Sexual Politics Research Articles

Antonio’s Sad Flesh

ABSTRACT This article examines different meanings attached to the adjective ‘sad’ in the 1590s in order to reinterpret the sexual politics of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The play’s title character Antonio famously proclaims that he performs ‘a sad [part]’ on the world’s ‘stage’. Critics have related this apparent declaration of melancholy to Antonio’s love for Bassanio and the heartbreak he may experience when the latter marries Portia. However, by examining the word's largely forgotten physiological meanings, I show that ‘sad’ was also a non-judgmental term for a man who lacks interest in procreation. Antonio’s embrace of this label has implications both for the play’s sexual politics and for its representation of putatively non-generative market economics.

Redefining the Other: Sexual Politics in Ismat Chughtai’s “The Mole” and “The Homemaker”

In presenting the sexual politics in her stories, Ismat Chughtai is often quite deconstructive. In her stories, “The Mole” and “The Homemaker,” she breaks the traditional power nexus of man as the subject and woman as the Other in the politics of sexuality by presenting the characters of Rani and Lajo respectively. These characters, with their bold and authoritative sexuality, choose their sexual relationships on their own and posit themselves at the centre of those relationships—Rani in her relationships with Choudhry, Chunnan and Ratna; and Lajo in hers with Mirza. By portraying these two women as the subject in their sexual politics, Chughtai redefines the Other to be the man, instead of the woman. The pattern that Chughtai weaves here to do that has two distinct threads: first, empowering both Rani and Lajo with their sexuality and second, making them reciprocal in the sexual politics they share with the men in the stories. Drawing on the theoretical perspective from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, this paper examines Chughtai’s process of redefining the Other in the sexual politics between the men and the women in her stories. The study demonstrates that the author has redefined the Other to be the men in the stories when it comes to the question of a reciprocal sexual politics and thus she has contributed to the gynocentric Urdu narratives by manifesting an intellectual rebellion against the phallocentric notions of her time.

Tongzhi Sovereignty: Taiwan’s lgbt Rights Movement and the Misplaced Critique of Homonationalism

Abstract This essay reviews the influential work of a group of Leftist ‘sex liberation’ scholars who pioneered queer sexuality studies in Taiwan in the 1990s. In doing so, it focuses on their post-2000 political rift with the mainstream Taiwanese lgbt (tongzhi) rights movement. What ostensibly began as a split over views of same-sex marriage has developed into a contentious politics of Chinese versus Taiwanese national identity and what I call ‘tongzhi sovereignty’. In bringing together both national identity and sexual politics in Taiwan as increasingly intertwined sites of contestation, I argue that the two must be theorised in tandem. As a fertile site for unpacking this contentious divergence, I examine and problematise the way that cultural theorist Jasbir Puar’s popular concept of homonationalism has circulated in scholarship of cultural/sexuality studies about Taiwan as a slanted and largely unchecked analytic to criticise lgbt sociolegal progress and, for some scholars, obscures a pro-unification agenda.

Blooming against Meat: Silence, Starvation, and Arboreal Subjectivity in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

ABSTRACT Divided into three main sections, each narrated from the perspective of the protagonist’s ex-husband, brother-in-law, or sister, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian introduces a woman whose choice of eating (and non-eating) is conditioned by the inherent violence of a patriarchal society. However, throughout the novel, the woman is given little space to voice for herself. This article examines her voicelessness, both as an oppressed female object of patriarchy and a human-turned-into-tree, to consider the politics of voice and performativity in this context. Referencing “the patriarchal texts of meat,” this study examines the protagonist’s transformation from meat-eater to vegetarian and eventually to tree, contextualizing the sexual politics of meat, vegetarianism, and arboreal metamorphosis. The latter part of this article turns to the questions of art, diet/hunger, performativity, and their intricate interconnectedness, to consider the protagonist’s meat-refusing body as a performative text against an overwhelming patriarchal power structure and her arborealized identity as the phantasmatic performance of the “unreal.”

Homosexual Stories, Family Stories: Neo-Confucian Homonormativity and Storytelling in the Chinese Gay Community

AbstractThis article investigates the recent proliferation of family-themed homosexual stories in China based on life-history interviews and participant observation conducted in Shenzhen. We develop the concept of “neo-Confucian homonormativity” – characterized by a harmonious relationship between gay men and their families of origin and their ability and aspiration to enter a monogamous relationship and become parents – to explain the production, circulation and consumption of these stories in the Chinese gay community. We argue that these stories are socially embedded actions enabled by the emerging neoliberal sexual politics in the Chinese gay community that influence the organization of the Chinese gay community and Chinese gay men's lived experiences. By analysing the emerging storytelling practices in the Chinese gay community, this article challenges the Western-centric way of theorizing homonormativity and opens up the possibility to conceptualize homonormativity from an Asian perspective.

Breaking conventions? Political ideology of films with explicit sex

Explicit sex in films on general release remains rare, even if it has significantly increased since the late 1990s. Commentary on explicit arthouse films has tended to focus on those also containing sexual violence, and debates have often revolved around whether explicit imagery constitutes art or pornography. Relatively little attention has been paid to explicit romantic films, and to what leads some of them to gain notable international visibility, while others languish in obscurity. This article examines 9 Songs and Love, two of the most discussed and financially successful arthouse films with a romantic storyline that also devote significant screen time to explicit images of sex. It argues that their success can be attributed in part to their conservative sexual and gender politics, and their ideological proximity to conventional heterosexual pornography. They are contrasted with The Story of Richard O. and Daughters of Fire, two explicit films that struggled to gain critical attention or financial reward. These latter films are shown to have fundamentally different ideological foundations, including radical ideas about sex and gender, and an embrace of the artistic value of the pornographic. Such an ideological gap can be considered a contributory factor in the divergent destinies of these explicit romantic films. 

The Sentimental Physician: J. Marion Sims’s Story of My Life

The career of Dr. J. Marion Sims, considered the “father of modern gynecology,” culminated with his autobiography. Story of My Life signals the interdependency of American medicine and nineteenth-century print culture, which furthered the demand for physicians’ life narratives. Published posthumously in 1884, Sims’s autobiography is informed by abolitionist sensationalism and sentimentality. Though his work depended on the exploitation and labour of enslaved women, Sims represents himself and his patients sentimentally, in ways that dismiss his culpability in the violence of slavery while legitimizing his authorial voice. By examining how medicine and sentiment intersect within Sims’s autobiography, this paper demonstrates how Sims’s performative affect, together with nineteenth-century sexual and racial politics, granted him unmitigated access to enslaved women’s bodies. The rhetoric of sentimentality deployed in Story of My Life functions to secure Sims’s authority and innocence as a benevolent physician, erasing the labour and embodied experience of the enslaved women he experimented on.

“Children of the Mantled-Birth”: Georgia Douglas Johnson, Photography in The Crisis, and the Politics of Black Childhood

This essay examines Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poetic depictions of Black motherhood and childhood in the annual “Children’s Numbers” of The Crisis that appeared from 1912 to 1934. Visually and discursively, the run of “Children’s Numbers” stages the modern crucible of educating Black children on the realities of racism and contends with racialized notions of childhood innocence. This essay considers how Johnson’s poems respond to such ideas of education and innocence in W.E.B. Du Bois’ editorials on childhood and the photographs of Black children that appeared in these issues. Focusing primarily on Johnson’s motherhood poems that appeared in the “Children’s Numbers” and the striking photographs of children that accompanied these poems, this essay asserts that Johnson’s poems disrupt racialized notions of childhood innocence, intervene in discourses on Black education, and challenge the representational politics of the “Children’s Numbers” by centering the epistemological perspective of Black motherhood. Furthermore, this essay argues for the benefits of reading Johnson’s motherhood poems in relation to her erotic poetry, demonstrating that Johnson’s poetry of Black motherhood addresses the sexual politics of the Black bourgeoisie at the turn of the century and creates a space for the expression of Black female sexuality.

Introduction: Global TV Images of Female Masculinity in the 2010s

Abstract This introductory article to the special Forum “Global TV Images of Female Masculinity in the 2010s” offers a reflection on the concept of “female masculinity” in global media and gender studies. Witnessing a growing number of TV representations of masculine girls and women worldwide, we present a summary of the four articles which comprise this themed Forum and address a number of key issues in their case studies, including televisual imaginaries of heterosexual, masculine women, the cultural legitimization of global female masculinities on reality TV, and the racialization and stigmatization of masculine women in White heteronormative societies. The Forum thus promotes a critical dialogue that aims to stimulate further interest in this interdisciplinary field by emphasizing the mutual implications of gendered TV genres and tropes, cross-cultural currents of gender, sexual, and racial knowledge and politics, and the intersectionality of female gender, sexuality, race, and nationality in TV representations.

The ‘Conspiracy of Homosexualisation’: Homosexuality and Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1970s–1990s

The article examines the far-right idea of a Jewish-led ‘conspiracy of homosexualisation’ between the 1970s and the late 1990s. To this end, it primarily scrutinizes the monthly magazine Instauration, edited by Wilmot Robertson. Embedded in a broader narrative that claimed that a Jewish-led regime of ‘liberal-minority racism’ would discriminate against white people in general and White men in particular, white nationalists and white supremacists such as Robertson imagined sexual politics as an important field of anti-white oppression. In addition to feminism and ‘miscegenation’, the promotion of ‘homosexual rights’ and the spread of homosexuality were conceived of as another means of Jews to undermine the white patriarchal family, which white nationalists and supremacists idealized as the backbone of the nation's well-being. Conceiving of homosexuality as a threat to white people and ‘white reproduction’, white nationalists and white supremacists claimed that the alleged struggle for ‘homosexual rights’ constituted a strategy used by Jews to maintain their supposed social, cultural and economic power and dominance.

The Court of Bigotry: Contested Sexuality of Dalit and Non-Dalit Women

In the Indian context, women, especially Dalit women, have been subjected to scripturally and culturally sanctioned misogyny. These deep-rooted prejudices are manifested at both the societal and the institutional levels. In such a scenario, any assertion of justice by Dalit women is fraught with tensions. The sexual violence against them is routinized, normalized and invisibilized. For the victims, it is a lonely struggle as civil society scarcely registers such crimes; for the law and judiciary, it is another claim for meagre compensation. Their bodies are bereft of honour, and their sexuality is viewed with suspicion, easily accessible to any male of the dominant communities who can lay claim to it. This article explores two case studies—Khairlanji and Nirbhaya, geographically distinct spaces, where Dalit women were brutally raped and mutilated, and the perpetrators were let off lightly. The mainstream media largely ignored the developments. The article also focuses on the fissures within the feminist movement vis-à-vis caste and the politics of sexuality.

The Scandal of Women’s Emancipation. Femonationalism, Right-Wing Sexual Politics, and Anti-Feminism

Abstract In the past decade, several publications in gender studies have been grappling with conservative and reactionary politics claiming to defend women and sexual minorities against immigrants. Sara Farris’s concept of femonationalism offers explanations for the paradox of far-right actors pretending to care about women and sexual minorities and some feminists making racist statements. Yet Farris’s methodology as well as her arguments show important shortcomings. In a close reading of Farris’s book, this article refutes her hypothesis of a conversion of far-right, EU, neoliberal, and feminist politics and lays out alternative perspectives in order to develop a better understanding of the ongoing phenomenon. The article deconstructs the false opposition of heterosexual familialist migrant and Muslim communities versus queer-friendly feminist Europeans. In presenting recent feminist studies, the article suggests it is necessary to understand paradoxical far-right sexual politics in their familialist, capitalist, and colonialist contexts.

Representing Bodies and Bathing Machines: Jane Austen’s Sanditon and Andrew Davies’s 2019 ITV Adaptation

Jane Austen’s final novel fragment Sanditon has inspired continuations of many kinds from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The most recent literary afterlife it has generated is the 2019 British adaptation for ITV, created by Andrew Davies, and with a screenplay by Davies, Justin Young and Andrea Gibb. This eight-part adaptation attempts to recreate Austen’s Regency world but reimagines and develops Sanditon through the lens of twenty-first century sexual sensibilities. Most notably, depictions of male nudity and sex acts demonstrate the adaptation’s engagement with contemporary sexual politics. Scenes offering salacious views of naked men sea-bathing counter the historical tradition of the female nude offered up for male gaze; the female body, in contrast, remains fully clothed in response to the contemporary Me-Too context. Furthermore, the inclusion of sex scenes, a character with a backstory of sexual abuse, a relationship featuring coercive control, and an ending denying the heroine her man reflects the zeitgeist. However, the disappointing British viewing figures for Sanditon suggest that sex does not always sell, particularly when it comes to creating a successful twenty-first century Austen adaptation.

Trans-Visibilities and Sexual Politics: Temporary Passages in Spanish Popular Cultures

This article aims to review the models that historically have shaped technologies of gender through popular representations in Spanish culture. First, an anthropological view will be cast on the naturalised Catholic-Francoist models that exalted heterosexual dichotomies and reproductive marriage. This includes an analysis of how, although the criminalization of transsexuals aggravated their situation, resistance movements generated a wide range of cultural references and possibilities for inclusion. Second, the article will review the models associated with Spain’s transition to democracy and their evolution moving on to the beginning of the 21st century. Finally, it will draw an outline of the trans models produced during the past two decades and their popular expressions.

Angels in America ve How to Get Away with Murder başlıklı eserlerde gizlilik ve ifşaat

The emergence of various sexual subcultures and communities is part of a larger process that has characterized the twentieth century, resulting in ever-growing social complexity and social differentiation. This differentiation process has produced “a new pluralism of class, ethnic, racial and cultural forms as well as a diversity of gender and sexual experiences,” as Jeffrey Weeks puts it in his work, Sexuality (1986, p. 75). Angels in America (1992-1995) by Tony Kushner is a play set in America in the 1980s against a backdrop of conservatism, sexual politics, and a new mysterious disease: AIDS. On the other hand, How to Get Away with Murder (2014-2020) is an American legal thriller television series created by Peter Nowalk and produced by Shonda Rhimes in ABC Studios, in which the LGBTQ community finds its long-neglected place in American society. In both works, written twenty years apart, secrecy and disclosure strongly tied to sexual identity is the real nexus of the storyline in which the protagonists fight with their sexual identities along with social, cultural, and political attitudes, thus, transforming their entire lives into a battleground. In this paper, we aim to discuss the secrecy and disclosure of sexual identities in light of the USA's social, political, and cultural changes in Angels in America and How to Get Away with Murder.

Subverting Hamlet through Re-writing: Sexual and Gender Politics of the Mother in Howard Barker’s Gertrude-The Cry

In Howard Barker’s Gertrude-The Cry (2002), all the things most popularly known about Shakespeare’s play Hamlet are subverted and transformed to a great extent. In this adaptation, the title character of the source text is changed from Hamlet to Gertrude, who is presented as a villainous woman in Hamlet with her potential involvement in her husband’s murder and subsequent marriage to Claudius. Barker alters the status of Hamlet as the tragic hero and makes his mother the new heroine of the play who does not conform to any of the norms set for her in Shakespeare’s text. Instead, Gertrude behaves as a woman extremely driven by erotic desire towards several male characters in the play. This paper analyses Barker’s rewriting as an attempt to challenge the norms of womanhood represented in conventional literary works. The transformations in Barker’s version are also related to women’s role and status in society at the time the play was written. Regarding the dominant ideas of the play such as personal will and sexual liberation in light of the relevant legislations of the New Labour as the ruling party in Britain in the early years of the twenty-first century, Barker’s play is also discussed as a politically driven adaptation.

Superimposing Sex-Politics in Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

Literature centering on Melvin Van Peebles's influential, and controversial, independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) has focused on the hermeneutics of reception, the timeliness and appropriateness of a talkback by an oppressed race, and the role of the sexual numbers within a film advertised as more of a politically charged product than of a pornographic one. None of the scholarship research incorporates the three crucial parts of the film, showcased visibly in the title itself, into the issues of reception, of critical race strategism, and of sexual politics—what is missing is precisely a productive mode of reading into being and meaning the sweet back, the bad ass, and the background songs. This essay attempts to insert the back side of sex, including the back itself and the ass, both of which I will subsume under the term "back," into the matrix of sex and politics. I argue that back sex directs the audience toward an inescapable engagement between sexual politics and racial politics, that sex serves—is made to serve—within not just the consciousness formation of the individual but also the consciousness formation of the individual within the community. Back sex therefore is revolutionary and constantly in crisis because it changes instead of repeating itself: unlike penile sex characterized by frontal/confrontational penetration, the back gestures a communitarian plurality of sex that escapes classic understanding of monogamous sex within the neoliberal family structure, and the ass emphasizes constant movement, sidewise, back and forth, that oscillates between a vulnerable position that requires backing and a determined democratic demand to be allowed to move counter-progressively. I emphasize the need to read the back as an instance of sex-politics into a more immediate consciousness of the audience, who in turn will benefit not from a total abandonment of penile sexual politics but rather from a novel engagement with the politically charged sexuality of a new zone named the back.

About the Contributors

Other| June 01 2022 About the Contributors GLQ (2022) 28 (3): 487–488. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9738615 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation About the Contributors. GLQ 1 June 2022; 28 (3): 487–488. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9738615 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search Anjali Arondekar is professor of feminist studies and founding codirector of the Center for South Asian Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean studies and South Asia. She is the author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2009), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality, Historiography, Geopolitics (forthcoming from Duke University Press), grows out of her interest in the figurations of sexuality, caste, and capital in colonial British and Portuguese India.Baird Campbell holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Rice University and an MA in Latin American studies from Tulane University. His research engages queer activism in post-dictatorship Chile through... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Makings of a Classic: Literary Precursors, Textual Strategies, and Political Purposes in Niane’s Soundjata

More than sixty years after its publication, Niane’s Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue remains a standard and popular account of the Manding oral epic. This article seeks to determine the causes of its longevity through a comparison with other Sunjata narratives that Africans published in the period 1930–1960. Factors identified include the narrative’s length, format as a single volume, and claim to the high-status literary genre of epic, alongside the characterization of the hero and a relatively weak focus on women, sexual politics, and the supernatural. New information on the range of sources Niane employed is used to counter widely held assumptions on the nature of the book as a translation or transcription, and to support the hypothesis that Niane sought to model complex aspects of traditional African oral sapience through his book.

Go (Away) West!

Go (Away) West!