Sexual Subjectivity Research Articles

Critical femininities: exploring young women’s digital sexual cultures

ABSTRACT This study adopts a Critical Femininities approach to examine the under-theorised domain of sexual norms on dating apps, with a focus on the self-representations of Spanish heterosexual women on Tinder. Through an analysis of three hundred profiles, this research investigates the gendered dynamics influencing these women’s portrayals of themselves in the digital dating context. Combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the findings reveal patterns in women’s online-mediated intimacies and sexual subjectivities, highlighting the pervasive influence of femmephobia in this space. Empirical data underscore how these dynamics operate, providing insight into the extent to which hegemonic gender beliefs and regulatory norms shape digital femininities. Moreover, a discursive examination of the ways these Spanish women construct their gendered and sexual identities on Tinder offers a critical view of the constraints and possibilities they face within this specific socio-cultural framework. This study’s focus on linguistic and representational strategies in digital self-presentation deepens our understanding of how normative gender expectations continue to shape social and sexual interactions in contemporary online spaces. In so doing, this research contributes to broader discussions in Gender Studies and linguistics, illustrating how femininity is performed, policed, and navigated in digital dating environments.

Revising Gerty MacDowell’s Identity and Agency: An Intersectional Feminist Disability Perspective

Gerty MacDowell’s initial, albeit brief, appearance in James Joyce’s Ulysses has sparked debates regarding her identity and agency. In the critical literature, there are interpretations that characterize Gerty as a woman and disabled person whose actions conform to patriarchal beauty standards that objectify her. This paper argues for revising such readings by applying an intersectional feminist disability perspective attuned to the interconnections between her womanhood and disability. Rather than positing Gerty’s identities as inherently conflicting, I illustrate how her disability and feminine social position co-constitute and transform one another. Her self-care practices aimed at securing a husband, though partly conforming to norms, also foster confidence and counter pervasive cultural assumptions of disabled women as ugly, useless, and asexual. Gerty’s exhibition of sexual desire and pursuit of pleasure likewise contest views of disabled women as unsuitable for romance or unable to be agentic sexual subjects. Furthermore, conceptualizing agency beyond neoliberal notions of rational autonomy acting against all constraints upholds Gerty’s agentic power. She makes strategic use of available discourses and resources to expand her precarious options given material and ideological limitations. Overall, analyzing Gerty’s intersectional experience denaturalizes the reductive models of identity and agency that have dominated Ulysses criticism. Applying fresh perspectives opens new symbolic interpretations of embodied identity and sexuality.

The attributions of public policies in the educational system for the prevention of sexual violence against children and adolescents

Sexual violence against children and adolescents is a problem whose scars can last a lifetime. In this sense, the general objective of the research is to analyze the attributions of public policies in the educational system for the prevention of sexual violence against children and adolescents based on the existing guidelines in the BNCC regarding sexuality in schools. With this overall purpose, specific objectives were developed in the subdivisions of the research work: to verify the right to education for children and adolescents in Brazil; to contextualize how the BNCC addresses the theme of sexuality in schools and to demonstrate the role of the educational system in promoting rights to confront sexual violence against children and adolescents. The research question guiding the study is: given the existing guidelines in the BNCC (National Common Curricular Base) regarding sexuality in schools, what are the attributions of public policies in the educational system for the prevention of sexual violence against children and adolescents? The deductive approach is used as the method of analysis, with the monographic procedure as the method of investigation, while the bibliographic technique is employed for research. It is evident that the educational system, through schools, acts as an important instrument for public policies to confront various violations of rights occurring during childhood.

Queer Transformation and Intersectional Identities: Analysing Race and Sexuality in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits

This article offers an in-depth examination of Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, contextualizing its narrative within the frameworks of Queer theory and African American cultural studies. Set against the backdrop of a rural North Carolina community, the novel focuses on the experiences of Horace Cross, a young African American grappling with his homosexuality amidst the constraints of a Christian Fundamentalist society. The analysis explores how the novel navigates themes of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly through Horace’s quest for self-transformation. This study underscores the novel’s intricate exploration of these themes, positing queer transformation as a pivotal element that provides insight into the complexities of identity and community within the African American context. Additionally, the article examines the novel’s integration of popular culture references, revealing their role in bridging the discussions of racial and sexual identity. The aim is to shed light on Kenan’s narrative as a significant contribution to the discourse on intersectionality in literature, highlighting its impact in the broader fields of Black and queer studies.

Parental Sexual Socialization, Sexual Subjectivity, and Emotional Responses to Sexual Experiences among Adolescent Girls.

This study explored girls' sexual subjectivity as a pathway through which parental socialization influenced their emotions about past sexual experiences. A national online survey of 397 adolescent girls (Mage = 16.8 years) from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds (33.0% Black, 25.7% Latina, 28.0% non-Hispanic White) assessed (1) parental messaging emphasizing relational, sex-positive, gendered sex role, abstinence-only, and sex-is-taboo discourses; (2) girls' sexual subjectivity including sexual body esteem, entitlement to sexual pleasure, and perceived sexual control; and (3) positive and negative emotional reactions to sexual experiences. Sexual subjectivity fully mediated the positive effect of relational messaging on positive emotional reactions and the negative effect on negative emotional reactions. Additionally, sexual subjectivity partially mediated the positive effect of gendered sex role messaging on negative emotional reactions. This study draws critical attention to placing the psychological aspects of girls' sense of their own sexuality and the emotional components of their sexual experience at the forefront of understanding the influence of parental sexual socialization on the sexual experiences of adolescent girls.

Healthy sexuality—not sexual health: for the sexual subject

The aim of this paper is to defend the emerging conceptualization of healthy sexuality (Bianchi in Figurations of Human Subjectivity: A Contribution to Second-Order Psychology. Springer, Berlin, 2020) against the traditional authoritative concept of sexual health as defined by the WHO. Becoming a sexual subject means following a sexual trajectory with episodes of one’s own bodily experiences, genital satisfaction, intimate attachment, acceptance of sexual identity, sexual pleasure, mutual sexual satisfaction and planned parenthood. In each of these episodes, the individual may experience feelings of pressure, fear, shame, pain and/or joy and pleasure. The extent to which the subject has a healthy sexuality depends on whether these feelings/emotions facilitate or inhibit healthy sexuality. The concept of healthy sexuality runs counter not only to quantitative statistical demographic measures of sexual health, but also to the existing arsenal of sexology questionnaires. Qualitative empirical research is being conducted into the facilitators and inhibitors of a healthy sexuality (in the first author’s PhD research).

The Black (W)hole of Dysphoria

This essay returns to Evelynn Hammonds’s field-changing essay “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” with a focus on the labor of knowledge production under fraught institutional conditions, characterized in this essay as languaging. The simultaneous desire for and impossibility of accurate language to describe racialized, gendered, and sexual subjectivity drive Hammonds’s essay as well as a number of other key texts in Black feminist sexuality studies. This essay (re)introduces the diagnostic category of dysphoria to speak to this paradox: here, dysphoria describes the affective and psychic condition of institutional illegibility and fungibility for racialized and gendered people. Using the analytic of dysphoria to characterize and connect the political economy of Black feminist knowledge production and the life narrative of A. Dionne Stallworth, a Black trans woman activist, this essay directs urgent attention to the simultaneously material, spiritual, psychic, and affective dimensions of self-, knowledge-, and world-making.

Gender socialization and adolescent pregnancies in Togo.

The aim of this article is to understand the significance of the gender socialisation of adolescents and its impact on sexuality. This socio-anthropological study is based on qualitative surveys conducted as part of two action-research programmes implemented between 2018 and 2022 in Togo. The empirical data comes from individual semi-directed interviews, group interviews and life stories relating to the themes of sexuality, early pregnancy and gender-based violence. The results show that in these patriarchal societies, the socialisation of adolescents is structured around gender relations. The social construction of masculinity is based on a position of decision-making power for young boys, while that of femininity inculcates submissive behaviour in young girls. In these contexts, many young girls, even if they do attend school, find it difficult to express their opinions on matters of love and sex.

Sexualita jako riziko? Sexuální výchova v českých kurikulárních dokumentech

Formal sex education and its implementation in education have been increasingly debated in recent years. In the Czech Republic, the area came to the centre of public policy interest in early 2023, when, in response to several sexual harassment cases, former Minister of Education, Mr. Balaš, expressed the need to strengthen sex education in schools. With the ongoing revision of the national Framework Educational Programme and the awareness of the lack of research coverage in this area, we consider it appropriate to look at how sex education is framed in institutional documents in the Czech Republic today. We conduct a qualitative analysis of the Recommendation of the Ministry of Education for the Implementation of Sexuality Education in Primary Schools, selected school education programmes and minimum prevention programmes. We compare these with the principles, rationale and topics articulated in the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe, which were developed to support the implementation of holistic sexuality education. We point out significant differences in the conceptualisation of the Czech documents, particularly the normative, biologizing and risk-oriented sex education. We see the untold potential for a quality approach to sex education, which takes into account the sexual subjectivity and uniqueness of adolescents’ experience and the interactive nature of sexuality, which the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe emphasize, in the areas of Education for Citizenship, Ethics Education or in Social and Personal Development.

Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Pursuit of Modernity: British Biopower and Female Sexuality in Domestic and Colonial Practice

This paper explores how female sexuality became a primary site for the exercise of British biopolitical regulation as illustrated both in colonial Hong Kong and Singapore, and in domestic practice within the metropole. The application of biopolitical regulation on the subject of female sexuality was based on a discursive production making indissociable the success of the imperial project and the survival of the imperial race and the control of the female body. This discursive production mobilized intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality through the Victorian cult of domesticity, resulting in a racialization of female sexuality with implications transcending the permeable frontier between the metropole and the colonies. Making “the prostitute” the exemplar of deviant, dangerous, and immoral sexuality had discursive repercussions for female sexuality more broadly; explained in contrast to “the prostitute,” the construction of sexual deviance had implications for understandings of sexual conformity and acceptability both in Victorian society and abroad.

Changes in ageing women’s sexual subjectivity as seen from a life course perspective: security, caring, and desire

This article explores the sexual subjectivity of women of post-reproductive age who seek partners on dating apps. The existing literature highlights the sexual subjectivity and agency of older women as contested and not sufficiently investigated. Even less research has been conducted on changes in the sexual subjectivity of women born in the USSR in the 1960s, with the liberalisation of sexual behaviour. The study is based on 45 interviews with women aged 55 years and over, who were born in the USSR and who now live in Israel, Finland and Russia. In the article, we examine sexual subjectivity as presented in the interviews from a life course perspective. We explain theoretically and empirically how changes in sexual subjectivity are expressed in the light of age and socio-cultural context constraints. Three life stories highlight the accumulation of experience and turning points, such as divorce and migration. They illustrate very different pathways in changing sexual subjectivity, yet all contain three Leitmotifs: desire, security and caring. The expression of post-reproductive female desire can be related to the need to feel secure and enjoy mutual care in sexual relationships. We show that these Leitmotifs shape and are shaped by women’s identifications as both sexual objects and subjects, and explore how they relate to different sexual cultures and variations in the socio-sexual positioning of women in Israel, Finland, and Russia.

Viral ecologies: Refiguring ‘psychic immunology’, in the art of Helen Chadwick

This article examines the artist Helen Chadwick’s 1989 digital montage series Viral Landscapes as an intervention in discourses of immunity circulating around the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the UK. The Viral Landscapes are unusual for art of this period in working closely with medical concepts and technologies, if only to problematise the ways in which these were mobilised. Strategically appropriating ideas of ‘psychic immunology’ emergent at the time, the work, I argue, formulates an affective ground for the extension of immunological responsibility beyond the confines of human bodies and societies. Through a close examination of the artist’s methods and the work’s aesthetics, I identify therein an alternative model of the subject from the closed bodily system and fixed identity presupposed by contemporary biomedicine. Influenced in particular by Deleuzo-Guattarian theories of machinic desire, as well as queer-theoretical constructions of the sexual subject as polymorphous, Chadwick’s model of the psychically immune subject seems to be grounded in a vital sexual energy, constructed through interpenetration by multiple, diffuse entities in ecological relation.

Between diaspora and region: Tony Gatlif and Mehdi Ben Attia

The article investigates the creative tensions between diaspora and region as they appear in queer Maghrebi francophone visual culture. By examining two important films from Maghrebi-French cinema – Tony Gatlif’s Exils (2004) and Mehdi Ben Attia’s Le fil (2009) – the article theorizes an affective understanding of diaspora and regionality wherein ephemeral aesthetic objects constitute regional archives of feeling and assemblages that reveal the messy complexities of identity, space, and belonging in a Maghrebi postcolonial setting. In so doing, the article also aims to ascertain how regional constellations of queer diasporic aesthetics may lead to new forms of kinship and community for minority ethnic and sexual subjects.

Sexing the history of Indian anti‐colonial internationalism: White women, Indian men and the politics of the personal

AbstractIn contrast to the wealth of literature on the gendered and sexual politics of Indian nationalism, studies on the internationalisation of Indian anti‐colonial nationalism are rarely informed by the twin themes of gender and sexuality. As Indian activists traversed international political spaces in the early twentieth century, they frequently entered into sexual relations with white women. This article explores the possible political consequences of such sexual contact through a study of the personal lives of Arathil Candeth Narayanan Nambiar and Manabendra Nath Roy and their relationships with the largely unknown German‐born sisters, Eva and Lu Geissler.

Justice and Rape Trials in Rural India - Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India. By Rupal Oza. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023. xxvii + 208 pp. $99.95

Justice and Rape Trials in Rural India - Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Subjectivity and Violation in Rural India. By Rupal Oza. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023. xxvii + 208 pp. $99.95

That time I was reincarnated as a problematic trope: Viewer preferences and cultural trends in reincarnation isekai anime

The genre of reincarnation isekai anime, wherein a protagonist dies in their original world only to be reborn in a fantastical one, has grown significantly in global appeal. Yet, this genre’s expansion also normalizes controversial themes such as mental health issues, sexual and violent content, and the sexualisation of virtual minors. This article employs a data-driven approach, analysing user-generated coding of themes and properties from English-speaking fan sites, to critically examine three emergent and interconnected dimensions: the success of series deemed ‘trashy’, the complexities surrounding sexual themes, and the rising appeal of the ‘zero-to-hero’ motif in a post-pandemic world. The findings reveal a paradoxical allure of ‘trashy’ but popular content, complex ethical dilemmas surrounding sexual themes, and an increased resonance of empowerment motifs resulting from the pandemic. These discoveries provoke renewed discussions on anime’s role in shaping and reflecting societal values and raise questions about regulatory challenges in a globalized media setting. The study confirms the need for more nuanced understandings of the genre’s growing global influence, particularly outside of Japan, and calls for continued research to delve deeper into its complexities.

From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel: The Shlemiel’s Journey from Ancient to Modern Israel

Abstract This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the complexities of his character, rooted in folklore and revolving around mistaken identity. Themes of gender and sexuality, along with interpretative acrobatics add layers of ambiguity and complexity, shaping the shlemiel’s narrative in various literary and cultural contexts. Through a detailed analysis of works by authors ranging from Heinrich Heine through Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, to Sammy Gronemann, the essay demonstrates the shlemiel’s versatility and enduring presence in Jewish comedy. Moreover, it examines his role as both a pariah and an agent for social change, reflecting on his significance in different cultural landscapes, as he lands eventually in America and Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. By exploring adaptations and interpretations across time and place, this essay highlights the shlemiel’s resilience amidst shifting societal norms across the globe, offering insights into the enduring relevance of this iconic figure in Jewish literature and culture.

From Zurishaddai to Menachem Mendel: The Shlemiel’s Journey from Ancient to Modern Israel

Abstract This essay explores the evolution and resilience of the shlemiel, a central figure in two millennia of Jewish culture. Rooted in biblical narratives, the shlemiel transitions eventually into a symbol of Yiddish and Eastern European diasporic life, embodying both comedic and tragic elements. Tracing his journey through cultural history, from German to Yiddish and modern Hebrew and American literature, theater, and film, the essay delves into the complexities of his character, rooted in folklore and revolving around mistaken identity. Themes of gender and sexuality, along with interpretative acrobatics add layers of ambiguity and complexity, shaping the shlemiel’s narrative in various literary and cultural contexts. Through a detailed analysis of works by authors ranging from Heinrich Heine through Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, to Sammy Gronemann, the essay demonstrates the shlemiel’s versatility and enduring presence in Jewish comedy. Moreover, it examines his role as both a pariah and an agent for social change, reflecting on his significance in different cultural landscapes, as he lands eventually in America and Palestine/Israel in the 20th century. By exploring adaptations and interpretations across time and place, this essay highlights the shlemiel’s resilience amidst shifting societal norms across the globe, offering insights into the enduring relevance of this iconic figure in Jewish literature and culture.

Exploring the Portrayal of Masculinity in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question A Postmodern Perspective

This research article explores the portrayal of masculinity in Howard Jacobson’s novel, The Finkler Question, through a postmodern lens. It examines how the novel challenges traditional beliefs about masculinity and male identity, drawing on Jean-Francois Lyotard and Judith Butler to explore the fluid and contested nature of masculinity. Using textual analysis, the study focuses on themes of ageing, sexuality, and power in the portrayal of male characters and their relationships. The findings reveal that these characters navigate complex and contradictory identities, challenging conventional notions of masculinity. The novel critically reflects the socio-political context of contemporary Europe, highlighting diverse expressions of masculinity and the impact of societal expectations and traditional gender roles on male identity. Through its characters, the novel envisions a more inclusive and diverse understanding of male identity, emphasizing the fluid and evolving nature of masculinity. This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on gender and identity by demonstrating how The Finkler Question provides valuable insights into the nuanced nature of masculinity in contemporary Europe. The novel's critique of traditional masculinity underscores the need for a more inclusive understanding of male identity and highlights the importance of a postmodern perspective in grasping the fluid nature of masculinity in modern society.

Queer theory, sex work and the European Union: on the constitutive exclusion of sex work from the European Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual policies

Queer theory, sex work and the European Union: on the constitutive exclusion of sex work from the European Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual policies