Homosexual Subjects Research Articles

“Like a Furnace Burning and Turning” – London in Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London

Unlike the two subsequent novels, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Hawksmoor (1985), PeterAckroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London (1982), was not published to high critical acclaim. However, thenovel establishes its author’s concept of his fictional London, which focuses primarily on the city’s unofficial,off-the-record history. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that although it is a seemingly unambitious work anda relatively raw text, especially due to its explicit treatment of the theme of male homosexuality and the story’s bleakending, The Great Fire of London can be understood as a kind of a “proto-text” containing all the major definingaspects of its author’s fictional city, which are explored in more in-depth ways in his later, more mature Londonnovels.

Porneia, Homosexuality, and the Need for Homiletic Evolution

Does preaching about human sexuality fixate upon the themes of porneia and homosexuality? And if so, do those homiletic preferences narrowly characterize the sexual body politic of the United States? Engaging the writings of Patrick Cheng, Kyle Harper, Mark Jordan, and Jeff Chu, Gerald C. Liu examines genealogical and empirical accounts of porneia and homosexuality to request broader conceptions of sexual difference from preachers who dare to speak about sex, especially with respect to race and in particular, Asian American male sexual identity.

Love Thy Fatherland as Thyself: Patriotism and Passing in Herman Bang

Love Thy Fatherland as ThyselfPatriotism and Passing in Herman Bang Olivia Gunn For, just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation, the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, the more true. (Wilde 2003, 1131)1 It might initially seem strange to label Herman Bang as a patriot given the cosmopolitanism of his biography, the persistent rhetorical marking of the homosexual as a threat to the nation, and the prevailing figure of the patriot as both masculine and sure. However, Bang’s concern for Denmark was persistent, and his varied remarks on the state of the nation reveal that cosmopolitanism is opposed to provincialism rather than to patriotism.2 For Bang, both patriotism and [End Page 183] cosmopolitanism turned on the theatrical or on a performance of the menneskelig (human) that is always marked by a degree of tragic contradiction and displacement. For the homosexual subject, cosmopolitanism was often linked to the practice of passing: a project of aesthetics (the art of acting) and of survival (the staging of queer life). Bang’s particular brand of patriotism was infused with a melancholy resignation and based in narratives of nederlaget (defeat); but if he insisted on his own queer exile, he also granted himself a critical perspective on—and love for—the nation via this exile. Perhaps most importantly, his treatment of the nation involved a subtle resistance to the formula that the nation equals the reproductive community. This article focuses on Bang’s self-representation, realist aesthetics, and theater theory, reading them in concert with questions of nation, exclusion, belonging, and passing. The queerness that permeates Bang’s aesthetics is located in the meeting place between his notions of self-exposure (a kind of stylized self-outing that is nonetheless realist) and his understanding of the non-reproductive subject’s relationship to the nation. Self-exposure in Bang is a passing that can never wholly succeed, a constant border crossing between the foreign and the familiar, an unmasking that requires a mask. His self-figuring as a patriotic servant of Denmark in letters to Peter Nansen, his introduction to the 1889 novel Tine, and his posthumously published essay on homosexuality, Gedanken zum Sexualitätsproblem (1922), reveal this (un)masking as a constant in his aesthetics. Importantly, I discuss Bang’s literary aesthetics in this article in order to better understand his broader aesthetics rather than to set up a reading of his fiction. As will be seen, when discussing the homosexual as a novelist and as an actor, Bang lays bare, without really intending to, a rift in realism that splits at the concept of the staged. Through a version of Oscar Wilde’s “curious inversion,” Bang critiques provincialism and the normative figure of the nationalist by both wielding and succumbing to his position as a stranger within. In much criticism on the literature of the Scandinavian modern breakthrough, Bang’s figure serves as a point of confluence for a variety of modern issues: his aesthetics of “Uro og Mangfoldighed” (1979, 14) [unrest and multiplicity], his depiction of non-reproductive subjects in literature, and his self-figuring or self-staging come together with contemporary European understandings of heredity and gender, and of the homosexual as member of a fundamentally cosmopolitan race: “den fransk-jødiskeuropæisk-unationale-radikal-fandenivoldsk-liderlige retning” [End Page 184] (Knudsen 2008, 173) [the French-Jewish-European-antinational-radical-devil-may-care-depraved trend]. Although his homosexuality was an open secret in Denmark, his own references were oblique, even in private correspondence: Jeg er altid sky for at tale om de Punkter i mine nærmestes Liv, hvor jeg ikke kan kende fuldstændigt. Forelskelsen er et af disse Punkter. Før jeg har set en af mine Bekendte beruset, ved jeg ikke, hvorledes han ter sig som fuld—hvordan Kærligheden laver Jer—hvad I...

Homophobic Africa? Toward A More Nuanced View

Abstract:The recent emergence of homosexuality as a central issue in public debate in various parts of Africa has encouraged a stereotypical image of one homophobic Africa, often placed in opposition to a tolerant or depraved West. What is striking is that this image of Africa as homophobic is promoted by both traditionalists who insist that homosexuality is a Western intrusionand bythe Western media that focus on homophobic statements from African political and religious leaders. What both neglect, however, is the existence of internal debate and disagreements among Africans on the subject of homosexuality. In this article we try to counter this image of a homophobic Africa with a more nuanced discussion, including a comparison of different trajectories in the emergence of homosexuality as a public issue in four countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Uganda, and South Africa). The comparison highlights considerable variations in the ways in which the issue became politicized. There is a world of difference, for example, between the image of the homosexual asun Grand(a rich and powerful “Big Man”) who imposes anal penetration as a supreme form of subjection (as in Cameroon or Gabon, where homosexuality is associated with witchcraft and other occult forces; compare Achille Mbembe's visionary evocation of a “phallocracy”) and the often quite marginal persons who become victims of gay persecution in other contexts. More insight into the variations of what is loosely and inaccurately called “homophobia” can help connect international pressures for decriminalization and protection to local circumstances. Working through local activists is crucial for the effort to counter homophobia in Africa.

Edward II (review)

Reviewed by: Edward II Johan Callens Edward II. By Christopher Marlowe. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin. 20–21 January 2012. When assuming the artistic directorship of Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2000–2001, Ivo van Hove took a gamble by mounting Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, a propagandistic piece that has survived in a corrupt memorial reconstruction and that has been underrepresented in the repertoire. That production featured a daring set by Jan Versweyveld, van Hove’s partner and collaborator since their early days on the margins of 1980s Flemish theatre, and costumes by gay fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck. In this respect, it was as radical an artistic statement as the “filmic” production of Edward II (1924) with which the young and aspiring Brecht claimed his place on Berlin’s stage. As Martin Esslin and Jan Knopf have argued, Brecht’s Marlowe adaptation broached not only the subject of homosexuality but revived the question of history’s theatrical representation, which was either silenced in the wake of World War I disillusionment or spectacularized in epic UFA pictures like Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920). Almost a century later, the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz—the same company that revived van Hove’s acclaimed production of The Misanthrope for the New York Theatre Workshop (2007)—invited him to stage Marlowe’s Edward II. Outdoing Brecht yet using Marlowe’s original like both Claus Peymann (1998) and Frank Castorf (1999) before him, van Hove enhanced the homosexual theme and recontextualized the play within the problematic German heritage of World War II. Telescoping events that took place years apart, Marlowe’s history play personalizes the early fourteenth-century struggle between the English Crown and the nobility through Edward’s love for the low-born Gaveston. In Germany, Edward II reentered the repertoire with Brecht’s adaptation, which was dependent on Lion Feuchtwanger’s help and Walter von Heymel’s 1912 translation, which van Hove also used. If Brecht was attracted to the play’s critique of abusive authorities, Derek Jarman, in the AIDS-dominated climate of the 1990s, took an interest in the play’s gay theme and its usefulness for his activist agenda. Van Hove also foregrounded these political issues, shifting the setting to the interior of a contemporary prison, replete with camera surveillance, factionalism, and sexual violence, and using a self-conscious, intermedial mise en scène to invoke the fraught memory of Germany’s military past—still repressed by the elder generation, already forgotten by the younger. The result was a heavily edited text, structured and framed by fifteen intertitles that invoked Brecht’s epic theatre and Piscator’s agit-prop, even if the ideological side of van Hove’s earlier Marlowe production as a piece of religious propaganda may have proven a liability. For van Hove, Gaveston’s early intention of pleasing the art-loving king with boys reenacting Actaeon as he spies on a naked Diana—a speech delivered without visual support to give the language its full due—turned the entire deposition drama into an inset of sorts, “The Dream of Edward II,” as announced in the first program-matic intertitle. The brevity of the first few scenes, marked by the titles’ brusque and noisy intrusion, imposed a dynamic that instantly drew the viewers into the drama. Subsequently, the pace varied, following the demands of the action, ever summarized in single catchwords (Politik [politics], Liebe [love], Widerstand [resistance], Komplott [conspiracy], Kalkül [calculation], Homosexualität [homosexuality], and [End Page 601] so on). All intertitles were briefly projected onto a screen straddling two rows of four cells separated by an elevated security desk, a panoptic watchtower against a back wall of galvanized metal plates. Click for larger view View full resolution Urs Jucker (Leicester) in Edward II. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.) This omnipresent camera surveillance, deployed in screen montages (by Tal Yarden), linked inmates separated by the wide stage but also exposed their intrigues, secret thoughts, and yearnings. Occasionally, the perspective of the prison interiors was distorted or the otherwise black-and-white images morphed into colors, thereby measuring the subjectivity of certain speeches and the drama’s emotional intensity. Van...

Proust and Ambient Medico-Literary Homosexualities 1885-1922

It is indeed true that Proust's many-faceted portrait of homosexuality, and especially of the gay baron de Charlus, constituted, as he tried to impress upon early potential publishers of A la recherche du temps perdu, something quite original in French literature, so original in fact that it was unsettling, if not shocking, to many critics and readers. As we know, the poet Francis Jammes, horrified by the early lesbian scene at Montjouvain, begged Proust to remove it from his novel, and after Proust's death, he labelled A la recherche as a whole an abomination. This was but one of the many comments, Irom quibbles and reservations to cries of indignation, that greeted Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe from critics such as Paul Souday, Gustave Binet-Valmer, Paul Lombard, the critic of L'lntransigeant, Andre Germain and others. (2) But did Proust's writing about homosexuality, as Antoine Compagnon's epigraph to this essay might suggest, happen in a literary vacuum? There are indications that Proust was not unfamiliar with the treatment of homosexuality we see in middle-brow and popular fiction of the 1885-1910 period. Smitten as a gay teenager by Verlaine and by Baudelaire (as we know, Proust surprised Gide by asserting that Baudelaire was also homosexual (3)), and confidently embracing his own love for young men, as one sees in letters from the lycee years written to or about Jacques Bizet, (4) Proust would certainly have been aware of much of the literature dealing with lesbianism and male homosexuality of the period we are exploring. In mentioning his familiarity with Musset's pornography and Verlaine's Femmes and Hombres, Proust recalls in fact how schoolboys love to pass around to their friends copies of the latest racy works they get their hands on (A propos de Baudelaire, csb, 630). Nor was Proust immune to an attraction to erotic materials in later life. In a 1908 letter to Georges de Lauris where he speaks of having purchased some pornography, including deux Verlaine secrets, immondes et stupides, he light-heartedly offers to share his purchases with his friend. (5) By examining lesbian, gay and erotic texts by Catulle Mendes, Henri d'Argis and Marcel Prevost from the 1890s and late 1880s, I will attempt to provide an early literary context for Proust's writing about homosexuality. Examples will show how place and personal names, episodes such as the retrospective discovery of lesbianism in a lover, the danse contre seins, and lesbian love-making performed for a fee, were available to Proust in then-contemporary fiction as he himself began to write short stories with erotic or homosexual themes. It is useful and illuminating, I believe, to re-examine one novel of homosexuality in particular that Proust definitely did read--Lucien by Gustave Binet-Valmer--partly because of Proust's violent reaction to it: he described the work as livre le plus imbecile que j'aie jamais lu. But Lucien is not as imbecilic as all that. Rather its publication was an incursion into what Proust was hoping to claim--via his character Charlus--as his private turf, and it came precisely at a moment when he was beginning to sound out editors such as Alfred Vallette, the publisher of the Mercure de France, about taking on his novel. However, there is perhaps an additional personal reason for Proust's irritation, and for our interest in Binet-Valmer's novel: it is that the plot of Lucien doubles certain aspects of Proust's own family life. Binet-Valmer and Proust knew each other, though not well, as early as 1902-1903, and it is not impossible--though there is no hard evidence for it--that Binet-Valmer had Proust's family configuration in mind when composing his novel. And finally, there is the broader issue of how Proust's and Binet-Valmer's novels negotiate their positions in relation to late-19th-early-20th-century theory about, and physical and moral diagnoses of, homosexuality. Which of these novels, the imbecilic Lucien or the monumental A la recherche du temps perdu, is more anchored in the past? …

Re-Examining Evelyn Hooker: Setting the Record Straight with Comments on Schumm's (2012) Reanalysis

Evelyn Hooker's research comparing the mental health of 30 male homosexuals to 30 male heterosexuals may be the most influential study in the history of social science. The American Psychological Association (APA) claims her work was the major reason it began advocating for acceptance of homosexuality. It led the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to eliminate homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And it impacted the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 legalization of sodomy in Lawrence v Texas. Hooker reportedly believed experts would be unable to distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals on psychological tests. Re-examination of her work indicates that Hooker's study was neither rigorous nor reliable. Among other problems, homosexual subjects were easily identified on test protocols; her reports of how she obtained her samples were incomplete and contradictory; and her study generated results supportive of obsession/compulsivity in homosexuals. Thus Hooker's study was seriously flawed. Moreover, because it was marketed by the APA as central in transforming homosexual activity from an illness/crime into acceptable behavior—yet Hooker did not correct those who mischaracterized her work—APA misrepresentations of Hooker over the past 40 years appear to be more in line with ideology than science.

Violence and the cultural logics of pain: representations of sexuality in the work of Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi

Nicholas Hlobo and Zanele Muholi have raised critical issues regarding sexual identity in patriarchal contexts since they premiered at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in 2005. Nicholas Hlobo, a sculptor and performance artist, and Zanele Muholi, a photographer and activist, explore different ways of representing sexuality – in particular, homosexuality. Hlobo investigates notions of masculinity and the practice of circumcision, while Muholi documents the existence of transgender and homosexuality in township spaces (her recent work expands to various other spaces). This article focuses on the roles that violence plays in the sexual politics represented in Hlobo and Muholi’s work. While numerous South African artists’ work deals with these issues, the choice of these two practitioners in particular is based on their approaches to the ambivalence of violence (the infliction of pain) with regard to the black homosexual subject in conservative, as well as liberal, spaces. Although it can be argued that Hlobo's work deals mainly with black masculinity rather than homosexuality, his work is chiefly inferential to sexual dynamics between men and gender transformation. Central to the work of these two artists is the ambiguity of sexual identity. Hlobo and Muholi's visual imagery investigates the boundaries set by different social constructs. These set boundaries have also affected crimes against bisexual, transgender and homosexual individuals which are reaching alarming proportions. Hlobo questions the validity of structures that marginalise homosexual individuals through drawing attention to the ambivalence of certain statutes, while Muholi seeks to publicise the injustices asserted on homosexual individuals in order to demonstrate the weight of that crisis. Hlobo and Muholi not only bring these issues to light, but also highlight the dilemma inscribed in the social and political history of (South) Africa, with regard to collective and individual identities.

Veja o fim do arco-íris – uma análise do artigo “A geração tolerância” e a construção de identidades homossexuais

Discursive representation of events and practices is one of the most frequent activities in human experience. Either in ordinary activities or in specialized ones, representation takes part in different social practices in which people engage themselves, influencing one’s particular perspectives on world. This paper discusses the representation and identifi cation of homosexual Brazilian youngsters in Veja magazine – the largest weekly news magazine in Brazil. It is based on CDA approach (Fairclough, 2003; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999), associated with studies about ideology and mass media in Thompson (1998, p. 2002) and identity theory in Hall (2001). Applying analytical categories such as intertextuality, polyphony, presupposition, evaluation and modality (Resende and Ramalho, 2009), it was possible to unveil linguistic structures which establish opposite perspectives between past and present social struggles. Thus it was possible to find that, in spite of bring forth the subject of homosexuality, the magazine shows sexist views which legitimate stereotypes in a veiled way. Key words: discourses, representation, critical discourse analysis, mass media, homosexuality.

Homophobia as the State of Reason

The stigmatization of Caribbean postcolonial nation-states in the Western imagination as exemplifying some of the most homophobic nationalisms masks a more-nuanced reading of the complexities of Caribbean modernity. As such, the hardening of homophobic nationalisms in settings such as Trinidad and Tobago forces us to question how and why compulsory homophobia is deployed as a form of moral discipline that is made to seem compatible with postcolonial modernity. This article explores the “problem space” of state-sanctioned homophobia as a regulative and generative (not simply repressive) force in postcolonial nationstates. It first briefly theorizes how compulsory homophobia has become a mandate of state-popular affinity in the postindependent era that conditions the possibility of pluralistic consensus in the postcolonial nation-state. Within this context, the author further explores a historic court case involving the “wrongful arrest” and alleged strip search of an out gay subject by state police officials. Some analytic insights into the strip search and subsequent court case testimonies are offered with a view to understanding the regulatory and generative potentials of institutionalized homophobia. The implications of this case for an incipient LGBT activist platform are also discussed as an expansion of the complex debates about sexual citizenship and political community within the postcolonial condition.

Cleaver/Baldwin Revisited: Naturalism and the Gendering of Black Revolution

Cleaver/Baldwin Revisited:Naturalism and the Gendering of Black Revolution Nathaniel Mills (bio) Literary naturalism has played a fundamental role in shaping discussions of the sociopolitical responsibilities of black writing. In African-American literary history, conventions of naturalist political protest have been most frequently associated with the work of Richard Wright, and dissent from those conventions associated with James Baldwin. In "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949) and "Many Thousands Gone" (1951), Baldwin indicted what he saw as Wright's reductive depiction of black life lived at the mercy of structural forces and characterized by violence, individual isolation, and cultural impoverishment. By deploying the assumptions and décor of naturalism—gritty urban settings, determining environmental and political forces, and a male protagonist deformed by those forces—Wright reinforces white America's at-best condescending and at-worst racist misperception that "Negro life is in fact as debased and impoverished as our theology claims" ("Many" 41). Eldridge Cleaver, the veteran of the California prison system who went on to become a Black Panther Party leader, praised Wright while denigrating Baldwin in the notorious essay "Notes on a Native Son," included in his 1968 prison memoir and essay collection Soul on Ice. The revolutionary value of Wright's work, Cleaver writes, derives both from Wright's clear understanding of black masculinity's uncompromising resistance to a "totalitarian white world" and his espousal of naturalist tenets. "Of all black American novelists, and indeed of all American novelists of any hue, Richard Wright reigns supreme for his profound political, economic, and social reference. Wright had the ability, like Dreiser, of harnessing the gigantic, overwhelming environmental forces and focusing them . . . on individuals and their acts." By contrast, Cleaver sees Baldwin's homosexuality as a perversely weak, racially inauthentic masculinity that is part and [End Page 50] parcel of a fawning love of whites and white culture. That love of whiteness accompanies Baldwin's refusal of naturalism's "social reference": "His characters all seem to be fucking and sucking in a vacuum" (132, 134-35). Recent critical work that situates Baldwin as both a queer and black writer can be read as a response to the argument typified by Cleaver: that homosexuality is a literary, political, and racial betrayal of blackness.1 Multiple critics lament what they see as a chastened response to Cleaver in Baldwin's late 1960s and 1970s work, in which Baldwin adopted a radical skepticism toward America and the chances of interracial harmony and espoused the Black Power movement and radical black nationalism rather than the reformism of mainstream Civil Rights politics. Douglas Field and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. posit that Baldwin's shift in this period can be attributed to Cleaver particularly and to the homophobic, heteropatriarchal rhetoric of black nationalism more generally. Field writes that Cleaver's essay had a "profound effect" on Baldwin, who responded to black radicals like Cleaver by becoming "taciturn about the subject of homosexuality" and writing in "a new radical rhetoric that sounded borrowed and unsure in Baldwin's pen" (465-67). Gates sees Cleaver as representative of "a newly sexualized black nationalism that could stigmatize homosexuality as a capitulation to alien white norms, and correspondingly accredit homophobia . . . as a progressive political act." Cowed by this revolutionary appropriation of homophobia, Baldwin "responded with a pose of wounded passivity" and "borrowed the populist slogans of the day." In place of his earlier emphases on interracial love and humanism, the ascendency of Black Power "forced Baldwin to simplify his rhetoric" to terms of black separatism and hatred of whites (12-13). Baldwin's political shift was accompanied by a turn toward fiction that resembled the literary naturalism he was famous for critiquing. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) deals with an urban, politically conscious black family struggling against the forces of white racism, police oppression, and state power. Beale Street is also atypical for Baldwin in that it features no interracial or homosexual relationships and offers a glowing depiction of a patriarchal black family. It seems to conform to black nationalist discourse in celebrating a heteropatriarchal mode of black masculinity. Keith Clark describes it as "a paean to anachronistic constructions of black manhood" (58), and he, Douglas Field...

Islam and Homosexuality by Habib Samar (review)

Islam and Homosexuality J. Harold Ellens This two‐volume set is introduced in a foreword by Parvez Sharma in which he lucidly describes this work by pointing out that the issue of homosexuality is approximately the same in Islam as in Judaism and Christianity. He emphasizes that this same‐sex preference is approximately as large a percentage of the Muslim population in any of its communities as it is in the other two religions of the book. Moreover, an official approval of homosexuality in Islam is about as likely as getting the Vatican to modify its rigid stance on sexuality in all of its nuances. Sharma is the producer of the remarkable documentary film, A Jihad for Love that examines in detail, on the basis of personal interviews worldwide, the state of homosexuality in Islam and how gay persons are dealing with it. With Sharma's interesting and articulate essay kicking off this massive work, the reader is deeply engaged from the outset and it is difficult to put the volumes down. Same‐sex intercourse is condemned outright under Islamic law, and today, convictions of homosexual behavior are punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mauritania, Sudan, and Yemen. Yet a study of Islamic religion and history shows a more nuanced view of homosexuality than often perceived. Evidence indicates that a genuine LGBTIIQ movement is gaining momentum in the Muslim world. Islam and Homosexuality gathers together 20 experts exploring these issues to provide an expansive look at the treatment of same‐sex interactions in Muslim cultures today. The first volume offers specific experiences of gay Muslims today, and its companion offers us a global perspective. The specific life experiences of LGBTIQ Muslim persons within Islamic nations and in the diaspora communities are explored in depth. The author of each chapter explores the quality of the homosexual experience, the roots of homophobia in Islamic theology, and the variety of judgments about homosexuality reflected in each of the large number of schools of Islamic law and philosophy. Throughout these two volumes the basis in the Qur'an and Hadith is explored for including or excluding LGBTIQ persons in Muslim society. This is the only current comprehensive source on this matter, despite the fact that Islam is one of the world's largest religions. This is the first time that the subject of homosexuality in Islam has been given such a deep and wide analysis. The editor of these volumes, Dr. Samar Habib, is a professor at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is the Editor in Chief of Nebula. Her previously published works include two definitive tomes: Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations and Arabo‐Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality: 850‐1780 AD. Habib has provided us with a set of volumes containing 20 chapters, a 62‐page introduction, extensive scholarly chapter notes, an adequate index, but unfortunately no integrated alphabetical bibliography in the end papers. The two volumes are beautifully organized and Praeger has presented them most attractively, as usual. The 20 chapters treat the following issues. Volume one has the politics of homophobia and persecution of homosexuals in Islam, fear and loneliness or isolation of gay persons in Islam, male homoerotic desire and public displays of affection in Arabic society, the problem of acceptance of homosexuality in relationship to economic issues, sexual orientation and chat room discourse, Allah's word and femaleness in Singapore, and neo‐orthodox Islam in relationship to the unlawfulness of same‐sex relations under the Hadith. Volume two offers social constructions of religious realities by Queer Muslims, the possibility of Islam being gay‐friendly, sexual purity in the context of Islam's objections, cases of same‐sex unions, Queer visions of Islam, identity problems for a Queer American Muslim, narratives from diasporic Muslim women and gay‐liberation, hiding in the many different closets, marketing the diversity in Queer Turkish organizations in Berlin today, the experience of diasporic Islam communities, and sexualities and the social order in Arab and Muslim communities. In her remarkably helpful and revealing Introduction to these volumes Habib points out that it is easy for non‐Muslims, apparently, to judge that alternative forms of sexuality in Arab cultures are...

Minireview: Hormones and human sexual orientation.

Many people believe that sexual orientation (homosexuality vs. heterosexuality) is determined by education and social constraints. There are, however, a large number of studies indicating that prenatal factors have an important influence on this critical feature of human sexuality. Sexual orientation is a sexually differentiated trait (over 90% of men are attracted to women and vice versa). In animals and men, many sexually differentiated characteristics are organized during early life by sex steroids, and one can wonder whether the same mechanism also affects human sexual orientation. Two types of evidence support this notion. First, multiple sexually differentiated behavioral, physiological, or even morphological traits are significantly different in homosexual and heterosexual populations. Because some of these traits are known to be organized by prenatal steroids, including testosterone, these differences suggest that homosexual subjects were, on average, exposed to atypical endocrine conditions during development. Second, clinical conditions associated with significant endocrine changes during embryonic life often result in an increased incidence of homosexuality. It seems therefore that the prenatal endocrine environment has a significant influence on human sexual orientation but a large fraction of the variance in this behavioral characteristic remains unexplained to date. Genetic differences affecting behavior either in a direct manner or by changing embryonic hormone secretion or action may also be involved. How these biological prenatal factors interact with postnatal social factors to determine life-long sexual orientation remains to be determined.

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF GENDER PERFORMANCE

This essay examines the cultural politics of gender performance in relation to the conditions of intelligibility in Chinese society. Cultural imaginings of gender in China are influenced not only by the ideological apparatuses but also by a traditional mode of epistemology that sustains a regime of collective make-believe wherein homosexual subjects are regarded as unintelligible. Although homosexuality exists in social reality, the lack of its own truthful representation creates numerous misunderstandings that prevent the development of a positive identity in Chinese culture, and homosexual sensibilities are suppressed by the hegemony of cultural values that drive sexual deviants to self-negation and self-sacrifice. Fe/male impersonation, as an oblique mode of expression, reveals a radical difference in desire which, undefined by the existing measures of epistemology, characterizes a phantasmal situation of the obscure human passion that fails to produce full presence in Chinese cultural space.

P03-374 - The neurobiology of sexual orientation

IntroductionHomosexuality is a constantly debated issue as to whether it is determined at birth or a choice (nature vs. nurture). The works of the Kinsey Reports and Dr. Evelyn Hooker published in the 1950s resulted in the removal of homosexuality from the DSM4 in 1973. Since then, it has been mentioned as an illness only in the context of being a putative exacerbating factor in anxiety states. Recent studies reveal a clear cut neurobiology to sexual orientation.MethodsNeurobiologist Simon LeVay conducted a study of brain tissue samples from 41 human autopsies performed at several hospitals in New York and California. He found a significant size difference of the interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus between homosexual and heterosexual men.ResultsIn addition, Dr. Ivanka Savic-Berglund and Dr. Per Lindström of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, performed fMRI and PET measurements of cerebral blood flow. Using volumetric studies, they found significant cerebral size differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects; the brains of homosexual men resembled heterosexual women and homosexual women resembled heterosexual men. Pheromonal studies also have added to the scientific knowledge of sexuality. Sex-atypical connections were found among homosexual participants. Amygdala connectivity differences were found to be statistically significant and provided evidence towards sexual dimorphism between heterosexual and homosexual subjects. Extensive controls were performed during testing to exclude analytical variability.ConclusionsA totally evidence-based medicine presentation will provide current data regarding homosexuality showing differences, or similarities, between the brains of homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope: Negotiating the Intersections of Religion and Sexuality on Network Television's The Book of Daniel

This article analyzes the television series The Book of Daniel, a program that shows in full relief the ways that current discourses of religion and sexuality converge to produce a particular type of gay subject. This subject, primarily male, might be understood as bound through an innate identity and commitment to the sanctity and reproduction of heteronormative institutions such as the church and state, which renders him assimilable into the social order. As homosexuality, per se, is no longer “outside” the normative order, the program constructs an unstable, nonbinary, and nonheteronormative other who is best understood as queer.

Coming out of the cabinet: Fashioning the closet with Sweden's most famous diplomat

This article offers a critical analysis of the media discourse surrounding the Swedish diplomat Sverker strm's coming out as a gay man at the age of 87. Particular interest is devoted to his striking fashion choice of wearing a pair of oddly coloured socks, which highlighted his contradictory masculinity as well as the many inherent paradoxes of the closet. strm's red and green socks functioned as a means to express forbidden desires, to oppose normative expectations in a playful way and to grant the gay subject a presence in a world that is still very much structured by the logics of the closet. Moreover, his contradictory body language, coupled with his repeated affirmations that his coming out was a private issue, revealed a divided masculinity that was ideologically dependent on a pre-feminist understanding of gender and sexuality as private, that is to say non-political. The article argues that there was strong evidence to suggest that his coming out was in fact a tactical move in a political game, a move aimed to denounce and ridicule the Swedish Security Police (SPO), who, after decades of surveillance, refused to grant the diplomat access to its classified files on him.

“Under a Foreign Sky:” Place and Displacement in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Critical readings of James Baldwin’s Giovanni Room have largely focused on what is considered its displacement of blackness unto whiteness in the form of the novel’s white protagonist, David, and stage a sort of lynching party to search out and expose to the critical gaze the “absent black man” in the text. Only a few recent readings, beyond biographical surveys of expatriate writers, have considered expatriation outside of Baldwin’s biography and essays, or seriously attempted to locate exile as a key theme and strategy in his fiction. Since, as Méral has noted, Paris is “closely linked with the first fictional attempts to deal with the subject of homosexuality” (223), there must be something about the city which is ripe as a setting for exploration of homosexual themes.In an attempt to address this lacuna, and to unite Baldwin’s biographical and fictional interest in the productive functions of expatriation, this article examines the symbolic function of the places and displacements in Giovanni’s Room through the prism of the décalage afforded by Parisian exile. I argue that, through the depiction of the Parisian spaces—the city itself, the gay bars, and Giovanni’s room—and their contrast with American spaces, Baldwin shows the function of exile and otherness in not only evading, but producing and reinforcing (sexual) identities. With the freedom afforded “under a foreign sky” to ‘find oneself,’ David explores, then excises and exorcises, his hidden, “dirty,” “dark,” gay self in the figure of the guillotined Giovanni. As such, David reproduces heteronormativity through, literally, torturous means, highlighting the contortions required to maintain the heteronormative status quo, as well as white American identity.

A Gay Immigrant Student's Perspective: Unspeakable Acts in the Language Class

This article focuses on a subset of the student cohort that has, until recently, been largely hidden from view in the literature of language education: gay immigrants. Little is known about what sorts of classroom experiences gay immigrant students find engaging or alienating, or why this sort of knowledge is needed. This case study uses interview excerpts to examine self‐accounts of three classroom interactions that were significant to Pablo (a pseudonym), a 25‐year‐old gay man from Mexico studying English at a community college in the United States. The analysis takes into account Pablo's premigration experiences, together with relevant literature on second language socialisation, sexual migration, and gay language learners. By tracing Pablo's responses to the shutting down of gay themes, the presumption of heterosexuality, and the potential risks of signalling a gay identity, the analysis shows how gay topics and perspectives are constructed as unspeakable in the language classroom. The findings indicate that it can be difficult for gay immigrant (and international) students to establish communicative legitimacy in the language classroom, which can restrict learning opportunities. The classroom challenges that gay immigrants encounter—and the identity savvy they require—yield useful insights about language teaching in this age of mass migration.

Neural circuits of disgust induced by sexual stimuli in homosexual and heterosexual men: An fMRI study

Few studies demonstrated neural circuits related to disgust were influenced by internal sexual orientation in male. Here we used fMRI to study the neural responses to disgust in homosexual and heterosexual men to investigate that issue. Thirty-two healthy male volunteers (sixteen homosexual and sixteen heterosexual) were scanned while viewing alternating blocks of three types of erotic film: heterosexual couples (F–M), male homosexual couples (M–M), and female homosexual couples (F–F) engaged in sexual activity. All the participants rated their level of disgust and sexual arousal as well. The F–F and M–M stimuli induced disgust in homosexual and heterosexual men, respectively. The common activations related to disgusting stimuli included: bilateral frontal gyrus and occipital gyrus, right middle temporal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus, right cerebellum, and right thalamus. Homosexual men had greater neural responses in the left medial frontal gyrus than did heterosexual men to the sexual disgusting stimuli; in contrast, heterosexual men showed significantly greater activation than homosexual men in the left cuneus. ROI analysis showed that negative correlation were found between the magnitude of MRI signals in the left medial frontal gyrus and scores of disgust in homosexual subjects ( p < 0.05). This study indicated that there were regions in common as well as regions specific for each type of erotic stimuli during disgust of homosexual and heterosexual men.