Homosexual Subjects Research Articles

Queering Iranian Diasporic Cyberspace, Critiquing the Conditions of Belonging

Queering Iranian Diasporic Cyberspace, Critiquing the Conditions of Belonging

Oh Gay! al Bagaglino

In 1979 the Italian theatrical production offered plenty of plays centred upon gay themes, whilst television had already been displaying various characters – mostly from the music scene – whose gender identity and sexual orientation were not seen by the public as “traditional”. In the same year, the fifteen-year-old company “Bagaglino”, run by Mario Castellacci and Pier Francesco Pingitore, abandoned the genre of cabaret and started a new course putting on stage a musical comedy called Oh Gay!, trying to take advantage of the huge success of the Italian-French film La cage aux folles. The comedy is about a gay couple involved in the imaginary kidnapping of the Pope and it combines satire about the gloomy situation of Rome in the Years of Lead with a bland mockery of the multiplication of LGBT people in Italy.

ON SEX, GENDER AND SEXISM IN THE BULGARIAN CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

The paper is provoked by the rejection and falsification of the messages of the Istanbul Convention in Bulgaria and other post-communist countries which caused a wave of homophobia. The author tries to prove that neither in the communist period nor in the post-communist period a real emancipation of women was achieved, the theme of homosexuality was a taboo (in the communist period), over-presented in the first decade of the transition and later stigmatize by the rise of the populist nationalistic discourse. During the communist period, the so called “Unions of the fighters against fascism” turned into the male clientelistic networks granted with many privileges and marginalizing female antifascists. The critical discourse analysis of the press (1976) reveals male dominance and silencing of women playing mostly a decorative role. After the democratic changes the same male actors (nomenclature and former state security officers) benefited from the privatization, but the so called “mugs” (wrestlers) presented the new masculinity in the media: women were extremely sexualized and the new femininity was presented by the prostitutes and the girls in the entertaining industry, the professional women were rarely mentioned. The second part of the paper is a gender analysis of the lexical and grammatical system of the Bulgarian language. The analysis of the dominating metaphors reveals the means of male dominance in the everyday speech. Although the Slav languages have morphemes to denote women’s professions the media discourse prefers the male forms as more prestigious. The definite article and the plural forms serve to emphasise the male forms and to provide their euphony.

MAURICE: THROUGH THE LENSES OF LACANIAN “MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL…”

Maurice, a bildungsroman by E. M. Forster, revolves around the theme of homosexuality. By presenting homosexual characters, who are on a futile quest for their actual identity, Forster attempts to be the voice of the unspeakables in the Edwardian period in England, where all acts of homosexuality were considered illegal. In this paper, the identity of the characters is analysed through the lenses of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory by focusing on the concept of mirror. This paper attempts to reveal to what extent cultural codes and societal norms of the Edwardian period are functional in forming the identity of the characters. Besides, this study uncovers that Forster wisely uses Lacanian concepts such as imaginary order, symbolic order and real order in creating his characters. It is concluded that the mirror, which reflects the actual self of the characters, just like dreams and music, plays a significant role in (re)forming the identities from compulsory heterosexuality to voluntary homosexuality.

Dan Shen's “Dual Dynamics” and Dual Audience of Literary Fairy Tales

Dan Shen's “Dual Dynamics” and Dual Audience of Literary Fairy Tales

Geografías de exclusión: espacio público abierto y adultos mayores en el parque "Las Arboledas"de San Nicolás de los Garza, México.

This article is a reflection on the relationship between the production and reception of insults in the narrations of homosexual subjects in the city of Puebla, and how they affect their experience of social space. If we first acknowledge that insults discursively formulate the interpellated social subjects and their spaces, we can then consider those utterances as performative, since they affect naming and self-recognition. Insults are a recurrent feature of the experiences of segregation and discrimination of homosexual subjects. Thus, this article proposes to consider the experiences of homosexual subjects with insults as a discussion route to understand how the proliferation of injurious discourse operate in an empirical field.

Upgrading <em>The L Word: Generation Q</em>

Upgrading <em>The L Word: Generation Q</em>

Straight eye for the queer ad: attitudes, skepticism, inferences of manipulative intent and willingness to buy

PurposeThis study aims to provide a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of consumer attitudes toward brands and attitudes toward a series of fashion oriented print advertisements with and without homosexual themes, on consumer willingness to buy from brands. The influence of consumer skepticism and inferences of manipulative intent (IMI) as moderators between these variables is also investigated. This study also closes various research gaps identified within the literature.Design/methodology/approachA self-administered survey instrument was designed using established scales to collect data through an online questionnaire. Fashion advertisements namely one advertisement representing homosexual content and one heterosexual advertisement were used in the study within subjects (e.g. male and female) design. Statistical techniques, specifically factor analysis, regressions and multiple regressions are used to analyze the data.FindingsThe findings indicate significant and positive relationships between attitude toward the brand and advertisement as well as willingness to buy for both males and females. The moderation analyses noted that consumer skepticism enhanced the relationship between attitude toward the brand and attitude toward the advertisement, but weakened the relationship between attitude toward the advertisement and willingness to buy, only for the female cohort. Similarly, a weakening effect of IMI was noted on the relationship between attitude toward the advertisement and willingness to buy.Research limitations/implicationsThe current study contributes to the literature on homosexual imagery in advertising. In applying the persuasion knowledge model, the current study demonstrates the applicability of the model to homosexual themes in fashion advertising while accounting for the effects of consumer skepticism and IMI.Practical implicationsThe current research highlights the importance of accounting for gender differences when introducing homosexual themes in fashion advertisements. Heterosexual males and females differ in their attitudes toward homosexual themes in fashion advertising, as well as how skeptical they are with regards to the motives of the advertiser. While a great deal of acceptance is already present in today's society, these differences still need to be accounted for in future fashion advertising campaigns.Originality/valueThe present study represents an examination of consumer responses to a series of fashion advertisements in Australia and provides useful implications to marketers of fashion products. The study further contributes to the literature on consumer skepticism and IMI with regards to cause-related advertising.

Edmund White’s Post Gay Autobiographies

ABSTRACT This essay explores the achievement of the gay American author Edmund White’s numerous autobiographies and memoirs. After surveying the formal and thematic variety of White’s individual life writings, it then questions why nearly all of them were written after the explosion of gay life writing that took place in the United States beginning in the 1970s, that is, after the periods of greatest struggle for homosexual emancipation and the fight against AIDS. The essay argues that White’s non-fiction memoirs subtly re-configure the nature of the genre itself. Rather than explaining the narrator’s sexual difference to an audience not entirely aware of homosexuality (as did much early gay life writing) or struggling to find a voice in a homophobic society (one of the great themes of White’s autobiographical fictions), White’s non-fictional autobiographies establish a self-assured voice that presumes the world can be usefully examined and explained by the individual gay subject. They situate the gay speaker at the centre rather than on the margins of American and Western culture. Using the form to understand the world from a gay perspective, White merges sociological analysis with traditional forms of life writing to create something new in the American gay canon.

Los límites de la "hermandad". Modernidad e identidad gay en México

The paper starts from the concept of identity, as a discursive and normative construction that, in the specific case of gay identity, emerges within a middle, “white” and urban class, in a position to separate themselves from “traditional” forms of homoeroticism. From that point of view, we analyze the production of gay identity in Mexico, emphasizing the exteriors that constitute its limits and margins and the material and symbolic exclusions that it implies. It is proposed that these production depends on certain dynamics fundamentally crossed by a class structure, where the homosexual subject affirms his identity, as a white identity, through the daily updating of racialized objects of repulsion and desire, embodied in the body of la loca and el chacal.

Queer Music in the Queen’s Hall: Teleny and Decadent Musical Geographies at the Fin de Siècle

Abstract This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.

Cultural Spectrum in Arvind Adiga’s Selection Days

Cultural Studies have played a pivotal role in understanding and evaluating the power dynamics of the social, political, economic and ethical world order by empirically engaging and focusing on the present-day culture, tracing its historical roots and explicating its attributes with reference to a particular literary text and its reception in a society. Arvind Adiga, the Man-Booker Prize winning Indo-Australian author, in Selection Day, has adroitly detailed how cricket as an individual entity impacts the cultural phenomena of a society by confronting its inherent myriad issues. The narrative delves deep into the lives of two siblings – Radha and Manju, witnesses the dramatic turnaround of events and tries to capture the themes of unfulfilled desires and preordained destinies. The novel also explores how the sport holds different meanings and significance for different characters, each of whom view the game in the light of their own ideology. The author foresees and sensitizes the theme of homosexuality, which is still a taboo and been unheard of, within the sports fraternity. Adiga’s critique of the parental felony, embodied in Mohan Kumar, and its repercussions is the most compelling theme at the heart of this work of fiction. Selection Day powerfully binds together the societal phenomena of class construction, unquenchable thirst for money, sexual orientations and ideologies with a single thread and studies how culture, in itself, is an ever-evolving phenomenon.

Homosexuality and Childhood Trauma in Tunisia

Our goal was to assess the traumatic experience suffered in childhood by homosexual subjects and to compare it with the experience of heterosexual subjects. We carried out a study between January 2018 and March 2018 at a non-profit organization in Tunisia (ATL MST-SIDA). Participants who self-identified as homosexual were recruited (n = 24). The control group included healthy heterosexual adults recruited from the hospital staff (n = 24). Childhood trauma was assessed using the French version of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. In the homosexual group, we found that the most common form of abuse was physical neglect (61.6%), followed by physical abuse (38.5%), sexual abuse (30.8%), emotional abuse (23.1%), and emotional neglect (23%). The childhood trauma total score was 49.6 in the homosexual group and 35.0 in the heterosexual group, which is a statistically significant difference (p = 0.001). All subscale scores were found to be significantly higher in the homosexual group than in the control group, except physical and emotional abuse. The high reported frequency of childhood trauma among homosexuals calls for immediate attention from government and public health officials.

Pilot study about the relationship between body perception and sexuality using the DAS59

The idea of this study stemmed to understand if sexuality can be a factor that affects the perception of one’s body and can be a feature that makes the subject more inclined to undergo esthetic surgery. A total of 51 male subjects participated in this study by filling out the Italian version of the DAS59 consisting of 59 items, which took approximately 35 min, under the supervision of a research assistant who did not interfere with the privacy of the patient. The data was entered in SAS version 8.4 (SAS Institute, Cary, NC, USA). The reliability of the scale was tested by Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and the correlation coefficient. Retest reliability was also tested using Spearman’s correlation coefficient between items and the total scale score. Analysis of variance was performed between the two groups. Differences between the homosexual and heterosexual subjects were assessed using the Mann–Whitney test of discriminant validity. Adult homosexual male patients without a personal history of esthetic procedures were recruited. We enrolled 26 adult homosexual male patients aged 18–42 years old and 25 male heterosexual adults aged 18–43 years. Any subject had personal history of esthetic procedures. We analyzed direct and indirect indicators of “esthetic concern,” the number of answers given by each subject accuracy, the attention to the questionnaire, and the effect on age on accuracy between the two groups. We confirmed that there are many differences between the two groups. Nevertheless, the greater attention to esthetics and concern for appearance is much more present in the homosexual group than in the heterosexual group, and its relationship with age in the homosexual group is a strong indication of an important and essential phenomenon in development. The absence of such a relationship in the heterosexual group leads instead to think that the esthetic concern is in this group a phenomenon of local type and much less fundamental than the personality. The DAS59, used in a homogeneous study group, has shown that esthetic sensibility may depend on emotional and psychological factors within a homogeneous social dimension that does not create a difference. This pilot study is the first to introduce the importance of the role of sexuality in the perception of the esthetics of one’s body. Level of evidence: Not ratable.

Fashioning Fabulation: Dress, Gesture and the Queer Aesthetics of Mumbai Pride

India’s ongoing legal movement to decriminalise ‘gay sex’ has been witness to the simultaneous sanitisation of queer spaces. From Pride parades declaring ‘no nanga naach, no flamboyance’ to quotidian policing of excessive dress and gestures, there is a growing emphasis on respectability that stages queerness in the private rather than the public domain. The good homosexual subject is increasingly at odds with public gestures, performances and dresses that might seem too excessive, too flamboyant, perhaps too queer. But what might it mean to sit with the bawdy gestures enacted by kothi, hijra and MSM persons in Prides, in offices, in public spaces and in daily life? This essay makes a case for theorising the fabulousness of gender and sexual minorities in India, pushing homosexuality beyond the registers of legality and epidemiology. By examining the political implications of excessive and risky aesthetic practices, it argues that what is at stake is not only a centring of aesthetics in larger considerations of queer politics, but also the larger work of fabulation: the reinvention of what meanings queer subjectivity can take on in public spaces in India.

Kurmacada Kuir'in Kanonlaşması: Alan Hollinghurst'ün İngiliz Romanındaki Yeri

The present study aims at contextualizing the British novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction in the modern British Novel dealing with themes of homosexuality. The study will focus on the novels of E.M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood and Ronald Firbank and relate them to the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. Such a comparison will shed light on the evolution of themes of homosexuality and the depiction of queer characters in the British novel. Different from his predecessors, Hollinghurst focuses on homosexuality not only as a concealed or revealed identity, but as a textual phenomenon. Thus, Hollinghurst offers a wider fictional realm for the understanding of homosexual selfhood and identity. It could be argued that Hollinghurst’s fiction builds up a ‘queer’ canon in British fiction that deals with the homosexual experience not as a reason for alienation, but as a lens which opens up to a wider human experience and identity.

TRANSNATIONAL INTEREST CONVERGENCE AND GLOBAL KOREA AT THE EDGE OF RACE AND QUEER EXPERIENCES

AbstractThis is a story about gay/queer globalization unfolded through the narratives of Korean gay men in Seoul. In this paper, I make use of talanoa dialogues to apprehend the way race and racial hierarchies can provide insights into the conditions in which the gay subject in Seoul is intelligible in intercultural interactions. I present these narratives in the format of a thematic talanoa using Pacific Research Methodologies (PRM). In doing so, I advance a unique way to negotiate communication with participants in a cross-cultural setting, rendering myself visible as a racialized (Sāmoan) researcher. Empirically, I argue that the narratives of Korean gay men party to this study demonstrate how the Korea/local–West/global binary is an important referential, in that there exists a structural connection through immigration policies that facilitates a transnational convergence of local and global racial hierarchies. This connection, I also argue, helps to structure and position Whiteness at the apex of racial hierarchies around foreigner subjectivities in South Korea.

MEMÓRIAS DE HOMOSSEXUALIDADES, ESCOLARIZAÇÕES E HOMOFOBIAS

It is a postgraduate research in education that aims to relive memories of male and homosexual subjects about physical and non-physical violence experienced during the school period. Methodologically, we are guided by the bias of post-critical research in education by dealing with issues that destabilize universalizing models that use explanations that have essence and nature as classifying elements of people. This approach intends to pluralize meanings about the issue of social construction about gender and sexualities in order to better contextualize how the research participants insert their discursive memories. Given the conception of this approach, our study proposed participating in a Facebook group called the Gay Facebook Brazil Group (GGFBR), where we posted an invitation to move participation. We have eight subjects who have a variety of differences (age group, Brazilian region, life trajectories) that associated with the issue of school attendance bring us a diversity of issues so that the issue of sexualities and their performativities are validated in the school environment. In conclusion, sexuality emerges as a subject that also makes up the construction of subjectivity, which may lead to the necessary demands to discuss equity, ethics and plurality of constitution.

Homossexuais Negros na(s) História(s) do Pós-Abolição no Brasil: algumas provocações à luz do debate sobre as masculinidades negras

This article is built as a provocation from a visit to post-abolition historiographies, the Social History of Homosexuality in Brazil and the debates about black masculinities in Brazil. Visiting these three frameworks, I question how it is possible to think, from these, the trajectories of black homosexuals in Brazil thinking from the socio-historically constructed representations about black and / or homosexual subjects, especially in medical-legal discourses and academic formulations

Molecular characterization of Blastocystis subtypes in HIV-positive patients and evaluation of risk factors for colonization

BackgroundBlastocystis is one of the most common intestinal protozoa in human faecal samples with uncertain impact on public health. Studies on the prevalence of Blastocystis in HIV-positive patients are limited and dated.MethodsA cross-sectional study was carried out involving 156 HIV-positive patients to evaluate the prevalence of Blastocystis-subtypes by molecular amplification and sequencing the small subunit rRNA gene (SSU rDNA), to identify the risk factors for its transmission, to examine the relationship between the presence of the protist and gastrointestinal disorders. Furthermore, the evaluation of the faecal calprotectin by immunoassay from a sample of subjects was performed to evaluate the gut inflammation in Blastocystis-carriers.ResultsBlastocystis-subtypes ST1, ST2, ST3, ST4 were identified in 39 HIV-positive patients (25%). No correlation was found between the presence of the protist and virological or epidemiological risk factors. Blastocystis was more frequently detected in homosexual subjects (p = 0.037) infected by other enteric protozoa (p = 0.0001) and with flatulence (p = 0.024). No significant differences in calprotectin level was found between Blastocystis-carriers and free ones.ConclusionsBlastocystis is quite common in HIV-positive patients on ART showing in examined patients 25% prevalence. Homosexual behaviour may represent a risk factor for its transmission, while CD4 count and viremia didn’t correlate with the presence of the protist. The pathogenetic role of Blastocystis remains unclear and no gut inflammation status was detected in Blastocystis-carriers. The only symptom associated with Blastocystis was the flatulence, evidencing a link between the presence of the protist and the composition and stability of gut microbiota.