SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-22DOI: 10.1177/13634607241266430
Hazuki Kaneko, Diana Khor
{"title":"Doubly marginalized? Japanese gay men with interracial desires","authors":"Hazuki Kaneko, Diana Khor","doi":"10.1177/13634607241266430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241266430","url":null,"abstract":"Postwar Japan has built a new self-image as a peaceful, ethnically homogeneous island nation, obscuring the imperialist past. In this context, same-ethnic/racial partnering or so-called ethnic endogamy has been reinforced, whether gay or straight, as a normative sexual desire and practice. Japanese people who engage in intimate relationships with foreigners are potentially considered deviant and subject to social marginalization. Drawing on in-depth interview data, this research focuses on the experiences of Japanese gay men with such peripheral desires, examining how they negotiate their partner preferences when encountering social disapproval or stigma. Further, this research also discusses how their racialized desire intersects with their queer sexuality, simultaneously resisting and perpetuating same-ethnic/racial partnering normativity.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"94 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141778982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-22DOI: 10.1177/13634607241266082
Linda Roland Danil
{"title":"Book review: AIDS & Representation: Queering portraiture during the AIDS crisis in America","authors":"Linda Roland Danil","doi":"10.1177/13634607241266082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241266082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141778978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-22DOI: 10.1177/13634607241267087
Amber Husain
{"title":"Viral ecologies: Refiguring ‘psychic immunology’, in the art of Helen Chadwick","authors":"Amber Husain","doi":"10.1177/13634607241267087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241267087","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141778976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-21DOI: 10.1177/13634607241267090
Simon Clay
{"title":"Chemsex as wild self-care","authors":"Simon Clay","doi":"10.1177/13634607241267090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241267090","url":null,"abstract":"Chemsex has received increasing scholarly attention over the past few years and is frequently defined as the sexualised use of synthetic drugs. There is an emerging binary within the literature on chemsex that portrays it as either inherently risky or liberatory. This binary assumes that chemsex is a stable category of sex and always involves integrating ‘dangerous’ synthetic substances into sex. Drawing from interviews with 16 gay/queer men and individuals who identified with the gay community from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, I critique the underpinning assumptions of this binary and show how these individuals used chemsex as a technique of ‘wild self-care’. This unique model of self-care recuperates ‘dangerous’ practices in emancipatory and life-affirming ways. It shows how chemsex is both risky and liberatory in ever-changing and unexpected ways.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141745632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-21DOI: 10.1177/13634607241264955
Alamgir Alamgir, Emily Gray, Peter Kelly, Seth Brown
{"title":"“We are in a very precarious position”: Exploring the resilience of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities during the COVID-19 pandemic in Pakistan","authors":"Alamgir Alamgir, Emily Gray, Peter Kelly, Seth Brown","doi":"10.1177/13634607241264955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241264955","url":null,"abstract":"This paper draws upon empirical data in order to offer insights to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the lives of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities in Peshawar City, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan. The paper also considers the resilience that the community developed during this time. Drawing on Butler’s concept of precarity and liveability, we in this article demonstrate how the precarious positionalities of Khawaja Sara and Hijra were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and thereafter in Pakistan. 10 members of Khawaja Sara and Hijra communities were engaged in face-to-face interviews, and the paper demonstrates how community is made and maintained by Khawaja Sara and Hijra, who are amongst the most vulnerable, marginalized, oppressed, and isolated people in South Asian communities. Whilst not shying away from the violence that characterises the lives of participants, who face familial rejection, community, and social pressure to conform to strict cultural gender norms, and sexual and physical violence, the paper also works to highlight the ongoing adaptability and resilience of these ancient communities through engaging with the ways in which participants supported each other through the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141745631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-21DOI: 10.1177/13634607241261842
Mie Birk Jensen
{"title":"Phallic metaphors and metonyms: Emerging meanings of Viagra and masculinity in news media","authors":"Mie Birk Jensen","doi":"10.1177/13634607241261842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241261842","url":null,"abstract":"When Viagra was first introduced, it was presented as a new pharmaceutical with potentially revolutionizing effects in various forms of media across the globe. While it is no longer a new pharmaceutical, it still continues to find its way into news media. This article explores the continuous circulation of Viagra in news media over time, pointing to a global impact of the relationship between pharmaceutical advertising and news media, which play into reconfigurations of masculinity. Through an analysis of Danish news articles mentioning Viagra in different times, it is argued that Viagra is not only made news-worthy as a pharmaceutical; it has penetrated our language as a phallic metaphor and metonymic concept through which human and non-human actors become valorized as im/potent in different ways. This is further discussed as a potential indication of how gendered processes of medicalization can affect our understanding of the capabilities of the human body, and by extension the language we make use of to grasp the world we live in, as well as ourselves.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737098","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-07-19DOI: 10.1177/13634607241262147
Nisrine Chaer
{"title":"Strategies of passing: Hypervisible bodies, disrespectable affinities, and Syrian trans refugees in Lebanon","authors":"Nisrine Chaer","doi":"10.1177/13634607241262147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241262147","url":null,"abstract":"In today’s Lebanon, Syrian trans refugees face intersecting systems of violence that position them as hypervisible ‘deviants’ in multiple ways: as refugees without formal legal residency, as trans individuals without congruent gender markers, and as working-class individuals. Attending ethnographically to the notions of hypervisibility and (dis)respectability that underpin such deviances, this article explores how the Lebanese security-morality apparatus enforces hypervisibility on Syrian trans women by eroding their respectability and privacy. In the context of recent crackdowns on Syrian-majority areas and LGBT spaces, I look specifically to how (dis)respectability is deployed by and against Syrian trans women in their crisscrossing of the boundaries of both a ‘trans closet’ and ideals of middle-class Lebanese (cis)womanhood. My analysis evolves the concept of respectability to account for how my interlocuters navigate the permeability of their private spaces, secure themselves against potential harm, and assert their sovereignty. This is accomplished through the use of two strategies: ‘respectable passing’—investing in markers of class and citizenship over those of gender, and ‘disrespectable affinities’—engaging in a politics of the vulgar and forging social connections between hypervisible communities, effecting alternative forms of sociality that unsettle the border between trans and cis Syrians in the racialized and classed order of contemporary Beirut.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141737326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-06-25DOI: 10.1177/13634607241264319
Megan Ingram, Kai Jacobsen
{"title":"Both because of and in spite of: Towards the reclamation of queercrip joy","authors":"Megan Ingram, Kai Jacobsen","doi":"10.1177/13634607241264319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241264319","url":null,"abstract":"Queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people are frequently used to represent pain, suffering, shame, and disgust in dominant heteronormative and ableist discourses. However, many queer, trans, and crip scholars, artists, and activists have reclaimed previously pathologized and denigrated experiences as sites of pleasure and joy. Importantly, this queercrip approach to joy does not position joy as an opposite or replacement for pain, but embraces joy and pain as simultaneous and co-constitutive. This essay explores the proliferations, potentialities, and limitations of queercrip joy as a site of resistance to cisheteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Specifically, we spotlight gender euphoria and disabled joy alongside the scholarship of authors like Sara Ahmed and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the intersecting fields of crip theory, queer theory, trans studies, and affect theory. Ultimately, we argue that queercrip joy exists both because of and in spite of the pain of enduring oppression and physical and psychological pain. As such, queercrip joy is not merely a pure happy object, but a complicated formulation of intimacy, pleasure, pain, validation, refusal, and relationality–an indicator of the very attachments that allow us to be affected. Therefore, celebrating queercrip joy is an insufficient yet necessary tool for queer, trans, and disabled liberation.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141504761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-06-20DOI: 10.1177/13634607241263437
Ivan Bujan
{"title":"A case of chronic survivance: Decolonizing the epidemiology of HIV","authors":"Ivan Bujan","doi":"10.1177/13634607241263437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241263437","url":null,"abstract":"This paper argues that integrating Native American art, tradition, and healing practices into public health offers an effective intervention for revitalizing conventional sexual health strategies within Native American and Two-Spirit communities. To illustrate, the paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of various practices employed by Sheldon Raymore, a Two-Spirit artist and storyteller from the Cheyenne River Sioux nation, including performance, tipi-making, and beading. To bridge the gap between care methodologies in settler clinics, focused on behavior change and biomedicine, and Native American healing practices rooted in tradition and ceremony, the paper introduces a conceptual framework termed “chronic survivance.” This framework merges Western epidemiological terminology with the Indigenous concept of “survivance,” coined by Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor, which emphasizes themes of Indigenous survival and resistance amidst ongoing adversity. By employing this framework, the paper challenges the conventional understanding of HIV epidemiology, proposing that chronicity involves a complex interplay of discursive, cultural, and biopolitical practices, thus amenable to decolonization. Chronic survivance emerges as a tool for reimagining Indigenous well-being, bridging disparate traditions, and sustaining the enduring essence of Indigeneity amidst the persistence of U.S. settler colonialism.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141504760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
SexualitiesPub Date : 2024-05-28DOI: 10.1177/13634607241257397
Fran Amery
{"title":"‘Gender critical’ feminism as biopolitical project","authors":"Fran Amery","doi":"10.1177/13634607241257397","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607241257397","url":null,"abstract":"In the last few years, latent anti-trans sentiment within some corners of UK feminism has coalesced into a highly organised ‘gender critical’ movement that has seen considerable success in influencing policy and public debate. This article addresses ‘gender critical’ feminism as a lobbying movement, examining its orientation towards governance and power. It argues that the ‘gender critical’ movement must be understood as a biopolitical project indebted both to sexological work aimed at ‘normalising’ trans and intersex minds and bodies, and to 1970s feminist responses to this work. This project strives for the power to manage trans populations, both via direct surveillance of trans lives and indirectly, via attempts to counter the supposed threat to a broader cisfeminist population management project posed by trans identification.","PeriodicalId":51454,"journal":{"name":"Sexualities","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2024-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141173403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}