Sexualtiy Gender and National Identity

First published in 1988, this volume redefined the anthropological study of menstrual customs. Examining cultures as diverse as long-house dwellers in North Borneo, African farmers, Welsh housewives, and postindustrial American workers, it challenged the previously widespread image of a universal "menstrual taboo" as well as the common assumption of universal female subordination that underlay it. Offering feminist perspectives on comparative gender politics and symbolism, the book has interested students and scholars in anthropology, women's studies, religion, and comparative health systems. Originally listed as a “Notable” book in Choice, it later won the first Most Enduring Edited Collection Prize, awarded by the Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction (a unit of the American Anthropological Association.). The book continues to be taught regularly around the world.

Catalina de Erauso was a Spanish nun—turned soldier—who lived in 17th century Spain. Dressed as a man for almost two decades, she travelled to the Colonies to test her luck in the army, where she made the grade of ensign. In 1624 she wrote her memoirs. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was lost and the text which has survived is a copy, probably penned by an amanuensis. In 1996, an English translation of her memoirs was published. In my paper I will argue that the translation of the Stepto’s translation reflects a cultural bias and shows little effort at researching the nun's deeds and words. I will also examine gender attitudes in the Renaissance, and later periods, and the role of the Church in curtailing women from attaining intellectual maturity. To back my claims, I use Catalina's original text and contrast it with subsequent editions. I hope to prove that the English translation veers more towards sensationalism than to a deep and abiding respect for the nun’s misfortunes.
Keywords: Gender; translating issues; transvestite; Basque; anachronisms

This thesis (288 pages) represents an qualitative and historic inquiry into the meaning of abortion in present day Norway. The thesis includes new material (interviews with women and men), focused analysis of the relation and dynamics between religion, gender and present ideology of equality, as well as thorough discussions on theory (theories of Culture, Myth, History, Gender), and the development of a feminist foundation for a feminist theory of Myth.

In the modern game of baseball the game can no longer claim to be completely won on the field. Instead, the game is now won on computers in dingy clubhouse rooms by number crunchers that would probably do better in industries such as finance or science. When looking at the revolution of sabermetrics (also known as performance scouting), or the statistical analysis of baseball data that drastically differed from the old-school visual-based method of scouting, the first thought to your mind is not a comparison of the conflict that surrounds the issue of abortion.

Abstract:

This paper examines mid- 20th century pre-Stonewall American butch-femme bar culture in light of that community being a sacred community for many of its participants as it was “the only place,” a phrase used by many of the informants, to describe the bar as the place that many of them could have any community at all in the contested period when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill.  This paper continues that examination exploring this community in light of a possible sacrality, and the bar as an ecclesiastical site that was the birth site of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights, in contrast to the commonly held assumption that such rights began with the Stonewall Riots of the late 1969.
Further this paper proposes that this re-framed view of the community may be helpful to gerontological studies today as it allows a window through which the elder informants can view their past experiences through a gaze of spirituality. This gaze has not been previously available to them as the gay bar culture has been seen by many who participated in it as without deep meaning. By re-framing the period as having deep meaning, akin to religious significance, it allows the participants to enjoy the benefits that spirituality has been shown to have for the aging process. This community is then seen as a possible site of a lived corporeal theology. For instance, it demonstrates that traditional religious activities (such as marriage) and activities labeled “religious” because of their community functionality took place in the bars.

Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, or queer (LGBTQ) are at greater personal and academic risk than their heterosexual peers (Kosciw et al, 2012).  Many experience a negative school environment and few see themselves represented in the curriculum.  According to the literature, few English/Language Arts teachers are utilizing LGBTQ-focused texts in their courses (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; Author, 2014).  This case study demonstrates how one English/Language Arts teacher provided challenging, safe, inclusive educational experiences for students.  In so doing, the instructor also provides an example of critical pedagogy in practice.  The multiple strands of the teacher’s instructional approach are discussed, with the goal of helping inservice and preservice teachers to envision ways in which they, too, might challenge inequity and support LGBTQ and other students.

Technological advancement has swiftly changed the world.  Gone are the days, when one used to consider a book or meet a person for knowing about a particular topic/issue. Modern world due to the complex social-economic structure, needs to abide by the trends of and changes in the technology. Internet, the greatest inventions of all times, is one of the wonders of modern world that has produced revolutionary changes. It has enabled us to solve the problems ranging from biological diseases to space satellite allocation. This assignment will discuss the specific use of Internet, i.e. choosing a webpage from the internet and analyzing its contents in the light of authenticity and validity.

Gender role strain is the stress and pressure caused by societal expectations from individuals to behave and perform according to the role expectation attached with each gender. The study aimed to investigate Pakistani men's gender role strain; its influence on their physical, psychological health and overall wellbeing using survey method. The study was conducted on a purposive sample of 100 working men from various workplaces of Lahore, Pakistan. The instruments used were Gender Role Strain Questionnaire (self-constructed) and WarwichEdinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (Warwick & Edinburgh, 2006). Results confirmed that role strain existed among the working men and reported many physical, emotional and psychological symptoms. Head of family and being breadwinner were paramount roles that caused extreme strain in Pakistani men. Physical strength was found to be prime masculine stereotype. This study revealed average well-being score of men. Significant differences were found in the role strain among men with different age, income and educational levels. The researcher appeals religious scholars and government to play their part to reduce role strain and improve well-being among men.

The popular culture of Japan draws and consolidates fans from various geographical domains and multiple backgrounds. Its engagingly rich heredity and culture is much diverse and proliferates around comics (manga), games, animation (anime) and music. These various sub genres of Japan’s popular culture and the various terminologies associated with them and their audiences frame Western fandom. Cosplay (“costume play”) is a fan culture that has an active camaraderie where fans create their costumes which are inspired by fictional characters from comics, games, animation and music. Cosplay is a fine blend of both its origin terms: “costume” and “play” since a cosplayer portrays characteristics of both these words – dressing up as a fictional character and also enact the character’s life and situations with full realization that they are trying to capture the life of someone, temporarily, who does not exist in reality. In this process happens a blurring of reality, entry into the world of fiction, a creation of new identity through this narrative resulting in the birth of an entirely new persona which is supreme in itself. (Dorfman, 2007) According to Judith Butler, the practice of enacting various identities, genders and switching between them and trying new ones or performing multiple identities, like in Cosplay, allows individuals to redefine, discover, stretch and enhenhance their own sense of identity. Thus cosplayers slip in and out of identities by switching between costumes and perform their persona by enacting the “play”. Thus the concept of identity is in a constant influx where public and private realms merge creating a sense of fragmentation and decentered self giving rise to multiple conflicting identities.
This is a postmodern concept in all senses by creating a hyper-reality where there is a disruption of the dominance of high culture by popular culture formulating a hybrid culture. This signifies that we are living in the postmodern space of virtuality which defines hobbies and connections and we ourselves are unsure of our own structured identity defined by societal norms. In this technology driven age cosplay also allows a certain form of escapism and interaction with the physical world through conversion of hobbies from a screen-centric medium to a concrete physical world.

Grounded in three narratives, a lesbian high school student, a transgender college student and a high school teacher/researcher, this paper discusses student resistance in hetronormative spaces and places it relates to themes of agency, affect, and reflexivity.  The purpose of this paper is twofold.  It seeks to, on one hand, further nuance William A. Smith’s framework of Racial Battle Fatigue as it applies to questions of school, culture and fe/male bodies.  On the other, this piece discusses the multiple possibilities in resistance and with resilience when young wo/men enact a sense of agency to create spaces of equity and access in school.  By foregrounding the multiple intersections of self and sexual orientation in public schools today the paper discusses the direct impact of what the authors call Queer Battle Fatigue; an examination of the nexus of the ontological and epistemological as they relate the questions of equity and access in schooling.

Wozolek, B. (2015). Are we not fatigued?: Queer battle fatigue at the intersection of heteronormative culture, International Journal of Curriculum and Social Justice, 1(1), 186-214.

A History of Bisexuality combines history and queer deconstructive theory in order to rethink our understanding of sexuality in the West. Complicating recent historical and theoretical accounts, it begins with the assumption that any understanding of sexuality’s historical and epistemological construction is impoverished without an analysis of bisexuality.  The book argues that any definition of homosexuality or heterosexuality necessarily entails a definition of bisexuality, such that each of these terms requires the other two for its self-definition. A History of Bisexuality demonstrates this by retracing the history of modern sexuality through sexology, psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory, and the science of molecular biology and genetics.

It reveals that, in order to sustain our culture’s pigeonholing of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, the history of sexuality has been one of repeated attempts to deny the existence of bisexuality. A History of Bisexuality traces the historical forces responsible for this cultural myth, and in the process reveals sexuality, and its accompanying terms hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, all to be arbitrary designations whose boundaries overlap and merge inevitably and imperceptibly into one another.

Students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) are at greater personal and academic risk than their heterosexual peers (Kosciw et al.., 2014). Many experience a negative school environment and few see themselves represented in the curriculum. According to the literature, few English/Language Arts teachers are utilizing LGBTQ-focused texts in their courses (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; Page, 2014). This case study demonstrates how one English/Language Arts teacher provided challenging, safe, inclusive educational experiences for students. In so doing, the instructor also provides an example of critical pedagogy in practice. The multiple strands of the teacher's instructional approach are discussed, with the goal of helping in-service and pre-service teachers to envision ways in which they, too, might engage in critical pedagogy as a means of challenging inequity and supporting sexual minority and other students.

Some argue that the United States' AIDS epidemic effectively destroyed a generation of queer people and, along with them, the queer culture they had created. While it is true that the epidemic ravaged communities and impeded much of the social progress that the Gay Liberation movement had made, it did not necessarily destroy the entirety of queer culture: it radically changed its course. Reminiscent of the European Renaissance, art activism during the height of the U.S. AIDS epidemic allowed for the remembrance of fallen community members and, at the same time, created sociopolitical power that served to critique and dismantle oppressive institutions that perpetuated inaction on AIDS. Visual art embodying messages of anger at complacent officials, compassion for community members living with AIDS, and public health educational messages emerged as a new cultural wave in a time of darkness. Prominent pieces of art, like Keith Haring's symbolic subway graffiti and Gran Fury art collective's AIDSGATE vilified portrait of President Reagan, remain entrenched in the rich, visual history of the 1980s U.S. AIDS epidemic. The use of symbols and coding, the formation of collective groups to foster "Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further." -Keith Haring

This paper focusing on the fifth of the six stories, “The Best School of All,” that constitute Funny Boy, explores sexual identity politics on the school campus, by analysing how Selvadurai’s appropriation of the generic English school story, invests the popular genre with a disruptive potential, unknown to its original form, thereby generating immense pleasure in the reader. The paper argues that the pleasure in reading “The Best School” independent of the novel is to discover in it the familiarity of the school story, and also how it is constantly de-familiarised. By relating theories of genre, gender, nation and the diaspora, the paper attempts to show that “The Best School,” not only subverts generic rules by transfiguring an overtly masculinist genre to accommodate queer desires; it also opens up a dialogic space by confronting authoritative discourses on the colonial system of values perpetuated through the educational institutions, compulsory heterosexuality and ethno-centric nationalism of the postcolonial nation-state. In effect, “The Best School” becomes an important node in the dialogic network of queer narratives produced across the globe, qualifying as a “cause” novel: it advocates recognition of non-heteronormative identities and desires in a postcolonial nation, which is politically and morally opposed to legalising homosexuality, still criminalised under a Draconian colonial law.

Drawing from historical and literary analysis, I look at Ginsburg's Howl as a piece of performance poetry that redefined the spheres of sexuality that existed for many homosexuals during the Cold War era in the United States. Drawing from queer theory, Howl is seen as a literary cry that makes the invisible homosexual visible and destroys the silencing powers of heteronormativity

Clients from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India’s surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics, lives in surrogacy hostels and speaks with surrogates, their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons to capture the full mechanics of the business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande’s research focuses on the intersection of production and reproduction and its reflection of India’s larger labor regime. Yet her work also showcases the strategies surrogates deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures.. Pande ultimately advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.

"Las relaciones de parentesco han sido definidas en términos de altruismo y mutualidad de los seres. En estas relaciones se sintetiza el aspecto cooperativo de los humanos. Los parientes son personas que participan intrínsecamente en la existencia de cada uno; son miembros unos de otros.
En este libro hemos querido presentar de forma etnográfica una de las relaciones que en nuestro imaginario cultural mejor expresa la relación de mutualidad del ser: la maternidad.
En la primera parte, Reproducción, adopción y acogimiento, nos hemos preguntado por los cambios que supone la medicalización de la concepción y del nacimiento en la maternidad. ¿Sigue el nacimiento siendo la condición inicial de la persona? ¿Cómo se introduce la donación anónima de gametos en la historia personal? ¿Cómo se construye una relación de mutualidad en la adopción y acogimiento? ¿Cómo las madres constituyen el inicio de la mutualidad en formas de nacimiento y lactancia que podrían ser consideradas «tradicionales»? ¿Por qué la tradición innova?
En la segunda parte: Nuevos contextos de filiación, presentamos diferentes formas de maternidad en parejas gays y lesbianas, en madres solteras por elección. Analizamos la maternidad en relación a personas con alguna discapacidad intelectual. ¿Cómo se constituye la mutualidad de seres en el caso de la otredad intelectual? Finalmente, nos preguntamos por el aspecto personal (mutualidad, amistad) y el aspecto político (el principio de justicia) que presiden los cambios actuales en la experiencia de la maternidad."

The intersection of Jewishness and queerness, part of which is the historic correlation between anti-semitism and homophobia, has been investigated by many queer theorists, including Judith Butler, Daniel Boyarin, and Eve Sedgwick.
This book chapter looks at a particular cultural aspect of this intersection - the great American Jewish divas, who became "gay icons", subject to female impersonations in drag shows, and queer heroines. It concentrates on three such popular music Jewish divas– US-born Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, and, perhaps less known for her Jewishness due to the particular circumstances of her background,  the late Cuban bolero diva Olga Guillot, a “gay” icon in Cuba and in the Cuban Diaspora. 
Melodrama and tragedy on one side, and Camp (“a gay sensitivity” according to Susan Sontag),on the other,  constitute  a common factor in the performance of the three singers,  and their “diva” quality  – from Streisand's vocal melodrama, via Midler's outrageous comedy and camp, to Guillot's heartbreaking boleros and quivering lips.  This paper argues that and demonstrates how the two supposedly opposing powers of  drama  and Camp, via an ongoing dialogue between “tragedy and trash”, are important components of both Yiddish/Jewish culture, and gay culture, 
The article highlights and compares  issues of social acceptance, Diaspora, Jewish fatalism and Camp, religious and political non-conformism, and the way the three Jewish divas became major gay icons in their respective cultures.

This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue that, in concert, these two movements contributed to the erosion of the New Deal regulatory state by elevating psychological—rather than structural or socioeconomic—explanatory templates for social phenomena. In contrast to the literature of the long Progressive Era, in many works published during the 1950s the ego and its vicissitudes become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith’s novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state. Highsmith repudiates a narrative world governed by structural or environmental conditions and—in contrast to literary naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck—presents the darker corners of human experience as phenomena of the largely autonomous, internal arena of an existential psyche. These shifts in literary tastes, the essay argues, augmented the weakening intellectual purchase of an interventionist New Deal reform agenda during the 1950s.

The Caspian Project is a weekly digital magazine organized by the online analytical resource, Modern Diplomacy. Dr. Matthew Crosston is the Senior Editor of the project, which aims to acquaint people with this critically undervalued region of the world. The analyses go far beyond the standard issue of energy and encapsulates economics, politics, culture, religion, global affairs, conflict and peace.

This edition of the Caspian Project testifies to the enormous wealth of analytical opportunity seen all across the region. While in the past we have enjoyed producing single-issue specializations (which we did over the past two weeks with The Russian Debate and The Persian Gambit, to great fanfare and applause), the true essence of the Project is to have great diversity for the readers every issue. No. 11 as it turns out is something of a hybrid of these two aspects: readers with this issue get quite a bit of diversity while also getting to enjoy a mini-specialization, as a number of the articles inside deal with different aspects of the Russian intelligence community, namely, the Federal Security Service or FSB.

So, on top of some very thought-provoking and hard-hitting articles dealing with the ethics, surveillance, and transnational activities of Russian intelligence, readers ALSO get to learn more in this issue about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Turkmenistan’s human rights record, and Kazakhstan’s entrance into the WTO. It is an issue, therefore, that cuts across domestic politics, global affairs, security, economics, and international organizations. This is something we at Modern Diplomacy hold dearly when it comes to the Caspian Project: so much that is happening in the world today, affecting so many countries, transects in one way or another the greater Caspian sea region. It shall always be a hub of activity and importance, far beyond the standard call about energy and natural resources.

The Great Art Nude Survey is a life-model led research initiative aimed at assessing the current state of nude arts working in British Arts and Education. It is an independent Public Arts and Community Education project from Cast-Off Drama and consults with a range of partners. The first phase of open consultation will last from Sept 2014 - 30 June 2015. The second phase lasts from 1st August 2015 - 31st March 2017. The attached powerpoint presentation was launched at the Engage Show and Tell event, Leeds Art Gallery, Tuesday 11th November 2014. For further information, please see Cast-Off Drama - [email protected]

Since 9/11 American intelligence has evolved in a changing atmosphere of modern tactics and techniques of information collection. This atmosphere, coupled with massive leaps in technological advancement such as social media, mobile communications, processing analytics, large-form solid-state data storage and novel computational hardware and software equipment, has thrust the Intelligence Community into a strange new world of multi-dimensional intelligence.  With the implementation of new technologies and the expansion of those technologies to public access whereas they were once reserved specifically for governments or major conglomerations, intelligence collection methods have increased far beyond than the traditional human intelligence capability. In addition, the incorporation of science and technology into a loosely termed ‘Technical Intelligence’ (TechInt) has become a major contributor to both data and strategy.  While science and technology and human capability both remain valuable facets of the same overlapping intelligence construct, there is a growing trend of diametrically opposed camps setting one method over the other. This article explains how in terms of field application and intelligence information processing/analysis, both HumInt and TechInt are maximized by a mutual cooperation that at present does not exist.

Forthcoming Chapter in "Neurointerventions and the Law" with Oxford University Press ed. Nicole Vincent.
Feedback Appreciated

Abstract: Current legal arguments for gay rights use gay primarily to refer to individuals that have same-sex erotic desires. However, as this chapter argues using a thought experiment based on a neurointervention that would alter the orientation of one’s erotic desires, the term gay should be understood in a broader sense to include a more diverse group of individuals, including some individuals that do not have same-sex erotic desires. For this reason, the current restrictive use of the term gay presumed in legal discourse doesn’t capture the entire gay community that we should want to extend rights to. To rectify this problem with the way that arguments for gay rights are being framed, this chapter suggests that we expand the use of the term gay in legal discourse to encompass a more heterogeneous population than the one picked out by same-sex-attracted individuals, and it explains some of the advantages of doing so.

In 2009, psychoanalyst and queer theorist Tim Dean released Unlimited Intimacy, an anthropologically-tinged yet creatively psychoanalytic account of the bareback and bug-chasing subculture(s). Since then, a relatively new term has taken the place as the ‘new frontier’ for the study of gay sexual risk: chemsex. The intense medical and media focus on the practice of gay sex with drugs has led to numerous reports, sexual health strategies and sensational coverage on the practice, which has in part led to the theoretical consolidation of the subculture and the growing entanglement of sex and drug taking in the ‘urban’ gay male community. The documentary ‘Chemsex’, is a particularly famous example of such sensational coverage. Focusing on pornographic depictions of the act, it seeks to present itself as a ’neutral’ examination of the rise of chemsex while at the same time giving space for heavily medicalised and pathological arguments for its desirability among urban gay men. In offering a ‘gendered’ analysis of ‘Chemsex’, this essay will focus on the use of ‘bodies’ in the documentary, asserting that an amalgamation and syncretic reading of primarily two psychoanalytic theoretical frames is required. The first frame used by Tim Dean and Leo Bersani in their writings on bareback (unprotected sex) and bug-chasing (the fetishisation and practice of having sex to actively be infected with HIV), will be used to place chemsex as a practice within a subcultural tradition of sexual risk in the gay community. This will be used in conjunction with Laura Mulvey’s psychoanalytic work on representation in order to better imprint the lacanian frame onto a critique of filmic technique in “Chemsex” and explore how notions of gender and sexuality are communicated to the audience, and how that audience is constituted against the chemsexual subjects. Reflections will also be made on bell hooks and Judith Butler who offer insights into the role of spectacle and precarity respectively in constituting the audience. Ultimately, the gendered analysis of this essay rests on acknowledging how “Chemsex” misrepresents chemsex as a practice primarily through its hypersexualisation of gay subjects, pandering to the heterosexual matrix of the male gaze and already existing heteronormative conceptions of sexual deviancy. While this essay unarguably views “chemsex” as a mostly problematic portrayal of the subculture, an appraisal of new masculinities represented in the film will allow us to appreciate new gender paradigms being created in gay sexual subcultures via sexual risk.