Abstract Preview of the text: Coming of age as a bisexual Latina femme in the 1980s, I was surrounded by lesbian-feminist communities and discourses that disparaged, dismissed, and vilified bisexuality. Those of us that enthusiastically embraced femininity or that actively sought out masculine presenting butches, were deemed perpetually suspect. Femmes were imagined as being always…
How does contemporary science contribute to our understanding about what it means to be women or men? What are the social implications of scientific claims about differences between “male” and “female” brains, hormones, and genes? How does culture influence scientific and medical research and its findings about human sexuality, especially so-called normal and deviant desires…
This essay makes the case that the author’s friends, all of them, are or are becoming trans. Not in a way that indexes a medico-juridical demographic, but in the sense that trans as a mode of living is the grounds on which the author forges relationality. Thus it is no surprise that time and again,…
German-Jewish physician, sexologist and critical race theorist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) was arguably one of the most significant sexual thinkers of the twentieth century and a renowned sexual minority rights advocate. Hirschfeld’s sexual- emancipatory engagement has been widely acknowledged. But his groundbreaking universalization of sexual intermediariness and the resulting dissolution of binary, triadic or otherwise finite…
An excerpt from The Gendered Society, this reading discusses the state of the American gender binary in the late 1990s from a sociology perspective. The concept that gender is a set of norms is discussed at length, and in particular the ways that gender inequality produce gender difference.
Transphobia is supported by negative, prejudiced, discriminatory and harassing attitudes toward transgender men and women, rooted in social, political, educational, and religious learning. The present study aims to perceive the relationship between empathy, self esteem, religiosity and age on negative attitudes towards transgender men and women. We also aim to determine the collective and unique…
Since 2023, the UK government’s response to the “migrant crisis” has revolved around two controversial flagship policies: the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, and the detention of migrants aboard a giant barge. In this blog post for Engenderings, I examine the colonial and gendered dimensions of the two policies, finding them to be examples…
Pope Francis’ pastoral response to trans people represents a compromise between his negative-affective political stance towards transness, and his positive-affective theology of pastoral welcome. By reducing away transness to sickness or sin, he can welcome trans people as individuals in a depoliticized personal sphere apart from the political – at the cost of a reductive…
“This book explores drag performance in London since 2009 via the pubs, bars and clubs that make LGBTQ+ communities thrive. It studies the complex relationship between drag performance, LGBTQ+ venues and queer communities. In exploring drag performance, the book develops a greater understanding of the connection between drag performance and queer communities, in particular exploring…
On the Gender Subaltern Class, and the Three-Gender System that Defines Us A Marxist-Leninist analysis on the institution of gender as defined not by individual identities, but relations and proximity to power. Originally published on The Sizhen System’s Substack newsletter. Available on the Internet Archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240907213253/https://thesizhensystem.substack.com/p/faggotization-and-the-extant-gender