This book investigates what women enjoy about consuming, and in some cases producing, gay male erotic media-from slashfic, to pornographic texts, to visual pornography-and how this sits within their consumption of erotica and pornography more generally. In addition, it will examine how women's use of gay male erotic media fits in with their perceptions of gender and sexuality. By drawing on a piece of wide-scale mixed methods research that examines these motivations, an original and important volume is presented that serves to explore and contribute to this under-researched area.

This is the first concise handbook on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) health in the past few years. It breaks the myths, breaks the silence, and breaks new ground on this subject. This resource offers a multidimensional picture of LGBT health across clinical and social disciplines to give readers a full and nuanced understanding of these diverse populations. It contains real-world matters of definition and self-definition, meticulous analyses of stressor and health outcomes, a extensive coverage of research methodology concerns, and critical insights into the sociopolitical context of LGBT individuals health and lives.

This important textbook makes a timely contribution to international agendas in social work with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (LGBT) people. It examines how practitioners and student social workers can provide appropriate care across the lifespan (including work with children and families and older people) and considers key challenges in social work practice - for example, asylum, mental health and substance misuse. Drawing on practice scenarios, the book takes an enquiry based learning approach to facilitate critical reflection. Its distinctive approach includes: use of the concepts of the Professional Capabilities Framework for social work; key theoretical perspectives including human rights; structured around the framework of the UK National Occupational Standards for social work; student friendly features including key questions and exercises; complete glossary of key terms and concepts; and, the UK policy and legislative context. Informed by international research in social work with LGBT people, the book is essential reading for students on qualifying social work programmes and practitioners in statutory, voluntary and independent sectors.

Challenging persistent geopolitical asymmetries in feminist knowledge production, this collection depicts collisions between concepts and lived experiences, between academic feminism and political activism, between the West as generalizable and the East as the concrete Other. Borderlands in European Gender Studies narrows the gap between cultural analysis and social theory, addressing feminist theory's epistemological foundations and its capacity to confront the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The contributions demonstrate the enduring worth of feminist concepts for critical analysis, conceptualize resistance to multiple forms of oppression, and identify the implications of the decoupling of cultural and social feminist critique for the analysis of gender relations in a postsocialist space. This book will be of import to activists and researchers in women's and gender studies, comparative gender politics and policy, political science, sociology, contemporary history, and European studies. It is suitable for use as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in a range of fields.

British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality examines whether colonial rule is responsible for the historical, and continuing, criminalization of same-sex sexual relations in many parts of the world. Enze Han and Joseph O'Mahoney gather and assess historical evidence to demonstrate the different ways in which the British empire spread laws criminalizing homosexual conduct amongst its colonies. Evidence includes case studies of former British colonies and the common law and criminal codes like the Indian Penal Code of 1860 and the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899. Surveying a wide range of countries, the authors scrutinise whether ex-British colonies are more likely to have laws that criminalize homosexual conduct than other ex-colonies or other states in general They interrogate the claim that British imperialism uniquely 'poisoned' societies against homosexuality, and look at the legacies of colonialism and the politics and legal status of homosexuality across the globe.

Conversations with Edmund White brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White's predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career. Since the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, Edmund White (b. 1940) has become a major figure in literature and gay culture. White is, however, more than just a celebrated gay writer. He is an international man of letters, and his work crosses several genres. White's fiction includes an autobiographical trilogy-A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony-along with more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend and Our Young Man. White's love of French literature and culture is evident in biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and his antipathy to American Puritanism suffuses his collected essays and memoirs and is on full display in two early nonfiction works that helped define the era of gay liberation: The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with Charles Silverstein, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, White has earned many distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award. White has been a generous interviewer, sharing his time and insights not only with major publications such as the Paris Review, but also with smaller online publications for more limited audiences. A lively commentator, White has never been afraid to speak his mind, even when the result has been public feuds with literary peers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy among political activists of the LGBTIQ movement and the traditionalist movement during the "anti-gender" campaign, this book provides a dynamic picture of their sustained interactions. Through an analysis of the contentious strategies, discourses, and performances of both the LGBTIQ and the traditionalist movements from a strategic interactionist perspective, it considers the key actors involved in this struggle over normative and social change, showing how activists on both sides are confronted with different dilemmas, influencing each other's choices, practices and identities at the individual and collective levels. Approaching social movements as interactive processes, the author deploys the concepts of social performance and gender performativity to illustrate the ways in which activists interact with and within gender norms, and how they reproduce or contest gender hierarchies as they protest, thus revealing the centrality of gender to the analysis of processes of recruitment and mobilization, strategies, frames and forms of organization. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and political science with interests in social movements and gender.

The narrative re-tellings of the life, reign, and death of the English King Edward II (reigned 1307-1327) present a unique opportunity for scholars of sexuality in the early modern era. This is because the works of authors like Christopher Marlowe, Michael Drayton, Sir Francis Hubert, Elizabeth Cary, and Richard Niccols were all inspired by the public, cultural memory fashioned from Edward's same-sex love affair with Piers Gaveston. As such, each of them presents a particular representation of and a specific discourse about male-male sexual relations in the Renaissance. In other words, what these works present is a concentrated body of literature about same-sex love in the early modern era: works that openly and frankly explore the possible origins of the love, the reasons and causes for it; works that explore the ramifications of male-male romantic relationships; works that explore the sexual politics and sociocultural dynamics of same-sex romantic partnerships; and works that describe and denote same-sex love from an English Renaissance perspective. This study looks at each of the major Renaissance texts about Edward II and examines the means through which each text understands and analyzes the nature of male-male same-sex love. From Marlowe's crafting of a lover-identity for Edward to Drayton's obsession with Marlowe's version of (gay) history; from Hubert's Augustinian construction of Edward's nature to Cary's identification with the fallen king to Niccols' inspired exemplum, what each of these works demonstrates is that the "love that dare not speak its name" would not be silenced, at least not in the case of Edward and Gaveston. When one sees the name Edward II, one also sees his same-sex loves. The correlation has become ingrained into our public recall of history. Thus, as far as the world is concerned, Edward II was-and ever will be-the gay king.

The Victorians elevated the home and heteronormative family life to an almost secular religion. Yet alongside the middle-class domestic ideal were other families, many of which existed in the literature of the time. Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature is chiefly concerned with these atypical or "queer" families. This collection serves as a corrective against limited definitions of family and is a timely addition to Victorian studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, the collection opens up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. Broad in scope, subjects range from Count Fosco and his animal "children" in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, to male kinship within and across Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, and the nexus between disability and loving relationships in the fiction of Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge. Queer Victorian Families is a wide-ranging and theoretically adventurous expose of the curious relations in the literary family tree.

One of the few books to address the horror film from any kind of critical position.. Unique - The first history of the horror film to approach it from a queer perspective.. Written with detail and thoroughness - covers all eras of the horror film and correlates specific types of movie monsters to the historical social conditions which produced them.. Explores how popular culture encodes and demonizes queerness within the generic format of the horror film. -- .

Is queer theory dead? Through its increasing entanglement with capitalism, James Penney, controversially argues that queer theory has run its course. However, the 'end of queer' should not signal the death of liberatory sexual politics; rather, it presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics. The book makes a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis, via Freud and Lacan, and conducts a critical examination of queer theory's most famous proponents, including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In doing so, Penney insists that the way to implant sexuality in the field of political antagonism is - paradoxically - to abandon the exhausted premise of a politicised sexuality. He argues that by wresting sexuality from the dead end of identity politics, it can be opened up to a universal emancipatory struggle beyond the reach of capitalism's powers of commodification.

In today's culture, popular music is a vital site where ideas about gender and sexuality are imagined and disseminated. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions explores what that means with a wide-ranging collection of chapters that consider the many ways in which contemporary pop music performances of gender and sexuality are politically engaged and even radical. With analyses rooted in feminist and queer thought, contributors explore music from different genres and locations, including Beyonce's Lemonade, A Tribe Called Red's We Are the Halluci Nation, and celebrations of Vera Lynn's 100th Birthday. At a bleak moment in global politics, this collection focuses on the concept of critical hope: the chapters consider making and consuming popular music as activities that encourage individuals to imagine and work toward a better, more just world. Addressing race, class, aging, disability, and colonialism along with gender and sexuality, the authors articulate the diverse ways popular music can contribute to the collective political projects of queerness and feminism. With voices from senior and emerging scholars, this volume offers a snapshot of today's queer and feminist scholarship on popular music that is an essential read for students and scholars of music and cultural studies.

This groundbreaking book provides a challenging exploration of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism. Based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, it offers a new and thoughtful framework that does not inevitably pathologise or universalise all lesbianism. A wide range of psychoanalytic ideas are sur

Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Psychological Association's 44th Division (the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Issues) An in-depth, transnational primer on the current state of same-sex marriage post legalization The summer of 2008 was the summer of love and commitment for gays and lesbians in the United States. Thousands of same-sex couples stood in line for wedding licenses all over California in the first few days after same-sex marriage was legalized. On the other side of the country, Massachusetts, the very first state to give gay couples marriage rights, took the last step to full equality by allowing same-sex couples from other states to marry there as well. These happy times for same-sex couples were the hallmark of true equality for some, yet others questioned whether the very bedrock of society was crumbling. What would this new step portend? In order to find out the impact of same-sex marriage, M. V. Lee Badgett traveled to a land where it has been legal for same-sex couples to marry since 2001: the Netherlands. Badgett interviews gay couples to find out how this step has affected their lives. We learn about the often surprising changes to their relationships, the reactions of their families, and work colleagues. Moreover, Badgett is interested in the ways that the institution itself has been altered for the larger society. How has the concept of marriage changed? When Gay People Get Married gives readers a primer on the current state of the same-sex marriage debate, and a new way of framing the issue that provides valuable new insights into the political, social, and personal stakes involved. The experiences of other countries and these pioneering American states serve as a crystal ball as we grapple with this polarizing issue in the American context. The evidence shows both that marriage changes gay people more than gay people change marriage, and that it is the most liberal countries and states making the first move to recognize gay couples. In the end, Badgett compellingly shows that allowing gay couples to marry does not destroy the institution of marriage and that many gay couples do benefit, in expected as well as surprising ways, from the legal, social, and political rights that the institution offers.

Originally published in 1979. This is at once a look at the realities of homosexuality in history and an examination of the myths that have grown up around it. The record of practices and prejudices moves from biblical and classical through early and medieval Christian, Renaissance, and Victorian times, to our own era of dramatic changes. It looks at prominent figures who were homosexuals, the theories that have flourished and faded, the differing attitudes toward male and female homosexuality, persecution, and contemporary changes. This classic work is a fascinating historical perspective of all the factors that have shaped and changed our attitudes from ancient times to the present.

Skinheads go beyond the societal stereotype of hate mongers, bigots, and Neo-Nazis. The community of skins also includes traditional skins (those that adhere to the original philosophy of the British movement in 1969), Skinheads Against Racial prejudice (SHARPS), and gay skins, female skins and Neo-Nazi or Racist/Nationalist skins. Skinhead History, Identity, and Culture covers the history, identity, and culture of the skinhead movement in Europe and America, looking at the total culture of the skins through a cross-sectional analysis of skinheads in various countries. Authors Borgeson and Valeri provide original research data to cast new light into the skinhead community. Some of the data is ethnographic, drawing on face-to-face interviews with skins of all kinds, while other data is compiled from the Internet and social media about various skinhead groups within the United States, Europe, and Australia. The book covers the history of the subculture; explores the unique cultures of female, gay, and Neo-Nazi skins; and explores manifestations of the culture as represented on the Internet and in music. The work discusses how skinheads derive their values and morals and how they fit into the larger social structure.

Fighting for marriage and family rights; protection from discrimination in employment, education, and housing; criminal law reform; economic justice; and health care reform: the LGBT movement is engaged in some of the most important cultural and political battles of our times. Seeking to reshape many of our basic social institutions, the LBGT movement's legal, political, and cultural campaigns reflect the complex visions, strategies, and rhetoric of the individuals and groups knocking at the law's door.

The original essays in this volume bring social movement scholarship and legal analysis together, enriching our understanding of social movements, LGBT politics and organizing, legal studies, and public policy. Moreover, they highlight the struggle to make the law relevant and responsive to the LGBT community. Ultimately, Queer Mobilizations examines how the LGBT movement's engagement with the law shapes the very meanings of sexuality, sex, gender, privacy, discrimination, and family in law and society.

Contributors: Ellen Ann Andersen, Steven A. Boutcher, Bayliss Camp, Casey Charles, Ashley Currier, Courtenay W. Daum, Shauna Fisher, David John Frank, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Charles W. Gossett, Marybeth Herald, Nicholas Pedriana, Darren Rosenblum, Susan M. Sterett, and Amy L. Stone.

Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms ensures equality regarding sexual orientation and gender identity in Canada. Despite this, gay, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming teachers in publicly-funded Catholic schools in Ontario and Alberta are being fired for living lives that Church leaders claim run contrary to Catholic doctrine about non-heterosexuality. Meanwhile, requests from students to establish Gay/Straight Alliances are often denied. In Homophobia in the Hallways, Tonya D. Callaghan interrogates institutionalized homophobia and transphobia in the publicly-funded Catholic school systems of Ontario and Alberta. Featuring twenty interviews with students and teachers who have faced overt discrimination in Catholic schools, the book blends theoretical inquiry and real-world case study, making Callaghan's study a unique insight into religiously-inspired heterosexism and genderism. She uncovers the causes and effects of the long-standing disconnect between Canadian Catholic schools and the Charter by comparing the treatment of and attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer teachers and students in these publicly-funded systems.

Interest in sexual threesomes is significant, but how much do we really know about them? Why do people engage in them? What influences people's interest? And what are the longer term ramifications of a threesome? This book explores these questions and more; contextualising the findings in relation to wider norms of gender, sexual behaviour, and relationships. Drawing upon more than 50 interviews and 200+ qualitative surveys this book offers a rich and in-depth analysis of contemporary threesome behaviours. The findings suggest that threesomes are a complex and multi-faceted sexual behaviour. A behaviour which simultaneously resists and maintains norms of monogamy, serves important roles and functions for individuals and relationships, and is both highly desirable but potentially risky. This book would appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as postdoctoral scholars in the fields of sociology, psychology, and sexology. In particular, this book is essential reading for those interested in threesomes, consensual non-monogamies, and contemporary norms of sexual behaviour.

Social Justice Journalism: A Cultural History of Social Movement Media from Abolition to #womensmarch argues that to better understand the evolution, impact, and future of digital social justice media we need to understand their connections to a venerable print culture of dissent. This cultural history seeks to deepen and contextualize knowledge about digital activist journalism by training the lens of social movement theory back on the nearly forgotten role of eight twentieth-century American social justice journals in effecting significant social change. The book deliberately conflates "social movement media" with newer and broader conceptions of "social justice journalism" to highlight changing definitions of journalism in the digital era. It uses framing theory, social movement theory, and theories about the power of facts and emotion in storytelling to show how social movement media practice journalism to mobilize collective action for their cause. After tracing the evolution and functions of each social justice movement's print culture, each chapter concludes with a comparison to its online counterparts to illuminate links with digital media. The book concludes that digital activist journalism, while in some ways unique, also shares continuities and commonalities with its print predecessors.

Winner of the 2010 Pacific Sociological Association Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award A lesbian couple rears a child together and, after the biological mother dies, the surviving partner loses custody to the child's estranged biological father. Four days later, in a different court, judges rule on the side of the partner, because they feel the child relied on the woman as a "psychological parent." What accounts for this inconsistency regarding gay and lesbian adoption and custody cases, and why has family law failed to address them in a comprehensive manner? In Courting Change, Kimberly D. Richman zeros in on the nebulous realm of family law, one of the most indeterminate and discretionary areas of American law. She focuses on judicial decisions-both the outcomes and the rationales-and what they say about family, rights, sexual orientation, and who qualifies as a parent. Richman challenges prevailing notions that gay and lesbian parents and families are hurt by laws' indeterminacy, arguing that, because family law is so loosely defined, it allows for the flexibility needed to respond to-and even facilitate - changes in how we conceive of family, parenting, and the role of sexual orientation in family law. Drawing on every recorded judicial decision in gay and lesbian adoption and custody cases over the last fifty years, and on interviews with parents, lawyers, and judges, Richman demonstrates how parental and sexual identities are formed and interpreted in law, and how gay and lesbian parents can harness indeterminacy to transform family law.

Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises the question: how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional? Emotions as Commodities offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption - emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherical or mood-producing commodities, relation-marking commodities and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self. Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through psychotherapy, Emotions as Commodities will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

This book examines the queer film festival and opens the discussion on social enterprises and sustainable lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) organisations. With over 220 events worldwide and some of the bigger budgets exceeding $1 million, the queer film festival has grown to become a staple event in all cosmopolitan cities' arts calendars. While activism was instrumental in establishing these festivals, the pink dollar has been a deciding factor in its financial sustainability. Pretty gay boys with chiselled abs are a staple feature, rather than underground experimental faire. Community arts events, such as these, are now a creative industry. While clearly having a social purpose, they must also concern themselves with the bottom line. For all the contradictory elements of its organisational growth, this conflict makes the queer film festival an integral site for analysis. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach in examining the queer film festival as a representative snapshot of the current state of queer cinema and community based film festivals. The book looks at queer film festivals in San Francisco, Hong Kong and Melbourne to argue for the importance of these institutions remaining as community events.