This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region's highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women's movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces' organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

Dragging: Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life is an assemblage of fragments that collectively tell stories about a diverse group of artists and activists for whom drag serves as inspiration, method, object, and aim. Methodologically grounded in ethnography, Dragging incorporates auto-theoretical material that lays bare the intimacies of research, teaching, and loving, as well as their painful failures. Drag is more than gender impersonation, and it is more than resistance to norms. It is productively messy and ambivalent, and in these and other ways can serve to attune us to political and aesthetic alternatives to the increasingly widespread desire to be led. One of very few books about drag by an anthropologist, and using a uniquely personal approach, Dragging is an ethnography of artists and activists.

'Transition has not been something linear for me, my joy has come in seasons.' Now, more than ever, trans people deserve to hear stories of joy and hope, where being trans doesn't have to be defined by fear and dysphoria, but can be experienced through courage, freedom, and the love and acceptance of their chosen families. Through a series of uplifting, generous and beautifully crafted vignettes, T. C. Oakes-Monger gently leads you through the cycle of the seasons - beginning in Autumn and the shedding of leaves and identity, moving through the darkness of Winter, its cold days, and the reality of daily life, into Spring, newness, and change, and ending with the joy of long Summer days and being out and proud - and invites you to find similar moments of joy in your life. Celebratory and empowering, these stories are a reminder of the power joy can bring.

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance. The book's comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination of South-South interactions in the theory and praxis of sexual rights. Analyzing the circumstances of production and the contents of English-language and intermittently bilingual magazines and newsletters published between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, these sources offer a way to examine the convergences and divergences between postcolonial feminist, gay, and lesbian activism. It charts a set of concerns common to feminist, gay, and lesbian activist literature: retrogressive colonial-era legislation impacting the status of women and sexual minorities; a marked increase in sexual violence; piecemeal reproductive freedoms and sexual choice under neoliberalism; the emergence and management of the HIV/AIDS crisis; precariousness of lesbian and transgender concerns within feminist and LGBTQ+ movements; and Non-Governmental Organizations as major actors articulating sexual rights as human rights. This methodologically innovative work is based on archival historical research, analyses of national and international policy documents, close readings of activist publications, and conversations with activists and founding editors. This is an important intervention in the field of gender and sexuality studies and is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Futures, Subversive Histories prize in partnership with the NWSA. The book is key reading for scholars and students in gender, sexuality, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

Anyone can learn maps and battles. Geezer, I feel it! I live it! I'm giving everything to this beautiful, wild, absolutely pure British thing. Like, do you know what it took to get here, man? Stevie is a disillusioned academic who once wrote an unfashionable book on youth movements in Britain, now struggling to cope after a painful break-up. His misery is interrupted by Jimmy who lands unexpectedly on his doorstep beaming with excitement. Jimmy is 100% Mod: oversized military parka, fitted Italian suit, dessy boots, pork pie hat. The full package. Jimmy is seeking asylum in the UK. With just a few days before the substantive interview that's going to decide his fate, the stakes are high. So he came up with a brilliant plan. A plan that's going to work against all odds. It has to work. He can't go back. And Stevie has an important part to play.

This book investigates the phenomenon of queering in popular music and video, interpreting the music of numerous pop artists, styles, and idioms. The focus falls on artists, such as Lady Gaga, Madonna, Boy George, Diana Ross, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, Azealia Banks, Zebra Katz, Freddie Mercury, the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael, and many others. Hawkins builds his concept of queerness upon existing theories of opacity and temporality, which involves a creative interdisciplinary approach to musical interpretation. He advocates a model of analysis that involves both temporal-specific listening and biographic-oriented viewing. Music analysis is woven into this, illuminating aspects of parody, nostalgia, camp, naivety, masquerade, irony, and mimesis in pop music. One of the principal aims is to uncover the subversive strategies of pop artists through a wide range of audiovisual texts that situate the debates on gender and sexuality within an aesthetic context that is highly stylized and ritualized. Queerness in Pop Music also addresses the playfulness of much pop music, offering insights into how discourses of resistance are mediated through pleasure. Given that pop artists, songwriters, producers, directors, choreographers, and engineers all contribute to the final composite of the pop recording, it is argued that the staging of any pop act is a collective project. The implications of this are addressed through structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, and sexuality. Ultimately, Hawkins contends that queerness is a performative force that connotes futurity and utopian promise.

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.

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.

LGBTQ Lobbying in the United States argues that the issues and tactics prioritized by the mainstream gay lobbying community fail to serve LGBTQ interests and are complicit in perpetuating heteronormative power dynamics and institutions that render queer and trans people vulnerable to structural oppression. The book posits that there are different LGBTQ lobbying communities-a dominant gay mainstream lobbying category, whose work advances heteronormative ideals, and a second category of LGBTQ lobbying that is intersectional and challenges hegemonic heterosexual institutions. Analysis in the book builds on existing public policy literature and is aided by the author's practitioner experience in lobbying for LGBTQ issues in Washington, D.C. over the past 20 years. This book is suitable as a textbook for students and researchers in LGBTQ studies, U.S. politics, and gender studies. The book will also appeal to activists and professionals in political lobbying.

LGBTQ Lobbying in the United States argues that the issues and tactics prioritized by the mainstream gay lobbying community fail to serve LGBTQ interests and are complicit in perpetuating heteronormative power dynamics and institutions that render queer and trans people vulnerable to structural oppression. The book posits that there are different LGBTQ lobbying communities-a dominant gay mainstream lobbying category, whose work advances heteronormative ideals, and a second category of LGBTQ lobbying that is intersectional and challenges hegemonic heterosexual institutions. Analysis in the book builds on existing public policy literature and is aided by the author's practitioner experience in lobbying for LGBTQ issues in Washington, D.C. over the past 20 years. This book is suitable as a textbook for students and researchers in LGBTQ studies, U.S. politics, and gender studies. The book will also appeal to activists and professionals in political lobbying.

The split attraction model? Alterous Love? Queerplatonic relationships? From the creator of Perfectly Queer: An Illustrated Introduction, this bold and brilliantly illustrated guide is written for anyone looking to explore the beautiful ace and aro communities; the acefluxes, the arospikes, the demis, the greys, the frays and more. Separate the myths and stereotypes, and discover some of the wonderful intricacies that shape each spectrum, including: forms of love and attraction, common identities, microlabels, flags, and the entertaining community-led culture. Packed with quizzes, activity sheets and a directory of further resources, this is a celebration of all things ace and aro!

Part of the SAGE Contemporary Family Perspective series, this book presents a comprehensive yet accessible understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families today by drawing upon and making sense of the burgeoning scholarly literature about LGBT families from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It pays particular attention to how structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age shape LGBT families, and how members of such families negotiate the social landscapes within which they exist. The book will help readers better understand the formation, experiences, challenges, and strengths of LGBT families, and address two main questions: Why are new family forms so threatening to certain groups of people in society? and How are new family forms beneficial to the society in which they exist? Here is what author Nancy Mezey had to say in a recent interview: ? "LGBT people are creating families in a society that simultaneously demonizes and embraces them. With a desire to understand and perhaps deconstruct this rocky terrain, I decided to write LGBT Families, a comprehensive overview based on solid research so that readers can form their own opinions." "This book stands in solidarity with all diverse family forms - families that developed out of particular social and economic contexts, and that contribute to the society around them, despite the hardships that some in society may level at them."

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields - actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities - and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia's colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the most popular evidence-based interventions in the world, but little has been done to explore how it affects different groups of people, such as the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) community. The LGBTQI Workbook for CBT is filled with hands-on, practical perspectives for readers who are seeking a new point-of-view or for clinicians and students seeking additional tools, competence, and humility when working with sexual and gender minorities. The workbook focuses on skill building and addresses techniques for personal selfassessment, cognitive and behavioral activation, psychoeducation, and therapist resources. Incorporating structured learning tools to promote professional responsibility as well as ethically driven and evidence-based practices, this text aims to promote empowerment. Applied activities are available in multiple reproducible worksheets and handouts to utilize in session, in the classroom, in the field, and in life. The LGBTQI Workbook for CBT is an invaluable resource for interested members of the LGBTQI community, beginner or experienced clinicians, and students working with sexual and gender minority clients. It is an excellent supplementary text for graduate students in social work, psychology, nursing, psychiatry, professional counseling, marriage and family therapy, and other healing professions such as medicine, acupuncture, or physical therapy.

This book demonstrates the political potential of mainstream theatre in the US at the end of the twentieth century, tracing ideological change over time in the reception of US mainstream plays taking HIV/AIDS as their topic from 1985 to 2000. This is the first study to combine the topics of the politics of performance, LGBT theatre, and mainstream theatre's political potential, a juxtaposition that shows how radical ideas become mainstream, that is, how the dominant ideology changes. Using materialist semiotics and extensive archival research, Juntunen delineates the cultural history of four pivotal productions from that period-Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1992), Jonathan Larson's Rent (1996), and Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project (2000). Examining the connection between AIDS, mainstream theatre, and the media reveals key systems at work in ideological change over time during a deadly epidemic whose effects changed the nation forever. Employing media theory alongside nationalism studies and utilizing dozens of reviews for each case study, the volume demonstrates that reviews are valuable evidence of how a production was hailed by society's ideological gatekeepers. Mixing this new use of reviews alongside textual analysis and material study-such as the theaters' locations, architectures, merchandise, program notes, and advertising-creates an uncommonly rich description of these productions and their ideological effects. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, politics, media studies, queer theory, and US history, and to those with an interest in gay civil rights, one of the most successful social movements of the late twentieth century.

A fully interdisciplinary exploration of Irish Studies' development since the end of the Celtic Tiger (contributors include scholars from literary studies, history, sports studies, performance studies, music studies, language studies, politics, economics, media studies, art and visual culture, gender studies, and more) Includes essays from scholars and practitioners in Ireland, the US, and the UK Includes several essays that consider Irish studies in relation to ecological crisis, including the global pandemic Includes essays from both emerging and well-established scholars Addresses intersections between Irish studies and diverse theoretical frameworks, including queer theory, ecocriticism, critical race studies, feminist theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and queer theory.

Queer Sites in Global Contexts showcases a variety of cross-cultural perspectives that foreground the physical and online experiences of LGBTQ+ people living in the Caribbean, South and North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The individual chapters-a collection of research-based texts by scholars around the world-provide twelve compelling case studies: queer sites that include buildings, digital networks, natural landscapes, urban spaces, and non-normative bodies. By prioritizing divergent histories and practices of queer life in geographies that are often othered by dominant queer studies in the West-female sex workers, people of color, indigenous populations, Latinx communities, trans identities, migrants-the book constructs thoroughly situated, nuanced discussions on queerness through a variety of research methods. The book presents tangible examples of empirical research and practice-based work in the fields of queer and gender studies; geography, architectural, and urban theory; and media and digital culture. Responding to the critical absence surrounding experiences of non-White queer folk in Western academia, Queer Sites in Global Contexts acts as a timely resource for scholars, activists, and thinkers interested in queer placemaking practices-both spatial and digital-of diverse cultures.

The Modern Clinician's Guide to Working with LGBTQ+ Clients is a ground-breaking resource for therapists working with LGBTQ+ clients whose identity expressions span all gender-, sex-, and relationship-diverse groups. Combining the author's extensive clinical experience with contemporary evidence-based research, the chapters of this book explore the origins and development of sexual minority groups, going beyond lesbian women and gay men to include transgender and gender nonbinary people, kink and polyamory, bisexuality and pansexuality, and those who identify as asexual or aromantic. The text also offers in-depth coverage of clinical work with transgender, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary clients of all ages. With a wealth of therapeutic strategies and case studies, this resource helps professionals respond to this 'Big Tent' community in an informed and empathetic way. Spanning sexuality, gender, relationships and age groups, The Modern Clinician's Guide to Working with LGBTQ+ Clients is an invaluable reference for psychotherapists in a broad range of clinical settings.

Same-sex marriage is now legal in twenty-nine countries and the subject of continued debate around the world. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique considers this debate from a political economy perspective. Rather than engaging directly in the now well-rehearsed social-movement and academic for-and-against debates, this book focuses on processes of institutionalization of same-sex marriage and so-called "rainbow families" within (neo)liberal capitalist democracies. It examines how states and markets appropriate same-sex marriage and family to enhance their own political and symbolic capital, consolidating power and profit within existing systems of gendered and raced socioeconomic stratification. Taking a radical feminist, heterodox, qualitative and intersectional approach, this book investigates the political economy of same-sex marriage across three axes: same-sex marriage as institution; same-sex marriage and the market; and the political economy of the "rainbow family". The examination of case studies from different countries and regions enables a comparative analysis that foregrounds cultural, political and economic path dependencies while at the same time highlighting a number of striking commonalities. In all the countries discussed in this book and in most respects, same-sex marriage has been integrated almost seamlessly into a mainstream/malestream political economy of marriage and family and its translation into added market and productive value. The Political Economy of Same-Sex Marriage: A Feminist Critique will be of use to researchers and students alike, and indeed to all those who are curious about the mainstreaming of homosexuality within twenty-first-century capitalist democracies.

Recent decades have seen remarkable changes in the cultural visibility, legal status, and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, from positive representations of queerness in television series like The L-Word and Will & Grace, to films about queer intersectionality like Moonlight, to openly-gay and lesbian elected officials and leaders in the business community, to the end of anti-sodomy laws and marriage discrimination. With these advances have come assimilation of the queer subculture into the mainstream and, with it, loss of both some of the stigmatization of non-heteronormativity and the very cornerstones of the distinctiveness of LGBTQ+ communities, including queer neighbourhoods, bars and nightclubs, bookstores, publications, and other queer businesses. Queer couples and their children are migrating from LGBTQ+ enclaves to neighbourhoods with better schools, queer singles meet in virtual spaces rather than in bars, and LGBTQ+ bookstores and community centres, once the hub of queer communities, are closing, replaced by Amazon.com and social media. These changes raise the question of how LGBTQ+ culture is changing and whether, like many assimilated subcultures before it, it may be in fact endangered. This book examines these seismic changes, their sociological and cultural implications, reminisces about what has been lost and gained, and hints at what the future may hold for LGBTQ+ people. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.