Philosophy of Sexual Orientation

This paper focusses on the experiences of Indian lesbians and gays who are subjected to unethical acts of workplace bullying which get manifested through constant guesswork, comments and questioning about their sexual identity in the hostile Indian context. Given this, LG participants usually opt for secrecy and lead a double life, using ‘passing’ and ‘covering’ strategies to manage economic, social and psychological risks. Nonetheless, this paper rewrites the negative tenor of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals research by underscoring how LG (...) participants move from fear to courage in their endeavour to live authentic lives while considering the broader organizational and social context. We argue that their courage is manifested mainly through deliberate micro-disclosures and a sense of defiance which can be enhanced if organizations are designed to be more inclusive and ethical. Consequently, participants defined inclusive ethical organizations as having conducive environments with trustworthy, supportive, secure, fair, unbiased and safe non-discriminatory policies open to the idea of diverse sexual orientations. Our findings point to the fact that, first and foremost, organizations must be crafted and sustained to be courageous within a hostile social climate, for employees to overcome their fears. (shrink)

Los historiadores queery los activistas tienen una relación particular con la historia de la Unión Soviética. Un vínculo que ha sido moldeado por las políticas de la Guerra Fría y el ascenso, en primera instancia en el mundo anglo-americano, del movimiento de liberación gay. Para los militantes de izquierda, saber que el primer Estado socialista del mundo sancionó políticas sexuales radicales ha sido un talismán y una guía. La despenalización de la homosexualidad masculina, caratulada como sodomía, en los primeros años (...) de la Rusia revolucionaria, fue uno de los cambios más radicales en las leyes criminales, familiares y de propiedad que marcaron la llegada de los bolcheviques al poder. La eliminación de las regulaciones religiosas y reaccionarias del régimen zarista sobre la sexualidad ha sido presentada como el punto de referencia de las políticas sexuales progresistas. Siguiendo esa lectura, la re-penalización por parte del gobierno soviético de la sodomía durante 1933-34 es interpretada como una “tendencia reaccionaria” de la mano del régimen de Joseph Stalin, una degeneración del presumiblemente socialismo legítimo de Vladimir Lenin. Nuestras narrativas también presentan al cambio en la legislación de la homosexualidad masculina durante los convulsionados años de 1930 a través del prisma de las relaciones internacionales. Esta perspectiva recurre fuertemente al trabajo del reformista sexual freudiano y marxista Wilhem Reich, quien en 1936 publicó una acusación de la represión de los homosexuales soviéticos. (shrink)

En este artículo se exponen las conclusiones de un estudio cuyo objetivo principal fue describir y analizar las situaciones de discriminación, violencia y desigualdad contra enfermeros/as gays y lesbianas con pretexto de su orientación sexual y/o expresión de género en organizaciones de salud públicas y privadas de Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Aquí se analizan las estrategias y los modos en que gays y lesbianas gestionan la información personal relativa a su orientación sexual en sus intercambios socio-laborales para evitar el (...) estigma.Este escrito se centra en dos categorías principales que ordenaron la investigación: las posibilidades de expresar la propia orientación sexual en los respectivos espacios de trabajo y su vinculación con el estigma real o anticipado en las interacciones con compañeros/as, superiores y pacientes; y el heterosexismo internalizado como una categoría vinculada tanto con el estigma anticipado y experimentado como con los distintos grados de apertura sobre la propia orientación sexual en el trabajo.Para alcanzar el objetivo propuesto, se adoptó un enfoque cualitativo y se analizaron 20 entrevistas a enfermeros y enfermeras gays, lesbianas y heterosexuales, sumado a la indagación de diversas fuentes secundarias, desde los lineamientos de la teoría fundamentada en datos. Como conclusión, se destaca la asociación entre el grado de asunción de la propia identidad sexual, el uso de estrategias de gestión de la información personal y el heterosexismo internalizado, que repercuten en la reproducción de la opresión y el estigma entre gays y lesbianas en comparación con la población heterosexual. Por lo tanto, este trabajo pretende hacer un aporte significativo a las discusiones y los estudios sobre diversidad sexual en los espacios de trabajo de Argentina y la región. (shrink)

Historically, the Christian church was united in firm opposition to both homosexuality and contraception. Today most evangelical Christians continue to oppose the former but have embraced the latter. This paper argues that there is a clear tension between these views, especially when it comes to the evangelical use of natural law–type reasoning. The conclusion of this paper is that Christians who view homosexual activity as immoral must also view artificial contraception in the same light. They are wrong for the same (...) reason: they both misuse the sexual organs by directing sexual activity away from procreative unity. (shrink)

This volume collects together significant writings in the debate about the rights of sexual minorities. The topics covered include the meaning and importance of sexual freedom, gender roles, marriage and other significant partnerships, child care and adoption, the criminal law, employment, and expression and pornography. The essays reflect a variety of perspectives and seek to relate arguments about sexual orientation and rights to broader debates within feminist theory.

Gay and lesbian theology has been one of the most distinctive voices to have emerged in Christian theology in the last 30 years. It has placed lesbian and gay experience at the heart of the theological process. Elizabeth Stuart, one of the most prominent theologians in this field, presents a critical survey of gay and lesbian theology. She charts the development of gay and lesbian theology from an early apologetic phase, to a more confident liberationist outlook which owed much to (...) Latin American liberation theology and feminist theology, and finally to its current wrestling with queer theory. (shrink)

"Reissuing seven works originally published between 1977 and 1992, this collection offers a varied selection of surveys of historical practices and attitudes to sexuality, from complete reviews of changing attitudes through time, to individual studies of France in the 19th and 20th Centuries and England in the 17th"--Amazon.com.

Auf Ungereimtheiten innerhalb der liberal-demokratischen Gesellschaftsordnung und daraus resultierende Gefährdungen für den Einzelnen und die Gesellschaft weist Denis Bobanović in seinem Aufsatz „Der Traum vom ,homosexuellen Türken‘: Fehlzündungen liberaler Ideologie“ hin.

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes and devenir-femme, devenir-animal in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember-ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a celebration of dispersed, (...) multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order. (shrink)

This chapter brings feminist moral psychology into conversation with dominant theories of blame. There are three main areas of concern in feminist moral psychology: the value of marginalized emotions like care and anger; the role of distorted states in moral reasoning; and the notion that agency is collective or relational. Feminist debates in each of these areas have implications for the dominant theories of blame: cognitive theory; emotional theory; conative theory; and functional theory. These debates call into question some commonly (...) held beliefs about blame, including that it is a personal (apolitical) response to a target agent; that blaming emotions do or should track individual agency; and that blaming norms are generally felicitous and not in need of significant revision. Key words: feminist moral psychology, blame, responsibility, agency, moral reasoning, oppression, social justice . (shrink)

Sally Haslanger identifies three standard philosophical approaches – conceptual, descriptive, and ameliorative – and defends an ameliorative analysis of race and gender as the most effective at addressing social injustice. In this paper, I assign three influential theories of moral responsibility to these categories, and I defend the ameliorative approach as the most justice-conducive. But I argue that existing ameliorative accounts of responsibility are not ameliorative enough – they do not adequately address social injustice. I propose a new ameliorative model (...) that defines ordinary responsibility as part of a political apparatus of power that polices and enforces oppressive norms. And I argue that we should create new, counterhegemonic discourses about responsibility through collective political resistance. (shrink)

Catrióna Rueda Esquibel starts from the premise that Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms cannot be fully understood without taking account of the perspectives and experiences of Chicana lesbians. To open up these perspectives, she engages in close readings of works centered around the following themes: La Llorona, the Aztec Princess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, girlhood friendships, rural communities and history, and Chicana activism. Her investigation broadens the community of Chicana lesbian writers well beyond Moraga and Anzaldúa, while it (...) also demonstrates that the histories of Chicana lesbians have had to be written in works of fiction because these women have been marginalized and excluded in canonical writings on Chicano life and experience. (shrink)

Objectophilia (also known as Objectum-Sexuality) involves romantic and sexual attraction to specific objects. Objectophiles often develop deep and enduring emotional, romantic, and sexual relations with specific inanimate (concrete or abstract) objects such as trains, bridges, cars, or words. . The determinants of objectophilia are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine the determining factors of objectophilia. We examine four hypotheses about the determinants of objectophilia (pertaining to fetishism, synesthesia, cross-modal mental imagery, and autism) and argue that the (...) most likely determining factors of objectophilia are the social and non-social features of autism. Future studies on the determinants of objectophilia could enhance our understanding and potentially lessen the marginalization experienced by objectophiles. (shrink)

Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life draws explicitly from the writings of French second-wave feminist Monique Wittig. Given that Wittig’s work has fallen into obscurity in recent years, and that a number of critiques have responded to her theorization of the notion of “the lesbian,” this essay seeks to understand what Wittig has to offer to twenty-first-century intersectional feminist theory, like that of Ahmed. In this essay, I thus offer analysis and critique of Wittig’s discussion of race and slavery found (...) specifically in her philosophical writings. While emphasizing the significance of Wittig’s failure to be inclusive of women of color in these philosophical works, I propose that within Wittig’s literary writings there are potential tools and concepts—specifically multiplicity, interruption, and mutability—that can be fruitful for trans-inclusive and women of color feminist theorizing. (shrink)

The ‘1st Congress Churches and LGBTI+ Community: ecumenical dialogues for respect for diversity’ was held between 19th and 22nd of June 2019, in the city of São Paulo. The Congress was organised by the Parish of the Holy Trinity of the Episcopal Anglican Church in Brazil and Koinonia–Ecumenical Presence in Service. As we consider this congress a historic landmark in the debates concerning religions and sexualities that escape from cisheteronormativity in Brazil, in the course of this article, we propose to (...) analyse the social and political conjuncture that motivated the event. In a second step, we will briefly describe the structure of the event, as well as its objectives, in order to understand the assumptions that guided the construction of the Letter of São Paulo, the official and public document of the Congress, approved in plenary by the participants. We believe that the Congress and the Letter of São Paulo have political potential, as they claim the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex+ people as people of faith and denounce forms of oppression, exclusion and marginalisation reinforced by conservative and hegemonic religious discourses. (shrink)

A common belief is that, among our sexual dispositions, sexual orientations are important and deep features of who someone is. This distinguishes them from other sexual dispositions—“mere” preferences—that are thought to be trivial in comparison. Is there a way to adequately account for this distinction? What is a plausible explanation for the belief that sexual orientation is a deep and important feature of who one is? This paper defends one necessary condition for a sexual disposition to be an orientation, the (...) well-being condition: if a sexual disposition is an orientation, then the inability to act on it lowers one’s well-being by rendering one’s life sexually deprived. The paper argues that the well-being condition better explains than other criteria the belief that orientations are important features of who one is. The paper concludes by tracing the implications of this view to the common understanding of sexual orientation. (shrink)

This paper aims at analyzing the main findings of a research on sex-affective experiences of cis heterosexual adult men from the cities of Montevideo and Maldonado in Uruguay. In the approach of their discourses from an ethnographic perspective, we see that their experiences and subjectivities are traversed by the mandate of compulsive heterosexuality that, even if it is not actively subscribed, it appears as a permanent background that configures their masculine identities. Furthermore, it acquires different discursive characteristics according to the (...) social sector to which the individuals belong to. It is observed that in men’s sex-affective trajectories, they assign different meanings to their ties with women, moving between the affective, sexual and rational dimensions. This "three-dimensionality" is configured according to their vital projects and the place men assign to certain female identities. (shrink)

The tragedy of heterosexuality is this: modern straightness dooms once-hopeful, loving couples to share dull, frustrating, and lonely lives together. After all, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and what’s a heterosexual to do about it? Against this dismal state of affairs, Jane Ward’s The Tragedy of Heterosexuality offers a scholarly, empathetic intervention from the perspective of queer culture. Ward’s book reveals that the titular tragedy is rooted in the misogynistic ideology permeating straight culture, according to which women (...) are at once objects of desire and derision. In a culture animated by this antimony, women and men are very different creatures and, by the same token, they are bound to struggle... (shrink)

Girard discusses "homosexuality" on three occasions in his oeuvre. Late in the first chapter of Deceit, Desire, & the Novel he discusses the relationship between Veltchaninov and Troussotsky, characters in Dostoyevsky's The Eternal Husband. Then in Part III of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World the sections entitled "Homosexuality" and "Mimetic Latency and Rivalry" are dedicated to the subject. Indeed, in the latter of these Girard reproduces his discussion of Veltchaninov and Troussotsky from the earlier book. Finally, he (...) touches on the matter in Chapter 4 of A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare, dedicated to... (shrink)

In traditional applications of queer theory onto the cinematic medium, reading the subtext as a spectator becomes the main way in which queerness can be uncovered within past texts that might at first glance be considered part of the heteronormative sphere. However, I intend to upend this notion by foregrounding the work being done by online video editors to reformulate one of the more traditional culture makers; Disney, through a re-contextualisation of their animated canon to create an exploration of lesbian (...) desire. By analysing the aesthetic concerns of these videos, freely available on YouTube, from their jagged editing seams to their wide-ranging narrative paths, a link will emerge between amateur fan content and the queer spectator as an active participant rather than a passive watcher. I will take this link to its inevitable conclusion, that digital bodies severed from their original context prove fertile grounds for the next steps in the intersection of queer theory and fan studies. (shrink)

I claim that hate speech is actually antithetical to free speech. Nevertheless, this claim invokes the misconception that one would be jeopardizing free speech due to a phenomenon known as "false polarization" – a “tendency for disputants to overestimate the extent to which they disagree about whatever contested question is at hand.” The real polarity does not lie between hate speech (as protected free speech) vs. censorship. Rather, hate speech is censorship. It is the censorship of entire sectors of the (...) population, a violation of their right to be heard, and at worse, an incitement to their extinction. The liberal attempt to try to fit the metaphorical round peg of hate speech into the square hole of free speech is impossible without revealing one’s reluctance to endow people of color, the LGBTQ community, women, and other socially oppressed groups as equal and deserving of full human dignity. I start by providing a clear definition of "hate speech", then I remind the reader of the original/historical political intent of the freedom of expression, and finally I illuminate the very real physical, psychological and social consequences of hate speech. (shrink)