This article argues for the necessity of recognising the collective rights-holding status of ‘sexual and gender minorities’ by examining the limits of the discourse concerning sexual orientation and gender identity in international law. I consider both symbolic interactionism and queer theory, which are critical of the assumption that everyone subscribes to a gender and a sexual identity. The theorisation proposed here accounts for not only people who possess a relatively stable identity, but also people whose situations are not conclusively characterised (...) but still require recognition justice. Not equating SGMs to LGBTI populations, I contend that the use of the term ‘SGMs’ should capture the sociocultural dynamics of the way in which one is made a ‘minority’. In light of the variations regarding sexual and gender norms in diverse contexts, SGMs are conceptually useful to accommodate differential experiences of nonconformity with the normative. (shrink)

“Queerly Inside and Out in School... A Conversation” draws upon the research from See Me, Hear Me... Queerly Visible: Conversations About Family and School with Non-Heterosexual Parents and Their Children that explored the schooling experiences of non-heterosexual parents and their children in Nova Scotia. Leveraging visual arts and performance as both a means of data generation and data representation, the generated artifacts illustrated how dominant cultural practices and narratives surrounding school and family perpetuate heteronormative ideology, while excluding and silencing non-heterosexual (...) parents and their children. Queer visibility became a re-occurring place of reflection and tension for parents as they re-told their stories of creating a queer family presence in their child’s school. The stories represented within this paper provide a window into the experience of parents and children who on a daily basis run the risk of not being “seen” by their teachers, school administrators, and the broader school community. (shrink)

Sex raises fundamental philosophical questions about topics such as personal identity and well-being, the relationship between emotion and reason, the nature of autonomy and consent, and the dual nature of persons as individuals but also social beings. This article serves as an overview of the philosophy of sex in the English-speaking philosophical tradition and explicates philosophical debate in several specific areas: sexual objectification, rape and consent, sex work, sexual identities and queer theory, the medicalization of sexuality, and polyamory. It situates (...) these topics in a framework of shifting cultural attitudes and argues for the importance of the philosophy of sex. It ends with some suggestions about future research, particularly with regard to the changing nature of pornography and sexual justice in legal theory. (shrink)

The last decade has seen rise in technologies that allow humans to send and receive intimate touch across long distances. Drawing together platform studies, digital intimacy studies, phenomenology of touch, and ethics of technology, we argue that these new haptic communication devices require specific ethical consideration of consent. The paper describes several technologies, including Kiiroo teledildonics, the Kissenger, the Apple Watch, and Hey Bracelet, highlighting how the sense of touch is used in marketing to evoke a feeling of connection within (...) the digital sphere. We then discuss the ambiguity of skin-to-skin touch and how it is further complicated in digital touch by remediation through platforms, companies, developers, manufacturers, cloud storage sites, the collection and use of data, research, satellites, and the internet. Lastly, we raise concerns about how consent of data collection and physical consent between users will be determined, draw on examples in virtual reality and sex-robotics, and ultimately arguing for further interdisciplinary research into this area. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics and epistemology of (...) placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

This article applies a critical femininities perspective to the concept of women’s leadership, interrogating the market-oriented instrumentalization of femininity. The author presents empirical research consisting of in-depth interviews conducted with young women leaders in European student organizations. These participants juggle complicity and subversion as they negotiate the divergent expectations of femininity and leadership through interpersonal interactions and sociocultural positionalities. In these narratives the themes of social responsibility, difference, femininity, culture and embodiment are interlaced. The analysis of findings complicates monolithic interpretations (...) of femininity by evidencing intra-categorical fracturing, multiplicity in locations and manifestations of femininities, conflicting attachments and affective relations to femininity, and broader geopolitical contextualization. This theoretically and practically challenges tropes of hegemonic femininity, and presents opportunities for resistance. On this basis the author argues for countering the feminist trouble of engaging with non-transgressive femininity from within strongly normative spaces in the development of critical femininity studies. (shrink)

This article provides an introductory guide to queer scholarship in religious studies and theology. It also outlines approaches to queer studies and how they have been, and might be, appropriated in religious studies and theology. Finally, the article argues that greater clarity is needed when naming projects as “queer,” given that the terms “queer,” “queer theory,” and “queer studies” cover such a wide variety of approaches.

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the (...) perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries. (shrink)

One of the main influences on Judith Butler‘s thinking has been the work of Michel Foucault. Although this relationship is often commented on, it is rarely discussed in any detail. My thesis makes a contribution in this area. It presents an analysis of Foucault‘s work with the aim of countering Butler‘s representation of his thinking. In the first part of the thesis, I show how Butler initially interprets Foucault‘s project through Nietzschean genealogy, psychoanalysis and Derridean discourse, and how she later (...) develops this interpretation in line with the progress of her own project. In the main part of the thesis, I present an analysis of Foucault‘s thinking in the period from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to The History of Sexuality volume 1 (1976). This analysis focuses on the aspect of his work which has most influenced Butler‘s thinking: namely the notion of a relationship between knowledge, discourse and power. The other issues in his work which Butler addresses—genealogy, the subject, the body, abnormality, and sexuality—are discussed within this framework. I show how, in the early 1970s, Foucault develops the notion of power-knowledge, and sets out a relationship between power-knowledge and discourse which is overlooked by Butler. I argue that Butler interprets Foucaultian power through the notions of repression and social norms, and ignores the concepts of technology and strategy which form a key part of Foucault‘s thinking. I show how, from The Archaeology of Knowledge on, Foucault develops a socio-historical ontology and a genealogy of the subject, both of which are at variance with Butler‘s interpretation of his thinking. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of subjectivity from the perspective of a nonnative-English-speaking teacher educator at a Midwestern university in the USA. It begins with a literature review on the role subjectivity plays in education. It argues that acknowledging the existence of subjectivity allows us to investigate its enabling and disabling potential in relation to our practice. Building on George Herbert Mead’s work, various forms of the teacher educator’s subjectivity are revealed and examined with regard to his teaching and research. (...) It is hoped that this paper would serve as a prompt for more conversations on subjectivity as well as a point of entry into a better understanding of the teacher educators working in a cross-cultural context. (shrink)

This article emerges from a wider study on bicultural film archiving practice. It focuses on Jonathan Dennis as a subject of archiving, and as a distinctive archivist himself in relation to a specific archive at a particular moment. Dennis practice differed significantly from North American and European conventions contemporaneous with his life work. The charismatic founding director of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Jonathan Dennis became a conduit for tensions and debates during the 1981–2002 period in relation to indigenous and (...) non indigenous presentation of archival materials. This resulted in a film archive and curatorship practice which differed significantly from that of the North American and European archives he originally sought to emulate. As a Pākehā with a strong sense of social justice he argued for an awareness of geographical location and cultural context in his work. He supported a philosophical shift in archival practice, by engaging indigenous peoples in developing creative and innovative exhibitions and programmes from the 1980s period until his death.Note: From 1988 the official name for the New Zealand Film Archive was Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Since August 2014 the institution is called Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero to acknowledge the acquisition of the state-owned Television NZ Archive and Sound Archives from Radio NZ. For brevity’s sake the Archive is referred to throughout as NTSV.Key: NTSV PP JD refers to the NTSV Personal Papers of Jonathan Dennis. (shrink)

The clinic is a loaded space for LGBTQI persons. Historically a site of pathology and culturally a site of stigma, the contemporary clinic for queer patient populations and their loved ones is an ethically fraught space. This paper, which introduces the featured articles of this special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry on “Bioethics, Sexuality, and Gender Identity,” begins by offering an analysis of scrutiny itself. How do we scrutinize? When is it apt for us to scrutinize? And what (...) are the benefits and perils of clinical and bioethical scrutiny? Bearing in mind these questions, the second half of this paper introduces the feature articles in this special issue in response to such forms of scrutiny. How, why, when, and in what ways to sensitively scrutinize LGBTQI persons in the clinic are the aims of this piece. (shrink)

This article considers the late 19th-century medical invention of the category of the homosexual in relation to homosexuality’s moment of deliverance from medicine in the 1970s, when it was removed as a category of mental aberration in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). With the rise of the AIDS pandemic in gay communities in the early 1980s, I argue that homosexuals were forcibly returned to the medical sphere, a process I call “the painful reunion.” Reading a collection of queer narratives (...) across the 20th century, I show that historical and contemporaneous medical events prompted the mobilization of seropositive and queer artists at century’s end to rehabilitate, revise, and offend the historiography of queer illness. Collectively, my conclusions redefine our understandings of queer theory and queer politics as distinctively 1990s projects invested in the present to ones that purposefully aim to challenge the past. (shrink)