Caught between the orientalist–occidentalist polemic: gender mainstreaming as feminist transformation or neocolonial subversion?*

Here we provide a critical reading of gender mainstreaming as a potential emancipatory force that has been co-opted within orientalist–occidentalist polemics. This remains a critical period in the “mainstreaming” debate, where feminist reappropriation is necessary to repoliticize the concept and reorient development sector focus from tokenistic inclusivity to social transformation. We consider two sides of the debate. In the first scenario, the requirement for gender mainstreaming in international development discourse has not only failed to address its original feminist goals, but has become (or remained) an extension of orientalist, neocolonial projects to control and “civilize” developing economies. Here, a putative concern for gender equality in development is used as a means to distinguish between the modern, civilized One and the colonial, traditional Other. In the second scenario, gender mainstreaming is held up as all that these “othered” occidentalist forces stand against; an exemplar of the inappropriate imposition of “western” moralistic paradigms in non-western contexts. Ultimately, the co-optation of gendered discourses in development through these orientalist–occidentalist polemics serves to obfuscate the continued depoliticization of mainstreaming. A critical question remains: can gender mainstreaming ever transcend this discursive impasse and reassert its feminist transformatory potential?     

Intergenerational Yearnings and Other “Acts of Perversion”: Or Where Would I Be Without Lesbian Drumming?

This article explores the (il)legibilities of race, gender, sexuality, and interracial solidarity between two feminist generations. Using the words of Judy Grahn and Pat Parker, the author juxtaposes her own experience and writings as a queer, Black, feminist, born in 1971 with their dyke, feminist writings of the same period, asking “Where Would I Be, Without You?” Central to this question is a queer re-imagining of queer past and future in an effort to understand the potential for interracial, feminist solidarity in the twenty-first century.     

AMBIGUOUS IDENTITY IN AN UNAMBIGUOUS SEX/GENDER STRUCTURE:

This article explores bisexual identity as an ambiguous social category within the dominant dualistic sex/gender structure. The article documents the stigmatization of the bisexual category in the discourse of both the Religious Right and lesbian feminist communities, then examines the impact of dual stigmatization on bisexual women, who often see bi identity as disrupting the dominant sexual binary. Drawing from interviews with bisexual women, the article argues that bisexual women's discourse on sexual subjectivity does not escape the influence of binary structures, although it does at times reconfigure the binary along the queer/nonqueer and bisexual/monosexual axes. While the bisexual identity category may work as a discursive stabilizing device during the sex/gender crisis provoked by the AIDS epidemic, its politicization by bi feminists also allows the category to be strategically deployed for feminist and queer political projects.
At the present time, the regions where the grid is tightest, where the black squares are most numerous, are those of sexuality and politics; as if discourse, far from being that transparent or neutral element in which sexuality is disarmed and politics pacified, is in fact one of the places where sexuality and politics exercise in a privileged way some of their most formidable powers.
-Michel Foucault
No wonder people think we [bisexual women] are all sleazy.
-Bisexual woman     

Working at Intimacy: Gay Men's Workplace Friendships

Despite scholarly efforts to challenge the dualistic stereotype of men as rational and women as emotion experts, academics have paid little attention to the issues that arise when gay and lesbian sexualities are introduced into such debates. This article highlights the heterosexist content of much of the research on gender, emotion and organization, and argues the relevancy of investigating the largely neglected topic of intimacy and friendship in the work lives of gay men. Engaging with feminist, queer and sociological research that examines friendship in the lives of individuals who belong to sexual minority groups, I explore in this study the diversity in the way gay men find and work out intimacy in the context of workplace friendships with other gay men and with heterosexual men and women. The data for this article are drawn from in‐depth interviews with ten gay men employed in one UK National Health Service Trust. Study findings problematize conceptualizations of friendships at work as being bereft of intimacy, of little value and clearly distinguishable from business relationships. Dichotomous modes of thinking about the impact of gender and sexuality on intimacy and friendship are also challenged.     

Is Pornography Really about “Making Hate to Women”? Pornography Users Hold More Gender Egalitarian Attitudes Than Nonusers in a Representative American Sample

According to radical feminist theory, pornography serves to further the subordination of women by training its users, males and females alike, to view women as little more than sex objects over whom men should have complete control. Composite variables from the General Social Survey were used to test the hypothesis that pornography users would hold attitudes that were more supportive of gender nonegalitarianism than nonusers of pornography. Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory. Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes—toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion—than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory.     

Feminist and queer criminology: A vital place for theorizing LGBTQ youth

Creating safe environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ) youth has become a significant public health concern. Despite the disparities in the risk factors associated with identifying as a member of the LGBTQ community, the theoretical frameworks for understanding these issues, particularly within criminology, have been limited. The purpose of this work is to review the historical treatment of gender and sexual orientation within criminology. More specifically, this work reviews how gender was introduced into criminology through the work of feminist criminology, followed by the need for theorization that further analyzed sexual orientation. This then became the focus of queer criminology. After tracing the historical development of gender and sexual orientation, the author uses the theoretical foundations of both to show how it applies to recognizing the issues faced by LGBTQ youth. Finally, the author discusses why consideration of these frameworks is paramount in understanding the issues faced by LGBTQ youth, as well as how such consideration and understanding can help mend the existing gap in providing safer environments for LGBTQ youth.     

Navigating uncertainty,employment and women’s safety during COVID-19: Reflections of sexual assault resistance educators

COVID-19 affects women in ways unique to the impacts of structural inequalities related to gender, sexuality, disability, race and socioeconomic status. In this article, we reflect on our own experiences of the pandemic, as feminist students, workers and sexual assault resistance educators located in a Canadian post-secondary setting. Situating ourselves within feminist responses to sexual violence prevention, as facilitators of the Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, and Act (EAAA) sexual assault resistance education programme for university women, we reflect on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our work as EAAA facilitators in our Canadian university. We explore the theoretical possibilities that critical disability theory and queer theory present to the EAAA programme, and argue that incorporating concepts from these frameworks will complement the goals of the EAAA programme and improve inclusivity of queer, trans and disabled participants. We conclude with a look into the future by anticipating the impacts of COVID-19 on our future work.     

From Lesbian Nation to Transgender Liberation: A Bisexual Feminist Perspective

This paper begins by raising some questions about the relationship between transgenderism and bisexuality within queer politics and theory, centering on an interview with the curator of the Sexual Minorities Archives in Northampton, Massachusetts. The interview focuses on the changing body of the Archives from the New Alexandria Lesbian Archives to the Sexual Minorities Archives, in relation to the changing body of the curator, Bet Power, from lesbian to female-to-male nonoperative transsexual. These texts—interview, Archives, and body—are discussed from the perspective of a bisexual feminist interviewer and in the broader contexts of queer politics and theory. The aim is to highlight the interplay of gender, sexuality, and class in one particular context and through one interviewer’s eyes. What queer readings can be made of those “plays”? And how do those “plays” illuminate some of the issues and contradictions within queer politics and theory at present?     

Index of Volume 4, 2002

This article links a theoretical debate within poststructural feminisms – whether feminist politics can be pursued without hegemonic representations of women and gender – to the practice of transnational feminist organizing in the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in Durban in 2001. It goes beyond the traditional analysis of ‘adding’ gender to a mega world conference and asks the critical question of what

gender signifies in this instance of UN politics. The article argues that feminists’ strategic use of the concept of ‘gender as intersectionality’ marks a paradigm shift from the predominant monolithic representation of gender as women, being equal to or different from men, in international human rights frameworks. It puts the issue of diversity among women at the forefront of the intergovernmental WCAR. Far from entailing an abandonment of feminist politics, as some poststructuralist feminists have suggested, it is argued that opening up ‘gender’ for unlimited signification in

the case of WCAR marks the beginning of a new phase of transnational feminist mobilization.     

Queer Questions

Abstract

As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly prominent place in international politics, it seems clear that the long-running Woman Question has been supplemented by a set of variously articulated “queer questions.” Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, and readings of queer literary and cinematic texts from India and Iran, this article explores moments of resonance, intersection and tension between the Woman Question and queer questions. It argues, first, that contemporary queer questions echo the preoccupations of the Woman Question even as they are uncannily prefigured by it; second, that these questions have been mutually disruptive of one another, so that queer questions are not simply a rerun of the Woman Question; and third, that differences between these questions are problematically flattened out in projections of shared futurity articulated in the abstract universality of “human rights.” Navigating the shared pasts, fraught presents and imagined futures of Woman and queer questions, the article brings queer critiques of temporality to bear on the concerns of postcolonial queer activism. It elucidates opportunities and challenges for alliance between the subjectivities interpellated by these various questions. In addition, it asks how the proliferation of new subjectivities under the sign of “queer” troubles notions of universal human rights.     

Grim reapers: ghostly narratives of masculinity and killing in drone warfare

This article embraces the spectral turn and sociological framework of “Haunting” to investigate the gendered implications of armed drones for the individuals who crew them. Introducing original interview data from former British Reaper drone crews and focusing on their experiences of conducting lethal operations, this article builds on feminist and queer theorizing to illuminate the instability of the binary distinction between masculinity and femininity as traditionally understood. Developing “Haunting,” I draw out three themes: complex personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, and disturbed temporality as the frames through which the intersection of gender and drone warfare can be examined. I draw upon the conceptual metaphor of the ghost to explore the dead that is also alive, the absent that is also present, and that silence that is also a scream. Through this, I argue that Haunting provides a framework for both revealing and destabilizing gendered binaries and is therefore a useful tool for feminist security and international relations scholars.     

User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

A feminist look at social psychology / Una mirada feminista a la psicología social

This theoretical revision starts from the consideration that the gender perspective constitutes a critical, explanatory and alternative vision that comes from feminism and generates an analysis framework that takes into consideration and pays attention to the differences and inequalities between women and men in any activity or area of social development, research or public policies. The objective of this revision is to provide clues to understanding what gender or feminist social psychology is. To this end, firstly, we briefly describe feminist theoretical assumptions and the gender or feminist perspective, which constitute its starting point, and secondly, we analyse what it means to integrate these principles into psychology.     

Kristen Ghodsee. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism

This article addresses the challenge that feminist critiques of sex and gender present

for an ecofeminist strategy of affirming the materiality of bodies and earth. As a

starting point for thinking about human embodiment, earth is taken to be a community

of interconnected constituents, both human and other-than-human. The article presents an understanding of the material givenness of earth and bodies as at any moment in transformation: as the matter of interrelationships between a plurality of earth constituents. It is argued that a notion of the agency of the material given can underpin an ecological feminist thinking of sexed embodiment that need not be

essentialist. Read critically both science and certain traditions of spirituality suggest modes of knowing that offer only partial access to the material given. The emphasis on the material given is not a return to a pre-feminist understanding of the ‘naturalness’ of sex and gender, justly criticized by many feminist theorists. Rather it is a turn

towards earth necessary for an ecological feminist politics engaged with the mutual flourishing of women and earth. This ‘turn’ affirms a feminist deconstruction of the categories of sex and gender in the context of a reaffirmation of sexed bodies produced as part of the material given.     

Reorienting Gender and Globalization: Introduction to the Special Issue

The scholarship on gender and globalization has contributed a far more complex picture of the impact of global processes as well as added a crucial gendered perspective on such processes. It has shown us how global processes may reinscribe, alter, and challenge sex/gender orders, which are not necessarily coherent or hegemonic. Yet, we think there is more that gender and globalization scholarship can do to enhance understandings of global processes. We argue that to do so, the literature needs to develop further by overcoming several limitations: (1) an understanding of gender that still tends to reflect the binary sex/gender arrangements common to Western societies, while failing to address the influence of colonial histories and postcolonial states (Roberts and Connell, Feminist Theory 17(2): 135–140, 2016; Sinha 2012); (2) a gender asymmetry, i.e., a disproportionate focus on women; (3) a narrow set of issues that come under its analytical lens; (4) a primary focus outside the US; and finally (5) a gender division of intellectual labor in which primarily feminists who identify as women study gender and globalization while those who identify as men, feminist or otherwise, tend to study a gender blind globalization. In this introduction, we examine the development of the gender and globalization literature, discuss how the articles in this special issue expand on it, and conclude with future directions for this burgeoning field.     

Sex Ed in Higher Ed: Should We Say Yes to “Affirmative Consent?”

In this essay, the author explores the concept of “affirmative consent” as a sociolegal strategy for reducing sexual violence on college campuses. Meanings and implications of “consent” are considered from a psychoanalytic perspective, using the work of Laplanche and relational psychoanalysis to consider the fit between the construct of consent as it is invoked in contemporary sexual politics and our psychoanalytic understandings of sexual experience. The discourse of consent is also explored from the standpoint of queer and feminist theory. Finally, a brief clinical vignette is offered to illuminate the real challenges that are encountered in the effort to use language to communicate about sex. The author suggests an interdisciplinary, nonregulatory, exploratory approach to addressing the problem of sex and sexual violence on college campuses.     

Exploring Queer Consciousness Among Social Workers

The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of MSW practitioners toward lesbians and gay men using a recently developed instrument. Whereas prior research focused on blatantly homophobic or heterosexist attitudes, this research uses a measurement tool based on the concept of queer consciousness (QC) and measures subtle forms of prejudice, including both positive and negative attitudes along four dimensions: Value gay and lesbian progress/diversity, resist traditional sex and gender roles, positive beliefs about lesbians, and positive beliefs about gay men. Research findings indicate negative attitudes toward lesbians and gay men in three out of the four dimensions for the sample of social work practitioners. This article concludes with suggestions for social work educators who want to redress areas of subtle prejudice and promote higher levels of QC.     

Trans Men: Embodiments,Identities, and Sexualities

This article examines the experiences of 25 persons who were assigned female status at birth but do not wish to live as women and take on a masculine or queer gender identity. We employ the concept of “gendered embodiment” and introduce the concept of “sexualized embodiment” to highlight what is involved in this process. We ask how experiencing a masculine gender identity is reflexively tied to a trans man's sexuality and the ways in which these two embodiments are tightly, moderately, or loosely coupled. For example, a tight coupling appeared when trans men began to use testosterone and obtained surgery such as breast removal; a moderate coupling was found where gender validation was sought from a sexual partner (with this being related to sexual preference identities as well as the interpretation of vaginal penetration); the loosest coupling of the gender‐sexuality embodiments was linked to the liberality of the locale and whether “queer” identities could be easily adopted. In sum, our research demonstrates the link between gender and sexuality as a result of the body work trans men do and the historical and geographical situations in which they find themselves.     

Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime,sex, and rights

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.