“We Can Have It All”

Focusing primarily on films made in 2008 and 2009, this article examines the phenomenon of the girlfriend flick. Films such as Sex and the City, Baby Mama, The Women, and Bride Wars depict female friendship's priority in intimate culture, celebrating supportive and loving relationships over heterosexual romance. Exploring these films through the intersection between feminism and postfeminism, this article asks whether the girlfriend flick transcends limited understandings of sisterhood to include difference and to constructively explore conflict between women. This article argues that these films advocate a retreat into a segregated female sphere; not as radicalisation, but as a space where women monitor each other's drive for physical perfection and/or marriage and motherhood. Ultimately, they depict female friendship as maintaining “representable” femininities and producing sameness.     

Something Else Besides a Father

While heterosexuality has long been the assumed ideology of reproduction, the material existence of over thirty-three thousand US children a year born from sperm donation alone attests to a radical disjuncture between our conceptions of conception and how a good many children are actually conceived. Reproductive technologies, ranging from the aforementioned sperm donation to the more complicated processes of egg harvesting, surrogacy, and IVF, can thus be read as subverting our notions of the heteronormative family. As such, assisted reproductive technology evokes widespread cultural anxiety, especially for how it challenges notions of gender, sexuality, and parenthood.

Not surprisingly, popular culture has stepped in to allay some of these anxieties, and as such it is a productive site through which to examine debates around gender, sexuality, and parenthood. At the very least, the wide market of Hollywood cinema is evidence of the discursive pull of these debates. In an examination of three recent and representative Hollywood films, Baby Mama (2008), The Switch, and The Back-Up Plan (both 2010), I will analyze how they both challenge and reinforce the “socially foundational status of the male–female couple.” Through their (re)deployment of a variety of cinematic conventions, these films attempt to yoke the radical potential of reproductive technology to a conservative ideology incorporating post-feminism and new masculinity that insists on the emotive primacy of the heterosexual couple and its “language of naturalness.”     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

Assessing the Gender Invariance of the Modern Homonegativity Scale

The measurement invariance of the Modern Homonegativity Scale (MHS) was examined among heterosexual female (n = 449) and male (n = 329) university students who were predominantly Mexican American. The MHS demonstrated full invariance of factor loadings and partial invariance of latent intercepts. At the latent mean level, heterosexual men compared to heterosexual women held more negative attitudes toward both gay men and lesbian women. There were no latent mean differences in attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women when rated by either heterosexual men or heterosexual women. The MHS can be used by heterosexual men and heterosexual women to assess their homonegativity.     

Performativity Double Standards and the Sexual Orientation Climate at a Southern Liberal Arts University

This study employs quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how heterosexual, bisexual, and gay students rate and describe a Southern, religiously affiliated university’s sexual orientation climate. Using qualitative data, queer theory, and the concept tyranny of sexualized spaces, we explain why non-heterosexual students have more negative perceptions of the university climate than heterosexual male students, in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Although heterosexual students see few problems with the campus sexual orientation climate, bisexual men and women describe being challenged on the authenticity of their orientation, and lesbian and, to a greater extent, gay male students report harassment and exclusion in a number of settings. These distinct processes are influenced by broader heteronormative standards. We also shed much-needed light on how gendered sexual performativity double standards within an important campus microclimate (fraternity parties) contribute to creating a tyrannical sexualized space and negatively affect overall campus climate perceptions.     

Left Out? Lesbian,Gay, and Bisexual Poverty in the U.S.

This paper analyzes the risk of poverty for self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people from mid-2013 through 2016 in the National Health Interview Survey, a nationally representative survey of households that includes a sexual orientation question based on identity (n = 112,143). The study tests the role of family structure—living with a spouse or partner and having children—on the risk of poverty for LGB and heterosexual respondents. After controlling for education, demographic, and health measures in a probit model, lesbians and gay men are as likely to be poor as similar heterosexuals, but bisexual women and men are significantly more likely to be poor, regardless of relationship status. Single and childless gay men are also more likely to be poor than single heterosexual men. Being in a relationship reduces the likelihood of poverty for people of all sexual orientations, but the data show evidence of a gender composition effect: married male same-sex couples are less likely and unmarried female same-sex couples more likely to be poor than their married counterparts. Marriage reduces gay men’s poverty risk more and children increase their poverty risk less than for heterosexual men.     

“She Is Not Acting,She Is”

This essay examines the popular television show RuPaul's Drag Race to reveal the ways drag performance provides an ambivalent, contradictory space for wrestling with contentious issues surrounding cultural identity and authenticity in reality TV. Focusing on the show's controversial season three, the authors demonstrate how drag queens subvert and play with ideas of gender “realness” but find an impasse in open discussions of race. The racial minstrelsy of some contestants we observe created antagonisms between black/brown characters and their white/Asian counterparts, exposing a rift in ideas about racial play despite the general acceptance of flexibility in gender bending. Recognizing that reality TV exploits and uncovers these tensions, we demonstrate that while drag performance enacts a subversive mode of queer performance, it provides a contested site and complex semiotic space for dealing with sensitive matters of race/ethnicity, especially when certain forms of stereotyping are rewarded over others.     

Three Poetry Books

In this article, I argue that Richard Matheson's (1954) vampire novella, I Am Legend, encodes the protagonist's, Robert Neville, traumatic recognition of his queer sexuality in its monstrosity (the unspeakability of male penetrability). Neville's identification with and desire for his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, are symbolically codified through three different registers: intertextual references to vampiric conventions and codes, the semiotics of queer subculture, and a structure of doubling that links Neville to the queer vampire. Although Neville avoids encountering his unspeakable queer desire, which could be represented only at the level of the Lacanian Real, he must still confront Cortman's obsessive exhortations for him to come out. Only when he symbolically codifies his abnormality in its own monstrosity, by viewing himself through mutant vampires' eyes, can Neville reconfigure the ethical relationship between self and other, humans and mutant humans-vampires. However progressive Matheson's novella is in its advocacy of minority sexual rights, it still renders capitalism's problematic relationship with queer subjectivity invisible. Although capitalism overdetermines every aspect of the social field and makes Neville's daily life possible in its surplus enjoyment, the fundamental antagonism (class struggle) in capitalism is obscured by the assertion of identity politics.     

Good Gay Buddies for Lifetime: Homosexually Themed Discourse and the Construction of Heteromasculinity Among Chinese Urban Youth

Starting as an Internet meme, the homosexually themed gao-ji discourse recently became popular among Chinese urban youth in describing intimate relationships among heterosexual men. Positioned within a body of scholarship on the interplay between language, homophobia, and the construction of heteromasculinity, this article suggests that the gao-ji discourse manifests a form of male homosociality, through which new boundaries of Chinese heteromasculinity may be renegotiated. Based on qualitative interviews with college students, the article first tracks the genealogy of the gao-ji discourse in the wake of China’s booming Internet culture. The main body focuses on unpacking the daily use of the gao-ji discourse, with an attention to the two latent functions it serves (i.e., expanding heteromasculine behaviors and reiterating heteromasculine identities). In conclusion, I argue that the prevalence of the gao-ji discourse mainly resolves straight men’s anxieties against the background of growing public awareness of homosexuality; therefore, it cannot necessarily translate into social acceptance of homosexuality.     

The Rise and Fall of Civil Unions: Lessons From the Connecticut Legislature's Abandonment of Gay and Lesbian Citizens

On April 20, 2005, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell signed into law “An Act Concerning Civil Unions” (Public Act No. 05–10, 2005). That Act did two things: First, it afforded to qualifying same-sex couples many of the rights and benefits that the state makes available to married heterosexual couples. Second, it “defended” heterosexual marriage by defining marriage as involving one man and one woman. Although it might seem that the legislature was moving in an obviously correct direction, its decision to establish a statutory scheme consigning same-sex couples to civil unions was integral to the ideological exclusion of gays and lesbians from marriage and, thereby, implied that they are unfit for family life.

The Democrats' and Republicans' focus was on the formal equality guaranteed by the civil union legislation. But the heart of the legislation is disenfranchisement. Connecticut lawmakers placed the stamp of legitimacy on a policy that officially excluded lesbians and gays from full membership in civil society. To many gay and lesbian citizens in Connecticut, it was a slap in the face and awakened a realization that lawmakers' professed egalitarian ideals and the realities of defining who belonged to their communities may not coincide.     

Is Gaydar Affected by Attitudes Toward Homosexuality? Confidence,Labeling Bias,and Accuracy

Previous research has largely ignored the relationship between sexual orientation judgement accuracy, confidence, and attitudes toward homosexuality. In an online study, participants (N = 269) judged the sexual orientation of homosexual and heterosexual targets presented via a series of facial photographs. Participants also indicated their confidence in each judgment and completed the Modern Homonegativity Scale (Morrison & Morrison, 2002). We found that (1) homosexual men and heterosexual women were more accurate when judging photographs of women as opposed to photographs of men, and (2) in heterosexual men, negative attitudes toward homosexual men predicted confidence and bias when rating men’s photographs. Findings indicate that homosexual men and heterosexual women are similar in terms of accuracy in judging women’s sexuality. Further, especially in men, homophobia is associated with cognitive biases in labeling other men but does not have a relationship with increased accuracy.     

“Still Raped Over Here”: Gay Male Femininity and the Rewards of Camp Ambivalence in Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls

ABSTRACT

Girls Will Be Girls (GWBG) delivers a substantive queer-feminist critique of heteronormative animus toward women and gay men through jokes that weaponize that animus for insurgent purposes. The film’s rape and abortion jokes showcase the provocative notion that negative representations of femininity might be wielded strategically and, in fact, more resonantly because they resist recuperation by marginalizing normative hierarchies. GBWG’s enactment of gay male femininity deploys queer dissidence by ameliorating pain through mockery while emphasizing the costs of heteronormative and patriarchal inflictions. This essay offers a test case for a queer feminist politics—one that, without discarding the imperatives for and rewards of more materially grounded political work, mines the critical as well as affective affordances of rage, mockery, and indignity against heteronormativity’s arbitrary but still formidable injunctions. A queer feminist reading of camp denaturalizes heteronormativity with a potency that queer theory and feminist theory might harness yet more effectually in less divided collaboration.     

Written on the Body

The author considers two recent prize-winning films by women directors (one British and one American) with similar, if not identical themes. Placing them in the category first defined by David Considine as “the cinema of adolescence” the author considers the filmic traditions from which they arise. In both of the films under consideration—Fish Tank and Girlfight—the young female protagonists attempt to resist or subvert socially imposed restrictions. The author considers the way the entrapment of the working-class teenage girls at the centre of these films is represented by non-professional “actresses” selected because they come from the same milieu of run-down sections of cities as their on-screen characters. She explores the way in which these two writer-directors use their actresses to embody on screen issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and culture, and the near-impossible routes out of poverty. To do so, the author utilises theories from sociology, feminist theories of the body, as well as theories derived from film studies to examine these politically driven films.     

“A Girl Alone in a man's World”

War films were one of British cinema's mainstays throughout the 1950s, and one of the most iconic of the cycle is Ice Cold in Alex (1958). This particular film overturned some of the already familiar conventions of the genre, not least by allowing a female character, the nursing sister Diana Murdoch (played by Sylvia Syms), to play a more important role than women were usually granted. This article deploys close textual analysis to examine the representation of Diana, and suggests how this character not only reflects various competing and often self-contradictory discourses of 1950s femininity but also offers a rare depiction of women's contribution to the war effort from the decade following it.     

Mirror Rubbing: A Critical Genealogy of Pre-Modern Chinese Female Same-Sex Eroticism

This article offers a critical genealogy of pre-modern Chinese female same-sex relationships. Through the analysis of the primary source materials in history, fiction, and drama, the author shows that female homosexuality is silenced and suppressed. To Confucianism, female same-sex relationships threaten to exclude men from accessing female sex and keep women away from participating in extending the family line. Even the Daoist theory of sex can be used to discriminate against female homosexuality by denying women the ability to initiate and maintain the cycle of yin-yang interaction in sexual intercourse. There are 2 recurring themes in the male writers' imaginings of female same-sex eroticism. First, heterosexuality is the preferred sexual order, and female same-sex desire arises due to the lack of sexual access to men. Second, heterosexual relationships and intercourse are the norm that female homosexuality aspires to imitate.     

Space,Agency, and the Transfiguring of Lesbian/Queer Desire

In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from Pussy Palace, a lesbian/queer bathhouse in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which the bathhouse space impacted participants' sexuality, behaviors, and notions of self. The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), an explicitly feminist and queer organization, is responsible for putting on Pussy Palace events and in creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously sexual and safe. Findings indicate elements of both spatial praxis and sexual agency, wherein individuals expressed being able to “take risks,” “find their sexuality,” and “discover who they are” in a safe space, where nonnormative bodies and sexualities are to be celebrated. Although participants expressed feeling “liberated,” many also described feeling anxious, awkward, and insecure. Within a sexual space where bodies are exposed and highly salient, these anxieties worked to inhibit and curtail bodily expression. The author concludes by discussing the significance of spaces like Pussy Palace for lesbian/queer individuals when it comes to sexual expression and the need for further research when it comes to examining lesbian/queer sexualities and public sexual cultures.     

Psychometric and Faciometric Support for Observable Facial Feminization in Gay Men

ABSTRACT

Though male homosexuality appears to be evolutionarily paradoxical, phenotypic feminization has been offered as a route for three current models positing a genetic basis for male homosexuality. We tested whether facial feminization is observable in gay men in two studies. In Study 1, using two composite images of gay and of heterosexual men, naive participants (N = 308) rated the “gay” face more highly on stereotypically feminine traits and actual femininity and the “heterosexual” face more highly on stereotypically masculine traits and actual masculinity. In Study 2, faciometrics of 428 Internet images of gay (N = 219) and heterosexual men were analyzed along six sexually dimorphic ratios. The faciometrics of gay men were more feminine, both in gestalt terms and for five of the six individual traits. The studies offer objective support for a more feminized facial phenotype in gay males that is difficult to explain through cultural or behavioral cues.     

Flexible Queers,Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces

Queer spaces are significant for understanding transgender inclusion as “queer spaces were places where individuals were expected to be attentive to or aware of alternative possibilities for being, including non-normative formulations of bodies, genders, desires and practices” (Nash, 2011 Nash, C. J. 2011. Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space. Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 55: 192–207. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 203). Indeed, in this interview study of members of a queer leather group called the Club, members described a flexible “sexual landscape” that easily includes transgender members. However, these same queer spaces have been criticized for the way they regulate queer bodies and organize queer subjectivities. In this study, queer members of the Club also contrasted playful queer flexibility with serious transgender bodies. This article argues that, although there is a reiterative relation between transgender inclusion and queer spaces, the idealization of flexibility within queer spaces can also serve to marginalize and regulate transgender bodies.     

Perceived Sexual Orientation of Men and Women with Eating Disorders and Obesity

ABSTRACT

The present study explores the perceived sexual orientation of hypothetical men and women with various eating disorders and obesity. Undergraduates were randomly provided with one vignette describing a male or female with anorexia nervosa (AN), bulimia nervosa (BN), binge-eating disorder, or obesity and were asked about the target’s likely sexual orientation. Significant differences emerged between male and female targets with AN and BN on the forced-choice question, with a greater percentage of participants indicating that the male targets were probably non-heterosexual. On continuous items, participants rated the female targets as significantly more likely to be heterosexual and significantly less likely to be homosexual than male targets. The general public may be more likely to perceive men with eating disorders as gay or bisexual relative to females with eating disorders. Perceived sexual orientation might be an important factor to consider when exploring the potentially unique perspectives of men with eating disorders.     

Staging Gender and Sexuality in Experimental TV Entertainment

ABSTRACT

Via examples from recent Norwegian experimental TV shows, this article explores the function of “eye-catchers,” parodic (hetero)sexualization, female masquerade and neo-masculinization as strategies for “repetitions with a difference” of traditional styles and motifs by female show hosts, as well as the queer gendering and sexualization of men and masculinities by their male counterparts. Both formats represent innovative renegotiations of gender and sexuality that illustrate the relationship between post-modernism and queer aesthetics.