Same-Sex Sexuality and Educational Attainment: The Pathway to College

Research finds lower levels of academic performance among sexual minority high school students, but some studies suggest sexual minorities have higher levels of educational attainment in adulthood. To further our understanding of how and why sexual orientation is associated with educational success, this study turns attention to the pathways to college completion, examining points along educational trajectories in which sexual minorities fall behind or surpass their heterosexual peers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we find that sexual minority women are less likely than women with no same-sex sexuality to complete college, in part due to their high school performance and transition into college. Men who experience same-sex sexuality only in adolescence struggle in high school, but men who experience same-sex sexuality for the first time in adulthood are more likely to earn a college degree than men who do not experience same-sex sexuality.     

Selling the Post-Communist Female Body

During the years of the Cold War, propaganda by both sides of the divide was waged on every front. That propaganda prominently featured images of communist women, dressed in white lab coats, wearing construction hats, flying planes, and lacking any sense of sexuality. It also effectively created the most visually recognizable and ubiquitous symbols of communism in the West—the drab communist woman. Today, Eastern European women are anything but the asexual heroines of the communist past. In an attempt to aggressively break away from an ideologically oppressive past, young Eastern European women have adopted a new highly sexualized identity. Advertising, which boomed in the years of the post-communist transition, has offered an ideal venue for the display of this sexuality; and while this trend of exaggerated sexuality in advertising is certainly not a new one, it is a particularly fast and glaringly “normalized” trend in Eastern Europe with potentially, dangerous consequences. By focusing on the advertising campaigns of the Bulgarian vodka brand Flirt, this essay explores how women are portrayed and how these portrayals are marketed in an attempt to offer a revealing look at the mechanisms of constructing post-communist gender identities.     

Staying in the Hood: Black Lesbian and Transgender Women and Identity Management in North Philadelphia

ABSTRACT

The concept Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell regarding Black LGBT sexuality in Black communities has been an acceptable form of identity management for Black LGBT people. In other words, Black LGBT people are accepted as long as they are not vocal about their sexuality. However, this is changing with the issue of gay marriage, which is creating a space where Black LGBT people are more open about their gender identity and sexuality in heterosexual Black spaces. This new form of openness allows Black LGBT people to “stay in” their communities, as opposed to coming out. In this article I examine how Black LGBT women in North Philadelphia stay in their communities: being politically active regarding LGBT issues, disengaging from LGBT issues, passing, and educating straight Black people about issues affecting the Black LGBT community. I conclude with implications of staying in and intersectionality among Black heterosexual and LGBT women fighting for social change.     

Black women queering the mic: Missy Elliott disturbing the boundaries of racialized sexuality and gender

Though there were and always have been djs, dancers, graffiti artists, and rappers who were Black women, they are placed on the periphery of hip-hop culture; their voices, along with "gay rappers" and "white rappers" devalued and their contribution to the global rise of hip-hop either forgotten or eschewed. This article is an attempt to articulate the existence of Black women who work outside of the paradigms of the "silence, secrecy, and a partially self-chosen invisibility" that Evelynn Hammonds describes. At the center of this article lies an attempt to locate a new configuration and expression of desire and sexuality, opening a door, wide open, to gain a different view of Black women, their sexuality, their expression of it, and the complexities that arise when they attempt to express it in hip hop nation language.     

Feminine Sexualities in the Chick Genre

This paper foregrounds the voices of women who read chick lit or watch contemporary chick flicks or both, and who, to date, have been absent in the scholarship on representations of women's sexuality in this genre. It is informed by an empirical study of responses from forty-one Australian women to an anonymous Internet survey that asked, “How do you think women's experiences of sex are portrayed in the chick genre?” and “If you were a writer of the chick genre, how else would you portray women's sexual experiences?” Following the works of Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell, and Joke Hermes on “interpretive repertoires,” the data reveal that most readers draw on two repertoires to interpret representations of women's sexuality—one, as “passive or asexual,” and the other as “perfect with Mr Right”—both of which are situated within a wider “romantic love” frame of reference. Participants are, predominantly, critical of the way women's sexuality is represented in the chick genre. The findings, that also show that most readers have a preference for texts that show a broader range of sexual representations for women, are discussed in the light of current theorizing about postfeminist texts.     

Homosexual experience, desire and identity among young adults

Is young people's sexuality becoming more fluid and less tied to steady, stable identity patterns? Are we developing into a society where sexual relationships between individuals of the same sex are no longer reserved for the small minority of gay men and lesbian women? Adherents of so-called queer theory have promulgated such views. Using a population-based sample of young adults (aged 19 to 26, N 2753), we investigated homosexual experiences, desire and identity. We found that levels of prevalence of homosexuality were primarily a function of the criteria we used. Using the most restricted ("narrow") definitions, we found that about one percent of both genders reported "exclusive" homosexual interest and identity. Using the most inclusive criteria, we found that one of ten young men and one of four young women reported having some homosexual experience, interest or identity. Still, the most striking finding involved the substantial gender-specific differences: homoerotic activity and interest are far more interwoven with heterosexual activity for women. There are strong indications that homosexuality is a lot more threatening and potentially in conflict with traditional male gender roles than we find to be the case for women. In other words, while there may be signs of more fluid sexual identity categories, this phenomenon primarily applies to women.     

Secrecy and silence: why women hide contraceptive use

A recent Population Council survey of 1860 married women and 1056 of their husbands in urban Zambia found that many women who use contraception do so without their husbands' knowledge and that those women who hid their practice of contraception from their husbands did so because they found it very difficult to bring up the subject of family planning with them. These findings indicate that low levels of contraceptive use are not the result of a simple communication matter. Sex and sexuality are often the exclusive domain of African husbands. As such, if a wife initiates a discussion of family planning, she may threaten her husband's sense of control and create discord within the family. The culture of silence about sex and sexuality is very strong in Africa. 57% of women stated that were they to propose contraceptive use with their husbands and the husband opposed such practice, they would nonetheless use them without his knowledge. 7% of the women stated that if their husbands disapproved of contraceptive use, they would nonetheless openly use a method against his wishes. The majority of women correctly perceived their husbands' views on family planning use and fertility preferences. In focus groups, both men and women said that they did not believe that women have the right to independently act upon their reproductive preferences. A husband's inadequate financial support of his children could, however, justify clandestine contraceptive use. These findings point to the need to include easily hidden methods in the mix of contraceptives family planning programs offer. Moreover, service providers should not automatically encourage husbands' involvement. A client's right to privacy should always be respected.     

Veiled Representations

This article argues that the political divide between Islamists and secularists is what shapes and manipulates the representation of female sexuality in Turkish media. As manifested in the 2007 post-election debate surrounding veiled women and the g-string, Turkish media have been incapable of reconciling a traditionally western signifier (the g-string) with a quintessential Islamic sartorial symbol (the veil). This alleged irreconcilability of the two symbols in Turkish print media thus indicates, on the one hand, the already existing ideological rift in Turkish society between secularists versus Islamists, but more problematically, it is what alienates the female body from itself, denying it an autoerotic sexuality, and making it the site of bio-political battle.     

The bisexual identity: an idea without social recognition

Theories of sexuality reflect popular notions by treating sexual identity as a simple dichotomy. There is research evidence for the coexistence of homosexual and heterosexual interest and behavior in a significant portion of the population. This paper examines how various conceptualizations of human sexuality have failed to adequately deal with bisexuality. The lack of acknowledgement by both the larger heterosexual society and the emerging lesbian/gay community, and its impact on the individual bisexual is examined by using the sociological concept of marginality. Some of the differences in self-labeling by women and men are noted in the light of social sex-roles. Finally, the implications of society's acceptance of bisexuality for evolving forms of relationships are suggested.     

Making Christabel: sexual transgression and its implications in Coleridge's "Christabel"

Even among critics who recognize the role of lesbianism in "Christabel," none consider the implications of lesbianism for the characters. Many readers describe Geraldine as a kind of supernatural power, a demon. But Geraldine's identity is far from clear, and we don't need to explain away the lesbian sexuality as demonically-inspired in order to understand the dynamics of the text. The poem accounts for its characters' interactions on what is a more visceral and less fantastic level, the implications of a lesbian act in the world of "Christabel." In "Making Christabel," I consider the protagonist's social and psychological stresses in terms of an encounter with lesbian sexuality in order to understand the poem's ambiguities: Geraldine's guilt, Christabel's pleasure, the manipulation of gender roles, and the dynamics between Christabel, Geraldine, and Sir Leoline. To this end, I look at how the "unnatural" sexuality between Christabel and Geraldine is marked by a reversal of gender expectations. Sexual transgression is suggested not simply by two women heading off to share one bed, but by the manipulation of gender roles on their way to and within the bedroom. I also read the homosocial bond be tween Sir Leoline and Sir Roland in Part II as a foil. The knights offer the two women a concrete representation of their transgression from the existing power structure. They suggest not only the extent of the two women's deviance from the patriarchy, but a way to reassume an orthodox social role.     

Some myths and anomalies in the study of Roman sexuality

This paper seeks to dispel several myths prevalent in the scholarship on Roman sexuality: that a freed slave was still obligated to serve his former master's sexual demands (I.A.), that the cinaedus cannot be the same as the modern male homosexual because the cinaedus was thought capable of performing cunnilinctus (I.B.), that exoleti were male prostitutes (I.C.), that the Romans were implacably hostile to lesbianism and that they constructed the lesbian as a phallic monstrosity (II.). It also draws attention to some neglected, unfamiliar, or misinterpreted evidence-anomalous on the current understanding of Roman sexuality, where women, boys, and lower-class men are supposed to have equal standing as potential passive sexual partners for adult men-for adult men whose sexual partners are exclusively male, and either active or passive: exoleti as active partners (I.C.), a puer delicatus who is prized for a masculine appearance rather than a feminine one (I.D.), and the Warren Cup, which glorifies a world of exclusively male-male sexuality (I.E.).     

Sexuality in Older Spanish Women: Voices and Reflections

Our research has been aimed at understanding the experience, practice, and sexual life in a group of Spanish women over 50 years of age. We studied a sample of 729 women between 50 and 80 years old. Our results provide qualitative and quantitative information and important insights about the sexual life of Spanish women and identify differences in the experience and reality of sexual life after the age of 70. The status of having or lacking a partner, and a personal interest in emotional relationships and sexual practices, are elements that determine the possibility of enjoying a satisfying postmenopausal sexuality.     

Female genital mutilation: common,controversial, and bad for women's health

Female genital mutilation has grave consequences for women's sexuality, health, and fertility. Studies conducted since 1990 have found that 97% of women in Egypt, 94% in Mali, 72% in Northern Ghana, 43% in the Ivory Coast, and 20% in Senegal have undergone female genital mutilation. The Population Council seeks to discourage the continued practice of this procedure in Africa while at the same time respecting cultural norms regarding women's sexuality. Change will require political support, culturally sensitive education, and community development. Current Population Council research projects in North and West Africa are expanding understanding of the cultural, attitudinal, and behavioral factors that influence decisions about female genital mutilation, while Demographic and Health Surveys will provide baseline data on the current prevalence of this practice. An emphasis on the reproductive health implications of female genital mutilation, backed by the support of the medical profession, may prove to be the most effective strategy. Of the 8% of women in the 1995 Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey who indicated they would not have their daughters' genitalia excised, more than 40% cited medical complications as the reason.     

Aging and sexuality: how much do gynecologists know and care?

Enhanced knowledge and healthy attitudes toward aging sexuality can help promote the perception that full sexual expression is part of the entire extent of adulthood. We sought to determine gynecologists' knowledge and attitude regarding sexuality in older women. A total of 141 gynecologists in five hospitals responded to the survey: Aging Sexual Attitude and Knowledge Scale (ASKAS). No correlation was found between respondents' knowledge and attitude (r = .06, p = .54); no correlation found between respondents' age and knowledge (r = .20, p = .02), but 20% of the variance in attitude could be explained by age (beta 0.20, p = .02). Neither gender, ethnicity, level of training, nor hospital location demonstrated a significant correlation to either knowledge or attitude scores.     

Crooked men and straightened women: images of homosexuality across race in two women's magazines, 1986-1995

Images of traditional sexuality, across race, prevail in mass media, especially in women's magazines. While omitting less traditional sexual practices for the most part, New Woman and Essence magazines construct the image of a bisexual male who threatens the heterosexual woman and the legitimate heterosexual couple. These women's magazines also redefine homosexual activity, suggesting women who experience homosexual inclinations are really engaging in normal heterosexual behavior.     

An Ecological Synthesis of Research on Older Women's Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence

Enhanced knowledge and healthy attitudes toward aging sexuality can help promote the perception that full sexual expression is part of the entire extent of adulthood. We sought to determine gynecologists' knowledge and attitude regarding sexuality in older women. A total of 141 gynecologists in five hospitals responded to the survey: Aging Sexual Attitude and Knowledge Scale (ASKAS). No correlation was found between respondents' knowledge and attitude (r = .06, p = .54); no correlation found between respondents' age and knowledge (r = .20, p = .02), but 20% of the variance in attitude could be explained by age (beta 0.20, p = .02). Neither gender, ethnicity, level of training, nor hospital location demonstrated a significant correlation to either knowledge or attitude scores.     

Negating identity: a feminist analysis of the social invisibility of older lesbians

Older lesbians are invisible both within and outside of the lesbian community. Using a postmodern and lesbian feminist approach, in this article we identify a paradox in our society which defines lesbians in terms of their sexuality while older women are generally viewed as asexual. We suggest that this paradox contributes to the invisibility of older lesbians. Our focus is on the interactive nature of the relationship between personal and public constructions of lesbianism in the lives of older women. Finally, we discuss the potential impact of invisibility on self-identity, and using a feminist gerontological framework suggest implications for the empowerment of older lesbians.