Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

Hundreds of thousands of students in introductory human sexuality classes read textbooks whose covert ideology reinforces dominant heteronormative narratives of sexual dimorphism, male hegemony, and heteronormativity. As such, the process of scientific discovery that proposes to provide description of existing sexual practices, identities, and physiohgies instead succeeds in cultural prescription. This essay provides a feminist, queer content analysis of such textbooks to illuminate their implicit narratives and provide suggestions for writing more feminist, queer-friendly texts.

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)

Trans is usually defined as the set of practices and identities outside of the binary gender system and includes individuals who identity as genderqueer, transgender or transsexual. Trans theories refer to a range of approaches including medical and psychiatric theories, performativity and social constructionist theories, and queer theory, that are used to explain transgender practices and identities.

This article describes the mystico-religious character of the `gay-mega-party' phenomenon which has developed in and across urban gay `communities' of the Western world and suggests how the HIV/aids health crisis, pivotal in the enactment of this postmodern form of religious expression, sets it apart from mainstream expressions of `rave' culture. The concept of a gay `community' is problematic, and notions of `lifestyle' and `neo-tribalism' are employed in order to conceptualize individual and communal processes of identification of homosexual behaviour. The application (...) of Turner's anthropological perspective on traditional forms of pilgrimage reveals the proximity of the `megagay-party' phenomenon to popular pilgrimage culture. (shrink)

This article provides an empirical example and an analytic argument for how queer theory can be useful for sociological inquiries of gender relations. Using data collected through participant observation of a rock music subculture, the author addresses the importance of conceptualizing sexuality and gender as analytically distinct. There are five major findings drawn from this analysis. First, members of this subculture queered sexuality despite identifying as heterosexual. Second, there is a dissonance between how members talked about sexuality and how they (...) enacted sexuality. Third, queering sexuality opened space for subverting hegemonic gender relations. Fourth, some forms of gender resistance relied on and reinscribed hegemonic sexual relations. Fifth, only by analyzing sexuality at multiple levels of analysis was this play of resistance and hegemony revealed. Both empirical and theoretical implications are suggested. (shrink)

The central argument of this article is twofold. First, contemporary feminist gender theory, particularly as it has been used by feminist sociologists in recent years, has been misinterpreted by sexual difference theory in ways that may prevent scholars from fully appreciating current feminist work in the social sciences. Second, gender theory and sexual difference theory rely on different conceptualizations of fundamental concepts in feminist theory, including notions of “gender,”“sexuality,” and “symbolic.” An analysis of three key texts that critique the turn (...) to “gender” in favor of an allegorical notion of “sexual difference” suggests that feminist gender theory is a more useful perspective for feminist theory and research. The article concludes that gender theory allows feminist scholars to ask a wider range of empirical questions that are more readily of use for political action than does a sexual difference paradigm. (shrink)

Studies of heteronormativity have emphasized its normative content and repressive functions, but few have considered the strategic use of heteronormative and homonormative precepts to shape sexual selves, public identities, and social relations. Adopting an interactionist approach, this article analyzes interviews with homosexual elders to uncover their use of heteronormative premises to pass as heterosexual. Informants also used homonormative precepts, grounded in a postwar, pre-gay liberation assimilationist homosexual politics they adopted in their early years and maintained in later life, to justify (...) passing and to frame their understanding and evaluation of past and present homosexual practices. Viewed through a homonormative lens, heteronormativity provided the tools for personal survival in a hostile society and for the collective production of a respectable homosexual culture. Informants’ strategic use of heteronormativity can help explain heteronormativity’s survival despite the incoherence and fragility of its content. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the ways in which men construct and explain their sexual identity. When attending a genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinic the constraints of the system and the imperatives of the clinical encounter tend to be reductive, reinforcing the dominant constructions of male sexuality and masculinity. Interviews with men recruited as part of a study of the social construction of male sexuality yielded richly textured narratives of sexual experiences and explanations of sexual identity. The paper reports on the (...) ethnographic study and, using extracts from these narratives, will address central themes of: (i) emotional labour of identity formation; (ii) an essentialist view of sexual orientation and corresponding identity; and (iii) role, social fit and the reformulating of the dominant social notions of partnerships within a new geography of desire transgression, ‘authenticity’. (shrink)

New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...) dominant cultural narratives in relation to material bodies, particularly those of hegemonic masculinity and male (and female) sexuality. We conclude that Viagra carries the potential to reify and reinforce these dominant and hegemonic narratives, while at the same time, through ensuring an open market for heterogeneous users, it provides spaces for alternatives to these normative ideals and assumptions. (shrink)

Drawing on data from interviews with 65 masculine-to-feminine transgenderists, the authors examine the coming-out experiences of transgendered individuals. Drawing on the literature that shows gender to be an inherent component of the social infrastructure that at an individual level is accomplished in interaction with others, they demonstrate that interactional challenges to gender are insufficient to challenge the system of gender. Whereas many transgenderists believe that their actions and identities are radical challenges to the binary system of gender, in fact, the (...) majority of such individuals reinforce and reify the system they hope to change. (shrink)

This article investigates the embodied identities of Hong Kong gay men in two different `sites of desire', namely London and Hong Kong. In London, Hong Kong gay men have constantly encountered the intertwining relationships between race and sexuality in the constellation of the Western construction of body/desire/masculinity. By contrast, Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong tend to place more emphasis on issues of family and culture. The main site of struggle for Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong is (...) the family-oriented and community-based environment. They adopt not a confrontational politics in a constitutional sense but rather derive tactics of microscopic resistance against societal and familial domination. By comparing 34 Hong Kong gay men living in London and Hong Kong, I argue the divergent constructions of being gay in these two contexts. Through the `voices' of these gay men, I criticize the `Western' construction of identity/the body and offer new insights into the discussion of gay identities. (shrink)

This paper looks at how the strategies of mediaand cultural studies can be applied to thehealth studies field. This relationship,however, has been met with resistance due to anumber of status debates. We argue theimportance of fostering links between these`disciplines' namely because the definition ofwhat constitutes `health' has been broadenedand is inscribed in most forms of popularmedia. Using the example of the `health andlifestyle' debate, we argue that the mediainforms cultural understandings aboutrequirements for living and is therefore acrucial area of analysis (...) for health studies(and cultural/media studies) students. We arealso concerned with analysing how the mediacontributes to the construction and regulationof `healthy' subjects making links with publichealth discourses and current debates in thefield of media and health. (shrink)

This article is an offshoot of a research project on lesbian and gay self-organization in the UK's public sector union UNISON. The site upon which lesbians and gay men ‘work together’ is a complex and contradictory one, located at the juncture of several pathways – women's and men's movements, gendered politics and sexual politics, purist ghettos and queer rainbows. The UNISON group furnishes an ideal site for a case-study of sexual and gendered dynamics in lesbian-and-gay politics by dint of institutional (...) arrangements whereby separate spaces for lesbians and gay men respectively encourage reflexivity in working through these hyphens. While reflections from the lesbian feminist mirror have been active ingredients in the ongoing resocialization of gay men, it is argued that reflections from a gay male mirror will also be necessary if we are to nurture greater wisdom and justice in gender relations. Since the lesbian and gay group co-exists with other self-organized groups for women, black people and disabled people within a broader pro-socialist movement, the potential for working across other sets of differences is also noteworthy. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that a sustained coalition between lesbians and gay men is not sufficient in bringing about coalitions with other oppressed minorities or majorities, and may even be at loggerheads with them. (shrink)