Search results

Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.This paper seeks to add to the contemporary debate on women's military service the subjective dimension of gender and national identities of women soldiers serving in "masculine" roles. I use a theory of identity practices in order to analyze the interaction between state institutions and identity construction. Based on in‐depth interviews, I argue that Israeli women soldiers in "masculine" roles shape their gender identities according to the hegemonic masculinity of the combat soldier through three interrelated practices: (1) mimicry of combat soldiers' bodily and discursive practices; (2) distancing from "traditional femininity"; and (3) trivialization of sexual harassment.These practices signify both resistance and compliance with the military dichotomized gender order. While these transgender performances subvert the hegemonic norms of masculinity and femininity, they also collaborate with the military androcentric norms. Thus, although these women soldiers individually transgress gender boundaries, they internalize the military's masculine ideology and values and learn to identify with the patriarchal order of the army and the state. This accounts for a pattern of "limited inclusion" that reaf•rms their marginalization, thus prohibiting them from developing a collective consciousness that would challenge the gendered structure of citizenship.

BACKGROUND: In 1990, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) sparked a year long boycott of Philip Morris's Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer. The boycott protested the company's support of Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina), a leading opponent of AIDS funding and civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. ACT-UP demanded that Philip Morris sever its ties with Helms and acknowledge its responsibility to the LGBT community and to people with AIDS. OBJECTIVE: To assess the impact of the boycott on the LGBT community, the tobacco industry, and the tobacco control movement; and to determine what lessons tobacco control advocates can extract from this case. DATA SOURCES: Internal tobacco industry documents and newspaper archives. METHODS: Search of tobacco industry documents websites using "boycott", "ACT-UP", "gay", and other terms. RESULTS: Philip Morris used the boycott to its own advantage. It exploited differences within the community and settled the boycott by pledging large donations to combat AIDS. Through corporate philanthropy, Philip Morris gained entrée to the LGBT market without appearing gay friendly. Many LGBT organisations, thirsty for recognition and funding from mainstream corporations, welcomed Philip Morris's overtures without considering the health hazards of tobacco. CONCLUSIONS: Unless the goal of a boycott is to convince the tobacco industry to abandon tobacco altogether, such actions invite the industry to expand its marketing under the guise of philanthropy. Tobacco control advocates should be clear about goals and acceptable settlement terms before participating in a boycott of a tobacco company.

Questioning the emancipatory potential of hate crimes activism for sexual and gender non-normative people, this paper outlines the limits of criminal justice remedies to problems of gender, race, economic and sexual subordination. The first section considers some of the positive impacts of hate crimes activism, focusing on the benefits of legal "naming" for disenfranchised constituencies seeking political recognition. In the next section the authors outline the political shortcomings and troubling consequences of hate crimes activism. First, they examine how hate crimes activism is situated within a "mainstream gay agenda," a term they use to designate the set of projects prioritized by large, national gay rights organizations. The authors question the assimilationist drive of mainstream gay activism, and illustrate how such activism fails to reflect commitments to anti-racism, feminism, and economic redistribution. Second, they critique how the rhetoric of hate crimes activism isolates specific instances of violence against queer and transgender people, categorizing these as acts of individual prejudice, and obscures an understanding of the systemic, institutional nature of gender and sexuality subordination. Finally in this section, the authors interrogate hate crimes statutes as a practice of "identity politics" that, despite accomplishing certain goals, nonetheless dangerously reifies constructs of homosexual identity. In the third and final section, they look at how work on hate crimes occupies a place of "legitimacy" in the world of lesbian and gay activism. Preserving a sense of what hate crimes activism hopes to accomplish, they suggest other political strategies that pursue broader work for social and economic justice and build coalitions across identity categories.

This thesis addresses general questions about the relationship between the making of gender, the politics of national and ethnic identities, local - global articulations and the process of cultural transformation amongst Muslim Tausug and Sama communities in Sulu, the Southern Philippines. Specifically, I am concerned with the meaning, and experience, of the bantut, transvestite / transgender, homosexual men in Sulu. There is a long tradition of transvestism and transgendering in island Southeast Asia, where transvestites were considered to be sacred personages, ritual healers and/or, as in Sulu, accomplished singers and dancers who performed at various celebrations and rites of passage: embodiments of, and mediatory figures for, ancestral unity and potency. More recently, however, transvestites have emerged as the creative producers of an image of beauty defined in terms of an imagined global American otherness. This thesis is an attempt to understand and explain this phenomenon. In particular, I explore the relation between the collective endowment of the bantut as the purveyors of beauty, and their symbolic valorisation as impotent men and unreproductive/defiling women: those who are seen to have been overexposed to and transformed by a potent otherness. What is ultimately at stake, I argue, (and what is being asserted through the symbolic circumscription of the bantut) is local persons' autonomy over the process and consequences of cultural and political transformation in the face of the exclusionary violence of state enforced assimilation. However, the thesis is also concerned with the expressed transgenderal projects of the bantut themselves, a project which is variously about status and gender transformation, the elation and pleasure they experience in the production and performance of beauty, and the attempt to overcome the prejudice of the local populace, whilst establishing relationships that are based on mutuality and shared respect. What this thesis demonstrates is that there is nothing ambiguous about ambiguity, sexual or otherwise. Rather, it is the specific product or effect of different historical relations of power and resistance through which various cultural subjects are created and re-create themselves.

Articles from The Daily Barometer pertaining to LGBTQ+ issues and students on campus. All articles are organized in chronological order that begins with a Table of Contents listing the article titles and dates.

Articles from The Daily Barometer pertaining to LGBTQ+ issues and students on campus. All articles are organized in chronological order that begins with a Table of Contents listing the article titles and dates.

Articles from The Daily Barometer pertaining to LGBTQ+ issues and students on campus. All articles are organized in chronological order that begins with a Table of Contents listing the article titles and dates.

Articles from The Daily Barometer pertaining to LGBTQ+ issues and students on campus. All articles are organized in chronological order that begins with a Table of Contents listing the article titles and dates.