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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.

Most nonheterosexuals want to be guaranteed civil rights without regard to sexual practices; nevertheless, quite often, gay and lesbian activists formulate demands in ways that de-emphasize practice and emphasize identity. For example, instead of saying, "My having sex with women is irrelevant to the question of whether I should have custody of my child," a lesbian activist might say, "My lesbian identity is as moral and healthy as heterosexual identity and therefore should not prevent me from having custody of my child." The general claim is that lesbian or gay personhood is as good as heterosexual personhood, so lesbians and gays should have equal rights; our political system should recognize and protect a plurality of identities. There are obvious reasons why demands get articulated as support for identities rather than allowance of practices. Many people are much more willing to love the "sinner" if they are still allowed to hate the "sin," so gays and lesbians have formulated appeals in the ways most likely to be supported by heterosexuals. But, when pluralism of this sort is taken as the goal the powers supporting heterosexism go unchallenged and are even reinforced in some fundamental ways. In other words, pluralism as a political ideal may serve to oppress precisely those disprivileged or marginalized groups who might be expected to gain most from its realization. To make this argument, I will draw on the work of Michel Foucault.

When we think back to where the legal battle for gender equality and the rights of gay people stood a century ago, we see that, in fact, there was not much of a battle. Indeed, advocates for change were seldom triumphant. A survey in 1900 would have shown that American women were twenty years away from obtaining the right to vote, were unfit to be lawyers according to the U.S. Supreme Court, and were nowhere near being eligible-let alone required-to serve on juries. The survey would also have revealed a wide-ranging web of federal and state laws and policies that treated lesbians, gay men, and transgendered people as sexual psychopaths and dangerous perverts requiring incarceration. Fast forward to today and the picture becomes more complicated. In some respects, we have entered a new and better jurisprudential world with respect to gender and sexuality. For example, the tenor and substance of the Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans, striking down Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2, is light years away from the Court's hostile decision in 1986 sustaining Georgia's sodomy prohibition. No longer do we have a Supreme Court mockingly treating a gay person's constitutional claim as "at best facetious." Similarly, in many states, we have moved beyond the times in which courts regularly expressed utter shock or disgust that gay people would seek to have our relationships and families recognized; in this new era, our claims typically, though not always, receive serious consideration and often prevail.

One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the peoples of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this innovative volume illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia the authors expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new and rewarding directions

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Reclaiming Identity -- 1. The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition -- 2. Postmodernism, "Realism," and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism -- 3· "Who Are Our Own People?": Challenges for a Theory of Social Identity -- 4. On Representing Others: Intellectuals, Pedagogy, and the Uses of Error -- 5. "It Matters to Get the Facts Straight": Joy Kogawa, Realism, and Objectivity of Values -- 6. Racial Authenticity and White Separatism: The Future of Racial Program Housing on College Campuses -- 7. Who Says Who Says?: The Epistemological Grounds for Agency in Liberatory Political Projects -- 8. Is There Something You Need to Tell Me?: Coming Out and the Ambiguity of Experience -- 9. Reading "Experience": The Debate in Intellectual History among Scott, Toews, and LaCapra -- 10. Who's Afraid of Identity Politics? -- Contributors -- Index

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. How Do They Militarize a Can of Soup? -- 2. The Laundress, the Soldier, and the State -- 3. The Prostitute, the Colonel, and the Nationalist -- 4. When Soldiers Rape -- 5. If a Woman Is "Married to the Military," Who Is the Husband? -- 6. Nursing the Military: The Imperfect Management of Respectability -- 7. Filling the Ranks: Militarizing Women as Mothers, Soldiers, Feminists, and Fashion Designers -- Conclusion: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index