Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article uses a queer lens to examine two short stories by the Iraqi communist, teacher, and prose writer Dhu al-Nun Ayyub (1908–88), "The Eagles' Anthem" and "How I Found a Guy," published in his collection Sadiqi (1938). Scholars have avoided analysis of the homoerotic and heterotopic aspects of Ayyub's writings, even if they mention his depictions of physical attraction between men. Rather than read these fictional texts as sociological studies of sexual sensibilities, the article assumes that they tapped into and reflected psychological and social dynamics in interwar Baghdad. The Ayyub stories, which render homoerotic masculine sexualities as commonplace and a positive aspect of city spaces, are thus distinguished from most Iraqi writings during this period. The stories stage homoeroticism and love between men as democratic critique and affirmation of heterogeneity and vitality in a nationalist, militarist, and heteronormalizing setting that increasingly associated homosexuality with moral dissolution and backwardness.

While it has become nearly axiomatic to read Henry James's style as a privileged site for discussions of the unrepresentability of desire, I argue that in The American Scene James exhibits a literary style intimately related to the historical specificity of homosexual desire and the material networks of male-male cruising. To do so, I focus on James's overriding interest in what he calls "the life 'socially' led." Drawing on his use of the metaphor of a secret garden to praise the Presbyterian Hospital, I show how James's preferred social aesthetic forms appear modeled on a particular form of "the life 'socially' led": the actual network of secret gardens, streets, and parks where men cruised other men. Male homosexual cruising, I suggest, can be read not only as James's model for aesthetic form itself but also as his privileged mode of sociality, and where both should be read as profoundly materialist in their confrontation with an increasingly pervasive commodity culture in America.

Cruising bezeichnet die Suche nach potenziellen Geschlechtspartner:innen mithilfe von semantischen Codes und nonverbaler Kommunikation in semi-öffentlichen Räumen. Dieser Artikel fragt, wie genau diese Räume aussehen und welche konkreten Umstände und Bedingungen sie zu Cruising-Orten werden lassen.

The emergence of new communications technologies has provided a new space for initiating romantic and sexual relationships among gays who perceive social and physical places to be a traditional space that largely promotes connection among heterosexuals. Now, mobile networking applications like Grindr have made it easier for gay men to "cruise" and meet other men, and are seen to lead to the increasing number of sexual partners, being exposed to risks like sexually transmitted infections (STI), among others. Thus this study, framed within the theory of Mediatization – which critically analyzes the dialectic process in which both media and communications on one hand, and culture and society on the other, mutually shape and change each other in an interactional process – explores the question: How have gays' way of cruising, or the initiation of romantic or sexual relations (among others), in the Philippines been mediatized across history?

The goal of this study is to explore the perceptions and behaviors of drivers who cruise for parking. We conducted surveys with drivers in Brisbane, Australia, to understand potential factors that influence drivers' cruising behavior. This study reveals that errors in drivers' perception of parking cost are one of the leading factors encouraging drivers to cruise for on-street parking. Drivers are not necessarily well informed about parking costs, even when they claim to be familiar with these costs. The survey also reveals that the more informed drivers are about the local traffic and parking conditions, the less likely they are to cruise for extended periods of time. This finding demonstrates the value of traffic and parking information to effectively mitigate cruising for parking. The interview results also demonstrate that the on-street parking premium (i.e., accessibility or convenience factor) could be much larger than our common assumptions and a significant contributor to increased cruising time. Finally, this study introduces the sunk cruising cost and its potential impact on cruising time. Our hypothesis is that the effect of the sunk cost may manifest in a greater tendency for drivers to continue cruising because the time spent cruising is simply unrecoverable past expenditure. The survey data supports our hypothesis, and with findings on the drivers' misperception about parking cost and the familiarity factor, this result highlights the value of accurate and timely parking cost and availability of information to drivers to tackle the cruising-for-parking issue.

Known for his controversial first novel, City of Night (1963), John Rechy is a Chicano gay writer whose reputation as a documenter of the seedy sexual underworld of hustlers and tricks has set the tone for discussions about his work. Interrogating this characterization, the present article takes up the subtitle to Rechy's sixth novel, The Sexual Outlaw ("a prose documentary"), as a way to analyze the novel's generic and formal choices. While tracing the continuities between this text from 1977 and his earlier best-selling novels, the article locates this genre-bending novel in the context of the boom in LGBT documentaries of the time. Putting Rechy's text in conversation with the contemporaneous documentary Word Is Out (1977), by Peter Adair, the article establishes The Sexual Outlaw as both a response to and a parody of these landmark films, specifically by shedding light on the invisible and oft-forgotten outcasts of the LGBT community, those young outlaws of the working class who cruise and define themselves against the white and affluent "Mr. Middle of the Road" trope so exalted in Adair's documentary.