AbstractUsing the case of same-sex marriage in China, this article explores two fundamental questions: What motivates a non-democratic state to promulgate a progressive human rights policy? More importantly, when a non-democratic state adopts such policies, what is the impact on activism? I argue that same-sex marriage legislation could be used strategically to improve China's human rights reputation. While this would extend a pinnacle right to gays and lesbians, the benefits might not outweigh the costs: I show that when imposed from above, a same-sex marriage law would incur opportunity costs on activism; the passage of this progressive policy would eliminate an important issue around which the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gender/-sexual (LGBT) community might develop. Moreover, even if such policy is promulgated, the right to marry will do little to challenge the larger social pressures that make life difficult for LGBT Chinese.
Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- 1. Introduction -- Subjectivity, militancy, and political opportunities -- A microsociological approach "from below" -- Why the United States? -- Terminology -- 2. Of Homosexualities and Movements -- The homophile movement -- The gay liberation movement and the eruption of sexuality -- Gay communitarianism and the privatization of sexuality -- The advent of AIDS and the resurgence of activism -- Sexualization and strategic essentialism -- Legitimation, integrationism, and desexualization -- Recognition of marriage and desexualization -- 3. From Fragmentation to Coalescence -- The moral conservatism of the 1980s -- ACT UP: Provocative lesbian and gay activism -- AIDS, lesbianism, and male homosexuality -- Depolarization, appeasement, and assimilationism -- Institutionalization, status, and conduct -- Substantive rights and collective mobilization -- 4. Sexual Fulfillment and Political Disenchantment -- Militant disengagement -- Privatization and commodification -- LGBTQ pride controversies -- An idealized identity -- Authenticity -- Gratification, engagement, and disappointment -- Idealized identity, homogeneity, and AIDS -- Reasons for engagement, reasons for withdrawal -- 5. Sexuality and Empowerment -- Young people's sexuality -- LGBTQ youth as social actors -- Daring to talk about LGBTQ young people's sexuality -- Homosociality, desire, and ethnicity/race -- Sexuality and public spaces: Sex Panic! -- Sexuality, intimacy, and empowerment -- Sexualizing lesbianism -- The "doldrums" and abeyance structures -- Refocusing action on pleasure -- 6. Mobilization on the Threshold of the Political -- Guerrilla theater -- Maintaining grassroots activism -- Subaltern action -- Infrapolitics -- An extreme case: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence -- Three Sisters -- The significance of insignificance.
Our move into cyberspaces and cyber networks warrant higher digital footprints and our dependence on digital affordances engenders further stakes in dialogues of effective and appropriate representation of our non-virtual selves. These discussions necessitate questions on and the problematics of the virtual representation of otherness online. My research situates itself at the intersection of Big Data and digital activism movements in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in the Indian context, whose focus posits the struggle of the queer subaltern against the government as an institution that misrepresents democracy and other institutions with postcolonial, patriarchal and heteronormative notions and concepts of citizenship. My focus for the research is the recently eliminated colonial, anti-homosexuality law, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in India and the public, private and political discourses surrounding the issue. This study examines Big Data, particularly Twitter Data collected and filtered through queries of queer digital activism on the social media platform in the form of hashtags #Section377, #decriminalize+homosexuality, #Article377IPC among others in the understanding of an accurate virtual representation of the queer population that is engaged in the struggle and in the effective gauging of the problematics of intersectionality of representation. Is the data representative of the subaltern; is data racialized, gendered and inclusive or is it merely a depiction of the intent of an ideal of inclusion, queer empathy, and support as a part of a larger movement of progressivity and voice of the subaltern within digital movement uprisings in India? Is it too optimistic to posit sufficiency in the argument of the internet and digitized spaces as a form of Fraser���s (1992) counter-public spheres that combat authority, dominant narratives and/or structures and challenge the status quo? These are some questions that this research addresses.
An Introduction to Sexual Abuse and Domestic Violence in Germany -- A Legal Historical Overview of Domestic Violence -- International Law and Domestic Violence -- Judicial Activism and LGBT Rights -- Judicial Responses to Domestic Violence in the EU Member States -- Domestic Violence among German, Refugee, and Migrant Gay Men in Germany -- Epilogue: Domestic Violence and Happiness. .
Westboro Baptist Church, a small Topeka, Kansas-based church pastored by Fred Phelps, came to national attention for members' pickets of the funerals of gay people but has prompted continued public outrage because of pickets at the funerals of deceased military servicemen and women and at scenes of national tragedy, where they preach a message that God is destroying America because of the nation's sexual sins. Drawing from extensive field research at Westboro Baptist Church services and pickets, this dissertation provides an ethnography and history of the church. Rhetorical and visual analyses of church-produced artifacts, including sermons, signs, websites, and reports, provide data for an explanation of church theology and a timeline of anti-gay activism. The dissertation places the theology and activism of Westboro Baptist Church in the context of American religious history and suggests that Westboro Baptist Church's message of national doom that reflects a strand of thought that has always been present in American religion. Using radical flank theory, the dissertation examines Westboro Baptist Church in the context of the contemporary Religious Right, noting how the offensive message and in-your-face tactics of Westboro Baptist Church serve as a foil to the "compassion" of the Religious Right, centering and softening the Religious Right's anti-gay theology, which similarly argues that sexual sins damn a nation, and its anti-gay political activism. The dissertation concludes by examining legal aspects of Westboro Baptist Church funeral pickets and argues that public outrage in response to pickets at the funerals of fallen servicemen and women reveals a willingness to trade civil liberties for civility, an impulse to celebrate all fallen servicemen and women as straight and Christian, and a valuing of the lives of presumably straight servicemen and women as more deserving of dignity than the lives of gay men and women, trends that are more threatening to democracy, the dissertation, argues, than are the ...
This dissertation examines how LGBTQ Koreans configure and reconfigure their senses of self and national belonging through affective attachment to digitally networked communication, queer and normative bodies, and institutional powers while producing cultural forms. This study builds on 17 months of online and offline ethnographic study of the Korea Queer Culture Festival (a Korean counterpart of a US Pride parade) as an exemplar of queer cultural production and activism using feelings. In recent years, this queer cultural production has become a critical site where LGBTQ Koreans negotiate with global identity politics, right-wing anti-LGBTQ politics, and developmental nationalism to claim their citizenship. To understand the rise of queer cultural activism in specific Korean and transnational contexts, this dissertation suggests the idea of sticky cultural activism. By sticky cultural activism, I mean how LGBTQ Koreans (to whom negative feelings have become historically attached more than to cisgender heterosexual counterparts) cultivate emotional attachment to and detachment from people, organizations, and discourses to get through their everyday precarious moments through their cultural production. This study particularly focuses on festival organizers' diverse cultural and affective practices—creative labor, uses of stickers and selfies on social media, parades, performances, and profiling—as well as their interaction with local and transnational actors. Through these practices, LGBTQ Koreans get emotionally attached to the festival committee, Euro-American embassies in Korea, and Korean national development ideologies to produce self-affirming affect, realize their creativity, and build a sense of community, ultimately seeking to survive and thrive in a context of heightened precarity. This dissertation argues that a Korean queer subject is constituted as a collective, oppositional, and networked subject who embodies both possibilities and limitations. This dissertation makes three contributions. First, this study contributes to media studies by articulating the roles of networked affective attachment developed on social media in organizing social movements. Second, it contributes to citizenship studies by extending our understanding of how queer cultural producers engage with affective labor in the project of constructing new citizenship in post-developmental and neoliberal East Asia. Finally, it contributes to queer studies by providing contextual articulation of queer collectivity and its complications.
More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945. Entries include: * advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading. The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.
Thanks to the work of courageous individuals and energized organizations, great strides have been made in LGBTQ+ civil rights since the 1950s. These strides include the affirmation of marriage equality, enactment of anti-discrimination laws, and freedom to serve openly in the military. Despite such groundbreaking victories, achieving full equality remains a struggle. Readers will learn about the history of this fight, the activists, and the allies who've used their voices to spur progress. They will also discover the tools to safely and consciously support LGBTQ+ rights.
"Knowing Women is an ethnography on friendship, same-sex desire, and intimacy among urban, working-class women in southern Ghana who engage in erotic relationships with each other. The intersectional analysis of these women's life narratives and world views situates them in relation to contemporary political, economic, and social developments affecting Ghana and other African societies in a postcolonial world. Prominent among these are the anti-gay policies and rhetoric and the pro-gay activism of local and international LGBTIQ advocacy organizations. Paying close attention to the women's own practices of self-reference, S. O. Dankwa refers to them as "knowing women" in a way that both distinguishes them from, and relates them to such categories as lesbian or supi a Ghanaian term for female friend(ship). In so doing it critically refutes both the anti-gay claim that homosexuality is "un-African" and the universalizing claim that queer identity categories exist in and can be translated between all languages and cultures. The book contributes to the burgeoning field of global queer studies in which both women and Africa have been largely underrepresented. In addition to engaging feminist, queer, Africanist and postcolonial theories of gender and sexuality, it responds to anthropological theories of kinship and gift-exchange"--
African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) organizations face various strategic dilemmas in contexts characterized by political hostility to gender and sexual dissidents. In Malawi, one such context, we examine how an LGBTIQ social movement organization (SMO) in Malawi, the Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP), navigated one particular strategic dilemma—the dilemma of whether to adopt a less politicized public-health approach or a more nimble, grassroots-oriented, and social-justice approach to their advocacy work—and the consequences of the organization's strategic decisions. Scholars interpret these approaches as signifying differential political engagement among organizations, with the social-justice approach indicating political engagement and the public-health approach signaling political disengagement. This difference has led critics to argue that a public-health approach is poorly suited to generating social and legal reform because it de-politicizes LGBTIQ issues over time, while a social-justice approach exerts constant pressure on political and religious elites. Drawing on qualitative interview data with Malawian LGBTIQ activists and news media data reflecting public debate around homosexuality in the country, we illuminate how this SMO metamorphosed from an organization ostensibly focused only on public health and HIV/AIDS to one that advances social justice for gender and sexual dissidents. We argue for an understanding of the indigenous development of a hybrid strategy integrating the public-health and social-justice approaches.
"Whether they may be gay, trans, or queer, in recent decades a growing number of high school and college age members of the LGBTQ community have become societal activists fighting for equal rights and treatment. In whatever manner they may choose to stand up for themselves, all of these young activists have the same basic motivation. Namely, LGBTQ people still are not always treated equally to and with the same amount of respect as straight people in society"--
The Red House neighbourhood in the Ximen shopping district, located on the south side of Taipei, has been the centre of the city's vibrant culture of sexual inclusivity and gay activism since the early 2000s. Next to the shining billboards at Ximen Square, the Red House presents itself as a reminder of the neighbourhood's historical transformation from a marketplace during the Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan (1895–1945) to a major pornography theatre in the 1970s–1990s, while emerging as a new urban centre for youth culture, entertainment and outdoor gay bars in the 2000s. Addressing issues of urban exclusion and inclusion, this paper focuses on an HIV testing booth located in the Red House area. Based on interviews with social workers and drawing analyses from archival research, this paper reflects on the politics of a place of caring. Providing 15-minute HIV testing sessions free for anyone in the gay community, the testing booth is an outpost of the Taiwan AIDS Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation that receives public funds. Despite the fact that HIV tests are now widely available for purchase – even accessible from vending machines – the testing booth's cosy, discretionary and friendly manner renders it a place of caring, where one can be attended by social workers as well as receiving a consultation.