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In 1993 Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published a special issue titled "Studying Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism." It was a milestone in medieval studies, marking, belatedly, institutional recognition of the important contribution feminism and gender studies had made to transforming scholarly understanding of medieval culture over the previous two decades. Within the special issue, one contribution was by a man: Allen J. Frantzen's provocatively titled "When Women Aren't Enough," in which Frantzen charted the shift from the "women in history" approach to the rise of gender studies, arguing that, following what he saw as the triumph of feminism, "the study of the `masculine' has become as crucial as the study of the `feminine.'" More than fifteen years later, the debates have moved on, the terminology and theoretical frameworks have changed, and the victories of feminism seem short-lived. The major developments of the past two decades that have transformed our understanding of medieval culture and society have been the growth of the history of sexuality as a (sub)discipline in its own right and the impact of queer theory on literary criticism. As Frantzen predicted so accurately, the study of men and masculinity has been central to these new movements. However, in this essay reviewing four contributions to the field, I argue that women and femininity have once again become sidelined. Increasingly the terminology of both the history of sexuality and queer theory has become gender exclusive: homosexuality has come to mean, in common academic usage, male homosexuality; gay history is gay male history; queer sexualities are all-too-often queer male sexualities. Women are not given equal weight to men, and the histories of male and female sexualities are still artificially separated.

This essay examines Poet Francisco X. Alarcón's artistic expression of romance for gays within Latino communities. This study advances the concept of a "homoamorous" genre that privileges intimacy and romance between gay men without sensationalizing the physical contact such relationships may include. It also traces the evolution of Alarcón's expression of his gay identity over the course of three decades from verse that centered upon loneliness and guilt, through a period of "liberation" poetry, and ultimately to a long and very productive period resulting in a body of work that captures the love and sexual satisfaction that can grow from a committed relationship. These periods are marked by different imagery, language, and poetic structure.

War is a situation in which the normal rules of civilised behaviour have broken down. The idea of upholding human rights within such a context is considered by many to be a little strange. However, warfare has always been one of the most rule-bound activities that mankind conducts. This paper explores some of the reasoning behind this apparent paradox, using the Just War Theory as a framework within which to explore the relationship between ethics, war and human rights and the way they interact in the contemporary military environment.

This article applauds the recent rise of scholarly attention to studying the relation of religion to natural rights in general and Calvinism in particular. Against the strong belief in some quarters that appeals to nature, including the idea of rights, do not play a significant role in Calvin's thought, the article concurs with recent (and some not so recent) work to the contrary, arguing that such appeals do occupy an important, if ambiguous, place for Calvin. However, the article resists explaining the variations in his thought as the result of changing interpretations over time. Rather, it is contended that these matters were a source of tension throughout Calvin's career. He struggled not so much with the question of the natural knowledge of rights, but of the ability to choose to act on that knowledge. In conclusion, the article hints that Calvin's ambivalence on this issue sowed the seeds for significant divergence among his descendants. Adapted from the source document.

Two studies examined the impact of macrolevel symbolic threat on intergroup attitudes. In Study 1 (N = 71), participants exposed to a macrosymbolic threat (vs. nonsymbolic threat and neutral topic) reported less support toward social policies concerning gay men, an outgroup whose stereotypes implies a threat to values, but not toward welfare recipients, a social group whose stereotypes do not imply a threat to values. Study 2 (N = 78) showed that, whereas macrolevel symbolic threat led to less favorable attitudes toward gay men, macroeconomic threat led to less favorable attitudes toward Asians, an outgroup whose stereotypes imply an economic threat. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the role of a general climate of threat in shaping intergroup attitudes.

At the December 2006 MLA convention, the Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature organized a session titled "Queer Lineations: Robert K. Martin and Gay Literary Studies" to recognize the scholarly inventiveness and political commitment of one of the pioneers in LGBTQ studies. The three papers reprinted here—by Judith Scherer Herz of Concordia University, Eric Savoy of the University of Montreal, and Christopher Nealon of the University of California at Berkeley—sound the depths of Martin's scholarship in the context of the continued unfolding of LGBTQ studies. Martin's work includes his pathbreaking study, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979), and influential writings on American, British, and Canadian authors, artists, and theorists, including E. M. Forster, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and many others.