“There were no words”: Older LGBTQ+ persons' experiences of finding and claiming their gender and sexual identities

This article explores the representation of guilt in six recent young adult novels, in which it is suggested that teen protagonists still experience guilt in relation to their emerging non-normative sexual identities. The experience of guilt may take several different forms, but all dealt with here are characterised by guilt without agency – that is, the protagonist has not deliberately said or done anything to cause harm to another. In a first pair of novels, guilt is depicted as a consequence of internalised homophobia, with which protagonists must at least partly identify. In a second group, protagonists seem to experience a form of separation guilt from an early age because they fail to conform to the norms of the family. Certain events external to the teen protagonist, and for which they cannot be held responsible, then trigger serious depressive episodes, which jeopardise the protagonist's positive identity development. Finally, characters are depicted as experiencing a form of survivor guilt. A gay protagonist survives the events of 9/11 but endures a breakdown, and, in a second novel, a lesbian protagonist narrates her coming to terms with the death of her best friend.

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Constructing sexual identities in the high Middle Ages: the didactic poetry of Robert de Blois

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.1990.0010 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 105-131 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Roberta Krueger

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Didactic Poetry ◽

High Middle Ages

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Roses for the Revolution

International Review of Qualitative Research ◽

10.1525/irqr.2011.4.4.361 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 4 (4) ◽

pp. 361-384

Author(s):

Ulises Moreno Tabarez

Keyword(s):

Discursive Practices ◽

Performative Writing ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Love Story ◽

Experimental Project ◽

The Revolution

Representations of Mexican revolutionary hero, Emiliano Zapata, migrate across the Mexico/US borders. His specters inform and reflect sexual identities migrating across these borderlands. Theoretically guided by Madison's model of performative writing and Muñoz's disidentification, this experimental project highlights and challenges the heteronormativity that pervades these migratory representations and the discursive practices that bring them to life. Through a performative writing exercise, I travel through theory and time to (re)present the figure of Zapata in an intimate love story whose backdrop is violence and war.

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A body without a head

Body and Religion ◽

10.1558/bar.17782 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Ali Chavoshian ◽

Sophia Park

Keyword(s):

Liberation Theology ◽

The Body ◽

Women's Spirituality ◽

Passive Condition ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Logical Square ◽

The Social ◽

Feminine Sexuality ◽

Body Shapes ◽

Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

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“I’m just aware they’re labels”

Fieldwork in Religion ◽

10.1558/firn.v7i2.179 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sharon Smith

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Origin ◽

Political Organization ◽

Faith Communities ◽

Border Crossings ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Theoretical Approaches ◽

Class Status ◽

Sexual Identification ◽

Minority Ethnic ◽

Divine Order

This article discusses fieldwork in two research projects on Buddhists in London. It explores issues involved in researching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, questioning and/or intersex (LGBTQI) Buddhists. It also considers issues around heterosexual identities in Buddhist communi-ties. In researching dynamics of gender and sexual identification of participants it was observed that at times participant narratives treated these identities for these axes of difference as provisional and contingent rather than essential, fixed and a basis for socio-political organization. This contrasts with much of the work on religion and sexuality in mainstream theistic traditions, where their LGBTQI members often argue a “reverse discourse” asserting their place in a “Divine Order” in which their sexual/gender identity is a key part of “who they are.” It is argued that theoretical approaches based on queer theorizing could be particularly applicable to research on Western Buddhist perspectives on gender and sexual identities. This is attributed to the anti-essentialist approach Buddhism takes to questions of subjectivity and identification and its non-hegemonic status in the West. Such queer theorizing would, however, need to acknowledge the constraints to “border crossings” between identity positions arising from oppressive forces from gender minoritization, class status, minority ethnic origin, and so on. It is also suggested that research on the heterosexual majority can elucidate ways in which faith communities are gendered, racialized and stratified by class.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780190679699.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Penny Farfan

Keyword(s):

Case Studies ◽

Early Stage ◽

Sexual Norms ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Precise Understanding ◽

Central Argument ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Well Of Loneliness

This introduction sets forth the book’s central argument and establishes the historical, theoretical, and critical context for its case studies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern sexual identities emerged into view while at the same time being rendered invisible, as in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial on charges of gross indecency and the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Early stage representations of homosexuality were typically coded or censored, yet the majority of the works considered in this book were highly visible in their subversions of conventional gender and sexual norms. Queer readings of these plays and performances establish connections across high and popular cultural domains, demonstrating that some of traditional modernism’s perceived failures, rejects, and outliers were modernist through their sexual dissidence. These insights in turn contribute to a more precise understanding of how modernity was mediated and how such mediations enacted change.

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780190857790.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Patrick Colm Hogan

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Social Constructionism ◽

The Other ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

The Third ◽

Sexuality And Gender ◽

And Gender ◽

Sexual Part ◽

The One ◽

And Behavior

The introduction first sets out some preliminary definitions of sex, sexuality, and gender. It then turns from the sexual part of Sexual Identities to the identity part. A great deal of confusion results from failing to distinguish between identity in the sense of a category with which one identifies (categorial identity) and identity in the sense of a set of patterns that characterize one’s cognition, emotion, and behavior (practical identity). The second section gives a brief summary of this difference. The third and fourth sections sketch the relation of the book to social constructionism and queer theory, on the one hand, and evolutionary-cognitive approaches to sex, sexuality, and gender, on the other. The fifth section outlines the value of literature in not only illustrating, but advancing a research program in sex, sexuality, and gender identity. Finally, the introduction provides an overview of the chapters in this volume.

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Sylvia Barack Fishman (ed.), Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2015. 340 pp.

10.1093/oso/9780190912628.003.0043 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

Life Course ◽

Cultural Context ◽

The United States ◽

Work And Family ◽

Social Revolution ◽

Heterosexual Couples ◽

Sexual Identities ◽

Religious Context ◽

Love Marriage ◽

Jewish Families

This chapter reviews the book Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families: Paradoxes of a Social Revolution (2015), edited by Sylvia Barack Fishman. Love, Marriage, and Jewish Families deals with topics that intersect Jewishness, religion, nationality, gender and sexual identities, and life course perspectives. It shows that Jewishness cannot be understood without intersectional analysis of its national and cultural context (illustrated by the United States and Israel), religious context, its temporal context, and its life course context. Fishman explores the ways in which the U.S. and Israeli contexts are significantly different with regard to Jewish families and family orientations; how childrearing among gay and lesbian couples entails different challenges than among heterosexual couples; the added dimension to combining work and family in the case of religiously observant families; and how the overwhelmingly secular outside society can serve to empower haredi women in a shift toward egalitarianism.

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