scholarly journals The Politics of Affirmative Consent: Considerations from a Gender and Sexuality Studies Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 718-733
Author(s):  
Rona Torenz

AbstractWhile "no means no" considers sex as consensual until someone says no, "yes means yes" defines sex only then as consensual when all parties have explicitly agreed. Consent is thus positively determined by the presence of a yes and no longer negatively determined by the absence of a no. "Yes means yes" thus not only sets the limit as to when sex becomes sexual violence, it also tells us how morally "correct" sex should look like. In the first part I will give an insight into debates about affirmative consent in the US and Germany. In the following, I will work out how affirmative consent misjudges the subjectifying functioning of sexual power relations. I will show that the understanding of affirmative consent is based on a gendered giver-receiver grammar of consent, which stabilizes heteronormative notions of female sexuality as passive and male sexuality as active. Based on the results of conversational analytical studies on sexual communication, I will argue that the politics of affirmative consent underestimates the internalization of heteronormative discourses in sexual subjects.

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-234
Author(s):  
Sabine Hirschauer

Drawing on the author’s archival research in Germany and the US, empirical data about US-allied troop sexual violence during post-World War II occupied Germany suggests a complex interplay between gender, security, silence production, and state identity. Through a feminist security studies lens, this article theorizes about an unexplored, obscured form of de-securitization: the unmaking of a security issue or referent object as active silence. De-securitization as silence provides a unique insight into silence production, gender’s normativity, and security. To move beyond de-securitization’s presumed politicization, the argument identifies specific hypervisibilities and new state-self, dominant memory regimes as acts, discursive representations, processes, or incidents of de-securitization – producing and reproducing active silence and facilitating the making of a newly imagined, ‘good’ German state-self.


Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-181
Author(s):  
Asante Lucy Mtenje

This essay examines how contemporary Malawian female poets writing in the post-dictatorship era engage with aspects that inflect female sexuality such as eroticism, sexual desire, marriage, sexual violence, and HIV/AIDS through their poetry and how they represent these aspects against normative expectations of gender and sexuality. I am interested in how these poets depict the complex mediation of female sexualities by the state, the family, religious, and cultural bodies and how, in turn, they represent sexuality as simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency. Through an analysis of selected works by Malawian female poets, I examine how the authors negotiate issues of female sexuality within the new democratic dispensation which have traditionally been relegated to the margins in favour of more politically ‘relevant’ issues. I argue that these poets challenge the monolithic status quo through which Malawian women’s sexualities have been constructed by portraying the nuances, complexities, and ambiguities that characterize female sexuality in Malawi.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aliraza Javaid

In this paper, the author attempts to build a critical analysis of the interconnections between chemsex, drugs, sexual promiscuity and male sexual violence. The notion of power is understood within the context of chemsex, along with issues of drug taking and sexual promiscuity since these activities often manifest in chemsex settings. By formulating a theoretical and conceptual analysis, drawing on hegemonic masculinity and normative heterosexuality as theoretical and conceptual frameworks to elucidate some links between chemsex, drug taking, sexual promiscuity and male sexual violence, it is argued that the contexts in which chemsex occurs also give rise to male sexual assault and male rape in that the likelihood of these crimes occurring increases. This work is not (nor could it) generalize to a population. The slow upsurge of writing around male sexual victimisation has overlooked important and salient links between chemsex and male sexual violence. This paper offers a dialogue in which to speak about these links, encouraging future research on these important subject matters to contribute to knowledge in order to fully understand male rape. Making sense of these important links can provide some understanding of the personal, social and cultural implications associated with chemsex and male sexual violence. The current paper contributes to current debates in gender and sexuality studies, adding to current understandings of social and cultural constructions of masculinities and sexualities. Identifying the links between gender, sexualities, chemsex and male rape has largely been absent in gender and sexuality studies. The current paper makes these links to recognise and understand the different ways in which men navigate through different masculinities and sexualities, how they perpetuate or dispel hegemonic masculinity, and how men are positioned in certain masculinities in chemsex contexts. The paper considers the growing popularity of sexual practices that involve levels of drug use sufficient to pose tangible risks to those involved, which is clearly an important issue to highlight and to discuss.


Author(s):  
Michael K. Bourdaghs

This chapter revisits the critiques of area studies carried out in the 1980s and the 1990s. Area studies programmes during the Cold War were dominated by social scientists, but today’s programmes are almost exclusively the domain of the humanities. The US government and allied foundations sharply reduced budgetary support for Asian studies, with the void being filled by state and state-related entities from East Asia pursuing so-called ‘soft power’ strategies. Today the majority of dissertations in the field claim some measure of critical politicality, whether in terms of postcolonialism, gender and sexuality studies, or environmentalism. Many of the direct targets of the original critique of area studies of the 1980s and the 1990s have seemingly dissolved—and yet area studies continues to thrive as an institution underwriting American power. The chapter explores how we can renew and reenergize the critique of area studies in its latest guise.


Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Fernandes de Oliveira ◽  
Iran Ferreira de Melo

With this work, we aim to propose a didactic application of the news genre, from the perspective of critical reading practices in Portuguese language teaching, to approach the experiences of dissident gender and sexuality people who are being viewed and represented by the media hegemonic in Brazil. Therefore, we offer teachers 5 texts and 10 activities that can be used for the development of a didactic project that articulates several areas of knowledge and that is also built from an educational vision that dialogues reading, criticism , teaching, learning, assessment and self-assessment. In this sense, due to the theme we are dealing with, we assume a political-epistemological tone combating gender and sexual violence, with education being our battlefield.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Charlotte Louise Bagnall ◽  
Claire Louise Fox ◽  
Yvonne Skipper

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 1910
Author(s):  
Bailey Engle ◽  
Molly Masters ◽  
Jane Ann Boles ◽  
Jennifer Thomson

Fat deposition is important to carcass value and some palatability characteristics. Carcasses with higher USDA quality grades produce more value for producers and processors in the US system and are more likely to have greater eating satisfaction. Using genomics to identify genes impacting marbling deposition provides insight into muscle biochemistry that may lead to ways to better predict fat deposition, especially marbling and thus quality grade. Hereford steers (16) were managed the same from birth through harvest after 270 days on feed. Samples were obtained for tenderness and transcriptome profiling. As expected, steaks from Choice carcasses had a lower shear force value than steaks from Select carcasses; however, steaks from Standard carcasses were not different from steaks from Choice carcasses. A significant number of differentially expressed (DE) genes was observed in the longissimus lumborum between Choice and Standard carcass RNA pools (1257 genes, p < 0.05), but not many DE genes were observed between Choice and Select RNA pools. Exploratory analysis of global muscle tissue transcriptome from Standard and Choice carcasses provided insight into muscle biochemistry, specifically the upregulation of extracellular matrix development and focal adhesion pathways and the downregulation of RNA processing and metabolism in Choice versus Standard. Additional research is needed to explore the function and timing of gene expression changes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 285-299
Author(s):  
Yang Huang ◽  
Hui Sun ◽  
Hai Yu ◽  
Shaowei Li ◽  
Qingbing Zheng ◽  
...  

Abstract The rapid emergence of Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) as a pandemic that presents an urgent human health crisis. Many SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) were developed with efficient therapeutic potential. NAbs-based therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 are being expedited to preclinical and clinical studies with two antibody drugs, LY3819253 (LY-CoV555) and REGN-COV2 (REGN10933 and REGN10987), approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization for treating COVID-19. In this review, we provide a systemic overview of SARS-CoV-2 specific or cross-reactive NAbs and discuss their structures, functions and neutralization mechanisms. We provide insight into how these NAbs specific recognize the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 or cross-react to other CoVs. We also summarize the challenges of NAbs therapeutics such as antibody-dependent enhancement and viral escape mutations. Such evidence is urgently needed to the development of antibody therapeutic interventions that are likely required to reduce the global burden of COVID-19.


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