The Beatles, Gender, and Sexuality

2021 ◽  
pp. 139-166
Author(s):  
Katie Kapurch
Keyword(s):  
Gender Performance ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Fan Identification ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
Sexual Appeal ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Identification Processes

This chapter addresses the Beatles’ complex gendered and sexual appeal to audiences and the evolution of fan identification processes in the 1960s and beyond. The chapter unites the growing body of scholarship that treats issues of gender and sexuality in relation to the Beatles and their fans. After consideration of the theoretical difference between androgyny and gender fluidity, Beatles texts are discussed in relation to fan responses. Their gender fluidity inspired many girl fans to scream for (and sing about) the Fabs’ representation of freedom early in the decade. But their music shifted from the girl talk of “She Loves You” to the bravado of “You’re Going to Lose That Girl.” No longer clad in matching boyish suits, the Beatles maintained their fluid gender performance throughout the ’60s. The Beatles’ gender fluidity is a key ingredient in their sustained popularity. The band endures because listeners keep finding themselves in the Beatles.

Uncertain Sexualities and the Unusual Woman: Depictions of Jane Addams and Emily Dickinson

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Bartram ◽  
Japonica Brown-Saracino ◽  
Holly Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Jane Addams ◽  
The Past ◽  
House Museum ◽  
Sexual Histories ◽  
And Gender

Abstract How does contemporary society deal with uncertainty about sexualities in the past? We investigate how two museums manage uncertainty about the sexual histories of two female biographical subjects. Contributing to understandings of how cultural institutions handle such uncertainty, and, in particular, how museums depict gender and sexualities, our paper brings together current debates in literatures on queer histories, collective memory, and sexualities and gender. Our observations at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and the Emily Dickinson Museum reveal that both museums handle uncertainty about their subject’s sexuality by conflating ambiguous sexuality with non-normative gender performance. This conflation results in the depiction of the character of the “unusual woman.” While one museum relies on the “unusual woman” to evade discussions of non-normativity, the other uses the same device to acknowledge and politicize uncertainty. Our research thus reveals institutional depictions of the “unusual woman” even in an era in which many cultural institutions work to frame sexual minorities as “normal” or the “same.” At the same time, our work intervenes in gender and sexualities scholarship by demonstrating that unusualness can be either obfuscatory or provocative; conflations of gender and sexuality are multifaceted and can either reproduce or disrupt normativity.

La Malinche at the Intersection: Race and Gender in Down These Mean Streets

PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta E. Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Chicana Literature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
La Malinche ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets (1967) challenges binary notions of whiteness and blackness by valorizing a third term—mestizaje. And yet the novel enlists dominant views of female gender and sexuality to affirm the protagonist's ethnic male identity. In my Chicana feminist reading of this Puerto Rican text, I import the reinterpreted figure La Malinche and its companion figure La Chingada—prevailing tropes in Chicano and Chicana literature and discourse of the 1960s—to illuminate the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These intersections are key to social analyses that transcend binary conceptions of race and paradigms of dominant and subaltern.

scholarly journals Conversation Analysis, Language, and Sexuality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stokoe ◽  
Susan Speer
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Real World ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Doing Gender ◽  
The Real ◽  
Analytic Work ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter describes and illustrates a conversation analytic approach to language and sexuality. It begins by exploring contrasts between conversation analytic and other approaches to connecting language as a practice and sexuality as an identity topic. This discussion is set in a broader ethnomethodological context, drawing out key themes and debates that have emerged since the inception of ethnomethodological approaches to the study of gender and sexuality in the 1960s, including notions such as “doing” gender and sexuality and “passing.” The chapter then briefly reviews the controversial debates about the analytic tractability of identity topics, like sexuality and gender, in the conversation analytic tradition. After summarizing conversation analytic work on sexuality specifically, an illustration of what this approach offers to language and sexuality scholars is given, showing the methodological steps involved as well as the possibilities for applying findings in the real world beyond scholarly debate.

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

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.

Protestants and American Conservatism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Moral Agent ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
The Family ◽  
Conservative Beliefs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Protestant beliefs have made several significant contributions to conservatism, both in the more abstract realm of ideas and in the arena of political positions or practical policies. First, they have sacralized the established social order, valued and defended customary hierarchies; they have discouraged revolt or rebellion; they have prompted Protestants to view the state as an active moral agent of divine origin; and they have stressed the importance of community life and mediating institutions such as the family and the church and occasionally provided a modest check on an individualistic and competitive impulse. Second, certain shared tenets facilitated this conjunction of Protestantism and conservatism, most often when substantial change loomed. For example, common concerns of the two dovetailed when revivals challenged the religious status quo during the colonial Great Awakening, when secession and rebellion threatened federal authority during the Civil War, when a new type of conservatism emerged, and dismissed the older sort as paternalistic, when the Great Depression opened the door to a more intrusive state, when atheist communism challenged American individualism, and, finally, when the cultural changes of the 1960s undermined traditional notions of the family and gender roles. Third, certain Christian ideas and assumptions have, at their best, served to heighten or ennoble conservative discourse, sometimes raising it above merely partisan or pragmatic concerns. Protestantism added a moral and religious weight to conservative beliefs and helped soften the harshness of an acquisitive, sometimes cutthroat, economic order.

Secret lives and gender fluidity of people living with HIV in Hyderabad, India

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sameena Azhar ◽  
Jason Vaudrey ◽  
Sabitha Gandham ◽  
Sean Burr ◽  
Ganesh Oruganti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
People Living With Hiv ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Living With Hiv

scholarly journals Turkey’s queer times: an introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cenk Özbay ◽  
Kerem Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
And Gender

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

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