scholarly journals The Reimagining Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium: An Overview and Reflective Essay

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-83
Author(s):  
Natasha Ermineskin Stirrett

The following provides highlights from the Reimagining Kinship, Gender, and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium, a one-day event held in Kingston, Ontario at Queen’s University in January 2019. It was hosted by the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) and the Department of Gender Studies, Sexual and Gender Diversity Certificate Program. The overarching aim of the day was to provide a space for meaningful dialogue on gender, sexuality, cultural revitalization and relations within Indigenous communities. This special section of this Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (JCRI) issue highlights some of the Indigenous intellectual work emerging from the Colloquium. The written pieces presented here cover some of the themes related to love, two-spirit identities, governance, kinship, consent, storytelling, and belonging. It is our hope the Reimagining Kinship, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous Communities Colloquium and this special report from JCRI will spark further conversations and ideas that will contribute to the cultural resurgence of our Indigenous communities and knowledges across Turtle Island and among all our relations—human and more-than-human. 

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Dwyer

Using interview data on LGBT young people’s policing experiences, I argue policing and security works as a program of government (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991; Rose 1999) that constrains the visibilities of diverse sexuality and gender in public spaces. While young people narrated police actions as discriminatory, the interactions were complex and multi-faceted with police and security working to subtly constrain the public visibilities of ‘queerness’. Same sex affection, for instance, was visibly yet unverifiably (Mason 2002) regulated by police as a method of governing the boundaries of proper gender and sexuality in public. The paper concludes by noting how the visibility of police interactions with LGBT young people demonstrates to the public that public spaces are, and should remain, heterosexual spaces.


Author(s):  
Sharyn Graham Davies

The terms LGBT and Islam mentioned together in a sentence rarely evoke positive connotations. Rather, LGBT and Islam are often considered inherently incompatible. While there is little evidence on which an inherent incompatibility can be claimed, persecution of LGBT people across the globe is routinely carried out in the name of Islam. Yet at its heart, Islam can be a powerful force acknowledging sexual and gender diversity. Of all the world’s great religions, Islam is arguably the most sex positive of all. Three main avenues provide understanding of sexuality and gender in Islam. First is the Qur’an, or the Islamic holy book. Second is hadith, which are the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. Third are fatwah, which are the rulings of religious leaders. Certainly, most of this literature positions sexuality as properly confined to heterosexual marriage between a gender normative woman and a gender normative man. However, it is often difficult to distill such an imperative from cultural aspects that inflect all readings of religious scripture. In other words, it is often not Islam per se that prohibits same-sex sexuality and gender diversity but rather cultural interpretations of religious aspects. Moreover, it is not uncommon for fatwah to contradict each other, and thus which fatwah are followed comes down to which imam or religious leader espouses it. A further difficulty with discussing sexuality and gender vis-à-vis Islam, or indeed any religion, is that terms such as sexuality and gender are inherently modern and were developed long after understandings of religion were culturally and politically enshrined. As such, particular understandings of the categories of woman and man within scripture exist in a state where interrogation is not possible. If Muhammad were alive today, he would have linguistic tools available to him to talk about sexuality and gender in a much more nuanced way. To thus discuss LGBT subject positions within Islam, given that Islam was largely developed before words like gender and sexuality were invented, is difficult. Nevertheless, such discussion is warranted and fruitful and shows that while many interpretations of Islam seek to vilify LGBT, many aspects of Islam and its practice are inclusive of sexual and gender diversity.


Sexualities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 644-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
JE Sumerau ◽  
Lain AB Mathers ◽  
Alexandra CH Nowakowski ◽  
Ryan T Cragun

This essay offers some ways quantitative sociology may embrace increasing scholarly and public recognition of sexual and gender diversity. Specifically, we suggest that increasing (1) public awareness and debate concerning sexual and gender fluidity, (2) calls for sociologists to become engaged in public debates, and (3) awareness of gender and sexual nuances underlying the majority of social phenomena create an opportunity for quantitative sociology to begin answering longstanding calls for more empirically grounded measurements of sexualities and gender. To this end, we use our experiences designing quantitative measurements of sexual and gender diversity to provide options for quantitative sociology to better capture the empirical complexity of gender and sexuality within the contemporary world by expanding gender options on survey instruments and expanding sexual identification methods on survey instruments.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-62
Author(s):  
Emma Kauffman

Increasingly, there is a view that the recent emergence of sexual and gender diversity has helped to move mainstream society towards the eradication of the normative privileging of particular genders and sexualities. However, when we look beneath the surface it is more likely to be a reconfiguration of the heterosexual matrix, a term defined by Judith Butler as that grid of cultural intelligibility through which norms are created and maintained in bodies, genders, and desires and how they appear natural (Butler, 24). Using Judith Butler’s heterosexual matrix as my foundation, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which gender and sexuality become naturalized in order to explore the normalization process of both heterosexual desire, or orientation, and the gender binary. It will argue that although we are in the midst of a historic mobilization of diverse and complex (trans)gender movements, the sphere of intelligibility continues to be subject to hegemonic interpretations. These interpretations privilege a binary model of genders and sexual behaviors, thus resulting in a continuation of normative identities and desires. Further, as this essay will explicate, the heterosexual matrix, in accordance with neoliberalism, work as a mechanism of power that designates what is an intelligible life. As such, without first locating these functions of power, the push for a more fluid and open understanding of gender, sexuality and desire will continue to fail, and the space for widespread change will dissolve.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Zarb ◽  
Ryan F. Birch ◽  
David Gleave ◽  
Winston Seegobin ◽  
Joel Perez

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller

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.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document