A Maze of Challenges and Opportunities: An Autoethnography of a Queer Latinx Woman and Her Journey in Elementary Education Workplaces in the Borderland

Heteronormativity, gender bias, and whitewashed notions of education threaten queer identities in K–12 educational spaces, specifically queer women educators of color seeking leadership roles within the public school system. The understanding of race, gender, and sexuality in K–12 education spaces are each worthwhile as focal points of educational research. However, the intersection between race, gender, and sexuality requires consideration. Prior scholarly research focuses on educators of color, female educators, and LGBTQ+ educators, not on the intersection of these identities. The lived experiences of educators who identify as queer women of color lack attention. Hence, this autoethnography focuses on the maze of challenges and opportunities I experienced while navigating elementary educational spaces in a US Texas/Mexico borderland city as a queer Latinx woman of color. I accomplish this by reflecting upon, and analyzing, my (re)memberings and previous experiences in my journey from K–8 teacher to K–8 administrator. Finally, I provide recommendations to inform both scholars and practitioners.

Lesbian Cinephilia and Digital Affordances

This chapter revisits critical work on the challenges and promises of lesbian cinema spectatorship in light of new media technologies that allow for citation of audiovisual images. Analog videos made by lesbians in the 1990s about the homoerotic pleasures of watching classical Hollywood films are compared with contemporary queer fan videos and community practices on the internet as well as with scholarly video essays. Close readings of these works speculate on the connections between the datedness of cinema as a medium in the digital era and uneasiness with the connotations of the term lesbian on the part of contemporary queer women. Carol, the 2016 film adaptation, by Phyllis Nagy and Todd Haynes, of the 1950s lesbian romance by Patricia Highsmith is an example of a work that appeals to contemporary viewers by engaging both lesbian and media history.

Negotiating Intimacy via Dating Websites and Apps

Since the early 2000s, researchers have illustrated the primacy of online spaces for people to find platonic, sexual, and/or romantic intimacy. Online dating has increasingly become among the most common ways for couples of all sexual orientations—particularly heterosexuals and gay men—to meet in the United States. As the study of online and offline intimacy moves forward, it is necessary not only to assess the effects of political contexts and discrimination but to consider how marginalized groups like queer women, trans and nonbinary people, fat, and/or disabled people rely on and navigate these spaces in their efforts to fulfill their sexual lives and find romance. This article provides an overview of existing sociological research on online dating to illuminate the ways dating websites/apps are shaping contemporary relationship formation along the axes of race, gender, class, and sexuality, while also noting avenues for new research trajectories.

Qualified to be deviant: stigma-management strategies among Chinese leftover women

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

“Look at Me! I Can Change Your Tire”

Outside of bodybuilding, queer women in fitness and exercise cultures have received little attention in popular discourse and academic research. In this article, I examine how queer use of gym space can inform and reify a queer identity, specifically the enactment of queer female masculinity. I use Jack Halberstam’s work on female masculinity and literature in the fields of cultural studies and sport studies to discuss how queer identity, space, and power operate on the body in the context of fitness culture.