“There’s a Rainbow on the River”: The Affordances of Boy Soprano Bobby Breen in 1930s Hollywood

This chapter discusses the cultural and industrial significance of boy soprano and child star Bobby Breen, who starred in a series of popular musical films in 1930s Hollywood. It argues that Breen’s status as a presexual child allowed his queer-coded voice and persona to escape the condemnation of gender-nonconforming adult male singers that was prevalent at the time, opening up spaces for queer reception, resistance, and celebration. An interdisciplinary, intersectional framework is applied to identify Breen’s particular affordances, offering a broad and inclusive application of the word “queer” to demonstrate how Breen’s boy soprano activated multiple kinds of social difference. Breen’s narratives place his characters in direct opposition to white, middle-class, masculinist, heteronormative men and the institutions they represent, giving representation and agency to otherwise marginalized groups as central narrative actors, industry professionals and audience members, including gender-variant and queer people, women, working-class white ethnics, and Black and other communities of color.

The Border and the Way We Live Now

In this essay-review, Paula Moya discusses three recent scholarly books by T. Jackie Cuevas, Marissa López, and Roberto Hernández that react to the negative racialization of Mexican origin people in the US by analyzing a variety of strategies employed by Chicanx writers and artists in literary and cultural artifacts produced from the 19th century to the present. Cuevas argues that Chicanx scholars need to better acknowledge the wide variety of types of Chicanx people living in the US, including those who are gender variant. López charts how some writers rebuff limiting ethnic stereotypes by engaging in a politics of performative, aggressive abjection as a way of refusing to perform institutionally recognized latinidad. And in his focus on two transnational sites along the US-Mexico border, Hernández seeks to analyze the historical causes and underlying logic of our modern/colonial world system by articulating the not always evident relationship of local eruptions of violence to the global flows of racial capitalism. Together, they unite in fighting the forces of dishistoricization by recovering the history of Chicanx people in the US and imagining for the community a decolonial future that can elude the violent constraints of racial subordination.

‘The Eyes of an Intellectual Vampire’: Michael Field, Vernon Lee and Female Masculinities in Late Victorian Aestheticism

This article reframes debate on the intersections of female aestheticism and cultural dissidence by focusing on the construction of queer masculinities at the end of the nineteenth century. Looking at the diary of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), it examines the descriptions of Vernon Lee, Clementina (‘Kit’) Anstruther-Thompson and Maud Cruttwell during the Fields’ trip to Italy in 1895. The ambivalent presentation of these figures in the diary reveals a conflicted legacy of aestheticism, centred around the inheritance, interpretation and embodiment of queer masculinity. The article argues that the Fields developed themes associated with a previous generation of male aesthetes in order to articulate gender difference between themselves and other female-bodied aesthetes. In particular, it considers how the gender-variant Fields rejected Lee, Anstruther-Thomson and Cruttwell’s trans-masculinities as perversions of their sex.

Un-boxing Gender Variance: A Preliminary Investigation into Patient Satisfaction with Services for Gender Variance within the NHS.

SUBMITTED AS PART OF A PSYCHOLOGY BSc. To knowledge, previous research into gender variance has not differentiated subgroups of trans people in terms of their clinical presentations. This study examined different types of gender variant people in terms of their satisfaction with health care services, both general (primary care) and specific to their needs (gender identity clinics; GIC). An online questionnaire assigned participants to groups according to their symptomology and took measures of satisfaction of each clinical setting that trans people wishing to seek expert advice (in order to transition or not) must attend. No significant differences in satisfaction were found between types of trans people or among distinct clinical settings. However, “competency of practitioner” (an aspect of care known to hold importance for trans people), was found to be significantly higher at the GICs. These findings support previous literature on the nature of trans people as a whole and explore new ways to include certain subgroups of gender variant people in research.

Un-boxing Gender Variance: A Preliminary Investigation into Patient Satisfaction with Services for Gender Variance within the NHS.

To knowledge, previous research into gender variance has not differentiated subgroups of trans people in terms of their clinical presentations. This study examined different types of gender variant people in terms of their satisfaction with health care services, both general (primary care) and specific to their needs (gender identity clinics; GIC). An online questionnaire assigned participants to groups according to their symptomology and took measures of satisfaction of each clinical setting that trans people wishing to seek expert advice (in order to transition or not) must attend. No significant differences in satisfaction were found between types of trans people or among distinct clinical settings. However, “competency of practitioner” (an aspect of care known to hold importance for trans people), was found to be significantly higher at the GICs. These findings support previous literature on the nature of trans people as a whole and explore new ways to include certain subgroups of gender variant people in research.

Trans* media ecology: The emergence of gender variant selfies in print

Despite having become more visible in popular and academic discourses over the last half decade, trans* selfies are not new. In this article, I examine an early set of trans* selfies featured in a sexploitation periodical published in the United States during the early 1960s. I show how numerous media, including bodies, clothing, cosmetics, photographs and magazines, produced a socio-technical environment through which trans* subjects composed alternative gender expressions and identities, formed intimate networks and created conditions of possibility for the eventual re-emergence of trans* selfies via digital social media platforms. Merging trans* theory with media ecology, I develop trans* media ecology as a conceptual frame from which to locate the always imbricated – but never complete – becoming of gendered bodies and media. Methodologically, trans* media ecology adopts three guiding principles: (1) genders are media, (2) genders depend on media and (3) genders and media change.

“Now I feel ‘truly’ like me!”: a discourse analysis of the ways ‘the gaze’ functions in two children's picture books featuring transgender and gender variant characters

Drawing on transgender, queer and feminist theoretical perspectives, I critically analyze two children’s picture books featuring transgender and gender variant characters. With these critical theoretical perspectives in mind, this discourse analysis examines the ways the books, both visually and textually, depict gender embodiment and the experiences of the characters. Using questions derived from these theoretical lenses, I analyze concepts of power, normalcy, difference, the gender binary, gender fluidity, intelligibility and unintelligibility. These concepts contribute to the dominant discourse of ‘the gaze’, seen in varying ways in the books. Children’s story books largely underrepresent the experiences of transgender characters, particularly books outlining, and explaining, a social gender transition. The majority of picture books with LGBTQ+ themes focus on same sex families and feature boys in dresses, thus centralize around disrupting the constraints of masculinity. I conclude this paper with recommendations for selecting, reading, and discussing books with transgender and gender variant protagonists. The central themes outlined in the academic literature illustrate that ‘the gaze’ and regulation of knowledge have a significant impact on what is visible in children’s books. This may ultimately affect children’s understanding, and appreciation, of gender variance and, hence, social gender transitions in early childhood.

“Now I feel ‘truly’ like me!”: a discourse analysis of the ways ‘the gaze’ functions in two children's picture books featuring transgender and gender variant characters

Drawing on transgender, queer and feminist theoretical perspectives, I critically analyze two children’s picture books featuring transgender and gender variant characters. With these critical theoretical perspectives in mind, this discourse analysis examines the ways the books, both visually and textually, depict gender embodiment and the experiences of the characters. Using questions derived from these theoretical lenses, I analyze concepts of power, normalcy, difference, the gender binary, gender fluidity, intelligibility and unintelligibility. These concepts contribute to the dominant discourse of ‘the gaze’, seen in varying ways in the books. Children’s story books largely underrepresent the experiences of transgender characters, particularly books outlining, and explaining, a social gender transition. The majority of picture books with LGBTQ+ themes focus on same sex families and feature boys in dresses, thus centralize around disrupting the constraints of masculinity. I conclude this paper with recommendations for selecting, reading, and discussing books with transgender and gender variant protagonists. The central themes outlined in the academic literature illustrate that ‘the gaze’ and regulation of knowledge have a significant impact on what is visible in children’s books. This may ultimately affect children’s understanding, and appreciation, of gender variance and, hence, social gender transitions in early childhood.