Gender and Sexuality in Physical Education and Health Curricula in Japan

This comparative study of gender messages in Japanese textbooks reveals a pattern of underlying sex discrimination as well as efforts at reform. There is a “hidden curriculum”—the presence of powerful, hegemonic messages that reinforce dominant social structural values of a gender binary—shaping the learning environment and sustaining structural inequalities. An effort to address the hidden curriculum of gender and sexuality biases in Japanese textbooks was published in 2020 through the National Elementary School Health textbooks and curriculum. This study analyzes existing gender messages permeating the explicit and hidden curriculum and reform efforts, employing mixed methods of content analysis and ethnographic observations.

Recommendations from LGBTQ+ adults for increased inclusion within physical activity: a qualitative content analysis

For decades, physical activity contexts have been inherently exclusionary toward LGBTQ+ participation through their perpetuation of practices and systems that support sexuality- and gender-based discrimination. Progress toward LGBTQ+ inclusivity within physical activity has been severely limited by a lack of actionable and practical suggestions. The purpose of this study was to garner an extensive account of suggestions for inclusivity from LGBTQ+ adults. Using an online cross-sectional survey, LGBTQ+ adults (N = 766) were asked the following open-ended question, “in what ways do you think physical activity could be altered to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ participation?” The resulting texts were coded using inductive qualitative content analysis. All coding was subject to critical peer review. Participants’ suggestions have been organized and presented under two overarching points of improvement: (a) creation of safe(r) spaces and (b) challenging the gender binary. Participants (n = 558; 72.8%) outlined several components integral to the creation and maintenance of safe(r) spaces such as: (i) LGBTQ+ memberships, (ii) inclusivity training for fitness facility staff, (iii) informative advertisement of LGBTQ+ inclusion, (iv) antidiscrimination policies, and (v) diverse representation. Suggestions for challenging the gender binary (n = 483; 63.1%) called for the creation of single stalls or gender-neutral locker rooms, as well as for the questioning of gender-based stereotypes and binary divisions of gender within physical activity (e.g., using skill level and experience to divide sports teams as opposed to gender). The findings of this study represent a multitude of practical suggestions for LGBTQ+ inclusivity that can be applied to a myriad of physical activity contexts.

From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology: Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Historiography

The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.

Getting into the Schwing of Things: Hunter x Hunter’s Progressive Gender Depictions and Exploration of Non-Binary Possibilities

<p>This thesis investigates the depiction of gender in Madhouse’s 2011 television anime adaptation of Hunter x Hunter; a commercially successful ongoing manga (comic) series with a multitude of incarnations. The thesis examines three groups of characters across three chapters, respectively: androgynous men who embody conflicting attributes of hegemonic and homosexual masculinities; masculine women who defy traditional stereotypes via their association of domesticity with violence; and gender ambiguous characters who potentially challenge the established gender binary model by demonstrating loyalty to neither category. These characters are studied in relation to both Japanese and western gender norms to highlight cultural differences, however emphasis is placed on western interpretation through the application of western theories to the text and incorporation of western fan discourse into my own textual analysis. I assess the characters with an understanding that gender is not a biological prescription but a social construction and observe how characters are easily able to adopt masculine and feminine qualities regardless of their implied sex. I additionally aim to shed light on how Hunter x Hunter (2011) refreshingly tests the notion that mainstream shōnen (boys’) series are necessarily conservative in their alignment with normative gender ideals; on the contrary, Hunter x Hunter (2011) fearlessly challenges its viewers to question established gender norms and encourages discussion about the legitimacy of binary gender categories. Overall, I posit anime is an important area of study due to its growing popularity in the west, signalling a need to better understand the texts in relation to our own ideological perspective.</p>

Getting into the Schwing of Things: Hunter x Hunter’s Progressive Gender Depictions and Exploration of Non-Binary Possibilities

<p>This thesis investigates the depiction of gender in Madhouse’s 2011 television anime adaptation of Hunter x Hunter; a commercially successful ongoing manga (comic) series with a multitude of incarnations. The thesis examines three groups of characters across three chapters, respectively: androgynous men who embody conflicting attributes of hegemonic and homosexual masculinities; masculine women who defy traditional stereotypes via their association of domesticity with violence; and gender ambiguous characters who potentially challenge the established gender binary model by demonstrating loyalty to neither category. These characters are studied in relation to both Japanese and western gender norms to highlight cultural differences, however emphasis is placed on western interpretation through the application of western theories to the text and incorporation of western fan discourse into my own textual analysis. I assess the characters with an understanding that gender is not a biological prescription but a social construction and observe how characters are easily able to adopt masculine and feminine qualities regardless of their implied sex. I additionally aim to shed light on how Hunter x Hunter (2011) refreshingly tests the notion that mainstream shōnen (boys’) series are necessarily conservative in their alignment with normative gender ideals; on the contrary, Hunter x Hunter (2011) fearlessly challenges its viewers to question established gender norms and encourages discussion about the legitimacy of binary gender categories. Overall, I posit anime is an important area of study due to its growing popularity in the west, signalling a need to better understand the texts in relation to our own ideological perspective.</p>

Discrimination on Gender Binary Campuses

In recent years, transgender people have both grown in numbers and visibility in the united states. However, the issue of discrimination against transgender people has been a serious and widespread phenomenon in today's society. This paper discusses the transgender issues at large and how the issues negatively affect transgender students' college experiences in a variety of ways, including but not limited to institutions' failure to include "gender identity" in their nondiscrimination policies. The evidence from scholarly sources also suggests that religiously affiliated, single-sex and two-year colleges typically offer few protections for transgender students. Finally, the paper will examine institutions' past initiatives on the subject matter and provide recommendations for institutions to create a more gender-friendly environmnent.

New trends in the linguistic study of gender, its conceptualization and representation in modern English

The article examines recent shifts in the English-based research on language and gender. It addresses the denial of gender binary structure, recognition of gender identity fluidity, which may transcend the established ideas about masculinity and femininity or constitute a complete rejection of gender. In the discursive practices of everyday life, these tendencies manifest themselves in the creation of new words and affixes, a change in the reference and combinability of the words that make up the core of the gender concept, as well as the emergence of new communicative norms and practices that legitimize individuals’ right to gender self-identification, non-heteronormative language and degenderization of communication. Research sample includes 250 text fragments from the English-language media, academic and specialized portals, lexicographic online resources, and everyday communication.

Sex/gender differences in interactions between sexual self-schema and monosexual vs. bisexual attractions

Sexual self-schema (SSS) – the cognitive frameworks that organize information about one’s own sexuality – are known to guide sexual attitudes and behaviors, and are thus likely to interact with the kinds of people to whom one is attracted (i.e., heterosexual, same-sex/gender, monosexual or bisexual patterns of attraction). Extending prior work highlighting differences in SSS between discrete sexual orientation identity groups, we investigated associations between multiple aspects of SSS and attraction patterns among 602 young adults with a range of sexual orientations. Generally, there were more similarities than differences in SSS across individuals with monosexual vs. bisexual patterns of attraction. However, a few significant effects emerged, with significant differences across sex/gender. For women, the greatest differences were seen between romantic self-schema in women with asexual vs. non-asexual patterns of attractions, while women with bisexual attractions were relatively similar to those with monosexual attractions (either exclusively heterosexual or same-sex/gender attracted). For men, however, the greatest differences were seen between open/liberal self-schema in exclusively same-sex/gender attracted men vs. either bisexual or heterosexually attracted men. Broadly, these findings point to subtle sex/gender differences in how bisexual attractions interact with one’s conceptualization of one’s sexual self. Also, a non-trivial portion (22%) of participants reported attractions to gender non-binary people, and these attractions significantly predicted different SSS, suggesting the need to measure attractions outside of the gender binary.

On Stalling and Turning

This series of elliptically interrelated autotheoretical vignettes offers a “wayward genealogy” of how the author came to be involved in the Stalled! public toilet redesign project and what that project entails. The article revolves around observations of the actions of stalling and turning and of the spatial imaginaries that make these actions both necessary and legible in a variety of contexts—of watching pelicans dive into the Pacific Ocean, living on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, encountering transphobic feminism, researching San Francisco's urban history, and reading psychoanalytic theory, among others. After describing the origins of the Stalled! project in recent public discourse on “transgender toilets,” and its practical designs for abolishing the gender binary in space, the article suggests that concepts of transness make sense only in relation to a spatial configuration on which the logic of the term depends: it requires difference and separation as a precondition of its transversal operations, even as it demonstrates how other arrangements—other floor plans, not just of sex and gender but of space and time and sociality—are possible.