Drawgasms: Playing with expectations and experiences of pleasure through multimodal accounts

Drawing on a study consisting of 29 multimodal accounts of orgasms, we make visible processes, emotions, and notions of playfulness that highlight the critical role of orgasms in transcending the fleeting distinction between reality and play. As sexual pleasure does not necessarily result from experiencing an orgasm, our data also reveals how playful strategies are enacted in order to mitigate ambiguity and societal norms. Instead of seeing the orgasm as a physiological or psychological change in an individual or as an epitome of “good” sex, the multimodal accounts employed in the study reveal attitudes, assumptions, and expectations related to playful pleasure.

Queering deportability: The racial and gendered politics of lesbian anti-deportation activism

This article explores how deportability structures the experiences of lesbian refugees and asylum seekers in the United Kingdom. The first part of the article considers the racial and gendered processes through which the UK asylum system transforms lesbian migrants into detainable and deportable subjects. Part two then examines lesbian migrant protests that are emerging to contest the United Kingdom’s participation in the global deportation regime. The final part of the article discusses how deportation has become absorbed into the cycle of lesbian migration and asylum. The article concludes by calling for a feminist, queer, and anti-racist understanding of the processes through which lesbian migrant deportability is produced and experienced in 21st century Britain.

“Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade”: Exploring LGBTI+ digital activism in Turkey

This article analyses the #HerYürüyüşümüzOnurYürüyüşü (Every Parade of Ours is a Pride Parade) hashtag campaign for 2019 Pride month in Turkey, expressing the collective frustration of the LGBTI+ community against long-lasting bans for LGBTI+ events and public assembly. Drawing on a digital ethnography from Twitter, the article explores networked resistances within the complexity of online and offline entanglements of activism during Istanbul Pride 2019. The multimodal discourse analysis conducted in this article focuses on the interactions of digital affordances and embodied street actions in rearticulating queer political places. The study emphasizes the important role of hashtag activism in the (re)making of place as a trans-located experience, as well as affording emergent LGBTI+ resistances.

U.S. Family Law Along the Slippery Slope: the limits of a sexual rights strategy for polyamorous parents

Families in the United States are rapidly changing, and the normative familial model of two married, monogamous, heterosexual parents with children no longer reflects the majority of U.S. families. Nonetheless, state incentive-based policies and discriminatory family laws continue to enforce heteronormative monogamy. Recent changes to the U.S. legal landscape have produced limited formal recognition and protections for same-sex couples and LGBTQ parents, and even these narrow rights are withheld from other diverse familial configurations including families with polyamorous parents. This article uses the concept of sexual citizenship to frame the analysis of U.S. family courts’ normative construction of family, identifying striking parallels between family courts’ historical and contemporary prejudicial treatment of LGBTQ parents and the institution’s similar delegitimization and denigration of polyamorous parents today. This paper reviews polyamorous parents’ efforts towards achieving legal and societal legitimatization, finding significant parallels with legal strategies LGBTQ parents utilized to seek legal recognition and protection prior to federal recognition of same-sex marriage. This paper highlights the inadequacies of such a formal sexual citizenship approach, finding that a limited strategy of accumulating specific sexual rights fails to address non-monogamy’s more radical cultural presence as well as the (non-legal) informal aspects of belonging needed to improve the livability of polyamorous parents’ and their children’s lives. This paper concludes with recommendations for improving the treatment of non-traditional families including LGBTQ, polyamorous, and other blended families, both within and outside the legal institution.

Constructing hierarchies of victimhood: Queer male survivors' evaluations of sexual assault survivors

The author employs a critical sexualities approach and draws on feminist theories of sexual assault to examine queer male survivors’ constructions of hierarchies of victimhood. Results, based on in-depth interviews conducted with 60 queer male survivors, reveal that participants most commonly responded to questions concerning hierarchies of victimhood by arguing that sexual assault is taken more seriously when it happens to women than to men. The second most common response involved participants constructing other queer male survivors as blameworthy, invoking a stereotype of a feminized queer man seeking consensual sex. In light of these findings, the author argues for greater attention toward building solidarity among survivors across the lines of gender and sexuality and for further feminist, sex critical interventions that challenge the pathologizing of male femininity and consensual sex.