By Momin Rahman
Drawing at the instance set through feminists, this textbook explores the issues of pursuing lesbian and homosexual political agendas in the current constitution of democracy. utilizing an interdisciplinary process, the writer connects the research of lesbian and homosexual identities in sociology and cultural reviews with the research of democracy in political conception. This paves the way in which for a attention of the consequences of sociological theories of sexuality for democratic idea and perform. attractive with queer concept, the dominant standpoint within the zone of sexual identification and politics, the writer deals a critique of the various theorists - together with Judith Butler and Diana Fuss - and instructions inside of this box. This procedure deals a large concentrate on the problems of citizenship and criminal, social and political rules with which queer theorists are concerned. modern with present debates, this ebook displays the necessity to go back from an inaccessible point of summary thought. It grounds rules approximately sexuali
Read Online or Download Sexuality and Democracy: Identities and Strategies in Lesbian and Gay Politics PDF
Similar gay & lesbian books
Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature
Male Sexuality below Surveillance is a full of life, clever, and expertly argued research of the development of male sexuality within the enterprise workplace. Graham Thompson interweaves 3 major threads: a historicized cultural research of the advance of the fashionable enterprise place of work from its beginnings within the early 19th century to the current day, a Foucauldian dialogue of the workplace because the web site of assorted disciplinary practices, and a queer-theoretical dialogue of the textualization of the homosexual male physique as a tool for generating a taxonomy of male-male kin.
Summer time, 1976. A airplane crashes on a farm within the Cambridgeshire fens. Out of the flames walks younger Maggie Beck, clutching a toddler in her palms. Twenty-seven years later, investigative journalist Philip Dryden - vacationing his spouse, Laura, in health facility - is witness to Maggie's deathbed confession. yet a few secrets and techniques are most sensible saved mystery, and what began for Dryden as a small and curious tale in regards to the basically survivor of an almost-forgotten airplane crash quickly escalates right into a full-blown homicide research.
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government
In chilly conflict the US, Senator Joseph McCarthy loved large aid within the struggle opposed to what he known as atheistic communism. yet that aid stemmed much less from his wild fees approximately communists than his extra substantiated fees that "sex perverts" had infiltrated govt businesses. even though now remembered as an assault on suspected disloyalty, McCarthyism brought "moral values" into the yankee political arsenal.
Doubting Sex: Inscriptions, Bodies and Selves in Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories
A young person lady is mocked while she takes a tub together with her friends, simply because her genitals appear like these of a boy. a pair visits a physician asking to ‘create extra space’ within the lady for sex. a physician reveals testicular tissue in a lady with appendicitis, and makes a decision to maintain his findings quiet.
Extra info for Sexuality and Democracy: Identities and Strategies in Lesbian and Gay Politics
Sample text
It is the concept of gender which defines the way in which physiological distinctions and sexual acts are both understood and made socially significant. Desire is taken to be indicative of our general subjectivity and yet subjectivity is defined according to gender; physiological sex is used as the ultimate referent of both desire and gender, and yet the framework of ‘sex’ can only be understood within the context of gender. It is this tortuous construction which defines our current conceptualisation of sexuality.
The historian Thomas Lacqueur suggests that the conditions of modernity produced a cultural imperative for a radical differentiation between men and women which displaced the previous conceptualisation of both sexes as variations on one blueprint (1990). This in turn provided a ‘natural’ basis for the hierarchical division of psychological and physical aptitudes between men and women. The physical essentialism of previous eras is replaced with a gendered, sociobiological and psychological essentialist construction of sexuality which suggests that subordinate roles for women within sexual relations, marriage, family, and society, are ‘natural’ and inevitable.
The two best known studies are Le Vay ’s study on the hypothalamus region of the brain, and a genetic study of 40 pairs of gay brothers. To be fair to each group of scientists, neither has claimed that they have discovered a ‘cause’ for homosexuality. The methodological and causal problems with the research have been thoroughly criticised by those better qualified to do so (see for example, Fausto-Sterling 1992; New Scientist 24 July 1993; Vines 1993), and instead I would like to emphasise the common cultural conditions and assumptions which underpin these studies.