This ground-breaking book challenges the widespread view that sex and homosexuality were unmentionable in the USSR. The Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras (1956–82) have remained obscure and unexplored ...from this perspective. Drawing on previously undiscovered sources, Alexander fills in this critical gap. The book reveals that from 1956 to 1991, doctors, educators, jurists and police officers discussed homosexuality. At the heart of discussions were questions which directly affected the lives of homosexual people in the USSR. Was homosexuality a crime, disease or a normal variant of human sexuality? Should lesbianism be criminalised? Could sex education prevent homosexuality? What role did the GULAG and prisons play in homosexuality across the USSR? These discussions often had practical implications – doctors designed and offered medical treatments for homosexuality in hospitals, and procedures and medications were also used in prisons.
This captivating book contains 31 case studies that focus on what is said and done in actual counseling sessions with LGBTQQI clients, including diagnosis; interventions, treatment goals, and ...outcomes; transference and countertransference issues; other multicultural considerations; and recommendations for further counseling or training. Experts in the field address topics across the areas of individual development, relationship concerns, contextual matters, and wellness. The cases presented include coming out; counseling intersex, bisexual, and transsexual clients; couples, marriage, and family counseling; parenting issues; aging; working with rural clients and African American, Native American, & Latino/a, Asian, and multiracial individuals; sexual minority youth; HIV; sexual and drug addictions; binational couples; work and career; domestic violence; spirituality and religion; sexual issues; and women’s health
Violence against lesbians and gay men has increasingly captured media and scholarly attention. But these reports tend to focus on one segment of the LGBT community-white, middle class men-and largely ...ignore that part of the community that arguably suffers a larger share of the violence-racial minorities, the poor, and women. InViolence against Queer People, sociologist Doug Meyer offers the first investigation of anti-queer violence that focuses on the role played by race, class, and gender.Drawing on interviews with forty-seven victims of violence, Meyer shows that LGBT people encounter significantly different forms of violence-and perceive that violence quite differently-based on their race, class, and gender. His research highlights the extent to which other forms of discrimination-including racism and sexism-shape LGBT people's experience of abuse. He reports, for instance, that lesbian and transgender women often described violent incidents in which a sexual or a misogynistic component was introduced, and that LGBT people of color sometimes weren't sure if anti-queer violence was based solely on their sexuality or whether racism or sexism had also played a role. Meyer observes that given the many differences in how anti-queer violence is experienced, the present media focus on white, middle-class victims greatly oversimplifies and distorts the nature of anti-queer violence. In fact, attempts to reduce anti-queer violence that ignore race, class, and gender run the risk of helping only the most privileged gay subjects.Many feel that the struggle for gay rights has largely been accomplished and the tide of history has swung in favor of LGBT equality.Violence against Queer People, on the contrary, argues that the lives of many LGBT people-particularly the most vulnerable-have improved very little, if at all, over the past thirty years.
African sexualities are dynamic, multi-faceted and resilient. However, people with non-heterosexual sexualities and gender variant identities are often involved in struggles for survival, ...self-definition, and erotic rights. Queer in Africa forms an entry point for understanding the vulnerabilities of queer Africans as shaped by social, cultural and political processes, aiming to provide innovative insights about contentious disagreements over their lives. The volume mediates Southern and Northern scholarship, directing attention toward African-centred beliefs made accessible to a wide audience. Key concerns such as identity construction and the intersections between different social forces (such as nationalist traditionalism and sexualities) are addressed via engaging chapters; some empirically based and others providing critical cultural analysis. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, Queer in Africa provides a key resource for students, academics, and activists concerned with the international support of sex and gender diversity. It will appeal to those interested in fields such as anthropology, film studies, literary studies, political science, public health, sociology, and socio-legal studies.
This unprecedented book examines the explosion of homosexual discourse in post-Soviet Russia from the turbulent years of the immediate post-communist era through the more troubling recent ...developments of Vladimir Putin's regime. Focusing on concepts of sexuality, gender, and national identity within competing portrayals of same-sex desire, Brian James Baer explores a variety of popular media, including fiction, film, television, music, and print to detail how homosexuality in today's Russia has come to signify a surprising and often contradictory array of uniquely post-Soviet concerns. Summary reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan
Queer Rebels is a study of gay narrative writings published in Spain at the turn of the 20th century. The book scrutinises the ways in which the literary production of contemporary Spanish gay ...authors – José Luis de Juan, Luis G. Martín, Juan Gil-Albert, Juan Goytisolo, Eduardo Mendicutti, Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo – engages with homophobic and homophile discourses, as well as with the vernacular and international literary legacy. The first part revolves around the metaphor of a rebellious scribe who queers literary tradition by clandestinely weaving changes into copies of the books he makes. This subversive writing act, named ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ after the protagonist of José Luis de Juan’s This Breathing World (1999), is examined in four highly intertextual works by other writers. The second part of the book explores Luis Antonio de Villena and Álvaro Pombo, who in their different ways seek to coin their own definitions of homosexual experience in opposition both to the homophobic discourses of the past and to the homonormative regimes of the commercialised and trivialised gay culture of today. In their novels, ‘Mazuf’s gesture’ involves playing a sophisticated queer game with readers and their expectations.
What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia's little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, ...race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as Lesser Los Angeles - a global prototype for sprawl - Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia's nowherespaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.Across southern California's freeways, beneath its overpasses and just beyond its winding cloverleaf interchanges, Tongson explores the improvisational archives of queer suburban sociability, from multimedia artist Lynne Chan's JJ Chinois projects and the amusement park night-clubs of 1980s Orange County to the imperial legacies of the region known as the Inland Empire. By taking a hard look at the cosmopolitanism historically considered de rigeur for queer subjects, while engaging with the so-called New Suburbanism that has captivated the national imaginary in everything from lifestyle trends to electoral politics, Relocations radically revises our sense of where to see and feel queer of color sociability, politics and desire.
Whether one defines sexual orientation as sexual behavior, self-identification, or attraction, sexual orientation is primarily about motivation. The same-sex marriage debate is part of a broader ...discussion about sexual orientation that we are having as a society. Many of the issues have or should be addressed by psychology and related fields, yet this literature is not yet well-known. Thus, the goal of this volume is to provide a forum for leading scholars to share their work on a variety of topics including the 'coming out' experience, same-sex families, hate crimes and bias, and psychobiological underpinning of sexual orientation. Because gays, lesbians, bisexuals and their families live with an evolving legal status for their civing rights and protections, this volume also examines the topic from a legal perspective.
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