Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality are seen as successful integration, rejecting them is regarded as a sign of failed citizenship. Focusing on premarital sex, homosexuality, and cohabitation outside marriage, this book provides an ethnographic account of sexuality among the Iranian Dutch. It argues that by embracing, rejecting, and questioning modernity in stories about sexuality, the Iranian Dutch actively engage in processes of self-fashioning.
Tamsin Wilton interviewed close to a hundred women in order to understand how we go about constructing a sexual identity as 'lesbian' or 'heterosexual'. How do women experience desire? What are the differences between men and women as sexual partners? How do desire, pleasure, intimacy, gender and morality become part of women's sense of self? Asking these, and other questions, this study breaks through the stand-off between essentialists and constructionists to propose a fresh re-thinking of the desiring self.
The first book-length feminist analysis of Eileen Gray's work, Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In argues that Gray's unusual architecture and design - as well as its history of abuse and neglect - emerged from her involvement with cultures of sapphic modernism. Bringing together a range of theoretical and historical sources, from architecture and design, communication and media, to gender and sexuality studies, Jasmine Rault shows that Gray shared with many of her female contemporaries a commitment to designing spaces for sexually dissident modernity. This volume examines Gray's early lacquer work and Romaine Brooks' earliest nude paintings; Gray's first built house, E.1027, in relation to Radclyffe Hall and her novel The Well of Loneliness; and Gray's private house, Tempe ?nbsp; Pailla, with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. While both female sexual dissidence and modernist architecture were reduced to rigid identities through mass media, women such as Gray, Brooks, Hall and Barnes resisted the clarity of such identities with opaque, non-communicative aesthetics. Rault demonstrates that by defying the modern imperative to publicity, clarity and identity, Gray helped design a sapphic modernity that cultivated the dynamism of uncertain bodies and unfixed pleasures, which depended on staying in rather than coming out.
"Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism"-- Publisher's description
Examine Lytton Strachey’s struggle to create a new homosexual identity and voice through his life and work! This study of Lytton Strachey, one of the neglected voices of early twentieth-century England, uses his life and work to re-evaluate early British modernism and the relationship between Strachey’s sexual rebellion and literature. A perfect ancillary textbook for courses in history, literature, and women’s studies, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity: The Last Eminent Victorian contributes to the expanding field of queer studies from an historian’s perspective. It looks at homosexuality through the eyes of Lytton Strachey as opposed to the too-often analyzed Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster. Questioning the idea that homosexuality is a “transgressive rebellion,” as Strachey as well as scholars on Bloomsbury have insisted, this volume focuses on the ongoing conflict between Strachey’s Victorian notions of class, gender, and race, and his desire to be modern. Linking Strachey’s life and work to the larger movement of English modernism, Lytton Strachey and the Search for Modern Sexual Identity examines: Strachey’s role at Cambridge before World War I how he created his version of homosexuality out of the Victorian tradition of male romantic friendship his relations with the British Empire as he constructed a rich fantasy life that rested on racial and class differences his friendships and rivalries with the women of Bloomsbury how Strachey’s use of sexuality, androgyny, and history defined (and undermined) his brand of modernism This thoughtfully indexed, well-referenced volume looks at Strachey’s life, in the words of author Julie Anne Taddeo, “to illustrate some of the issues concerning his generation of Cambridge and Bloomsbury colleagues and how they battled the Victorian ideology, often without success.” It is an essential read for everyone interested in this fascinating chapter in literary (and queer) history.
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The chapters in this volume explore some uncomfortable territories – spaces where desires and practices remain ‘taboo’, pathologised or invisible. Unveiled are premises under which citizenship can be constructed, and the ways that persons can be made valid or invalid as cultural artefacts. This book speaks loudly to our cultural and collective identities. A number of crucial debates that surround relationships between and among gender, sexuality and identity within a global context are discussed across an eclectic array of disciplines, professions and vocations. The result challenges perspectives and provides new and innovative possibilities for future development. The authors’ international perspectives illuminate practices that continue to discriminate and marginalize those identities, behaviours and desires that are seen to sit outside hegemonic cultural norms
The book confronts the anxieties associated with sexuality in the late modern, western world and engages with wider debates on social transformations in late modernity. As such, it provides both an overview of the field of sexuality as well as setting a new agenda for debating the topic.
