Gender Sexuality And The Cultural Politics Of Men S Identity

This book considers mass media and contemporary cultural trends to examine masculinity at a point of unprecedented change. While sexual and gender politics have always been fraught, the long unexamined privilege associated with masculinity is now subject to intense scrutiny marked by a host of complex factors. As past markers of masculine norms have been challenged on cultural, social, and economic fronts, men occupy public space ever aware that how they interact with others is questioned and questionable. What does manhood mean? Who is included in its dominant formations? What performances signify membership in the club? How are men reading this contemporary moment and to what extent does cultural literacy inform, maintain, or challenge normative male identities and subsequent performances? This work examines such questions through language and symbolic meaning, and challenges its readers to critically examine what men know and how they understand and embody gender and sexuality in a post-millennial society. Gender, Sexuality, and the Cultural Politics of Men’s Identity in the New Millennium: Literacies of Masculinity crosses academic disciplines and will be highly relevant in composition/rhetoric, gender studies, masculinity studies, and cross-curricular courses that take up popular/contemporary culture as well as gender, sexuality, race, and class. It has been designed with both undergraduate and graduate students in mind.

Why are manifestations of sexuality and ambiguity currently provoking so much interest? This collection of essays uncovers many reasons as it examines ambiguously gendered bodies--bodies that defy ideologically produced gender boundaries. In the course of identifying the social institutions and assumptions that repress or articulate gender ambiguity, Body Guards demonstrates that this ambiguity has a long history and a wide cultural reach.

In globalizing Asia, sexual mores and gender roles are in constant flux. How have economic shifts and social changes altered and reconfigured the cultural meanings of gender and sexuality in the region? How have the changing political economy and social milieu influenced and shaped the inner workings and micro-politics of family structure, gender relationships, intimate romance, transactional sex, and sexual behaviors? This volume offers up-to-date, grounded, critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across a diverse array of Asian societies: China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters disentangle the ways in which gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Whether highlighting intimate relationships between elite businessmen and their mistresses in China; nightclub performances by Thai men in Bangkok; single women’s views of romance, motherhood, and marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo; or male same-sex relationships in Pakistan—each chapter centers around the stories of the gendered subjects themselves and how they are shaped by outside forces. Taken together they provide a provocative entrée into the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia. By foregrounding cross-cultural ethnographic research, this volume sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, and women’s and LGBTQ studies.

Textbook on gender.

The dynamics of identity politics frequently have been studied from the perspective of 'outsider' groups, those outside the bounds of the imagined community. But how does this dynamic play out in the construction of the 'national imaginary'? This book helps reformulate how we use rights - to what end and through what means.

Focusing on the social and political dimensions of sexual experience, this book examines the social construction of sexual subjectivities, the dynamics of sexual oppression, and the struggle for sexual rights and empowerment in countries and cultures around the globe.

Sexual identity has emerged into the national discourse of post-apartheid South Africa, bringing the subject of rights and the question of gender relations and cultural authenticity into the focus of the nation state’s politics. This book is a fascinating reflection on the effects of these discourses on non-normative modes of sexuality and intimacy and on the country more generally. While in 1996, South Africa became the first country in the world that explicitly incorporated lesbian and gay rights within a Bill of Rights, much of the country has continued to see homosexuality as un-African. Henriette Gunkel examines how colonialism and apartheid have historically shaped constructions of gender and sexuality and how these concepts have not only been re-introduced and shaped by understandings of homosexuality as un-African but also by the post-apartheid constitution and continued discourse within the nation.

This accessible introduction to gender and sexuality theory offers a comprehensive overview and critique of the key contemporary literature and debates in feminism, sexuality studies and men′s studies. Chris Beasley′s clear and concise introduction combines a wide-ranging survey of the major theorists and key concepts in an ever-growing and often passionately debated field. The book contextualizes a wide range of feminist perspectives, including: modernist, liberal, postmodern, queer and gender difference feminism; and in the realm of sexuality studies covers modernist liberationism, social constructionism, transgender theorising and queer theory. In men′s studies, Chris Beasley examines areas of debate ranging from gender and masculinity to questions of race, ethnicity, imperialism and gay masculinities. Interconnections between the subfields are highlighted, and Beasley considers the implications of body theory for all three. Key theorists covered include: Altman · Brod · Butler · Califia · Carbado · Connell · Dowsett · Grosz · Halberstam · Hook · Jackson · Jagose · Nussbaum · Rich · Seidman · Spivak · Stoltenberg · Weeks · Whittle · Wolf · Wollstonecraft The only book of its kind to draw together all the important strands of gender analysis, Gender and Sexuality is a timely and impressive overview that is invaluable to students and academics taking courses on gender and feminist theory, sexuality and masculinity.