_Queer Theory and Social Change_ argues that there is a crisis within Queer theory over whether or not its theories can actually deliver change. Max Kirsch presents a challenging alternative to the current fascination with post-modern analyses of identity, culture, and difference. It emphasizes the need for a discussion of the importance of communities and the role of globalization on queer movements.

The emergence of queer theory represents a huge leap in our understanding of lesbian and gay peoples. It embodies a context for treating these people as worthy of consideration in their own rights and not as an appendage to general cultural theory. Max Kirsch argues that the current development of this area is in danger of repeating past mistakes in the construction of analyses, and ultimately, social movements. In this way, the book presents an alternative to the current fascination (...) with the abstract categories of identity, culture and difference, and emphasizes the need for a discussion of the importance of communities and role of globalization on queer movements. (shrink)

_Queer Theory and Social Change_ argues that there is a crisis within Queer theory over whether or not its theories can actually deliver change. Max Kirsch presents a challenging alternative to the current fascination with post-modern analyses of identity, culture, and difference. It emphasizes the need for a discussion of the importance of communities and the role of globalization on queer movements.

The study investigates how the territorial community can influence the individual and social well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual youth and especially the recognition of their feelings and the construction of their own identity as well as their needs to be socially recognized. This research focuses on the experiences of 30 LGB individuals, with a mean age of 25.07 years, living in urban and rural areas of Southern Italy. Focalized open interviews were conducted, and the Grounded Theory Methodology, supported by (...) the Atlas.ti 8.0 software, was used for data analysis. The textual material was first coded, and then codes were grouped into five macro-categories: Freedom of identity expression in the urban and rural context, identity construction and acceptance process, need of aggregation and identification with the LGB community, role of the interpersonal relationship in the process of identity acceptance, socio-cultural context, and LGB psychological well-being. The results showed a condition common to the two contexts that we can define as “ghettoization.” The young LGB is alone in the rural area due to a lack of places and people to identify with and greater social isolation. On the contrary, although there are more opportunities in the urban area, young people feel stigmatized and ghettoized because “their places” are frequented exclusively by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, queer community. The work will extensively discuss the limitations of the research, future proposals, and the practical implications of the results. (shrink)

Altered Conditions provides a bold new intervention into existing theories of the human body and its meanings in a variety of cultural contexts. By exploring the history of medical narratives, especially medical case histories, as well as the exciting work that has been done in feminist and lesbian and gay studies, Julia Epstein poses a number of provocative questions about the relations between bodies, selves, and identities. Epstein focuses on a number of diagnoses that shed light on what is at (...) stake when cultures regulate human bodies, including hermaphroditism, birth malformations, and AIDS. She pays special attention to the regulation of sexual minorities and women and looks carefully at the ways in which cultures attempt to define and control behaviors seen as threatening or subversive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith —is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, and culminating in The Paying Guests, this (...) phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion. (shrink)

Much has changed since the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and the feminist movement in the 1970s in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Yet, to a degree, the invisibility of gay male, lesbian and transsexual lifestyles as well as individual struggles for rights and recognition remains. The diverse contributions in this book discuss how the reframing of ‘queer’ as a proud, border-crossing identity challenges conventional views of gay, lesbian, transsexual and heterosexual identities. At the heart of queer politics and theory lies the (...) double irony that ‘queers’ still experience different social positions and are confronted differently by public challenges, and they also seldom agree about how, and for what political reasons, sexuality should be defined and categorised. In this book, 'queer' brings together wide-ranging commentaries on the history, politics and culture of thirty years of sexual history in Aotearoa/New Zealand. (shrink)

Radical innovations and practices frequentlyfind themselves in an inhospitable environment,struggling against the gravitational force ofdominant norms, practices and relations. Thispaper explores the problems radical changeconfronts in its attempts to become sustainable.Against the postmodern valorisation of thetransient and ephemeral, the paper argues forthe importance of routinisation and repetitionin the process of creating and sustainingchange. A metaphor of social pathways isdeveloped to explore how new routines arecreated through de jure (governance) andde facto (usage) means. The paper arguesthat, in contrast to governance, (...) the emergentdurability generated by usage enables routinesto outlive their conditions of existence.At the same time, routines at odds with theirsocial and institutional environment tend overtime to disappear. The second half of the paperdraws on four British attempts to introduce newpathways: lesbian and gay local governmentinitiatives, Conservative education reforms,Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and LocalExchange Trading Systems (LETS). Through theseexamples, the paper reflects on attempts tocreate more conducive environments, and some ofthe difficulties this generates. (shrink)

Can and should political liberals recognize and otherwise support legal marriage as a matter of basic justice? In this article, we offer a general account of how political liberals should evaluate the issue of whether the legal recognition of marriage is a matter of basic justice. And, we develop and examine some public reason arguments that, given the fundamental interests of citizens, could justify various forms of legal marriage in some contexts. In particular, in certain conditions, the recognition of some (...) form of legal marriage may be the best way to protect the fundamental interests of women as citizens in freely chosen associations. Or, it may be that, in certain conditions, to secure the social conditions necessary for gays, lesbians and bisexuals to be free and equal citizens, some form of legal marriage can or should be recognized. (shrink)

Many areas of genetic research, genetic forensics and genetic essentialism are treated in public sphere debate as suspicious and problematic or are subject to waves of moral panic. In cultural theory, likewise, strong critiques of the genetic essentialism emerge as part of a broader critical assessment of the discourses of the biological sciences and the assertion of a connection between genes and human behavior. However, the scientific and popular claim to the existence of a “gay gene” is not treated in (...) the same way, and has been widely celebrated both within lesbian/gay culture and more broadly in liberal-humanist speech. This essay suggests that it is not enough to presume that this is a result of the extension of essentialism into new popular understandings of human biology. Rather, this essay examines five reasons which have made the popular acceptance of a “gay gene” tenable: the dominance of “gay personage” arguments, the continued influence of early sexology, the suspicion of psychological and constructionist approaches to lesbian/gay sexualities, the effectiveness of genetic essentialism in“ethnic rights” political approaches and the continued centrality of “fixed subjecthood” in contemporary western culture. (shrink)

This paper investigates interdiscursivity in talk about gender norms in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer community. Drawing from field work conducted among gay and lesbian parents, transgender people, and the Drag King community, I show how accounts like les hommes sont comme ça or les femmes sont comme ça emerging in discourse about pregnancy reveal gender-based norms and their relationship to social conditions. Adopting a linguistic anthropology perspective, while paying particular attention to agency, categorization, circulation, and recontextualization processes, (...) I show how gender norms are constructed and deconstructed through interactional, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns found in a variety of multisemiotic mediums and in a diversity of contexts. In addition to its contribution to the study of gender and language, this article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization analysis and queer linguistics. (shrink)

The article provides an overview of arts-based research within social work and general healthcare practice in Canada, and how it can be used to uncover racism within vulnerable populations, particularly youth, women, immigrants and refugees, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex community, and Indigenous peoples. This is a general review of the literature. A literature search was conducted using the University of Western Ontario’s Summons database, with coverage from January 2000 to February 2019. Data exploring participant experiences, (...) personal identity, voice, and invisible powers were extracted, and analyzed using a critical race lens to examine the intersection of societal and cultural practice with race and power.Results indicate that ABR can support therapeutic recovery from oppression by enhancing self-expression of feelings and thoughts, and affording participants the agency to reclaim and reframe their personal narrative. ABR can further generate a sense of community by creating connections between participants with similar oppressions to overcome disconnection and marginalization. Within a broader community context, ABR permits the sharing of stories and insights with others, which can generate dialogue on important social issues to expose areas of social inequity and oppression alongside potential solutions for transformative social action. This dialogue can also extend to discussions with policy makers on the impact of social inequities to guide recommendations that address system gaps for broader community-level change. The paper concludes that ABR can move beyond merely reflecting on social conditions toward actively addressing them by promoting sustainable social change. The voices expressed through ABR illustrate possible solutions to overcome racism through inclusive social practice, deconstruction of the racial status quo, and movement toward an equitable distribution of power. (shrink)

Every theory of justice presupposes a theory of agency which specifies the nature, capacities, and needs of the agents to whom it applies. Likewise, every theory of agency can serve as the basis for a theory of justice which specifies the social conditions in which persons can develop and exercise their capacities for agency. Contemporary liberal, communitarian, and feminist theories of justice all share an abstract understanding of agency as involving the capacity to pursue a conception of the good (...) and the capacity to fit that pursuit into a moral vision. Liberalism, communitarianism, and feminism do not differ primarily over what agency amounts to or whether agency is morally valuable, but over what social conditions persons require in order to develop and exercise their capacities for agency. ;I develop analytic models of a liberal and a communitarian theory of social justice, and I derive from each of these an analytic model of the theory of agency on which it tacitly depends. I show that neither the liberal nor the communitarian theory of agency can accommodate the needs of subordinate social groups such as African-Americans, women, and lesbians for a society in which denigrating racist, sexist, and homophobic cultural images are absent and in which the different needs for agency of members of different social groups can be addressed. ;I also develop a feminist dialogical theory of justice which leaves the demands of justice open to determination by an open, ongoing, egalitarian social dialogue about the social conditions required for agency. I then derive from it a theory of agency which is, I argue, better able to meet the differing needs for agency of members of different social groups, to uncover hidden forms of injustice, and to address changes in prevailing forms of domination and oppression over time. (shrink)

A large proportion of nursing home residents in developed countries come from ethnic minority groups. Unmet care needs and poor quality of care for this resident population have been widely reported. This systematic review aimed to explore social conditions affecting ethnic minority residents' ability to exercise their autonomy in communication and care while in nursing homes. In total, 19 studies were included in the review. Findings revealed that ethno‐specific nursing homes create the ideal social condition for residents to (...) express their care needs and preferences in a language of choice. In nonethno‐specific nursing homes, staff cultural competence and nursing home commitment to culturally safe care are crucial social conditions that enable this group of residents to fulfil their autonomy in communicating and in participating in their care. In contrast, social conditions that undermine residents' ability to express their care needs and preferences include low levels of staff cultural awareness and cultural desire, negative attitudes towards residents and limited organisational support for staff to improve culturally responsive and culturally safe care. In conclusion, it is important to optimise the social conditions to support ethnic minority residents to communicate their care needs and preferences. (shrink)

Three arguments summarize opposition to laws protecting LGBTQ+ persons from discrimination: (1) The pseudo-democratic argument (social change should be free of governmental coercion); (2) The clinical argument (homosexuality is an illness); (3) The choice argument (homosexuality is a choice). My purpose is to show the three are vulnerable to damaging objections. This article reflects conditions as they were in 1987 in the USA. For example, the expression LGBTQ+ had not been coined. My use of "gays and lesbians," then (...) believed to be inclusive, excluded a lot of people. (shrink)

Political philosophers have long focused on how to explain democratically legitimate governance under social conditions of pluralism. The challenge, when framed this way, is how to justify a common set of political principles without imposing controversial moral, religious, or metaphysical doctrines on one another. In this paper I propose an alternate starting point, replacing the concept of “social conditions of pluralism” with the background assumption that democratic societies must respond to “social conditions of strangerhood.” In the first (...) section, I make my case for viewing political relationships in terms of relationships with and as strangers, partly illustrated by empirical examples. In the second section, I explain why I think solutions to the challenges of democratic pluralism in terms of the support for public deliberation and reasoning are doomed to fail in addressing much deeper dilemmas posed by the persistence of governing as strangers to the extent that they depend on ties of cultural or epistemic familiarity and commonality. Finally, in the third section, I propose ways we might change our expectations of democratic legitimacy to better facilitate our political relationships with and as strangers. (shrink)

This essay aims to explore imitation in social contexts. The argument that summarizes my claim is that the perception of other people’s behaviour conditions the agent in imitating that behaviour, as evidence from social psychology holds :893–910, 1999; Bargh and Ferguson in Psychol Bull 126:925–945, 2000; Bargh and Ferguson in Trends Cogn Sci 8:33–39, 2004), but what the agent perceives and experiences becomes potential motives for her actions only through her identification with a particular way of being and (...) acting. Therefore, although the agent’s actions are conditioned by perceptual stimuli, the latter are not the cause of the actions. The agent is the ultimate cause. That is, a convergence between perceptual stimuli and conscious will. I take this latter conclusion to suggest a compatibilist approach whereby action in a social situation would require the perceptual conditioning as much as the freedom and consciousness of the agent. (shrink)

Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change. By Celeste Michelle Condit.

Many believe that nanotechnology will be disruptive to our society. Presumably, this means that some people and even whole industries will be undermined by technological developments that nanoscience makes possible. This, in turn, implies that we should anticipate potential workforce disruptions, mitigate in advance social problems likely to arise, and work to fairly distribute the future benefits of nanotechnology. This general, somewhat vague sense of disruption, is very difficult to specify – what will it entail? And how can we (...) responsibly anticipate and mitigate any problems? We can't even clearly state what the problems are anticipated to be. In fact, when we move from sweeping policy statements to more concrete accounts, nanotechnology seems to bifurcate into two divergent streams: one is fairly continuous with current developments, extending extant science in a quantitative way; the other is radically new, and includes science fiction-like dreams of molecular manufacturing and assemblers, with their utopian scenarios of absolute plenty. In these cases, “disruption” takes on the valence of Huxley's brave new world. (shrink)

Here we consider two ways that nanomedicine might be disruptive. First, low-end disruptions that are intrinsically unpredictable but limited in scope, and second, high end disruptions that involve broader societal issues but can be anticipated, allowing opportunity for ethical reflection.

In the last third of the twentieth century, humanists and social scientists argued that attention to genetics would heighten already‐existing genetic determinism, which in turn would intensify negative social outcomes, especially sexism, racism, ableism, and harshness to criminals. They assumed that laypeople are at risk of becoming genetic essentialists. I will call this the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” This model has not accurately predicted psychosocial impacts of findings from genetics research. I will be arguing that the failure (...) of the model can be traced to its inability to recognize the complexity of laypeople’s attitudes; its incorrect theory of how beliefs, attitudes, and discourse function; and its blindness to how academics’ own interests can override the available evidence. More specifically, I suggest that the substantial data about laypeople’s deployment of genetics supports what I will call the “laypeople are strategic essentialists model” better than the “laypeople are genetic essentialists model.” The strategic essentialists model holds that people tend to store multiple categories, including multiple causal forces, that they deploy “strategically” to serve context‐dependent goals. It will be difficult for academics to reorient ourselves to model laypeople as sophisticated strategic essentialists rather than as naïve genetic essentialists. Perhaps a little shift, however, will be of value. (shrink)

Memory, funerals, and the communion of the saints: growing old and practices of remembering / M. Therese Lysaught -- God bends over backward to accommodate humankind...while the Civil Rights Acts and the Americans with Disabilities Act require [only] minimum effort / Mary Jo Iozzio -- Radical solidarity: migration as challenge ofr contemporary Christian ethics / Kristin E. Heyer -- Catholic lesbian feminist theology / Mary E. Hunt -- Theology of whose body? Sexual conplementarity, intersex conditions, and La Virgen de Guadalupe (...) / Katie M. Grimes -- Social conscience and politics in the United States of America: reflections / Mary Jo Bane -- Pope Francis, women, and the church for the poor / Lisa A. Fullam -- Floodwaters and the ticking clock: the systematic oppression and stigmatization of poor, single mothers in American and Christian theological responses / Julie A. Mavity Maddalena --What causes inequity? / Dean Baker -- Engaging the U.S. Bishops' pastoral on crime and criminal justice: from atomism to community justice / Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon -- Reconstructing the moral claim of racially unjust mass incarceration / Alison Benders -- The systemic erasure of the Black/dark-skinned body in Catholic ethics / Bryan Massingale -- Anti-blackness and white supremacy in the making of American Catholicism / M. Shawn Copeland -- White privilege / Charles E. Curran -- The Black Lives Matter Movement: justice and health equity / Michael P. Jaycox -- Mujerista theology: a challenge to traditional theology / Ada María Isasi-Díaz -- Faith of our mothers; Catholic womanist God-talk / Diana L. Hayes. (shrink)

Employees often experience ethical dilemmas throughout their service in an organization. This study utilized a multilevel standpoint to address employees’ differences in ethical reasoning. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze responses from 40,485 full‐time employees across 54 countries. Drawing from Durkheim's concepts of the homo duplex, socialization process, and social conditions, this study found a positive relationship between employees’ income level and unethical reasoning. Furthermore, the results indicate that modern social regulation, technological advancement, economic development, and economic (...) change moderate the relationship between income and ethical judgment. The study findings contribute to the Durkheimian model by validating the effects of individual‐ and country‐level factors on employees’ ethicality. Considering that the results contradict Durkheim's initial propositions, another concept and theory are proposed, which may complement Durkheim's arguments. Practical implications for organizations and society are further discussed to reinforce employees’ ethics. (shrink)

In the paper, titled ‘Choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy and harm reduction,’ Wiebe and Mullin argue that people living in unjust social conditions are sufficiently autonomous to request medical assistance in dying (MAiD). The ethical issue is that some people may request MAiD primarily because of unjust social conditions, not their illness, disease, disability or decline in capability. It is easily agreed that people living in unjust social conditions can be autonomous. Nevertheless, Wiebe and Mullin (...) fail to appreciate that autonomy is only a necessary condition for MAiD. In addition to autonomy, one must decide that providing assisted dying to a patient because they are living in unjust social conditions is ethical. Central to making this ethical decision is the principle of non-maleficence, famously articulated as ‘do no harm.’ The authors admit that performing MAiD in response to unjust social circumstances is harmful, but they justify this harmful action by appealing to the principle of harm reduction. A fundamental flaw of their approach is that it relies on the legislative definition of intolerable suffering, which is based on circular reasoning and given that 99.2% of patients that have applied for MAiD satisfied this criterion, it is essentially equivalent to no standard/criterion. Canadian society is struggling with the ethical implications of its permissive MAiD programme, and, fundamental to this debate, will be determining the proper balance between autonomy and non-maleficence for people living in unjust social conditions. (shrink)

The human propensity for casting our social worlds as "us against them" is perhaps the primary impediment to deep and broadly inclusive understandings of the workings of rhetoric. Many decades ago, Kenneth Burke assailed that barrier with regard to Adolf Hitler. Surrounded by the satisfactions of vituperation against the leader of one of the world's most heinous social movements, Burke begged his readers to make space for understanding how Hitler's rhetoric brought about what it did. Philippe-Joseph Salazar's Words (...) Are Weapons makes a similar contribution for our era. He asks us to resist the gratifications generated by dismissing as "Islamaphobic" any critical analysis of what he calls "caliphal"... (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Lockdown!” has articulated our collective and individual fear response to the novel coronavirus. Two regnant specialized discourses fostered by the academy—science and ideology critique—could not redirect this inadequate response nor generate their own adequately broad and focused social responses. This suggests the desirability of the academy adding phronesis as a goal for its pedagogical practices.

This paper briefly summarizes Durkheim’s theory of the dual nature of man suggested earlier in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is characteristic of human beings that two opposite principles confront each other within them: soul and body, concept and sensation, moral activity and sensory appetites. Although this inherent inconsistency of man has been long recognized by philosophical thought, no doctrine explanation to it has been provided to date. While empiricist monism has proved to be unable to explain how (...) concepts emerge from sensations and disinterestedness develops from self-interest, absolute idealism, on the contrary, cannot deduce sensations from concepts. Although theories suggested by Plato and Kant do not bypass the problem of dualism, they only rephrase it and make no progress in solving it. According to Durkheim, dualism of human nature stems from the fact that all religions are founded on dividing all things into the sacred and the profane. This division, in turn, is explained by coexistence of collective and individual origins in the human being. Sacred things arise out of the collective origin that enables individual consciousnesses to fuse into communion. Collective origin does not act with constant strength, but intensifies during the periods of effervescence, when it subdues the individual origin. Since the importance of the social aspect of man increases over time, there is no reason to believe that complete consent between individual and society is possible that would endow man with internal harmony. (shrink)

In 2014 Jennifer Cramblett, a white lesbian, filed a Complaint for Wrongful Birth alleging that the Midwest Sperm Bank mistakenly provided sperm from an African–American donor. In this article, we trace the complex and overlapping lines of legal and social inheritance that have conditioned not only the possibility of such a lawsuit, but also the legal language and arguments within the Complaint itself. First, we trace the racial politics of homonormativity, which set the conditions of possibility for an out, (...) white lesbian to bring this case forward. Second, we trace the inheritance of wrongful birth tort law, reviewing its prior race and disability-related uses, and its basis in feminist reproductive rights. Third, we trace how disability, race and sexuality interlock within the eugenic inheritance of both ‘wrongful birth’ and reproductive technologies. Finally, we follow traces of racial inheritance, namely, the loss of white property and proximity to whiteness. (shrink)

The article explores epistemic and social conditions of the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. I claim that there are three kinds of conditions for the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. The first condition is epistemic and means that scientific knowledge enjoys high credibility. The second condition concerns the significance of scientific knowledge. It means that scientific generalizations are relevant for elucidating the particular cases that constitute the challenges for expert judgment. The third condition concerns the social processes involved in producing (...) science-based recommendations. In this context trust is created by social robustness, expert legitimacy, and social participation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 287 Julienne Obadia Responsibility, Respectability, Recognition, and Polyamory: Lessons in Subject Formation in the Age of Sexual Identity Introduction: It’s About Time “Sexuality” has become a strikingly capacious category in recent years. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans* have been joined by queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, Two Spirit, asexual, and ally, as the acronym LGBT increasingly serves as a (...) base for expanded formulations such as LGBTQQIP2SAA. In light of this trajectory, perhaps it should not have surprised me to hear so many of my polyamorist interlocutors identifying polyamory as their sexual orientation. While polyamory’s emergence as a named practice in 1990 was more closely associated with the sexual revolution than the gay liberation movement, the increasing intelligibility of polyamory as a sexual orientation, I argue, offers important insights into how, and to what effect, the category of sexuality is expanding, and illuminates contemporary mechanisms of subject formation in American late liberalism. It is tempting to analyze this phenomenon solely within the historical context of the twentieth century rise of identity politics. However, a focus on recent decades is insufficient for understanding the increasing capaciousness of the sexual orientation framework. I argue that, more than simply demonstrating a proliferation of sexual identities, polyamory ’s reconfiguration also highlights the powerful demands made of subjects of sexual orientation to be respectable by espousing particular forms of intimacy over others. These demands call for a longer historical 288 Julienne Obadia view of marriage, monogamy, and whiteness as constitutive of US social, political, and legal recognition. Consider my encounter with Steve: At the 2013 annual “Poly Living” convention in Philadelphia, organized by the polyamory advocacy group, Loving More, I gathered with the other attendees in a large circle in the main hall. After a brief welcome by the organizers, we introduced ourselves one by one and then dispersed for drinks and informal mingling. I took a seat alone and, after a moment, a man in his sixties with a graying ponytail and wearing a Hawaiian shirt approached me. “You’re an anthropologist?” he asked. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I smiled and gestured at the seat across from me, and he introduced himself, putting his beer on the table beside mine and sitting down. Fidgeting nervously, he explained that he and his wife had been married for over twenty years, but the last several years had been sexless, with her desire waning while his had not. After learning about polyamory, he cautiously suggested it and she reluctantly agreed to let him do some sexual exploring outside the marriage, but with tight restrictions: He could go to events like these and could have limited sexual interaction with others, but he could not have penetrative sex, nor could he pursue any emotional or more-than-casual intimacy with anyone. He found these constraints difficult, understandably so at such events, where people were in fact encouraged to seek out emotional intimacy and enjoy a wide range of consensual connections. Such limitations ran counter to polyamory’s ethos, which, as indicated by the organization’s name, sought more love, although particular arrangements varied significantly. As he elaborated on these details, I realized that Steve was not simply sharing as people often did, unprompted, at these events, which seek to foster open communication, curiosity, and self-exploration. He was torn about how to identify his sexual desire and make sense of his difficulty finding fulfillment within his wife’s conditions. He paused, looking at me searchingly with a mix of distress and hope, and asked if his desire to see other people was natural. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that being poly is a sexual orientation I was born with, like being gay?” He hoped that, precisely in my capacity as an anthropologist, I might have some definitive expert knowledge about human sexuality—an incontrovertible yes or no about the provenance of his desire and the legitimacy of his dissatisfaction. Julienne Obadia 289 As Steve’s conundrum makes clear, the intelligibility of polyamory as an immutable sexual orientation is very recent. Its inclusion marks a dramatic shift from Eve Sedgwick’s observation nearly three decades ago... (shrink)

In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring (...) away from questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in early twenty-first-century New York, but what they have in common, indeed what radical lesbian theory from the 1970s shares with contemporary theorising by trans women, is the insight that identifying with men is expected. It is in identifying with women that we are most at risk. (shrink)