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This interdisciplinary guide has been compiled to enable the discovery of resources exploring gender and sexuality in the collections of UCL Libraries. In line with current collecting policy and practice, resources in this subject area reflect a range of voices and perspectives. Some of these may include controversial viewpoints, or harmful, discriminatory or offensive terminology.
For more information on the work UCL is doing to address bias and inclusivity in library collections, visit the Inclusive Library Collections webpage.
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This guide has been put together by the subject librarian for Gender and Sexuality Studies and it is relevant to all students on the Gender, Society and Representation programme. This guide is an overview of the library resources and support available to you to help you in your studies or research.
Use the menu to find out what is available, including key information on:
Please get in touch through the help channels on this page if you have any enquiries!
Few studies have explored the lives of imprisoned transgender women and none consider non-binary prisoners. Transgender and Non-Binary Prisoners' Experiences in England and Wales fills this gap by delving deep into their ordeals. Drawing on a three-year project of correspondence with nineteen trans women and four non-binary persons incarcerated in men's prisons as well as a critical analysis of the Prison Service policies and practices, Olga Suhomlinova and Saoirse Caitlin O'Shea bring to light the realities of these lives, in the prisoners' own words. Rich in inimitable detail, Transgender and Non-Binary Prisoners' Experiences in England and Wales documents the struggles against harassment and abuse, the challenges of access to transgender healthcare and feminine items, and the complexities of relationships with other prisoners and staff, revealing the strength of character required to maintain individual identity in a totalising institution.
In Queer Emergent, Justin Perez explores how advances in HIV prevention work alongside broader economic and political shifts in global health to shape queer subjectivities. Drawing on ethnographic research among gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru, Perez describes how queer social worlds emerge through scandalous storytelling--a practice of exaggerating and embellishing stories about everyday life that transgresses social norms and hierarchies. Perez shows that through such storytelling, gay and transgender communities contested the assumptions of global HIV prevention's shift from the provision of costly antiretrovirals to the mitigation of social conditions like discrimination and stigma.
The lived experiences of sexual minority and gender diverse (SMGD) people in romantic relationships remain relatively understudied compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. This volume pioneers an effort to address this gap by uniting interdisciplinary researchers to examine key aspects of SMGD individuals' lives and relationships across 12 countries. Specifically, this book focuses on the individual well-being, relational well-being, social support, and dyadic coping of SMGD people.
Queer Teachers' Agency in Language Educationexplores how to create an inclusive, gender-fair language learning environment by embracing the queer identity of the teacher, challenging traditional norms and fostering acceptance. Language teaching is inherently tied to the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs, and it reflects, often unconsciously, the dominant norms and values of society. As such, language classrooms are frequently sites where heteronormative practices and assumptions are reproduced, often to the detriment of queer language teachers and students. Mark BedoyaUlla delves into the interplay of culture, gender identity, and language in the classroom to cultivate a more inclusive and open learning space and discusses how queer language teachers can actively shape inclusive, equitable language learning environments.
Populations are growing older in a public health climate where brittle public services are struggling to cope with the demands associated with ageing populations. LGBTQ+ populations also continue to grow in line with these trends but receive much less attention in the scholarly debate. This short work offers a theoretical and practical exploration of LGBTQ+ ageing in the UK, drawing on a blend of public health and occupational therapy theory, and phenomenology. Based on original primary evidence gathered through a survey and interviews, Fox and Hannis kickstart a new and much-needed discourse in the literature about hidden populations during the WHO's Decade of Healthy Ageing.
The first retrospective monograph for a legendary feminist artist and pedagogue who taught generations of artists at CalArts Accompanying the first retrospective exhibition showcasing three decades of work from Millie Wilson (born 1948), this publication delves into the influential, yet under-recognized, artist and educator whose work has deftly examined feminism, queerness and their historical erasure from art institutions. Her work joins 1980s postmodernism with the personally and politically charged conceptualism of the 1990s, reflecting a particularly unruly conception of queerness that emerged in California during these decades.
How do feminist movements develop and organise in ethno-nationally divided societies? How does this challenge our understandings of contemporary fourth wave feminism? Women’s Troubles sets out to answer these questions using rich empirical data and analysis in an examination of feminist activism after the Northern Irish peace agreement. Utilising feminist frameworks and debates on movement building, policymaking, abortion rights, gender-based violence and the UN women, peace and security agenda, Claire Pierson interrogates the opportunities and challenges in articulating a feminist voice and creating feminist spaces in the conflict transformational politics and society. Capturing the complexities of contemporary feminist movement building in a divided society, Women’s Troubles contributes to ongoing analysis of contemporary global feminisms.
The rise of religious conservatism and right-wing populism has exposed the fallibility of women's rights in liberal states and has seriously undermined women's ability to trust liberal states to protect their rights against religious and populist attacks. Gila Stopler argues that right-wing populists and religious conservatives successfully attack women's rights in liberal democracies because of the patriarchal foundations of liberalism and liberal societies. Engaging with political theories such as feminism, liberalism and populism, and examining concepts like patriarchy, culture, religion and the public-private distinction, the book uncovers the deep entrenchment of patriarchy in legal structures, social and cultural systems, and mainstream religions within liberal democracies.
To be trans and disabled means to have experienced harassment, discrimination, loneliness, often poverty, to have struggled with feeling unworthy of love. To be trans and disabled means experiencing ableism within our trans communities and transphobia within our disabled communities. To be trans and disabled means to love our fellow trans and disabled people harder than we could ever love ourselves. This anthology brings together vulnerable stories, poems, plays, drawings, and personal essays.
The Routledge Handbook of Heritage and Gender offers an exceptional range of international contributions that interrogate and analyse the interactions within - and between - heritage and gender. Taking an intersectional and global approach, the Handbook opens up space for a more critical and situated consideration of how gender comes into contact with heritage as a concept and practice. The volume considers heritage in the broadest sense: as a concept, performance, and materialisation. The contributions also consider how heritage impacts identity, power, people, values, politics, and ethics as well as processes and sites across material culture, nature, and intangible practices. The volume and its contributions are inclusive of cisgender, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex identities. Reflecting the multidisciplinary and transnational voices of its authors, the collection challenges readers to consider what a focused analysis of heritage and gender can offer heritage studies as an evolving discipline and field of study.
Utilizing a breadth of archival sources from activists, artists, and policymakers, Teenage Dreams examines the race- and class-inflected battles over adolescent women’s sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Charlie Jeffries finds that most adults in this period hesitated to advocate for adolescent sexual and reproductive rights, revealing a new culture war altogether--one between adults of various political stripes in the cultural mainstream who prioritized the desire to delay girlhood sexual experience at all costs, and adults who remained culturally underground in their support for teenagers’ access to frank sexual information, and who would dare to advocate for this in public. The book tells the story of how the latter group of adults fought alongside teenagers themselves, who constituted a large and increasingly visible part of this activism. The history of the debates over teenage sexual behavior reveals unexpected alliances in American political battles, and sheds new light on the resurgence of the right in the US in recent years.
Contemporary debates on marriage are often situated within feminist philosophy, queer philosophy, and critical race theory, but sustained engagement within Africana philosophy is virtually nonexistent. Single Black Mother fills this gap and corrects the impoverished narrative of single Black motherhood by engaging the following questions: How has the American marital institution served to confine political, moral, and economic capital amongst elites to the detriment of unmarried Black mothers and their families? How should considerations of anti-Black racism inform our deliberations concerning the role, if any, the state should undertake regarding intimate relationships? How can we affirm the matrifocal dyad as a productive site of racial justice? Single Black Mother deploys a queer Black feminist lens to illuminate the multiple vectors of harm, inclusive of material, moral, and political harms, that serve to undermine the freedom of unmarried Black mothers existing outside of the state marital regime.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Reproduction provides an in-depth approach to issues of gender and reproductive justice from a wide variety of countries and perspectives, with particular attention to the range of reproductive injustices that flow from racism and sexism. This collection provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the current issues surrounding gender and procreation. Topics addressed within these chapters include feminist history and reproductive rights, reproductive care, midwifery, obstetric violence, trans pregnancy, abortion, IVF, LGBTQ inclusive maternity care, obstetric racism, gender, and parenting from a diverse range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology, history, and midwifery. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Reproduction provides an urgent and necessary overview of research in these areas, and is an essential resource for those studying these topics as well as for practitioners.
Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within larger social structures that define whiteness as desirable and normative while othering men of color. With vivid examples from interviews, media representations, and online dating sites, Han highlights the creative means through which gay men of color, cordoned off in spaces both gay and straight, produce alternative frameworks to combat dominant narratives. Racial Erotics offers a new paradigm for understanding the connection of race and queer desire, demonstrating how race profoundly shapes sexual desires among men while racialized notions of desire construct beliefs about belonging
Following recent legislation and cultural initiatives across many Western countries hailed as confirming the darkest days for LGBTQ+ people were over, this book turns our attention to artists fixed on history's enduring harm. Guiding us through an eclectic range of examples including theatre, performance, installation and digital practices, Fintan Walsh explores how this work reckons with complex cultural and personal histories. Among the issues confronted are the incarceration of Oscar Wilde, the Holocaust, racial and sexual objectification, the AIDS crisis and Covid-19, alongside more local and individual experiences of violence, trauma and grief.
This vital new collection presents new Marxist-Feminist analyses of Capitalism as a gendered, racialized social formation that shapes and is shaped by specific nature-labour relationships. Leaving behind former overtly structuralist thinking, Marxist-Feminist Theories and Struggles Today interweaves strands of ecofeminism and intersectional analyses to develop an understanding of the relations of production and the production of nature through the interdependencies of gender, class, race and colonial relations. With contributions and analyses from scholars and theorists in both the global North and South, this volume offers a truly international lens that reveals the the vitality of contemporary global Marxist-Feminist thinking, as well as its continued relevance to feminist struggles across the globe.
Hotbeds of Licentiousness is the first substantial critical engagement with British pornography on film across the 1970s, including the “Summer of Love,” the rise and fall of the Permissive Society, the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, and beyond. By focusing on a series of colorful filmmakers whose work, while omnipresent during the 1970s, now remains critically ignored, author Benjamin Halligan discusses pornography in terms of lifestyle aspirations and opportunities which point to radical changes in British society. In this way, pornography is approached as a crucial optic with which to consider recent cultural and social history.
Scholars and social critics are looking at gender and sexuality, as well as masculinity, in new ways and with more attention to the way cultural ideologies affect men’s and women’s lives. In Getting It, Having It, Keeping It Up, Beth Montemurro explores the cultivation of heterosexual men’s sexual selves. Based on detailed, in-depth interviews with a large, diverse group of heterosexual men between the ages of 20 and 68, she investigates how getting sex, having sex, and keeping up their sex lives matters to men. Montemurro uncovers the tension between public, cultural narratives about hetero-masculinity and men’s private, sexual selves and their intimate experiences.
Both Russia and Turkey were pioneering examples of feminism in the early twentieth century, when the Bolshevik and Republican states embraced an ideology of women’s equality. Yet now these countries have drifted towards authoritarianism and the concept of gender is being invoked to reinforce tradition, nationalism and to oppose Western culture. Huriye Gökten Doğangün’s book explores the relationship between the state and gender equality in Russia and Turkey, covering the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Republican Revolution of 1923 and highlighting the very different gender climates that have emerged under the leaderships of Putin and Erdogan. The book reveals what it means to be a woman in Turkey and Russia today and covers key topics such as hostility towards feminism, women’s employment, domestic violence, motherhood and abortion.
Over the last three decades, religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility across the globe, turning secularity and its relationship with religion into subjects of intense interdisciplinary and international debate. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to explore these relationships. The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.
This fully updated and revised eighth edition examines the behavioural, biological, and social context in which people express gendered behaviours, utilizing the latest research to help students think critically about research findings and stereotypes and provoking them to examine and revise their own preconceptions. The text’s unique pedagogical program helps students understand the portrayal of gender in the media and the application of gender research in the real world. Headlines from the news open each chapter; Gendered Voices present true personal accounts of people’s lives; According to the Media boxes highlight gender-related coverage in newspapers, magazines, books, TV, and movies; while According to the Research boxes offer the latest scientifically based research to help students analyse the accuracy and fairness of gender images presented in the media. Additionally, Considering Diversity sections emphasize the cross-cultural perspective of gender.
Inspired by recent adoptions of same-sex marriage, From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage provides international perspectives on the legal and social history of same-sex relationships from the early 19th century to the present. Its emphasis is on areas where the impetus for change has been most noticeable: Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. From Sodom and Gomorrah to Britain’s sodomy laws and continental Europe’s abhorrence of sexual acts ‘against nature’, the history of same-sex love traditionally ranged from fire and brimstone maledictions to secrecy and scandal. Until recently, legal positions across the western world reflected the legacies of the British and French empires, as well as Christianity, particularly Catholicism. In recent years, however, there has been a revolution in attitudes towards same-sex relationships. This poses hitherto unanswered questions: what historical complexities lie behind the revolutionary shift from punitive attitudes to legal endorsement of same-sex relationships? Given the cultural variety of historical attitudes to same-sex relationships, why has their legal acceptance been so international? The essays in this volume provide answers to these questions, offering the first international overview of the topic.
In this book, Omar Encarnación presents a cross-national exploration of the politics of “gay marriage wars” by looking at how gay marriage has been framed in three nations.Drawing on the campaign for same-sex marriage in Spain, the United States, and Brazil, Encarnación conceptualizes three types of framing models-legal, moral, and political.He argues that while all three models can bring the campaign to a successful conclusion, the moral framing-which views gay marriage as a gateway to “full citizenship” for gay and lesbian couples-is the most consequential for mitigating backlash and bolstering equality.
The historiography of feminist rhetorical research raises ethical questions about whose stories are told and how. Women and other marginalized people have been excluded historically from many formal institutions, and researchers in this field often turn to alternative archives to explore how women have used writing and rhetoric to participate in civic life, share their lived experiences, and effect change. Such methods may lead to innovation in documenting practices that took place in local, grassroots settings. The chapters in this volume present a frank conversation about the ways in which feminist scholars engage in the work of recovering hidden rhetorics, and grapple with the ethical challenges raised by this recovery work.
Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Using the women's quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women's challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.
Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean draws attention to a wide, and surprising, range of writings that craft inclusive and pluralizing representations of sexual possibilities within the Caribbean imagination. Reading across an eclectic range of writings from V.S. Naipaul to Marlon James, Shani Mootoo to Junot Diaz, Andrew Salkey to Thomas Glave, Curdella Forbes to Colin Robinson, this bold work of literary criticism brings into view fictional worlds where Caribbeanness and queerness correspond and reconcile. Through inspired close readings Donnell gathers evidence and argument for the Caribbean as an exemplary creolized ecology of fluid possibilities that can illuminate the prospect of a non-heteronormalizing future.
A comparative study of the United States, India, and Hong Kong, this book explores how courts often use LGBTQ+ rights to demonstrate their rhetorical commitment to liberal and global constitutionalism, even as their judgments fall short of, or even undermine, those ideals.
Gender and sexuality are often problematically considered to be irrelevant to very young children. This Handbook surveys, challenges and advances the theories, research approaches, and practices around gender and sexuality in the early years and foregrounds early childhood as a crucial site for constructions and deconstructions around gender and sexuality. The Handbook features chapters by leading academics, practitioners, and policy makers based in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the UK and the USA. It covers a range of key critical theories, methods and practices including engagements with post-developmentalism, feminist, Black feminist, queer and trans theories, intersections with indigeneity, race, and class, ethnography, action research, care ethics, and sexual health. The Handbook illuminates the importance of attending to gender and sexuality in the early childhood across various sites, including in the classroom, at home, in policy, and more.
Discover the trailblazing lives of thirty trans people who will radically change everything you've been told about transgender history. Highlighting influential individuals from 1850 to 1950 who are all but unknown today, Eli Erlick shares thirty remarkable stories from romance to rebellion and mystery to murder. These narratives chronicle the grit, joy and survival of trans people long before gender became an everyday term. Organised into four parts, paralleling today's controversies over gender identity - kids, activists, workers and athletes - Before Gender introduces figures whose forgotten stories transform the discussion. These ground-breaking histories include two of the first teens to access gender-affirming medical treatment, a countess who instigated an LGBTQ+ riot forty years before Stonewall and the greatest female billiards player of the 1910s.
Combining representation and abstraction, Abney's vibrant works reference gender, sexuality and pop culture Committed to sharing social realities through fantastic, expansive forms, Nina Chanel Abney is an artist possessed of an iconic style and wit. Through stylized, cubistic and highly charged painterly symbols, she references radical traditions of graphic design and street art to communicate urgent political and cultural realities with immediacy to the largest possible audience. Abney's paintings and collages use dynamic color and form to draw viewers into complex narratives. Big Butch Energy/Synergy features Abney's recent exhibitions at ICA Miami and moCa Cleveland. In these works, Abney mines cinematic and media representations of student Greek life to explore how gender perception and performance is inspired by the legacies of social ritual and visual culture.
An exploration of queerness in visual and material culture with regard to the specific conditions of the making and experience of art in different cultural, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. ambivalent work*s presents case studies, close- and against-the-grain readings of artworks across different media and geographies, conversations on the epistemological and methodological frameworks of a queerly-informed art history, and artistic contributions. Together they revisit central aspects such as visibility, failure, transgression, and subversion in recent art production while at the same time providing valuable links for transhistorical explorations. Making a case for polyvalence and simultaneity, ambivalent work*s demonstrates how intersectional approaches extend the examination of queer capacities in art and art history beyond issues related solely to sexuality and gender. Scholarly and artistic articulations equally push the boundaries of the academic field of art history while giving shape to an (im)possible project of a "queer art history."
A groundbreaking deep dive into the history, politics and lived experiences of three often-misunderstood identities: Asexuality, Aromanticism and Agender. How did asexual identity form? What is aromanticism? How does agender identity function? Researcher and writer Michael Paramo explores these misunderstood experiences, from the complex challenge of coming out to navigating the western lens of attraction. Expertly mapping their history, Paramo traces the emergence of vital online communities to the origins of the Victorian binaries that still restrict us today. Powerfully persuasive and thought-provoking, Ending the Pursuit asks us to reimagine sexuality, romance and gender without the borders imposed by society. With a groundbreaking blend of memoir and poetry, online articles and discussions, Ending the Pursuit is a much-needed addition to the cultural conversation. It encourages us to end the search for 'normalcy' and gives voice to an often-misunderstood community.
This is a love letter to the pioneers of solidarity and coalition. It's a new global look at those bold moments where marginalised voices came together to say 'enough is enough'. It's the story of those who sacrificed individual gains to fight for collective freedom. Through astounding research and fascinating storytelling, Shoulder to Shoulder, transports us through time and into the world of these trailblazers, bringing their tales to life and exploring both the inexplicable joys and brutal realities of their fights for justice. Spanning movements from the Black Panthers coalition with the Gay Liberation Front in the US to the Pride support for miners strikes in the UK, Shoulder to Shoulder shows how marginalised activists have always been intertwined in their pursuit of joint liberation.
Here, the history of the Indonesian LBT movement is charted, from invisibility, to visibility and now as it moves again into hiding. In the early 1980s, during the oppressive military dictatorship called the New Order in Indonesia, the first organizations of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans persons were established. They were short-lived, but prepared the ground for a more comprehensive LBT rights movement after the democratic opening of society in 1998. From 2000 to 2015 the visibility of the movement grew, until a vicious state-sponsored backlash set in, driven by majoritarian, fundamentalist Islamist groups. Saskia Wieringa tracks the movement's progress and explores the persistence of the butch/femme model of relationships; the proliferations of identities; family violence and conversion therapy; religion; and the anti-LGBT campaign.
A daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online. As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women. Women play significant roles in far-right movements, acting as propagandists, prizes to be won and mother-warriors of the nation. But up to now their activities have been largely overlooked. In Pink-pilled, journalist Lois Shearing interviews leading experts and infiltrates communities of tradwives and femtrolls to provide a cutting-edge account of how the far right uses the internet to recruit women. Shining a light on women's experiences within these movements, Shearing reveals horrifying examples of misogyny and violence. Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back. Pink-pilled offers key insights for countering women's radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.
Even though they are the largest sexual minority group in the United States, the lives, joys, and struggles of bi+ people, as well as the social structure of monosexism, are regularly overlooked in social scientific research and broader conversations about sexuality and gender. Mapping the Monosexual Imaginary interrupts this pattern of erasure by providing readers with a sociological examination of sexualities in society that places bi+ people and monosexism at the center of analysis. Through exploring bi+ peoples experiences navigating identity, community, and politics, Lain Mathers argues that to understand and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, we must first recognize and interrogate the structure of monosexism.
This edited collection of contributions explores non-normative genders, sexualities, and relationality among Autistic people. Written within an explicitly neuro-affirmative frame, the collection celebrates the diversity and richness of Autistic identity, sexuality, gender, and relationships, exploring areas such as consent, embodiment, ink, kink, sex education, and therapeutic work. All editors and contributors are neurodivergent and members of the communities that the book focuses on, providing an authentic and unique exploration of gender, sexuality, and relationality in Autistic people by Autistic/other neurodivergent authors.
From a trans rights activist and athlete, an urgent guide that changes the conversation about gender identity. Anti-transgender legislation is being introduced in state governments around the United States in record-breaking numbers. Trans people are under attack in sports, healthcare, school curriculum, bathrooms, bars, and nearly every walk of life. He/She/They compassionately addresses fundamental topics, from why being transgender is not a choice and why pronouns are important, to more complex issues including how gender-affirming healthcare can be lifesaving. With a relatable narrative rooted in science, and history, Schuyler helps restore common sense and humanity to a discussion that continues to be divisively coopted and deceptively politicized.
This book draws together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine the legal, moral, and socio-spatial regulation of sex work in the contemporary context. With a thematic focus on the gendered landscape of sex work, formal and informal methods of socio-spatial control, and (in)access to justice, this book explores the role of space in the regulation of sex work in diverse contexts, from the local to the global. The chapters collectively bring together complex, inter-related issues that impact the lives of sex workers throughout the world, providing evidence of the impacts of regulation on sex workers and subsequent barriers to accessing justice and rights. This collection centres the regulated lives of sex workers, using an intersectional lens that highlights the gendered and racialised impacts of stigma.
The contributors to Feminism against Cisness showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness: the fallacy that assigned sex determines sexed experience. The essays demonstrate that this fallacy hinges on the enforcement of white and bourgeois standards of gender comportment that naturalize brutalizing race and class hierarchies. It is, therefore, no accident that the social processes making cisness compulsory are also implicated in anti-Blackness, misogyny, Indigenous erasure, xenophobia, and bourgeois antipathy for working-class life. Working from trans historical archives and materialist trans feminist theories, this volume demonstrates the violent work that cis ideology has done and thinks toward a future for feminism beyond this ideology's counterrevolutionary pull.
Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women's, and non-binary people's experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways. Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people's experiences. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities.
Desi Queers reveals how diasporic South Asians have shaped LGBTQ+ movements and communities in Britain, from the 1970s to the present day. Weaving the history of 1980s anti-racism with the emergence of Black LGBTQ+ and feminist coalitions, this book highlights landmark moments in British queer life and culture through South Asian lives, and illuminates British histories of color through queer politics and creativity. From the Gay Black Group to Haringey Council's pioneering Lesbian and Gay Unit, desi queers were at the center of anti-homophobic direct action in the 1980s, including the historic 'Smash the Backlash' demo against bigotry. This activism birthed key grassroots groups of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Shakti and Naz, whose founders and early members opened a path of creative resistance to the intersecting violence of racism and homophobia-a path of solidarity echoing through the twenty-first century. These spaces and networks have been a refuge for people doubly marginalized in Britain-by experiences of homophobia within South Asian communities, and by the whiteness of mainstream queer scenes.
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise. Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City's fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement. Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism - and beyond.
Racialized women and girls often feel racial injustice before they have the words to name it. Sometimes they fight these feelings, and sometimes they use these feelings to fight. In this important and revealing book, Gulzar Charania puts the experiences of women of colour at the centre of her investigation, sharing how they endure everyday racism, as well as its lasting impacts and exacting costs in their lives and educational trajectories. Fighting Feelings highlights how the elasticity of white supremacy invites people of colour to be its accomplices, how interlocking forms of oppression force racialized queer women to calibrate the risk of expressing their sexuality, and how schools and the nation inform the development of racial literacy.
Michael Andor Brodeur is a Gen-X gay writer with a passion for bodybuilding and an insatiable curiosity about masculinity--a concept in which many men are currently struggling to find their place. In our current moment, where "manfluencers" on TikTok tease their audiences with their latest videos, where right-wing men espouse the importance of being "alpha," as toxic masculinity and the patriarchy are being rightfully criticized, the nature of masculinity has become murkier than ever. In excavating this complex topic, Brodeur uses the male body as his guide: its role in cultures from the gymnasia of ancient Greece to Walt Whitman's essays on manly health, from the rise of Muscular Christianity in 19th-century America to the swollen superheroes and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of Brodeur's childhood. Interweaving history, cultural criticism, memoir, and reportage, laced with an irrepressible wit, Brodeur takes us into the unique culture centered around men's bodies, probing its limitations and the promise beyond: how men can love themselves while rejecting the aggression, objectification, and misogyny that have for so long accompanied the quest to become swole.
Through a curated selection of scholarship, Adi Saleem demonstrates that representations of Muslim and Jewish sexuality are often racialized and gendered in parallel ways as non-Western, deviant, and dangerous within Euro-American modernity. Contributors reckon with the intertwined past and present of Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, coloniality, misogyny, and homophobia through distinct and complementary perspectives. In the first of three sections, scholars investigate the construction and performance of multiple identities and the crossing of boundaries. Studies of scriptural texts and media discourse as they shape perceptions of Jewish and Muslim gender and sexual minorities follow, highlighting how these representations impact the lived experiences of queer Jews and Muslims. The final section examines the efforts of contemporary queer Jews and Muslims to organize and form communities to forge solidarity in the face of multiple forms of oppression and marginalization.
As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012.
Queer Memory and Storytelling unpacks the ways in which the narrative practices of recounting past experiences play a formative role in formation of identities, cultures, and social change among gender and sexually diverse individuals. Grounded in theoretical research, this work delves into historical accounts, case studies, and draws from the rich tapestry of interviews conducted during extensive LGBTQ+ research studies. It explores the power of memorial storytelling to shape the narratives surrounding gender and sexual diversity, offering profound insights into the role storytelling plays as a deeply subjective, personal, communal, and cultural form of expression. The book introduces a queer perspective that reframes the study of narrative psychology, community history, philosophies of subjectivity and the socio-cultural heritage of LGBTQ+ minority communities. It also focuses on the pivotal role played by memory and reflection found within online coming-up stories and contemporary modes of shared community memorialization. By employing queer theory, ethnographic research, interviews and meticulous media/textual analysis, the book presents new frameworks for comprehending the myriad facets of identity, and investigating what it means to remember and narrate selfhood in the context of social life, actively 'queering' the concept of memory.
Exploring the phenomenon of Femslash fanfiction, this book analyses fan-authored works as forms of literature worthy of studying at length. It examines the anti-racist, feminist, sapphic fan works produced in response to white supremacist, heteronormative, queerbaiting mainstream fantasy and argues that they represent a significant site of queer healing for marginalised audience members. Focusing on the 'Swan Queen' fandom, where fans pair the 'white trash' heroine, Emma Swan and the villainous Latina Evil Queen (Regina Mills) from ABC's hit show Once Upon a Time, Alice Kelly redresses the widespread academic neglect of queer female fandoms and responds to urgent calls to diversify fan and fantasy scholarship.
Love and Sexuality in Social Theory considers the role that love and sexuality play in private and public life. Presenting an understanding of love as the social basis of altruism, as an important factor in modern conceptions of subjectivity and that which shapes intimacy and contemporary social life, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social theory and the sociology of emotions.
In this edited volume, contributors recognize and reflect on communication studies' queer past and examine the current state of queer theorizing within communication studies. Through this reflection, the book fills in gaps in the history of this sub-discipline and demonstrates that even as scholars in the field empowered queer voices in the past, they often failed to recognize the intersectional aspects of queer identity, through which scholars can form new understandings of past scholarship in new queer(er) lights. Ultimately, contributors collectively provide a critique for the lack of broader inclusion of queer theorization in the field and provide new pathways for the continued development of queer communication studies.
Inspired by leaders such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, the online Manosphere has exploded in recent years. Dedicated to anti-feminism, these communities have orchestrated online campaigns of misogynistic harassment, with some individuals going as far as committing violent terrorist attacks. Although the Manosphere has become a focus point of the media, researchers and governments alike, discussions tend to either over-sensationalize the community or offer simplistic explanations for their existence. This book uses a mixture of historical and economic analysis, alongside actual Manosphere content, to delve deeper. With The Male Complaint, Simon James Copland explains how the Manosphere has developed and why it appeals to so many men. He argues that the Manosphere is not an aberration, but is deeply embedded within mainstream, neoliberal, social structures. For a cohort of alienated men, the promise of community provides a space of understanding, connection and purpose.
Teenage Intimacies offers a new account of the 'sexual revolution' in mid-twentieth century England. The book reveals the transformations in social life that took place in school playgrounds, local cinemas, and suburban bedrooms. Based on over 300 personal testimonies, Teenage Intimacies traces the everyday experiences of teenage girls, illuminating how romance, sex and intimacy shaped their young lives. The book shows how sex became embedded in ideas about 'growing up' and explores how heterosexuality influenced young women's social lives and vice versa.
Materials for gender and sexuality studies are distributed amongst several collections in UCL's libraries.
To locate books, remember to use the library catalogue Explore, it will give details of the library site and collection in which the book can be found. Click here for instructions on how to find a book. Self-guided tours and getting started introductory information is also available.
Key electronic resources in your subject area include:
Cross-search with other Gale/Cengage primary sources in Gale Primary Sources. Access is to all six collections: Community and Identity in North America, International Perspectives on LGBTQ Activism & Culture, L'Enfer de la Bibliotheque National de France, LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part 1, LGBTQ History and Culture Since 1940, Part 2 and Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century
Best streamed on Chrome, Safari, or Edge. Providing video streaming to over 26,000 films including thousands of award-winning documentaries, training films and theatrical releases. The collection includes a number of leading producers, such as the Criterion Collection, PBS, Kino Lorber, New Day Films, The Great Courses, California Newsreel, BBC and hundreds more. Accessibility statement for Kanopy.
Access for UCL students and staff only. Database of news and company information (formerly provided as LexisNexis 'Executive').
Collection of primary source exhibits focusing on queer history and culture. The database uses “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense, to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT
See the LibrarySkills@UCL guide to Scopus. Multi-disciplinary database containing references to journal articles, conference proceedings, trade publications, book series and web resources. Please use IE 8 or higher, Google Chrome or Firefox browsers.
bell hooks (1952 - 2021) was the pen name used by the American public intellectual, author and activist Gloria Jean Watkins. Her work covered a range of issues and genres including, but not limited to; gender, race/racism, class, sexual politics, spirituality, love, education and pedagogy, cultural criticism, poetry, and children’s fiction.
bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation (film)
Image: Alex Lozupone
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), born Paul-Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, literary critic and political activist. His work is foundational in gender and sexuality studies. He explored how power operates in society—not just through laws or institutions, but through everyday practices, language, and norms. Foucault argued that power and knowledge are deeply connected: what we consider “truth” is shaped by systems of control.
In his influential book The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault challenged the idea that sexuality has always been repressed. Instead, he showed how modern societies actively produce and regulate sexual identities through discourse—how we talk about sex, define it, and study it. This insight helped pave the way for queer theory and critical approaches to gender.
BoB National - Thinking Allowed: Michel Foucault, 26th August, 2013, 30 minutes, BBC Radio 4.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) was a French philosopher, writer, and feminist whose work has had a lasting impact on modern thought. She is best known for her groundbreaking book The Second Sex (1949), where she explores how society constructs gender roles and famously writes, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Her ideas helped shape feminist theory and challenged traditional views about identity, freedom, and equality. de Beauvoir also wrote novels, short stories, biographies and other books on philosophical, political and social issues.
BoB National - Bookmark: Daughters of de Beauvoir - 22nd March, 1989 (60 minutes), BBC2.
Judy Chicago (born Judith Sylvia Cohen; 1939-) is an American feminist artist, art educator, and writer known for her large collaborative art installation pieces about birth and creation images, which examine the role of women in history and culture. During the 1970s, Chicago founded the first feminist art program in the United States at California State University, Fresno, which acted as a catalyst for feminist art and art education during the 1970s. Her most well-known work is The Dinner Party which celebrates the accomplishments of women throughout history and is widely regarded as the first epic feminist artwork.
Omnibus: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (BBC1)
Rebel women: the great art fightback (BBC4)
Women's Hour (BBC Radio 4)
Judith Butler (1956-) is an American feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional, heteronormative notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship.
HARDtalk: Judith Butler - Philosopher and Gender Theorist (BBC News 24)
Susan O'Neal Stryker (1961-) is an American professor, historian, author, filmmaker, and theorist whose work focuses on gender and human sexuality. She is a professor of Gender and Women's Studies, former director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona. Stryker is the author of several books and a founding figure of transgender studies as well as a leading scholar of transgender history.
Masculinity / femininity (Kanopy)
