Davy, Z. (2023). Nomadic ethics versus adultism: Towards equitable healthcare futures. In J. A. Langarita, A. C. Santos, M. Montenegro, & M. Urek (Eds.), Child-friendly perspectives on gender and sexual diversity: Beyond adultcentrism. London: Routledge: pp.47-62.
Parents and their trans and gender expansive children over several years have had to navigate prejudice and misinformation about healthcare interventions available. In the UK, which I use as a case study in this chapter, gonadotrophin-releasing hormone analogues interventions (GnRHa) for trans children has been vilified as an experiment by trans exclusionary people (TEP). TEP suggest that GnRHa stops trans children from developing ‘normally,’ into cis gender straight, gay and lesbian people and also sterilizes them. This, they say, is underpinned by a conspiratorial trans lobby pushing an ideological message that removes women’s and girl’s rights. These challenges have apparently been accepted by the UK government’s equalities minister in 2020, and in a December 2020 impacted a court ruling where the judges said that it was highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or less would be competent to give consent to the administration of GnRHa, and that it was doubtful that 14 or 15 year old children too could understand the long-term risks and consequences of these healthcare interventions and if desired by the child they must acquire legal consent. In the UK, this shift in sentiment attempted to establish a legal framework that does not reflect all children’s equitable competency to consent. The ruling casts trans children and their parents within an oppressive adult-centric medicolegal structure that is not applied equitably to cis children who may also take this intervention for other conditions; however, it does force precedents for them. This chapter explores adultist notions of competency to consent by juxtaposing trans and cis people’s requests for GnRHa. Firstly, I argue that that trans exclusionary people’s arguments and the legal ruling reifies a representation of adult binary sex-differences, which reinforces what I call a gender normative adultism. I demonstrate that the logical outcome of these gender critical contestations and the legal ruling form a gender normative adultism that will negatively impact all children’s healthcare desires. Considering this through the lens of neo materialist nomadic ethics (Braidotti, 2006), I will argue for a medical-patient ethics based on varying nomadic human drives that challenges gender normative adultism.
Davy, Z., Benson, J., & Barras, A. (2022). Shared care and gender identity support in Primary Care: The perspectives and experiences of parents/carers of young trans people. Health. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13634593221138616
This article addresses the complex issues surrounding trans youths’ shared care perceived by parents in primary care settings in the UK. The analyses in this article draws on qualitative data derived from an online survey of 153 parents with trans children. Through the conceptual framework of healthcare assemblages, findings suggest that quality shared care for trans youth is based upon transient service relationships inherent in their healthcare—primary care, gender identity services, endocrinologists, and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAHMS)—and, as such, this complexity must be understood better by GPs in order for quality shared care to be administered. We explored various blockages to quality shared care within primary care surgeries that produced limit situations, such as lack of knowledge, training, or experience with trans healthcare. One other key factor was that there were strong external forces that were limiting trans youths’ quality shared care in the form of abject depictions from beyond the consultation, which all produced negative effects. Despite these blockages, we also demonstrate how and where quality shared care is received. For instance, we show that continuity of care or treatment after an initial diagnosis or assessment contributes to quality shared care as too does personalized care to those youths receiving it. Overall, this research provides insights into the complex perceptions of parents about what quality shared care is and ought to be for trans youth.
Davy, Z. (2023). Affective trans relationships: Towards a Deleuzian approach to friendship theory. In A. C. Santos (Ed.), LGBTQ+ Intimacies in Southern Europe: Citizenship, Care and Choice (pp. 213-232). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter challenges mainstream friendship theory from philosophy and psychosocial studies that seems to suggest that at school friendship is based on hierarchized types of relationship. Drawing on data from parents of trans and gender-diverse children, this chapter demonstrates that friendship and friendship bonds cannot be universalized and that we must acknowledge the different desires, choices, and lived experiences through time and space, the roles, and the desires that are produced in an ongoing way within friendship relationships and that they are constantly moving. I argue that by looking at these friendship affects through a Deleuzian lens we are able to enunciate how friendships are, according to the parents, affective and becoming minoritarian and thus producing new ways to think about friends and friendship bonds. OPEN ACCESS file:///C:/Users/zowie/OneDrive/Documents/Embodied_Queer_Epistemologies_A_New_Approach_to_a_.pdf
Davy, Z. (2022 at press). Affective trans relationships: Towards a Deleuzian approach to friendship theory. In A. C. Santos (Ed.), LGBTQ+ Intimacies in Southern Europe: Citizenship, Care and Choice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
This chapter challenges mainstream friendship theory from philosophy and psychosocial studies that seems to suggest that at school friendship is based on hierarchized types of relationship. Drawing on data from parents of trans and gender-diverse children, this chapter demonstrates that friendship and friendship bonds cannot be universalized and that we must acknowledge the different desires, choices, and lived experiences through time and space, the roles, and the desires that are produced in an ongoing way within friendship relationships and that they are constantly moving. I argue that by looking at these friendship affects through a Deleuzian lens we are able to enunciate how friendships are, according to the parents, affective and becoming minoritarian and thus producing new ways to think about friends and friendship bonds.
Jordan, A., Anitha, S., Jameson, J., & Davy, Z. (2022). Hierarchies of Masculinity and Lad Culture on Campus: Bad Guys, Good Guys and Complicit Men. Men and Masculinities. doi:10.1177/1097184×211064321 (Open Access)
Research on ‘lad culture’ and gender-based violence (GBV) in student communities has examined ‘hypermasculine’ gender performances, with little attention paid to hierarchies of masculinity. We explore ‘lad culture’ by analysing qualitative, in-depth interviews with students. Our findings challenge simplistic constructions of ‘good guys’ as allies/protectors in opposition to hypermasculinised, deviant ‘bad guys’. We demonstrate how such binary constructions are premised upon gendered norms of men-as-protectors/women-as-weak, and bolster problematic hierarchies of masculinity. We also highlight the crucial role of complicit masculinity in maintaining GBV-tolerant cultures. Our research suggests academic understandings of lad culture could benefit from a more comprehensive picture of the relationship between masculinity/ies and campus GBV. By theorising complex negotiations of hegemonic masculinity in this context, the paper also advances conceptual debates around the promise/limitations of changing, ‘softer’ masculinities. Practice implications include rethinking how/whether prevention education can deploy ‘softer’ masculinities whilst avoiding reinstating gender hierarchies that ultimately scaffold GBV.
European Professional Association for Transgender Health Conference Keynote: A Year+ in Review
Jutel (Jutel & Nettleton, 2011) has argued that diagnosis changes the practice of medicine from a purely biomedical process to a medico-social practice, with intersecting social, political, technological, cultural and economic forces all connecting. We can see these forces manifest in the research on trans, non-binary and sex/gender diverse people in the social and political sciences. There has been a rise in transphobia particularly but not exclusively in the UK emerging from the more conservative ideals associated with trans-exclusionary people and the creation of what Hines (2020) calls gender-panics surrounding sex/segregated spaces, sports, human rights principles and whether children and adolescents have the capacity to understand their minds in relation to gender identity and expressions and medical interventions if so sought. These anti-trans/anti-gender scholars and activists are using arguments derived from earlier trans related health research from the US and Canada that highlights what they suggest are the fundamental differences between biological sex and ’gender identity’ and resultant ’disorders,’ when they do not align. Moreover, they often suggest that despite trans related medical interventions, trans people can only ever be the sex assigned at birth and thus can only ever be a fiction. The most vitriolic of these critics suggest that trans women are deluded, perverse and dangerous autogynephiliacs, and that trans ideology has made lesbians into trans men, resulting in high profile politicians and media outlets portraying the dangers of trans medicine and trans people to conventional ways of life and is particularly dangerous for trans and gender expansive children, which they believe do not exist. Some key research has been produced in response to this anti-trans sentiment in a special issue and book from the Sociological Review edited by Vincent et al (2020) entitled TERF Wars: Feminism and the fight for transgender futures, which collectively imagines a future of collaboration with the critics, rather than conflict. For example, Rowan Hildebrand-Chupp’s (2020) contribution opens the debate around collaboration surrounding detransitioning, not in the form that existing medical research has constructed it as, as a negative clinical outcome to be prevented, or by focussing on the causes of ‘detransing’ and the detrans rates. Hilderbrand-Chupp (2020) argues that this approach becomes a divisive issue of zero-sum clinical risk. This, they argue, is not oriented toward helping people who detransition and those who have a negative transition experience. Understanding people’s attitudes towards trans and non-binary people and discriminatory actions towards them was addressed by Molin et al (2021) in Switzerland who show that those with more right-leaning politics tend to perceive the sex/gender binary system more rigidly than those with feminist leaning politics, suggesting that there is a link between gender fluidness and feminism because of them challenging traditional gender roles.
Alonso–Martínez et al (2021) suggest that the maintenance of discriminatory actions has been fuelled by medical and legal pathologisation that has stigmatised while sanctioning trans recognition vis a vis the dominant cisgenderist binary gender system that systematically and unfairly subjects trans people to exclusions, repressions and other practices of personal, institutional and social harassment. Trans identities have, they go on, been considered incomplete people or them having pathological conditions, which is not surprising in that The World Health Organization did not redefine until recently in the 11th edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11) “transsexualism” and “gender identity disorder in children” as incongruities of gender in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. This all of course potentially has had an impact on life satisfaction studies of trans and non-binary people as Anderssen et al (2020) suggest there are significantly more psychosocial burdens on all the measures that they used in their study when comparing cis gender and trans and non-binary students.
Young trans and non-binary people and schooling
A key theme in the review of the literature focussed on young people. Hilario and Marques’ (2020) study demonstrates how trans young people can create their own gender-discursive and embodied selves – drawing upon a plurality of narratives, models and/or institutions in active and creative ways. Bower-Brown et al (2021) report on the school experiences of binary-trans, non-binary and gender-questioning individuals in the UK. Non-binary individuals seemed to experience higher levels of discrimination than binary-trans individuals, a finding that echoes Davy and Cordoba’s (2019) findings in a UK based study that looked at parent’s involvement when supporting their trans and gender diverse children through the school system due to the absence of inclusive facilities within school environments that is exacerbated by being both legally and socially unrecognized. See also Paechter et al (2021). Lorusso and Albanesis (2021) report similar difficulties in accessing information, obstacles in finding adequate support from educational professionals, recognizing that these challenges are strongly embedded in the Italian socio-cultural context. A persistently stressful and hostile school climate can make school about survival rather than success and fulfilment, with stressors detrimentally affecting educational achievement and wellbeing and according to Horton some shifts are needed in trans inclusive education, such as a shift in expectations and ambition from aspiring for resilience and protection from violence and abuse, to aspiring for self-confident, secure pupils who are validated and represented both in school and across the curriculum so that they can excel and thrive. It must be noted however that a few European countries do recognise nonbinary genders in official registries or use no gender markers at all in some of the official documentation. In an interesting study it suggests that high levels of bullying at school correlates with perpetrating bullying behaviours, for example in a Finish study by Heino et al (2021) show that non-binary and trans adolescents who are or have been bullied also report bullying others. Trans and gender diverse people in higher education both as learners and as members of staff had also encountered barriers to their learning or work which they directly attributed to their trans or gender diverse status, according to McKendry and Lawrence.
Trans and non-binary young people struggle to access the internationally recommended affirmative model of clinical care according to Carlile and colleagues (2021) and Rickett et al (2021). Wait times, under-trained clinical staff, and conservative treatment protocols in the UK conspire to produce a pessimistic scenario. Where appropriate medication was unavailable, many Trans and non-binary young people assigned female at birth were placed on high dose contraceptive hormones instead. Parents who advocated powerfully for their children were more successful in obtaining treatment. Paying for private care was also a route some families took, even where money was tight. Families referred to being ‘lucky’ if they met a supportive, affirmative practitioner, suggesting that the system feels generally weighted against them. Interrelated difficulties surrounding transitioning was investigated by Magalhaes et al (2020) in Spain where age, lack of financial resources, areas where they were living, knowing what they wanted, and lack of self-acceptance figured.
Fertility, fertility preservation technologies and experiences of pregnancy and parenthood
Several studies in the past couple of years have focussed on fertility, pregnancy and parenthood in trans and non-binary populations. Mendes and Poirier (2021) suggest that there has been less research on the experiences of trans and non-binary parents who have transitioned before having their children. However, data on parental desire and fertility preservation were assessed in a large, nonclinical sample of AFAB trans people by Defreyne et al (2020), where 39% of respondents had a current/future parental desire. Parental desire rates did not differ between trans men and non-binary people. Barriers for fulfilling the parental desire included assumed difficulties in the adoption procedure, fear of discrimination against the child or being discriminated against as a transgender parent, the cost for using personal genetic material was also a factor as was the case in Rogers et al (2021), who suggest that financial and geographical costs of fertility preservation facilities are the main issues. In a different publication by Defreyne et al (2020) 21.6% of assigned male a birth respondents had a current/future parental desire, parental desire was already fulfilled in 31.9%. Trans women were more likely to express a parental desire, compared to non-binary people and cross-dressers. The expectations and experiences of pregnancy related care in Sweden according to Flack et al highlights that antenatal and obstetrical care and the positioning of a masculine identity and pregnancy as mutually exclusive affected patient security and interaction with HCPs, leaving participants feeling excluded and ignored at the same time as their gender was a focus of attention. Navigating healthcare was stressful and required considerable attention, personal resources and energy, leaving the most vulnerable at risk of a lower quality of care. Bower-Brown and Zadeh (2021) look at various strategies used by trans and non-binary parents in negotiating normativity in parenting spaces while acknowledging the tensions between being a pragmatic parent alongside what they call a pioneering parent. Benaloun et al (2021) and several other studies, such as Mancini et al (2021) argue for fertility preservation to be addressed with all trans and non-binary people before they start hormonal treatments and/or surgical procedures. Along with pregnancy, Riggs et al (2020; 2021) in two different papers with international participants from the EU, United states and Australia looked at both the complexity surrounding conception, which highlight that broader societal acceptance of gestational parents who are men, trans/masculine, or non-binary, and their families, should not solely (or indeed) be the work of this diverse population. Rather, fertility clinics have an important role to play in normalizing and affirming the conception-related needs of men, trans/masculine and, moreover, pregnancy loss and suggest that clinicians might meet the needs of trans/masculine and non-binary people who have experienced a pregnancy loss by focusing on the emotions attached both to the loss and to the possible desire to attempt another pregnancy, rather than focusing on pregnancy loss to infer that trans/masculine, non-binary and men’s bodies should not be pregnant.
Parenthood for trans and non-binary people in relation to adoption and fostering has been addressed by Brown and colleagues (2020) and suggest that there continues to be few social workers who have had experience of trans adopters, and found a lack of experience in supporting trans adopters and carers resulting in a catch 22 situation where children’s placements are less likely to happen with trans and non-binary folk, which impacts on the ability for social workers to gain experience in removing the gendered barriers both in the interests of children needing homes and adults whose preference or fertility experiences bring them to adoption and fostering. Also highlighted is that these experiences must also extend beyond adoption and fostering staff to those working in child placing authorities, as well as panel members. Whereas practice knowledge and perceived practice challenges for social care staff supporting families with a/some trans members was highlighted as lacking by Hafford-Letchfield et al (2019), due to their professional standards of practice requires professionals to take active responsibility and be more accountable in educating themselves and others on the rights and best practice for these families. Professionals also need to reach out to trans and non-binary communities to include them in improving services as well as being active in their own organizations to ensure these are inclusive and responsive.
Sex and sexuality
One other key theme within the literature was research on trans and non-binary people’s sexual practices, fantasies and sexuality, which seems to move beyond the heterosexual/homosexual binary. My own research (Davy, 2021a) looking at trans DIY porn and erotica emphasises that there is a growing population of trans, non-binary and genderqueer folk who reject heteronormative and homonormative constructions of their sexuality and have begun developing language and describing their experiences beyond those described in trans medicine and health literature. Similarly, in Anzani and Prunas’s (2020) study using the Italian version of the Sexual Fantasy Questionnaire they suggest that non-binary folk did not rate the items presented as sexually exciting, suggesting that their sexual fantasies require more understanding vis a vis the hetero/homonormative descriptions of sexuality for this population. Anzani et al’s (2021) study focuses on the ways in which trans masculine and nonbinary individuals describe how they use their body during sex and how body dysphoria and the strategies to overcome body dysphoria were particularly relevant and that they find themselves discussing their sexuality with their partner much more openly.
Connolly et al (2021) found in contrast to the positive aspects of sexuality that respondents to the Global Drug Survey on their experiences of being taken advantage of sexually while under the influence of alcohol and/or other drugs found that transgender people were more likely than cisgender people to have experienced being taken advantage of in the last year (9.3% vs 4.2%). Non-binary participants were more likely than binary transgender participants (27.7% vs 17.8%) to report being taken advantage of sexually. Adding to the evidence about the interconnection between psychological vulnerability and sexual-related features Ristori et al confirm the importance of developing gender inclusive sex education programs to prevent negative sexual outcomes in this population. Whereas Anzani et al (2021) showed that trans and non-binary bodies were also sites of fetishization from cisgender people, which tended to objectify them rather than respect them.
Ageing and trans and non-binary populations
At a time when welfare rights are being eroded across Europe and a context where the care from a family of origin is often lacking, trans and non-binary people are increasingly relying on health and social care services designed for cisgender people. In an excellent review by Benbow et al (2021) trans people’s previous experiences of discrimination, including discrimination from service providers, will influence their worries about accessing and using later life services. These worries are exacerbated in different ways if the physical transition took place earlier or later in their life. In the former, limited access to informal social support possibly in conjunction with less financial resources may lead to greater reliance on a system and workforce that does not understand trans and non-binary people. This has been identified as a concern for trans individuals as they grow older: people fear increasing dependency and a need for assistance with personal care and other activities of daily living either in their own home, in a long-term care setting or communal housing. The evidence shows there is still much work to be done to ensure that older trans people have access to culturally appropriate and welcoming services.
Sport and exercising
Competing in sport whether at a recreational, competitive or high-performance level is also important to understand more. Transnegativity according to Braumüller et al (2020) is perceived to be a big problem by most of their respondents and particularly for trans girls and women. Transnegativity they suggest is underscored by the image that the there is a level playing field if assigned female at birth and assigned male at birth do not compete together.
Recreationally, exercising such as swimming is addressed by Caudwell (2020) in which they show how public space produces real and perceived levels of public surveillance of the bodies of trans and non-binary people, meaning that their safety is negotiated variously daily. Feelings of being safe and/or unsafe to take part in physical activity extend to embodiment and the display of their bodies. Combined, these elements affect opportunity to go swimming, in this case, and gives rise to intricate exclusions. In a study with trans children by Gilani et al (2021) they found that most participants were motivated to exercise, however, several factors impeded them, such as revealing sportswear, body dysmorphia and not being as good as others. Interestingly, some suggested there were not barriers however these respondents were highly motivated to exercise to begin with. For genuine non-binary inclusion, it will mean a radical rethinking of how gender and sex operate in sport, according to Erikainen et al (2021). One such consideration for high level female sport is serum testosterone concentrations as a primary biomarker to regulate the inclusion of athletes into the female category. At this time, it is the only method based on an objective biomarker supported by most available scientific literature but is far from perfect according to some, such as Hamilton et al (2021).
Other key studies informing health and wellbeing that are worth highlighting
Avgeri (2021) shows that in trans refugee populations, transphobia is present both in the country of origin and in the EU and that its intelligibility and narration changes according to context and culture. As such, there is a need to decolonize gender identity and expression in refugee law, which has implications for decolonizing trans medical and healthcare research.
I have not mentioned thus far anything that we all have been negotiating this past year or so COVID. Surprisingly, there were few studies looking at the impact of the pandemic on the lives of trans and gender diverse populations in the SCOPUS search conducted. A notable study from Buspavanich et al (2021) in Germany and from Jones et al (2021) in the UK demonstrate heightened rates of poor mental health and clinical depression among trans and non-binary people due to a lack of access to gender-affirming resources and the ability of trans and non-binary people to live according to their gender. The COVID pandemic created an additional burden of lack of referrals a limited access to gender-affirming treatment, hair removal and binder services as well as access to mental health counselling and psychotherapy, which was linked to increased depressive symptoms. As such, we must consider here at this conference better ways of allowing access to services without physical presence, to look at new digital ways of supporting those in need of trans and non-binary healthcare, while acknowledging the continuing levels of displeasure and barriers to self-determining healthcare that is observed in the social and political science literature. Which brings me to a new book entitled: Sex/Gender and Self-determination: Policy Developments in Law, Health and Pedagogical Contexts (Davy, 2021b) which looks at the debates and issues surrounding the concept of self-determination when, in our case here, trans, non-binary and intersex people vis a vis cis people are treated inequitably when accessing treatments, and pedagogical spaces due to medicolegal frameworks surrounding their bodies, minds and desires.
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Riggs, D. W., Pearce, R., Pfeffer, C. A., Hines, S., White, F. R., & Ruspini, E. (2020). Men, trans/masculine, and non-binary people’s experiences of pregnancy loss: an international qualitative study. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 20(1), 482.
Riggs, D. W., Pfeffer, C. A., Pearce, R., Hines, S., & White, F. R. (2021). Men, trans/masculine, and non-binary people negotiating conception: Normative resistance and inventive pragmatism. International Journal of Transgender Health, 22(1-2), 6-17.
Rogers, C., Webberley, M., Mateescu, R., El Rakhawy, Y., Daly-Gourdialsing, A., & Webberley, H. (2021). A retrospective study of positive and negative determinants of gamete storage in transgender and gender-diverse patients. International Journal of Transgender Health, 22(1-2), 167-178.
Vincent, B., Erikainen, S., & Pearce, R. (Eds.). (2020). TERF Wars: Feminism and the fight for transgender futures. London: Sage.
Transforming Society ~ Towards a less pathologising life for trans people
Transforming Society article has been just been published https://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2022/01/19/towards-a-less-pathologising-life-for-trans-people/
Sex/gender and self-determination is OUT
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/sexgender-and-self-determination
Davy, Z., Santos, A. C., Bertone, C., Thoresen, R., & Wieringa, S. E. (Eds.). (2020). SAGE Handbook of Global Sexualities (Vol. 1 & 2). London: Sage.
This two-volume handbook about sexualities across the globe emerges at a time when the topic has acquired a recognizably new significance. Sexuality and sexual politics are again a key battlefield for the deep political cleavages of our time, a point of coalescence of current struggles on the fate of the modern subject and of a social organization based on gender binarism.
Sexuality captures the powerful connection between the personal and the political. The field of sexuality studies is expanding. Critical knowledge of sexuality, the questioning of an essentialist view of sexuality as the expression of the subject’s inner truth, is confronted today with powerful global tendencies to re-naturalize social hierarchies, with the reaffirmation of gender binarism and racialized boundaries. Politically, the rise of populism and the extreme-right in the Trump-era, fueled by related religious fundamentalisms, strengthens the responsibility of producing academically-sound work that can be widely read and used in our collective struggle for a fairer world. In the 21st century sexual freedom is met with both resilient oppressions that remain engrained in law and culture, and new forms of backlash perpetrated by self-proclaimed defenders of family values and children’s best interest.
The Vatican is not the only religious institution to have chosen the sexual as a major battlefield. Advocates of fundamentalist streams within Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam too enforce sexual-moral injunctions, typically targeting women and sexual and gender minorities to advance their moral-religious agendas.
The Handbook represents a sustained effort to cover an array of topics, disciplines and geographical locations, reflecting the field in its time. It is characterized by its timely, controversial and plural approach to sexualities. The Sage Handbook of Global Sexualities consists of two volumes, seven parts and 23 chapters.
Section 1, Understanding sexuality: epistemologies and methodological challenges, explores some of the methodological problems encountered by sexuality researchers.
A focus is trying to uncover how and why sexuality is a topic that comes with particular boundaries of what (ethically) can and cannot be done – as well as the implications these have for how we understand it, who has the authority to create those understandings and what epistemological and political parameters researchers are working within to get a glimpse of the topic area. The collection of chapters in this section suggest avenues to interrogate further, challenging previous understandings as societies across the world unfold and reconfigure sexuality through changing theoretical, epistemological, methodological, political and disciplinary conditions.
The chapters collected in section 2, Enforcing and challenging sexual norms, explore how norms render social life intelligible and at the same time discipline us into acceptable behaviors. They typically are sedimented in laws and customary and religious practices, and are instilled and (re) produced in the home, the educational sector and through the media. Tradition is often invoked to justify a certain normative order, but tradition is based on selective memory and subject to political and postcolonial mythmaking. Norms guide us in our daily decisions and govern our desires. Yet individual people do of course possess agency; though we don’t choose our desires we can make choices on how to live them. But not all choices are intelligible or acceptable. Those who do not live their gender or sexuality in accordance with prescribed norms are at risk in the political order they inhabit; they may be criminalized and stigmatized. Intelligibility of certain gendered and sexual norms varies in space and time, along axes of gender, age, ability, socio-economic status, religion and ethnicity. A central concept in this regard is heteronormativity which refers to a regime in which sexual conduct and kinship relations are organized in such a way that a particular form of heterosexuality becomes the culturally accepted ‘natural’ order.
In section 3,– Undoing sexual categories the ways how categories are developed and challenged are discussed. This section contains chapters on BDSM, polyamory, chronic illness and HIV-positive people, as well as on hijras in South Asia and the challenges of being queer and Xhosa.
Section 4, Sexuality and the market, takes a look at the social process and the marketization of sexuality. Intimate and sexual relations are often conceived as governed by different logics than those of market transactions. Under the modern, western construction of intimate relations, sexuality and economy are presented as “hostile worlds” that should avoid contamination. Yet topics such as the viagrization of older people’s sexuality, and the marketing of other forms of virility medicines as well as of genital cosmetic surgery refute this argument. HIV prevention, pornography and sex work also have distinct relations to the market economy.
Section 5, Sexual rights and citizenship (and the Governance of Sexuality), looks at how governments, law and rights have developed in various places across the world. Sexualities have informed citizenship from the outset, long before they became acknowledged as a constitutive element of the relationship between individuals and rights within and beyond the nation-state. Amongst the many criteria used to enforce hierarchies and to promote exclusion from equality were the different values ascribed to gendered and sexually embodied experiences.
Section 6, Sexuality and social movements, focuses on challenges to sexual governance. Sexuality has long played a role in social mobilization. Along with the global anti-slavery movement, activists and organizations pressing for women’s rights are often hailed as one of the earliest influential transnational advocacy networks. In subsequent years, movements led by feminists, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, people living with HIV/AIDS, sex workers, intersex people, and other constituencies have all emerged as powerful political forces. In distinctive ways, each of these movements around sex and sexuality has not only affected formal politics, but has reshaped cultural norms, patterns of material distribution, and even the language people use.
Section 7, Language and cultural representation explores movements in the linguistic and cultural characterization of global sexualities through various mediums. Language both reflects and creates sexual and gendered norms and practices as a force that is both (re)productive, disciplinary and transformative. In language and in cultural representation, certain (racial, religious, ethnic) sexualities can be naturalized or abjected. Language can be used to both hide and reveal gendered and sexual subjectivities and practices. Sexual and gender dissidents can use cultural and linguistic practices to (re)imagine and represent themselves; conversely, language can praise, denounce and punish. Infused with moral injunctions of sin and pathology, for example, language has functioned as a major tool of enforcing heteronormativity and of abjecting non-binary persons – and it still does so in particular political and cultural settings.
https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/the-sage-handbook-of-global-sexualities/book257059
also available as a Kindle Edition
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