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Recent cases of teen suicide linked with homophobic bullying have thrust the issue of school safety into the national spotlight. In “Don’t Be So Gay!” Queers, Bullying, and Making Schools Safe, Donn Short considers the effectiveness of safe-school legislation. Drawing on interviews with queer youth and their allies in the Toronto area, Short concludes that current legislation is more responsive than proactive. Moreover, cultural influences and peer pressure may be more powerful than legislation in shaping the school environment. Exploring how students’ own experiences, ideas, and definitions of safety might be translated into policy reform, this book offers a fresh perspective on a hotly debated issue.
This volume analyses the terms “camp” and “the closet” in Alan Hollinghurst’s fiction, since all four of his novels – The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), The Folding Star (1993), The Spell (1998), and The Line of Beauty (2004) – investigate the gay male experience throughout the late-twentieth century. The book analyses these terms in Hollinghurst’s work in order to find out whether the author writes from the margin or from the centre to recreate the origin. Gay subjectivities are of great concern to this study, though it is not a product of identity politics, given the latter’s propensity to re-establish the binary structure of the Western thought. As such, this book explores how Hollinghurst, by camping and closeting the gay male, re-produces homosexuality as a distinct identity with a subculture of its own.
LGBTQ kids reveal what it’s like to be young and queer today Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as children and adolescents. This groundbreaking and timely consideration of queer identity demons...
Living in the Merry Ghetto reframes how people use music to build resistance. Author Trever Hagen addresses the social context of illegal music-making in Czechoslovakia during state socialism. He tells the story of a group of rock'n'roll musicians who went underground after 1968, building a parallel world from where they could flourish: the Merry Ghetto. The book examines the case of the Czech Underground and the politics of their music and their way of life, paying close attention to the development of the ensemble The Plastic People of the Universe. Taking in multiple political transitions from the 1940s-2000s, the story focuses on non-official cultural practices such as listening to forei...
Gay life has become increasingly open in the last decade. In Beyond the Closet , Steven Seidman, a well-known author and leading scholar in sexuality, is the first to chronicle this lifestyle change and to look at the lives of contemporary gays and lesbians to see how their "out" status has changed. This compelling, well-written, and smart account is an important step forward for the gay and lesbian community.
`The creation of a new field of lesbian and gay studies over the past thirty years has been a fascinating project. This volume brings together key authors in the field in 26 major essays and provides a clear sense of just how much has been achieved. It is a guide to the state of the art, and invaluable for scholars throughout the world' - Ken Plummer, Professor of Sociology, University of Essex; and Editor of Sexualities `This book is unique in lesbian and gay studies. From politics to health, cyber-queers to queer families, the review essays in this volume cover all the important bases of GLB history and politics. The Introduction is a simple and accessible overview of the changing faces of...
Breaking new ground, both substantively and stylistically, Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, Second Edition offers students and academics an engaging, thought-provoking introduction and overview of the social study of sexualities. Its central premise is to explore the social construction of sexuality, the role of social differences such as race or nationality in creating sexual variation, and the ways sex is entangled in relations of power and inequality. Through this approach the field of sexuality is considered in multicultural, global, and comparative terms, and from a truly social perspective. The second edition of this definitive textbook consists of over seventy-five short, origin...
In Syndicate Women, sociologist Chris M. Smith uncovers a unique historical puzzle: women composed a substantial part of Chicago organized crime in the early 1900s, but during Prohibition (1920–1933), when criminal opportunities increased and crime was most profitable, women were largely excluded. During the Prohibition era, the markets for organized crime became less territorial and less specialized, and criminal organizations were restructured to require relationships with crime bosses. These processes began with, and reproduced, gender inequality. The book places organized crime within a gender‐based theoretical framework while assessing patterns of relationships that have implications for non‐criminal and more general societal issues around gender. As a work of criminology that draws on both historical methods and contemporary social network analysis, Syndicate Women centers the women who have been erased from analyses of gender and crime and breathes new life into our understanding of the gender gap.
Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention An unprecedented contemporary account of the online and offline lives of rural LGBT youth From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker’s Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today’s rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its deso...
Growing Up America brings together new scholarship that considers the role of children and teenagers in shaping American political life during the decades following the Second World War. Growing Up America places young people—and their representations—at the center of key political trends, illuminating the dynamic and complex roles played by youth in the midcentury rights revolutions, in constructing and challenging cultural norms, and in navigating the vicissitudes of American foreign policy and diplomatic relations. The authors featured here reveal how young people have served as both political actors and subjects from the early Cold War through the late twentieth-century Age of Fracture. At the same time, Growing Up America contends that the politics of childhood and youth extends far beyond organized activism and the ballot box. By unveiling how science fairs, breakfast nooks, Boy Scout meetings, home economics classrooms, and correspondence functioned as political spaces, this anthology encourages a reassessment of the scope and nature of modern politics itself.