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Erotic capital and erotic dividends Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Beth Montemurro, Elizabeth Hughes
Sexualities scholars have developed the idea of erotic capital, that is the characteristics that make someone sexually desirable in specific contexts. While much of the literature focuses on those who either possess or lack erotic capital, and how erotic capital manifests within sexual and dating situations, few studies pursue what happens after erotic capital is used to attract a partner or how individuals
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Book Review: The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Manning Zhang
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‘Send Nudes?’: Teens’ perspectives of education around sexting, an argument for a balanced approach Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Giselle Natassia Woodley, Lelia Green, Carmen Jacques
This paper explores teens’ perceptions of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) around sexting (the exchange of sexually explicit imagery). Adopting a ‘sex-positive’ balanced approach to adolescents’ digital expressions of sexuality may be a more beneficial response than censure since fear-based narratives fail to recognise sexting as part of an array of sexual behaviours enacted by teens. Prohibition
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Solving puzzles, playing games: The potential and pitfalls of entertainment education in teaching about sexuality Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Marijke Naezer, Willemijn Krebbekx
This paper explores the potential of entertainment education (EE) in teaching about sexuality, especially in terms of (1) addressing gaps and instigating an approach that is more (2) youth-centred and (3) norm-critical than conventional sex education. Based on the analysis of five projects in the Netherlands (escape room, educational theatre performance, interactive website, offline game, VR production)
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We are queer and the struggle is here! Visibility at the intersection of LGBT+ rights, post-coloniality, and development cooperation in Uganda Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Jakob Svensson, Emil Edenborg, Cecilia Strand
This article unpacks different meanings of visibility and adds to a more complex and nuanced understanding of visibility and its role in LGBT + activism in Uganda, a widely discussed case of political homophobia. Public visibility has a central, although contested, role here. The study aims to explore how visibility is understood and navigated by local LGBT + activists, unaffiliated people with same-sex
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Domesticity and the construction of intimacy: Producing the erotic body and self within ‘the love nest’ Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Liza Tsaliki, Despina Chronaki
Following recent academic attention on the neoliebral self, in this article, we situate the construction of the sexual self and body as part of an ongoing, neoliberal ‘aesthetic entrepreneurship’ and argue that people draw on various material and cultural resources in order to put these entrepreneurial selves together. Drawing on 40 open-ended interviews with young Greek adults aged between 20 and
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Erotic habitus and collapsed masculinity in male-dominated spaces: The case of the no Fap relapse spaces Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Steven Dashiell, Alexis Rowland
This paper examines how men in online discourses are constrained by sexual ideals, and use curated discourses in an effort to empower their social selves. Drawing from Adam Green’s work, we speculate that an erotic habitus surrounding sexual ideas allows men who see themselves besieged by porn and masturbation addiction to craft specific male-oriented language. In this paper, we demonstrate how men
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Unpacking categorizations in researching GBTIQ+ parents Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2024-01-16 Carole Ammann
In this article, based on anthropological research conducted in the Netherlands and Switzerland, I show the diversity and multi-faceted nature of GBTIQ+ (gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer) parenting. In contrast to recent research on GBTIQ+ parents, which often distinguishes between parents who have children through a (former) heterosexual encounter, adoption, fostering, surrogacy, co-parenting
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‘Looking back, I don’t quite recognise myself’: Narratives of the past in prostitution Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Theresa Dyrvig Henriksen, Margaretha Järvinen
This paper uses George Herbert Mead’s theory on time and the self in an analysis of qualitative interviews with sex sellers in Denmark. We show how exit from prostitution is associated with a gradu...
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Gratitude to Ken Plummer Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Gloria González-López
The author weaves her favorite quotes from Ken Plummer’s celebrated book, Telling Sexual Stories with her own voice to offer a modest tribute and express her gratitude to him. In this exercise of c...
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Ken Plummer’s contributions to the study of sexualities and beyond Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Travis SK Kong, Arlene Stein
This special issue pays tribute to and critically engages with the work of Ken Plummer, the founder of this journal. A distinguished sociologist who taught at the University of Essex for thirty yea...
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“A very risky queer thing to do”: In conversation with Ken Plummer Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Arlene Stein, Travis S. K. Kong
A conversation about the different generational experiences of LGBT academics and the changing status of sexuality and queer studies. Ken Plummer, Arlene Stein and Travis Kong, longtime colleagues ...
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Homo narrans: A transdisciplinary reading of Ken Plummer’s narrative sociology Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Rebecca Babirye, James Farrer
The most significant and lasting contributions of Ken Plummer to the sociology of sexuality have been his work on sexual storytelling. Best represented in Plummer’s 1995 book Telling Sexual Stories...
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Contested intersections: Asexuality and disability, illness, or trauma Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Anna Kurowicka
This article analyzes the personal writings of asexual people for whom their identity is connected to disability, illness, or trauma. Asexuality is typically understood as an inherent sexual orient...
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BDSM and total power exchange: Between inclusion and exclusion Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Ofer Parchev
In recent decades, BDSM as a form of power exchange has gained partial recognition and social inclusion in the public sphere. The inclusive process comes with the price of excluding concrete behavi...
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Journeying with Ken Plummer through radical constructionism, critical humanism and intimate counterpublics Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-26 Christian Klesse
Ken Plummer’s life work has had a major impact on the development of the sociology of sexuality. While being firmly rooted in and committed to the traditions of pragmatism and symbolic interactioni...
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Ken Plummer, editor Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-24 Feona Attwood
Many of the relationships described in this special issue, put together to honour the work of Ken Plummer, focus on Essex connections, intergenerational friendships, or particular intellectual conc...
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Young women’s sexual agency, relationality, and vulnerability: The Israeli case study of “attacking” Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-21 Rachel Levi Herz, Miri Rozmarin
The sexual agency of young women is constructed within various discourses that articulate multiple and conflicting social imperatives, such that they need to account for their sexual and social vul...
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Playing with straight lines and queer times: Children engaging with romantic love within and beyond heteronormative temporalities Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Lena Sotevik
This article explores how life schedules and life courses that are organized chronologically become part of normalized heterosexuality in children’s conversations and play. The analysis draws on et...
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An “Academic Homosexual”: Ken Plummer and the National Deviancy Conference Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Janice M Irvine
Like all scholars, Ken’s work was shaped at the intersection of his personal experiences and the complexities of his historical moment. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming an “academic ...
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Appreciation, admiration and affection Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Jeff Hearn
As you get older, a couple of things happen – the probability of your own dying increases, and so too does that of friends. So, recently there have been the deaths of some very good friends and col...
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Ken Plummer: What it is to be human Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Jeffrey Weeks
Ken Plummer’s career embraced a range of interests, and disparate interventions but is marked by a remarkable consistency, rooted in a profound humanistic understanding of the social world. This is...
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Hypercategorization and hypersexualization: How webcam platforms organize performers and performances Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Hanne M Stegeman, Olav Velthuis, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, Thomas Poell
Webcam sex platforms simultaneously host thousands of live performances. To allow users to explore these, platforms categorize. On porn sites, this has led to extremely detailed, hypercategorized c...
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Fangirling and a sociology of fucking Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-14 RF Plante
The last time I saw Ken Plummer was in Lancaster, England in 2018. He was gently and kindly listening to a younger sociologist talking about trying to do sexualities scholarship in a challenging Br...
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Developing parenthood through giving birth to a dead child – bereaved lesbian mothers’ maternity care experiences in Scandinavia Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Idun Røseth, Dorte Hvidtjørn, Bente Dahl
This phenomenological study uses in-depth interviews to explore how six lesbian couples experience the loss of a child in the perinatal period. Our findings revealed the importance of developing qu...
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Ken Plummer Memorial Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Jodi O’Brien
Jodi O'Brien remembers Ken Plummer.
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Queer legibility and the refugee status determination process Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Lotte Wolff, Brandy Cochrane
It is well documented that LGBTIQ+ applicants face a multitude of stereotypes and biases from decision-makers worldwide. We build on literature that argues that there is an unspoken component of cr...
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The Black pill pipeline: A process-tracing analysis of the Incel’s continuum of violent radicalization Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Robert Green, Kurt Fowler, Allan Palombi
Incels represent a subculture born on the Internet and unified by their inability to establish and maintain sexual relationships with women. When new members enter, they are placed at the beginning...
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Queerly departed: Queer viral socialities and Caribbean migrant desires Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 David AB Murray
In this paper I explore the transnational journeys of a group of queer HIV positive (HIV+) Caribbean migrants moving between Canada and the Caribbean. I focus on queer orientations and viral status...
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Mobile intimacies? Uncertainty, ambivalence and fluidity in the intimate practices of dating app users in Germany and the UK Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Andrea Newerla, Jenny van Hooff
Research on dating app practices has drawn on a dichotomous conception of love and sex, with users viewed as seeking either casual sex or a committed relationship. Drawing on qualitative interview ...
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Interactions and intersections Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Diane Richardson
This ‘thank you note’ pays tribute, albeit briefly, to the enormous contribution Ken Plummer’s work has made to sociology and to the study of sexualities in particular. He played a pioneering role ...
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Vexed in the city: Femme Failure in the World of Carrie Bradshaw and the “Long-Winded Lady” Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Edward O’Rourke
Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of HBO’s Sex and the City, remains a talking point of pop culture. Tutued flâneuse, Bradshaw succeeds a long line of unconventional, feminist pathfinders, of whom Maeve Bre...
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The ‘good gay’ versus chemsex: The articulation of a homonormative response Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-03-24 Daniel Joloy
Responses to chemsex have largely fluctuated between punishment, moral censure and indifference and have been weaponised to justify anti-drug policies and to protect established norms of gender and...
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The Elle Woods effect: Being “girled” while reclaiming girliness Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-03-22 Jocelyne Bartram Scott
Using a case study of Elle Woods from Legally Blonde (2001), I assert that sorority communities are a prime example of the powerful impact of femmephobia in popular culture. Drawn from qualitative ...
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Mozambican “tolerance” toward homosexuality: Lusotropicalist myth and homonationalism Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Francisco PV Miguel
In this article, the result of ethnographic research on the LGBT community over the last five years in Mozambique, I will deal theoretically with a hegemonic elite discourse alleging tolerance of h...
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Editorial Introduction: Special Section on older-age migrants and sexualities Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Aija Lulle, Cornelia Schweppe
Research on migration in older age has been flourishing during the recent years. However, motives and experiences related to love, sexuality and intimacy are still a sensitive desideratum in older-...
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‘It’s a generational thing, really’. Understandings of sexual rights in a digital age Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Sanna Spišák
Deriving from a large-scale research project on intimacy in data-driven culture in Finland, I build on a sub-study examining Finland’s presumed sexual digital divide between generations. I analysed...
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Love, sex, and other dangers – intimate partner relationships of young ethnic queers in Aotearoa New Zealand Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Camille Nakhid, Lourdes Vano, Makanaka Tuwe, Zina Abu Ali
Open and long-term intimate partner relationships are missing from the landscape of the queer ethnic community in Aotearoa New Zealand. For young ethnic queers, this lack of visibility denies them ...
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“Any cosmo girl would’ve known”: Collaboration, feminine knowledge, and Femme theory in Legally Blonde Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-26 Andi Schwartz
In 2001, the film Legally Blonde was released into a pop cultural landscape saturated with the Spice Girls’ brand of feminism-lite and postfeminist media texts like Sex and the City (1998–2004). Wi...
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Iatrogenic effects of Reboot/NoFap on public health: A preregistered survey study Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Nicole Prause, James Binnie
“Reboot,” especially NoFap, promotes abstinence from masturbation and/or pornography to treat “pornography addiction,” an unrecognized diagnosis. While the intention of Reboot/NoFap is to decrease ...
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Algorithmic heteronormativity: Powers and pleasures of dating and hook-up apps Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Diana C. Parry, Eric Filice, Corey W. Johnson
We propose the concept of algorithmic heteronormativity to describe the ways in which dating apps’ digital architectures are informed by and perpetuate normative sexual ideologies. Situating our in...
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Gender, sexuality and race: An intersectional analysis of racial consumption and exclusion in Birmingham’s gay village Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Melindy Duffus, Ben Colliver
Queer spaces have gained increasing attention academically with a range of studies exploring the construction of such spaces. This article addresses the spatial and social practices and processes t...
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Bye bye romance, welcome reputation: An analysis of the digital enclosure of dating Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Carolina Bandinelli, Alberto Cossu
In contemporary ‘platformised’ societies, digital businesses play a key role in producing and reproducing romantic cultures. In this article, we explore how the digital industry of dating has trans...
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Controlling the narrative, examining the self: The unruly femme subjectivity of Fleabag Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Aviva Dove-Viebahn
This article challenges conventions of normative femininity and popular feminism by examining the television show Fleabag (2016–2019) and the destabilizing tendencies of its unnamed protagonist (Ph...
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Hijra, trans, and the grids of “passing” Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Salman Hussain
This paper examines the contestation about khwajasara corporeality—legal, medical and activist claims about the khwajasara body—and how it has been subjected to state projects of welfare and citize...
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“It’s hard to know what we should be doing”: LGBTQ+ students’ library privacy in the COVID-19 pandemic Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Michele A. L. Villagran, Darra Hofman
Given both the historical and ongoing surveillance and policing of marginalized communities, contact tracing, and other pandemic control measures pose additional dangers to marginalized communities...
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Bold resistance: Developing tenets of femme analysis for an era of popular feminism Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Sarah Kornfield, Chloe Long
Feminist analyses of postfeminism too often abject femininity, rendering spectacular femininity as a masquerade that endears women to heterosexual men. Moving into the era of popular feminism, femi...
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Changeable sexualities and fluid masculinities: The intersections of sexual fluidity with hegemonic masculinity Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-24 Rita Grave, Ana R Pinho, António M Marques, Conceição Nogueira
This article explores the concept of sexual fluidity and its applicability to men’s sexual experiences by approaching the surveillance and control of hegemonic masculinity. We carried out semi-stru...
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Performing smart sexual selves: A sexual scripting analysis of youth talk about internet pornography Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-22 Siobhan Healy-Cullen, Tracy Morison, Joanne E Taylor, Kris Taylor
In this article, we explore young New Zealanders’ use of sexual scripts in talk about Internet pornography (IP) to perform ‘smart’ sexual selves. Using sexual scripting theory, as developed by femi...
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“Strength and courage in a wonderbra”: Femininity, drag, and the spice girls Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-21 Maayan Padan
The Spice Girls were a unique pop phenomenon, promoting feminist ideology while being dismissed as proponents of postfeminism and positioned as collaborators with the patriarchy. Drawing on music v...
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“I wish people knew that there are other flavors” Reflections on the representation of poly-kink in mainstream media by polyamorous kinksters in the Netherlands Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Suzanne van der Beek, Laura Thomas
Although studies have remarked upon the increase in representation of kinksters and BDSM practices in mainstream media narratives, community voices indicate that these narratives do not provide an ...
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Stretched kinship: Queer female university students negotiating family and identity Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-16 Annaliese Boyd, John Wei
For lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer + people, family and peer support are often important in their identity development during early adulthood. Young queer adults who have moved out o...
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How homophobic propaganda produces vernacular prejudice in authoritarian states Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Jeremy Morris
An understanding of gendered homophobia in authoritarian states like Russia provides insights into intolerance as a function of propaganda. What is the effect on ordinary attitudes of “political ho...
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“Digital kink obscurity: A sexual politics beyond visibility and comprehension” Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Jenny Sundén
Based on an interview-driven ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this article explores digital kink expressions at a moment when kink communities are ...
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Grindr? it’s a “Blackmailer’s goldmine”! The weaponization of queer data publics Amid the US–China trade conflict Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-12-26 David Myles
In March 2019, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) identified Grindr, a hookup app that predominantly caters to men who have sex with men, as a “national security threa...
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Do you have to have sex to have sex? Defining sex in British law and medicine from the 1950s Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-12-25 David A Griffiths, Katherine A Hubbard
Sex has at least two different but related meanings: a biological property that bodies can seemingly ‘have’, and a set of bodily practices that one or more people can ‘have’. In the 1950s, the endo...
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The big picture: Representation of LGBTQ characters and themes in picture books available in the United States 1972-2018 Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Hubert Izienicki
The number of LGBTQ picture books—literary works for children containing lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer characters and themes—has increased considerably since 2000. While different segmen...
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Rape culture: sexual intimidation and partner rape among youth in sexually diverse relationships Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Emmanuel Mayeza
South African studies on rape culture have examined this issue in relation to heterosexuality. They demonstrate how toxic masculinity exercises sexual power by victimizing women and girls. However,...
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Mundane matters: Mapping the becomings of heterosexual girlhood in the emerging sexual cultures of elementary school children Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Eveliina Puutio, Tuija Huuki, Suvi Pihkala
This article explores the vital roles of matter in the emerging sexual cultures of elementary school children. Based on a case study of a seven-year-old girl, it draws from ethnographic research on...
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Becoming aware of your gender and sexual identity: Narrative experiences, intersecting identities, and healthcare implications Sexualities (IF 1.524) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Julie L Nagoshi, Vijayan K Pillai, Craig T Nagoshi, Kris L Hohn, Louis M Lindley
Eleven self-identified gay/lesbian individuals were interviewed about the age at which they became aware of their gender and sexual identity and whether they recalled specific life events associate...