Archive - Topic - Gender and Identities

Affect is not an expression of transsexuality but is, rather, the definitive condition of it. --Lucas Cassidy Crawford, “Transgender Without Organs?” Transsexuality offers a dramatic instance of the temporal instability of the flesh. It sets embodiment in motion. --Susan Stryker, “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology.” [1] No body seems...

“Just the term ‘black women’ conjures up thoughts of an overweight, dark-skinned, loud, poorly educated person with gold teeth yelling at somebody in public. I hope that doesn’t make me racist but honestly that’s the 1st thing I think of.”- Lee, middle class white male in his 30’s, from Florida...

Introduction: The new folk devils [1] In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, their classic application of cultural studies, political economy, and critical race studies to the interrogation of "crime," Stuart Hall and his co-authors from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of...

[1] The history of black feminist theory relates black women’s sexuality as silence or dissemblance (Hammonds, Hine, Spillers). With continued sexual exploitation of black women and girls, increasing attention to male rape in prisons, misogyny in popular culture, and homophobia in black communities, the discourse of silence reigns supreme, but...

[1] Images of ideal masculinity in Singapore are, as in any society, unstable and subject to ongoing modification. Local imperatives have brought about adaptations to normative masculinities, but interaction with global dynamics and market forces has also introduced new possibilities for the reinscription of masculinity. The rise of the “New...

[1] The notion of genre has long proved useful as an organising category for scholars approaching popular British television drama. For example, relatively early academic work on the soap opera (Dyer, Ang, Geraghty), the detective or police series (Clarke, Sparks) and the costume drama (Brandt), placed these popular genres firmly...

[1] Soon after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, the abject figure of the burqa-clad woman awaiting freedom was publicized by the State Department as a major justification for the war. This recycling of a familiar nineteenth-century colonial narrative of saving brown women was accompanied by the renewed popularity...

[1] This article addresses gender and popular music-making in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand, a moderately prosperous provincial city (population 130,000) which services a large rural sector (the Waikato). Starting from the observation that few women enroll in tertiary commercial music courses in Hamilton, I aim to examine both...

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’m sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that...

[1] Scholars have recently begun to create theoretical models that help us to register important differences within contemporary transgendered identifications. In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble denaturalized norms of gender and sexuality, performing a critique of prior feminist work on gender that not only influenced subsequent directions in feminist studies...