Amy L. Stone

Containing pariah femininities: Lesbians in the sorority rush process:

Mimi Schippers (2007) theorizes that hegemonic femininity operates in relation to and support of hegemonic masculinity. According to Schippers, hegemonic femininity is maintained by the containment of pariah femininities, gender non-conforming femininities that may contaminate the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and femininity. We extend Schippers’ theory by analyzing the containment practices that are used to manage pariah femininities by examining the containment of lesbians in the sorority life of a liberal arts college in the USA. Using interviews and focus groups with sorority members, we demonstrate the way sorority members engage in subtle containment practices such as silencing to prevent lesbians from joining their sorority.

Flexible Queers, Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces

Queer spaces are significant for understanding transgender inclusion as “queer spaces were places where individuals were expected to be attentive to or aware of alternative possibilities for being, including non-normative formulations of bodies, genders, desires and practices” (Nash, 2011, p. 203). Indeed, in this interview study of members of a queer leather group called the Club, members described a flexible “sexual landscape” that easily includes transgender members. However, these same queer spaces have been criticized for the way they regulate queer bodies and organize queer subjectivities. In this study, queer members of the Club also contrasted playful queer flexibility with serious transgender bodies. This article argues that, although there is a reiterative relation between transgender inclusion and queer spaces, the idealization of flexibility within queer spaces can also serve to marginalize and regulate transgender bodies.

Diversity, Dissent, and Decision Making: The Challenge to LGBT Politics

Queer and radical criticisms of the LGBT movement have existed since the movements origins. Indeed, within any movement there are tensions between radicalism and liberalism, assimilation and separatism, and the role of professional or hierarchical organizations. Examining three recent publications on the LGBT movement, I argue that within the LGBT movement there is a tension between queer radicalism and professionalism (which is often conflated with homonormativity and assimilation.) As the national LGBT movement grew, it inevitably developed professional, formal organizations. Although a necessity in maintaining movement coherence and focus, professional organizations are also deeply problematic because of how they suppress dissent and radicalism. Professional organizations also incorporate corporate diversity culture, which is often staffed and led by white professionals and targets only visible and fundable identities such as race and gender.

From ‘Black people are not a homosexual act’ to ‘gay is the new Black’: mapping white uses of Blackness in modern gay rights campaigns in the United States

This paper examines the ways in which rhetorics of Blackness and civil rights have been deployed by Whites positioned on both sides of modern gay rights discourse in the United States. The authors argue that the contemporary deployment of Blackness by both gay and anti-gay movements concurrently is linked to the longstanding use of race on both sides of anti-gay referendum and initiative campaigns since the late 1970s, as well as to the even longer history of the racialization of homosexuality in Europe and the United States. The paper offers a brief history of the late nineteenth-century racial construction of homosexuality, which sets the stage for the later pairing of political discourses linking Blackness and homosexuality in the twentieth-century. Drawing on research of gay rights referendums and initiatives from 1977 to 2000, the paper then demonstrates how White religiously-motivated anti-gay activists relied upon divisive arguments about whether homosexuality is ‘like race’ to secularize and legitimize their campaigns. Furthermore, the authors show that White gay activists have adopted varying strategies as the lesbian and gay movement has evolved – from coalitional approaches that refused simplistic ‘like race’ arguments at the height of the gay liberation period, to color-blind ‘human rights’ frameworks in the 1990s, and more direct uses of race in the 2000s that mirror religious right rhetoric. The paper concludes with a discussion of the origins and effects of ‘gay rights versus Black rights’ discourses more broadly, and their implications for contemporary gay marriage debates.

Dominant tactics in social movement tactical repertoires: Anti-gay ballot measures, 1974–2008

This study theorizes about the development of dominant tactics within social movements, as certain tactics within a tactical repertoire are used frequently and imbued with ideological significance. Little research has been done on hierarchies within tactical repertoires, assuming that all tactics within a repertoire are equal. Between 1974 and 2008, the US Religious Right attempted over 200 anti-gay referendums and initiatives to retract or prevent gay rights laws. This research examines how the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement developed campaign tactics to fight these direct democracy measures. This research expands the existing literature on tactical repertoires by theorizing about the mechanisms by which tactics become dominant, namely, their affirmation by victories, responsiveness to countermovement escalation, and involvement of institutionalized social movement organizations to disseminate tactics. This research contradicts existing movement–countermovement literature that suggests that movements do not develop dominant tactics when mobilizing in opposition to a countermovement.

Gender Panics About Transgender Children in Religious Right Discourse

ABSTRACT This paper is a content analysis of political flyers and messages developed by Religious Right campaigns between 1974 and 2013 to fight legislation supportive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. The analysis focuses on 16 campaigns in which Religious Right groups made claims about transgender adults and children. In these messages (n = 60), transgender children are presented as similar to adults; campaigns frame these children as immutably gendered, confused, and sexually predatory. This research advances the body of literature on the adultification of minority children. I argue that transgender girls are adultified and sexualized rather than framed as innocent or imperiled, which perpetuates cisgender domination of transgender people.

Sexualities and Social Movements: Three Decades of Sex and Social Change

Social movements have been at the center of dramatic legal, political, and social change for marginalized sexualities for the last 30 years. These social changes include increase of supportive laws, policies, public opinion, cultural visibility, and affirming identities for alternative sexual practices, identities, and communities. This includes more positive visibility for sexual practices, identities, and communities around sexualities such as homosexuality, bisexuality, polyamory, sex work, and BDSM. There have been, of course, limitations to these social changes, as many sexualities are still stigmatized or legally marginalized. This chapter considers the role that social movements play in the social transformation of gender and sexuality with attention to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) movement.

“You’re Really Just a Gay Man in a Woman’s Body!”: The Possibilities and Perils of Queer Sexuality

Queer theory has long argued for the liberatory potential of separating masculinity from men. This article examines whether and how masculinities can be radically transgressive for individuals and simultaneously re-create gendered systems of inequality. In two case studies—a drag troupe and a queer leather club—we find that the cultivated queer sexualities were mimetic iterations of sexual practices among gay men and came rife with both the possibilities and problematics of these real and imagined tropes. We trace the consequences of this in two processes: the eroticization and self-exploration of masculinity and the reliance on validation from gay men. We find that the empowering sexualities taken up by individuals were concurrently rooted in and reproduced sexist meanings of desire and sexual agency. In so doing, we contribute to sociological understanding of masculinities by charting how androcentrism is reproduced in some groups, with or without the presence of male bodies.

Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism

illustration of this fact, toward the end of the book, Hondagneu-Sotelo watches as an informant from a modest urban community garden visits the wealthy, formal, speciespacked botanical garden. Before our eyes, two different ways of experiencing the cultivation and enjoyment of plants unfold in tandem, and each is neatly crystallized for the reader. It is a moving moment and one of the many pleasures of this engaging book.

Gay and Lesbian Movements

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by D. Altman, volume 9, pp. 5895–5899,