Sally R Munt

Murder by the book? Feminism and the crime novel

Murder by the Book? is a thorough - and thoroughly enjoyable - look at the blossoming genre of the feminist crime novel in Britain and the United States. Sally R. Munt asks why the form has proven so attractive as a vehicle for oppositional politics; whether the pleasures of detective fiction can be truly transgressive; and when exactly it was that the dyke detective appeared as the new super-hero for today. Along the way Munt poses some critical questions about the relations between fiction and activism, politics and representations, the writer and the reader. This will be an important book both for addicts of the genre and for students and their students.

Virtually Belonging: Risk, Connectivity, and Coming Out On-Line

This essay examines a self-defined, lesbian on-line community focusing on the construction and performance of identity in relation to coming out on-line. Coming out is a central narrative form in the construction of lesbian identity. In considering the implications of coming out in an on-line community, issues of privacy and public space are central. Coming out on-line can be seen as both an alternative to, and augmentation of, coming out off-line. Questioning whether this on-line community sustains performative utterances, the authors explore the relationships between on-line and off-line locales. The construction of boundaries is considered in an analysis of how sexualized bodies emerge in virtual spaces.

Shame/pride dichotomies in Queer As Folk

Queer As Folk, an eight-part gay drama scheduled in February, March, and April 1999, was seen by Channel 4’s Chief Executive Michael Jackson as a signature show that would help to develop the channel’s distinctive place in British broadcasting for radical, experimental, minority television. The programme has subsequently developed iconic value for Channel 4, appearing on much of their publicity material and mission statements, signifying the sincerity of their liberal credentials. The shorter, two-part sequel, Queer As Folk 2, screened in February 2000, similarly received significant pre-exposure in a number of media domains. This essay will explore the encoding of gay identity within the series. Queer As Folk was a huge hit with gay, lesbian and straight women audiences; it functioned as a popular cross-over text carrying complex enjoyment to some diverse viewing positions. My point here is not to poison those pleasures but to unwrap some of the paradoxes of the narrative dichotomies inscribed.

Journeys of resilience: the emotional geographies of refugee women

This article considers the emotional geographies of a highly vulnerable demographic: refugee women. As a marginalised and ontologically fragile group, refugees have developed rich and perceptive insight on space and place, by developing a critical vigilance that reflects forward and back on their life journeys, real and metaphorical. Through participation in a psycho-educational course designed by the author, nine women produced their own images of resilience, in creative exercises that provided ‘landmarks’ of recognition for other participants. Via participation in this temporary ‘community of practice’, therefore, another journey was taken; this article will also consider the epistemology of that itinerary using interdisciplinary insights from geography, cultural studies, cognitive behavioural therapy and gender studies.

Sensory geographies and defamiliarisation: migrant women encounter Brighton Beach

Abstract This article’s starting point is a sensory, reflexive walk taken on Brighton seafront and beach, by fourteen migrant women and some of their children. It goes on to open up a wider discussion about the cultural politics and affective resonances, for refugees and migrants, of beaches. By discussing their sensory experiences of the beach, we begin to understand their ‘ostranenie’, or defamiliarisation, of making the familiar strange. We also see how evocative such sense-making can be, as the women compare their past lives to this, perceiving their lifeworld through a filter of migrancy. The article goes onto discuss the broader cultural symbolism of beaches, which are a site of contestation over national values, boundaries and belonging. As well as discussing sensory methodology in this article, and explaining the locale of Brighton Beach itself, it concludes with some wider thinking of the cultural politics of beach spaces and migrant perceptions.

‘I Teach Therefore I Am’: Lesbian Studies in the Liberal Academy

The article discusses the origins of Lesbian Studies as arising out of an intellectually engaged grassroots lesbian community and an emergent Womens Studies within the academy. The article contrasts Lesbian Studies in the UK with the USA, which has ‘professionalized’ work in Lesbian and Gay Studies, which concomitantly has produced its own problems. Feminism bequeathed to Lesbian Studies the axiom ‘the personal is political’ and this is discussed as both a positive and a negative inheritance. The academy itself collapses the personal on to the Lesbian Studies lecturer which produces particular pressures from students, colleagues, the institution, and upon ones own intellectual trajectory in the form of the ‘taint’ of subjectivity. Finally the article attempts to identify an ambivalent relationship to liberalism which has made a limited space for Lesbian Studies but also continues to seek to police that sphere.

Pride and Prejudice: Legalizing Compulsory Heterosexuality in New York's Annual St. Patrick's Day Parades

This article discusses the successful legal exclusion of Irish lesbians and gays from the St. Patricks Day parade in New York and explores the ideologies of nation-space and public space that underpin this exclusion. It argues that the progression through urban space of the marches enforces compulsory heterosexuality, through actual and semiotic exclusion. Irish American nationalism can be read as illustrative of the heterosexualization of nationalism. It was the unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish that provided the fundamental premise from which it was logically and successfully argued in U.S. courts: that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. By contrast, the article holds up the parades in Cork and Dublin as designated inclusive and multicultural events, the nation-space of the Irish Republic economically liberated and wishing to communicate modernity to its citizens.

A queer undertaking: anxiety and reparation in the HBO television drama series 'Six Feet Under'

The USA television drama Six Feet Under ended after five successful seasons, in 2005. Created by Alan Ball, who also wrote and directed many of the subsequent episodes, the aesthetic of Six Feet Under manages to combine camp, dark humour with a contrasting tragic seriousness concerned with negotiating an ethics of love and death. This humour is manifested through the surreal content, for example in the bizarre and witty modes of death in the opening scene of each episode; the mischievously gothic representation of corpses and body parts; sentimentalism; musical and hallucinatory cameos; talking ghosts and sixpenny crooners; gruesome satire around death and the death industry; and an affectionately ironic melodrama. Six Feet Under has inscribed a gay aesthetic; this has much to do with its production context, with the programmes writers, producers, and directors. It is infused with the American experience of AIDS and death upon the gay aesthetic in the late twentieth century. Six Feet Under also deals with class in a complicated fashion—one might risk saying it has an uncanny, or queer rendition of class positions and relations.

Angels and the dragon king's daughter: gender, sexuality in Western Buddhist new religious movements

Abstract Through colonialism and globalization, Buddhism has developed an increasing profile in the West. This can be observed within popular culture as well as the presence of Buddhist practitioners from a range of ethnicities of whom a significant number are converts. This presence has led to the development of Buddhist new religious movements (NRMs). We first outline interpretations of gender and sexuality that have arisen within Buddhist traditions. Then, using Linda Woodheads (2007) model that theorises religions positioning with respect to gender, we discuss gender norms that have developed for two of the largest Buddhist NRMs in the UK: the Triratna Buddhist Community (TBC, formerly the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, FWBO) and the Nichiren group Sōka-Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK). Through examining new empirical data, we explore how their gender norms are negotiated by members. We note that within these movements, women, queer people and people of colour are creating provisional spaces that challenge attempts to hegemonize hetero-patriarchal perspectives.

Is there a feminist in this text? Ten years (1979–1989) of the lesbian novel: A retrospective

The decade 1979–1989 saw an explosion of lesbian fiction, partly as a result of the Womens Liberation Movement during the 1970s. This article looks at the relationship between lesbianism and feminism, as it is manifested in the novel, taking a few paradigmatic texts, such as The Wanderground (1979), Zami (1982), Relatively Norma (1982), Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), She Came Too Late (1986), Heartbreak on the High Sierra (1989), and the anthology Serious Pleasure (1989). Explorations into the identity and literary form signify an increasing amount of self-consciousness within the category “lesbian fiction,” which reflects the problematization of both the Lesbian, and the Literary.