Ageing masculinities and the nation: disrupting boundaries of sexualities,mobilities and identities

This article draws from a large-scale comparative project to focus on ‘ageing masculinities’ of second-generation Greek-American returnee migrants. In deconstructing multiple hegemonies (ethnicity, nation, patriarchy), the article explores how narratives of longing, belonging, family and kinship, as both experiential and storied accounts of self-imaging, become entangled through migration with social and personal his/stories, childhood upbringings and life-course stages. The analysis aims to explore the tensions and dynamics between structural, individual and cultural factors with respect to masculinities, and to elaborate on the contextualisation of masculinities in specific relational settings in later life. It is suggested that theoretical insights gained from a hermeneutical phenomenological analysis that is attentive to both the emotional/affective and gendered meanings of being and self-identity are important in empirically grounded studies of gender and migration. Such an analytical lens allows issues of masculinity and hegemony to be addressed and contributes to understanding transnational accounts of gendered power relations.     

Roller derby's publicness: toward greater recognition of diverse genders and sexualities in the Bible Belt

While scholars have considered the various meanings of roller derby for participants and discussed how roller derby critiques and stabilizes gender and sexuality normativity, their investigation into how a larger public is impacted by roller derby's public performances has received less attention. Here, we begin to address this oversight. Employing both participant and spectator data, we examine facets of publicness in the discursive and material spatial practices associated with roller derby in the US Bible Belt, specifically Oklahoma. While some scholars doubt that there is much social impact from roller derby, we suggest that the specific spatial qualities in roller derby's public performances, in both the sporting and playful senses, contribute to a change in cultural norms – that of greater recognition of diverse genders and sexualities in this region. Such validation increases the social stability of individuals who do not neatly reside within heteronormativity.     

Sexual crime in the Irish Free State 1922–33: its nature,extent and reporting

This paper explores sexual crime in the Irish Free State through the utilisation of hitherto unexamined files held in the National Archives in Dublin. An exploration of these files has provided a deepening understanding of the realities of sexual crime, societal attitudes towards it and the views of those charged with protecting the public. The files also provide valuable insights into attitudes towards female sexuality, the nation's youth and the rights of children. Additionally, the files have facilitated the widest study, to date, of the reporting of sexual offences trials by local and national newspapers – a study that shows that the overwhelming majority of sexual crime prosecutions were never reported in the nation's press and that those that were, were reported in ways that obscured the actual nature of the offence or portrayed them as alien, non-Irish crimes committed by outsiders. The article demonstrates that sexual crime in the Free State was an ideological as well as a law enforcement issue in a newly emerging state sensitive to the views of its enemies and the outside world and insecure about its place in it, a nation that legitimised itself, in no small part, as a beacon of Celtic Catholic purity in a world otherwise sullied by sin.     

Remapping disclosure: gay men's segmented journeys of moving out and coming out

Drawing on recent work that examines the contingent, personal nature of queer migration, this paper provides empirical support for recent claims that coming-out journeys are more complex than the linear, often rural-to-urban typologies that have framed them during the past two decades. Since coming-out journeys are rarely elaborated beyond a conceptual level, overly teleological understandings involving homophobic, rural places, inclusive urban homelands, and one-time, linear ‘flights’ and ‘escapes’ persist. Employing the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men who settled in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, USA, this paper challenges the linearity and finality of coming-out migration by highlighting particular segments of the journey. These include short-term trips to scout the gay life potentials of places, migrations that result in a degree of re-entry into ‘the closet,’ relocations that allow men to test or try on different places and identities, and moves (or imminent moves) that ‘trigger’—rather than stem from—a coming-out process. Taken together, these segments suggest that coming-out journeys are ongoing, relational, and often discontinuous journeys influenced by both queer individuals' intersectional subjectivities (e.g., age, race, and class) and the social contexts of the places they encounter.     

‘Extreme pornography’ and the contested spaces of virtual citizenship

This paper considers issues of sexual citizenship in light of new UK legislation that prosecutes the viewers of ‘extreme pornography’. Justified as an attempt to uphold public decency, government intervention seeks to prevent people seeing ‘extreme’ images not by limiting access to certain websites, but instead by intervening in the private consumption of these images. In this paper I draw on the discourses of those who have supported such intervention, and suggest that these arguments make a claim to space that defends the rights of some citizens over others. I examine the entwining of rights of expression, rights to identity and rights to safety. In conclusion, I argue that sexual citizenship is not just about the right to occupy actual physical places but also the right to inhabit the virtual—cyberspace. I hence argue that the internet plays a key role in transforming the sexual geographies of public and private.     

Castration of male sex offenders in the Nordic welfare state in the context of homosexuality and heteronormativity, 1930–1955

The eugenic legislation was a defining aspect in the development of the Nordic welfare state. While sterilization is a widely recognized method of restricting reproduction, another part of the legislation was the castration of male sex offenders for criminal-therapeutic purposes. This article discusses the conflicts arising from the castration of male criminals. Especially targeted were male criminals whose crimes could be traced back to a conflicted sexuality, including homosexuality and such vaguely termed conditions as hypersexuality and an abnormal sex drive. This article highlights the exclusive connection of sexual violence to male violence in the context of Nordic castration legislation. It is further argued that the decriminalization of homosexuality did not lead to sexual liberation but rather to much more harshly restricted sexuality through medicalization. The medicalization of homosexuality and the castration of men labelled as sexual offenders show how the conformity of the Nordic welfare state has tended to restrict sexuality with the help of the concept of heteronormativity.     

Feminist Geography 30 Years on – They Came,They Saw But Did They Conquer?

Feminist geography emerged in Australia in the 1980s, spurred on by the local Women's Liberation Movement and inspired by the academic activism emanating from England, Canada, and the United States. Producing critical evaluations of male‐dominated geography departments, curriculum, and journals, feminist geographers proceeded to stake claims in each of these spheres while also substantially revising the content of geographical research. There were significant interventions into urban, social, cultural, and economic geography and in environmental discourses, as well as into the gendered research process. Having arrived, identified, and addressed these issues, the discipline was critiqued and transformed over the 1980s and 1990s. Crucial to the strength of this critique were key individuals, the Gender and Geography Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers, and the role played by journals such as Geographical Research and the Australian Geographer in providing spaces for feminist work. However, as the new century dawned, the agenda changed and the anger and urgency dissipated as the broader and university contexts altered. It was a period of consolidation, as feminist insights and approaches were focused on key subject areas – such as the home, identity, and sexuality – and became more mainstream. However, is this work and the presence of women in the academy an indication of success or of co‐option? This paper will trace these various shifts – from the arrival to the mainstreaming of feminist geography – and analyse what might be read as a retreat from feminist politics and practice within the discipline in Australia. I will conclude by re‐stating the case to advance a new feminist agenda in the face of continuing gender inequality within the academy, in Australia, and across the globe.     

Obscenity,Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India

Abstract:

In the 1850s, the British “discovered” a community of transgender eunuch performers, the hijras, and legislated for their surveillance and control under the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) in 1871. This article examines how the British dealt with transgender colonial subjects and the implications for our understanding of colonial masculinities. In particular, I analyse colonial attempts to erase hijras as a visible socio-cultural category and gender identity in public space through the prohibition of their performances and feminine dress. This case study demonstrates, first, how masculinity intersected with a broad range of colonial projects, agendas and anxieties. Focusing on the problematic presence of cross-dressing and performing hijras in public space, I examine how colonial attempts to order public space and reinforce political borders dovetailed with discourses of masculinity, obscenity and contagion. Second, I argue that attempts to discipline masculinity and obscenity were uneven in practice, meaning the CTA had varying localised impacts upon hijras. The lack of interest of some British officials in regulating hijras, inadequate policing resources, and pragmatic compromises opened up gaps in surveillance that hijras grasped and expanded, frustrating colonial attempts to transform their bodies and behaviours.     

Planning,Law, and Sexuality: Hiding Immorality in Plain View

Emerging research in sexuality and space outlines the diverse forms of spatial governmentality used to discipline non‐normative sexual behaviours, exploring how exclusion, concealment, and repression combines to ensure that ‘immoral’ sexualities are out of the sight of the ‘moral majority’. In this paper, we explore this contention in relation to planning for sex service premises (brothels) in New South Wales, Australia. Though such sex service premises are now legal, our analysis nonetheless considers the way that these premises have been subject to forms of planning constraint that reflect planners' assumptions about the appropriate manifestation of sex premises within the urban landscape. By exposing the assumptions written into planning law that sex premises are legal but potentially disorderly, we demonstrate the evidential power of planning to reinforce dominant moral geographies through instruments which, at first glance, appear to be focused on objective questions of amenity and the ‘best use of land’. This paper hence explores the ways in which planners have translated assumptions of disorder into categories of visibility and distance, meaning that brothels have become hidden in plain view so as not to disturb the integrity of residential ‘family’ spaces.     

Producing ‘decent girls’: governmentality and the moral geographies of sexual conduct in Ireland (1922–1937)

In this article we examine the mode of governmentality constructed in Ireland with regard to the regulation and disciplining of sexuality in the post-independence era up to the writing of the Constitution (1922–1937). Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault, we document how Ireland became an intense site of applied, national bio-politics with a panoply of government commissions and legislation, accompanied by new sites of reform (Magdalene Asylums and Mother and Baby Homes), which together were designed to mould and police the sexual practices of its citizens and create a sanitised moral landscape. Whilst a thoroughly gendered project, with nearly all legislation and sites of reform targeting women, we contend it was also a highly spatialised endeavour. The modes and practices of governmentality produced a dense spatialised grid of discipline, reform and self-regulation, seeking to produce ‘decent’ women inhabiting virtuous spaces by limiting access to work and public spaces, confining women to an unsullied (marital) home, and threatening new sites of reformation, emigration or ostracisation.