El deporte y la actividad física como mediadores de modelos corporales : Género y sexualidad en el aprendizaje de las masculinidades

Este artículo parte del análisis de algunas contribuciones teóricas sobre la conceptualización del cuerpo en las sociedades contemporáneas, que nos permitirá dialogar con las experiencias reflexivas de un grupo de chicos sobre el aprendizaje de la(s) masculinidad(es)i en sus vidas. El énfasis fenomenológico y político del cuerpo en los estudios feministas -con la noción de corporización- ha sido fundamental para problematizar las variables encarnadas de género, raza, edad, clase social, (dis)capacidad, etc. que no sólo operan en una relación de poder sobre nuestros cuerpos, sino también como locus de agencia y resistencia. La teoría queer con la deconstrucción de la sexualidad normativa -gracias a la noción de performatividad- será clave para entender el papel fundamental que la sexualidad desempeña en la construcción de la(s) subjetividad(es). Los relatos de los chicos nos permitirán explorar el papel que la actividad física y el deporte tiene en sus vidas como mediadores en la construcción de subjetividades "masculinas", muchas veces como un espacio opresor de identidad de género y opción sexual, y abrir la reflexión a las visiones hegemónicas de cuerpo que median tanto la educación física en las escuelas, como en el deporte de competición y/o de elite, y sus representaciones en los mass media.

El deporte y la actividad física como mediadores de modelos corporales : Género y sexualidad en el aprendizaje de las masculinidades

Este artículo parte del análisis de algunas contribuciones teóricas sobre la conceptualización del cuerpo en las sociedades contemporáneas, que nos permitirá dialogar con las experiencias reflexivas de un grupo de chicos sobre el aprendizaje de la(s) masculinidad(es)i en sus vidas. El énfasis fenomenológico y político del cuerpo en los estudios feministas -con la noción de corporización- ha sido fundamental para problematizar las variables encarnadas de género, raza, edad, clase social, (dis)capacidad, etc. que no sólo operan en una relación de poder sobre nuestros cuerpos, sino también como locus de agencia y resistencia. La teoría queer con la deconstrucción de la sexualidad normativa -gracias a la noción de performatividad- será clave para entender el papel fundamental que la sexualidad desempeña en la construcción de la(s) subjetividad(es). Los relatos de los chicos nos permitirán explorar el papel que la actividad física y el deporte tiene en sus vidas como mediadores en la construcción de subjetividades "masculinas", muchas veces como un espacio opresor de identidad de género y opción sexual, y abrir la reflexión a las visiones hegemónicas de cuerpo que median tanto la educación física en las escuelas, como en el deporte de competición y/o de elite, y sus representaciones en los mass media.

Queering U.S. History Museums: Heteronormative Histories, Digital Disruptions

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Moving beyond heterosexism? The good, the bad and the indifferent in accounts of others’ reactions to important life events

Latterly the psychology of sexualities has diversified. There has been increased engagement with queer theory and a heightened focus on sexual practices alongside continued interrogation of heteronormativity via analyses of talk-in-interaction. In this article, I offer an argument for juxtaposing the incongruent in order to further interrogate manifestations of heterosexism in lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people’s lives. In this case, accounts of others’ reactions to a happy event and to a sad experience. By drawing on two contrasting data corpuses – 124 people planning or in a civil partnership and 60 women who had experienced pregnancy loss – there is increased potential for understanding variation in ‘normative’ and/or heteronormative interpretations of LGBTQ lives. I suggest that, despite significant legal and structural gains for LGBTQ communities in a number of Western countries in recent years, and lively internal debates within the psychology of sexualities field, critical examination of manifestations of heterosexism should remain a central focus.

“Somos quem podemos ser”: os homens (trans) brasileiros e o discurso pela (des)patologização da transexualidade

This research analyzed the discourse of Brazilian transmen in relation to (un) pathologizing of identity (trans). Therefore, it seeks to analyze the perception of the meanings attributed by Brazilian transmen to their experiences within the context in which their experience is considered a psychiatric disorder, which can be (or not) be diagnosed by doctors and psychologists. Whereby, obtaining such permissions becomes a necessity to perform bodily changes, as well as referrals for modifications of civil documentation. The methodology used was discourse analysis and research techniques were semi-structured interviews and systematic observation of the meetings of Cartografias Trans group, psychotherapeutic care group of transpeople to the Centro de pesquisa e atendimento à travestis e transexuais - CPATT in Curitiba , Paraná. The theoretical framework of the research suppoted mainly, but not only, in the studies proposed by queer theory. In this sense the research found by entering the field and analyzing the data brought, among other things, the existence of a strategic discourse by Brazilian transmen toward depathologization of their identities, manifested mainly on the notion of to have the identity (trans) pathologized does not make them sick.

Entre elas: políticas públicas e cidadania de travestis e mulheres transexuais de uma ONG em Natal/RN

The core of this research it is anchored in the analysis of the relationship between experiences and experiences of transvestite and transsexual women and citizenship category in Natal. For this, we analyzed, at first, the unfolding instilled in acting from the agenda of a Non Governmental Organization of the city, the Atransparência. In a second, and more importantly, time, reflections of those actions were followed in the daily and transgender women in the city belonging to NGOs. Methodologically, work is characterized as a qualitative research, with ethnographic deployment, made possible through interviews with semi-structured questionnaires. The analysis of the collected material was possible from the discourse analysis (Foucault, 1996), as well as qualitative analysis (Caregnato and Mutti, 2006). Theoretically, it was done the exercise to think queer theory conciliated her with the prospect of criticism of eucorêntrismo of power and knowledge, with fundamental emphasis on the relationship between theoretical national queers - Bento (2014), Miscolci (2014), Pelúcio (2014 ) and Pereira (2012) - authors and descolonial such as Mignolo (2008) Quijano (2005).

War Worlds: Violence, Sociality, and the Forms of Twentieth-Century Transatlantic Literature

“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.

Inventing "French Feminism:" A Critical History

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

Fucking Failures: The Future of Fat Sex

In the context of the obesity ‘epidemic’ fat people’s sex lives are cast as sterile, sexually dysfunctional or just plain non-existent. This article analyzes medical discourses of obesity and sex in order to argue that fat sex is constructed as a type of failure. Using insights from antisocial queer theory, fat sex is further shown to be queer in its failure to adhere to the specifically heteronormative dictates of what Edelman (2004) calls ‘reproductive futurism’. The analysis finally engages with Halberstam’s (2011) notion of queer failure to demonstrate how deconstructing notions of success and failure might offer fat political projects new ways to imagine the future of fat sex.

A Hint of the Lavender - The Gay Gangster in British Crime Cinema

This chapter traces the image of the gay gangster in British cinema. It draws upon film history and Queer theory to attempt to understand the fascination of this marginal character.

Femininos de montar - Uma etnografia sobre experiências de gênero entre drag queens

The paper presents a discussion about gender and body in the drag queens experience at Natal city (RN). From the different concepts that characterizes the identity processes on subjects who perform gender transformation (transvestites, transsexuals and female impersonators), the justification for studying the drag character is observed as a means to understand matters that are important when you take such a position. Therefore, there is a need for a linkage between the various concepts responsible for this definition, in addition to considering the historical and cultural process responsible for the creation of such categories, identities and stereotypes among these individuals. In this sense it will be possible to carry out a critical analysis on the different social loads present in each representation, and understand what is at stake in the attribution of classifications and terminologies that are applied to different expressions of metamorphosis. This ethnography considers the debate from a field research conducted at LGBT social establishments and other performance spaces of these people, verifying their dynamics in these places and investigating relationships between performers, personas and characters and also backstage scene in which they participate

No right to sext? A critical examination of media and legal debates about teenage girls' sexual agency in the digital age

Advances in digital photography and distribution technologies enable many people to produce and distribute images of their sex acts. When teenagers do this, the photos and videos they create can be legally classified as child pornography since the law makes no exception for youth who create sexually explicit images of themselves. The dominant discussions about teenage girls producing sexually explicit media (including sexting) are profoundly unproductive: (1) they blame teenage girls for creating private images that another person later maliciously distributed and (2) they fail to respect—or even discuss—teenagers’ rights to freedom of expression. Cell phones and the internet make producing and distributing images extremely easy, which provide widely accessible venues for both consensual sexual expression between partners and for sexual harassment. Dominant understandings view sexting as a troubling teenage trend created through the combination of camera phones and adolescent hormones and impulsivity, but this view often conflates consensual sexting between partners with the malicious distribution of a person’s private image as essentially equivalent behaviors. In this project, I ask: What is the role of assumptions about teen girls’ sexual agency in these problematic understandings of sexting that blame victims and deny teenagers’ rights? In contrast to the popular media panic about online predators and the familiar accusation that youth are wasting their leisure time by using digital media, some people champion the internet as a democratic space that offers young people the opportunity to explore identities and develop social and communication skills. Yet, when teen girls’ sexuality enters this conversation, all this debate and discussion narrows to a problematic consensus. The optimists about adolescents and technology fall silent, and the argument that media production is inherently empowering for girls does not seem to apply to a girl who produces a sexually explicit image of herself. Instead, feminist, popular, and legal commentaries assert that she is necessarily a victim: of a “sexualized” mass media, pressure from her male peers, digital technology, her brain structures or hormones, or her own low self-esteem and misplaced desire for attention. Why and how are teenage girls’ sexual choices produced as evidence of their failure or success in achieving Western liberal ideals of self-esteem, resistance, and agency? Since mass media and policy reactions to sexting have so far been overwhelmingly sexist and counter-productive, it is crucial to interrogate the concepts and assumptions that characterize mainstream understandings of sexting. I argue that the common sense that is co-produced by law and mass media underlies the problematic legal and policy responses to sexting. Analyzing a range of nonfiction texts including newspaper articles, talk shows, press releases, public service announcements, websites, legislative debates, and legal documents, I investigate gendered, racialized, age-based, and technologically determinist common sense assumptions about teenage girls’ sexual agency. I examine the consensus and continuities that exist between news, nonfiction mass media, policy, institutions, and law, and describe the limits of their debates. I find that this early 21st century post-feminist girl-power moment not only demands that girls live up to gendered sexual ideals but also insists that actively choosing to follow these norms is the only way to exercise sexual agency. This is the first study to date examining the relationship of conventional wisdom about digital media and teenage girls’ sexuality to both policy and mass media.

El cuerpo como artefacto: tecnologías médicas, anatomopolítica y resistencia

En este artículo se defiende la tesis de que hay un giro importante en el biopoder anatomo-político de finales del siglo XX y comienzos del XXI. Este giro consiste en la aparición de diferentes tendencias culturales que comprenden el cuerpo humano como un artefacto que puede usarse para manifestar resistencia al poder. Para ello, estas tendencias se sirven de las tecnologías médicas como un medio para diseñar el cuerpo de acuerdo con una intención particular que permita cumplir cierta función elegida de antemano por quien identifica ese cuerpo como propio.

Femininos de montar - Uma etnografia sobre experiências de gênero entre drag queens

The paper presents a discussion about gender and body in the drag queens experience at Natal city (RN). From the different concepts that characterizes the identity processes on subjects who perform gender transformation (transvestites, transsexuals and female impersonators), the justification for studying the drag character is observed as a means to understand matters that are important when you take such a position. Therefore, there is a need for a linkage between the various concepts responsible for this definition, in addition to considering the historical and cultural process responsible for the creation of such categories, identities and stereotypes among these individuals. In this sense it will be possible to carry out a critical analysis on the different social loads present in each representation, and understand what is at stake in the attribution of classifications and terminologies that are applied to different expressions of metamorphosis. This ethnography considers the debate from a field research conducted at LGBT social establishments and other performance spaces of these people, verifying their dynamics in these places and investigating relationships between performers, personas and characters and also backstage scene in which they participate

La famille nucléaire au 21e siècle : quelle place pour le père?

Depuis les débuts de la deuxième vague féministe, la participation quasi-universelle des femmes au marché du travail a causé la perte, pour les pères de famille, du rôle de pourvoyeur exclusif que ces derniers avaient tenu depuis si longtemps. Les femmes hétérosexuelles de la société contemporaine sont dorénavant plus scolarisées et atteignent des carrières plus avancées que leurs contreparties masculines. Alors que les femmes soutiennent davantage la famille par leurs emplois, les hommes doivent proportionnellement assumer des rôles plus actifs et participatifs à la maison. En cette période de transition, de transformation et de redéfinition rapides des rôles genrés à l’intérieur de l’économie familiale hétérosexuelle, les pères participent de manière plus équitable à l’éducation des enfants et à l’entretien du domicile, ces rôles ayant longtemps été attribués presque exclusivement aux femmes. Ces nouvelles responsabilités détonnent avec les représentations stéréotypées des hommes dans la culture populaire, ainsi qu’avec les modèles d’identification de la masculinité normative que les hommes ont requis et requièrent toujours sous l’égide de l’hétérosexualité imposée. De ce fait, les hommes occidentaux de moins de cinquante ans se trouvent souvent à cheval entre deux mondes d’exigences concurrentes. La place que peuvent et doivent prendre les pères au sein de leurs familles requiert un questionnement critique. L’ironie de la place du père peut être comprise comme la tension entre les normes du genre rétrogrades ou conservatrices et les exigences – à la fois politiques et pragmatiques – de la masculinité de la classe moyenne contemporaine. Cette tension fondamentale et structurante de la masculinité contemporaine est vécue par l’anxiété d’association au genre, ainsi qu’à travers des difficultés filiales, paternelles et intergénérationnelles. Ce mémoire de maîtrise adopte une approche déconstructiviste envers l’analyse de constructions contemporaines de la masculinité reproductive. À travers les gender studies, la théorie queer ainsi que la psychanalyse, le mémoire offre des lectures analytiques du discours de croissance personnelle de John Stoltenberg, de la fiction autobiographique de Karl Ove Knausgaard, ainsi que de la série télévisée américaine Dexter.