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A new account of the formation of sexual identity, coined 'emerged fusion', which avoids the traps of the essentialism versus constructivism debate, and offers a viable third alternative. This book is a theoretical tool that will be useful in sociology, queer studies, and gender studies as a new approach to understanding sexual identity.
Why are manifestations of sexuality and ambiguity currently provoking so much interest? This collection of essays uncovers many reasons as it examines ambiguously gendered bodies--bodies that defy ideologically produced gender boundaries. In the course of identifying the social institutions and assumptions that repress or articulate gender ambiguity, Body Guards demonstrates that this ambiguity has a long history and a wide cultural reach.
In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.
In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine the theory and politics of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that there are both positive and negative implications in any gender and sexuality practices, both sameness and difference from heteronormativity, and unfixed possibility in the diverse nature of discourse and practice (rather than just "difference" among fixed multiplicities). Contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The authors examine the ambiguities of performance and reception, and address the vexed question of whether it is possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically. This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies.
Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King, Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, 'my friend whom I loved dearly'. This book examines the stories' sexual and homoerotic language and suggests that its ambiguity provides fresh ways of understanding ideas of gender and sexuality in the ancient Near East.
A delicate exploration of the discrimination that gender-diverse people face, this book analyzes the relationship between gender identity and performance in the workplace while considering the emotional and economic survival of those who identify as transgender. The transgender community is more visible now than ever before, but the diversity within this community has remained obscure in the workplace as organizations, corporations, and institutions struggle to keep up with the rate at which transgender communities are gaining visibility. For leaders seeking best practices related to bathroom access, workplace transition, hiring practices, inclusive workplace culture, and more, this book offers guidance and novel policy recommendations designed to ensure the success of transgender employees. Extending the existing theoretical literature on masculinity in the workplace, gender discrimination, and gender performance, the book introduces the new concept of "doing ambiguity." It contains original research complemented by humanizing narratives from transgender people that provide insights into rarely explored non-binary, gender-fluid, and genderless experiences. In addition, it identifies factors that may preclude and minimize discrimination, including strategies pursued by transgender people at the individual level as well as policies employed at the organization level, and outlines a pragmatic set of policy recommendations for employers, community leaders, and others looking to help transgender people thrive in organizational environments.
Were eunuchs more usually castrated guardians of the harem, as florid Orientalist portraits imagine them, or were they trusted court officials who may never have been castrated? Was the Ethiopian eunuch a Jew or a Gentile, a slave or a free man? Why does Luke call him a "man" while contemporaries referred to eunuchs as "unmanned" beings? As Sean D. Burke treats questions that have received dramatically different answers over the centuries of Christian interpretation, he shows that eunuchs bore particular stereotyped associations regarding gender and sexual status as well as of race, ethnicity, and class. Not only has Luke failed to resolve these ambiguities; he has positioned this destabilized figure at a key place in the narrative-as the gospel has expanded beyond Judea, but before Gentiles are explicitly named-in such a way as to blur a number of social role boundaries. In this sense, Burke argues, Luke intended to "queer" his reader's expectations and so to present the boundary-transgressing potentiality of a new community.
A highly inclusive collection, "Sexuality And Masquerade" celebrates the erotics of indecision, of gender performance, of sexual artifice in its full range.
"Breeding is a beautifully printed and bound collectors slip-cased edition of some of Rankin's finest black and white portraits. Rankin is well known as a prolific fashion and advertising photographer as well as for high profile projects such as "Celebritation and "Nudes. In "Breeding, one of Rankin's private projects, he shows his subtlety and depth. Here the images are contemplative and questioning. The inherent androgyny of many of the models is exaggerated, passing simple comment on human sexuality and how it is represented. Models include Kate Moss and Helena Christensen.