ABSTRACT
In South Africa, sexual and gender minorities experience a wide array of health inequities and face many difficulties in accessing health services. This is largely due to the general heteronormative-based health system that is not well equipped to meet the needs of those not conforming to "normal" forms of gender and sexuality. In addition, the heteronormative-based approach to LGBT health has rendered the unique needs and experiences of sexual and gender minorities invisible within mainstream health data, systems and policies. Increasing evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened health disparities and this is likely a consequence of existing challenges related to structural violence that persisted prior to its emergence. Given the current structure of South Africa's health system, this chapter examines structural violence in the context of healthcare and draws on in-depth interviews conducted with 12 LGBT students at a university in South Africa. The findings highlight the importance of raising awareness on the spectrum of sexual orientation and gender identity, applying an intersectional lens to the health system to address health inequities and gearing healthcare programs to provide services for all. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
In this article, we connect illiberal populism in Hungary with the instrumentalizing of genderphobia through state policies starting from 2010. This became especially salient during the COVID-19 pandemic when a contentious state of emergency laws enabled the government's ruling by decree. Analyzing relevant pieces of legislation and policy documents, we show how genderphobia became a fundamental feature of an expanding far-right agenda that has been playing out in practice since the System of National Cooperation was established in 2010. Genderphobia is the aversion to disrupting dominant gender and sexual hierarchies, by addressing and critically interrogating gendered differences and gender as a social construct. Genderphobia is both an ideology about the fearfulness of gender as well as the action of fear-mongering for political effect. State institutions are gendered and sexualized in that they have been structured on dominant gender and sexual norms that reinforce male and heterosexual dominance. We argue that genderphobia is evident in the rise of anti-LGBTIQ policies and contributes to the weakening of democratic and liberal institutions in Hungary. We will also present examples of the Hungarian government's attempts to monopolize the definition of "the family" and hollow out the social representation of child protection. In addition, we will explore resistance against the recent anti-LGBTIQ policies through children's literature. Our aim is to demonstrate how the Hungarian genderphobic policies ultimately deny not only LGBTIQ human rights but the existence of LGBTIQ youth and children who could benefit from social support as well as representation in education and literature.
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How are transgender athletes understood in popular discourse? This paper adapts and merges Glaser and Strauss’ 1967 Grounded Theory Method with computerized Automated Text Analysis to provide clarity on large-n datasets comprised of social media posts made about transgender athletes. After outlining the procedures of this new approach to social media data, I present findings from a study conducted on comments made in response to YouTube videos reporting transgender athletes. A total of 60,000 comments made on three YouTube videos were scraped for the analysis, which proceeded in two steps. The first was an iterative, grounded analysis of the top 500 “liked” comments to gain insight into the trends that emerged. Automated Text Analysis was then used to explore latent connections amongst the 60,000 comments. This descriptive analysis of thousands of datapoints revealed three dominant ways that people talk about transgender athletes: an attachment to biology as determinative of athletic abilities, a racialized understanding of who constitutes a proper “girl”, and perceptions of sex-segregated sports as the sole way to ensure fairness in athletic opportunities. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications of this research for how scholars understand the obstacles facing transgender political mobilizations, presents strategies for addressing these roadblocks, and underscores the importance of descriptive studies of discourse in political science research concerned with marginalization and inequality.
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Heteronormativity comprises essentialist, binary beliefs about sex and gender, and normative behaviors derived from those beliefs. There is scarce literature on how heteronormative attitudes and well-being variables are concurrent among individuals who are heterosexual or gay, lesbian, bisexual, and of other queer sexual identities (LGBQ). The objective of this study was to distinguish profiles of university students based on essentialism and normative behavior, two dimensions of heteronormativity, and to characterize these groups by sexual orientation and gender, perceived social support, physical and mental health, and life satisfaction. A sample of 552 university students in Temuco, Chile, responded to an online questionnaire consisting of sociodemographic questions, the Scale of Heteronormative Attitudes and Beliefs, the Life Satisfaction Scale, the Health-Related Quality of Life Index, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. We used Latent profile analysis to distinguish profiles based on significant score differences in Essentialism and Normative behavior. We identified four heteronormativity profiles: High heteronormativity (34.85%), with a significant proportion of heterosexuals and men; Low heteronormativity (25.59%), comprising a significant proportion of students who were non-binary, and LGBQ; Heteronormativity focused on normative behavior (20.42%), with a significant proportion students who were men or non-binary, and who were lesbian, gay or bisexual or preferred not to disclose their sexual orientation; and Heteronormativity focused on essentialism (19.14%), with a significant proportion of heterosexuals and women, and individuals who preferred not to disclose their sexual orientation. The four profiles differed in the proportions of students by faculty and area of residence (urban/rural), and by life satisfaction, self-perceived mental health, and perceived social support. These results show that patterns of association between heteronormativity and subjective well-being are heterogeneous among heterosexual and non-heterosexual individuals. Some of these patterns may respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted daily life and social dynamics. These findings expand our understanding of advantageous and disadvantageous conditions associated with maintaining heteronormativity attitudes, particularly among non-heterosexual individuals.
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PURPOSE: Sexual history taking is an integral skill for clinicians, as sexual health is a component of a complete medical evaluation. Medical curricula lack effective sexual history instruction, creating gaps in clinicians' confidence and proficiency. Average sexual and gender minority (SGM) curricular inclusion content is 5 hours over a 4-year span. This study investigated how students perceive their comfort level and biases during a simulated sexual history taking encounter. METHODS: Data were derived from student reflection assignments following simulated sexual history interviews. Researchers analyzed and coded data. Themes were labeled and paired with corresponding quotes from data. RESULTS: Comfort and bias were predetermined main themes, each with eight subcategories that emerged including embarrassment, insight, lack of exposure, comfort/discomfort with sexual subject matter, and preparedness. Students' personal perceptions of comfort and biases represented a broad spectrum within the overarching concepts. CONCLUSIONS: Trainee insight can guide educational and instructional modifications on proficient, inclusive sexual history taking. Exercises with sexual history interviews inclusive of SGM populations are essential tools to build student comfort with sexual content topics and diminish potential for invasive biases to undermine the integrity of sexual history taking. Future research is necessary, including implementation of pre and post surveys to gauge efficacy of instruction. J Allied Health 2022;51(2):97-103.
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Notwithstanding the challenges in South Africa, Black people were also discriminated against in the services offered to people fleeing the war between Russia and Ukraine. [...]I ask, "What does breaking free mean in the context of Black-on-Black hatred and violence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, and Operation Dudula in South Africa?" "Are African refugees as human as Ukrainian refugees?" "Who is human, and whose rights should be celebrated?" "Are there some people whose humanity surpasses others?" "Are there people who are less human-whose rights do not matter?" "What do we mean by celebrating human rights amidst all the abuses of women, children, and those on the periphery of society, those who do not look like us, those who have different beliefs to our own?" "How long will we keep using 'them' and 'us' to divide humanity?" "When will the sexual health and reproductive rights of marginalised people be celebrated as human rights?" "When will the rights of the poor become human rights?" "Are human rights greater than environmental rights and ecological rights?" "Can humanity survive without the ecosystem?" "Can we celebrate humanity without celebrating all life forms and their support systems?" "Do human rights exist in unethical business and development?" I know I have asked too many questions, and the truth is that I have no answers to them yet. Ashnie Mahadew and Dipane Hlalele's article, "Challenging Gender Certainties in Early Childhood Care and Education: A Participatory Action Learning and Action Research Study," places the reader in the early childhood classroom to explore how dominant ideologies about gender can be challenged within communities, beginning with the youngest community members. [...]Year Student Teachers' Perspectives," 'Mathabo Khau discusses sexual rights within disability as a neglected and underdeveloped terrain in the human rights discourse worldwide, especially when addressing adolescent sexuality. [...]gender-nonconforming learners were mistreated in some schools while in others, these learners were accepted into friendship groups and class activities by teachers and other learners.
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Though we are at different institutions in different areas of the country (a public liberal arts university in the rural Midwest, a public research university in the southwest, and a private federally chartered university in the mid-Atlantic), and work in different fields (teacher education, counselor education, and psychology) our lives during the pandemic illustrate similarities between queer academic parents. In heterosexual relationships with cisgender partners, that parent is often the mother. [...]much of the advice to mothers (gestational parents) seems to be, according to Alice, "'How to get 'Dads' involved as if Dads need all this special treatment and structure for how to parent their own child. Additionally, throughout this process I recall my mother frequently commenting on how my cisgender male family member's wife was not as involved in the parenting as 'she should be' and that it was 'impressive' that he was 'doing a lot.' COUNTERING GENDERED NORMS AND ENMESHMENT As Shane discussed above, we have found that the lack of societal definition for queer parenting roles, while freeing, can also lead to "our roles
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[...]even as appreciation washes through, reproductive care workers are increasingly stepping out to say that garlands are not enough.1 This emergent public reckoning comes on the heels of an extended scholarly rethinking of capitalism, as a growing group of scholars argue that capitalism is always already embedded in gendered and racialized relations of extraction and expropriation.2 Especially generative has been Karl Marx's remarkable historical account of capitalism's origins in a process he dubbed "primitive accumulation. "3 Intent on forestalling moralistic justifications for the system's origins, Marx argued that elites used a combination of land expropriation and violent vagrancy policing to produce both the starter capital and the "free labor" needed to bring that capital to life. Since Rosa Luxemburg, scholars have expanded that account to challenge the more and teleological formulations contained in other parts of Marx's larger oeuvre.4 Rather than see primitive accumulation as focused exclusively on domestic processes and ownership relations, subsequent theorists have pointed to the transnational, racialized, colonial, and gendered processes that characterized its emergence, along with the persistence of these putatively time-limited processes throughout capitalism's existence.5 Prompted by the deep inequities of neoliberalism, David Harvey has argued that the present, in fact, is best understood as a new episode of primitive accumulation, which he names "accumulation by dispossession. The term social reproduction first emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the writings of Wages for Housework and Marxist feminist theorists.7 Focused on the work it takes to make and remake people, "reproductive labor," these social reproduction theorists located an essential dynamic of capitalist accumulation in the production rather than the exploitation of labor power. Like other elements of primitive accumulation, one of the distinctive features of reproductive labor is that it is not "free labor" in the sense defined by Marx.9 A fundamental feature of the workings of capitalist labor, he argued, was that "the worker leaves the capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever he likes . . . but he cannot leave the whole class of purchasers . . . without renouncing his existence.
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[...]Cai Yiping's News and Views offers a nuanced engagement with the Chinese government's formal proclamations on women's rights.1 In the first essay, "Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy: Evidence from Taiwan's Cross-Border Marriages," Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang demonstrate the fallacy of treating cross-border marriages and cross-border sex work as separate as well as grouping women dichotomously under one or the other set of practices. Most migrant men experience a profound sense of emasculation as they struggle against the exclusionary forces of what Cheng calls the "racial-border regime." Because these men tend to embrace idealized roles of husband, father, and breadwinner, many experience an "existential dislocation" in Hong Kong that manifests as unending dependence and uncertainty. While these gay parents believe it is only natural to desire children, they also seek a genetic link with their offspring, a Eurasian biological mixture for their children, and a normative family life that, they hope, will lead to greater acceptance in Chinese society. According to Liu, the Chinese state champions "equality between men and women" as a means to justify its leadership in the Global South, but it will not embrace "gender equality," which might include transgender rights, same-sex marriage, reproductive freedom, battles against the policing of gender expression, and new configurations of family and kinship.
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The Wolf Warrior is a gorgeous, muscled, Chinese male rogue soldier in exile who adventures through the archipelago of the prc's shipping, mining, and medical projects across the Global South to battle white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates - all while saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic. Paradoxically, it also enacts a horizontalist, nonbiological family network mobilized by an anti-imperialist vision - a kind of bonding achieved not through marriage and childrearing, but through adoptive intimacies as well as trans-generational and "mixed race" friendships and empathies. The latter are described by Chunyu Zhang as practices through which queer female and non-binary fans turn "a voyeuristic gaze upon men . . . [which] allows fans to play with patriarchal gender constructions, provides escapism, and creates aesthetics that offer an alternative to clichéd heterosexual romantic storytelling. "8 This deconstructive Danmei/BL/Slash method aims to excavate a utopian vision of feminist South-South solidarity via imaginaries of transracial adoption and militant intimacy, map queer possibilities for China-Africa cooperation via alternative orderings of a "global family," and identify contradictory agendas for insurgent anti-imperialism via racialized homoeroticisms involving rogue Asian soldiers both wrestling and disidentifying with white mercenaries as well as Black pirates.
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[...]Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto declares that our online self is directly tied to our offline self, and this looping connection is something we can analyze and harness to expand conversations surrounding our understanding of the body. Russell, who is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, also emphasizes the value of digital art and its capacity for allowing escape from gendered and racialized body expectations by incorporating images from queer artists and artists of color. According to Russell, "A glitch is an error, mistake, a failure to function . . . an indicator of something having gone wrong" (7). [...]with many universities moving to exclusively online instruction in the wake of the pandemic, Russell's artist examples show us how we might inspire our students to harness the power of the Internet to distribute messages about bodies and identity in ways that undermine society's exclusionary structures.