ABSTRACT
Language is pivotal in the areas of human rights protection, good governance, peace-building, reconciliation and sustainable development. A person's right to use his or her chosen language is a prerequisite for freedom of thought, opinion and expression;for access to education and information;for employment;and for building inclusive societies. In the context of a potential political realignment of the island of Ireland, this essay considers the contentious political debates and acrimonious commentary surrounding language, primarily Irish and Ullans, and explores the sharply divided opinions regarding the role and place of language in society: how various attitudes are based on social context, social class and educational attainment, and the extent of the challenge to overcome these in the attempt to create a safe and neutral space in which the multi-layered aspects of the language debate can be addressed in a non-threatening manner. In conclusion, it teases out some of the more intense and extreme aspects, and how they might be addressed.
ABSTRACT
The 2022 Festival had been promoted as the 'largest Queer Arts programme in the history of the festival', with arts events (dance, theatre, music, cabaret, comedy, live art, film, drag performances, ballroom, circus, craft, literary events and public art exhibitions) making up ninety out of the Festival's 180 events.1 Auckland Pride framed its decision to cancel the majority of its programming as part of an ethics of care for the rainbow community, deeming that it would be 'irresponsible' to proceed during an Omicron outbreak.2 While Auckland Pride's 2022 Festival had lost the game of live event production pandemic roulette, the size and strength of its planned queer arts programme reflects the prominence of queer performance in Aotearoa's contemporary cultural landscape. Over My Dead Body: UNINVITED by Jason Te Mete and Everything After by Shane Bosher ask us to attend to Aotearoa's queer history, by bringing visibility to the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Aotearoa's rainbow community;Yang/ Young/Ш by Sherry Zhang and Nuanzhi Zheng foregrounds the space of high school and the Chinese family, using the domestic landscape to explore intersectional politics through a narrative of triumph and pride that challenges the limitations of Western notions of 'coming-out'. The only play that Brooks had written at that point that he deemed a 'gay' play was Queen, a stream-of-con- sciousness monologue 'about the young gay guy experience'.13 Queen's April 2013 season at the Basement Theatre coincided with the New Zealand Parliament passing the Marriage Equality Bill. James Wenley quoted the words of queer MP Tamati Coffey in his review of Queen: 'This bill will validate my place in society ... it moves mountains for future New Zealanders, who will live in a time where it's normal to be able to love whoever they want to'.14 As recently as 2012, a major plot point of Benjamin Cleaver's musical Day After Night, directed by Wenley and performed at Basement Theatre, was the inability of the central gay couple to become legally married and adopt a baby together.
ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
This book analyzes how the increasing number of same-sex couples is changing the traditional concepts of family and parenthood, and how these changes affect the psychological studies of family, couple relationships and human development. The majority of chapters included in this contributed volume present results of research conducted with LGBTQ+ people in Brazil, a country where same-sex couples have been recognized by the national legislation since 2011, but is currently facing a conservative wave which threatens much of the victories gained by the LGBTQ+ movement in recent years. That's why this book aims to provide both updated theoretical and methodological contributions as well as ethically and political engaged reflections to the field of psychological studies of LGBTQ+ parenting and couple relationships. Chapters in this volume analyze different aspects of LGBTQ+ parenting and couple relationships, such as changes in the concept of family;the role of the family of origin in the coming out process of young adults;risk and protective factors in couple relationships between lesbians and gay men;vulnerabilities experienced by trans couples during the COVID-19 pandemic;how lesbians, gays, trans and non-binaries are approaching parenting and raising their families;factors that shape the reproductive decisions of LGBTQ+ individuals;adoption and coparenting in families composed of gay and lesbian couples, among other topics. Parenting and Couple Relationships Among LGBTQ+ People in Diverse Contexts will be of interest to social, developmental and family psychologists and social workers researching and working with same-sex couples and families, and with the LGBTQ+ population in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Approximately four percent of American adults-the same percentage of people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender ("LGBT")-are currently in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Progressive municipalities have recently shown an interest in recognizing and extending legal rights to individuals in such relationships. In the past two years, the cities of Somerville and Cambridge, and the town of Arlington, Massachusetts, have enacted domestic partnership legislation that extends to more than two partners. Others are sure to follow. This Article offers guidance regarding the form that legal regulation of plural relationships should take. To date, the few scholarly attempts to study the regulation of plural relationships have focused on polygamy: Marriage between more than two partners. This Article takes a different approach. Rather than adapting the framework of marriage to relationships involving multiple partners-a fruitless task given the incredible variation in plural relationship types-it decenters marriage by identifying how people in plural relationships configure their lives and analyzing how the law can respond to their needs. The Article makes three contributions. First, it reveals the diversity of plural relationship forms and explains their regulatory consequences. Second, it articulates a set of principles to guide the creation of plural relationship statuses at the state and local level. Third, it explores the potential of plural relationships to break marriage's stranglehold on all forms ofadult intimacy, promoting greater individual freedom and equal treatment ofall relationship types.
ABSTRACT
What would a romantic relationship between a biological human and an artificial intelligence system look like? The question is explored through a fictional correspondence between Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace.
ABSTRACT
[...]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.