Sexuality

Citation:

Payne, William J. 2016. “Death-Squads Contemplating Queers as Citizens: What Colombian Paramilitaries Are Saying.” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23 (3): 328–44. 

Author: William J. Payne

Abstract:

Colombian right-wing paramilitary forces aligned with the state and leftist guerrilla groups are associated with homophobic and transphobic attacks. However, the most extreme accounts of violence are attributed to the former group. Sexual and gender minorities are victimized in the ongoing internal conflict in which armed actors use attacks as a form of communicative violence meant to discipline the civilian population. At the same time, Colombian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities are making significant advances in gaining recognition of their human rights. This article explores the space where the advance of LGBT rights confounds reactionary homophobic beliefs of illegal right-wing armed groups. I consider how concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ shape the discourse of paramilitary forces in their account of their group's homophobic violence. Special attention is paid to the logic provided by two informants, former paramilitary members themselves, regarding the conditions under which right-wing paramilitary groups would be obliged to recognize the rights of sexual and gender minorities as citizens. The article concludes with a discussion of how the development of a sexual citizenship discourse, in place, may serve to disrupt extreme violence against sexual and gender minorities in the context of militarization and armed conflict.

Keywords: sexual citizenship, paramilitary, homophobic violence, Colombia, LGBT, queer

Topics: Armed Conflict, Citizenship, Gender, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Paramilitaries, Rights, Human Rights, Sexuality, Violence Regions: Americas, South America Countries: Colombia

Year: 2016

Citation:

Arik, Hulya. 2016. “Security, Secularism and Gender: The Turkish Military’s Security Discourse in Relation to Political Islam.” Gender, Place & Culture 23 (5): 641–58. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2015.1034242.

Author: Hulya Arik

Abstract:

This article examines the sexual and corporeal constructions of risk within the security discourses of the Turkish military in response to the rise of political Islam and Islamist identities in Turkey. I look at the Turkish military as the self-proclaimed guardian of the secular Republic, which, until recently, has actively configured political Islam as a risk to national security and ingrained such risk onto the body of the headscarved woman. My analysis covers a time frame from 1980s to late 2000s when the military issued memorandums and public statements against the rise of political Islam and pursued a belligerent campaign to erase ‘Islamist’ identities both from civilian politics and its own structure. The military implemented security regulations and dress codes to detect the ‘Islamist’ military personnel who are most conspicuously identified with the dress style of the women in their families. I explore these security regulations through women’s everyday and personal experiences in relation to their dress, headscarf style and comportment in military spaces and try to understand how ‘Islamism’ is constructed as a security threat in sexually and corporeally specific ways. I demonstrate how secularism is constructed, and needs to be protected, on the basis of a particular regime of gender and sexuality at the merger of traditional gender norms and secular Western modernity.

Keywords: risk, headscarf, secularism, Turkish military, political islam, security

Topics: Gender, Women, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Religion, Security, Sexuality Regions: MENA, Asia, Middle East, Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Turkey

Year: 2016

Citation:

Maclin, Beth, Jocelyn Kelly, Justin Kabanga, and Michael VanRooyen. 2015. “'They Have Embraced a Different Behaviour’: Transactional Sex and Family Dynamics in Eastern Congo’s Conflict.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 17 (1): 119-31. 

Authors: Beth Maclin, Jocelyn Kelly, Justin Kabang, Michael VanRooyen

Abstract:

The decades-long conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has resulted in major changes to local economies, strained social networks and insecurity. This environment forces many to pursue unconventional and, at times, socially stigmatised avenues for income. This paper explores the ways in which individuals in eastern DRC engage in, and are affected by, the commoditisation of sex within the context of decades of violent conflict. Focus group discussions conducted with men and women in 2009–2010 highlight how the war in the region has placed individuals, particularly women, in dire economic circumstances, while also changing their roles within families. In the face of severe poverty, women and girls may choose to engage in transactional sex in order to support themselves and their families. Discussants detailed how engaging in transactional sex due to an economic imperative has nonetheless damaged women’s relationships with family members between spouses as well as parents and their children through breach of trust and failure to provide. These focus group discussions elucidate how transactional sex is both a symptom of, and a catalyst for, changes within family dynamics in eastern DRC.

Keywords: family dynamics, transactional sex, conflict, DRC

Topics: Civil Society, Class, Economies, Economic Inequality, Poverty, Gender, Women, Households, Livelihoods, Sexual Livelihoods, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Regions: Africa, Central Africa Countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Year: 2015

Citation:

Moon, Katherine H. S. 2004. “Stars and Stripes and Sex: Nationalism and Globalization in the Kijich’on.” Women’s History in Modern Korea.

Author: Katherine Moon

Topics: Citizenship, Gender, Women, Globalization, Nationalism, Sexuality Regions: Asia, East Asia

Year: 2004

Citation:

Jauhola, Marjaana. 2016. “Decolonizing Branded Peacebuilding: Abjected Women Talk back to the Finnish Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” International Affairs 92 (2): 333–51. doi:10.1111/1468-2346.12554.

Author: Marjaana Jauhola

Abstract:

Topics: Gender, Women, Gender Analysis, Gender Balance, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Peacebuilding, Sexuality Regions: Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Finland, Indonesia

Year: 2016

Citation:

Khalili, Laleh. 2011. "Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency." Review of International Studies 37: 1471-91.

Author: Laleh Khalili

Abstract:

Current US counterinsurgency doctrine is gendered diversely in the different geographic locations where it is formulated, put in practice, and experienced. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted – for violence or ‘nation-building’ – on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incendiary form in the seam of encounter between counterinsurgent foot-soldiers and the locals, where sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race. Finally, in the Metropole, new masculinities and femininities are forged in the domain of counterinsurgency policymaking: While new soldier-scholars represent a softened masculinity, counterinsurgent women increasingly become visible in policy circles, with both using ostensibly feminist justifications for their involvement.

Topics: Armed Conflict, Class, Combatants, Development, Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Political Participation, Race, Sexuality, Violence Regions: MENA, Americas, North America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, United States of America

Year: 2011

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Citation:

Jabbra, Nancy W. 2006. "Women, Words and War: Explaining 9/11 and Justifying US Military Action in Afghanistan and Iraq." Journal of International Women’s Studies 8:1, 236-55.

Author: Nancy W. Jabbra

Abstract:

Texts and images in the print media, outdoor advertisements, and on the Internet form the primary source material for this article. The Bush administration and the American media, drawing upon well-worn traditions of representation, contrasted American women and Muslim/Middle Eastern women, American and Middle Eastern male sexuality, and the moral qualities (good versus evil) of American and Middle Eastern people. They used those contrasts to explain 9/11 and legitimize war in Afghanistan and Iraq. 9/11 was simply explained through a contrast between American innocence and Muslim savagery. For Afghanistan, the predominant trope was liberating Afghan women from the Taliban, or white men rescuing brown women from brown men, a story at least as old as the British Raj. The Iraq representations were more complex; both pro-war and anti-war proponents used the same images of suffering Iraqi women and girls, but to different ends: Saddam Hussein was a demon who must be destroyed, or the suffering was caused by sanctions and Western military action. Saddam himself was conflated with Iraq, and images of deviant sexuality were employed. Throughout, American women and girls were portrayed as the right kind of woman: usually white and innocent, or heroic soldiers. In any case, they were free, not oppressed. 

Topics: Armed Conflict, Combatants, Female Combatants, Male Combatants, Gender, Women, Men, Masculinity/ies, Gender Roles, Gender Analysis, Media, Terrorism, Sexuality Regions: MENA, Americas, North America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia Countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, United States of America

Year: 2006

Citation:

Mitchell, Rhoda. 2013. “Domestic Violence Prevention through the Constructing Violence-Free Masculinities Programme: An Experience from Peru.” Gender and Development 21 (1): 97-109

Author: Rhoda Mitchell

Abstract:

This paper examines work undertaken with male perpetrators of violence in the Construction of Violence-free Masculinities, a project run by the Centro Mujer Teresa de Jesus, a Women’s Centre located in a poor peri-urban district of Lima, Peru, in conjunction with Oxfam-Quebec. Centre staff faced the challenge of how to work with men who are violent towards their intimate partners. They use a community education approach, to challenge powerful stereotypes about gender roles, to question men’s assumed dominance over women, and support men to construct new forms of masculinity, without violence. Ultimately, the programme seeks to modify and change the beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviours of men who are aggressors.

Keywords: masculinity, Intimate partner violence, domestic violence, men's groups

Topics: Armed Conflict, Civil Wars, Ethnic/Communal Wars, Domestic Violence, Education, Gender, Women, Men, Girls, Boys, Masculinity/ies, Gender Roles, Gender Analysis, Gender Balance, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Gender Hierarchies, Gender Equality/Inequality, Gender Equity, Masculinism, Households, NGOs, Nonviolence, Sexual Violence, Male Perpetrators, Rape, SV against Women, Sexuality, Violence Regions: Americas, Central America, South America Countries: Peru

Year: 2013

Citation:

Matarazzo, Bridget B., Sean M. Barnes, James L. Pease, Leah M. Russell, Jetta E. Hanson, Kelly A. Soberay, and Peter M. Gutierrez. 2014. "Suicide Risk Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Military Personnel and Veterans: What Does the Literature Tell Us?" Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 44 (2): 200-17. doi:10.1111/sltb.12073.

Authors: Bridget B. Matarazzo, Sean M. Barnes, James L. Pease, Leah M. Russell, Jetta E. Hanson, Kelly A. Soberay, Peter M. Gutierrez

Abstract:

Research suggests that both the military and veteran and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations may be at increased risk for suicide. A literature review was conducted to identify research related to suicide risk in the LGBT military and veteran populations. Despite the paucity of research directly addressing this issue, themes are discussed evident in the literature on LGBT identity and suicide risk as well as LGBT military service members and veterans. Factors such as social support and victimization appear to be particularly relevant. Suggestions are made with respect to future research that is needed on this very important and timely topic.

Keywords: LGBT, homophobia, homosexuality, military, suicide, mental health, veterans

Topics: Health, Mental Health, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Sexuality

Year: 2014

Citation:

Lee, Alvin. 2010. "Assessing the Korean Military's Gay Sex Ban in the International Context." Law & Sexuality: A Review of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Legal Issues 19: 67-94.

Author: Alvin Lee

Topics: Gender, Men, LGBTQ, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militaries, Sexuality Regions: Asia, East Asia Countries: South Korea

Year: 2010