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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Sexuality

City University of New York (CUNY)

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte Feb 2022

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …


Desexualizing Queer Identities: Methods To Validating Non-Sexual Romantic Attraction And Relationships, Unnati Patel Jun 2020

Desexualizing Queer Identities: Methods To Validating Non-Sexual Romantic Attraction And Relationships, Unnati Patel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is an increase in the negative views of queer and LGBT+ people in America, and I argue that it is, in part, due to the sexualized connotations of, and sexual association with, queer and LGBT+ identities. Innocuous acts by queer or LGBT+ people, such as being an out school teacher or holding hands in a public space, is enough for non-LGBT+ people to become uncomfortable to varying degrees and, sometimes, even cause verbal abuse or violence. When we look at queer or LGBT+ representation through the possibility of queerness, and by reading representations of queer and LGBT+ romantic attraction …


Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen May 2018

Dolls Who Speak: Sex Robots, Cyborgs And The Image Of Woman, Victoria E. Pihl Sorensen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the emerging phenomenon of sex robots from a feminist materialist perspective. I explore the current scholarly and popular debates on sex robots, and suggest a reading of sex robots in their machinic, literary and cinematic expressions to move beyond the moral-ethical impasse that seems to dominate sex robot discussions. Employing Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Myth” on a methodological and theoretical level, I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to studying sex robots, which proceeds carefully so as to avoid contributing to sex panic, and which thinks critically about what it might mean to assess sex robots from a feminist …


Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash Feb 2018

Race, Sexuality, And Masculinity On The Down Low, Stephen Kochenash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a so-called post-racial America, a new gay identity has flourished and come into the limelight. However, in recent years, researchers have concluded that not all men who have sex with other men (MSM) self-identify as gay, most noticeably a large population of Black men. It is possible that a tainted history of Black enslavement in this country that is inextricably linked with ideas of space, surveillance, subversion, and survival inform a Black male’s self-identification as being “on the down low” (DL). This begs the question: What does mainstream society view as gay-ness and how is the DL constructed …


Gay And Lesbian Studies In Brazil: A Field In Construction, Berenice Bento Apr 2008

Gay And Lesbian Studies In Brazil: A Field In Construction, Berenice Bento

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Traditionally, sexuality studies in Brazil have been organized around ideas of normalization. Specialists in the field have been trained to observe and comment on behaviours that did not conform to the imperatives of heterosexuality. Gender was polarized and hierarchical, and gained meaning from the idea of separate, complementary sexes. Heterosexuality gave meaning to human existence and reproduction, and every other kind of sexual expression was measured according to the rule of heteronormativity.