I am a Negro Faggot, if I believe what movies, TV, and rap music say about me. Because of my sexuality, I cannot be Black. A strong, proud, Afrocentric Black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual. Hence I remain a Negro. My sexual difference is. . . a testament to weakness, passivity, the absence […]
День: 17.10.2015
The Terri Schiavo Case
On February 25, 1990, 26-year-old Terri Schiavo collapsed in her home from a possible potassium imbalance caused by an eating disorder, temporarily stopping her heart and cutting off oxygen to her brain. On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died after her feeding tube had been removed 13 days earlier. On these two points everyone connected […]
The Price of Life-Sustaining Care
A growing debate in Western society concerns the financial, personal, and moral costs of keeping people alive on life-support machines. For example, many people argue that treating secondary diseases in terminally ill older adults or keeping them alive on life support makes little sense. They argue that such treatment is extremely expensive, that these people […]
POPULARISING REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS:. MADONNA AND THE TEXTUAL POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE
It is against this theoretical background and the demand for a proliferation of representations of sexualities that the emergence of Madonna as a ‘gay icon’ can be read. As Hann (1995:5) comments, ‘Madonna embodies one accessible point in popular culture where representations of homoerotica, bisexuality, s/m, sexual freedom etc reach the wider public’. The central […]
Sodomy Laws, Tradition, and Social Change
My concerns about the role of historical interpretation in legal advocacy resurfaced in later court cases concerning homosexuality. Just as the opponents of abortion had claimed long-standing hostility to the practice, the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) based its support for state antisodomy laws on the “ancient roots” of state regulation of homosexual […]
SPECTATEUR, SPECTATRICE
If late-twentieth-century publishing increasingly became a department or specialism within vast multi-media conglomerates, it is also the case that for many men and women reading novels is now inseparable from their wider consumption of cultural narratives via film and television. To a large extent, these media currently occupy the space that once belonged to the […]
Liberation Movements: Birth and Transformation
The articulation of interests in the women’s liberation movement differs from the articulation in working-class feminism in a number of ways. Its main feature has been the construction of a collective project whose theme is the generalization of women’s struggles across different settings, relationships and areas of life. It arose on a much narrower social […]
Conclusion
Over the course of a few generations, the everyday possibilities for same-sex relationships in Western societies have altered in dramatic, but uneven, ways. In some contexts, it has become possible for same — sex couples and partners to live more mainstream lives than ever before. There are few contexts in which the mainstreaming of same-sex […]
Nationalism and Feminism
Tlatli, Mehta, and Khleifi did not invent the fictitious and cinematic configuration whereby woman and nation are equated. In fact, feminism in Israel, India, Tunisia, and Palestine (as well as elsewhere) had developed in tandem with national liberation movements. Much like the American women’s suffrage movement—which emerged out of the comparison between the statuses of […]
Working-class Feminism
In plain language, both in law and in popular morality, the wife is still the inferior in the family to the husband. She is first without economic independence, and the law therefore gives the man, whether he be good or bad, a terrible power over her. Partly for this reason, and partly because all sorts […]