Gender and sexual identities in transition - Jos Santaemilia|Patricia Bou

The aim of this volume is to offer an international panorama of gendered and sexualised experiences, with new and original data collected from a variety of cultural settings and sociopolitical contexts. We look at many parts of the world (Japan, Sweden, Poland, Cyprus, Spain, US, Australia, Canada, Hungary) with different assumptions and expectations, often revealing various research practices and traditions. Gendered or sexualized discourses are unstable constructions, in permanent transition, in a perpetual struggle to gain social legitimacy and to counter the workings of opposite discourses. They constitute privileged vantage points from which one can observe and judge power relationships. New identities are created and reproduced, refused and challenged.

This volume explores, among other issues, the perpetuation of hegemonic masculinity in Evangelical universities; the pharmaceutical industry's promotion of biometaphors involving a shopping strategy which revolves around compulsory heterosexuality; the perpetuation of Greek-Cypriot men's sexual superiority over women; the Catholic Church's attempt to impose a restrictive view of religion and of sexual ethics; the consolidation of American TV shopping channels as a setting where middle-class femininity and consumption are linked stereotypically; the negotiation of gender- and sex-related norms in groups of British Bangladeshi girls. Even heterosexuality, as the unmarked form of sexual identity and the primary site for the reproduction of gender difference, needs to reassert its normative and prescriptive status, maybe through the silent workings of tradition. By suggesting the concept of transition, we resist seeing the idea of identity as a fixed and definitive category. Gender and sexual identities are never at rest. One is never finished developing into a woman or a man, or any other gender/sexual identity.

Contributors include: Joan Pujolar, Andrea Simon-Maeda, Allyson Jule, Stina Ericsson, Agnieszka Kielkiewicz-Janowiak, Joanna Pawelczyk, Nora Schleicher, Elli Doukanari, Pilar Garces-Conejos, Lidia Tanaka, Jose Santaemilia and Pia Pichler.