Gwen Benaway, "When it comes to health care, transphobia persists"
"I suppose I should have predicted that transphobia would follow me into every aspect of my life, but I naively assumed that having the correct name and gender on my health card would protect me."
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, "‘My Dark Secret’: Orthodox Women Reveal Their Abortion Stories"
"[T]here is one group of women for whom abortion is an especially fraught decision — women in religiously conservative communities, and particularly, women of the Orthodox Jewish community."
Sadie Dingfelder, "The Crane Who Fell in Love with a Human"
"Early one summer morning, as rain is misting the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a middle-aged man is courting a crane."
Sara Gregory, "How Queer Comics Are Confronting Rape Culture"
"Trauma and triumph have always been source material for queer performers. The difference now is that people with power are starting to pay attention: men, heterosexuals, cisgender people, white people—even the holy trinity of cishet white men."
Henry Samuel, "'I will not tolerate this': Video of street attack on student by sex harasser shocks France"
"Describing the unknown man’s behaviour as 'unacceptable', Ms Laguerre wrote: 'It happens every day, everywhere and I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a similar story'."
Harriet Sherwood, "Recognition at last for Gentleman Jack, Britain’s ‘first modern lesbian’"
"She was a 19th-century pioneer in many fields: business, travel, mountaineering. But 178 years after her death, Anne Lister is best known for her string of female lovers, with their erotic encounters explicitly chronicled in a coded diary stretching to 27 volumes."
Michael Stahl, "The Renegade Fashion Guru Who Wants to Change the Way We Think About Gender"
"A 30-year veteran of the commercial retail industry, Smith dreamt up The Phluid Project while on an excursion of self-discovery in South America. As a gay man who struggled with his identity throughout most of his life, he fancies the store as his chance to give back to the nonbinary and LGBTQ communities, to cultivate a place for people — anyone — to simply be themselves."
Isabella Steger and Sookyoung Lee, "South Koreans are tired of bad sex education—and bad sex—in the #MeToo era"
"Long before #MeToo took off, three South Korean teachers knew the country had a gender problem."
Maxwell Strachan, "The Secret History Of Gay Hollywood Finally Gets Its Movie"
"A new documentary tells the story of Old Hollywood's inescapable closet through the eyes of a man once known as the 'Pimp to the Stars'."
Article Spotlight
Scott De Orio, "The Invention of Bad Gay Sex: Texas and the Creation of a Criminal Underclass of Gay People," Journal of the History of Sexuality 26, no. 1 (2017): 53-87. https://muse.jhu.edu/
"Texas was an especially key battleground because of the particular character of the state’s political culture. Like the better-known gay meccas of New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, and Houston also fostered vibrant traditions of gay activism. What was perhaps unique to Texas, however, was that gay activists had to reckon with an especially intense backlash from conservatives in the battle against the state’s sodomy law. Unlike the twenty-nine other states that had decriminalized anal and oral sex between consenting adults in private by 1979, conservative groups in Texas had succeeded in 1974 in passing a new law that decriminalized heterosexual sodomy but left what the statute called “homosexual conduct” a crime. Ultimately, activists had to fight two and a half decades longer than in most other states to get the Texas sodomy law invalidated for gay sex, too. It was this peculiar nature of Texas’s political culture—which included both a vibrant gay movement and exceptionally robust conservative opposition to gay rights—that made the state the origin of the court case that ultimately led to the reform of sodomy laws nationwide."
Call for Papers
Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920
Submission Deadline: September 15, 2018
"This collection will map out the last 100 years of this lengthy struggle, focusing on efforts to recognize, appreciate, and cultivate women’s civic engagement since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Our purpose is not celebratory. Instead, we seek to trace the uneven road to suffrage and public office women of different backgrounds and means experienced after 1920. We also intend to expose the institutional barriers and masculinist conceptions of leadership that women in politics have faced and continue to tackle. Women have exhibited considerable democratic imagination within and outside the traditional channels of electoral politics. Melding gender, social, cultural, and political history, this collection seeks to capture examples of women acting together and on their own within and outside electoral and governmental channels to claim a political presence, enlist state action, and create alternative services and solutions. In doing so, we use this historic centennial to make visible the determined presence of women in politics since 1920, while also calling attention to the ways these women have and continue to be written out of history"
Please send article abstracts of 500 words and a CV by September 15, 2018 to: Stacie at staranto@ramapo.edu or Leandra at lrzarnow@central.uh.edu. We also welcome questions and comments at those email addresses.
Episode Spotlight
In the 1970s, Evangelical women published bestselling marriage manuals. These books encouraged millions of American women to have active and exciting sex lives. They also insisted that in order to find happiness, a woman must submit to her husband's divinely ordained authority.
Books
Sexing History Swag
Podcasts
The United States of Anxiety's "These 'Witches' Are Empowering the Next Generation"
"[G]roups like Brujas, a radical youth collective in New York City, is using art, politics and skateboarding to reject these traditional ideas of America. Brujas, which means witches in Spanish, is part of a new generation of revolutionaries who are unafraid to blur the lines between culture and activism. They are all for disrupting the patriarchy, trans-liberation and prison abolition — and are doing it unapologetically."