Justin Bengry I’ve never come out to my students. I’ve never stood at the front of a classroom and told my students that I’m gay, and I’ve never told them witty anecdotes about my husband. That isn’t to say that I’m not completely out both professionally and personally (as google […]
Tag: sexual categories
“Cow protection or Gay protection?” LGBT rights, “Hindu” tradition and the Indian elections
Onni Gust with Radhika Govindrajan Elections in India are drawing to a close with results pending. Amongst the 814 million eligible to vote are 28 000 gender non-conforming people, many of whom are hijra, who can now register as “third gender.” The competition for seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, […]
The Erotics of Shaving in Victorian Britain
Justin Bengry Beardedness, or alternatively clean-shavenness, has long been an important signifier of manliness, inscribing crucial gender and sexual meanings onto the male body. But fashions in shaving are notoriously unstable, even in the nineteenth century, that idyll for the hirsute among us. Beardedness in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, only […]
Beards, Real Men, and Poseurs: male sexuality and fashion since around 1900
Julia Laite A recent post by regular blogger Nikki Daniels (‘An open letter to bearded hipsters’) that has made the usual rounds of facebook and twitter has got me thinking about how male fashion has long been central to the way we define what it means to be a ‘real’ man. The blogger wrote about […]
‘In the manner of a woman’: John/Eleanor Rykener and the Inessentiality of Gender
Kim Racon On what was likely a cold Sunday night in Cheapside, London, in December 1394, John Britby passed through the high road, catching the eye of a woman called Eleanor. She was bundled up but still held his attention. He approached her and asked her to have sex with […]
Hyperbole and horror: hijras and the British imperial state in India
Onni Gust Nineteenth-century British travel writers and colonial officials rarely passed on the opportunity to prefix some derogatory hyperbole to the word ‘eunuch.’ Frequently they offered extensive defamation, referring to eunuchs as “the vilest and most polluted beings” and commenting on the “revolting” practices that they imagined, but could rarely […]
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