Archive - Topic - Gender and Identities

[1] The average person does not distinguish between “sex” and “gender,” and uses the two terms interchangeably. The same can be said of a significant number of social scientists. For instance, an unsystematic review of one recent issue of Sociological Forum and several recent issues of American Journal of Sociology...

[1] Writing in issue 38 of this journal, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard suggested that Hindu nationalists in pre-Independence India engaged in “a process of myth-making whereby feminine sexual purity was endowed with the status of the transcendental signifier of national virtue … embedded in a mosaic of macrosociological dynamics of colonialism and...

My inspiration for the script came from watching the religious right videotape The Gay Agenda. There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrator is warning viewers that these people will take over your town, and I thought, ‘Well, that would be fun.’ –...

[1] “Would you like to know how it feels to be an American Negro? Would you like to know what Negroes are thinking and doing? Would you like to see their daily life pictured?” asks an advertisement for W.E.B. DuBois’s monthly magazine The Crisis, printed in the March 1925 issue...

“As we Latinos redefine ourselves in America, making ourselves up and making ourselves over, we have to be careful, in taking up the promises of America, not to adopt its limiting racial paradigms.” Julia Alvarez, “A White Woman of Color” Will Ferrell to Jennifer Lopez during her opening monologue on...

[1] In the preface to her analysis Racechanges, feminist scholar Susan Gubar explains her own induction to contemporary race theory via gender theory and questions the resistance to scholarly work on racechange: “Was the subject of transracial crossing more taboo than that of transvestism or transsexuality? Not only has the...

Canadian Nationalism and the Construction of a “Socially Appropriate” Femininity [1] Nations have historically constructed themselves as gendered institutions (eg. Nagel 1998; Parker and Russo et al. 1992; Yuval-Davis 1997), and at different times and for different purposes, they have sought to promote certain “official” gendered or sexual identities for...

(part of a series in Special Issue #40: Scared of the Dark: Race, Gender and the “Horror Film” – Guest Editor: Frances Gateward ) [2] Neil’s transformation is not just from white to black but from modern to primitive. At first, Neil believes that he has Chippewa blood in his...

(part of a series in Special Issue #40: Scared of the Dark: Race, Gender and the “Horror Film” – Guest Editor: Frances Gateward ) What became transparent were the self-evident ways that Americans choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation...

(part of a series in Special Issue #40: Scared of the Dark: Race, Gender and the “Horror Film” – Guest Editor: Frances Gateward ) [1] Film genres routinely mix and evolve over time in ways that change our expectations of them, and change the way that we as audiences read...