Who ‘framed’ Ramchandra Siras? Journalistic discourses of sexual citizenship in India

In 2010, a professor in India was forcibly outed as gay and catapulted into a nationwide debate about LGBTQ rights in India. A textual analysis of prominent Indian English-language newspapers revealed the framing devices journalists used to report the case, unpacking how coverage essentialized gay identity, signified civil rights and citizenship, problematized notions of consent, complicated public/private demarcations of sexuality, and negotiated competing claims of morality. Journalistic discourse inevitably privileged dominant western neoliberal conceptions of sexuality, reducing sexual citizenship to a particular classed and gendered subject at the expense of a more expansive range of alternative sexualities in India.

Research on Diversity in Sexual Identities

If the elaboration of LGB identities is predicated on the development of binary sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries around normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or Western and non-Western, research at the dawn of the twenty-first century has turned decidedly to the fluidity of sexuality and the various ways that sexual behavior is situated in social relationships and as social identities. This chapter turns to the persistence of alternative sexualities outside of or beyond the construction LGB, interrogating the links between sexuality and gender, the various reactions to the global diffusion of homosexuality (and homophobia) as cultural forms predicated on Western binaries, and the possibilities inherent in a world of diversely constituted sexualities.

Exploring judgement and internal bias of Life Orientation teachers in sexuality teaching

There are various challenges in the teaching of sexuality within a South African multicultural context, as there is no uniform knowledge across learner backgrounds. As such, teachings often revert to the teacher’s beliefs, in order to create meaning within the uncertainty, at the expense of the individual learners’ personal identity formation. This paper explores the teachers’ internal bias and its subsequent influence on the teaching of alternative sexualities in Life Orientation classes. Through purposive sampling, four teachers in the Mangaung area of the Free State province participated in semi-structured interviews and electroencephalogram (EEG) measurements. Data were analysed by means of thematic analysis and descriptive statistics collected through EEG readings in order to explore how teachers construct knowledge about alternative sexualities while mediating internal conflict, specifically through measuring frustration responses to stimuli. Findings suggest that the challenge of personal background influences teaching practice as well as limitations at curriculum level, leading to personal interpretations of content. Furthermore, sensitisation to content significantly affects levels of frustration, while the active versus reactive nature of teaching sexuality becomes apparent in how teachers ultimately accommodate personal bias. Recommendations include the need for sensitisation, during teacher induction, to sensitive topics such as sexuality, and to provide less biased messages during teaching.

Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp

Avery explores Lytton Strachey’s engagement with Christian ethical discourse and iconography to promote a queer ethical ideal of friendship and intimacy unfettered by moral convention. In his famous biographies and in a series of essays, short stories, and dialogues, it is clear he was perennially interested in religious questions and themes. Despite his atheism and disapproval of religious faith, he believed that the achievement of sexual and ethical autonomy, the legitimation of alternative sexualities and a new sexual ethic, demanded a serious critique of Christian moralism. In a sado-masochistic crucifixion experiment in the late 1920s, he allowed himself to be affixed to a cross and pierced in the side by his lover Roger Senhouse, providing a striking example from the modernist period and from the Bloomsbury milieu of how an iconically normative object may be used to express a queer ethical, sexual, and social vision.