Identities on the Move: Contemporary Representations of New Sexualities and Gender Identities

by Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego (Editor), Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz (Editor), María José Coperías Aguilar (Contribution by), Logie Barrow (Contribution by), Mariam Bazi (Contribution by)

Overview

The development of new sexualities and gender identities has become a crucial issue in the field of literary and cultural studies in the first years of the twenty-first century. The roles of gender and sexual identities in the struggle for equality have become a major concern in both fields. The legacy of this process has its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century.

The Victorian preoccupation about the female body and sexual promiscuity was focused on the regulation of deviant elements in society and the control of venereal disease; homosexuals, lesbians, and prostitutes’ identities were considered out of the norm and against the moral values of the time. The relationship between sexuality and gender identity has attracted wide-ranging discussion amongst feminist theorists during the last few decades. The methodologies of cultural studies and, in particular, of post-structuralism and post-colonialism, urges us to read and interpret different cultures and different texts in ways that enhance personal and collective views of identity which are culturally grounded.

These readings question the postmodernist concept of identity by looking into more progressive views of identity and difference addressing post-positivist interpretations of key identity markers such as sex, gender, race, and agency. As a consequence, an individual’s identity is recognized as culturally constructed and the result of power relations. Identities on the Move: Contemporary Representations of New Sexualities and Gender Identities offers creative insights on pressing issues and engages in productive dialogue. Identities on the Move to addresses the topic of new sexualities and gender identities and their representation in post-colonial and contemporary Anglophone literary, historical, and cultural productions from a trans-national, trans-cultural, and anti-essentialist perspective. The authors include the views and concerns of people of color, of women in the diaspora, in our evermore multiethnic and multicultural societies, and their representation in the media, films, popular culture, subcultures and the arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498508766
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	06/03/2016
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Silvia Castro Borrego is lecturer of English and North American literature and culture at the University of Málaga.

Maria Isabel Romero Ruíz is lecturer in social history and cultural studies at the University of Málaga.

Table of Contents

List of Contents INTRODUCTION: GENDER STRIKE! SEEING GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Silvia Pilar Castro Borrego and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, University of Málaga (Spain) Part I: HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND SEXUAL WOUNDS CHAPTER 1 “Queering Decoloniality: Epistemic Body Politics in Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood” Laura Gillman, Virginia Tech University (USA) CHAPTER 2 “Women’s Migration, Prostitution and Human Trafficking: Gender and Historical Approaches” Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz, English Department, University of Málaga (Spain) CHAPTER 3 “Representations of Transnational and Sexual Violence in Zoë Wicomb’s The One that Got Away” Cynthia Lytle, Universitat de Barcelona (Spain) CHAPTER 4 “Child Sexual Abuse and Traumatic Identity in Down by the River by Edna O’Brien” María Elena Jaime de Pablos, Universidad de Almeria (Spain) Part II: EPISTEMIC BODY POLITICS AND GENDER STRUGGLES CHAPTER 5 “Ascribe, Divide – and Rule? (Some modes of intellectual liminality among ethnic, class, gender and medical Others)” Logie Barrow, Bremen University (Germany) CHAPTER 6 “Sex, Pain and Sickness: Performances of Identity through Spaces and Bodies” Eduardo Barros Grela, Universida de da Coruña (Spain) CHAPTER 7 “Interrogating the Posthuman in Contemporary US Science Fiction Films” Rocío Carrasco Carrasco, University of Huelva (Spain) CHAPTER 8 “Sexuality and Gender Relationships in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea” Lucia Garcia Magaldi, University of Cordoba (Spain) CHAPTER 9 “Lust and sexuality in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Antoinette Mason” María José Coperías Aguilar, Universitat de València (Spain) Part III: THEORIZING DIFFERENCE: RECONFIGURING QUEER IDENTITIES CHAPTER 10 “‘I am a Black Lesbian, and I am your sister’: Audre Lorde’s Theorizing Difference as Weapon for Survival and Change”. Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego, University of Málaga (Spain) CHAPTER 11 “The inside and outside of gendered space. Gender migration and Little Britain from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble to Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Yonqui” David Walton, University of Murcia (Spain) CHAPTER 12 “Shifting Bodies and Boundaries: Representations of Female Soccer Players and the Shortfall within the South-African Press” Kate Joseph and Antje Schuhmann, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa) CHAPTER 13 “Contemporary African American Women Playwrights and Homophobia: Before it Hits Home and Blues for an Alabama Sky” Inmaculada Pineda Hernandez, University of Málaga (Spain) Part IV: MIGRANT SEXUALITIES AND GENDER POLITICS CHAPTER 14 “An Epic Migration: African American Women, Representation, Mis/Guided Identities, and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help” Angelita Reyes, Arizona State University (USA) CHAPTER 15 “Identity and Agency in I been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked out all the Pots Marietta’s Sexual Self” Concepción Parrondo Carretero, University of Málaga (Spain) CHAPTER 16 “Muslim Women in the Third Space: Negotiating Diaspora, Sexuality and Identity from a Feminist Postcolonial Perspective” Mariam Bazi, University of Málaga (Spain) INDEX

Editorial Reviews

This collection of essays will make you uncomfortable, challenging everything you thought you knew about gender theory, migration theory, queer theory, postcolonialism, geopolitics, and sex trafficking. Acknowledging yet questioning the foundations for theoretical approaches set out in the twentieth century, the sixteen essays included here stretch our consciousness and provoke new questions, new formulations, and explode our academic “givens”. A must-read.

Justine Tally

Identities on the Move is a substantial and stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate on the construction of sexual and gender identities and their intricate relationship with body politics, gender performativity, gender relations, and queer/transgender agendas—all while intersecting with uneven power relations, (post)colonial (dis)encounters, and even (post)human conceptualizations. A welcome addition to the field!

Mar Gallego

Borrego and Ruiz have assembled a comprehensive and diverse collection of case studies, theoretical essays, and film, novel, and character analyses, all of which foreground cultural and literary approaches to understandings of identity. Contributors discuss topics such as migration and queerness; representations of anti-trafficking and prostitution; the trauma of incest; uses and transgressions of the physical body; (ab)uses of silence, power, and collective action; post-decolonialism and post-humanism; feminism, black feminism, and patriarchy; victimization and agency; and anti-essentialist, hybrid, and intersectional understandings of identity. Strengths of the collection include its focus on contemporary controversial issues tied to gender, sexuality, race, and location; its use of short, accessible, theoretically informed chapters; and its innovative, disruptive configurations of identity. These nuanced accounts consider how such configurations are constrained by, and may even perpetuate, stereotypical, dominant, and insidious understandings of identity. This book will appeal to multiple audiences and could be of great use in courses that focus primarily on personal and social identities. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

Choice Reviews

Borrego and Ruiz have assembled a comprehensive and diverse collection of case studies, theoretical essays, and film, novel, and character analyses, all of which foreground cultural and literary approaches to understandings of identity. Contributors discuss topics such as migration and queerness; representations of anti-trafficking and prostitution; the trauma of incest; uses and transgressions of the physical body; (ab)uses of silence, power, and collective action; post-decolonialism and post-humanism; feminism, black feminism, and patriarchy; victimization and agency; and anti-essentialist, hybrid, and intersectional understandings of identity. Strengths of the collection include its focus on contemporary controversial issues tied to gender, sexuality, race, and location; its use of short, accessible, theoretically informed chapters; and its innovative, disruptive configurations of identity. These nuanced accounts consider how such configurations are constrained by, and may even perpetuate, stereotypical, dominant, and insidious understandings of identity. This book will appeal to multiple audiences and could be of great use in courses that focus primarily on personal and social identities. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

Choice

Borrego and Ruiz have assembled a comprehensive and diverse collection of case studies, theoretical essays, and film, novel, and character analyses, all of which foreground cultural and literary approaches to understandings of identity. Contributors discuss topics such as migration and queerness; representations of anti-trafficking and prostitution; the trauma of incest; uses and transgressions of the physical body; (ab)uses of silence, power, and collective action; post-decolonialism and post-humanism; feminism, black feminism, and patriarchy; victimization and agency; and anti-essentialist, hybrid, and intersectional understandings of identity. Strengths of the collection include its focus on contemporary controversial issues tied to gender, sexuality, race, and location; its use of short, accessible, theoretically informed chapters; and its innovative, disruptive configurations of identity. These nuanced accounts consider how such configurations are constrained by, and may even perpetuate, stereotypical, dominant, and insidious understandings of identity. This book will appeal to multiple audiences and could be of great use in courses that focus primarily on personal and social identities. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers.

CHOICE