This article analyses how performatively heteronormative, male teenage Chinese fans consume sports games through the prism of masculinity, using secondary school students’ engagement with the NBA (National Basketball Association) as a case study. Drawing on focus groups of twenty-three participants, we discover that male teenage sports fans constantly evoke elite NBA athletes as male ideals to define a desirable, heteronormative wen-wu masculinity specific to the post-reform era. In this process, they often engage in a double-standard practice, manifesting as their appropriation (...) of the CP (coupling) rhetoric to ‘ship’ athletes and their problematisation of heterosexual women and LGBTQ fans’ similar usage of it. This double-standard practice constitutes an attempt to monopolise the interpretation of masculinity both within and outside of the sporting context. It sheds light on the heteronormative male cohort’s rejection of alternative masculinities, underscoring how aspects of gender politics unfolding in wider society are reflected in China’s teenage sports fandom. (shrink)

This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ (...) fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism. (shrink)

The field of social entrepreneurship, a domain focused on implementing solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues, remains highly male-dominated. Research continues to emphasise that women social entrepreneurs are often expected to behave in masculine ways in order to become successful. The study presented in this article explored the perceptions and experiences of thirty-three women living in the United Kingdom who were developing their skills in social entrepreneurship. Documenting their experiences, we sought to understand how women work in a male-dominated (...) field. Our analysis primarily builds on a Bourdieusian-revisionist approach of emotional capital to advance understandings of how women’s networks with other women allow them to navigate social entrepreneurship. Drawing on emotional capital, as a theory, we examine the ways in which these women find these spaces generative and how it contributes to their problematising of masculine orthodoxies. (shrink)

This article analyses the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson as a heroine through the notion of labour, emphasising how heroine narratives are both a product of labour as well as a form of labour. After offering a short account of Marsha P. Johnson’s role in the Stonewall riots and STAR, we explore the development of trans communities’ ability to create, sustain and disseminate heroine narratives, emphasising Tourmaline’s pivotal archival role in establishing Johnson’s legacy. Then, we elucidate the role of heroine (...) narratives in creating and sustaining a collective identity. We argue that community attachment to Marsha P. Johnson reclaims the place of trans communities in LGBTQ+ history but is often done in a manner that obscures the whiteness of mainstream trans advocacy. We suggest that the recent increase in interest towards the life-sustaining labour of STAR House reflects the evolution of trans collective identity in the post-visibility era. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing anti-feminist, conservative movement across many parts of the world known as the anti-gender movement. This movement has been especially strong in Central Eastern Europe, where anti-gender actors have framed ‘gender’ as a static, foreign concept imported from ‘the West’ and destructive to ‘traditional’ societies. Utilising a postcolonial feminist approach, I examine the concept of ‘gender’ in Czechia, drawing attention to the role played by Czech academics, activists and policymakers in negotiating the use (...) of the term ‘gender’. This article traces the history of the term from the 1990s when ‘gender’ was first introduced to a Czech academic audience, through public seminars and lectures hosted by the Prague Gender Studies Centre, to the present-day inclusion of gender mainstreaming discourse in Czech policy documents. I reveal that ‘gender’ is not a timeless, clearly defined, fixed term wholly imported from ‘the West’ but rather a concept with a variable and complicated history. Thus, this crucial term, first developed in Anglo-academia, is not uncontested or uncritically accepted, contrary to the claims made by anti-gender actors. The findings presented in this article hold implications critical to transnational feminist dialogue and activism during the current period of growing global anti-feminist sentiment. (shrink)

In July 2021, a series of gruesome videos exposed a case of brutal torture perpetrated by a guru or leader of the trans feminine hijra community in eastern India. This guru was allegedly of a Bangladeshi Muslim background, and various community members used the case as an alibi to target hijras of such national and religious origin, sometimes even demanding their expulsion from India. This phenomenon paralleled increasing affiliations between certain sections of trans/hijra communities and the Hindu Right. This article (...) situates this case within the broader rise of queer and trans Hindutva or Hindu nationalism and locates it as indicative of Hindutva’s expansion to its erstwhile ‘elsewheres’: areas outside its traditional strongholds such as eastern India and communities such as hijras who are known for their mixed religious practices and have been historically stigmatised by Hindu society. However, the article also analyses the case to show how hijras and related communities evidence contingently wavering political alliances and complex dynamics of intra-community power and resistance that remain irreducible to typical equations of Hindu right-wing politics. Queer/trans Hindutva might become disrupted by its potential constituents themselves, showing how Hindutva’s ‘elsewheres’ trouble its assimilationist capacities. (shrink)

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I (...) explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty. (shrink)

Deliberations and discussions on inter-caste relationships in South Asia so far have been fixed within the confines of heterosexuality. Not only are heterosexual inter-caste relationships the default imagination of an inter-caste love, but also notions of heteronormativity dominate discussions of inter-caste love, relationship and, importantly, inter-caste marriages. In asking ‘queer’ questions about caste, this article analyses what an inter-caste dynamic means for social movements which rally around notions of love and desire or choose to reject them. This article recentres desire (...) and intimacy into caste to imagine queer (im)possibilities of dalit love. In doing so, the article asks: where is the dalit lover? Building upon conversations and interviews with five dalit-queer scholars, intellectuals and activists, as well as provocations offered by them, this article complicates ‘inter-caste love’ itself as a site of power and politics, of social categorisation as well as of critical theorisation. (shrink)