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

Description

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. Contents......Page 9 Introduction......Page 11 Chapter One: Queering Decoloniality......Page 21 Chapter Two: Women’s Migration, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking......Page 37 Chapter Three: Representations of Transnational and Sexual Violence in Zoë Wicomb’s The One that Got Away......Page 49 Chapter Four: Child Sexual Abuse and Traumatic Identity in Down by the Riverby Edna O’Brien......Page 63 Chapter Five: Ascribe, Divide—and Rule?......Page 77 Chapter Six: Sex, Pain, and Sickness......Page 107 Chapter Seven: Interrogating the Posthuman in U.S. Science Fiction Films......Page 119 Chapter Eight: Sexuality and Gender Relationships in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea......Page 135 Chapter Nine: Lust and Sexuality in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Antoinette Mason......Page 149 Chapter Ten: “I Am a Black Lesbian, and I Am Your Sister”......Page 161 Chapter Eleven: The Inside and Outside of Gendered Space......Page 177 Chapter Twelve: Shifting Bodies and Boundaries......Page 189 Chapter Thirteen: Black Feminist Theatrical Responses to Homophobia......Page 203 Chapter Fourteen: An Epic Migration......Page 217 Chapter Fifteen: Identity and Agency in I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots......Page 237 Chapter Sixteen: Muslim Women in the Third Space......Page 251 Index......Page 267 About the Contributors......Page 271