Polarising Sexualities and Genders

This ground-breaking open access collection tackles polarisations around sexualities and genders and in doing so, it opens out debates and discussions to reflect on how people live them, including and moving beyond social movements and political debates.

Anti-gender and heteroactivist movements have become increasingly recognized as key political groups in the last decade, driving resistances that often respond to LGBTQI+ inclusion. How these divisions are felt and experienced is under-explored.

Crossing a variety of geographical contexts, including the USA, Canada, Ireland, and Great Britain, Polarising Sexualities and Genders brings together leading and emerging scholars in multiple disciplines to explore, theorise and hope for change in social, legal, and political sexual/gendered/LGBTQIA+ landscapes. Examples include polarisation in media coverage and legislative debates about gender and transgender rights in the US and UK, to the possibility of occupying a sexual borderlands, the changing language for LGBTQIA+identities within the US, and the ways in which new discourses emerge to capture sexual lives. Through these case studies, the book explores how polarizing discourses and sociopolitical landscape shape the lived experiences, divisions, and marginalizations among LGBTQIA+ people in places including Lithuania and the southern United States.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

Kath Browne is a Professor of Geography at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research has focused on social justice and inequalities, specifically around gender and sexualities. She has published Liveable Lives (Bloomsbury, 2023), Heteroactivism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and After Repeal (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Emily Kazyak is Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her research focuses on laws related to sexuality and gender as well as on the family relationships of LGBTQ people.