Identities on the Move

Contemporary Representations of New Sexualities and Gender Identities

Silvia Pilar Castro-Borrego, Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2014
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739191705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Queering Decoloniality
• Women’s Migration, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking
• Representations of Transnational and Sexual Violence in Zoë Wicomb’s The One that Got Away
• Child Sexual Abuse and Traumatic Identity in Down by the River by Edna O’Brien
• Ascribe, Divide—and Rule?
• Sex, Pain, and Sickness
• Interrogating the Posthuman in U.S. Science Fiction Films
• Sexuality and Gender Relationships in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
• Lust and Sexuality in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Antoinette Mason
• “I Am a Black Lesbian, and I Am Your Sister”
• The Inside and Outside of Gendered Space
• Shifting Bodies and Boundaries
• Black Feminist Theatrical Responses to Homophobia
• An Epic Migration
• Identity and Agency in I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots
• Muslim Women in the Third Space
• Index
• About the Contributors