Journal of Homosexuality最新文献

Despite rights-based advancements within Canada, sexual and gender minority people continue to face barriers when accessing and navigating the legal system across a wide range of legal issues. This study presents findings from 21 qualitative interviews conducted from 2020 to 2021 with sexual minority people in Western Canada exploring their experiences with the legal system. Findings presented in this paper focus on experiences of participants interacting with the legal system, the barriers to resolving their legal problems, and the resulting impacts experienced by sexual minority people. While participants experienced a range of legal problems, these challenges were rooted in systemic forms of oppression including: settler colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and cis/heteronormativity. Barriers to resolving these legal issues included lack of clarity about legal processes, financial barriers, slow timelines for legal resolution, and challenges with proving discrimination and harassment. Many participants' legal problems arose specifically from their treatment within the legal system. This demonstrates the limitations of legal protections and the importance of addressing and dismantling systems of oppression, including the treatment of sexual and gender minority people by both legal actors and institutions, to improve access to justice for these communities.

The unprecedented victory of drag performer Nymphia Wind in Season 16 of RuPaul's Drag Race marked a historic milestone for Asian and LGBTQ+ representation in global media. The present study employed a mixed-methods design to investigate the awareness, significance, and impact of Nymphia's achievement on Taiwan's LGBTQ+ community. Among 1370 LGBTQ+ individuals surveyed, the results indicated that 46.0% demonstrated high awareness of Nymphia's victory. The achievement was widely perceived as encouraging authentic self-expression (73.8%), enhancing LGBTQ+ visibility (76.7%), and boosting Taiwan's international image (77.8%). Path analysis indicated that achievement awareness was associated with reduced self-stigma and improved well-being, mediated by increased levels of identity pride and community visibility. Complementing these quantitative findings, inductive thematic analysis revealed six major themes: (1) inspiration and empowerment, (2) personal connection and resonance, (3) visibility and representation, (4) public acceptance and awareness, (5) cultural and international presence, and (6) mixed reactions and concerns. These results demonstrate the influence of prominent LGBTQ+ achievements on community dynamics and experiences. Responses ranged from celebration to concerns about privilege and stereotyping, reflecting the complexity of representation and signaling that visibility alone is insufficient without deeper societal understanding and structural change.

This study adopts a critical phenomenological approach and bases its conceptual and interpretative framework on a decolonizing critique of Western-centric formations of citizenship. The study aims to explore the legitimacy of social exclusion by engaging with ongoing political discourse on social exclusion while examining exclusionary politics surrounding qualification and citizenship through the lens of South Korean Queer individuals. A total of 32 adult participants who self-identified as Korean Queers and were residing in South Korea were recruited online. A 1:1 in-depth interview was conducted between July and August 2024, lasting approximately 90 minutes. The analysis resulted in four major themes: (1) Governing Citizenship, (2) Surviving Surveillance: Queer Negotiations, (3) Hierarchies Within: Extended Exclusionary Politics Among Queer Communities, and (4) Misaligned Queer Futurities. Subthemes included "Controlled Visibility," "The Temporality of Disqualification," "Model Queer Citizen?" and "Stratified Belonging." The findings suggest that within Korea's context, the legitimacy of exclusion is inseparable from social inclusion. Based on the findings, I reorient Western-centric notions of citizenship and discuss how exclusion is reconfigured into localized forms under imported regulatory ideals.

Borders and boundaries have long served as powerful metaphors in migration and queer studies, yet they risk reproducing heteronormative paradigms that equate (border) penetration with power, and movement with violation. Drawing on interviews from research with queer refugees in Berlin and Copenhagen, this article foregrounds bodies, sexual desires and pleasures, dimensions often marginalized within queer asylum scholarship. Through two empirical vignettes, the analysis mobilizes "circlusion," a concept developed as a counterpart to penetration, as a conceptual alternative for examining queer migration as an embodied process of opening rather than intrusion. Rather than displacing existing analyses of violence, surveillance, and credibility, the article situates circlusion as an analytical lens that brings desire and pleasure into view within the asylum contexts. Focusing on the lived, sexual experiences of Joshua and Khaled, the article shows how queer refugees can be understood not only as objects of control but also as agents of pleasure, relation, and subversion. By centering desires beyond credibility, this contribution opens space for more nuanced engagements with pleasure, agency, and embodiment in queer asylum research, without reducing queer refugees to either victims or icons of resistance.

Intersectionality and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) issues have a significant and overlapping history. However, little is known concerning how adversarial arenas, such as online conservative news media, may condemn intersectionality and LGBTQ issues simultaneously. Using grounded theory methods, I examined how 427 online conservative news media reports, from nine widely searched websites in the U.S., linked intersectionality with LGBTQ issues to position both in negative ways. The reports connected intersectionality with LGBTQ people of color to narrow its relevance, constructing multiply-marginalized groups as specific rather than expansive and drawing on understandings of people of color and LGBTQ individuals as specialized. Further, the reports constructed intersectionality as helping LGBTQ people of color and transgender individuals, but as harming other marginalized groups, including cisgender women, men of color, and white gay men. These findings indicate that online conservative news media are strategically using LGBTQ people of color and transgender individuals to attract those with more privilege into conservativism.

In 2017, Israel pioneered a globally novel position: LGBT social workers within the welfare system. This marked a transition from NGO-based service delivery to direct governmental responsibility, creating new professional roles for a historically marginalized population within the mainstream welfare system. This study examined how practice-driven processes shape professional role development when serving marginalized populations. A qualitative study employing semi-structured interviews was conducted with 50 social workers who currently hold or previously held LGBT social worker positions across 49 local authorities in Israel (78% coverage). Data were collected between February and September 2024. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Four central themes emerged: (1) From ambiguity to practice-driven design-The absence of clear formal definitions enabled workers to become active architects of their own positions through locally responsive approaches; (2) Active outreach and visibility-Institutional denial led to the development of distinctive practices of outreach and visibility as permanent role components, requiring workers to prove population existence while delivering services; (3) Knowledge translation and brokering-The lack of professional LGBT knowledge transformed workers into institutional knowledge authorities and inter-system coordinators, creating new professional discourse across municipal departments; and (4) Structural factors-Client quota systems, part-time allocations, and confidentiality requirements actively shaped role boundaries and functions. The study revealed that professional roles for marginalized populations develop through practice-driven processes operating across three interconnected dimensions: Role Genesis, System Transformation, and Practice under existential role threat. These dimensions operate simultaneously, compelling workers to construct roles while educating systems and defending their existence. The findings demonstrate that structured ambiguity, combined with outreach and visibility work and knowledge brokering, can enable comprehensive institutional innovation. The Israeli model offers insights for developing responsive services for marginalized communities within mainstream welfare systems. The findings inform policy guidance for creating specialized professional roles serving excluded populations in other national contexts.

In Africa, mourning is both a personal and communal expression of grief. Among the rationales for commiseration or shared mourning is a recognition of the bereaved person's loss and pain. This recognition of grief is culturally believed to help the bereaved walk through grief. However, the right to mourn and be recognized as an ideal mourner is contingent on some ideals of being and relations that invalidate the grief of any mourner outside this framing. Specifically, in postcolonial African cultural framing of marriage as the union of a biological man and a biological woman, the grief of the gay widower (or lover) is barely acknowledged publicly. Arinze Ifeakandu's short story, "Where the Heart Sleeps," constructs and contests this disenfranchised grief of a homosexual partner. The story, by narrating the condition of mourning vis-à-vis discrimination based on sexuality, interrogates the extent to which African humanism or ubuntu is realized in homophobic cultures. It imagines a world in which the resources of ubuntu resolves the contradiction in the African cultural imaginary, thereby inscribing the possibility of an other-respecting and embracing community. Through a critical interpretation of the narrative affordances (story, symbol, character, etc.), Ifeakandu's investment in reimagining African future is unveiled.

Latinx sexual minoritized emerging adults (SMEA) face heightened mental health risks due to compounded ethnic-racial and sexual orientation-based discrimination. This study examined how personal, ethnic-racial, U.S. and sexual orientation identity centrality relates to mental health and moderates the effects of discrimination. In a sample of 220 Latinx SMEA (74.1% female, Mage = 20.13 years, SD = 1.43, 18-24 years old) personal and ethnic-racial identity centrality were positively associated with psychological well-being. U.S. identity centrality was negatively associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. Sexual orientation identity centrality was negatively associated with symptoms of depression. Discrimination was linked to poorer mental health overall, and sexual orientation discrimination was negatively associated with psychological well-being, but only when personal identity centrality was high. These findings contribute to the existing intersectional literature on the experiences of Latinx SMEA and provide support for existing theories that note the importance of developing a positive sense of self, particularly within minoritized populations.

Given systemic marginalization, LGBTQIA+ populations face persistent health inequities. While religiosity and spirituality (RS)-factors commonly studied in relation to health-are often associated with improved mental health in general populations, their impact among LGBTQIA+ individuals is less clear. This preregistered systematic review synthesizes findings across 55 quantitative studies (N = 512,551) to examine associations between RS and psychological wellbeing among LGBTQIA+ adults. Guided by the Religious/Spiritual Stress and Resilience (RSSR) model-which conceptualizes RS as both a potential stressor and source of resilience-findings reveal RS to be a highly ambivalent force. RS is associated with distress when linked to internalized homo/bi/transphobia, identity conflict, and exclusion, but also with resilience through meaning-making, spiritual coping, and affirming communities. Spirituality is more consistently associated with positive outcomes, and internalized homo/bi/transphobia emerges as a key mediator of psychological distress. This review refines the RSSR model by centering internalized homo/bi/transphobia and ambivalence as core analytic constructs. Findings also have critical implications for clinical care, spiritual support, and theory development, underscoring the need for LGBTQIA+-affirming practices that address both the harms and healing potentials of RS in their lives.

Sexual minority women (SMW) may be at increased risk for certain types of disordered eating compared to their heterosexual peers. Negative emotional reactivity is associated with disordered eating in general samples of adults, and negative emotional reactivity to minority stress (NERMS) is associated with poorer psychological outcomes among racially/ethnically minoritized groups. However, NERMS has rarely been studied among sexual minority individuals. The purpose of the current study was to examine individual differences in NERMS as a predictor of disordered eating among SMW. One hundred and thirty-two adult cisgender SMW completed measures of disordered eating (i.e. cognitive restraint, uncontrolled eating, and emotional eating), an adapted measure of heterosexist discrimination experienced over the past 12 months, and a measure of NERMS (operationalized as the elevation in each participant's negative affect after watching a video-based minority stress induction). Results revealed that NERMS directly and positively predicted uncontrolled eating and emotional eating, but not cognitive restraint, over and above the effect of heterosexist discrimination. NERMS did not moderate the association between heterosexist discrimination and any of the disordered eating outcomes. NERMS mediated the association between discrimination and emotional eating. Researchers should continue to examine NERMS as a predictor of psychopathology among sexual minority individuals.