Gender, Race and Identity

INTRODUCTION             The proliferation of gay online spaces and the opportunity they present to experiment and explore one’s own sexual identity have made online platforms increasingly significant in the social, romantic, and emotional lives of gay men.[1] For many gay men, online spaces serve as sanctuaries to meet other gay men, experiment with their personal identity construction, and cultivate […]

Malaka Shwaikh argues that the discourse of resilience is dehumanizing in how it imposes mythical terms on the colonized people worldwide. It deals with them as if they have supernatural ‘coping mechanisms,’ romanticizes them as exemplary in ‘enduring’ everything, obscures their humanity, reduces the depravity of colonial violence, and ignores layers of structural violence they continue to face.

Sara Bennett photographed 20 women in New York state prisons who are serving life sentences. In this excerpt from her project, five women write about the impact COVID-19 has had on them.

In December 2020, Singapore’s hawker culture was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, reflecting its immense value to Singaporean culture. Nationwide conversations on key concerns and questions relating to Singapore’s hawker culture were revitalised. What is our hawker culture? As older […]

In 1984, San Francisco effectively shut down gay bathhouses in a desperate attempt to curb HIV transmission, assuming that these venues create what is presently referred to as “super spreader events.” Despite changes in the global understanding of HIV and scientific advances in medication, these cultural centers remained effectively banned for over 36 years.[i] These closures […]

“I do not conceive how someone who loves nothing can be happy.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book IV “Tonight we are just going to have a lesbian night in.”“What makes it a lesbian night in?”“Oh, the fact that it is a night in.”—A.A, personal communication(emphasis added) “Don’t let them inI am too tiredTo hold myself carefullyAnd wink when they circleThe fact […]

Introduction The spread of social media offers insight into how understandings and formations of bodies are created intra-communally in global and pluralistic ways. This gives us an opportunity to see how social bodies are rendered through syntheses of digital narrative that are not only mimetic to a more seemingly natural social body, but indelibly a […]

Religious liberty and LGBTQ civil rights are falsely portrayed as being at opposite ends of the cultural and policy spectrum. We have seen this in cases brought before the Supreme Court involving employment rights, commerce, marriage, and adoption. Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have recently even gone so far as to frame LGBTQ […]

MORGAN BENSON  Thomas, it’s so nice to be speaking with you today. I first came across your books and reporting when I was looking for trans perspectives on masculinity and manhood while going through my own transition, for lack of a better word, a few years ago. You’ve now published two books: Man Alive, which you’ve […]

Introduction  We are APIENC, an organization building power for and by trans, nonbinary, gender expansive, and gender abundant Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Bay Area, and this project is a love letter to our community. We know how hard it can be to be our full selves in this world. We know how hard it […]

When I moved to Seoul in 2019, it marked a twenty-year homecoming. I came back to my father’s homeland not as a Korean but a gyopo, the name for us westernized sojourners, distinctively set apart from locals thanks to our loud tattoos and poor Korean speaking skills. Living in diaspora, you arrive everywhere hollow. Sometimes you […]

The United States remains behind its’ global economic peers in providing work-family policy that supports parents maintaining their professional status without sacrificing family responsibilities[i]. This has been particularly damaging to American women, who continue to take on the majority of domestic household duties[ii] and are more likely to sacrifice careers to compensate for family needs […]