This year’s issue 6 of the Journal of Gender Studies begins with a collection of articles on literature. In the first of these Alba Fernández-Alonso and María Amor Barros-Del Río consider how African American poet, Langston Hughes, wrote about gender, race and identity, drawing on his experiences of the Spanish civil war. They show that female characters in his poetry are often marginal and essentialized but they represent resilience and hopefulness in a hostile world, demonstrate an inclusive understanding of race, and carry traces of the more autonomous characters that would emerge in his later work.
María Laura Arce Álvarez analyzes Carla Trujillo’s presentation of Chicana lesbian identity in her novel What Night Brings (2003), whose protagonist - an eleven year-old Chicana girl, Marcia Cruz, prays every night for her Dad to disappear and ‘to change into a boy’. Catholicism provides a way for Maria to deal with the violence and homophobia of Chicano society, but eventually she and her sister run away, and she becomes able to distance herself from religion, to express her rebellious spirit and to be the girl she wants to be. She also discovers she not need to be a boy in order to form a romantic relationship with a girl.
Mohammed Hamdan investigates how the female body and voice are presented in a short story, ‘Let’s Play Doctor’ (2005), by Egyptian writer, Nura Amin. Amin’s story focuses on four young girls who invent a game ‘let’s play doctor’, using this as a way of understanding their bodies and their power. The game and the story both challenge traditional representations of women’s bodies as shameful and threatening, in need of regulation by male doctors and scientific knowledge.
Muhammad Safdar and Musarat Yasmin consider representations of female subjectivity, focusing on the depiction of Pakistani Muslim women in Mohsin Hamid’s novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013). They argue that this maps out three subject positions - the ‘Sister’, a traditional woman with limited freedom, the ‘Pretty Girl’ who struggles to fulfil individualist aspirations, and the ‘Wife’ who attempts to balance family life with sexual desire and individual choice - and that a subject position that negotiates both Western secular feminism and indigenous patriarchal dogma is the most productive of these; allowing for the creation of a new hybrid gender identity.
Finally, Partha Bhattacharjee and Priyanka Tripathi examine Ram Devineni’s comic Priya and the Lost Girls (2019), in which Priya, the narrative’s superheroine, rescues women from sex trafficking in India. Bhattacharjee and Tripathi consider the affective and immersive experience created for readers through the use of graphics and augmented reality and the potential role of comics of this kind for the purposes of sex education.
The second half of our issue draws together articles that consider gender, age, activism, migration and gay relationships in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the first of these N. Ermasova and N. Rekhterb discuss a study they carried out in the early stages of the pandemic. This investigated how perceived vulnerability to COVID-19 was associated with perceptions of stress and accompanying health issues among different population groups in the United States - and in particular how these related to gender and age. They found that the top stressors for respondents were difficulties with work, news, emotional problems, and financial issues. Female respondents were impacted by these and also by interpersonal stressors, such as relationships, to a higher degree than male respondents. Young adult respondents had higher stress perceptions relating to emotional problems, family problems, difficulties with work, and unemployment, compared to older respondents.
Fatemeh Sefidgarbaei and Fardin Mansouri consider the impact of the pandemic in Iran and its effects on women who were head of their household. They show that job insecurity, problems with housing, sexual harassment, lack of a sense of happiness, and anxiety and fear have been the most substantial impacts of COVID-19. They argue that policy makers need to pay more attention to this group.of Iranian women as a vulnerable population with responsibility for others.
Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Yvonne Su and Tyler Valiquette consider queer rights activism and migration in the context of the pandemic, focusing on Brazil, which is home to the only LGBTQI+ refugee centre in Latin America, Casa Miga. In the context of a growing anti-gay and anti-gender counter-movement, where fake stories of LGBTQI+ people spreading COVID-19 circulate, and the homophobic president, Bolsonaro, has claimed that masks are ‘for sissies’, LGBTQI+ asylum seekers are at risk of heightened violence and discrimination. Drawing on interviews with Venezuelan asylum seekers, politicians, NGOs, and UN staff in Brazil, they examine how Casa Miga provided a defence against attacks on LGBTQI+ people.
In the last of our COVID-19 articles, Jonalou S. Labor and Augustus Ceasar Latosa show how gay couples in the Philippines who were separated during the pandemic used communication technologies in their relationships, for posting updates about daily routines, sending affirmative messages, discussing health, social, and relationship issues, dining together and having online sex. Such technologies provided safe spaces, and made possible relational intimacies, forms of mobile affection, and the shared anticipation of a future, off and online.
In our final article of this issue, Kevin Guyan reports on Scotland’s 2022 census, which for the first time asked a question about sexual orientation. Looking at correspondence between National Records of Scotland, the Scottish Parliament’s Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee and campaign groups, he considers the question of who is included when LGBTQ people are counted in this way. As he shows, the questionnaire upheld the binary categories of female and male and the committee abandoned its plan to use predictive text technology for the ‘Other’ category of the sexual orientation question (though it maintained this for questions on religion, national identity and ethnicity). These decisions suggest that while the Census remains a historical milestone in the recognition of sexual identity, it was designed to maintain particular ideas about gender, sex and sexuality rather than collect data accurately, thereby ‘designing-out’ some queer lives and experiences.