Sexualities

The idea of “consent” has come under scrutiny in the last decade, while at the same time campus and public campaigns have emphasized it as the sine qua non of ethical sex. This dependence on consent ignores other ethical perspectives and two decades of research that show sex is often entered into ambivalently and that unwanted but consented to sex is quite common. Despite these challenges to consent, few studies have explored what makes sex ethical beyond consent and what individuals believe make sex ethical. This qualitative study explores, through focus groups, young adults’ ideas about ethical concepts such as consent, reciprocity, mutuality, and vulnerability. Young adults were recruited into 10 focus groups to discuss their beliefs about what makes sex ethical. Discourse analysis revealed that focus groups strove to construct an idealized version of consent while also grappling with contradictory ethics such as the obligation to care for another person, consideration of power differences, and vulnerability caused by trauma. Their emphasis on agency and reciprocity is examined under the lens of neoliberalism.

This article examines rezu fūzoku, a sector of Japan’s sex industry in which female providers offer sexual services exclusively to women. Drawing on an ethnographic approach based on observations and in-depth interviews with sex workers and their clients, and on the concepts of gender performativity and ‘undoing gender’, I argue that when women engage in commodified female/female intimacy, they disrupt normative gender scripts and relational expectations. These practices constitute what I define as implicit feminism: unintentional feminist action that emerges through everyday acts of self-determination and resistance against heteronormative structures. Rather than relying on ideological identification, implicit feminism manifests through the pursuit of emotional fulfilment, bodily autonomy, and alternative relational modes.

Many sex workers withhold the character of their work from family members and partners for fear of rejection due to social stigma. Passing as a non-sex worker allows them to secure their social status, but also makes it impossible to obtain support and can thus give rise to a sense of loneliness. Within the family, siblings can act as a safe audience for disclosure purposes. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with female sex workers in Poland, I discuss their siblings’ diverse reactions to disclosure, ranging from acceptance to rejection. My focus is primarily on the differences between brothers' and sisters’ responses, both at the time of disclosure and in the long term. The dynamics of sibling post-disclosure relationship patterns are plotted against the impact of factors such as age and exposure to courtesy stigma. I also address the potential redefinition of a sibling’s role in the wake of such disclosure (e.g., assistance in hiding sex work from other family members or involvement in sex work).

This article is a restudy of a community of homosexual men with a feminine appearance, entering in relationships with ordinary looking men, in a poor barrio in Mexico where the author conducted fieldwork between 1988 to 1996 (Prieur 1998 a,b) and again in 2024. The informants claimed there were no problems related to social acceptance anymore. They expressed more positive attitudes towards their own male bodies, seeing it less as a source of shame and more as a source of pleasure. The terms used for identifying themselves had also somewhat changed. The first research question is descriptive and seeks to show how identifications, partner relations and sexual practices have changed among self-identified homosexual men in a poor urban area of Mexico City over the last 30 years. The second and more analytical research question asks how these changes relate to changes in gender structures and cultural conditions, and also how the changes have come about.

Desire is felt by all, yet undesired for all. Some bodies are allowed to feel and express desire while others have been written off as unqualified for it. In Zimbabwe, queer and trans people are considered undesirable in and by themselves, and their expressions of desire a crime. What then becomes of the desire that is held and perched intricately in the bodies of these undesirable bodies, especially in repressive contexts? This question forges an entry point to a conversation about black queer and trans desires and how they find expression in the form of embodied languages such as theater. Three theatre projects, namely Young Desires, Nhanho and Hweva that I facilitated in Harare, Zimbabwe are the main creative repositories from which I draw to make an argument around how black Zimbabwean queer desire finds expression in a repressive context.

I present a sensory ethnography of doing sex at three men-only play parties at an Amsterdam-based nightclub. I refer to sex as sexual acts and use doing to highlight these acts as embodied practices. Through the curation of sensorially stimulating experiences, characterized as feel-, sound-, smell-, and viewscape, bodies are aroused and oriented toward each other and engage in sexual practices differently. Using participant sensation, an ethnographic method featuring multisensory observation, and queer phenomenological analysis, I show distinct ways of doing sex enabled by and mediated through varied sensory experiences. This ethnography responds to the lack of attention and methodology in addressing sensuality in the discursive analysis of sex. It foregrounds a sensory body that situates a discursive body in its flesh and senses.

Public and academic debates on pornography in Flanders are often shaped by moral panics regarding its effects on youth, narrowing the figure of ‘the porn consumer’ to heterosexual men while overlooking young people’s situated perspectives. Drawing on seven focus groups with 45 young adults (aged 20–25) of diverse gender and sexual identities, this study examines how participants conform, challenge, and/or counter cultural gendered and harm scripts. While some reaffirm dominant narratives, many – particularly queer participants – actively resist them through offline peer conversations and online sex-positive communities such as Reddit and BookTok. These findings underscore young people’s critical agency in reshaping cultural narratives around pornography and sex among peers.

Sexual labor in Chile remains criminalized despite organized sex workers’ demands for recognition. Drawing on interviews with autonomous sex workers, advocacy groups, and feminist debates on sex work, this article argues that the Chilean state’s abolitionist agenda is the primary cause of the material and symbolic precarity experienced by sex workers. While sex workers view their labor as a means of economic empowerment and as offering better conditions than other informal jobs, its invisibilization systematically exposes them to different forms of violence. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with the sex workers’ union, the article examines how nonrecognition operates as violence, tracing the links between the absence of a regulatory framework and the multiple forms of violence that sex workers experience in their everyday lives. Uncovering the material and symbolic consequences of the state’s abolitionist approach illustrates that recognition is not merely a labor rights issue but a crucial intervention against cultural and structural violence. By demonstrating how legal and symbolic nonrecognition operates as a mechanism of marginalization and oppression, the article underscores the need for regulation and shifts responsibility onto the state. Grounding the concept in the lived experiences of sex workers, the article illustrates the inseparability of recognition from economic redistribution, showing how its absence leads to material precarity. It contends that legal and social recognition would fundamentally enhance the lives of sex workers by ensuring safer working conditions, securing better earnings, and challenging stigma to foster cultural transformation toward building a more inclusive society.

Against the background of growing securitization in response to the migration crisis erupted after the Syrian War, this article analyses the non-profit partnership Kurdish queer activists build with the queer refugees, in contrast to the Northern profit-based colonialist culture of solidarity. While Northern humanitarian institutions often require fitting the essentialist Western standards in terms of gender and sexuality to offer help, Kurdish queer activism seeks instead to restore the dignity and self-worth of queer refugees, providing a safe space to socialize, collaborate and exchange shared experiences. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the summers of 2019 and 2023, the article explores how Kurdish queer activism reject Northern identity-based activism and instead establish partnership with queer refugees as a result of suffering from the same circumstances themselves. Situated at the intersection of Kurdishness and queerness, they open themselves a queer in-between field, struggling against the racism of the broader LGBTQ+ movement in Turkey and the homophobia within the Kurdish movement.

In recent decades, Latin America has become a significant leader in LGBTI+ rights in the international arena, serving as a reference point for queer activism within the Global South. Yet research on transnational LGBTI+ activism has largely neglected the region, especially concerning cooperation among Latin American activists and organizations. Could Latin America be an overlooked “laboratory” for innovative experiences of transnational LGBTI+ South-South activism? And to what extent do these experiences challenge or reinforce inequalities of power between the North and the South? In this article, we explore the experiences of transnational cooperation among Latin American LGBTI+ activists, parliamentarians through the participation of #VoteLGBT, a grassroots Brazilian organisation, in international forums and at the Encuentro de Liderazgos Políticos LGBTI de las Américas, a biennial event and activist network established in the 2010s to foster connections among activists, organizations, and political leaders working to promote LGBTI+ political participation. Drawing on interviews with LGBTI+ activists and elected officials, we highlight the main challenges and opportunities for South-South transnational mobilization within this network. Our findings suggest that despite criticisms of ongoing Global North influence within this network, Latin American activists draw several advantages from participation in the Encuentro, including connection with other grassroot organizations in the region, access to resources, skills, visibility, political support, and the socialization of a new generation of Global South LGBTI+ leaders in transnational politics.

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is said to have transformed pleasure and sexual practices in myriad ways. This article draws on interviews with PrEP users in Australia who had paused, stopped, or switched PrEP use in order to explore the varied affects and experiences of PrEP in relation to different dosing strategies. Drawing on the concept of ‘desiring-assemblages’, we considered ‘what can a body with PrEP do?’. Our analysis affirms PrEP as transformative, enabling freedom through reduced or removed fear of HIV transmission. However, participant accounts also suggested that PrEP has been normalised as an ordinary part of sexual cultures, with some indicating that PrEP use was felt as obligatory or ambivalent. Daily and nondaily dosing also potentiated different flows of desire and connections, remaking what PrEP is and can be in participants’ lives in ways that trouble the idea that PrEP consistently facilitates pleasure. PrEP dosing was framed by discussion of changes to one’s sense of self and future priorities, and through ideas about freedom, pleasure, shame, safety, obligation, fitting in, waste, and potential. While PrEP is increasingly promoted through messaging linked to ‘pleasure’, instead of earlier discourses of ‘risk’, a pleasure-centric focus may delimit understandings of how PrEP can produce multiple sexual lives and practices, including the mundane aspects of sex and pleasure. To appeal to a range of potential PrEP users, health promotion should emphasise the different possibilities for PrEP – it’s potential for pleasure, its critical role in preventing HIV, and its normative mundanity.

Despite increasing legal protections, LGBTQ+ students remain among the most vulnerable groups within educational settings, facing persistent discrimination, exclusion, and emotional distress. Using a youth-centred qualitative approach—combining Relief Maps and focus groups with 285 students— this article examines the lived experiences of non-heterosexual boys and trans and non-binary students in secondary schools in Catalonia. Specifically, I conceptualize students’ experiences not as isolated individual events, but through a relational perspective that situates them within a cisheteronormative institutional logic. The findings unpack how students navigate mechanisms of control, punishment, and reward related to gender and sexuality, through the lens of gender policing. These mechanisms are further analysed in relation to the specificities of different school spaces, highlighting the multidimensional nature of spaces and their differentiated impact on youth—not only through their architecture but also through the social dynamics they enable. By foregrounding youth voices and analysing how school institutions (re)produce hegemonic identity models, this research calls for a feminist ethic of care and shared responsibility to address school-based violence and promote inclusive educational practices.

Image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) is an evolving and increasingly pervasive form of harm in young people’s digital lives. In England, current responses remain fragmented, punitive and often ineffective, shaped by moralistic education, legal incoherence and risk-averse safeguarding practices. In this we review, we synthesise critical literature and stakeholder insights to examine how a trauma-informed, rights-based and ecologically grounded framework can support more coherent, compassionate and developmentally attuned responses to IBSA. We propose ‘safe uncertainty’ as a practical approach for operationalising these principles in context. Safe uncertainty provides a structured way to navigate complexity, resist binary framings and support ethical, relational and context-sensitive professional judgement. By framing IBSA as a relational and structurally embedded harm, this model offers a foundation for more responsive, youth-centred interventions across education, safeguarding and justice systems.

The article argues that trans feminism occupies the location of an outsider within the neoliberal university, particularly institutionalized gender and queer studies. Trans feminism must differentiate its epistemological frameworks from those of gender and queer studies, while simultaneously being dependent on the invitation to be accommodated in their departments. In the context of the neoliberal university, this invitation forces trans feminism into a predicament that positions it as an outsider within institutionalized gender and queer studies and reinforces the instrumentalization of Blackness. Instead of getting lost in epistemological trench warfare, epistemological work must focus on coalition-building and on those who are especially affected by violence, in particular Black, poor, and sex-working trans women.

This article examines the 2024 anti-Woubi (a locally used term for gender non-conforming gay men) crisis in Côte d’Ivoire, a period of intensified hostility directed at sexual and gender minorities following the circulation of inflammatory digital content. Drawing on 10 months of ethnographic research combining digital ethnography with interviews conducted across multiple cities, the study analyses how violence was anticipated, unevenly distributed, and collectively managed by members of the Woubi and broader LGBTIQ community. Rather than focusing solely on enacted violence, the analysis foregrounds fear and anticipation as structuring forces that reshaped everyday life, mobility, and economic activity before large-scale attacks occurred. The findings show that exposure to harm was highly uneven, particularly for transgender women and visibly gender non-conforming individuals whose embodied visibility and economic precarity heightened vulnerability. In the absence of immediate institutional protection, community responses prioritised harm containment through collective care, emergency displacement, and discreet digital coordination, highlighting care and discretion as central to queer survival during moments of acute risk.