Are We Thinking Too Straight? Why We Need More LGBTQ+ Studies in India: A Perspective

Despite India’s antiquity recognizing all types of queer sexualities, there is still much stigma and taboo that surrounds the Indian LGBTQ+ community. This stigmatization can be reflected in the scarcity of literature that focuses on the community. This article discusses the lack of LGBTQ+ studies in India, the consequences, and how encouraging more studies for this community can help eradicate prejudice and discrimination.

Current Research Involving LGBTQ People in Malaysia: A Scoping Review Informed by a Health Equity Lens

In Malaysia, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people (collectively known as LGBTQ) are subjected to cisheterosexism that criminalizes, pathologizes, and marginalizes their identities. Given the relative cisheterosexist nature of Malaysian society, it is important to scrutinize the current trend of research studies that have recruited LGBTQ people as subjects. The present study comprises a scoping review of existing Malaysian studies involving LGBTQ people, as we set out to provide an overview of study characteristics, research methods, and literature gaps. Through systematic searches in the Malaysian Citation Index, PsycINFO, and PubMed databases, as well as additional hand searches, we included forty-four studies in this review. Our review noted many Malaysian LGBTQ studies explicitly focused on related topics of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) (41%), men who have sex with men (39%), trans women (30%), and people from Kuala Lumpur (25%). Our review also uncovered STI risks, living experiences in relation to cisheterosexism, and barriers to access safe-sex measures, healthcare, and social support among Malaysian LGBTQ people. Drawing from the health equity framework, we provided recommendations for future LGBTQ research in Malaysia to avoid utilizing a pathological lens that stands in contrast with LGBTQ-affirming approaches, as well as to engage LGBTQ members throughout all research phases.

When Did You Know You Were Straight? Teaching with the Heterosexual Questionnaire

This Teaching Note describes the process of forming a panel of straight students to answer questions from Martin Rochlin's Heterosexual Questionnaire. The activity highlights heterosexism and heterosexual privilege, provides an opportunity to talk about satire and queer humor, and is a useful way to engage with concepts from class readings in introductory LGBTQ Studies and Women's Studies courses.

Queer Youth and Education

Discussions surrounding the rights, desires, and subjectivities of queer youth in education have a history marked by both controversy and optimism. Many researchers, practitioners, and teachers who critically examine the role of education in the lives of queer youth insist that the youth themselves should be involved in setting the terms of debate surrounding if and how they should be included in sites of education. This is important because the ways in which their needs and subjectivities are conceptualized have a direct impact on the futures that queer youth imagine for themselves and for others. For example, the furious and impassioned debates about sex education in schooling are also to do with the amount of empathy we have for queer youth. Thus, sex education is a frequent point of analysis in literature on queer youth in education. Literature on queer youth and education also helpfully demonstrates how racialization, gender, neoliberalism, and settler-colonialism permeate discourses of queer inclusion and constitute the conditions of both acceptance and oppression for queer youth. While queer studies has at times sharpened perceptions of queer youth’s subjective and systemic experiences in education, it cannot be collapsed into a unified theory of sexuality because it too is ripe with debate, variation, and contradiction. As many scholars and intellectual traditions make clear, the global and transnational dimensions of gender and sexuality cannot be subsumed into a unified taxonomy of desire or subject formation. More ethical interactions between teachers, peers, and queer youth are needed because our theories of queer desire and the discourses we attach to them evince material realities for queer youth. Despite the often prevailing insistence that queer youth belong in educational institutions, homophobia and heteronormativity continue to make inclusion a complicated landscape. In recognition of these dynamics, literature in the field of educational studies also insists that some queer youth find hope in education. Withdrawing advocacy and representation for queer, trans, and nonbinary youth in educational settings becomes dangerous when it creates a terrain for isolation and shame. Importantly, queer theory and LGBTQ studies have conceptualized the needs of queer youth in ways that emphasize education as a space wrought with emotion, power, and desire. Early theorizing of non-normative sexual desire continues to set the stage for contemporary discussions of schools as spaces of power and repression. That is, histories of activism, knowledge, and policy construction have made the present conditions of both inclusion and exclusion for queer youth. Contemporary debates about belonging and marginalization in schools are made from the residues and endurance of earlier formations of gender and race.

LGBTQ+ Epistolary Rhetoric/Letter Writing

Approaching letter writing as a rhetorical practice—as epistolary rhetoric—is not an obvious priority for queer studies in communication. Yet the importance of letters to LGBTQ+ studies of rhetoric have come to the fore in two key ways. In a first approach, following the long-standing use of letters as evidence within interdisciplinary LGBTQ+ histories, letters serve as vital primary sources in histories of LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Letters act as evidence of LGBTQ+ romantic, erotic, and sexual relations within queer studies of public memory. Also, acting as so-called hidden transcripts, letters document other kinds of background information about rhetorical situations. In a second approach LGBTQ+ letters have been analyzed as rhetoric. Receiving the most attention are obviously public and political letters, such as those appearing in movement publications, the rhetoric of public officials and their political campaigns, and activist letter-writing campaigns. Especially in the case of LGBTQ+ life, however, letters often blur the lines between genres that are public and private, political and intimate. As such, even those letters considered most intimate, such as romantic and erotic letters, have been theorized as forms of epistolary rhetoric. Both approaches persist and are in productive tension with each other. Whether scholars underscore how LGBTQ+ letters are rhetoric or simply draw on them as records of information, letters are indispensable sources for the development of LGBTQ+ histories of rhetoric, studies of public memory, and research on communication.