"House Passes Sweeping Gay and Transgender Equality Legislation"
”The bill, first passed by the Democratic-led House in 2019, faces a steep climb in the Senate. It was approved as Democrats and Republicans sparred more broadly over transgender rights.”
"The Equality Act and the ramped-up culture war over LGBTQ rights"
”As Congress considers the Equality Act, legislation that would largely ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and identity, the topic of transgender rights is taking center stage.”
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter attack on congresswoman’s transgender daughter draws outrage"
”Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter attack on a fellow congresswoman’s transgender daughter has drawn outrage from other members of Congress. Greene, a pro-Trump freshman from Georgia who has espoused baseless conspiracy theories, posted an anti-transgender sign in a shared office hallway.”
"Major Evangelical Adoption Agency Will Now Serve Gay Parents Nationwide"
”The decision comes as more cities and states require organizations to accept applications from L.G.B.T.Q. couples or risk losing government contracts.”
"Republican Legislatures Are Trying To Ban Transgender Athletes From Women’s Sports"
”The bills are obvious attempts to restrict LGBTQ rights under the guise of solving phony concerns about athletic advantage.”
Esther Want, "These Girls Just Wanted to Run; the Right Wanted a War"
”How Republicans thrust teen girls into the center of a years-long, organized hate campaign to legislate trans people out of society.”
Michael Waters, "The Untold Story of Queer Foster Families"
”In the nineteen-seventies, social workers in several states placed queer teen-agers with queer foster parents, in discrete acts of quiet radicalism.”
Jessa Crispin, "Feminism in Lockdown"
”The pandemic has foregrounded women's exploitation in the home and challenged feminism to once again go beyond middle-class concerns.”
Article Spotlight
Gábor Szegedi, “The Emancipation of Masturbation in Twentieth-Century Hungary.” The Historical Journal, 2021, 1–25. doi:10.1017/S0018246X21000091.
In this article, I discuss the emancipation of masturbation in twentieth-century Hungary, focusing on the socialist, Kádár era (late 1950s to late 1980s), which I claim was the time when the discourses concerning masturbation underwent profound transformation. I use Thomas Laqueur's periodization of discourses on masturbation in the West and make the case that in Hungary, due to its twentieth-century political and intellectual history, which affected both the institutionalization of sexology and discourses on sexuality, there is a markedly different chronology. In Hungary, interwar socialists were the first to suggest a new approach toward masturbation but these ideas remained marginal during the Horthy regime and in the ‘Stalinist’ 1950s. In the early years of the Kádár regime, debates about sexual morality reformulated what should be understood under socialist sexual morality. The concept of socialist humanism, especially Imre Hirschler's work, linked early 1960s sex education with the interwar socialist discourse on sex and paved the way to the emancipation of masturbation and the establishment of a post-Stalinist, socialist sexual ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s, iconic sexologists like Vilmos Szilágyi and Béla Buda moved away from socialist humanism and continued Hirschler's work, but mirroring the perspectives of contemporary Western science.
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Episode Spotlight
In the 1960s and 1970s, a belly dancing craze swept the United States. Audiences could enjoy live belly dancing performances in Middle Eastern restaurants and clubs. Viewers could watch belly dancers in hit movies and on popular television show. At first glance, the history of belly dancing appears to be a story of white middle class women appropriating Middle Eastern culture and styles to make themselves more exotic. But the story of belly dancing is much more complex: it is a story in which Middle Eastern and American artists and audiences shaped and reshaped artistic expressions, sexual performances and cultural identities.
For more, listen here.
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