This round table is based on a panel discussion that was held at the Symposium ‘Queer Kinship Studies – International Perspectives’ on 16 September 2025, at Manchester Metropolitan University, in the UK. It features leading scholars from within the field of nonmonogamies studies who have conducted research in different countries, including the United Kingdom, Portugal, Brazil, Israel/Palestine, and Australia. The participants in this conversation foreground the significance of nonmonogamies for queer kinship scholarship, reflect upon nonmonogamies scholarship in different regions of the world, and discern distinctive features in nonmonogamous ways of life, activism, and legal or political regulation across cultural contexts. The discussion highlights the coloniality embedded in some of the most high-profile forms and identities concerning nonmonogamies and queer kinship and argues for the intensification of dialogue across the Global North and Global South divide.
This article refines the concept of sexual capital in sexual field theory to account for a wider range of sexual practices and relationship trajectories. Moving beyond previous theorizations that privilege visually perceived sexual desirability while often overlooking sexual performance and the socially valued qualities that shape relational development, I propose a two-dimensional model comprising sexual desirability and social desirability. Sexual desirability refers to the ability to evoke others’ willingness to engage in sex, based on attributes such as physical appearance, affective characteristics, sociocultural styles, and sexual performance. Social desirability refers to attributes and behaviors regarded as socially and culturally preferable, which contribute to attraction and relational development. Drawing on empirical data from a research project on urban middle-class gay men’s online dating practices in China, I illustrate how the two-dimensional model helps explain the process of ‘desire sorting,’ through which participants navigated sexual and relational possibilities ranging from casual sex to long-term commitment. The analysis suggests that while sexual desirability plays a strong role in initial encounters, social desirability—assessed in terms of factors such as communication competence, education, trustworthiness, and the ability to inspire a sense of safety—often shapes whether relationships progress beyond casual sex. The two-dimensional model explains not only attraction in anonymous and short-term contexts but also the formation of enduring partnerships. Theoretically, this reconceptualization extends sexual field theory by incorporating the interplay between bodily and social value. Practically, it offers a flexible tool for examining sexual hierarchies in diverse cultural and technological settings.
This study examines the lived experiences and encounters with digital representation of LGBTQ individuals on Indonesian social media amidst the rise of conservative religious discourse and socio-cultural heteronormativity. Grounded in queer theory and using a qualitative approach, the research is based on in-depth interviews with 42 self-identified LGBTQ Indonesians. It reveals four interrelated themes: resistance to heteronormative structures, pervasive homophobia and microaggressions, ongoing navigation of internal identity tensions, and the dual role of digital platforms as spaces of both vulnerability and resistance. Digital media provide avenues for visibility, community formation, and affective solidarity. However, they also facilitate discriminatory practices, hate speech, and symbolic violence. Participants described a dual experience - finding empowerment and unity online while at the same time facing hostility and psychological stress. The analysis reveals how LGBTQ Indonesians negotiate and resist dominant discourses by asserting multiple identities and utilising digital tools to resist marginalization. These findings underscore the intricate relationship between online empowerment and offline sociopolitical structures that perpetuate discrimination. The study contributes to a more inclusive understanding of LGBTQ digital lives in Southeast Asia, challenging heteronormative portrayals and highlighting actual lived experiences. It calls for an understanding of the relationship between digital rights and human rights, highlighting the need for inclusive governance of online spaces and ethical media representation. As Indonesia grapples with ongoing debates about identity, democracy, and pluralism, empowering queer voices in the digital space emerges as both a scholarly and humanitarian urgency.
Beginning in the late 1950s, state socialist discourses on sexuality emphasized centrality of emotional attachment for fulfilling sexual relationships and the importance of female sexual pleasure for a fulfilling emotional relationship. By the 1980s, Hungarian sex advice literature increasingly focused on technique for achieving female sexual pleasure and advocated for men to engage in sexual practices beyond the conventional. Concurrently, criminological and legal texts defined ‘prostitution’ as sex devoid of emotion, ‘prostitutes’ as sexually deviant and non-conventional sex acts as perverse. While scholarship on sexuality in the Eastern Bloc has exploded in recent years, this has often focussed on expert discourses and only marginally engaged with commercial sex and sexual practice. I argue that sources on commercial sex offer a productive way of engaging with the history of sexuality in state socialist Hungary. Using sociologist Pál Diósi’s life course interviews with women and men involved in commercial sex in 1980s Budapest, I demonstrate how socialist sexual scripts around emotion and female pleasure were negotiated and embodied through sexual practice. These interviews highlight a shift in sexual practices and their framing, women focused increasingly on technique for achieving pleasure in their private sex lives, yet the de facto primacy of male sexual pleasure remained. The boundary between ‘private’ and ‘commercial’ sex, ostensibly demarcated by the presence or absence of emotion and pleasure, was in practice unstable. The increasingly widespread practice of oral sex was used to demarcate the boundaries of emotional intimacy and was imbued with different meanings depending on relational context.
Parents are particularly vulnerable to Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, yet there is little research on their lives while they have and raise children in a hostile and authoritarian context. This article is concerned with the question: how do queer parents negotiate visibility and risk in a context of state hostility? Based on a mixed-method qualitative study on how migrant LGBTQ+ parents from Russia made sense of their parental journeys with in-depth interviews of 25 LGBTQ+ Russian parents at the centre, this article utilises the theoretical framework of family display to examine how Russian queer parents navigate risk and disclosure. The article examines how family display (or lack thereof) is situational and depends on the setting and audience, as queer families navigate finding a balance between intimacy and safety: some settings allowed for more flexibility and ambiguity, other settings were too dangerous to even hint at the family’s real story. The article finds that it is the privilege of access to private services including healthcare facilities, kindergartens and schools that allow for a safer space for greater visibility. Using the framework of family display showed that the decision to disclose not only changes spatially and temporally, but also includes other family members (primary the children themselves). The focus on families provides a unique contribution to literature on queer (in)visibility, going beyond the binary of the closet and instead highlighting the collective nature of disclosure which is added to the individual disclosure of each parent.
Based on 25 in-depth interviews with Russian LGBTQ migrants in Sweden, the article explores how decisions to (not) come out contribute to navigating precarity induced by geopolitical polarization around LGBTQ rights. This article highlights the agentic and empowering potential of multiple queer (in)visibility practices in transnational contexts and the ways in which material conditions influence decisions to (not) come out. The analysis focuses on how Russian queer migrants deliberately use various queer tactics of discretion , preferring partial disclosure and remaining unintelligible across the public, familial, diasporic, and institutional domains. It shows that coming out is not a linear or individual act, but a context-sensitive strategy for negotiating geographical and social contexts and material realities.
This introduction to the Sexualities Special Issue Queer Frontiers: Imagining New Intellectual Queer Futures contextualises queer studies in the present moment. We discuss the current social and political context of the edition, noting the rise of the far right, queerphobia, transphobia and other discriminatory practices. In doing so, we highlight how the authors contributing to this special edition help progress and develop queer studies to equip scholars with concepts and methodologies that can progress our field of thought.
While Chinese queer scholarship has long focused on LGBTQ + life in major cities, including digital media practices, less attention has been paid to how lesbian women living in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas navigate digital media in everyday life. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews conducted with self-identified lesbian women living beyond major metropolitan centers in Jiangsu Province, this article examines how participants used different social media platforms to access lesbian-related knowledge, manage visibility, seek connection, and imagine possible futures. Rather than treating digital media as a general support tool, the article argues that participants navigated a differentiated platform ecology in which different media served different relational and practical functions. In contexts where locally available queer reference points were relatively limited, acquaintance networks were denser, and pressures around family and marriage remained strong, social media took on a more compensatory role. Participants pieced together knowledge, selective visibility, connection, cultural belonging, and future-oriented strategies across platforms such as WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, QQ, and lesbian-oriented apps, although these digital arrangements remained uneven and fragile. To conceptualize this pattern, the article proposes the notion of polymedia resilience: the strategic and uneven way in which lesbian women living in non-metropolitan settings navigate multiple platforms to make queer life more intelligible and more manageable. In doing so, the article contributes to Chinese queer studies by shifting attention beyond metropolitan-centred narratives, and to digital media scholarship by showing how platform use acquires distinct significance in non-metropolitan social worlds.
The University of Oxford played an important role in the education of Britain’s social and political elite. The university and its network of colleges, each of which maintains an archive, has preserved a detailed set of institutional records. There were stringent prohibitions against sexual liaisons of any kind on the part of students, but residential accommodation in single-sex colleges could facilitate homosexual connections. Reading between regulatory records and semi-autobiographical interwar novels enables us to understand the ways in which apparently repressive university structures facilitated closeted forms of queer life and tacit knowledge concerning them. Life in the colleges was also policed by students who deployed forms of sexualized bullying on their peers. These processes shaped the emergence of the homosexual closet on campus.
This paper examines how masturbation and pornography are problematized in a Swedish NoFap-inspired forum discussion, and how such problematizations are related to masculine self-understandings and practices of self-regulation. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, the analysis is based on a qualitative study of discussions from a Swedish online forum, where users talk about their involvement in a NoFap-inspired abstinence challenge. In this context, abstinence is understood as a method for regaining confidence and a sense of lost masculinity. The analysis shows how sexuality is constructed as a problem of regulation, particularly through neurobiological logics expressed in references to hormones and brain function. Participants describe efforts to ‘reboot’ the body by regulating sexual behavior and engaging in daily routines aimed at restoring physical and mental strength. These practices can be understood as technologies of the self, with masculinity functioning both as the method and the goal of transformation. The analysis also demonstrates how moralized health discourses around male masturbation and pornography use incite men to engage in routines of self-surveillance and bodily regulation.
This article examines rezu f & umacr;zoku, 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.
In recent years, chemsex has attracted growing scholarly attention for its intersections with health, pleasure, and sexuality. Scholarship largely produced in the Global North, has focused on health risks, recreational use, and the emergent meanings of chemsex subcultures. Yet the voices of chemsex participants in contexts marked by drug prohibition and the political silencing of homosexuality remain limited, though equally important to examine. This study investigates the sexualised use of cannabis and poppers among gay men in China, exploring how participants narrate their drug use in relation to sexual pleasure and, in doing so, construct and affirm a distinct chemsex subculture. Drawing on in-depth online interviews (N = 20) conducted in 2022, we conceptualise this practice as weak chemsex to examine how drug use operates as a cultural script showing sexual pleasures and mediating sexual roles and power relations in one-to-one encounters. Findings indicate that, while substances facilitate pleasure, reduce discomfort, and enable role conformity, they also foster a form of non-critical obedience among bottoms, reinforcing intra-community sexual inequalities. By situating weak chemsex within the broader socio-political climate of drug prohibition and enduring stigma toward homosexuality, the study calls for culturally attuned approaches that address the relational and power-laden dimensions of sexualised drug use.
This article examines how Filipino male sex workers and content creators manage erotic visibility and safety through visual privacy : the aesthetic and affective labour of deciding what may be seen, hidden, or blurred. In a setting where both sex work and pornography remain criminalised and morally scrutinised, men who sell sexual content online must balance the economic value of exposure with the risks of recognisability, platform sanctions, and stigma. Drawing on visual culture, masculinity studies, and theories of contextual integrity, we analyse 100 publicly available posts from a larger corpus of 32,216 images across 55 high-follower Filipino creators on X (formerly Twitter). The study identifies three recurring modalities of visual privacy— clothed , blurred , and exposed — that translate postcolonial ideals of discretion and masculine respectability into strategies for platformed visibility. These practices reveal privacy not as withdrawal but as aesthetic governance: creators convert moral and algorithmic constraints into professional technique. By centring Global South masculinities, the article challenges Western narratives that equate sexual openness with liberation and reframes opacity and discretion as skilled modes of agency within digital sexual economies.
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 Pol & iacute;ticos LGBTI de las Am & eacute;ricas, 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.
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.
This article examines the 2024 anti-Woubi (a locally used term for gender non-conforming gay men) crisis in C & ocirc;te 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.
This study emerges from the authors' reflections on their fieldwork and doctoral research analyzing LGBTQIA+ Venezuelan youth displacements in the state of Roraima, in the northern Brazilian Amazon. Through an intersectional analysis, the aim is to understand how generation operates in relation to gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity and social class in the displacement of young LGBTQIA+ Venezuelans in Boa Vista, Roraima. This article focuses on the different transitions in the crucial, still unfinished, stages between adolescence and adulthood of 11 Venezuelan LGBTQIA+ interviewees. Without intending to essentialise these sexual and gender identities, this article uses intersectional approaches to understand the relationship between Venezuelan migration and youth, shedding light on gender and sexualities, racialisation processes, social class, migratory status, among others, in the Amazonian region of Roraima. The findings point out that the experience of "being young" during displacement is constitutive for the construction of the self among the participants. It is observed that some Venezuelan LGBTQIA+ interlocutors travel alone and often separate from their family ties to continue their migration project independently. Their sexual, racial and gender identities are factors that complicate the sense of lack of opportunity and singularise their actions and strategies for coping with the precariousness and challenges of migration.
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.
