China's marital eligibility rules restrict Chinese lala (lesbian) families' access to authorised domestic assisted reproduction, leading some to purchase sperm through informal domestic or cross-border commercial channels. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews conducted in 2024-2025 with members of 28 lala families, this article examines sperm-provider selection among the 25 families that purchased sperm and entered an IVF pathway. Families evaluated providers' health, education, occupation, ancestry and appearance when imagining their children's future lives. Some valued physical features associated with White ancestry but sought to avoid a conspicuously 'mixed-race' appearance. Anticipated attention to children's appearance or parentage sometimes altered the importance assigned to provider characteristics and, in some cases, the provider ultimately selected. Accounts after childbirth described differences between expected and actual appearances, alongside varied interpretations of comments about children's visible differences. Commercial channels differed in the candidates they offered, transaction costs and access to information for evaluating providers. The analysis shows how expectations of children's social reception shape the value that Chinese lala families attach to racialised appearance, while commercial arrangements affect which provider attributes families can assess and which preferences they can pursue.
Gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender (GBQT) men in Singapore face layered marginalisation shaped by heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and socio-religious conservatism, producing complex experiences of vulnerability and isolation. Singapore's landscape of queer expression is frequently policed, medicalised, or confined to sexualised and digital spaces, with few safe and affirming environments. This qualitative study explores how eight GBQT men in Singapore experienced a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) workshop as a space for safety, belonging, and collective reflection. Drawing on video recordings, participant reflections, field notes, and a focus group discussion, data were analysed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis. Findings illustrate how participants sought safe and platonic queer spaces, negotiated belonging and queer legitimacy, and collectively engaged with embodied experiences of marginalisation. Across these experiences, safety, belonging and embodied meaning emerged as relational processes negotiated through participants' interactions, dialogue and collective witnessing. Findings characterise belonging as an ongoing relational process and underscore the need to cultivate non-sexualised, community spaces in Singapore where queer and transgender people can experience safety, reflection and collective care.
In the USA, non-profit abortion support organisations provide resources to ameliorate abortion-related financial, logistical, informational, and psychosocial challenges, but do not provide abortion services. This sector developed under a regulatory environment in which clinic-based abortion was legal and abortion outside of clinician supervision was uncommon. The US Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of constitutional protection of abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the rise of medication abortion without clinician supervision have substantially changed the US abortion access landscape. Post-Dobbs, abortion support does not have to be tethered to a clinician-managed provision model, prompting research questions about whether and how the sector’s relationship to this model operates post-Dobbs. Drawing on findings from interviews with 32 abortion support organisation staff and volunteers from 17 organisations, this paper finds that abortion support organisations, both individually and as a group, operate in novel, collective ways that do not depend on a clinician-based model of abortion provision, including by prioritising resource sharing on behalf of clients and by incubating and instilling a philosophy of radical non-judgement of clients’ circumstances. Despite this, however, their activities remain broadly constructed so as to privilege clinician-supervised abortion, leaving the sector deeply tied to the formal healthcare system.
Gay and bisexual men describe their sexual positioning through an expanding vocabulary: 'top' and 'bottom' now sit alongside 'versatile', the hybrid categories 'vers-top' and 'vers-bottom', and 'side'. Whether this reflects changed sexual behaviour, changed labelling, or changed meanings attached to the labels themselves is unresolved. This paper asks why a shift towards positional flexibility would be theoretically expected. Drawing on sexual script theory, gender performativity and queer theory, it distinguishes positional roles that are fixed and identity-constitutive, from positional repertoires that are more flexible and context-dependent, and argues that the destabilisation of binary gender norms has made repertoire orientations more culturally legible without necessarily changing what men do. This distinction is analytic rather than historical, since any positional category can be inhabited either way. This paper sets out a series of hypotheses through which the argument might be tested.
