This article examines the role of travel writing in British gay pornographic magazines of the late 1970s, focusing on Q International as a case study to explore the construction of a transnational gay male imaginary. Positioned within the socio-economic and political turbulence of late 1970s Britain, Q International addressed a readership navigating the tensions between persistent social stigma, and emerging gay consumer power. The magazine’s travel features, advertisements, and editorial content collectively interpellated an “average homosexual” as mobile, culturally curious, and aspirational, encouraging identification with a broader European (and global) gay world. Travel is framed not merely as leisure but as a route to self-realisation, sexual freedom, and escape. We situate these representations within histories of gay consumer culture, suggesting that gay travel and publishing were integral to the emergence of modern gay identities. We complicate narratives of gay sex tourism as exploitative, demonstrating instead that Q International ’s travel writing articulates complex desires for connection, belonging, and a utopian “elsewhere.” We contend that Q International offers a valuable archival lens onto a pre-AIDS moment of possibility, in which mobility and imagination were central to gay male identity formation. Its travel writing captures both the promise and fragility of this imagined world.
This paper advances a Marxist approach to the idea of “human nature” - bound not to a fixed essence, but to sensuous human activity and social transformation - to expose the static materialism and nature essentialism of gender critical feminism. Moreover, it is shown that a longstanding intersectionality of racist, nationalist, gendered, and sexualised imaginations of abnormality and threat to society and nature easily merges with gender critical feminism’s fixed and essentialist material world. From this basis, the paper critiques an ideological current in the gender critical feminist milieu which fuses transphobia with anti-Jewish racism: specifically, the conspiratorial idea that rich and powerful Jews are behind a capitalist transgender lobby and transhumanism agenda to profit from the destruction of the natural essence of human beings.
This article argues that disavowal, understood as a structured practice of acknowledging harm while suspending its political consequences, is essential but absent from the conceptual vocabulary of anti-queer governance scholarship. Drawing on feminist, queer, and affect literature, I conceptualise disavowal as a technique of governance that operates by managing recognition. The concept is developed sociologically rather than psychoanalytically: what is at stake is not a subject defending itself against a traumatic perception but the routine administration of recognition across media, law, and archival infrastructure. Where existing accounts explain how Russian law neutralises queer harm once a case has entered legal discourse, disavowal names the prior and more general operation through which publicity itself is converted into neutralisation. Comparing how disavowal operates through bureaucratic care in liberal regimes and through overt moral control in authoritarian settings, I argue that it adapts to divergent political economies while retaining its core capacity to sever recognition from consequence. The argument proceeds through a single brief media report that condenses the narrative mechanisms by which violence is rendered reportable without becoming actionable. Academic activism is developed here as the article’s methodological frame, in which documentation, archiving, positioned writing, and the choice of analytical vocabulary function as interventions against epistemic erasure and state silencing.
ADHD and autistic (AuDHD) people often experience atypical responses to sensory input. In this study, we examine the experiences of AuDHD individuals reporting to use BDSM/kink as a means of managing sensory processing needs during sex. Using inductive thematic methods, we analyzed existing data from posts on Reddit and TikTok to explore the experiences of AuDHD sexuality and how BDSM/kink is utilized to create pleasurable, accessible sexual experiences. We found that a number of AuDHD people report experiencing sensory overload during sex; to accommodate this, many AuDHD people report utilizing sensory deprivation aspects of BDSM/kink (such as blindfolds and earplugs). AuDHD people also report sensory under-stimulation during sex and, in response, report using BDSM/kink for its sensory novelty (such as inflicting pain or other sensations). Social media platforms also allowed AuDHD people to learn about their AuDHD and feel less alone in their experiences. These findings emphasize how the accessibility strategies AuDHD people use to accommodate their needs prioritize pleasure over ‘normal’ sex, ultimately challenging these constructions of ‘normal’ sex. Facing inadequate sexual education and stigmatization of AuDHD and BDSM, social media allows open discussion of such experiences not available elsewhere. Understanding these experiences helps us challenge ideas of ‘normal’ sexuality, recognize the ingenuity of AuDHD accessibility, and improve lay understandings of AuDHD experience.
This article examines how knowledge around the sale of sex came to be produced in late twentieth-century Britain. Within the context of emerging neoliberalism, evidence-based public health and HIV/AIDS, the sexual practices of those who sold sex became the centre of inquiry. This article examines surveys, reports and questionnaires to see the process through which sex workers’ understandings of sex became publicly legible. In doing so, I argue that sexual knowledge was not simply recorded but actively translated into medicalised and sanitised language that constructed ‘sex’ through frameworks of risk, responsibility, and governance. By tracing how ‘sex’ was made knowable, I highlight the ethical tensions of writing the ‘sex’ of sex work history and the need for reflexive, feminist methodologies.
