Veiling is a significant practice among different religious groups around the world. While typically associated with Islam, some Catholic women have recently re-embraced veiling practices, nearly forty years after Vatican II indicated that women no longer needed to cover their heads during Mass. To investigate why some Catholic women have chosen to re-veil, the authors conducted thirty in-depth interviews with practicing Catholic women who veil or do not veil from across the United States. The authors transcribed, coded, and analyzed all interviews, finding that many veiling women are 20-30 years old and their reasons for veiling indicate increased traditionalism among young Catholics with concomitant use of scapulars and the embrace of more conservative ideas about women's modesty, femininity, and sexuality. The authors frame the discussion via the concept of teshuvah, a Hebrew term meaning "a return to a place of origin or a place where one belongs." This re-veiling signals a return to tradition and feminine values associated with the Virgin Mary-values that appear to be at odds with contemporary ideas about sexuality and bodily expression.

There has been a Jewish presence in Muncie, Indiana since before the city was incorporated in 1865. Most people, however, do not even know that the city has a synagogue or where it is located. This study contextualizes this small Jewish community within small-town America. For this study, we interviewed 12 Jewish individuals, including college students and faculty members at Ball State University, about their Jewish religion, identity, and experiences with antisemitism in this East-Central Indiana community. The interviews were transcribed and hand-coded for elements of Jewish life and identity, including the frequency of terms related to Jewish holidays, Christian dominance, and antisemitic interactions. These transcripts were also used to create a word corpus that was analyzed using a text analysis tool that calculates the frequency of dominant terms and their context. From this analysis, we determined that many Jewish college students and professors in Muncie experience Christian hegemony, not only because of public religious celebrations, feelings of difference, and Christian evangelization on campus and in public spaces, but also because many of the people interviewed revealed experiences of being someone’s “first Jew,” or the first Jewish person they have met.

Beginning in spring 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore's LGBT communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBT Singaporeans. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People's Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. This paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog The Online Citizen. Two separate language corpora ( State Media and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 111,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014), top keywords and phrases were identified by comparing these corpora to each other. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance.

Water has always played a pivotal role in Jewish life and the Torah (Old Testament) is replete with accounts testifying to this fact. The story of Moses striking a rock from which water pours forth and the description of the "well of Miriam," a rock that traveled with the Israelites through the desert providing fresh water, both signify the importance of water in this tradition—particularly springs and wells. In the modern era, water has also come to play an important role in the form of the mikvah, the pool of water at the center of Jewish ritual purification. Much has been written on women's experiences of post-menstruation mikvah immersion—usually in mikvahs located in synagogues. Drawing on textual and ethnographic data, this chapter considers a naturally occurring outdoor mikvah on the outskirts of Jerusalem used primarily by men for their own purification purposes.

This chapter examines the changing nature of contemporary Jewish subjectivity in Brooklyn and Jerusalem. The yeshiva has a rigorous curriculum and a faculty well-versed in Jewish law—the interpretations of which were at the center of the research. Reform scholars have reinterpreted Leviticus by suggesting that it was written as a way of teaching against Jews taking part in fertility cults—not as a condemnation against sexual relations between men and Conservative scholars have ruled that "when societal perceptions have changed and homosexual relations are no longer considered an abomination, the prohibition disappears". Yet, the clear majority of mainstream Orthodox rabbis continue to insist that the only valid interpretation of the verse is one of complete prohibition. Changing the focus of one's research from gay homonormativity in Singapore to the bodily politics of bareback pornography in London and Paris to gay men embracing Orthodox Judaism in the US and Israel is neither an expected nor conventional research trajectory.

Reviewed by: Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives by Moshe Shokeid Robert Phillips Moshe Shokeid, Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 232 pp. In Gay Voluntary Associations in New York: Public Sharing and Private Lives, Moshe Shokeid examines the participation of gay urban men in a wide variety of social, sexual, and religious groups that meet at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village (the Center). These include a senior’s group, a support group for sexual compulsives, a bisexual social circle, an interracial gay men’s association, a group of “Gentle Men,” and a series of gay religious congregations. Drawing upon research conducted over more than two decades, Shokeid provides a focused ethnographic account of these intertwined individuals and groups within the Center and, in doing so, sheds new light on modern views of intimacy—especially the notion of affective solidarity and related phenomena surrounding the “spontaneous fraternity” (8) that is built when strangers share the private details of their inner lives with one another. Shokeid is a British-trained Israeli anthropologist who is neither American-born nor gay. This “outsider” status allows him to examine events at the Center in a straightforward and critical manner. Although Shokeid is highly knowledgeable of American LGBT communities (as demonstrated by his previous monograph, A Gay Synagogue in New York [2002]), he is nonetheless, in many ways, a cultural foreigner. This only adds to the appeal of the book in that so much of what has been written about gay cultures in past decades has been from an insider’s perspective. Shokeid’s etic position is not only refreshing, it also allows him to notice behaviors and interactions that someone who has fully internalized gay culture might overlook. Shokeid opens Chapter 1 with a brief review of the study of sexuality within anthropology in order to set the stage for his own encounters with [End Page 341] various institutions, organizations, and individuals within New York’s gay communities. He focuses on issues surrounding the positionality of the ethnographer, especially in relation to the observation and analysis of sexuality within anthropology. He lays out the history of what he refers to as “hidden” and “active” observers (13–19) in a segue into an engaging discussion of the struggles surrounding the ethics of anthropologists participating in sexual activities while in the field. In relating his own experiences and the complex issues that he confronted in his study of gay communities, Shokeid reveals a vulnerability that many ethnographers are acquainted with, but of which few write. This intimate perspective continues into Chapter 2 with a discussion of the multiple relationships one builds during fieldwork, especially the deep friendships that are made possible by long-term immersion within a given community. Of particular interest here is the slippage among the subjectivities of ethnographer, participant, confidant, and friend that Shokeid experiences. Friendships are built, secrets are shared, deceptions occur, and disappointments are felt—leading to a number of personal and ethical dilemmas. This personal involvement and investment that Shokeid has in the communities he studies becomes evident and adds a much-welcomed humanity—missing from much contemporary ethnography—to his narrative. The ethnographic portion of the text is composed of six substantive chapters covering several social and sexual associations that meet at the Center. Chapter 3 sketches a gay senior’s group—the description and discussion of which serves as a template for the groups presented in the chapters that follow. He describes the group’s weekly meetings as “oral diary sessions, filled out and expanded with the help of questions and comments raised by sympathetic listeners” (50) with a dominant theme of finding “Mr. Right.” Chapter 4 deals with meetings of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous (SCA)—a 12-step group designed to help those seeking respite from excessive sexual activity. In this chapter, Shokheid raises issues of ethics and methodology; because of the confidential nature of SCA meetings, he was unable to record or take notes on the proceedings and so had to reconstruct them from memory. Perhaps, more significantly, the issue of transparency arises when a...

Singapore is one of a few nations in Asia that has yet to decriminalize homosexuality yet has a queer scene that rivals other more liberal cosmopolitan centers. Since the introduction of the Internet into Singapore in 1994, queer Singaporeans have been exposed to a variety of regional and transnational discourses of sexual subjectivity and rights. In this article, I examine the ways that individuals and activists in Singapore reject the “globalization” of sexuality and instead create unique ways of speaking about queer rights. In the process, they are creating a rights movement that is beginning to find limited success.

African American and Latino young men who have sex with men (YMSM) are at the forefront of the U.S. HIV epidemic. As members of the "cellular generation," these youth are very likely to use text messaging; yet, relatively little research has explored use of text messaging as a tool for sexual health promotion, particularly among racial ethnic minorities who are also sexual minorities. We report on the results of ten focus groups conducted among African American and Latino YMSM, aged 18-25, regarding their current texting practices and the feasibility/acceptability of text messaging as a means of conducting sexual health promotion. Our analyses revealed four main themes around their texting behaviors, texting preferences, perceived advantages/disadvantages of texting, and the "etiquette" of texting. We consider implications of these findings for the development of texting-based sexual health promotion interventions, particularly in conjunction with other existing interventions operating in a new risk environment.