Researching Language, Gender And Sexuality: A Student Guide

This volume offers an empirically rich, theoretically informed study of the shifting intersections of nation/alism, gender and sexuality. Challenging a scholarly legacy that has overly focused on the masculinist character of nationalism, it pays particular attention to the people and issues less commonly considered in the context of nationalist projects, namely women and sexual minorities. Bringing together both established and emerging researchers from across the globe, this multidisciplinary and comparison-rich volume provides a multi-sited exploration of the shifting contours of belonging and Otherness generated by multifarious nationalisms.

Although the Supreme Court of India decriminalized same-sex relationships in a historic ruling in 2018, societal attitudes remain largely unchanged. One of the reasons cited for this is that religion, which has a pervasive hold on people's mindsets, takes a conservative view of such matters. Two landmark books - I Am Divine, So Are You and Behold, I Make All Things New - attempted to correct that misconception by putting forth perspectives on sexuality from Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity. They recast religion as an ally, not an adversary, of queer emancipation.

In a convoluted fashion, this edited volume developed from a cosy international symposium on ‘Talking Gender & Sexuality’ that took place at Aalborg University, Denmark on November 5-6, 1999. In the end, all but one of the
contributions to the book were selected from the many presentations given at (or submitted to) that symposium. The chapters are significantly revised versions of the original presentations, amended in the light of discussions at the symposium, the reviewers’ and editor’s comments, and the contributors’ magnanimous reading of each other’s drafts. Praise must be heaped on the contributors, who wrote such excellent articles, met my deadlines for submissions and revisions, and were thoroughly professional in their commitment to the project.