This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

Gay American autobiographical writing since the year 2000 became “post-gay,” where “gay” denotes a distinctive, unitary gay male cultural tradition. Post-gay means gay plus: the “post” signifies the movement toward an intersectional model of identity, where other dimensions of culture are integrated with sexuality, and sexual cultures – such as elite gay culture – are transformed by their intersection with black, brown, yellow, and other colors of the rainbow. The 1990s saw the explosive visibility of what was then called the “lesbigay” community in all areas of American public life. That tide ebbed during the second Bush administration, in the backlash against LGBT rights. But the cultural work progressed apace, becoming socially diversified. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen the proliferation of gay US voices. Not simply de-pathologized, and not simply decriminalized, self-consciously gay autobiographical writing has multiplied into as many niche segments as the overall population. These include hyphenated queer Chicano authors, memoirs about drug addiction, and pre-Obergefell gay marriage chronicles, among other intersectional narratives.

The chapter asks how fertility was managed at home in early modern England. Conception and pregnancy were a source of fascination and gossip for elite and middling families, and were seen as having a direct relationship to the godliness of the family line. The stakes, therefore, were high and there was considerable pressure placed on newly married couples to announce that they were expecting shortly after marriage. Medical texts and records of medical practice reveal that men and women often altered their behaviours to ensure they were fertile and able to conceive. Despite this, previous histories have emphasised that early modern people thought only women could be infertile. Challenging this narrative, the chapter finds that although both men and women sought treatments to increase their fertility, male efforts were minimised in paperwork because it was perceived as especially embarrassing and emasculating to not conceive easily.

This interleaf comprises a journey through peri-urban Kiambu, a glimpse of its terrain and inhabitants, as well as an arrival at the homesteads of Ituura, where the book’s narrative is set.

Chapter 3 shows how older men, established patriarchs, wrestle with the temptation to sell their land and live lives of ‘fun’, abandoning their obligations to pass on wealth to future generations. Speaking to a rich regional literature on fatherhood and provider masculinity, it unveils a local politics of masculine responsibility, focusing on the question of land sale and fatherly obligation. Adult men from the Ituura neighbourhood who work for wages in the informal economy to support their families are shown to condemn other ‘bad’ men who sell their family land to live ‘comfortable’ lives of short-term consumption. The discourses of self-styled moral men valorise their self-disciplined control of a desire to consume wealth against the grain of immorality they perceive in the neighbourhood and beyond, especially by retaining their ancestral land. Complicating these heroic narratives of economic striving, the chapter explores the life circumstances that force land sale, as well as a growing cynicism amongst working-aged men towards the obligations of patrilineal kinship.

The 17-item Male Body Image Self-Consciousness Scale (M-BISC; McDonagh et al., 2008) examines the extent to which men feel self-conscious about their bodies when engaging in physically intimate activities with another person. The M-BISC can be administered online or in-person to adolescent and adult individuals who identify as male. It is free to use in any setting. This chapter first discusses the development of the M-BISC and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. More specifically, the M-BISC was found to be unidimensional via exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Internal consistency reliability and convergent validity support the use of the M-BISC. Next, this chapter provides the M-BISC items in their entirety, instructions for administering it to participants, item response scale, and scoring procedure. Logistics of use, such as permissions, copyright, and contact information, are available for readers.

Scholarship on the gendered dimensions of US foreign relations flourished in the twenty years following the appearance in 1986 of Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of History Analysis.” But a worrisome drop-off in the last decade or so merits a reminder that gender matters and that we have good tools for integrating gender analysis in our work. This chapter encourages historians of US foreign relations to pay careful attention to the types of sources we use and the questions we ask of them; the assumptions and stereotypes that permeate diplomatic interactions; the ways in which gender helps create, maintain, and justify hierarchies of power; and the role of sex and sexuality in shaping relations between the United States and the world.

Consumer items and gendered identities on display and in transition, existing materially and symbolically within a matrix of relations of production and desire. The practical frustrations and self-confirming identity choices of local shopping lead to consideration of twentieth-century consumer society’s essentialization of individual gender identities despite apparent freedoms and autonomy of choice. Marx’s analysis of the reification of the object and the fetishization of the commodity informs public displays of youth culture: masculine, feminine, and trans. Modern young women and men shape their gendered public personas through the knowing appropriation of brands as identity performance, yet risk repression by the state, society, and family. Whether dancing too exclusively to Pharrell Williams’ Happy, or performing gender identity too essentially through transsexual identification, Iranian youth encounter the limits of branded identity even as they claim the freedoms apparently promised by the social market. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan’s positing of gender as a choice between two doors, the question of what is behind the doors might matter more than deciding between them.

This chapter examines how Islamist dissidents of the 1960s and 1970s in Türkiye, Iran, and the United States mobilized race and religion in their comparative critiques of authoritarian modernization and, in so doing, transformed Islamism into a critical interlocutor on racial justice.

This chapter explores the multifaceted role of gender within extremist ideologies and examines manifestations of masculinity, femininity, and misogyny in various extremist contexts. It shows how different scholarly approaches explain the ways in which gendered narratives shape recruitment, radicalization, and participation in extremist activities. Different explanations of male violence emphasizing the sociocultural construction of masculinity within extremist milieus is discussed and the notion of the “manosphere” and its subcultures like incels is introduced thereby showing how online spaces foster misogynistic ideologies that can escalate into violence. Furthermore, the roles women play within extremist groups, from active participation in violence to providing crucial support functions, are also highlighted. Finally, the implications of gender dynamics for prevention efforts are discussed. Ultimately, the chapter advocates for a nuanced understanding of gender dynamics to inform more effective prevention strategies and policymaking in the fight against violent extremism.

Much of the existing analysis of women in O’Casey’s plays concentrates on the women in his earlier work; this chapter examines the representation of younger women in O’Casey’s later plays, revealing how O’Casey presented a strongly contemporary feminist outlook which sought to re-position his audience’s understanding of female sensibility. The chapter analyses the way in which, by questioning theatrical form and critiquing patriarchal control of women, O’Casey enabled experimentalism in dramatic form to go hand in hand with a willingness to evolve and develop a progressive expression of female sexuality.

O’Casey was a great writer of war, and he wrote a great deal during the Second World War when he lived in England, although much of this work has failed to find a place in the theatrical repertoire. This chapter focuses on the two wartime plays set during the war: the comic Purple Dust (1940), about two Englishmen moving to Ireland to escape the conflict; and the tragic Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), set during the Battle of Britain. This chapter shows how the geopolitics of the Second World War, combined with O’Casey’s complex political affiliations and a heightened anxiety about Irish masculinity, placed O’Casey in a position from which he found it difficult to speak.

This chapter considers the influence of fellow writers James Baldwin and Ed Bullins on August Wilson’s dramaturgy. It argues that Bullins and Baldwin’s simultaneous inclusion on Wilson’s list of “Bs” represents both an expansion of his original influences and a specific articulation of his artistic pursuit or philosophy.