The present thesis aims to understand the global decrease of homophobia over the last few decades. In Chapter 1, I summarise previous research on homophobia, especially in the context of Romania and the UK. The next two chapters focus on psychological interventions to reduce homophobia. A systematic review and set of meta-analyses in Chapter 2 found that education and contact with LGB people were effective interventions. The same review found that most research was conducted with American college students, and that some high-quality research performed by postgraduates was left unpublished. In Chapter 3, a systematic qualitative review found that these interventions were often described by participants as ‘eye-opening’, but were sometimes criticised as ‘out of context’. In the following chapter (Chapter 4), I looked at the change in homophobia on a societal level. Reanalysing data from a large scale international survey, I found that the same model could explain homophobia in the US, the UK and Romania, but the decrease of homophobia over a 20-year period remained unexplained. In the next two chapters, I turned from the causes to the consequences of the decrease in homophobia, asking whether the acceptance of LGB people may have negative implications for ethnic prejudice. In Chapter 5, I performed discourse analysis on media reports of a gay pride parade in Romania, finding that LGB people were excluded from constructions of Romanian national identity. In Chapter 6, I proposed a questionnaire and an experimental task to study sexualised nationalism, a set of ideologies that either include or exclude LGB people from national identities. I found that more acceptance of LGB people in Romania and the UK was not linked to exclusion of ethnic minorities. In the conclusion (Chapter 7), I propose that reducing homophobia can be achieved within a plurality of theoretical and practical frameworks.

Extant caregiving research indicates family caring as being a female gendered task and the family caregiver as a related, heterosexual, female. On the other hand, research examining caregiving by the LGBT population is focused on partner caregiving or parenting. Taken together, the experiences of lesbian family caregivers remain unexamined by both caregiving research and LGBT psychological research. To redress this omission four empirical studies were undertaken. Study One was a Foucauldian genealogy, which aimed to establish how the current construction of the informal carer concept came into being. The analysis highlighted how the current carer concept influences research leading to some carers being considered more valid than others. Study Two examined the elder caregiving experiences of lesbian women (n = 10) using grounded theory methodology. Issues pertaining to lesbian identity, privacy and living as an “out” lesbian were raised. Study Three explored the anticipated future caregiving involvement with aging families of young lesbian women (n = 20) using thematic analysis. The young women anticipated future, unproblematic, connectedness with their families, as well as future lesbian created families of their own. Study Four examined how a general population (n = 324) perceived lesbian family caregiving using a vignette questionnaire with 8 conditions. Overall an effect of modern homonegativity was found. In sum, the lesbian caregiver experience is elided due to the dominant heteronormative family discourse that dictates the focus of caregiver research. Examining the lesbian caregiver experience indicates unique issues for lesbian carers around the loss of lesbian identity, loss of lesbian social networks, and difficulties in lesbian identity performance within the home. Younger women anticipated providing family elder care, but did not envisage sexual orientation related problems. While general perceptions of lesbian caregiving are mediated by modern homonegativity that work to deny the lesbian carer agency.

This thesis looks at the racialized experiences of gay black minority ethnic (GBME) men in white gay spaces within England. This thesis makes an original contribution to the field of racialized embodied subjectivity and racialized spaces by theorizing the lived-Body using Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of embodied sense to develop Frantz Fanon's concept of embodied dissonance in relation to racialized information present within the invisible white Gestalt in white gay spaces. This approach is important where the racialized discursive formations and practices around whiteness in gay spaces are often "invisible‟ or strategically obscured, whilst being simultaneously visible and understood by GBME men as implicating racialized Othering. This sensed pattern of perceptual information is defined as the invisible white Gestalt. The empirical research involved face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 11 GBME men and 3 gay support officers who were GWME (gay white majority ethnic) men. The locations for the interviews were London and the north of England. The ages of my respondents ranged from 21 to 56 years. This thesis begins by exploring how interpellation and the interpellative gaze respectively impact upon the discursive and affective attributes of embodied subjectivity. Here for example racist behaviour not expressed verbally will require sensing through feelings of being unwelcomed or understanding particular language as „invisibly‟ referring to "race‟. I then explore how embodied subjectivity around the whole self and the penis interprets and understands the racialized information circulating within the white gay space. Here I show how sense can enable complex understandings of the social interactions. Finally this thesis explores how atmospheres in white gay spaces can be sensed by GBME men, here I show how atmospheres may be racialized to exclude GBME men. This thesis argues that whiteness can be experienced as an affective sense of whiteness by GBME men in white gay spaces.

“Heterosex” occupies a contradictory position in academic feminism. While much research has been done through the decades, the substantive research focus, and the theoretical approaches used to conceptualise and explain it, have remained more limited. This has produced significant empirical gaps and limitations, and while feminists have remarked on this for some time (Albury, 2008, Segal, 1994), it has not been seriously addressed. The diversity of knowledge production has continued to remain “strangely repressed” (Smart, 1996). This thesis represents an intervention in relation to this landscape. Firstly, it identifies and traces the methodological and theoretical limitations within the contemporary and historical body of work on heterosex, and through this develops an alternative conceptual framework and analytical ground, offering the possibility to render it more expansively. Secondly, through the accounts of 27 middle and working-class heterosexual men and women, it theorises heterosex and provides insight into its experience clustered along four areas. These areas are informed by theoretical work on phenomenology, intersubjectivity and ethics, and strongly account for experiential aspects of heterosex. The research findings highlight the significance of practice and learning in determining how heterosex is experienced: participants asynchronously develop capacities, knowledges and skills that are indivisibly connected to the experiential over time. This then also constitutes subjectivity as sedimented through time, yet, as able to change. Rather than gender or class providing the primary explanatory ground for the experience of heterosex, age (youth) and in/experience figure as the most salient variables in how participants’ make sense of heterosex at any given point in time. Crucially also, women and men’s experiences of heterosex often challenge the portrayal offered by much of the feminist/queer literature on heterosex. The thesis thus urges for further interrogation of the limits of focus/approach for supposed “proper” political/ethical feminist research on heterosex, and for a proliferation of knowledges on this research object. It concludes that heterosex cannot be adequately captured through categories of gender or normativity alone - as commonly foundational to much feminist and queer work - and that feminist “disciplinarity” (Wiegman, 2012) enacts limitations on the possibilities for knowledge production on heterosex today.

This study explores the dynamics of sexuality amongst relatively wealthier urban young adults in the capital of Mozambique, Maputo. How class works in shaping sexuality and gender dynamics constitute some of the questions tackled here. Such questions have not received much attention on studies regarding these topics in the African continent. Based on 15 months of fieldwork, the thesis analyses how young adults use sexuality to give a sense of self and personhood in a context marked by rapid transformations occurring in the country intertwined with the legacy of colonialism, socialism, civil war and liberalisation of the economy. Tactical agency emerges as a critical concept to explain the ways in which both men and women manoeuvre to reach emotional stability and social recognition in the city. Questions of identity, which are negotiated in regards to diverse modernities and African heritage, are at the core of radical contradictions that characterise the everyday dynamics, expectations of young cosmopolitans in the city. Amongst young adults there is a constant (re-)shaping of perceptions and ways of living femininities and masculinities. These are fuelled by internal logics of sexual and intimate relationships as well as the management of emotions within them. However, class and its dispositions permeate these processes. Marriage is the key means to socially recognized adulthood however; the process towards it is perilous as it involves a constant negotiation of expectations. Finally, love emerges as a space of catharsis in which individuals feel at ease and distant from social pressures and the desire to 'fit in'. Paradoxically it is a space of stress it is perceived as a source of profound unhappiness when things go wrong.

My key question is whether granting rights to minority cultural groups can undermine the interests of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals (LGBs) within those groups. Put differently, this thesis is an investigation about whether the interests of LGBs within minorities are damaged by granting rights to minority cultural groups. I argue that LGBs have the following interests; in family life, sexual freedom, basic civil and political rights, participation in cultural and political life, bodily and psychological integrity, employment equality and equal access to welfare. In order to answer to this question, I engage with the contemporary political philosophy of multiculturalism and I approach the research by critically analysing five different accounts, which can be categorised as: multicultural citizenship, liberal feminism, negative universalism, deliberation and dialogue, and joint governance. My contribution to the debate is by making a variety of critical and positive claims. I make critical claims about the approaches taken by some authors by affirming that they may not fully protect LGBs within minorities from heterosexism. I make positive claims by suggesting innovative policy alternatives for tackling heterosexism within minorities. Three of the positive claims stand out. First, in order to tackle heterosexism it is important to eliminate stereotypes about LGBs. Second, it is possible to have a set of criteria in favour of group rights that does not imply the reinforcement and/or the facilitation of heterosexism within minorities. Third, the oppression of LGBs within minorities is not the logical extension of engaging in multicultural policies. These claims lead me to defend a model that combines aspects of associative and deliberative democracy. I defend that this model deals adequately with the potential threats of granting rights to cultural groups because it has a variety of mechanisms to prevent and tackle heterosexism.

Benefitting from social changes in the last few decades, single Taiwanese women seem to have gained greater sexual autonomy and freer lifestyle choices. Single lesbians can now more easily pass as heterosexual; however, this is not an easy choice once they form a relationship. Despite increased freedoms, it is difficult for lesbian erotic relationships to be acknowledged in patriarchal families. I argue for an understanding of lesbian relationships that takes account of families of origin and lesbians’ negotiation of the wider social context of Taiwanese Confucian patriarchy. Drawing on a qualitative study of 15 lesbian couples, with data from couple interviews and individual interview for each (i.e. 45 interviews in total), this research explores how lesbians form their relationships and develop their notion of family. Participants were aged between 28 and 40 and most had attended higher education. At the time of the interviews, the length of relationships averaged at seven years and varied from six months to sixteen years. Most couples were living together while two were temporarily in long distance relationships. Individual interviews focused on personal sexual stories, how lesbians developed their sexual identities in various social settings and the ways they negotiated their sexuality with their families of origin. Couple interviews then focused on relationship histories, the ways they committed to and conducted their relationships. Four main areas of analysis emerged from accounts: how lesbians recognised same sex attraction, how that differed from identifying as lesbian and the ways they built up communities and group norms; negotiating sexuality in their families of origin and their relations with their partner’s families of origin; lesbian couples’ relationship practices and their varying experiences of commitment; lesbian couples’ domestic arrangements, including differing degrees of equality that they achieved and how gender role-playing influenced these decisions. By highlighting the specific issues in Taiwan, I argue that it is possible for lesbians to make their lives outside patriarchal families and this is understandable only in their situational contexts.

This thesis considers the relationship between feminism and heterosexuality in practice. It aims to explore how feminist values and beliefs help to shape or inform (hetero)sexual practices, identities and relationships. In turn, it highlights how lived experiences of (hetero)sexuality influence feminist politics. Seventeen feminist-identified women explored this complex relationship through solicited diaries and semi-structured (follow-up) interviews. Theoretically informed by a feminist phenomenological poststructuralist framework, this research argues for the importance of lived experience as a way of making meaning. Equally, it recognizes the narratives presented as part of a much broader social world – a world with already established meanings. Participants are understood as both producers and carriers of meaning, where the social world is constructed through their actions (and stories), but who are, in turn, being constructed by them. Plummer notes that sexual stories work in many ways - they reinforce the dominant culture, and at the same time, put it into question. These women’s experiences have proven to produce both. The findings of the research suggest that feminist values not only influence experiences of heterosexuality within the context of a sexual encounter, but also between instances of sex (through everyday interactions that occur outside a sexual encounter) and beyond the context of sex. This three-part approach supports the idea that meaning-making is fluid, unstable, and subject to change as participants move through different contexts of sex; as such, the findings present an understanding of plural feminisms and multiple heterosexualities, where feminist values and identities are just as various in meaning as the (hetero)sexual experiences from which they emerge. Grounded in often complicated and contradictory narratives, this research explores a relationship between feminism and heterosexuality that acknowledges its complexities and possibilities, tensions and potentialities, and in doing so, presents a nuanced understanding of feminist heterosexualities.

No description available.

Authors have suggested that people living with severe mental health difficulties may experience problems in intimate relationships (IRs) (e.g. McCann, 2003). However, the quality and meaning of IR experiences in this population are relatively unknown. Five studies have addressed this gap in the literature (Davison & Huntington, 2010; McCann, 2000, 2010; 65tman, 2008; Volman & Landeen, 2007). Although these studies offer important insights, they do not account for the specific experiences of sexual minority service users, the effects of institutionalisation on IRs, or the role of IRs in recovery from mental health difficulties. This study addresses these gaps and explores the inpatient experiences of lesbian and gay (LG) service users in relation to their IRs/IR needs, and their experiences of the relationship between their IRs/ IR needs and recovery. The study employed a qualitative design and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three gay men and three lesbians (aged 31•57 years), all of whom had been resident on an inpatient ward within the last five years. Bisexual people did not participate. Five master themes emerged from the data analysis which characterised IR experiences for these participants: 'redefining intimacy'; 'a reciprocal relationship in recovery: IRs and mental health'; 'the ward environment: a barrier to forming and maintaining IRs'; 'prejudice and discrimination: barriers to forming and maintaining IRs'; and 'being a service user: the loss of power and personal identity'. These themes are discussed in relation to the research questions and existing theory and research, and potential theoretical and clinical implications and areas for future research are considered.