When two elite, female figure skaters are both at a crossroads with their skating performance, they decide to form a same-sex skating pair for a chance to save their careers.

Yes / Nigeria is one of many countries in Africa that criminalize same-sex relations, and this has been reinforced by law enforcement agencies and the courts. As part of efforts to protect LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) persons from various forms of discrimination and violence, the growing LGBTQ movement sometimes approaches the court for rights enforcement. There is a dearth of cases specifically focused on lesbian rights except for a 2018 case, Pamela Adie v. Corporate Affairs Commission. This limits empirical evidence for assessing the role of the courts but also strengthens the case for an enquiry into how the courts can protect lesbians in Nigeria against discrimination on the grounds of their sexual identity. This chapter analyzes how intersecting categories of gender, sexual orientation, class, and location affect lesbians’ experiences of discrimination. It also explores impediments in laws and the formal justice system that result in discrimination, thereby affecting access to justice. The analysis reveals opportunities for the courts to adopt a proactive approach to interpreting fundamental rights guarantees in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999. Pragmatic recommendations are made for a multi-stakeholder approach and cross-jurisdictional learning.

Bakgrund: HBTQ+-personer utsätts för diskriminering, våld och utstötning. Även om det strävas efter lika vård för alla och trots framsteg i lagstiftning och medvetenhet, möter HBTQ+-personer fortfarande barriärer som kan leda till fördröjning, undvikande och/eller vägran att söka vård. Syfte: Syftet med denna systematiska litteraturstudie var att sammanställa barriärer för vårdsökande bland HBTQ+-personer. Metod: En systematisk litteraturstudie genomfördes, där totalt tio vetenskapliga artiklar inkluderades enligt fördefinierade urvalskriterier och bedömningar. Resultat: Tre huvudkategorier kunde identifieras som barriärer för vårdsökande bland HBTQ+-personer: diskriminering, sociodemografiska faktorer och övriga faktorer. I avsnittet om diskriminering framhölls det i överväldigande majoritet att sexualitet/könsidentitet och/eller stigma var orsaker till att HBTQ+-personer fördröjde, undvek, och/eller vägrade att söka vård. Ras/etnicitet påvisades som den mest framträdande sociodemografiska faktor. Dessutom förstärktes hälsovårdsbarriärerna för HBTQ+-personer av övriga faktorer såsom samhällsfaktorer samt förekomsten av våld och/eller sexuella trakasserier. Konklusion: Denna systematiska litteraturstudie kan ses som ett bidrag till förståelse av barriärer för vårdsökande bland HBTQ+-personer. Diskriminering baserat på sexualitet/könsidentitet och/eller stigma är en huvudorsak till dessa barriärer. Ras/etnicitet är en framträdande sociodemografiska faktor och övriga faktorer såsom samhällsfaktorer samt våld och/eller sexuella trakasserier, utgör ytterligare barriärer för HBTQ+-personer när de söker vård. Behovet av riktade utbildningsprogram för vårdpersonal och politiska insatser framhålls. Det är viktigt med fortsatt forskning och genomförande av åtgärder för att uppnå en mer rättvis vård där alla har likvärdig tillgång. / Background: LGBTQ+ individuals are subjected to discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Even though there is a strive for equal healthcare for all and despite advancements in legislation and awareness, LGBTQ+ individuals still encounter barriers that can lead to delays, avoidance, and/or refusal to seek healthcare.  Aim: The aim of this systematic literature review was to compile the barriers faced by LGBTQ+ individuals seeking healthcare.  Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted, where a total of ten scientific articles were included based on predefined selection criteria and evaluations. Results: Three main categories could be identified as barriers to healthcare seeking among LGBTQ+ individuals: discrimination, sociodemographic factors, and other factors. In the section on discrimination, it was overwhelmingly highlighted that sexuality/gender identity and/or stigma were reasons why LGBTQ+ individuals delayed, avoided, and/or refused to seek healthcare. Race/ethnicity was demonstrated as the most prominent sociodemographic factor. Additionally, healthcare barriers for LGBTQ+ individuals were reinforced by other factors such as societal factors and the occurrence of violence and/or sexual harassment. Conclusion: This systematic literature review can be seen as a contribution to understanding barriers to healthcare-seeking among LGBTQ+ individuals. Discrimination based on sexuality/gender identity and/or stigma is a major cause of these barriers. Race/ethnicity is a prominent sociodemographic factor, and other factors such as societal factors and violence and/or sexual harassment constitute additional barriers for LGBTQ+ individuals when seeking healthcare. The need for targeted educational programs for healthcare professionals and policy interventions is emphasized. Continued research and implementation of measures are important to achieve more equitable healthcare where everyone has equal access.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between academia and the state in creating and reinforcing what came to be known as “conversion therapy.” Combining intellectual and political history, Straight Talk argues that after World War II academics working in universities developed the theory and practice of sexual orientation change efforts and how this process made visible tensions between “expert authority” and individual choices related to sexual identities. This research project explores the rise, fall, and lasting impact of ideas, stereotypes, and expectations about sexual minority identities that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists with academic credentials promoted over several decades. By reinterpreting the development and practice of what came to be called conversion therapy, Straight Talk also reframes conventional understandings of the connections among sexuality, higher education, and religion. Contrary to popular belief, religious motivations did not initially fuel sexual orientation change efforts. Rather, religious leaders and professionals within religious universities took up the scientific and academic orthodoxy about sexual orientation change possibilities and deployed them in new settings. Political pressure from within and without the universities, including pressure from emergent and empowered gay and lesbian political groups (including gay and lesbian student groups on university campuses) of the late 1960s, forced secular universities to stigmatize and abandon therapy practices they had long taught as scientifically sound and therapeutically effective. By approaching this topic historically, with a chronological scope that extends from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, this project demonstrates how sexual orientation change efforts first emerged as a respected academic endeavor. Only later through a process lasting several decades did conversion therapy practices become a shadowy, unregulated, and stigmatized set of practices without institutional or mainstream support. Conversion therapy allows for a unique entry point for exploring the relationships between universities, medicine, and the state and how these three entities worked in tandem to stigmatize homosexual identities while simultaneously constructing heterosexual masculinity as the ideal citizen of the twentieth century. / 2026-09-30T00:00:00Z

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In recent years, the field of queer asylum studies has slowly been expanding in different contexts across the world, with numerous methodologies and various topics of focus. In Sweden, the academic work in this area has mainly focused on legal perspectives. Providing a different perspective, this thesis examines the situation and experiences of LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees in Linköping, Sweden through a community-based collage project. It examines how collages can be used as a method for research and a tool for community building within this context, and explores the experiences of LGBTQ asylum seekers and refugees in Linköping, Sweden, using individual and group collages. Using the concept of bricolage, the thesis ties together various artworks with short narratives and analytical interpretations. Together, they form a fragmented, in itself collage-like insight into this community. Through these fragments, the thesis reflects on the themes of migration, belonging, survival, and identity. Additionally, it explores questions of home, family, refugeeness, mess, homonormativity and representation. I argue that commonly used narratives of migration often do not fit this group, as they face highly complex forms of oppression based on their intersecting identities. Furthermore, the thesis examines the use of collage as a method by looking into the ways collage can negotiate methodological issues like accessibility and researcher accountability, how it can function as a tool for community building, and how it can be used to allow a community researcher to negotiate their positionality in an easier way. I argue that the use of collage has many benefits and that the use of the collage method in this thesis has enriched the research.

abstract: At their cores, both rhetoric and public sphere theory have conceptualized how membership in public and counterpublic settings, as well as participation in public life and discussion, is cultivated, shared, contested, and shaped. Previous case studies on publics and counterpublics have looked at the experiences of individuals and collectives who enact practices in rhetorical invention that mark participation in public life. Much of public sphere scholarship focuses squarely on seasoned individuals in positions of authority and decision making in mainstream publics. Conversely, counterpublic spheres focus on the labor of individuals who have extensive experience in articulating discursive practices in response to dominant publics. However, a quietude that has permeated much of rhetoric and public sphere scholarship comes by way of the absence of youth-based voices in the public sphere. It is these same youths who are expected to lead the very publics that claim to represent them, yet do not afford them a mode of participation or agency in their own right. Given that studies in critical and vernacular rhetoric invest significant inquiry into the ways that marginalized communities enact responses towards dominant and mainstream ideologies, it is necessary to consider how these youthful perspectives contribute to rhetoric and the public sphere writ large. In an effort to inform the rhetorical tradition of its potential in accounting for the voices of youth, this study explores the ways in which youth speak, perform, and embody the various ways in which they belong to a public sphere. Through fieldwork in the LGBTQ youth organization One n’ Ten, I aim to speak to the ways in which rhetorical scholarship can begin to move towards a rhetoric of youth in public life. In this field, I utilize the concepts of enclaving and imagining in counterpublic spheres to examine the practices, discourses, and values that give rise to a queer counterpublicity that emboldens LGBTQ youth to speak and act in a way that honors their identities. Moreover, I draw on theories of critical and vernacular rhetorics to make sense of how One n’ Ten provides youth with opportunities to enact rhetorical agency conducive toward participation in public and counterpublic spheres. Finally, I discuss implications pertaining to how the experiences of young individuals stand to substantially inform theories in public, counterpublic, critical, and vernacular rhetorics, all of which contain opportunities to represent the experiences of both LGBTQ youth and youth writ large as members of public life. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication Studies 2018

In this study, I use critical discourse analysis to analyze how queer women are represented in 34 English-language children’s picture books distributed in contemporary U.S. markets. I consider how these books include and exclude particular types of queer women characters and incorporate or omit specific queer women experiences. I argue that, in children's picture books, many queer women identities are “othered” through the binary oppositions of (i) lesbianism and motherhood and (ii) lesbianism and being a woman of color. In addition, (invisible) lesbianism in these picture books is still presented as an “issue.” The binary opposition of lesbianism and motherhood is created by making lesbianism invisible in children’s picture books by emphasizing mothering through the prominence of caregiving activities, limiting queer physical intimacy, limiting queer verbal intimacy, utilizing naming practices based on motherhood labels, and directing homophobia disproportionately at queer characters without children. The binary opposition of lesbianism and being a WOC is created by primarily featuring white queer characters. (Invisible) Lesbianism is still presented as an issue by the representation of two-mom families/queer relationships as “incomplete,” “unnatural,” “special,” “just the same as non-queer families and relationships,” and homonormativity. Informed by these results, I offer (i) a toolkit to evaluate the representation of queer women characters in picture books and (ii) a creative response to the queer women representation gaps in children’s literature.

Mention obtenue: Exceptionelle / Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’inscription des sujets LGBTQ dans les discours dominants et leurs dispositifs dans le cadre de la production culturelle caribéenne récente. Pour ce faire, la recherche se base sur l’autobiographie Antes que anochezca de Reinaldo Arenas; les romans El Rey de La Habana de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez et Masi de Gay Victor; le recueil de nouvelles Mundo cruel de Luis Negrón; la nouvelle « ¡Jum! » de Luis Rafael Sánchez; les poèmes « Young Faggot » et « Surrender » de Faizal (Deen) Forrester; le documentaire Des hommes et des dieux d’Anne Lescot et de Laurence Magloire. Le point de départ théorique de la thèse st le concept (bio)pouvoir développé par Michel Foucault, soit un réseau de relations de pouvoir omniprésent qui encadre, détermine, crée, définit et limite les sujets à l’aide de discours (tels que l’idéologie ou la religion) et de dispositifs (comme le genre et la sexualité). Dans un premier temps, la thèse analyse la représentation du corps LGBTQ dans les discours que sont la norme du genre et de la sexualité, la nation et la religion (christianisme et religions syncrétiques afrocaribéennes). Marginalisés par la norme, les corps des sujets LGBTQ sont aussi définis comme étant problématiques par les discours nationaux et religieux. La thèse traite par la suite de la construction des identités LGBTQ caribéennes, qui sont représentées comme étant fortement dichotomiques et basées sur le rôle sexuel, ainsi que des espaces dans lesquels sont représentés les sujets LGBTQ caribéens. Ceux-ci sont marginaux et fonctionnent comme des hétérotopies. Finalement, la thèse s’intéresse aux stratégies de survie qui permettent aux sujets LGBTQ caribéens de négocier avec le biopouvoir : la désidentification, l’invisibilité contextuelle et la migration. / This thesis concerns the inscription of LGBTQ subjects in dominant discourses and their apparatus in the context of recent Caribbean cultural production: Antes que anochezca by Reinaldo Arenas, El Rey de La Habana by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, and Masi by Gary Victor; the collection of short stories Mundo cruel by Luis Negrón; the short story “¡Jum!” by Luis Rafael Sánchez; the poems “Young Faggot” and “Surrender” by Faizal (Deen) Forrester; and finally, the documentary film Des hommes et des dieux by Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire. The theorical starting point of this thesis is the concept of (bio)power developed by Michel Foucault: an omnipresent web of power relationships that oversees, determines, creates, defines and limits subjects by means of discourses (such as ideology or religion) and apparatus (like gender and sexuality). Additionally, the thesis deals with the construction of Caribbean LGBTQ identities, which are represented as strongly dichotomic and based on the sexual role, and with the physical spaces in which Caribbean LGBTQ subjects are represented. These are not only marginal but they function as heterotopies. Finally, the thesis analyses the survival strategies that allow Caribbean LGBTQ subjects to negotiate with biopower, such as disidentification, (in)visibility, and migration. / Esta tesis se interesa en la inscripción de los sujetos LGBTQ en los discursos dominantes y en sus dispositivos del biopoder en la reciente producción cultural caribeña: Antes que anochezca de Reinaldo Arenas, El Rey de La Habana de Pedro Juan Gutiérrez y Masi de Gay Victor; la colección de cuentos Mundo cruel de Luis Negrón; el cuento “¡Jum!” de Luis Rafael Sánchez; los poemas “Young Faggot” y “Surrender” de Faizal (Deen) Forrester; el documental Des hommes et des dieux de Anne Lescot et de Laurence Magloire. El punto de partida teórico de esta tesis es el concepto de (bio)poder desarrollado por Foucault, es decir una red de relaciones de poder omnipresente que enmarca, determina, crea, define y limita a los sujetos gracias a discursos (tales como la ideología o la religión) y a dispositivos (como el género y la sexualidad). Inicialmente la tesis analizará la representación del cuerpo LGBTQ en el discurso de la norma sexual y de género, la nación y la religión (cristianismo y religiones sincréticas afrocaribeñas). Marginalizados por la norma, los cuerpos de los sujetos LGBTQ también son definidos como problemáticos por los discursos nacionales y religiosos. A continuación, la tesis analiza la construcción de las identidades LGBTQ caribeñas, que son representadas como fuertemente dicotómicas y basadas en el rol sexual, y los espacios físicos en los que son representados los sujetos LGBTQ. Estos son marginales y funcionan como heterotopías. Finalmente, la tesis deslinda las estrategias de supervivencia que permiten que los sujetos LGBTQ caribeños negocien con el biopoder: la desidentificación, la invisibilidad contextual y la migración.

Syftet med denna studie är att bidra med kunskap om svenskundervisning ur ett hbtq-perspektiv i fyra olika grundskolor, varav två är hbtq-certifierade, samt att dessutom närmare undersöka lärares kunskaper om och upplevelse av att arbeta med hbtq-perspektiv i svenskundervisning. Jag har studerat hur lärarna arbetade, vilka som representerades i läromedlen och i klassrumsmiljöerna, hur klassrummen var möblerade samt hur eleverna var grupperade. Fyra skolor, varav två genomgått RFSL:s hbtq-certifiering, ingår i undersökningen. Studien visar att det råder brist på kunskap om hbtq hos två av de fyra lärarna. Normkritiskt arbetssätt är inte något som praktiseras kontinuerligt förutom av en lärare som ibland hade inslag av normkritiskt arbete. Ingen av de fyra lärarna hade berört hbtq under sina lärarutbildningar. Slutsatsen av mitt arbete är att det krävs en kompetenshöjning när det gäller hbtq-relaterade frågor hos personal som jobbar i skolan. Att hbtq-certifiera verksamheten verkar inte ge bestående effekt; det krävs uppföljning och kontinuerligt arbete för att ändra på de starka normer som råder i samhället. Då styrdokumenten tydligt förespråkar en inkludering av alla elever oavsett kön, könsöverskridande identitet eller uttryck, etnisk tillhörighet, religion eller annan trosuppfattning, funktionsnedsättning, sexuell läggning eller ålder borde kraven på kompetenshöjning i ett normkritiskt arbetssätt komma via styrning uppifrån för att nå ett snabbare resultat. / The purpose of this article is to study four primary school teachers and how they work with LGBTQ-perspectives. Four schools, of which two are LGBTQ-certified by RFSL, are included in this study. The study reveals a lack of knowledge regarding LBTQ issues in three out of the four teachers. Norm critical practices are not continuously applied by the teachers in their work, with the exception of one who does apply them. None of the teachers had come in to contact with LGBTQ through their own education. The conclusion I have drawn from my work on this article is that an improvement of competence concerning LGBTQ related issues among personnel working in school environments is required. LGBTQ-certification does not seem to come with a lasting effect; follow-ups and continuous work are required to change the strong norms that are currently present in society. As Skolverket clearly advocates for the inclusion of all students, regardless of gender, cross-gender identity or expression, ethnic background, religion or other faith, disability, sexual orientation, or age, the requirements of competency improvement regarding the application of norm critical practices should come through guidance from above to assure quick results.