Many sex workers withhold the character of their work from family members and partners for fear of rejection due to social stigma. Passing as a non-sex worker allows them to secure their social status, but also makes it impossible to obtain support and can thus give rise to a sense of loneliness. Within the family, siblings can act as a safe audience for disclosure purposes. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with female sex workers in Poland, I discuss their siblings’ diverse reactions to disclosure, ranging from acceptance to rejection. My focus is primarily on the differences between brothers' and sisters’ responses, both at the time of disclosure and in the long term. The dynamics of sibling post-disclosure relationship patterns are plotted against the impact of factors such as age and exposure to courtesy stigma. I also address the potential redefinition of a sibling’s role in the wake of such disclosure (e.g., assistance in hiding sex work from other family members or involvement in sex work).

HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is said to have transformed pleasure and sexual practices in myriad ways. This article draws on interviews with PrEP users in Australia who had paused, stopped, or switched PrEP use in order to explore the varied affects and experiences of PrEP in relation to different dosing strategies. Drawing on the concept of ‘desiring-assemblages’, we considered ‘what can a body with PrEP do?’. Our analysis affirms PrEP as transformative, enabling freedom through reduced or removed fear of HIV transmission. However, participant accounts also suggested that PrEP has been normalised as an ordinary part of sexual cultures, with some indicating that PrEP use was felt as obligatory or ambivalent. Daily and nondaily dosing also potentiated different flows of desire and connections, remaking what PrEP is and can be in participants’ lives in ways that trouble the idea that PrEP consistently facilitates pleasure. PrEP dosing was framed by discussion of changes to one’s sense of self and future priorities, and through ideas about freedom, pleasure, shame, safety, obligation, fitting in, waste, and potential. While PrEP is increasingly promoted through messaging linked to ‘pleasure’, instead of earlier discourses of ‘risk’, a pleasure-centric focus may delimit understandings of how PrEP can produce multiple sexual lives and practices, including the mundane aspects of sex and pleasure. To appeal to a range of potential PrEP users, health promotion should emphasise the different possibilities for PrEP – it’s potential for pleasure, its critical role in preventing HIV, and its normative mundanity.

This special issue explores a new strategy for addressing an old problem in queer theory and queer Asian studies: how to effectively challenge Western hegemony and provincialize Euro-American experiences of gender and sexuality. Specifically, we are interested not only in how a critical regional and transnational queer studies can generate new knowledge and insight about non-normative genders and sexualities in Asia and Asian diasporas, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how the growing field of queer Asian studies may be uniquely positioned to broaden, challenge, decolonize, expand, and generate new theoretical frameworks and understandings of queerness, both in Asia and beyond. Working from locations as diverse as China, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam, the contributors to this special issue examine how the various communities with whom we work are creating, imagining, questioning, resisting, and witnessing what it means to be queer in Asia, including how the very paradigm of queerness itself can often obscure some Asian experiences of gender, sexuality, and (anti)normativity. By seeking to move the field of queer Asian studies from “queer studies in Asia ” to “queer theory from Asia ,” we hope to offer another possible path toward the centering of queer Asias within queer studies and theory.

How do self-identified LGBTQ+ individuals with migration histories imagine their transnational belonging when living within the United States? And how do they navigate nostalgia about their home countries? Drawing from 33 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ people who have migration histories within their families, my findings introduce fractured nostalgia as a framework through which imagined belonging and (trans)nationalism can be understood across national contexts. Rather than documenting how LGBTQ+ identity shapes migration, or lived experiences of sexual migration, this work highlights how family narratives shape national attachment and nostalgia. In doing so, I show how nostalgia functions across national contexts not only as a force that connects, but additionally, as a force that disconnects.

In this article, I examine the heteronormative political and economic consequences of demographic anxieties and pronatalist governance in South Korea and beyond. As economic instability contributes to intergenerational dependence, declining marriages, and low fertility rates in many locations, South Korea’s dramatic case has brought the state to undertake pronatalist policies that tie welfare to heterosexual marriage and parenting. I propose a framework of demographic queering and reproductive straightening to account for how increasingly non-reproductive populations become “queered” in relation to heteronormative ideas of adulthood, and “straightened” through the market incentives of pronatalist policies in return. Building on ethnographic research with queer communities in Korea, I examine how this situation privatizes and constrains queer kinship, caregiving, and reproduction. I suggest that these developments not only ask us to rethink marriage and neoliberalism in queer and feminist theory, but also the political relationships between queer identifying and structurally queered populations.

Consent is often positioned as the linchpin of sexual ethics and justice, framed within binary paradigms such as ‘yes means yes’ and ‘no means no’. However, this fails to account for the complexities of power dynamics, ambiguous desires, and the interplay of verbal and non-verbal communication in sexual encounters. This paper critically interrogates how consent is constructed and mobilised in legal cases involving ‘sex games gone wrong’, where claims of consensual rough sex are often used to mitigate or exonerate acts of violence in which women are killed or injured by men. It provides an innovative intervention into these debates framed around the potentialities of queer approaches to consent and sexual encounters. Through in-depth analyses of Crown Court case transcripts, the paper reveals how heteronormative romantic relationship scripts and rape myths underpin consent narratives, often privileging male perspectives while erasing or discrediting those of women. Significantly, the paper draws on queer and BDSM scholarship to propose a ‘queerying’ of consent: a deconstructive approach that unsettles traditional assumptions and embraces the ambiguity, imperfection, and intersubjectivity of consent. By challenging the legalistic and cultural orthodoxy of consent, this paper offers a more nuanced, ethics-driven framework that fosters sexual justice in both legal and socio-cultural contexts.

Despite the ubiquity of smartphones globally, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the uses of smartphone-based social networking apps in the Global South, particularly among LGBTQI+ and Muslim communities. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews and oral life histories, this essay explores the uses of the Grindr app among gay, bisexual and queer men in Pakistan, and examines especially the negotiations of risks and perils of Grindr. As I argue in this essay, Grindr’s usage in Pakistan creates opportunities for casual sexual encounters and demonstrates the construction of a non-normative sexuality that appropriates Western epistemologies of sexuality. Such appropriations notwithstanding, Grindr’s usage in Pakistan is also characterized by risks and perils. Narratives of users reveal instances of physical and sexual violence, financial extortion, threats of public exposure and blackmail, and catfishing. These risks and perils play out in a restrictive societal milieu. Homosexuality is legally criminalized in Pakistan and access to Grindr is blocked by the government. As such, Grindr represents an important site for digitally mediated negotiations of risks and the desire for same-sex sexual connectivities and intimacies.

This article explores the counter archive of Black queer AIDS activist Gregory Smith, and the ways in which his incarcerated AIDS activism became a means of resistance to the carceral state and premature death. Against the register of the case which follows a racial as juridical index, Smith’s own letters form a counter to the official record -- exceeding it -- as it documents his ‘agency’ only as a racialized pathos of criminality and threat to the security of the social contract and prison form. I show how Black AIDS activism confronts premature death—not as a new violence on the political scene but rather as a constitutive violence of modernity, a plantation modernity realized and actualized through the slave ship and the apparatuses of the slave fort as colonial, bio and necropolitical and carceral technologies.