While there is much attention paid to the connection between social boundaries and consent, the relationship between consent literacy and sexual agency has not yet been explored. This qualitative analysis, which is part of a larger mixed-methods study, sought to explore the relationship between consent literacy and sexual agency in young people. Participants ( n = 18) were recruited from nonprofit organizations and were asked to complete a 30–40 minutes semi-structured interview and two questionnaires. Through our grounded theory approach to the analysis of the interviews, we identified three overarching themes and several sub-themes. The main themes were as follows: (1) Young people develop a broad understanding of sexual agency and consent through various social and environmental influences; (2) Most of consent is conceptualized through non-verbal cues (“vibes”), prior communication, and past experience with the person; (3) There are notable differences in demonstrable sexual agency between males and females and non-binary individuals, and between individuals participating in heterosexual versus queer sex acts in establishing and negotiating consent. These results provide preliminary evidence that sexual agency and consent literacy share similarities as they are being used in practice during sexual interactions. Further research is needed to deepen our understanding of how these constructs are related in order to improve levels of consent literacy.

Despite growing debate about the role of monuments in diverse societies, there has been insufficient attention to contestations that have emerged involving ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ monuments. This article examines the politics of inclusion and exclusion that can stem from the social practices that evolve around these monuments, particularly as the imperatives and priorities of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) activism evolve while monuments, created in a particular historical and geographical context, are in some sense ‘set in stone’. Drawing on an intensive, mixed-methods case study of the Homomonument in Amsterdam, the article develops a grounded critique of processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically in relation to Black, bisexual and transgender people. With a focus on dance parties organised at the Homomonument, the article calls for more research that analyses monuments as sites of practice.

Toronto in the 1980s was embroiled in intense debates about the place of sex work in society. The passing of new legislation in 1985 criminalizing communication for the purposes of prostitution led to increased police harassment of outdoor sex workers. Within a gentrifying urban neighborhood, homeowners created a neighborhood organization, the South of Carlton Association, with the express purpose of collaborating with Metro Police and City Council to remove sex workers from the downtown stroll. In turn, sex worker activists in the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes practiced a range of strategies to challenge this oppression—including archiving their resistance.

Drawing from qualitative interview data, this article examines men who manage men in thesex industry. A gendered lens reveals that male sex work management engages with sexualand gender scripts in ways that are quite distinct from female sex work. These thirdparties assume that male sex workers can defend their own security but notably also worryabout male workers victimizing them, even as they opportunistically deploy hegemonicmasculinity in their business and security practices. The article highlights and reflectson how these framings shape managerial strategies, perceptions of risk and the law, andexperiences of stigma.

Researchers have been moving toward understanding sex workers as agentic and career-based social actors for some time. However, while these modern sex work lenses are readily applied to a variety of high-end and emerging forms of sex work, the field has often been reluctant to frame impoverished and potentially exploitative sex work in the same manner. Here, I ask whether and how the frameworks of “agency” and “career” can be applied to a population of poor male-identified survival sex workers. I use data from an innovative mixed-methods community-based approach that yields a broad sample of majority African American male survival sex workers from a large US city. I argue that by privileging respondents’ own interpretation of their lives, it is possible to construct a nuanced understanding of sex work as a “career” and to conceive of their work as both a profession and a source of disadvantage. I conclude that we should continue to focus on the voices of sex workers themselves in defining what sex work means and how it affects their lives.

This article examines the relationship between language and sexual identity, using data collected from in-depth interviews with cisgender women who are in relationships with female-to-male transgender men. The data illustrate that many of the women have complex relationships with the labels that they use to describe their own sexual identity currently and in their past. When referring to their own sexual identities, cisgender women partners of trans men (a) are flexible with specific terms they use in order to respond to varying social contexts, (b) use specific terms to signify cultural belonging to or difference from different communities, and (c) use language as a suggestive action to others to question heteronormative assumptions. Further, this research highlights the importance of considering time in sexuality research, including the timing of the partnerships, and collecting data that reflect the individuals’ histories to analyze the connection between sexual identity and the use of language.

The linguistic coding of sexual and gender diversity remains highly contested in African contexts. While English language terminologies reflecting rights-based talk proliferate, such terms fail to fully reflect the lived realities of African queerness. This paper engages existing South African research on indigenous terminologies to describe sexual and gender diversity, focusing on representations of male same-sex sexualities. Our findings show that local terminologies serve not only to ‘other’ sexual and gender diversity, but also hold the potential to render those existing outside of normative sex/gender binaries as socially intelligible. Two core themes emerged: (i) the persistence of heterogendered subjectivities, where sexual dissidence is mapped onto a normative male/female binary; and (ii) a procreative imperative focused on communitarian norms that privilege heterosexual childbearing. The findings highlight the limitations of global terminologies of sexual and gender diversity by engaging the ways in which local African terminologies provide social recognition for same-sex sexualities in generally heteronormative community spaces. We discuss the implications of this gendered encoding of sexual dissidence in terms of advocacy strategies for the greater social inclusion of sexual and gender minorities.

This article examines how historical contexts affect the recollection of experiences of rape. We reanalyze sexual autobiographies that were gathered in Finland in 1992 in a sex research project called FINSEX. To illustrate how the time of the rape as well as the time it is recalled shape the possibilities of narrating a life story, we present a close reading of four autobiographies that we place in the context of the collection as a whole, and compare our analysis of the autobiographies to their interpretation in the FINSEX study. The narrative elements of the autobiographies reflect the violent experiences in complex and layered ways. For the authors of these autobiographies, temporal changes in cultural and social understandings of sexual violence enable the reinterpreting of life events and the naming of previously unnamed experiences.