Two LGBTQ affirmative US Supreme Court Rulings occurred in the second decade of the twenty-first century: the 2015 Obergefell ruling in support of same sex marriage, and the 2020 Bostock decision ruling that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is prohibited by Title VII. In The Politicization of Trans Identity: An Analysis of Backlash, Scapegoating, and Dog-Whistling from Obergefell to Bostock, Loren Cannon critiques the opinions of the court in both cases. Cannon carefully presents the evidence that transgender identity itself has become politicized post Obergefell and provides a thorough consideration of the ramifications of this politicization across the nation, especially in the form of proposed legislation and violence. Cannon argues that the politicization of trans identity can rightfully be understood as a backlash response to the Obergefell decision and increased LGBTQ equality. According to Cannon, aspects of the politicization can be characterized as scapegoating and as dog-whistling. This book offers unique contributions to the understanding of these ideas, including a creative application of Rene Girard’s theory of scapegoating. Lastly, Cannon argues that conceptually, virtue signaling needs to be paired with dog-whistling to have the political result that the whistler intends.

Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies introduces new thinking on non-conforming gender representation, addressing transsexuality as a subjective experience that highlights universal dilemmas related to how we conceive identity and exploring universal questions related to gender: its objects, objections, and obstacles. This book seeks to disassemble prejudicial orientations to the challenges and the everydayness of transsexuality and build new understanding and responses to issues including: medical biases, the problem of authenticity, and the agency of the child. Oren Gozlen leads an examination of three central pressures: transformation of a medical model, the social experience of becoming transgender, and the question of self-representation through popular culture. The chapters reframe several contemporary dilemmas, such as: authenticity, pathology, normativity, creativity, the place of the clinic as a problem of authority, the unpredictability of sexuality, the struggle with limits of knowledge, a demand for intelligibility and desire for certainty. The contributors consider sociocultural, theoretical, therapeutic, and legal approaches to transsexuality that reveal its inherent instability and fluidity both as concept and as experience. They place transsexuality in tension and transition as a concept, as a subject position, and as a subjectivity. The book also reflects the way in which political and cultural change affects self and other representations of the transsexual person and their others, asking: how does the subject metabolize the anxieties that relate to these transformations and facilitations? How can the subject respond in contexts of hostility and prohibition? Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration, Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapist as well as psychologists and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.

The Politicization of Mumsnet investigates the growing politicization of this parenting discussion forum and its use by politicians to influence middle-class women in the UK.

This compact book is constructed using psychological theory and research to empower university faculty to facilitate student engagement and address student resistance to diversity and social justice education more effectively. University faculty teaching diversity and social justice have traditionally encountered various forms of student resistance. Recent cultural trends of political opposition to teaching critical race theory and other forms of increased polarization and scapegoating with decreased levels of social tolerance have exacerbated challenges in promoting student engagement in diversity and social justice education in universities and colleges. In contrast to traditional models that tend to be confrontational in addressing student biases, the new Moving Towards Social Justice (MTSJ), Relational Partnership Development Model (RPDM) and process theoretical models seek to build on appropriate pre-existing strengths, interests, values, and the developmental readiness of students who might otherwise oppose learning about the contexts, lives, and predicaments of marginalized persons living in various intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity and ability/disability status. Emphasis is placed on the development of professional and life skills, such as wisdom and intercultural competence, which provide incentives and remove barriers to learning about social justice and diversity. Project-based learning approaches grounded in a developmental framework to foster the thriving and well-being of diverse students, collaborative partners in the community, and diverse persons served by the community partners are emphasized. The role of empirical assessment, feedback, and program refinement over time is also delineated within the models. Subverting Resistance to Social Justice and Diversity Education: Constructive Approaches with Undergraduate Students is an indispensable and timely resource for university and college instructors who teach courses or have significant portions of a class that involve education around social justice, diversity, and intersectionality issues, such as cross-cultural psychology, multicultural psychology, social work, sociology, intercultural communication, and counseling or clinical practice with individuals or families from diverse social locations. University officers of diversity, faculty development providers, and other administrators interested in empowering university faculty to increase student engagement in social justice and diversity education also would find the book a useful reference.

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of identity as the answer to the question, "who, or what, am I?" It covers the century from the end of World War I, when identity in this sense first became an issue for writers and philosophers, to 2010, when European political leaders declared multiculturalism a failure just as Canada, which pioneered it, was hailing its success. Along the way the book examines Erik Erikson's concepts of psychological identity and identity crisis, which made the word famous; the turn to collective identity and the rise of identity politics in Europe and America; varieties and theories of group identity; debates over accommodating collective identities within liberal democracy; the relationship between individual and group identity; the postmodern critique of identity as a concept; and the ways it nonetheless transformed the social sciences and altered our ideas of ethics. At the same time the book is an argument for the validity and indispensability of identity, properly understood. Identity was not a concept before the twentieth century because it was taken for granted. The slaughter of World War I undermined the honored identities of prewar Europe and, as a result, the idea of identity as something objective and stable was thrown into question at the same time that people began to sense that it was psychologically and socially necessary. We can't be at home in our bodies, act effectively in the world, or interact comfortably with others without a stable sense of who we are. Gerald Izenberg argues that, while it is a mistake to believe that our identities are givens that we passively discover about ourselves, decreed by God, destiny, or nature, our most important identities have an objective foundation in our existential situation as bodies, social beings, and creatures who aspire to meaning and transcendence, as well as in the legitimacy of our historical particularity.

This unique volume brings together literary critics, historians, and anthropologists from around the world to offer new understandings of gender and sexuality as they were redefined during the upheaval of 1968.