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Purpose: To understand how lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and asexual (LBTQA+) young women interpret the social construction of “lesbian obesity” in the context of their lived experiences and membership in the LGBTQ+ community.

Methodology: Individual, in-depth interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of 25 LBTQA+ women, ages 18–24, to explore how participants perceive and experience dominant discourses about gender, sexuality, and weight. Interviews were analyzed using a combination of deductive and inductive coding approaches.

Findings: Participants resisted public health discourse that frames obesity as a disease and the implication that their sexual identities put their health at risk. Many participants viewed their sexual identities and membership in the LGBTQ+ community as protective factors for their health statuses in general and their body image in particular.

Implications: Our findings suggest a need to reconsider the utility of the concept of “lesbian obesity” to characterize the significance of elevated rates of overweight and obesity in this population. Public health and clinical interventions guided by body positive approaches may be of greater relevance for sexual minority women.

Originality: This study centers the perceptions and experiences of LBTQA+ young women in order to examine how the intersections of sexual minority identity, dominant cultural ideals about weight, and obesity discourse inform their health.

The purpose of this paper is to examine LGBT exclusion from sporting institutions, examining this as a phenomenon which takes place in specific spaces within these institutions.

A conceptual framework is developed which highlights the differences between initiatives to change heteronormative cultures at institutional levels and the levels of individual sporting spaces. This is applied to examples of heteronormative behaviour in sporting spaces and to diversity initiatives to promote LGBT participation in sport.

The paper argues that change initiatives are only effective if they engage with individual spaces within sports institutions rather than at a blanket institutional level.

The paper outlines links between similar findings in management and organisation literature and findings about sports organisations in the sports sociology literature. It outlines the role of institutions in both promoting LGBT inclusion in sport, but also in drawing LGBT participation towards mainstream heteronormative behaviours.

This article’s principle aim is the investigation into the underdeveloped field of lesbian audience research. It theorises the relationship between the text of Xena Warrior Princess a television programme and a fanclub called Xenasubtexttalk that evolved on the Internet. The researcher has drawn on evidence from a case study and participant observation over a twelve month period, the gathering of postings from bulletin boards and continuing interviews lasting between one and two hours conducted over the Internet. This has revealed some of the practices and rituals of two self‐identified lesbians who participated in this fanclub. Informed by a postmodernist feminist framework several issues of methodology are discussed. The main theme in this study’s findings is that these fans have produced through the appropriation of this particular text, biographies that represent a “coming out narrative”.

Rights constitute a familiar feature of the liberal discourse of judging. This chapter seeks to recast this discourse away from the language of rights by considering two cases where liberals often invoke it: abortion and same-sex marriage. I argue that the presence of rights in American constitutional discourse exacerbates the counter-majoritarian nature of judicial review. We do better to recast the language of judging from an emphasis on protecting rights to an emphasis on making sure that the demos acts on publicly justifiable reasons. In doing so, I proffer a novel analysis of liberal theory's extant commitment to public reason, one that conceptualizes public reason as representing the scope of state power.

This study challenges contentions that rights are limiting through an analysis of grassroots rights talk in the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer) community in the 1980s. I argue that rights talk can be an important source of constructing community within local, nonmainstream, noninstitutional spaces through a discourse analysis of a forum for LGBTQ community-building in the past: the letters to the editor columns in Gay Community News. This study enhances law and social movement scholarship on the role of rights in social movements by exploring how rights discourse is employed by everyday people in a noninstitutional community-building venue rarely addressed in contemporary research.

This chapter focuses on gender, sexuality and security in post-Apartheid South Africa.

The methodology includes secondary analysis of policy and research with the aim of highlighting and assessing the position of gender, sex and security in post-Apartheid South Africa. Feminist theory and intersectionality are used to discuss issues of sexuality, security, construction of gender relationships and experiences of being a woman in South Africa. The normalisation of violence against women is challenged.

The social implications of this research are that it challenges normalisation of gendered violence, questions gendercide and produces knowledge of a gendered social reality of living in South Africa. Women who consider assault a regular feature of their sexual relationships have been brought into a discourse which includes the liberalisation of sexual expression, claims to new sexual rights and aspirations to power and status through sexual relationships (Posel, 2005a).

Throughout the chapter the achievement of gender equality is problematised and questioned. However, gender and the relationship between power and sex remain at the centre of the inquiry, particularly with reference to the increasing culture of violence and men as the perpetrators of violence against women.

According to Posel ‘one of the most striking features of the post-apartheid era has been the politicization of sexuality’ (2005a, p. 125) and this chapter demonstrates that a response to the violation of the Women’s Charter of Effective Equality, passed in 2000, is a priority as women and families are disproportionately affected by violence in multiple ways.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which Canadian lesbians and gay men manage their non‐hegemonic identities in organizations, given the relative paucity of qualitative data in the area, the importance of work as a site for identity projects in the contemporary west and growing pressure on employers to attend to sexual orientation as part of diversity management initiatives.

Data were gathered through 16 semi‐structured interviews with lesbian and gay workers from three Canadian cities.

The data emphasize the importance of organizational environments in which queer people feel able to integrate their identity at work with their identity in the rest of their lives. Role models were identified as especially important in this regard, particularly for women who talked of the organizational “double jeopardy” of being female and a lesbian.

Although the data reported here are not generalizable, it is worrying that they echo many earlier studies on the negative aspects of lesbian and gay workplace experience. One key implication is that those employees who conform most closely to what Butler calls the heterosexual matrix are less likely to experience problems related to their sexual orientation.

This paper indicates several themes which are not extensively travelled in the existing literature, including the suggestion that coming out to colleagues is easier if one is in a long‐term relationship, as well as a sense that having to negotiate such disclosure simultaneously enhances work‐related interpersonal skills.

Purpose – This study examines the consequences of sudden influx of medicalized discourse of gender in Japan by introduction of gender identity disorder (GID) in the late 1990s where transgender identities and the LGBT activism have had a different history and meanings from Western societies.

Methodology – I use discourse analysis of autobiographies of people with GID in Japan and the limited studies concerning the history of GID and transgender in Japan.

Findings – The introduction of GID to Japanese society contributed to increased social awareness of transsexual individuals. However, it also resulted in transsexual fundamentalism, which has excluded individuals who do not meet certain rigid medical and social identity criteria. This development reinforces the conventional binary gender norms instead of problematizing them. Furthermore, a legislation strictly based on the diagnosis has produced two groups: transsexual individuals with GID diagnosis who will be legally and socially recognized as legitimate, and those who are not GID and thus undeserving of such recognitions.

Social implications – Diagnosis cannot exist without criteria, therefore it is impossible for GID to function as an inclusive identity category. Therefore, we must seek a system to provide medical services that do not necessitate diagnosis. It is also crucial to nurture the social environment where people can freely choose gender identities and expressions that go beyond conventional binary gender system and to keep insisting on plurality and fluidity of gender so that people do not have to rush for a narrow window of recognition.

Purpose: The goal of Volume 21 of Advances in Medical Sociology, entitled Sexual and Gender Minority Health, is to showcase recent developments and areas for future research related to the health, well-being, and healthcare experiences of LGBTQA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Queer, Asexual, and related communities that do not identify as heterosexual) persons and communities.

Approach: In this introduction to the volume, we trace the historical development of research on sexual and gender minority (SGM) health, discussing how priorities, theories, and evidence have evolved over time. We conclude with brief suggestions for future research and an overview of the articles presented in this volume.

Findings: Research on SGM health has flourished in the past two decades. This trend has occurred in conjunction with a period of intense social, political, and legal discourse about the civil rights of SGM persons, which has increased understanding and recognition of SGM experiences. However, recent advances have often been met with resistance and backlash rooted in enduring social stigma and long histories of discrimination and prejudice that reinforce and maintain health disparities faced by SGM populations.

Value: Our review highlights the need for additional research to understand minority stress processes, risk factors, and resiliency, particularly for those at the intersection of SGM and racial/ethnic or socioeconomic marginality.

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether lesbians may experience an “advantage” in non‐traditionally female work compared to heterosexual women, but argues for an intersectional approach to understanding the relationship between gender, sexuality and class in male‐dominated work.

The research uses semi‐structured interviews with women working transport and construction, focusing here on an analysis of 13 interviews with lesbian workers, eight working in transport and five in construction, representing both professional/managerial and skilled manual occupations.

The paper considers the question of whether lesbians may experience an “advantage” in non‐traditionally female work compared to heterosexual women, but finds that their experience is complicated by other factors such as ethnicity, class and organisational culture. Organisational response and practice in relation to sexual orientation is found to be equally significant in shaping the realities of working lives for lesbians in traditionally male work.

The findings in this paper are based on an analysis of interviews with lesbians drawn from a larger research project examining the experience of both heterosexual and lesbian women working in the transport and construction sectors.

The paper addresses a gap in the literature on lesbian experience in non‐traditionally female work and aims to contribute to knowledge of the diversity of lesbian experience through examining the working lives of lesbians in both professional and skilled manual roles.