This chapter analyzes processes of learning sex work, observing the initiation in the activity and the development of skills and performances. Based on the approach of situated learning developed by Jean Lave (1991, 2011), the data from previous research were reconsidered and I returned to the field in a red-light district of Belo Horizonte, the Bohemian zone. The focus on learning brought new contributions: It highlighted the interaction of novices with the environment and the community, learning and adapting practices. The stories sex workers tell each other change their ways of working, talking, behaving, and dealing with customers. Analyzing continuities and differences in the practices of sex workers and the connections between different contexts through which they move also pointed out socio-historical transformations of the practice of sex work in the Bohemian zone, as well as individual and collective changes lived by the workers.

‘Edna O’Brien’s Narratives of Self-Fashioning’ begins by noting that even though Edna O’Brien had been publishing novels and receiving considerable public attention since the appearance of her Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), scholarship on her work only appeared belatedly, starting in the 1990s. The originality of these early novels lay in the frankness with which they addressed sexuality and gender-based violence and oppression in Ireland. Later works, such as A Pagan Place (1970), moved to more experimental forms of writing, and this in turn has opened up ecocritical modes of reading O’Brien’s work, in which the natural world and the human world are intimately connected. In this respect, that early Trilogy provides a template for reading much of O’Brien’s later work, even as she continued to write well into the twenty-first century, insofar as it contains the element of ‘making contact’ that O’Brien identified as the impetus behind her earliest writing.

‘Sexuality and the Irish Novel’ situates the work of Irish writers addressing sexuality in Irish fiction after about 1960 in the context of the final years of literary censorship in the Irish Republic. Around the time of Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy (1960–4), a series of novels, including J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955), Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley (1964), and later John McGahern’s The Pornographer (1979), combine explorations of sexuality with experiments in literary form. In the case of Anthony C. West’s The Ferret Fancier (1963) and Julia O’Faolain’s Women in the Wall (1975), the exploration of sexuality involves combining the historical novel with the Bildungsroman, while Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle (1977) strives for an embodied feminine consciousness. In each case, these novels explore sexual repression as a symptom not only of a postcolonial condition but also of the alienating tendencies of capitalist modernity.

Chapter 5 investigates the networks of relationship that sustain individuals and communities in the poems. It addresses family, marriage, sexual desire and agency, male bonds and loyalty, and the expectations placed on women and men. It also considers childhood and old age, hospitality, and wider social connections, arguing that epic memory preserves not only heroic deeds but everyday forms of attachment and obligation.

This chapter examines intensifying state-led attacks on LGBTQ people and reproductive rights in the United States through the lens of patriarchal authoritarianism. It connects the rise of the worldwide anti-gender movement with the historic exploitation of preexisting patriarchal power disparities by fascist and authoritarian regimes. It exposes the retrenchment towards state control over reproductive, bodily, and sexual autonomy as a tangible marker of a nation’s transition towards patriarchal authoritarianism and a time-tested fascistic tool. Patriarchy can be wielded as a fascistic tool and help facilitate a slide into authoritarianism by expanding social control and narrowing acceptable expressions of individuality, dignity, and freedom. Patriarchy excludes women from the public sphere while also exerting control throughout the private sphere of the family. Patriarchal authoritarianism further reinscribes patriarchy by exerting state control over reproduction, sexuality, and the family. Restricting opportunities for women and narrowing avenues for gender and sexual expression support the consolidation of power by limiting individuality and nonconformity.

This chapter looks beyond traditional concepts of democratic defense and provides a framework for the queer and trans community to engage in the process of democratic creation within the broader pro-democracy and democratic resistance movements. It argues that the queer and trans experience with rejection, vulnerability, and collaborative survival has uniquely prepared us to navigate the unfolding American democratic crisis. It encourages LGBTQ people to embrace the powerful status of being an “outsider” in service to the larger democratic project. Rooted in feminist and queer theory, this chapter concludes that both our societally manufactured difference and our innate equal dignity and humanity can help us to see beyond the restrictive binary thinking of mainstream society. This chapter argues that pro-democracy movements must be fueled by a commitment to collaborative survival and mutual aid. It recognizes that the celebration of our authentic expression and humanity are radically pro-democratic actions, especially when faced with state mandated conformity.

The rise of feminism both outside and inside Japan has heightened awareness of gender stratification in Japanese society and directed attention to a broad range of questions. In what ways are Japanese women subjected to a Japan-specific system of gender control? What types of gender barriers are present in Japan’s labor market? How is female sexuality controlled in Japan? How are women disadvantaged within the Japanese family structure? These issues represent some of the most fundamental problems of stratification and inequality in contemporary Japan. Specifically, this chapter explores the patriarchal family registration system, which is ingrained in gender relations and the family system in Japan; women’s employment conditions in the labor market; issues surrounding sexuality and reproduction; marriage and divorce; various family structures; and, finally, gender diversity and sexual minorities.

Over the past several decades, a handful of scholars have focused on the role that women poets have played in the medieval and early modern Irish literary tradition. While women typically did not have access to the ranks of professional poets ensconced in noble houses and monasteries (nor to the education and literacy that they might have achieved there), there are women poets named in the historical record, some of whose poems survive. This chapter will have a triple task: to account for what is can be known about specific Irish women poets and their work before the eighteenth century; to discuss the more general ways in which woman participated in the early Irish poetry, even if some of the specifics of such participation remain elusive because it largely takes place within an oral culture outside of the elite classes; and to consider how poems by women worked with and against the highly gendered generic and rhetorical conventions implicit in prominent modes of Irish poetry such as elegy, encomium, and, later, the aisling.

Chapter 14 examines significant moments in the Brazilian novel through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality, all framed by postcolonial theory. This perspective exposes deep-seated blind spots around abusive behaviors and hidden biases in the texts, showing just how these attitudes have been normalized by enduring colonial power structures. The chapter reveals how Blackness and Indigeneity have long been overshadowed by dominant white, masculine literary viewpoints. At the same time, it highlights counter-hegemonic works that actively challenge and resist patriarchal ideas. A standout example is the analysis of Coelho Neto’s Esfinge (1908), a lesser-known neo-Gothic “Frankensteinian” story about a character surgically fused from a man’s body and a woman’s head. The chapter covers a diverse range of authors – from José de Alencar to Conceição Evaristo – and works – from Bernardo Guimarães’ A escrava Isaura (1875) to Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan (1985).

Chapter 10 looks at Jorge Amado’s large body of work, dividing his novels into three main stages. These stages build on each other, adding new themes and styles that broaden Amado’s creative reach. The release of Gabriela, cravo e canela in 1958 is a key moment in this development. While staying true to his political beliefs, Amado’s ideas grew into a form of social humanism that mixed local culture, storytelling traditions, comic characters, strong women, and an open look at sexuality. Amado’s focus on sexuality highlights a major theme: the blending of races as a lively force that enriches culture, promotes acceptance, and pushes back against racism and xenophobia. In Amado’s third stage, Brazil goes beyond itself to symbolize the spirit of the Americas, reflecting the idea of e pluribus unum. The chapter ends by considering how Amado was received in the United States, calling it a “rollercoaster ride” shaped by both fair and unfair reasons.

Chapter 5 focuses entirely on Naturalism. It challenges the common elite opinion that sees the naturalist novel as a low-quality or failed form of literature. Instead, it looks at the topic from a fresh and insightful angle by examining the nineteenth-century publishing market. A key part of this study is sexuality, which helped naturalist fiction sell well but also made it a target for criticism. The chapter uses sexuality to explore popular naturalist types like the “hysterical girl” and the “spent man,” while also showing how Naturalism included queer characters. It also discusses the criticism of slavery, featuring characters like Bertoleza from Aluísio Azevedo’s O cortiço and Amaro from Bom-crioulo. Bertoleza and Amaro are two complex, self-aware Black characters, something not seen before Naturalism.

This chapter introduces the major themes, questions, methods, and layout of the book.

Gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation are often not well understood, creating confusion, prejudice and ignorance among some populations. To change societal views, various individuals and groups have provided education and shared their own personal journeys about gender identity, sexuality and sexual orientation. Although there have been some positive changes for the LGBTTQIA+ population, there is still much to be done to change attitudes, beliefs and values to improve how those who identify as LGBTTQIA+ are accepted and valued within society.

This chapter draws on recent work in transnational feminist studies and critical beauty and fashion studies to examine South Asian American chick lit. It attends to how the transnationalization of Indian fashion and beauty industries produce new definitions of cosmopolitanism through economic citizenship, or the “right to work” in a global economy. The chapter focuses on Kavita Daswani’s chick lit novel Salaam, Paris (2006) and the Indian Muslim protagonist Tanaya Shah’s entry into the world of fashion modeling. It argues that Tanaya’s Muslimness contributes to the construction of fashion as a failed moral economy, in addition to operating as a racialized identity that facilitates the multicultural brand expansion of a global clothing retailer in a post-9/11 world. The chapter reads the sexual management of Tanaya's identities as a post-9/11 Muslim subject and an Indian model as allowing the fashion industry to produce convivial relations between Muslim identities, fashionability, and cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.