The Gender and Sexuality Collection is a valuable resource for university librarians, researchers, and teaching staff. This collection delves into themes such as domesticity, education, work, sexuality, representation, religion, mental health, activism and motherhood. By surveying gender identity and sexuality from diverse perspectives, it raises critical questions about gender roles, feminist theory and heteronormativity. Covering a broad historical range from the medieval period to the present day, this collection is indispensable for those engaged in gender and sexuality studies.
| Key series |
| Gender in History |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Women, Theatre and Performance |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 7 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 2004-2022 titles | 89 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Domesticity |
| Education |
| Work |
| Nature |
| Sexuality |
| Heteronormativity |
| Representation |
| Religion |
| Global South |
| Mental health |
| Motherhood |
| Gender roles |
| Activism |
| Feminism |
| Beauty |
| Thema subject categories |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History |
| Economics |
| Politics and government |
| The Arts |
| Feminism and feminist theory |
| Film history, theory or criticism |
| Gender studies, gender groups |
| History of religion |
| LGBTQ+ Studies / topics |
SDG coverage
Gender and sexuality collection
The chapter explores how the EU’s boundary-drawing practices directly influence anti-LGBT mobilisation in countries seeking accession to the EU by focusing on the case of surging resistance to LGBT rights in Serbia. It addresses demands posed by the EU concerning LGBT rights and the emergence and transformations of the local political discourses which interlock and mutually incite anti-LGBT and anti-EU appeals. The chapter traces the changing discourses and practices of arguably the most active and influential participants in the anti-LGBT mobilisation, such as the political movement/party Dveri, public intellectuals, politicians and members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and uses relevant textual sources, including EU and nongovernmental statements, media reports and documents produced by or about the observed actors. By looking at the productive interplay of anti-LGBT and anti-EU arguments in the Serbian context, the chapter shows how EU sexual governance can be seen as a particular marker of the symbolic border between Europe’s ‘Western core’ and its ‘Eastern’ periphery. The chapter argues that this border-making process represents one of the key factors which not only influence anti-LGBT mobilisation, but also incite a desire to resist membership in the European Union.
This chapter studies the border from the perspective of gender, exploring the desires present in the current images and practices associated with the Finnish–Russian border and the act of crossing it. The analysis is based on long-term ethnographic work with autoethnographic observations of the border, border-crossings and the border area on both sides of Finnish–Russian border since the beginning of the 2000s. The chapter explores gendered border-produced desires through the prism of resentment and nostalgia, the sources of which we see in the perceptions and memories of Second World War and the Cold War era on the one hand, and in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Socialism on the other. This is accompanied by different desires for crossing the border among border area residents of different backgrounds. For some the border represents a guarantee of national and personal security; for others the border represents access to desired other spaces: for Finnish border-crossers the ‘home’ and battle landscapes lost in the Second World War; and for the Russian-speaking immigrants living in Finland the welfare state and social security lost after the collapse of the Soviet system, which, it is believed, can be rediscovered on the other side of the border.
This chapter links the historic Antemurale Christianitatis narrative of Croatia’s role as a bulwark separating ‘Christian Western civilisation’ from ‘Balkan barbarism’ to recent policies and media representations that gender and sexualise the nation. Croatia’s liminal position between Europe and the Balkans epitomises the desire for the respective ‘other’ on both sides, while it draws its own raison d’être from separating the two. Hence, Croatia can best be conceptualised as an ambiguous, contested site that is constantly (re)produced by and simultaneously produces desire. Politicized representations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity are most visible in the discourses on the ambiguous role of Croatian ex-generals in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Homeland War’ (1991–95) in which Croatia gained independence from Yugoslavia. In public discourse, the military success of Croatia – and ultimately the image of Croatia as a nation – is closely linked to the sexualised, mythic image of one man, former Lieutenant General Ante Gotovina. The chapter analyses a 2001 biography of Gotovina and ensuing film and television series adaptations from 2019. It argues that the narratives sketched therein construct the nation as being in need of a male protector and locate Croatia as wedged between an immoral Europe on one side and an uncivilised Balkans on the other.
This chapter examines how borders work to produce desires both in the form of sexualisation as well as through a lived sense of sexuality. The chapter is based on long-term fieldwork with Latvian migrants in Guernsey, UK. The chapter argues that the borders that people cross create new desires. Borders shape people as sexual beings in novel ways. By weaving together notions of ethnosexuality, bordering and desire, the chapter examines sexualisation in migrant spaces, at work and in public spaces.
The Introduction to the collection of studies in Borders of Desire outlines and theorises the book’s approach to borders as being productive of desire. Instead of focusing on the ways in which borders obstruct, the volume asks what desires, particularly those around gender and sexuality, are produced by the very presence of borders. The Introduction presents the book’s performative approach, which emphasises not what borders are, but what borders do – and in this case, what desires they produce. It further introduces the agentic approach to desire drawing on Michel Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s theorisations of subjectivation, desire and resistance. The Introduction then explores the structuring themes of the volume’s chapters, highlighting aspects of fantasy, personal escape and transformation related to border-crossing; ethnosexualised borders which create desires for exoticised others; and political desires for certain pasts and futures marked by borders that may also provoke a desire to resist normative orders of gender and sexuality associated with border-related differences. The Introduction highlights the ways in which the chapters speak to these themes and to each other, showing how borders can trigger new desires expressed as aspirations, resentment, actions or movements. In laying out this approach, the Introduction also sets this book apart from most other studies that take borders for granted and desire as something that precedes the presence of a border. Instead, the Introduction stresses how gendered and sexualised desires are built through various configurations of imagination and bordering practices through which individuals are constantly called to be desiring subjects.
This chapter investigates how desire is relevant for our understanding of transnational prostitution. The context is migration for and through prostitution across what used to be the Nordic–Soviet divide, across borders which during the last decades have changed their meaning and materiality profoundly. The chapter investigates the desires attached to the border, building on research among women from Eastern and Southeastern Europe who in the mid-2000s travelled back and forth between Norway, their country of origin and other countries on a regular basis, engaging in commercial sex in some or all of these places. The research demonstrates that desire for a different life than what could be realised by only ‘staying at home’ made mobility attractive and that the ethnosexual desire of Nordic men made it possible for the women to attain what they desired. In this scenario, what lies beyond the border is imbued with value and desirable objects for both sellers and buyers of sex, and the existence of the border plays a part in this. While desire is a feeling experienced on a deeply personal level, the desire for things and experiences that can only be accessed elsewhere, and the possibility of having one’s desires met, speaks to geopolitical, cultural and economic relations and changes. Borders are not only an organising principle, but also something that gains meaning and materiality through people’s desires and how they act upon them.
This chapter examines the ways in which women who have migrated from post-socialist countries to Italy and Finland narrate their reasons for migrating. Drawing on two different ethnographic research projects conducted in two different settings, the chapter analyses how migration can be a strategy for escaping certain gender relations or an attempt to take full advantage of other configurations of them. We explore the different dimensions of desire by looking at the continuum from sex to love as ways to ensure a better future and how this continuum sits in the post-socialist gender orders and their renegotiation in these migratory contexts. Moreover, we argue that mainstream migration literature needs to reconsider the idea of the migrant as an economically rational individual by taking into account the importance of desire as a driver of migration and as a key force which shapes gendered migratory mobilities.
This chapter examines the productive aspect of borders in the realm of the border hotel-casinos and beauty consumption practices in the Balkan region. For the regular gamers visiting the casinos on the Macedonian side of the border, the gaming universe opens up a possibility for trespassing on the rigid class boundaries that lock people into seemingly fixed subject positions determined by their rural background in northern Greece. Financial superiority entitles gamers to demand special treatment by the hotel-casino employees. Thus the desire to gamble becomes more than an addiction: it is an escape from the everyday, as crossing a border to gamble involves a creation of another reality and allowing the gamers to create their new selves. For the urban consumers from Thessaloniki, the border also offers the possibility of maintaining beauty practices such as cosmetic and hair-dressing services that are too expensive and unaffordable in Greece. The proximity of the border and the possibility to visit beauty parlours in Gevgelija enables these women to reinstate their sense of femininity and middle-class position; crossing the border makes them feel like women, which raises the question of the effect of the border on the notion of gender. Arguably, the crossing of a border affects the way desires intersect with other consumer aspects such as acquiring the luxury, comfort or status markers necessary for maintaining certain ethnically and class-marked modes of being a `real` woman.
This chapter explores how the relationship between labour relations, healthcare policy, and institutional arrangements shape care work through a combined focus on situated work experiences in the feminised and increasingly multi-cultural municipal healthcare sector and on policy discourse and policy framing in Norway. The chapter identifies and describes labour relations, labour experiences, and the part-time employment ‘culture’ in the care services, and the ways healthcare services and care work are envisioned in recent policy. Development in the labour market over the last decade, spurred by amongst other thing migration and the welfare state ‘crisis’, has changed the institutional conditions of labour. Based on examination of political discourse and on data from fieldwork in three Norwegian municipalities, the chapter aims at a multi-level analysis of labour relations in the municipal care sector in order to show the ways a ‘shifting institutional ecology’ opens for precarity of labour in Norway. The key argument of the chapter is that the shifting boundaries of politics have created problems where labour falls outside of the policy frame, something that contributes to a debasing of (care) work as a political category and to the emergence of precarious labour, often naturalised as flexibility, in the public care services.
This chapter looks at the functioning and effects of border regimes in relation to marriage migration from rural Kosovo to Western Europe, and here especially to Germany and Austria, which restricted the opportunities for marriage migration considerably over recent years. The restrictions are based on gendered and ethnicised assumptions of marriage migration as being patriarchal and a threat to German and Austrian society. Shedding light on a rather unexplored perspective, the chapter focuses on young women in Kosovo’s south, who aim to move to Western Europe via marriage, and the barriers they meet and struggle to overcome. It explores how prospective migrants position themselves towards marriage migration, and how they experience the increasingly restrictive European border regime in terms of family and marriage migration. It furthermore questions the meaning of polity borders in such intimate realms as marriage. The chapter argues that with the new policies and measures concerning marriage migration, Western European states externalise their borders and put enormous pressure on prospective marriage migrants. These borders, partly gendered, can be bodily felt, often postpone migration, and may alienate partners. Contrary to the stated aims of such policies, these measures do not necessarily support women in their free choices in intimate realms, but interfere in intimacies and restrict their agency. Still, women also act as agents by relying on family support in order to realise their imaginations, or by choosing exit strategies when the pressure on them becomes too burdensome or realities are too far away from their imaginations.