You Don't Look Like a Lesbian: A Coautoethnography of Intersectional Identities in Counselor Education

Please don't gayify!: an autoethnographic account of medicalised relationality for LGBTQI+ safe affirming medical health education and clinical practice

In this article, the authors, a cis-gender gay man and an Indigenous non-binary, two-spirit person, narrate their past encounters with health professionals and their experiences pursuing allied health care training as students. Taking an autoethnographic approach, the first author re-narrates how medical practitioners and students engage (or fail to engage) with the LGBTQIA+ community. They draw on gray documentation derived from an interaction with a consulting physician that highlighted a telling lack of knowledge about the LGBTQ+ community, including those with diverse sex characteristics and sexualities/manifesting as unconscious bias. This interaction provided the impetus to speak back to the experience of being reduced to a medical prognosis. The second author questions the hegemonic practices underpinning encounters with the medical model of response in tertiary education. Our remit in this paper is to question how adequately the specific needs of the LGBTQI+ population are being addressed by the medical model and to what extent aspiring clinicians understand how their actions can contribute to gender- and sexuality-based discrimination and stigmatization.

"Femininity? It's the Aesthetic of Subordination": Examining Femmephobia, the Gender Binary, and Experiences of Oppression Among Sexual and Gender Minorities

The devaluing of femininity is a social problem with serious consequences. Violence against women, men, transgender people, and racial minorities is often exacerbated when elements of femmephobia are present. Femmephobia refers to the devaluation and regulation of femininity and suggests a separate, perhaps overlapping, phenomenon specific to gender (e.g., femininity), rather than gender/sex (e.g., woman) or sex (e.g., female). Yet, despite growing evidence warranting the consideration of femmephobia, little research has considered femininity as an intersectional axis. Femmephobia has been examined in a fractured manner, isolating its various manifestations in specific, rather than overarching ways. The current paper explored how these systems are interrelated and argues that sources of oppression underlying many forms of violence today (e.g., anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, Incel attacks, sexual violence, transgender murders) are all symptoms of the same underlying social prejudice: femmephobia. While sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and racism also play a role, previous research tends to overlook or conflate the role of femmephobia in fueling prejudice and violence. Using in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, the current paper explored the intersecting role of femmephobia in experiences of oppression among sexual and gender minorities (N = 38). Two thematic networks are presented. The first network pertains to masculine themes: masculine privilege, masculinity as protective, and masculinity as the norm. The second network pertains to femininity: feminine inferiority, femininity as target, and femininity as inauthentic. The connection between these two thematic networks illustrates the symbiotic relationship between femmephobia and the gender binary. Finally, patterns identified from the thematic analysis were used to generate a model of femmephobia. This paper suggests that the gender binary is not merely a division; it is also hierarchical and regulated by femmephobia.

Entangling past, present, and future to examine queerness and white privilege in academia

Lesbians have limited visibility or representation in educational research, and there has been even less consideration of the ways that lesbians' experiences are racialized. Using a methodological approach that entwines Karen Barad's concept of queer temporalities with Kimberlé Crenshaw's discussion of single-axis intersectionality, this paper uses critical autoethnography to offer narrative examinations of the author's queerness as constantly enmeshed with her Whiteness. The author considers the degrees to which being situated in the socio-politically conservative U.S. South have influenced her experiences as a queer lesbian academic, even as White privilege has, intentionally and unintentionally, shaped her scholarship.