It’s LGBTQ Pride Month

All people deserve to live with dignity and respect, free from fear and violence, and protected against discrimination, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

– Barack Obama in his Presidential Proclamation for LGBT Pride Month 2015

June is LGBTQ Pride Month. Celebrate with us!

Visit The Philosopher’s Eye Blog each Monday this month to read think pieces from Wiley authors and LGBTQ advocates. You’ll also get unlocked access to journal articles and book excerpts that examine the ethical, social, and philosophical issues faced by the LGBTQ community.

Join us as we continue the necessary conversation on LGBTQ rights, awareness, and support.

Happy Reading,

The Wiley Blackwell Philosophy Team

 

What Would Universal Marriage Equality Mean for Culture?

Until recently, American culture has been relatively devoid of representations of the LGBTQ couple. In fact, one of the frequent observations made by critics of television programs and films particularly has been the tendency of those forms to depict lesbians and gays as singular figures isolated from continuing relationships or larger community. There are,
one supposes, a few notable (or infamous) exceptions if one wishes to press the issue: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had attained a certain celebrity status by the 1920s and 1930s, though their salon days were spent in Paris and not in America. Likewise, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were by all accounts a couple in the 1920s but their infamy as murderers hardly made them role models.  Lesbian and gay couples did exist, to be sure, among them Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who were together more than five decades before Martin’s death in 2008, and Jorn Kamgren and gay activist Harry Hay, who were together for nearly a dozen years, but they were not well-known.  And novelist Henry James popularized “Boston Marriages” — close romantic relationships between women – in 1886’s The Bostonians, though the sexual nature of these relationships was likely neither universal nor well-understood. Lesbian and gay couples were becoming more culturally visible by the 1970s, thanks in part to a series of efforts by gay couples to marry in Minnesota, Seattle, and Colorado, as well as to their appearance in works such as the play and television series Hot L Baltimore.  Even as LGBTQ characters began to emerge in television and film, on-screen couples remained relatively scarce until the new millennium, with press accounts of states’ legalizing, first, civil unions and domestic partnerships, and eventually marriages.  When the TV series Modern Family debuted in 2009, the gay couple Mitch and Cam soon became audience favorites. The current U.S. Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which seeks to overturn state bans on the conduct and recognition of same-sex marriages, has dramatically increased the visibility of LGBTQ couples. But would universal marriage equality also mean greater cultural visibility or would an end to the legal and political battles over marriage equality lead to normalization and a return to invisibility?

Bruce E. Drushel, Ph.D.
Guest Editor, Journal of American Culture
Associate Professor, Media, Journalism & Film, Miami University

We encourage you to share, comment, and engage with us in the comment section below! Please also check out our free special collection of scholarly articles and books in LGBT studies.

YouTube Beauty Guru Ingrid Nilsen Comes Out in Emotional Video

If you’ve been on Facebook, YouTube, or even Time.com in the last ten hours, you may have seen the headlines that Ingrid Nilsen, a YouTube beautician with a following of 3.3 million followers, announced this morning to all her followers that she is gay. In between bouts of emotion and personal philosophy, Ingrid describes the overwhelming need she felt to have this conversation with her followers. Her story, honesty, and personal connection come at a pivotal time in our cultural acceptance of the “coming out” story.

Many in the LGBT community have a story of a similar hardship coming out to friends, family, and loved ones. It is not unheard of for social media outlets to spread notes, reactions, and personal stories like this across a member base. Ingrid’s story is unique in that it had by 900,000 hits in eight hours. The story has been picked up by multiple media outlets this morning and has subsequently raised viewership to 2,037,797 when this piece was written. For comparison, her other YouTube videos are on average around 500,000+ page views, almost 4 times her average viewership for one post.

Is the amplified reach and share-ability of these social media proclamations garnering the necessary support of our culture for acceptance? What will the cultural impact be of news outlets like Time picking up this personal story? Does this place pressure on the LGBT community to “come out” on social platforms or capture that moment in some way?

We encourage you to share your thoughts and comments on this post below. If you’re interested on reading scholarly content, made free this month only to support the continuation of conversations surrounding the LGBT Community, read here.

LGBTs in the workplace

Canadian Journal of Administrative Science

Call for Papers

Deadline: October 30, 2015

As the workforce becomes increasingly diverse, a lot of attention has been paid to the career issues of women and racial minorities. In contrast, comparatively little research has been conducted on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) people in the workplace. Maher and colleagues (2009) tracked empirical research in the LGBT domain and observed three distinct phases: Early work (1800s-1972) focused on homosexuality as a disease; the second phase (1972-1990) targeted negative attitudes towards homosexuality (e.g., combatting Homophobia, violence and discrimination against LGBTs); and the third phase (post-1990) focused on changing institutions to foster a positive climate in the workplace. Consistent with this, recent research in this domain has also shifted from employment discrimination, identity management, and career counselling for LGBT individuals (Chung, et al., 2009; DeJordy, 2008; Ragins, 2008) to countering heteronormativity in the workplace, the adoption of LGBT-friendly practices, and understanding the career choices of LGBT individuals (Chuang, et al., 2011; Ng et al., 2012; Ozturk & Rumens, 2014). The purpose of this special issue is to take LGBT scholarship to the next stage by gathering new knowledge and extending theory on LGBT individuals in the workplace.

We invite broad submissions for papers that focus on sexual orientation, gender identity and LGBT individuals within the work domain. Submissions can be conceptual or empirical (qualitative or quantitative), and review work is especially welcomed. In particular, we seek research that is thought provoking, fills a gap in the literature, or crosses boundaries particularly from critical and/or queer studies to management literature. Papers should appeal to management readers, add value through theory building, and provide implications for HRM practice for organizations and employers. We offer a list of topics below as a catalyst to encourage potentially impactful scholarship on LGBT issues in the workplace, but welcome other topics not specifically mentioned. We also use LGBT as a short hand for sexual minorities as a group, but papers can focus on one type of sexual orientation (e.g., transgendered employees) or sexual minorities collectively.

For suggestions on topics, more information on the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, and additional resources, please click here.

Canadian Journal of Administrative Science

Interview: Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers

Eric Reitan’s latest book, Is God a Delusion? A Reply to Religion’s Cultured Despisers was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2009. Here he tells us how he was motivated to write the book partly in response to the misrepresentations of religious thought he discovered in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but also by a very personal desire to reconcile his deep intuitions about ultimate reality with open intellectual inquiry.

Philosopher’s Eye: Why did you decide to write Is God a Delusion?

Eric Reitan: One day a few years ago, a colleague of mine handed me a photocopied page from a book, without any identifying information, and asked me to evaluate it as I would a student paper. On that page the unknown author attempted to summarize and then critique the first three of Aquinas’ “Five Ways” for proving God’s existence. I say “attempted” because the author got the arguments wrong