The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

Queer Questions

Abstract

As rights claims on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity occupy an increasingly prominent place in international politics, it seems clear that the long-running Woman Question has been supplemented by a set of variously articulated “queer questions.” Drawing on postcolonial, feminist and queer theory, and readings of queer literary and cinematic texts from India and Iran, this article explores moments of resonance, intersection and tension between the Woman Question and queer questions. It argues, first, that contemporary queer questions echo the preoccupations of the Woman Question even as they are uncannily prefigured by it; second, that these questions have been mutually disruptive of one another, so that queer questions are not simply a rerun of the Woman Question; and third, that differences between these questions are problematically flattened out in projections of shared futurity articulated in the abstract universality of “human rights.” Navigating the shared pasts, fraught presents and imagined futures of Woman and queer questions, the article brings queer critiques of temporality to bear on the concerns of postcolonial queer activism. It elucidates opportunities and challenges for alliance between the subjectivities interpellated by these various questions. In addition, it asks how the proliferation of new subjectivities under the sign of “queer” troubles notions of universal human rights.     

Queer Domicide

ABSTRACT

This article examines lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) experiences of displacement, home loss, and rebuilding in the face of natural disasters. LGBT vulnerability and resilience are little studied in disaster research; this article begins to fill this gap, focusing on LGBT domicide—how LGBT homes are “unmade” in disasters. To do this, we critically read a range of non-government, scholarly, and media commentaries on LGBT experiences of natural disasters in various settings over 2004–12, including South Asia, the USA, Haiti, and Japan. Additionally, we utilize preliminary data from pilot work on LGBT experiences of 2011 disasters in Brisbane, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. we find that disaster impacts are the first stage of ongoing problems for sexual and gender minorities. Disaster impacts destroy LGBT residences and neighborhoods, but response and recovery strategies favor assistance for heterosexual nuclear families and elide the concerns and needs of LGBT survivors. Disaster impact, response, and recovery “unmakes” LGBT home and belonging, or inhibits homemaking, at multiple scales, from the residence to the neighborhood. we focus on three scales or sites: first, destruction of individual residences, and problems with displacement and rebuilding; second, concerns about privacy and discrimination for individuals and families in temporary shelters; and third, loss and rebuilding of LGBT neighborhoods and community infrastructure (e.g. leisure venues and organizational facilities).     

The Protective Circle: Queer Fathers and Counselors

This article provides a review of the literature addressing the unique needs and experiences of queer fathers. Despite the growing number of queer fathers and families, and increasing scholarship on this topic, there is a major dearth in the counseling scholarship and practice related to queer families, or more specifically and especially, queer fatherhood. Thus, this article uses the concept of a “protective circle” to assist professional counselors to understand their vital role within a queer father and familial system. By understanding the experiences and needs of queer fathers, counselors can better conceptualize and assist this underserved and often silenced community.     

Queer Chicano Families: The Importance of Converging Literature on Queer Families,Chicano Families,and Chicano Queers

Despite growing literature on Latino families and Latino queer identities, there has been relatively little empirical research on Latino same‐sex families. Likewise, emerging empirical research on gay and lesbian couples tends to focus on the experiences of middle‐class, well‐educated, White couples. I argue that combining theoretical and empirical works on sexuality, Chicano studies, and queer studies can assuage this lack of diversity in each body of literature. This work first examines current literature on Latino families, with a focus on Latino familism. This is followed by a brief examination of current literature on queer Chicanos. Lastly, it will discuss queer families and the lack of current literature on Latino same‐sex couples, in order to present a course of action for further research on the intersectional social location of queer Chicano families.     

The Queer Sisters and its Electronic Bulletin Board

This paper explores the impact of the Internet on offline social movement mobilization from the perspective of identity building. It is based on a case study of a women's group in Hong Kong, the Queer Sisters, and the bulletin board it created on the World Wide Web. Content analysis, an online survey, interviews and observation conducted between September 1999 and December 2000 found that the bulletin board helped to foster a sense of belonging to the Queer Sisters among participants. Bulletin board participants also shared a culture of opposition to the dominant order. But a collective consciousness was absent, so the bulletin board fell short of building a collective identity among its participants. This paper, however, argues that the absence of a collective identity on the bulletin board is the result of the way the board was administered, constrained by the resources and the aims of the Queer Sisters. It suggests that the potential for the Internet to build collective identities for social movements differs for different types of social movements.     

The Experiences Queer College Women of Color Have of Friendship

Research has shown that friendship between queer college women of color was beneficial to racial and sexual identity development. To date, no study has sought to discover the ways in which queer college women of color develop and navigate friendship connections in the context of a women’s college environment. Using relational-cultural theory and narrative inquiry, the researcher collected stories from participants in friendship pairs. Further, the researcher narrowed the collection of stories and selected representative narratives from two college contextual environments.     

Queer Social Dreaming Matrix

The author reflects in personal and political terms on the experience of a monthly Queer Social Dreaming Matrix based in London.     

The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School

This article documents the pioneering—and largely overlooked—sociological studies of sexuality undertaken by scholars at the University of Chicago during the first decades of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on their investigations of a wide range of non-normative sexualities, including prostitution, cross-racial sexuality and homosexuality, it argues that these studies provided the foundation for a radical new understanding of sexuality that emphasized the social context and meaning of sexual practices and types, rather than their biological or psychological determination. Finally, it demonstrates the forgotten centrality of these studies to the establishment of the field of urban sociology by explicating the sexual subtext of several key concepts from the so-called Chicago School, including natural areas, concentric zones of urban development, mobility, social personalities and the marginal man.     

Exploring Queer Consciousness Among Social Workers

The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of MSW practitioners toward lesbians and gay men using a recently developed instrument. Whereas prior research focused on blatantly homophobic or heterosexist attitudes, this research uses a measurement tool based on the concept of queer consciousness (QC) and measures subtle forms of prejudice, including both positive and negative attitudes along four dimensions: Value gay and lesbian progress/diversity, resist traditional sex and gender roles, positive beliefs about lesbians, and positive beliefs about gay men. Research findings indicate negative attitudes toward lesbians and gay men in three out of the four dimensions for the sample of social work practitioners. This article concludes with suggestions for social work educators who want to redress areas of subtle prejudice and promote higher levels of QC.     

An Analysis of The Comfort of Strangers from the perspective of Queer Theory

Ian McEwan is generally acknowledged as a unique and prominent figure in the history of twentieth century English literature.In 2008,The Times featured him on their list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.The Comfort of Strangers,which was nearly universally praised both in the United Kingdom and in the United States.In The New York Times,the critic John Leonard wrote No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it.yet its status among the western literary critics varied greatly.Queer theory represents a theoretical vanguard in terms of the issues of sexuality and identity,and it does not mean to advocate homosexuality as some people misunderstood.Based on the detailed textual analysis of The Comfort of Strangers from the perspective of the Queer theory as the major theoretical basis,this paper intends to reveal McE wan's protest against rigorous gender categorization,and his appeal for the elimination of discrimination against homosexuality and the pursuit of a harmonious world.     

Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse

Abstract

The stereotype of the gay man as arbiter of domestic style and design is widely recognized. Robin Williams humorously referenced this in a joke: “We had gay burglars the other night,” he notes, “They broke in and rearranged the furniture.” What remains unclear is the ways in which stereotypes relate to the lives of ordinary people and the homes they inhabit. This article brings together the idiosyncrasies of queer design that circulate at a number of levels in a mainly transatlantic discourse—thanks to the help of mass media, television programs, and a niche of scholarly literature—with a study of ordinary homes belonging to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lives in a global city. It is argued that this wider queer aesthetic penetrates everyday space and shapes homes in complicated ways; there is a tension between these two domains. The empirical research draws from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Londoners gathered as part of a larger project on sexual minority identity at home in London, UK. Looking to these domestic case studies allows for a spatialized reading that challenges celebrated and exclusive interiors. Offering a timely and distinct architectural approach looking to the everyday users of ordinary domestic space aims to modestly move in another direction towards a model of diversity, opening up queer domesticity and sexual minority identity to multiple representations.     

Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and Representation of Queer Identities on the World Wide Web

This essay introduces the reader both to the varieties of representations of queers currently available on US Web servers and to the kinds of critical questions that scholars and activists can ask about such representations. As such, the author surveys, summarizes, and analyzes both pertinent Websites and scholarly writing about queer representation, identity, community, and social agency. Ultimately, the author concludes that analyzing queer self-representation on the Web is a significant scholarly undertaking in that it can help us understand better (1) how queers use, represent themselves, and are represented on the Web, and (2) what such representations might mean for our understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our future both locally and globally.     

The Dangerous Real: Queer Solo Performance in/as Active Disruption

Abstract

Like all radical community endeavours, queer performance in the United States has been shaped through resistance to restrictive ideologies. National insecurity over ‘indecent’ (read: queer) artistic expression in the US has been aimed at artists working in a variety of genres, and here I focus specifically on queer solo performance artists. This essay explores the dangerous realities that queer artists present to an imagined unified US national identity. I argue that queer solo performers operate as artistic activists, challenging homogenous fantasies about US culture through the queering of experience. Aesthetically disparate, their work is connected by common threads of vulnerability and precarity. The article asks how their work disrupts U.S. insecurities concerning intersections of sexuality, gender identity, race and religion.     

Queer Christian: The Catholic Homosexual Apologia and Lesbian/Gay Practice

This essay concerns recent positions on homosexuality taken by the Roman Catholic Church and places them with respect to historical documents engaging same-sex desire. Analyzing Aelred of Rievaulx's twelfth-century Spiritual Friendship, John Bloxam's 1894 The Priest and the Acolyte, and Marc-André Raffalovich's 1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité, this essay offers perspectives on contemporary lay and ecclesiastical apologias, defenses, and critiques of homosexual behavior. The relationship between past and present locates the Christian churches' response to the modern homosexual as a historically developed—rather than permanently fixed—model of identity and action.     

Language,Violence, and Queer People

Summary

The lives of queer people are too frequently filled with violence—physical attacks, social discrimination, and hate-filled verbal assaults. Language serves multiple purposes in the violence that is directed at queers. While the words themselves become instruments of psychological harm, they, in turn, are used to rationalize or justify acts of physical violence and social discrimination (Pierce, 1990). To analyze the issues regarding queer people, social discourse, and violence, this essay addresses: communication rules about queers and a formula for change in the discourse; the history of changing labels and meaning; enforcers of the dominant discourse and its rules of communication; and the role social workers should play in challenging and shaping the discourse.     

Learning from History: A Queer Problem

The author explores the ways in which the development of grand narratives of U.S. history may have influenced the direction, tactics, and expectations of lesbian and gay activists. Moving beyond the critiques of identity politics, this study uses and explains postmodern concepts to outline narratives of U.S. reform, and lesbian and gay histories and suggests that lesbian and gay politics have been formed symbiotically within these narratives, shaping them and allowing them to shape those politics. Finally, proposals for using history and postmodern theory to break from this pattern are offered.