Three Poetry Books

In this article, I argue that Richard Matheson's (1954) vampire novella, I Am Legend, encodes the protagonist's, Robert Neville, traumatic recognition of his queer sexuality in its monstrosity (the unspeakability of male penetrability). Neville's identification with and desire for his undead neighbor, Ben Cortman, are symbolically codified through three different registers: intertextual references to vampiric conventions and codes, the semiotics of queer subculture, and a structure of doubling that links Neville to the queer vampire. Although Neville avoids encountering his unspeakable queer desire, which could be represented only at the level of the Lacanian Real, he must still confront Cortman's obsessive exhortations for him to come out. Only when he symbolically codifies his abnormality in its own monstrosity, by viewing himself through mutant vampires' eyes, can Neville reconfigure the ethical relationship between self and other, humans and mutant humans-vampires. However progressive Matheson's novella is in its advocacy of minority sexual rights, it still renders capitalism's problematic relationship with queer subjectivity invisible. Although capitalism overdetermines every aspect of the social field and makes Neville's daily life possible in its surplus enjoyment, the fundamental antagonism (class struggle) in capitalism is obscured by the assertion of identity politics.     

The (temporary?) queering of Japanese TV

One of the primary texts of the "out" queer cinema of Japan is the television serial D s kai, first aired in 1993. Unlike Western television shows positing queer characters, D s kai presents its gay characters without apology or excuses, and as leads rather than as colorful appendages. At the same time, however, the show filters gay eroticism through the (hetero)normative mode of serial melodrama, at once pushing the boundaries of national permissiveness while normalizing and homogenizing homosexuality by rendering it within a conventional form.     

Identifying the death gender -- the ghost of masochism in queer subject

This article re-assesses the theories of death, narcissism and identification from a selection of essays by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in order to demonstrate that gender is generated out of masochism and the 'death drive' (Todestrieb). In closely reading and amending key sections of Judith Butler's queer theories, the author argues against her Foucaltian claim that the queer subject is constituted in the face of a sadistic Law, which s/he is forced to eroticise and internalise, and therefore conflate with her/his own masochism. It is argued that the subject's masochism is a queer attempt not to be; to bridge the constitutional split enforced by the Lacanian idea of the assumption of subjectivity through misidentification, and to become a living mortuary for the (dead) identifications that found the subject on his/her illusory ground through the (contingent) foreclosure of the Other.     

Uncanny Gaming

As video games are increasingly designed for and marketed to women players, new gaming styles, themes, and mechanics have become popularized. This analysis considers how the games in the Ravenhearst trilogy both reinforce and complicate expectations of women gamers through repurposing the gothic romance. While the series does not market itself exclusively to women, the narrative specifically places the player in the subject position that implies a heterosexual female. By tapping into gothic genre expectations the games help to marginalize the player within the larger scope of video games. The games play with gothic storytelling style, yet push against many traditional conventions of the genre, illustrating how digital spaces have begun to rewrite traditional narrative conventions, but still maintain their gendered affectations. Through gaming, the gothic romance premise is reproduced, but ultimately shifts the player from the role of an onlooker to the subject position of victimized protagonist.     

Queering Ethnicity in the First Gay Films From Ex-Yugoslavia

Between 2002 and 2005 four of the Yugoslav successor states produced major feature films with lesbian or gay protagonists: Maja Weiss's Guardian of the Frontier (Slovenia, 2002), Dalibor Matani?'s Fine Dead Girls (Croatia, 2002), Dragan Marinkovi?'s Take a Deep Breath (Serbia, 2004), and Ahmed Imamovi?'s Go West (Bosnia and Hercegovina, 2005). As with other films from Eastern Europe that portray queer characters, all of these films were shot by straight directors, and the queer characters are not representations of real local queer communities, but instead are used as metaphors to address topics the filmmakers find more important, such as ethnicity and national identity. The ethnic hatreds that fueled the wars of the 1990s were mobilized through the heterosexual matrix. In these films anxieties about ethnicity are worked out through plots involving queer sexuality, though they work differently for male and female couples: female bodies can be conventionally objectified by the heterosexual male gaze, while male couples become the focus for anxieties about male rape.     

Troubling the canon: bisexuality and queer theory

This essay explores the notion that bisexuality and contemporary bisexual political movements both align and trouble canons of queer theories of sexuality and gender. This project provides an historical review and assessment of recent bisexual theorizing to highlight key themes in its evolution as well as a discussion of how these themes have shaped the relationship of bisexuality and queer theory. Drawing on this assessment and a wider discussion of GLBT scholarship, we invite critical inquiry regarding the implications of bisexual theorizing on queer theory and vice versa. We address questions of bisexual epistemologies, its discursive roles within queer theory, and its impact on queer politics and organizing. Noting bisexuality's absence in much of this research and scholarship, we suggest these projects have been limited in their ability to fully and effectively address sexual subjectivity both in theory and in its everyday lived experience.     

Queering the politics of lambda picture book finalists: challenging creeping neoliberalism through curricular innovations

In many instances, adults serve as gatekeepers for what books children are permitted to explore. Unfortunately, this means that most children have limited access to picture books with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) characters. In this article, we use queer pedagogy and observations about neoliberalism to provide a qualitative analysis of LGBTQ characters in picture books which were finalists for a Lambda Literary Award during 2000-2005. We examined the ways in which LGBTQ identities and relationships are negotiated and how sexual prejudice is treated. While it is improbable that the books we analyze would be embraced by proponents of neoliberalism, we also briefly consider some ways in which they may be inadvertently consistent with that perspective. The article closes with recommendations regarding discussion questions, additional readings, and educational activities aimed at guiding children, and adults, to appreciate a diversity of multidimensional identities and family structures, to develop strategies to respond constructively to emotional and physical violence, and to promote the public wellbeing. We hope that this analysis will lead to more frequent, productive, and expansive discussions of this literature among adults and children.     

Historicizing (bi)sexuality: a rejoinder for gay/lesbian studies, feminism, and queer theory

One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality and to work the hetero/homosexual structure to the point of critical collapse. Despite an epistemic location within this very structure, however, the category of bisexuality has been largely marginalized and even erased from the deconstructive field of queer theory. This article explores some of the factors behind this treatment of bisexuality and suggests that bisexuality's marginalization and erasure brings into relief the strained relationship between the fields of gay/lesbian history, feminism, and queer theory. In exploring some early influential queer deconstructionist texts, it argues that in overlooking the role the category of bisexuality has played in the formation of the hetero/homosexual structure, the project of queer deconstruction has in important ways fallen short of its goals. The author concludes with a call to rethink conventional deconstructive reading practices.     

A critique of neoliberalism with fierceness: queer youth of color creating dialogues of resistance

As a form of deregulated capitalism that has run amok, commodifying all that is in its path, and as a cultural means of commodifying Black and brown bodies, neoliberalism has taken a serious toll on the lives of working-class queer youth of color. Although it has hijacked spaces of cultural representation and material production, neoliberal capitalism is far from transparent. Through resistance, activism and performance queer youth of color have now started to shape a critique of oppressive structures, neoliberal policies, and pedagogical practices that are critical of their intersecting identities. This article examines neoliberalism's impact on education, focusing on educational policy and how these policies have affected queer youth of color in the urban centers of our major cities. This article also considers the contributions made by educators writing from the perspective of critical pedagogy in addressing the plight of queer youth of color in U.S. schools while employing the example of the dance group, Innovation, as way of addressing the havoc of neoliberalism in the lives of queer youth of color through performance and activism. This group has not only transformed notions of gender, race, class and sexuality that challenge major tenants of neoliberalism, but has also served as potent sites for the development of a critical pedagogy for working-class queer youth of color. Through sites of resistance rooted in progressive struggle, queer youth of color must be enabled by critical transformative intellectuals committed to encouraging youth to critically evaluate and challenge ideologies while displaying an allegiance to egalitarianism.     

Domesticating Hermione

WIKTT, or “When I Kissed the Teacher,” is a listserv for the circulation and discussion of fan fiction featuring a romantic/erotic relationship between Harry Potter characters Hermione Granger and Severus Snape. WIKTT discussions reflect the discursive functioning of online fan fiction communities, as well as members' negotiations of the Harry Potter canon, conventions of the romance genre, and current gender norms. Tracing WIKTT's debates around the representation of rape in Hermione's fan fiction romances achieves two complementary goals by both showing the variety of modern women's interpretations of heterosexual exchange, and charting the complex process by which fan fiction communities and genres emerge from ideologically heterogeneous cycles of on-going discussion. Thus, while fan fiction communities can represent an alternative to editorial controls and the supply and demand model of professional publishing, the exact content of those visions will vary widely across and within various writing communities.     

Gay/Queer Dynamics and the Question of Sexual History and Identity

This article examines how the essentialist/constructionist and gay/queer divides have been structured by a division between closed and open notions, and it then argues that these gay and queer notions also interrelate. It argues that unhistoricist queer theory has recently drawn attention to this closed/open interrelationship by inadvertently raising (a) doubts about the irreducible openness of queer; (b) questions about its fundamentalism; and (c) reservations about its ability to handle the re-emerging issues of consonances between sexual concepts across history and the importance, usages, and allure of sexual identities. I argue that these concerns are well grounded, and that queer theory may thus have reached its expiration date.     

At home with their queerness: same-sex relationality and the Indian family in advertising media

The legal battle around the reform of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code brought the provisional decriminalization of homosexuality in 2009, which was overturned by the Supreme Court of India in 2013. Queer politics in India thus stands at a critical juncture regarding the goal to foster social acceptance of LGBT individuals. This paper offers an analysis of two recent media representations in India—a gay matrimonial ad and an online advertisement for an ethnic apparel brand featuring a lesbian couple—to demonstrate how the Indian family is emerging as an important arbiter of queer relationality. The negotiation of same-sex relations within the familial is premised on bourgeois notions of class, caste and gender, an ideological normativity that queer of color critique and queer theory have foundationally put up resistance to. This paper goes beyond the queer and feminist critiques of gender and class normativity to suggest that queer visibility in the Indian context is being negotiated not in opposition to, but through, the mandates of the familial.     

Jill Meagher CCTV

“Jill Meagher CCTV,” the security camera recording of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher's last minutes alive, registered more than 677,000 views on YouTube by early 2014. Little happens for most of its 232 seconds and, as would be expected with surveillance footage, there is no sound. In Australia, “Jill Meagher CCTV” forms part of a haunting iconography of a rape and murder victim that not only resonates with fictional narratives in other places, but also influences the way the Jill Meagher story, as a whole, is read. As Melissa Jane Hardie (2010) suggests of the “true crime” story (citing Bronski 2005, 29), the public reaction to high profile stories of violent crime “is often an emblematic cultural citation that represents a social problem or fixation.” This article considers “Jill Meagher CCTV” as such a cultural citation and goes further by highlighting its gothic tendencies. Highlighting the gothic aspects of “Jill Meagher CCTV” resonates with surrounding narratives of violence and gender justice, which have material consequences for women in the way that the most prevalent forms of violence against women continue to be downplayed in those narratives.     

Outlaws or in-laws? Queer theory, LGBT studies, and religious studies

Many queer theorists, like many queer activists and perhaps many LGBT people in general, regard religion as so inimical to their purposes and lives that it is not even worthy of critique; references to religion in queer theory, queer studies, and even LGBT studies are usually sparse, brief, and generally derogatory. Likewise, within most of the field of religious studies, queerness is rarely an issue of concern or even consciousness except in the context of organizational tensions over the proper roles of "homosexuals." While there is a growing body of work that brings these two fields together, the study of religion seems to be adapting only haltingly and partially to contemporary developments inLGBTstudies and queer theory. This essay assesses the current state of the "proto-fields" of LGBT studies and queer studies in religion, offers suggestions for new directions in the future, and considers the potential benefits of the interaction of these fields.     

Remembered branches: towards a future of Korean homosexual film

Korean cinema has long labored under an imported Confucian homophobia which, through its effects if not its causes, seems to mirror the Western conception of the closet. Recent cinematic developments in Korea, including a queer film festival in Seoul, are slowly but surely beginning to change that. Using as primary texts the recent Korean gay film Broken Branches and the long-forgotten lesbian film Ascetic: Woman and Woman, my essay hopes to serve as a set of introductory remarks on a queer Korean cinema culture whose surface has only just been broached.     

Queer criticism and sexual normativity: the case of Pee-wee Herman

One of the most useful aspects of queer theory is the critical force that the perspective provides scholars. The tenets of queer theory provide scholars with a model to interrogate how sexuality and other differences play a fundamental role in rhetorical practice. Focusing on differences rather than similarities, queer critics seek to dismantle hierarchies by blurring the definitions of specific identity categories. A framework for queer rhetorical criticism is described and illustrated with a variety of examples from popular culture. The model is further illustrated through an examination of the body of work of Pee-wee Herman.     

Racisms, heterosexisms, and identities: a semiotic phenomenology of self-understanding

This article examines the contributions of lesbians of color to the developmental relationship between queer theory and qualitative research methodology. Its thesis is that the contributions of lesbians of color in this context have been overlooked despite being featured. This oversight is explained through an examination of theoretical perspectives that dominate our current understanding of the relationship between queer theory and qualitative research. Postmodernism is revealed as susceptible to liberal bias and racist exclusions common in U.S. culture. Semiotic phenomenology is offered as a non-essentialist approach to queer theory and qualitative research that reduces the liberal bias and racist exclusions often perpetuated in postmodern theorizing that have led to the exclusion of contributions of lesbians of color in queer theory.