The Shape of Queer

ABSTRACT

The rise of queer theory and activism have posed problems of identity and of goals. Queer theory has problemaiized identity, including queer identity: who or what is queer? Queer activism, on the other hand, has been fraught with those challenging sexual boundaries and those for whom “queer” is just the new name for gays and lesbians. Many of these latter activists reject earlier politics, and are in danger of returning to interest-group liberalism as a result. This paper sketches these problems and argues that wholesale rejection of lesbian-feminism and gay liberation is a mistake. The broader vision of these movements offers the possibility of articulation with other movements for change, and this possibility must be renewed and rethought.     

Identity and Ideas: A Roundtable on Identity Politics

This roundtable discussion examines the issue of identity politics and how identity influences and is influenced by gay/queer politics and theory. The participants discuss how identity politics affects political organizing and activism, how different identity communities can build coalitions, how the language related to identity is evolving, and how sexual attractions and practices interact with identity. The discussants look at how the influx into the gay and lesbian movement of new groups that challenge traditional identity boundaries—e.g., bisexuals and transgendered people—is affecting the movement. Finally, the discussants examine how “idea-based” politics may supplant identity-based politics as a new inclusive paradigm.     

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.     

Adelina Anthony Interview with Aimee Carrillo Rowe

ABSTRACT

This interview explores how performing artist, activist, writer, director, performer Adelina Anthony stages queer women of color affects as a complex terrain to mobilize a decolonial imaginary. Anthony's characters are complex, contradictory, surly, and resilient with whom audience members connect and feel deeply. Especially for queer women of color, who rarely get to see their own experiences on film or on stage, Anthony's work provides a critical forum for discussing, imagining, naming, and envisioning the connections between our personal struggles and broader forces of imperialism, heterosexual capitalism, and settler colonialism. Through the “medicina” of gritty truth-telling and side-splitting laughter, Anthony discusses her own positionality as a coyote curandera. Through the exploratory genre of the interview, Anthony helps readers palpably engage a queer woman of color “theory in the flesh” to imagine their own creative potentialities through a compassionate lens of humility and humor.     

Ethnography as Precarious Work

Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologist's body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student “studying up” among guarded cultural elites. These positions opened an analytic lens into sociological concepts of labor exploitation, value, and social hierarchy. However, in occupying an insider role within a stratified field, observant participants face risks in trying to move beyond their own experiences in order to interview informants. My changing position in the field, from subjugated worker to interviewer, highlights how power and inequality operate in the fashion world. First‐person narrative illuminates these analytic payoffs of insider ethnography.     

Gertrude Stein,Opium Queen: Notes on a Mistaken Embrace

Gertrude Stein was not only a fairly open lesbian but also Jewish, expatriate, and androgynous—all attributes that often retarded mass-market success. Why then was she so popular? The article offers original research highlighting how Stein was constructed as a kind of “opium queen” in the popular American press, and the ways that this decadent, bohemian celebrity persona allowed her to operate as “broadly queer” rather than “specifically gay” in the American cultural imaginary—a negotiation that accounts for the mass-market success rather than censure of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas despite the unparalleled visibility of its lesbian erotics.     

Sex Ed in Higher Ed: Should We Say Yes to “Affirmative Consent?”

In this essay, the author explores the concept of “affirmative consent” as a sociolegal strategy for reducing sexual violence on college campuses. Meanings and implications of “consent” are considered from a psychoanalytic perspective, using the work of Laplanche and relational psychoanalysis to consider the fit between the construct of consent as it is invoked in contemporary sexual politics and our psychoanalytic understandings of sexual experience. The discourse of consent is also explored from the standpoint of queer and feminist theory. Finally, a brief clinical vignette is offered to illuminate the real challenges that are encountered in the effort to use language to communicate about sex. The author suggests an interdisciplinary, nonregulatory, exploratory approach to addressing the problem of sex and sexual violence on college campuses.     

Queer Selfhoods in the Shadow of Neoliberal Urbanism

This article explores the political and performative shift in representations of same-sex desire within the context of neoliberal urbanism in Bengaluru, India. The affective shift from labile sexual practices to defiant assertions of sexual identity over the past two decades warrants a conjunctural analysis that tracks the intersections between neoliberal cultures of consumption and liberal rhetorics of equal rights and freedom of choice. Focusing on the queer subject in Mahesh Dattani's dramatic oevre, this article considers progressivist accounts of same-sex desire in neoliberal Bengaluru over the past two decades. By examining how non-normative sexual practices are disciplined into the epistemological categories of LGBT identity politics, the essay charts the itineraries of “queer” as it travels to India.     

Beyond Repair: Interpretation,Reparation, and Melanie Klein’s Clinical Play-Technique

This article puts clinical child psychoanalysis into conversation with recent debates about critical method in order to question the turn toward so-called “reparative reading” in feminist and queer theory. While Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s original call for a new kind of reparative method culled its key terms (“reparative” and “paranoid”) from child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the scholars who have adopted reparativity in critical theory pay little attention to Klein’s work. In this article, I take up Klein’s theory of the depressive position and reparativity as she elaborated them in her clinical work with children, particularly her wartime analysis of “Richard” in 1941. Klein interpreted Richard’s play—his clinical “war games”—through her idiomatic vocabulary of “attack” and “repair.” By situating this case and Klein’s larger theory of psychic reparations in the political climate of wartime Europe, I argue that Klein’s writings point to the ethico-political dangers inherent in reparative endeavors, which name the object and narrate its injury and repair according only to the perimeters of one’s own self. From this reading, I propose that there might be a benefit to foregoing the injury/repair framework implicit in reparative agendas—both critical and clinical alike. By returning reparativity to Klein, I therefore aim not to offer a corrective to Sedgwick or to the scholars following her, but rather to interrogate the ethical stakes of all reparative endeavors, be they political, intellectual, or clinical. At the most basic level, then, this article argues that the space of the clinic is an important (and often undervalued) object for the consideration of critical method.     

Cripping sexualities: An analytic review of theoretical and empirical writing on the intersection of disabilities and sexualities

This paper provides a review of some of the literature addressing the juncture of disabilities and sexualities and invites sociologists to build on this work and take part in this important intersectional field. First, I discuss the central relevance of an intersectional lens for making sense of the unique experiences of queer people with disabilities who are located at the crossroads of various stratified systems. Then, I discuss some of the many unique challenges that queer disabled people face when exploring their sexuality, establishing relationships, and remaining sexual. The invisibility, marginalization, and discrimination of queer people with disabilities in both queer and disability communities are the focus on the third section. The fourth section speaks to current theoretical dialogues between disability studies and queer theory that have illuminated new pathways for theorizing the intersection of disabilities and sexualities, “cripping” sociological theories, and reimagining disability within sociology. As I demonstrate, this literature is growing; however, myriad exciting opportunities for empirical and theoretical sociological exploration remain and I will conclude with a discussion of possible directions for future research.     

Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia

Frantz Fanon examines the function of affect to describe colonization as a mode of the production of the body. His idiosyncratic analysis adjusts prevailing conceptions of the body in affect theory, the psychoanalytic study of narcissism, and non-psychoanalytic theories of racialization. This article focuses on the temporality of retroaction that characterizes what he describes as “affective ankylosis,” and links this notion of affect to the process of racialization that organizes a body in the Lacanian mirror stage. Affect under colonial conditions detemporalizes the subject and petrifies a racial schema into a non-binary dual narcissism—leading to the conclusion that the black body is a version of, or name for, the white body. In the same clinical vein inaugurated by Fanon’s literary analysis, I contrast the affective ankylosis and one of its phenomenological manifestations, a neurotic “affective erethism,” to the imaginary exchange that the black Martinican novelist Mayotte Capécia recounts in her semi-autobiographical I Am a Martinican Woman, prefiguring therein the desire of the woman of color as excessive to those politics of the body that colonization renders unsubversive.     

Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison's lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.     

Identity Dilemmas: Toward a More Situated Understanding

When are identity dilemmas—when people possess identities that conflict with one another and both are potentially stigmatizing—most likely to occur? Are they the result of generic social processes? A review of some of the extant research on “identity work” suggests that historical “misalignments” of culture and stratification, which we refer to as “lag,” create the greatest potential for stigma and the reproduction of inequalities. Lag is exacerbated by complex, intersecting axes of hierarchy, and amplified as symbolic environments globalize and subcultures multiply. Articulating culture and structure reveals how power plays out in interaction, and highlights the omnipresence of struggles for treatment as “fully human.” We consider whether “alignment” is even possible when multiple dimensions of social location intertwine, compete, and collide. Following Schwalbe and Mason‐Schrock (1996), we argue that “subcultural” or collective identity work that brings new meanings into dominant cultural narratives may offer the greatest hope, but in the interim all coping strategies are costly.     

The Dog Who Barks and the Noise of the Human: Psychoanalysis After the Animal Turn

What would or could a psychoanalysis beyond the human be? And who—and how—might we who call ourselves human be or become in turn? In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” Freud (1916–1917) famously declared psychoanalysis to be the third great blow to human self-love delivered at the hands of science. First, the Copernican revolution revealed that the earth was not the center of the universe “but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness.” Then Darwin and his contemporaries undermined the ground upon which “the human” had asserted a fundamental difference from “the animal.” And now, psychological research has tripled down, giving “human megalomania” its “third and most wounding blow.” “The ego,” Freud wrote, “is not even master in its own house.” In passages like this, we get a glimpse of a psychoanalysis beyond the human–animal boundary. Nevertheless, the force of anthropocentrism returns again and again in Freud’s body of work, as when he consigned human animality to a prehistoric past or linked it to the baser instincts that human civilization needs to overcome. But what if, instead of running away from the animal in us, we were to dwell with and alongside the nonhuman? Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and cultural theorist Nicholas Ray, this essay traces the sounds and scents of the nonhuman animal in and for psychoanalytic theory.     

Beyond Spatial Models: A New Perspective on American Operational Ideology Using Latent Class Analysis

Analyses of operational ideology—the pattern of correlations between different political attitudes—in the American public generally assume “spatial” models of ideology. Using Latent Class Analysis, we relax many of these assumptions by treating operational ideology as a latent categorical variable and analyze the changing structure of American operational ideology between 2004 and 2020. We find that some Americans during this period held consistently liberal or conservative views and were well sorted into the “correct” political parties. For other Americans, however, we observe complex and shifting relationships between partisanship and economic, moral, and racial attitudes. We find that Racial Justice Communitarians consistently prefer to identify as Democrats, while Nativist Communitarians and Libertarians both tended to identify with whatever party won the most recent presidential election. Future studies of operational ideology should be wary of simplifying assumptions that obscure important dynamics in American politics.     

Impact of Repeated Questioning on Interviewers: Learning From a Forensic Interview Training Project

Forensic interviewers have a difficult job with high risk for career burnout and secondary trauma. Few studies have addressed how new forensic interviewers or trainees experience repeated questioning and multiple interviews. This study simulated the process of training new forensic interviewers through the creation of two interview videos in which social work graduate students participated as actors portraying the roles of interviewer and child. These films served as instructional aids preparing graduate social work students for professional child welfare roles while promoting research-based approaches to interviewing children about sexual abuse allegations. Qualitative data from two cohorts of student actors were collected to analyze interviewers’ perspectives on repeated questioning and interviews in child sexual abuse cases. Two themes were extracted from the subjects’ experiences: “It is emotionally taxing” and “Navigating the interviewer role is unexpectedly complex.” Exposure to repeated questions and multiple interviews affected the performance and confidence of the interviewers.     

Putting the Logos to Work: A Reply to Meyer

Abstract

Journalist Janet Malcolm recently published several articles and a book in which she accused her own profession of manipulation and deceit in its listening and interviewing practices. Specifically, she focused on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, on which Joe McGinniss' book, Fatal Vision, was based. McGinniss, she claimed, fostered a close and seemingly empathic relationship with the accused in order to betray him later—and in this event Malcolm saw the prototypical journalist-interviewee relationship. Her accusations about the role of journalism raised intense professional scrutiny. This essay examines the case from the standpoint of journalistic listening. Are the temptations for deceptive or “slanted” empathy inherent in the journalistic interview? Does the journalist have a responsibility not only to listen to the person being interviewed, but to “listen” equally well to the demands of a developing story—as if it, too, were a living entity? Do ethical standards within journalism demand that an interviewer's listening style, especially as it is seen in empathic behavior, be congruent with his or her unexpressed conclusions?     

Saving the Savior

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question “Saving Sociology?” If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save–in both senses “to keep” and “to rescue”—it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society but also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a “global” society, we are increasingly facing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from “indigenous” beliefs and practices of other societies? Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance, I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how “indigenous” responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination, I will challenge the “localist” approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach.