The Emergence and Persistence of Queerness: Conversing Through Visual Culture Within a Generation

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors explore the work of becoming queer within the Millennial generation. Collaborative in nature, their investigation turns to three key popular-culture texts of the 1990s—Will & Grace, Rent, and MTV’s Spring Break—that were central to their then-emerging sense of self. Staged as an intragenerational conversation, the authors look to create space to unpack the connections, anecdotal by design, between popular texts and changing ideas of queer identity and community. Since neither author grew up within the confines of a gay ghetto—Boystown of Chicago, the Castro of San Francisco, the East Village of New York City—where they may have encountered and been enamored by the avant-garde queer subcultures so often praised in queer scholarship (for important reasons), they turn instead to experiences with popular culture that opened up lessons in becoming gay, in rural and Midwestern locales where queerness operated and emerged differently.     

Doing Sexuality in Sport

ABSTRACT

Based on interviews with Norwegian athletes living as lesbians, gays and bisexuals, this article investigates the possible subversive effect of queer visibility in sport. While female athletes living as lesbians sometimes create queer alternative spaces within mainstream sport contexts, male athletes acting openly as homosexuals challenge heteronormative discourses by attempting to disrupt hegemonic beliefs about homosexual behavior. The sexual practices of both groups confirm as well as challenge the laws of heteronormativity.     

Queer Youth in Educational Psychology Research

ABSTRACT

Despite greater social acceptance of individuals with diverse sexual identities across the world, queer students still experience greater bullying, poorer academic motivation, and lower school attendance than heterosexual students. Educational psychology could provide additional insight toward these experiences for queer students in school, but the field of educational psychology is often absent from research on queer students. To partially address this concern, the current article examines why researching queer students is important, reviews extant research on queer youth in predominant educational psychology journals, and provides potential avenues of future research. Further, the article explores protective factors that help queer students succeed in school.     

Flexible Queers,Serious Bodies: Transgender Inclusion in Queer Spaces

Queer spaces are significant for understanding transgender inclusion as “queer spaces were places where individuals were expected to be attentive to or aware of alternative possibilities for being, including non-normative formulations of bodies, genders, desires and practices” (Nash, 2011 Nash, C. J. 2011. Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space. Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 55: 192–207. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 203). Indeed, in this interview study of members of a queer leather group called the Club, members described a flexible “sexual landscape” that easily includes transgender members. However, these same queer spaces have been criticized for the way they regulate queer bodies and organize queer subjectivities. In this study, queer members of the Club also contrasted playful queer flexibility with serious transgender bodies. This article argues that, although there is a reiterative relation between transgender inclusion and queer spaces, the idealization of flexibility within queer spaces can also serve to marginalize and regulate transgender bodies.     

Working with the Complexity and Refusing to Simplify: Undocuqueer Meaning Making at the Intersection of LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourses

This study brings gender, sexuality, and immigration status, and their conceptual margins, to the center of analysis via the narratives of 31 self-identified undocuqueer immigrants. Undocuqueer immigrants ascribe meaning to their experiences by producing alternate subjectivities and subject positions that resist multiple axes of oppression. These subjectivities problematize the exclusionary repercussions of single-axis identity categorization that mostly benefit those who already have some structural privileges. Undocuqueer as a form of resistance to essentialized identity discourses was evidenced in participants’ opposition to heteronormative, homonormative, and DREAMer discourses. This study has implications for further understanding the way that queer politics and identity interact with various axes of inequality.     

Of Letters and Lists: How the MPAA Puts Films Recommended for LGBTQ Adolescents Out of Reach

ABSTRACT

The film ratings system employed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been criticized by LGBTQ critics who claim the system discriminates by holding queer content to a higher ratings standard than content in other films. The MPAA argues the constituency for its ratings system is parents in traditional families who may find queer themes inappropriate for their children. Paradoxically, a number of organizations serving adolescents identifying as LGBTQ or as questioning their sexualities have created lists of recommended films, many of whose MPAA ratings make them virtually off-limits to teens unless their parents approve. Cyberspace is also populated with lists of films recommended for teens regardless of their sexuality and gender identity. This article compares ratings distributions for lists of films recommended for queer teens and those recommended for mainstream teens and finds evidence of negative impact on access by queer teens to potentially helpful film content.     

Staging Gender and Sexuality in Experimental TV Entertainment

ABSTRACT

Via examples from recent Norwegian experimental TV shows, this article explores the function of “eye-catchers,” parodic (hetero)sexualization, female masquerade and neo-masculinization as strategies for “repetitions with a difference” of traditional styles and motifs by female show hosts, as well as the queer gendering and sexualization of men and masculinities by their male counterparts. Both formats represent innovative renegotiations of gender and sexuality that illustrate the relationship between post-modernism and queer aesthetics.     

Walt Whitman,Our Great Gay Poet?

ABSTRACT

This article surveys the critical debates around Walt Whitman's “Calamus” cluster, arguing that a “queer” reading of Whitman—one that does not see him as, for example, a closeted homosexual who censored his work for fear of being “outed”—is both historically accurate and politically efficacious. While previous efforts to reclaim Whitman as “our great gay poet” are understandable—particularly given critical readings of Whitman that denied the homoeroticism of his poems—today, a reading of Whitman as homosexual threatens to simplify our understanding of the history of homosexuality and to blunt the power of Whitman's poetry to continue to “queer” normative understandings of sex and gender identity categories and their relationship to politics.     

Queer Relationality as Family: Yas Fats! Yas Femmes! Yas Asians!

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we, as queer subjects, share our embodied experiences to rearticulate and reimagine possible and impossible performances of queer relationality as family. We collaboratively pay careful and nuanced attention to our queer performative roles of becoming and being femmes as referring points of this critical queer engagement. To do so, we adapt methodological implications of autoethnography and intersectional reflexivity. Thereby, we take further steps to explore an anti-anti-relational landscape of queerness that works on and against hegemonic, heteronormative, and homonormative paradigms of relating.     

Between Legal Recognition and Moral Policing: Mapping the Queer Subject in India

ABSTRACT

With the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2009, Indian queer subjects have become visible in various ways. Where Indian queer identities have asserted their public presence through Pride marches and protests, incidents of moral policing and surveillance, especially after decriminalization, have highlighted the broader social and religious attitudes that continue to pathologize homosexuality with grave outcomes. This article argues that debates around access to health care of Indian queer subjects must be framed against the social and religious pathologization of homosexuality in various contexts, which remains a primary bioethical dilemma, particularly in relation to legal change.     

Queering Poetics: The Impact of Poetry on LGBT+ Identity in Singaporean Adolescents

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explores identity formation in LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents, and how reading, writing, and listening to poetry shapes Singaporean adolescents’ social identities as queer people. Analyzing in-depth interviews with nine LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents, four themes were found: (1) LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents interested in poetry believe that reading, writing, and/or listening to poetry has been an integral part of constructing their queer identities; (2) the poems that have impacted LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents’ queer identities the most have been informed by queer sociocultural values; (3) poetry provides validation to LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents that their identities are real and that others before them have experienced the same challenges they are going through; and (4) poetry serves as a third space for LGBT+ Singaporean adolescents to safely construct their growing queer identities. Implications for teachers, counselors, and adult supporters of queer Singaporean adolescents are discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.     

Complicating the Coming Out Narrative: Becoming Oneself in a Heterosexist and Cissexist World

Traditional stage models of LGBTQ identity development have conceptualized coming out as a linear process from “closeted” to “out” that all queer/trans individuals must follow if they are to be considered healthy and well adjusted. These stage models have been critiqued for their rigidity and absence of a dynamic understanding of the coming out process. In this article we explore the findings from a qualitative photovoice study with 15 LGBTQ youths in a small urban center in Ontario that supports these critiques. We explore the efficacy of the photovoice technique in investigating questions of sexual and gender identity. This article identifies some contextual factors that are important in understanding coming out as a social (rather than internal) process; it also identifies some of the ways in which these youths’ experiences challenge normative understandings of the “good, out queer.”     

Performing the “quing of berlin”: transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture

Abstract

This paper employs the figure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.     

Poor Queer Studies: Class,Race, and the Field

ABSTRACT

This study asks, What are the material conditions under which queer studies is done in the academy? It finds a longstanding association of queer studies with the well-resourced, selective colleges and flagship campuses that are the drivers of class and race stratification in higher education in the U.S. That is, the field of queer studies, as a recognizable academic formation, has been structured by the material and intellectual resources of precisely those institutions that most steadfastly refuse to adequately serve poor and minority students, including poor and minority queer students. In response, “poor queer studies” calls for a critical reorientation of queer studies toward working-poor schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. Taking the College of Staten Island, CUNY as a case study, it argues for structural crossing over or “queer-class ferrying” between high-status institutions that have so brilliantly dominated queer studies’ history and low-status worksites of poor queer studies.     

Getting Out in the “Real World”: Young Men,Queer and Theories of Gay Community

ABSTRACT

A recent opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald expresses a widely held perception that, among young same-sex attracted men in Australia, “queer” has well and truly supplanted “gay” as the language and lens through which self and practice is generated. In this article, I discuss findings from a qualitative research project that studied notions of community among young gay men, and argue that this assumption should not be taken for granted. The article explores participants' understandings of the concept of “gay community,” arguing that the young men studied share a common definition of community: one based on a conventional liberal model which prioritizes sameness and the cooperation of individuals to achieve common goals. This is of particular importance in that problems around “fitting in” with these understandings are also raised. In examining the potential place for queer alternatives to these formulations, however, the article finds that queer attracts little support among participants, raising questions about the bind young men may find themselves in if they prioritize sameness as fundamental to community, yet feel themselves to be excluded from community by their own or others' perceived difference.     

Some Spatial Politics of Queer-Feminist Research: Personal Reflections From the Field

ABSTRACT

This article addresses methodological issues emerging from research conducted with Trans in the Center, an LGBT activist group in Tel Aviv, Israel. It addresses some complex issues related to the politics and ethics of applying queer and feminist methodology to qualitative research in a trans, queer, and feminist community space. The focus is on two issues: the researcher’s positionality vis-à-vis the participants and selecting the appropriate methodology in relation to the characteristics of the group under study. Such issues demonstrate how queer and feminist principles are articulated and interwoven in geographical-spatial research in two different dimensions: in the research practice and methodology and in the practices and the spaces created by the activity of the researched group itself. I conclude with insights arising from the attempt to apply feminist and queer paradigms in both theory and research, and I call for their integration into geographical research.     

“It’s Not About You”: Disappointment as Queer Pedagogy in Community-Engaged Service-Learning

ABSTRACT

Increasingly popular in the neoliberal university, community-engaged service-learning (CESL) courses offer rich yet contradictory opportunities for LGBTQ studies students to synthesize queer critiques of community and identity with experiences in LGBTQ communities. Much CESL scholarship has focused on the tensions between benefits to community and to students, prioritizing either radical social change or student satisfaction. Beside such debates, I propose the queer ethical, pedagogical, and political value of disappointment in the tedium and contradictions of community itself. Such queer disappointment, I contend, might enable students to cultivate the emotional and critical capacities to engage in community work on sustainable, dedramatized, and unentitled terms.     

Pathways Into Homelessness Among LGBTQ2S Adults

ABSTRACT

This article examines entries into homelessness among adults who identify as LGBTQ2S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, two-spirit). Twenty LGBTQ2S adults who were currently or formerly homeless participated in one qualitative interview. The interview protocol included questions on the participants’ history of homelessness, causes of homelessness, and relationship of their gender and/or sexual identity to their homelessness. Data were analyzed using an iterative coding process. Results demonstrated that the participants listed both structural (i.e., discrimination) and intrapersonal (i.e., substance use) variables related to their homelessness. In particular, substance abuse was a common antecedent of their homelessness, and some participants linked their homeless experiences to discrimination and victimization based on their sexual and/or gender identity. The results are discussed in terms of interventions to prevent homelessness among LGBTQ2S adults and support their exits out of homelessness.