Mapping Queer Bioethics: Space,Place, and Locality

ABSTRACT

This article, which introduces the special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” begins by offering an overview of the analytical scope of the issue. Specifically, the first half of this essay raises critical questions central to the concept of a space-related queer bioethics, such as: How do we appreciate and understand the special needs of queer parties given the constraints of location, space, and geography? The second half of this article describes each feature article in the issue, as well as the subsequent special sections on the ethics of reading literal, health-related maps (“Cartographies”) and scrutinizing the history of this journal as concerns LGBT health (“Mapping the Journal of Homosexuality”).     

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.     

Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?

ABSTRACT

This essay maps the epistemological terrain trans* studies may face as it is widely incorporated into queer studies programs, often housed within women’s studies departments. Over the past two decades, queer studies and women’s studies have rapidly professionalized, producing new modes of disciplinary power that may seek to either include or cite trans* studies, often without fully welcoming its specific material and political investments. Under such conditions, trans* studies may find itself heard largely as a but—an epistemic blockage, a distraction from proper objects, a hindrance to customary methods—that must be disciplined.     

Openings: On the Journal of Homosexuality,Volume 1, Issue 1

ABSTRACT

This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” in which we take a solipsistic turn to “map” the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines Volume 1, Issue 1 of the Journal of Homosexuality and asks whether the journal’s first contributors might reveal a historically problematic relationship whereby the categories of front-line LGBT health advocates in the 1970s might be incommensurate with the post-AIDS, queer politics that would follow in decades to come.     

Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha”

ABSTRACT

For this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author offers a reflection on the nature of the literary, written word as the ethically fraught site of queer bioethics. By invoking the historical tendencies and tropes of the clinical case history alongside a seminal text by Gertrude Stein, the author at once asks if we should liberate a queer bioethics from biomedical discourse via mainstream narrative; or if we should see this strategy as unavoidably housed in narrative forms of storytelling because it echoes the tropes and stakes of the clinical, pathologized case history as regards queer sensibilities.     

Zero Feet Away: The Digital Geography of Gay Social Media

ABSTRACT

For this contribution to the “Cartographies” section of the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author focuses on the terrains of digital media, geosocial networking, and sexually based social media in LGBT communities. Addressing the communal potentials and ethical complications of geosocial connections made possible by such sexually based social media, the author asks whether digital forms of cartography via applications such as Grindr and Scruff simplify, complicate, or merely expose historically longstanding notions of queer interconnectivity.     

Bodies on Display: Queer Biopolitics in Popular Culture

ABSTRACT

For this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author undertakes the curatorial spaces of the library, the museum, the textbook, and the public exhibition. With showcases such as natural history museums and the recent Bodyworlds traveling exhibit as touchstones, the author argues that distinctions between medical and popular visual culture in pedagogical contexts are porous, such that the study of sensational body types (queer, anatomically atypical, and otherwise) are couched in culturally problematic appreciations of the agency of certain bodies to speak for and/or about themselves. By extension, how and where certain bodies are viewed represent vital, bioethical dilemmas on the nature of corporeal viability.     

“I’m Not like That,So Am I Gay?” The Use of Queer-Spectrum Identity Labels Among Minor-Attracted People

ABSTRACT

Largely based on an erroneous belief that individuals who are preferentially attracted to minors are necessarily sex offenders, queer communities have distanced themselves from this population over the past several decades. There are now those who object to the use of labels such as “gay” and “queer” by minor-attracted people (MAPs), raising the question, “to whom do queer-spectrum identity labels belong?” I engage with this question using data from my research with 42 MAPs, exploring their uses of queer-spectrum identity labels and the conflicts they have encountered regarding their use of these terms. I then discuss the potential consequences of accepting the use of these labels by MAPs.     

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.     

Patriarchy,Power, and Female Masculinity

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of “butch” within the women's movement. The political potentials of butch in both her refusal of patriarchal constructs of femininity and her transmutation of masculinity will be explored. It will be argued that the butch lesbian threatens male power by severing the naturalized connection between masculinity and male bodies, by causing masculinity to appear “queer,” and by usurping men's roles. However, for “butch” to truly have feminist potential, it also needs to be accompanied by a feminist awareness and a rejection of aspects of masculinity that are oppressive to women. Hence, “butch feminist” need not be an oxymoron, but a strategy for challenging male domination and power.     

The Last Closet: LGBTQ+ Studies and Social Class

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the intersection of queerness and social class as it impinges on the field of LGBTQ+ studies. Specifically, it considers some of the disciplinary aims of queer critique in relation to the challenges facing first-generation queer scholars; in so doing, it suggests how forms of difference operate in relation to the personal over time. As a discipline committed to intersectional frameworks, LGBTQ+ studies (and its ongoing evolution) might thus usefully foreground overlapping understandings of outsiderness: namely, how queerness might be experienced as a form of class, and how class might be experienced as a form of queerness.     

“Nobody Don’t Really Know What That Mean”: Understandings of “Queer” among Urban LGBTQ Young People of Color

ABSTRACT

Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 40 urban LGBTQ young people of color, I explore their uses, understandings, and meanings of “queer.” With several notable exceptions—those who at least occasionally self-identified as queer—most of the young people avoided using the term altogether. Although the majority expressed confusion about what “queer” meant, many understood it to be somehow related to sexuality or being gay, but considered it potentially insulting. I discuss the relevance of these findings for work in queer fields, where research participants may not explicitly identify as queer or make use of the word.     

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.     

An Intersectional Analysis of LGBTQ Online Media Coverage of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting Victims

ABSTRACT

This study illustrates the radical potential of intersectionality to offer a more deeply critical analysis of hierarchies in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. The author examines how 377 reports from the five most-trafficked LGBTQ Web sites represented victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, FL. Findings support previous scholarship that has emphasized Latinx exclusion, as the articles generally failed to present the victims in an intersectional way, focusing on their LGBTQ status and excluding their Latinx identities. At the same time, a significant minority of the reports emphasized Latinx queer people, most frequently in a way that continued to prioritize LGBTQ identification, sometimes even advancing stereotypical representations of Latinx communities as extraordinarily focused on faith, family, or “machismo.” Moreover, none of the articles considered xenophobia as a potential motivating factor in the shooting, and the reports typically presented policing agencies in a neutral, and sometimes even positive, way.     

“Requestioning” AIDS: An Ethical Reflection From 1993 to Today

ABSTRACT

This article serves as one of the supplementary pieces of this special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” in which we take a solipsistic turn to “map” the Journal of Homosexuality itself. Here, the author examines the first feature-length article to address the relationship between HIV status and homosexuality. Lingering on both the temporal gap between the dawn of AIDS in American discourse and its inclusion in this journal, the author asks us to consider (in hindsight) such a delay bearing in mind queer theoretical projects of the present such as gay shame, stigma, and queer biopolitics.     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

Homosexual Experience,Desire and Identity Among Young Adults

ABSTRACT

Is young people's sexuality becoming more fluid and less tied to steady, stable identity patterns? Are we developing into a society where sexual relationships between individuals of the same sex are no longer reserved for the small minority of gay men and lesbian women? Adherents of so-called queer theory have promulgated such views. Using a population-based sample of young adults (aged 19 to 26, N 2753), we investigated homosexual experiences, desire and identity. We found that levels of prevalence of homosexuality were primarily a function of the criteria we used. Using the most restricted (“narrow”) definitions, we found that about one percent of both genders reported “exclusive” homosexual interest and identity. Using the most inclusive criteria, we found that one of ten young men and one of four young women reported having some homosexual experience, interest or identity. Still, the most striking finding involved the substantial gender-specific differences: homoerotic activity and interest are far more interwoven with heterosexual activity for women. There are strong indications that homosexuality is a lot more threatening and potentially in conflict with traditional male gender roles than we find to be the case for women. In other words, while there may be signs of more fluid sexual identity categories, this phenomenon primarily applies to women.     

Hearing “That’s So Gay” and “No Homo” on Campus and Substance Use Among Sexual Minority College Students

ABSTRACT

Sexual orientation microaggressions are common on college campuses and can contribute to negative outcomes; yet little is known about their relationship with substance use outcomes. Among a convenience sample of cisgender sexual minority college students (n= 574; 57.0% female, 24.9% people of color, 50.7% gay/lesbian; 72.4% public school) from 37 states (67.8% Midwest), this analysis investigates the association between hearing “that’s so gay” and “no homo” on campus and hazardous alcohol use and the frequency of illicit drug use. Using multivariable regression analyses, the commonly heard phrases “that’s so gay” and “no homo” were each found to significantly increase the risk for hazardous drinking and the frequency of drug use among students. Efforts should be made to create more welcoming campus climates for sexual minority students by reducing the use of these microaggressions and, in the meantime, offering supports to mitigate their harmful effects.     

When Queerness Meets Intersectional Thinking: Revolutionizing Parallels,Histories, and Contestations

ABSTRACT

Intuitively distinguishing the myriad of critically informed paradigms requires an in-depth analysis of genealogies, histories, and philosophical underpinnings grounding each paradigm. Despite significant parallels between queer theory and intersectionality theory, the distinction of these two paradigms acts in both complicated and complementary manners that necessitate a dialogue on the contributions emanating from both paradigms to LGBTQ studies. This article targets the following goals: (1) explicate genealogy, history, and philosophical tenets of intersectionality and queer theory; (2) dialogue about the complementary yet complex relationships between the two paradigms; and (3) illustrate the promise of the complex relationship and distinction for LGBTQ studies.     

Queer (in)frequencies: SiriusXM’s OutQ and the limits of queer listening publics

On February 23, 2016, OutQ, the nation’s only LGBT-focused satellite radio station, ceased broadcasting. This essay theorizes a queer listening public as intentionally imagined as such and concomitantly taken up as a queer listening public by queers. It utilizes in-depth interviews with OutQ founder John McMullen, and OutQ show hosts Frank DeCaro, Romaine Patterson, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as posts from Facebook Fan Pages, to explore the ways OutQ was both imagined and functioned as a queer listening public. Using the interview data, the essay argues that a queer listening public functions in three ways. First, it creates a specifically queer space for queer listeners, almost at the exclusion of heterosexual listeners. Second, it creates a queer affective community where events important to LGBT citizens can be “felt” in a communal, mediated space. Third, a queer listening public seeks to create a national/transnational queer listening public for geographically isolated queers. Additionally, this essay argues that in the cessation of OutQ, SiriusXM practiced what I call queer dispersal, a term deployed to describe the ways marketable aspects of queer life, like entertainment and music, are dispersed and hegemonically incorporated into mainstream media properties.