Suburban queer: reading Grease

This article examines how nontraditional representations of gender can complicate received social norms, and it examines, in particular, how pre-adolescent suburban youth reconfigure social codes within popular film in order to identify positive queer aesthetics. While several studies have documented the function of classic and mainstream film in the tradition of queer reading, there has been comparatively less analysis devoted to the ways that filmic representations themselves might contribute to theoretical debates regarding sexual identity. As a case in point, this essay analyzes the 1978 musical Grease in order to suggest ways that critics might navigate between strict social constructionist and essentialist theories of sexual identity in order to identify avenues for queer identification within non-queer contexts.     

Teaching queer theory at a Normal School

This article presents a case study of the ongoing struggle to queer West Chester University at the level of the institution, the curriculum, and the classroom. Part of that struggle includes an effort to establish a policy for free speech that accommodates the values of the institution toward diversity. Another part involves attempts to introduce LGBT Studies into the curriculum, and the resulting debates over whether the curriculum should be "gayer" or "queerer." I discuss the personal struggle to destabilize ready-made categories and encourage non-binary thinking, while honoring the identities we live, and perform, in the classroom. In the last four years, WCU has hired half a dozen out gay or lesbian faculty members, some of whom identify as "queer." In many ways, those faculty members have entered a climate open to new ideas for adding LGBT content to the curriculum and to queering the structure and curriculum of the university. But as faculty, staff, and students engage this cause-along with the broader cause of social justice at the University- we have found that our enemies are often closer than we might have guessed. Detailing the tensions that have characterized the landscape at WCUduring my three years and half years there, this essay elaborates on the epistemological and pedagogical issues that arise when queer Theory meets LGBT Studies in the process of institutional, curricular, and pedagogical reform. I argue that questions about content and method, inclusion and exclusion, and identity and performance can be answered only with a concerted effort and continued attention to the cultural tendency to re-assert binaries while simultaneously learning from them. What is true of West Chester, I argue, is true of the larger social system where the contested terrain of the queer has implications for the choices we make as both stakeholders and deviants in the systems we chronicle and critique.     

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.     

Negotiating multiple identities in a queer Vietnamese support group

My participant-observation with O-M?i, a support group for Vietnamese lesbians, bisexual women and female-to-male transgenders, and interviews with members, focusing on how different identity issues are negotiated, suggest that despite O-M?i's claim of supporting its members' multiple marginalized identities, group processes in everyday pragmatic interactions construct a hierarchy that centers and normalizes experiences of bilingual Vietnamese lesbians. This renders the marginalization of bisexual women, transgender men, and Vietnamese/English monolingual members. Using the concept of "identity work" to examine the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and gender/sexuality as everyday (counter)hegemonic processes, I discuss how organizational structure, discourse resources, and personal politics orient and mold members' talk and interactions leading to normalization and/or marginalization of certain groups' experiences.     

Queerer than queer: reflections of a Kike dyke

In this article the author, a Jewish lesbian academic, reflects on the positive and negative aspects of her dual identity and explores her feelings of exclusion from "in groups" in a range of settings. Annie Goldflam carries a legacy of fear from stories of medieval "witch" burnings and drownings and the twentieth century Jewish Holocaust, which she reflects on to compare the nature of anti-semitism and lesbophobia, considering the options of hiding from racist and homophobic forms of oppression or confronting them. She has chosen to confront, be "out" and politically active.     

"Beautiful publicity": an introduction to queer Asian film

With a few seemingly apolitical exceptions, openly queer cinemas have generally charted two opposing courses-a propagandistic search for bourgeois acceptance or a radical challenge to sexual hegemony. Yet even the most politically challenging of queer films, for example those of Pasolini, are nevertheless distributed and disseminated through the heteronormative and hegemonically capitalist means they philosophically oppose. This essay thus takes as its texts two low-budget gay male Japanese films of the 1980s, which have been made available on international home video, as opposing examples of politicoeconomic allegories enacted within the self-reflexive contexts of queer cinema and gay male political history. Taken together, the two films present an interlocking example of how Asian queer films both engage and refute "Eastern" and "Western" conceptions of homosexuality and sexual politics in general.     

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.     

The queer periphery: sexual deviancy and the cultural understanding of space

The association of normative sexuality with the geographical center and sexual deviancy with the geographical periphery represents a pattern of thinking that has stayed with us in different guises throughout history. The article traces this pattern and some of its complex ramifications from the ancient Greeks to the present.     

Gay grows up:an interpretive study on aging metaphors and queer identity

This study is based upon qualitative research conducted with the Phoenix chapter of the Prime Timers, a social organization that offers older men in the gay community a space to communicate their general needs and desires. Using data collected through participant observation and informant interviews, the research demonstrates the ways in which the group's affiliates respond to queer sensibilities. The analysis argues that intergenerational communication is fettered by age stereotypes that generate communicative boundaries between young and old members of the gay community. The report then suggests that age-based breakdowns in communication prevalent in the gay community are further advanced by a difference in intergenerational approaches to survival.