User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

Claiming Queer Territory in the Study of Subcultures and Popular Music

For both the heterosexual and queer subject, subcultural participation and stylistic modes of cultural production and consumption, including popular music, are critical mechanisms aiding in the construction and expression of identity. Yet, in spite of abundant empirical examples of queer music cultures, subcultural studies scholars have paid minimal attention to queer sexualities and their concomitant stylistic modalities. In this article, I claim the importance of queer subterranean music cultures by synthesising significant literatures from various fields of inquiry including cultural sociology, popular musicology and queer studies. To begin, I will briefly clarify to whom and about what queer (theory) speaks. I then go on to offer an overview of subcultural and popular music research paying particular attention to the subaltern queer subject and surveying queer criticism within each field. Accordingly, I discuss various sites of popular music production and subcultural style such as punk and hip‐hop, to show how non‐heterosexual subjects carve space for resistant queer sexualities and merge queer sensibilities with pre‐existing cultural forms. This article consolidates interdisciplinary approaches that will benefit scholars invested in the study of queer subcultures and popular music.     

"A whole stadium full": lesbian community at Women's National Basketball Association Games

Using qualitative interviews with lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual female Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) fans, I argue that the (perceived) large lesbian attendance at WNBA games enables the construction of a lesbian community by lesbian and bisexual fans in a site qualitatively different from traditional locations of lesbian community. Because the WNBA is not an explicitly lesbian or queer space, the process of speculating about which players, coaches, and fans are lesbians is a meaningful part of being a WNBA fan for many lesbian and bisexual fans. Fantasizing a large lesbian presence enables lesbian and bisexual fans to actively and interpretively create lesbian community at the games. The women socialize and connect with lesbian and bisexual women, construct lesbian ownership of WNBA games, and define WNBA games as a unique space that is different from lesbian bars and other traditional "gay-only" spaces.     

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.     

Exploring the Role of Being Out on a Queer Person's Self-Compassion

Recent changes in societal attitudes toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities have resulted in more people openly identifying with sexual minority status. Due to research on the effects of denying one's sexual orientation and the negative effects of this, many have advocated for more openness in queer sexual orientation. Compassion means connecting to the suffering of others not by avoiding their pain but instead by identifying it so that the feeling of kindness may emerge. Self-compassion, therefore, involves being touched by and open to one's own suffering, not avoiding or disconnecting from it, generating the desire to alleviate one's suffering and to heal oneself with kindness. The purpose of the research is to understand the impact that being out has on a queer person's self-compassion. The Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) is a 26-item, 5-point Likert measure, where a higher score equated to higher self-compassion and looked at how a person showed loving kindness to one's self through the six dimensions of self-compassion. The six dimensions of self-compassion are mindfulness, over-identification, self-kindness, self-judgment, common humanity, and isolation. Results showed that those who are totally out have a higher sense of self-compassion. Implications for practitioners working with the queer population are also discussed.     

Queer punx: young women in the Newcastle hardcore space

This article investigates the ‘becoming’ of queer female punx in the contemporary hardcore scene in a regional Australian city. Twelve young women aged 20–30 years were interviewed about their experiences of queer identity. They emphasized their involvement in the music scene as a key catalyst for the development of a queer punk identity even though the local hardcore scene is male-dominated and homosocial. We find that these young female queer punx assert their identity through collectively summoning and synthesizing the counternormative resources of both queer and punk Do It Yourself (DIY) to configure the space of hardcore differently. Our findings confirm the durability of a playful, subversive punk ethos in constituting challenges to the normative.     

Black Edens,country Eves: Listening,performance, and black queer longing in country music

ABSTRACT

This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. Royster suggests that through Black queer country music fandom and performance, fans construct risky and soulful identities. The article uses Tina Turner's solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! (1974) as an example of country music's power as a tool for resistance to racial, sexual, and class disciplining.     

Professor Petcock, or How the Academy Turns on Queer Studies

As an intellectually out lesbian faculty member, the author is keenly aware of her ornamental function vis-a-vis lesbian/gay and straight colleagues alike. Academically cast as a kind of regulating valve, she, through her work in gay and lesbian literature, ostensibly opens up the possibilities for diesel research throughout the university. Yet, her status as Professor Petcock—the dyke with intellectual and other equipment—belies institutional willingness to allow queer research, together with opportunities for political and social change within the university, to evaporate, evanesce.     

Smashing containers,queering the international through collaging

This article explores the potential of collage epistemology to cultivate queer intellectual curiosity about international relations. It argues that collaging and queering share many points of departure: in both, objects are taken from their conventional contexts and assembled into new relational constellations. The article draws from pedagogical work where collages were used in university teaching on the politics of gender and sexuality. A set of collages made by students are interpreted and brought into a dialogue with queer theorizing. The article suggests that collaging involves smashing a variety of containers that social sciences inquiry often operates with. It troubles not only established conceptions of sexuality and intimacy but also territoriality and theorizing. On this basis, the article concludes that collaging offers a fruitful modality of thought, analysis and expression for queer world-making projects.     

Alternative Domesticities

Abstract

This special issue responds to a growing body of literature at the nexus of studies on queer/sexuality and home/domesticity. It builds on this existing research that seeks to destabilize the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity, while also opening up this important space—and its constituent practices—for a plurality of identity formations and subjective experiences. Additionally, it addresses calls from lesbian, gay, and queer studies to shift our attention from public spaces and community places to the domestic. This special issue introduction speaks to continuing investigations of how different groups of people seek to creatively construct intimate relations across time, space, and place. Towards this end, the five articles in this special issue are introduced in the context of their contribution to a cross-disciplinary approach to alternative domesticities.     

Queer Farmers: Sexuality and the Transition to Sustainable Agriculture

Intimate relationships are foundational to farm viability. They affect how farmers share tasks, earn income, and access land, yet the role of sexuality and heteronormativity in agriculture remains understudied. Furthermore, queer people are largely ignored as potential farmers by the sustainable agriculture and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements. I document the lived experiences of queer farmers, an underresearched group, through participant observation and interviews with 30 sustainable farmers of various genders and sexualities in New England. I use a queer perspective to illuminate sexualized and heteronormative patterns in sustainable agriculture. Whereas the perception of rural heterosexism can discourage queer participation in agriculture, queer farmers faced less overt heterosexism than they expected. However, they did experience heterosexism particular to sustainable agriculture, and confronting it might jeopardize relationships important for economic and environmental sustainability and land access. Some farmers were attracted to sustainable agriculture for reasons specific to gender, sexuality, and anticapitalist values. I argue that sexuality and heteronormativity are embedded in farmer recruitment, retention, and land acquisition, which are critical for the transition to sustainable agriculture. I offer the sustainable agriculture movement a lens for envisioning alternatives for farm families, homes, and workplaces.     

Queering Asian Cultures

Queer Asian studies emerged from a need to study non‐normative genders and sexualities amidst discussions of transnationalism and the globalization of sexualities. In particular, it fills in a gap within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer studies by focusing on marginalized sexual subjectivities affected by race, ethnicity, immigration and citizenship. Major recent debates in the field of queer Asian studies include the contested usage of the term ‘queer’ and the application of ‘queer theory’ as an analytical framework, the call for intraregional dialogues within Asia and the discussion of normativity as a counter‐analytical framework to understand sexual cultures. Two developing trends can be identified as in growing numbers of research studies on everyday lives that extends beyond sexual identification categories, and pedagogical concerns with teaching sexuality and queer studies in the classroom.     

The Lies That Bind: Heteronormative Constructions of “Family” in Social Work Discourse

The social work profession has an enduring history of commitment to American families; in fact, it has often led the way in embracing alternative family arrangements. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) families are gaining more political visibility and lobbying for rights and protections from which they were previously excluded. Therefore, this study is an analysis of social work's contemporary, defining representations of LGBTQ families. Twelve LGBTQ “family” research studies were culled from the database Social Work Abstracts, and subjected to queer discourse analysis in order to illuminate how these alternative family forms are being constructed within the discipline. This analysis details the multiple ways in which heterosexual norms are privileged throughout the research studies. For example, the heterosexual family is often constructed as an unchallenged index for psychological health, appropriate partnering, and child rearing practices, social acceptability, and general normative behavior. LGBTQ relationships often earn their “family” designations by their ability to approximate these legible, heteronormative “family” characteristics. As such, this queer discourse analysis indicates that LGBTQ families are ultimately invited to join, but not to change, the traditional terms of “family,” thus making the social work research less of an exploration of alternative family forms and more of an endorsement of same-sex, nuclear families.     

The Protective Circle: Queer Fathers and Counselors

This article provides a review of the literature addressing the unique needs and experiences of queer fathers. Despite the growing number of queer fathers and families, and increasing scholarship on this topic, there is a major dearth in the counseling scholarship and practice related to queer families, or more specifically and especially, queer fatherhood. Thus, this article uses the concept of a “protective circle” to assist professional counselors to understand their vital role within a queer father and familial system. By understanding the experiences and needs of queer fathers, counselors can better conceptualize and assist this underserved and often silenced community.     

“Falling into a Place”: Reading for Renewal as Queer Pedagogy

This essay explores reading for renewal as queer pedagogy. Within the context of lesbian and gay literature courses, professors can teach students and themselves how to pull stories—beautiful, celebratory stories—out of the bits and pieces of stones of self-hatred and of suffering. If readers of gay and lesbian texts are to resist homophobic discourse, then they must not only train themselves to recognize signs of queerness within even the most oppressive of narratives, but also seek out those texts whose discussions of narrative theory and identity politics promote queer visibility. Reading for renewal—that is, locating a place of transformative possibility either within the text or within the experience of reading the text within the classroom—is, the author argues, integral to practicing a queer pedagogy.     

Rhythms of consumption

The emergence of queer theory has posed an incipient and significant challenge to the essentialism which has typically characterized theories of sexuality. In an attempt to eschew the totalizing effects of the categories ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’, queer theorists advocate a subjectivity which celebrates sexual difference without concern for achieved or ascribed characteristics. It is this remarkable capacity for inclusivity, attributed most immediately to the gender and race neutrality of ‘queer’, which is of particular interest here. More specifically, this article examines queer subjectivity's relation to a liberal humanist discourse whose purported universality requires the production of abstract, sovereign subjects without concern for their social location. The article in turn examines how the liberal premises which underlie queer subjectivity actually facilitate the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while undermining similar attempts to resignify racial epithets. Far from being a neutral subject position which ensures the liberty and autonomy of its inhabitants, the racial epithet here reinscribes the difference which the ‘queer’ subject and its liberal humanist prototype are perpetually trying to mask. I contend that it is this discrepancy in the capacity to mask difference – via a proximity to or distance from the liberal subject – which permits the reappropriation of ‘queer’ while racial epithets continue to remain taboo in the cultural mainstream.     

Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse

Abstract

The stereotype of the gay man as arbiter of domestic style and design is widely recognized. Robin Williams humorously referenced this in a joke: “We had gay burglars the other night,” he notes, “They broke in and rearranged the furniture.” What remains unclear is the ways in which stereotypes relate to the lives of ordinary people and the homes they inhabit. This article brings together the idiosyncrasies of queer design that circulate at a number of levels in a mainly transatlantic discourse—thanks to the help of mass media, television programs, and a niche of scholarly literature—with a study of ordinary homes belonging to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lives in a global city. It is argued that this wider queer aesthetic penetrates everyday space and shapes homes in complicated ways; there is a tension between these two domains. The empirical research draws from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Londoners gathered as part of a larger project on sexual minority identity at home in London, UK. Looking to these domestic case studies allows for a spatialized reading that challenges celebrated and exclusive interiors. Offering a timely and distinct architectural approach looking to the everyday users of ordinary domestic space aims to modestly move in another direction towards a model of diversity, opening up queer domesticity and sexual minority identity to multiple representations.     

From Lesbian Nation to Transgender Liberation: A Bisexual Feminist Perspective

This paper begins by raising some questions about the relationship between transgenderism and bisexuality within queer politics and theory, centering on an interview with the curator of the Sexual Minorities Archives in Northampton, Massachusetts. The interview focuses on the changing body of the Archives from the New Alexandria Lesbian Archives to the Sexual Minorities Archives, in relation to the changing body of the curator, Bet Power, from lesbian to female-to-male nonoperative transsexual. These texts—interview, Archives, and body—are discussed from the perspective of a bisexual feminist interviewer and in the broader contexts of queer politics and theory. The aim is to highlight the interplay of gender, sexuality, and class in one particular context and through one interviewer’s eyes. What queer readings can be made of those “plays”? And how do those “plays” illuminate some of the issues and contradictions within queer politics and theory at present?     

If I Am Not Straight or Gay,Who Am I?

Women that are violating heterosexual norms for sexual desire will run into issues about identity. This study explores ways of dealing with sexual identities that seems to provide a workable solution for women when they navigate and negotiate their lives as lesbians in a society dominated by heterosexual norms. The data sources are therapeutic conversations and followed-up interviews with ten women. The stories told by these women fail to fit the phases and the categorizations of the traditional coming out model. In handling dilemmas, ambiguity seems to be a resource to them. Their efforts and solutions are more in accordance with queer theory, when they navigate between dichotomies of homosexual/heterosexual, feminine/masculine, normality/deviance and personal responsibility/coincidence.