Space,Agency, and the Transfiguring of Lesbian/Queer Desire

In this study, the author uses ethnographic and interview data from Pussy Palace, a lesbian/queer bathhouse in Toronto, Canada, to examine the ways in which the bathhouse space impacted participants' sexuality, behaviors, and notions of self. The Toronto Women's Bathhouse Committee (TWBC), an explicitly feminist and queer organization, is responsible for putting on Pussy Palace events and in creating an atmosphere that is simultaneously sexual and safe. Findings indicate elements of both spatial praxis and sexual agency, wherein individuals expressed being able to “take risks,” “find their sexuality,” and “discover who they are” in a safe space, where nonnormative bodies and sexualities are to be celebrated. Although participants expressed feeling “liberated,” many also described feeling anxious, awkward, and insecure. Within a sexual space where bodies are exposed and highly salient, these anxieties worked to inhibit and curtail bodily expression. The author concludes by discussing the significance of spaces like Pussy Palace for lesbian/queer individuals when it comes to sexual expression and the need for further research when it comes to examining lesbian/queer sexualities and public sexual cultures.     

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.     

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.     

At home with their queerness: same-sex relationality and the Indian family in advertising media

The legal battle around the reform of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code brought the provisional decriminalization of homosexuality in 2009, which was overturned by the Supreme Court of India in 2013. Queer politics in India thus stands at a critical juncture regarding the goal to foster social acceptance of LGBT individuals. This paper offers an analysis of two recent media representations in India—a gay matrimonial ad and an online advertisement for an ethnic apparel brand featuring a lesbian couple—to demonstrate how the Indian family is emerging as an important arbiter of queer relationality. The negotiation of same-sex relations within the familial is premised on bourgeois notions of class, caste and gender, an ideological normativity that queer of color critique and queer theory have foundationally put up resistance to. This paper goes beyond the queer and feminist critiques of gender and class normativity to suggest that queer visibility in the Indian context is being negotiated not in opposition to, but through, the mandates of the familial.     

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.     

Queer Blindfolding: A Case Study on Difference “Blindness” Toward Persons Who Identify as Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgender

The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the narrative strategy of queer blindfolding. Utilizing psycho-discursive qualitative methodology, the authors will draw from a case study to demonstrate how some beneficent, well-intended persons who identify as heterosexual adopt the narrative strategy of queer blindfolding as they negotiate the discourse of heteronormativity. We will map this narrative strategy, compare and contrast it to racial colorblindness, and unpack the accompanying intra-psychic conflict and defense mechanisms that are utilized by the participant in the case study. We will also demonstrate how this discursive strategy positions participants within systemic heterosexism.     

Media Action Research Group: toward an antiauthoritarian profeminist media research methodology

The Media Action Research Group (MARG) is an antiauthoritarian, profeminist (antiracist, anticolonial, queer, trans and anti-capitalist) group of activist-researchers both inside and outside the university, studying autonomous social movement media activism in Canada and beyond. In this article we map a taxonomy of activist-research, illustrating how MARG brings together five specific methodologies—activist-led issue-based research, militant participatory ethnography, feminist community research, prefigurative antiauthoritarian feminist participatory action research (PAFPAR), and autonomous media research—to study how women, people of colour, queer and trans people, and Indigenous people in antiauthoritarian or anarchist-leaning social movements are using grassroots media to support and report on these movements. We find that although MARG set out to create an antiauthoritarian research-activist collective, we are restricted in some ways by the intensification of neoliberalism in the university institution. Nonetheless we are able to conduct transgressive research at the intersection between antiauthoritarian activism and the academy, producing three direct and immediate impacts: within social movements, within media activism, and within the university.     

LGBTQs and the DSM-5: A Critical Queer Response

This article outlines a community-based collaboration in Toronto, Canada that led to an official response to the APA’s call for comments and suggestions regarding diagnostic criteria revisions for the DSM-5 with a focus on disorders that have or may have an impact on the lives of LGBTQ people. We identified two diagnostic categories: gender dysphoria and paraphilias. The diagnostic categories and their respective disorders are deconstructed utilizing a critical queer analysis with recommendations for change. In addition, we explore the limitations of the APA review process itself and politics within the APA and the LGBTQ communities.     

Cape queer? A case study of Provincetown, Massachusetts

Cape Queer is a case study that details how sexuality intersects with race, gender, and class in the development of the gay and lesbian resort community, Provincetown, Massachusetts. It asks scholars to pay closer attention to the ways in which methodologies and practices utilizing LGBT studies and queer theory can combine rather than separate to interrogate LGBT and queer histories, politics and communities. In the process, it assesses how the global mechanics of capitalism led to the local queering and eventually un-queering of a gentrified, white, gay and lesbian enclave.     

“Still Raped Over Here”: Gay Male Femininity and the Rewards of Camp Ambivalence in Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls

ABSTRACT

Girls Will Be Girls (GWBG) delivers a substantive queer-feminist critique of heteronormative animus toward women and gay men through jokes that weaponize that animus for insurgent purposes. The film’s rape and abortion jokes showcase the provocative notion that negative representations of femininity might be wielded strategically and, in fact, more resonantly because they resist recuperation by marginalizing normative hierarchies. GBWG’s enactment of gay male femininity deploys queer dissidence by ameliorating pain through mockery while emphasizing the costs of heteronormative and patriarchal inflictions. This essay offers a test case for a queer feminist politics—one that, without discarding the imperatives for and rewards of more materially grounded political work, mines the critical as well as affective affordances of rage, mockery, and indignity against heteronormativity’s arbitrary but still formidable injunctions. A queer feminist reading of camp denaturalizes heteronormativity with a potency that queer theory and feminist theory might harness yet more effectually in less divided collaboration.     

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.     

Rural Men,Sexual Identity and Community

The relationship between rurality and men's sexuality remain relatively unexplored. This study addresses the knowledge gap in the research literature by focusing on men who have sex with men in rural areas across Ontario, Canada. Employing a constructivist grounded theory methodology, interviews were conducted with 32 men across 28 geographic locales consisting of populations of less than 10,000 people. Men identified as gay, bisexual, queer/bisexual, or refused labels. These self-selected identifiers were then explored to determine how participants conceptualized and organized their sexual identities in relation to context. Participants held divergent management strategies that resulted in two general identity grouping: “natives” and “transplanters.”     

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.     

Queering Bollywood: alternative sexualities in popular Indian cinema

In this essay, I demonstrate through numerous examples taken from four identifiable Hindi film subgenres queer themes which, though nontransgressive in their native Indian context, acquire subversive value and serve as queer points of identification when viewed from a non-nationalist bias. Watching particular films with this "queer diasporic viewing practive," sex/gender play which is normative (yet still coded) in the land of the films' production can be reclaimed as queer through the differently subjective lens of transnational spectatorship, a lens removed from patriarchy, sexism, and homophobia. This particularly becomes apparent in the Bollywood dance sequence-the frequent site of Hindi sex/gender play-whose coded queer desires are much easier to de-code (or re-code) when in the diaspora.     

Outlaws or in-laws? Queer theory, LGBT studies, and religious studies

Many queer theorists, like many queer activists and perhaps many LGBT people in general, regard religion as so inimical to their purposes and lives that it is not even worthy of critique; references to religion in queer theory, queer studies, and even LGBT studies are usually sparse, brief, and generally derogatory. Likewise, within most of the field of religious studies, queerness is rarely an issue of concern or even consciousness except in the context of organizational tensions over the proper roles of "homosexuals." While there is a growing body of work that brings these two fields together, the study of religion seems to be adapting only haltingly and partially to contemporary developments inLGBTstudies and queer theory. This essay assesses the current state of the "proto-fields" of LGBT studies and queer studies in religion, offers suggestions for new directions in the future, and considers the potential benefits of the interaction of these fields.     

Queer criticism and sexual normativity: the case of Pee-wee Herman

One of the most useful aspects of queer theory is the critical force that the perspective provides scholars. The tenets of queer theory provide scholars with a model to interrogate how sexuality and other differences play a fundamental role in rhetorical practice. Focusing on differences rather than similarities, queer critics seek to dismantle hierarchies by blurring the definitions of specific identity categories. A framework for queer rhetorical criticism is described and illustrated with a variety of examples from popular culture. The model is further illustrated through an examination of the body of work of Pee-wee Herman.     

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.     

A critique of neoliberalism with fierceness: queer youth of color creating dialogues of resistance

As a form of deregulated capitalism that has run amok, commodifying all that is in its path, and as a cultural means of commodifying Black and brown bodies, neoliberalism has taken a serious toll on the lives of working-class queer youth of color. Although it has hijacked spaces of cultural representation and material production, neoliberal capitalism is far from transparent. Through resistance, activism and performance queer youth of color have now started to shape a critique of oppressive structures, neoliberal policies, and pedagogical practices that are critical of their intersecting identities. This article examines neoliberalism's impact on education, focusing on educational policy and how these policies have affected queer youth of color in the urban centers of our major cities. This article also considers the contributions made by educators writing from the perspective of critical pedagogy in addressing the plight of queer youth of color in U.S. schools while employing the example of the dance group, Innovation, as way of addressing the havoc of neoliberalism in the lives of queer youth of color through performance and activism. This group has not only transformed notions of gender, race, class and sexuality that challenge major tenants of neoliberalism, but has also served as potent sites for the development of a critical pedagogy for working-class queer youth of color. Through sites of resistance rooted in progressive struggle, queer youth of color must be enabled by critical transformative intellectuals committed to encouraging youth to critically evaluate and challenge ideologies while displaying an allegiance to egalitarianism.     

Ferment in LGBT studies and queer theory: personal ruminations on contested terrain

The tensions between queer and gay rights theorists, not surprisingly, have grown as queer theory has developed and matured. In this self-reflexive essay, the "contested terrain" between these distinct perspectives is explored, particularly within the discipline of communication studies. The assumptions of queer theory are summarized briefly, and the author takes an autoethnographic approach to demonstrate the constant interplay between lived experience and the basic assumptions of queer theory. The author challenges both LGBT theorists and queer theorists to always consider the implications of their theories and practices.