Lesbian brides: post-queer popular culture

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of lesbian representations in European and North American popular culture, particularly within television drama and broader celebrity culture. The abundance of “positive” and “ordinary” representations of lesbians is widely celebrated as signifying progress in queer struggles for social equality. Yet, as this article details, the terms of the visibility extended to lesbians within popular culture often affirm ideals of hetero-patriarchal, white femininity. Focusing on the visual and narrative registers within which lesbian romances are mediated within television drama, this article examines the emergence of what we describe as “the lesbian normal.” Tracking the ways in which the lesbian normal is anchored in a longer history of “the normal gay,” it argues that the lesbian normal is indicative of the emergence of a broader post-feminist and post-queer popular culture, in which feminist and queer struggles are imagined as completed and belonging to the past. Post-queer popular culture is depoliticising in its effects, diminishing the critical potential of feminist and queer politics, and silencing the actually existing conditions of inequality, prejudice, and stigma that continue to shape lesbian lives.     

Who’s Afraid of the Beast in the Jamesian Closet?

Building on the Foucauldian insight that sexuality is a discourse and thereby refusing to be chained to the Freudian repressive hypothesis, this article aims to ascertain how the closet is made and how the homosexual comes to be seen in the act of reading the literary text “The Beast in the Jungle,” written by Henry James. It will examine the power relationships between the characters and between the narrator and the reader, surrounding the protagonist’s sexual secret, which is linked to fear.     

Beyond the Dichotomy: Six Religious Views of Homosexuality

Using published theological and scholarly evidence, this article disrupts the stereotypical “born gay”/“sinful choice” dichotomy widely assumed to characterize religious views of homosexuality in the United States. It argues that we need to keep moral questions separate from questions about the fixity or fluidity of sexual orientation. Rather than two, American Christian and Jewish views of homosexuality can been seen on a range from the “God Hates Fags” view through “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin,” “We Don’t Talk About That,” “They Can’t Help It,” “God’s Good Gift,” and a queer-theological view of the “Godly Calling.”     

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.     

The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda

This article focuses on the construction of one's relation to pornography in contemporary media by examining agony columns of young adult women's magazines. The analytical approach employed is a “close reading” from the perspective of queer theory, purposing both to “queer” the portrayals of heterosexuality and to critically review representations of non-heterosexuality. The focus is especially on the role of affects and emotions in moving subjects “toward” and “away” from porn and producing conceptions of gender and sexuality. On the one hand, the positive affects of excitement and interest are associated with men in the data corpus, whereas the negative affects of disgust and upset are usually connected to women. On the other hand, affects are absent when discussing queerness. The study thus offers an application of Ahmed's notion of the productive role of emotions both in expanding the idea of productivity from constituting ethnicity to establishing gender and sexuality and also in directing attention to the absence of affects or emotions in constituting norms.     

Queering the Cosmology of the Vikings: A Queer Analysis of the Cult of Odin and “Holy White Stones”

ABSTRACT

Ideas concerning Eros, honor and death were central to the Norse perception of the world. Odin is the greatest war god, and associated with manliness. However, Odin is also the most powerful master of seid (sorcery), an activity associated with women. Seid may be interpreted as a form of shamanism. If a man performed seid he could be accused of ergi, that is, unmanliness. Therefore it could be said that Odin exercised an activity considered unmanly. How could Odin perform seid without losing his position as the god of war and warriors? This paradox is discussed from a queer theoretical perspective. On this basis a new interpretation of the so-called “holy white” phallic stones in western Norway is suggested. Most of these stones are associated with burials from the later part of the Scandinavian Early Iron Age. The temporal distribution of the white phallic stones correlates well with the increasing importance of the cult of Odin. There may be a cultic association between the cult of Odin and the burial practices involving white holy phallic stones.     

Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope: Negotiating the Intersections of Religion and Sexuality on Network Television's The Book of Daniel

This article analyzes the television series The Book of Daniel, a program that shows in full relief the ways that current discourses of religion and sexuality converge to produce a particular type of gay subject. This subject, primarily male, might be understood as bound through an innate identity and commitment to the sanctity and reproduction of heteronormative institutions such as the church and state, which renders him assimilable into the social order. As homosexuality, per se, is no longer “outside” the normative order, the program constructs an unstable, nonbinary, and nonheteronormative other who is best understood as queer.     

Heteronormative bodies,queer futures: toward a theory of interpersonal panopticism

This essay examines the policing of sexual bodies via interactive online technologies. We draw from scholarly discourses regarding surveillance, queer theory, and affect to construct what we call interpersonal panopticism. Interpersonal panopticism serves as a theoretical account of the fluid nature of watching and being watched in relationships, especially in consideration of how intimate relationships and sexualities are surveilled and controlled in a digital era. To articulate the utility and potentials of this theoretical approach, we offer five cultural propositions that serve as a basis for interpersonal panopticism. Collectively these propositions illustrate the utility and potentials of unpacking the interplay of surveillance, heteronormativity, and affect through an interpersonal panoptic lens.     

A Legal Analysis of Segregation in Public Education

Many people fear that the current explosion in mass media technology is negatively affecting individuals and society via-à-vis considerations related to the accessibility of pornographic materials. The way this accessibility affects young people is of particular concern. In this article, the author addresses these concerns from the legal and media-effects perspectives. He argues that social studies teachers can respond to questions about pornography and the mass media in a more confident and informed manner if they gain some familiarity with court rulings and contemporary social science research relevant to the impact of the mass media in a democratic society. The author contends that education, not censorship, is the best way to address the issue.