Jennifer Tyburczy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226315102
- eISBN:
- 9780226315386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315386.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Chapter three transitions to temporary and explicit displays of queer sexuality in museums, specifically examining how the emotional habitus on sexual display is managed through unofficial museum ...
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Chapter three transitions to temporary and explicit displays of queer sexuality in museums, specifically examining how the emotional habitus on sexual display is managed through unofficial museum policy in the late twentieth century. This period, sometimes referred to as the “culture wars,” marks a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of certain sexual display policies such as warning signs that continue to influence the ways in which sexual material culture is consumed in museums. The final section of the chapter juxtaposes the politics and performances of display in temporary sex exhibitions in mainstream museums to the controversy surrounding the display of sex toys at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. This section examines what happens to queer sex when it is displayed in a museum dedicated to representing queer lives and what this means for the application of queer theory in museum practice. The chapter ends by examining theoretical ruminations on the supposed death of queer theory and argues that now is not the time to abandon queer theory, and that now more than ever, theorists and museum practitioners need queer praxis.Less
Chapter three transitions to temporary and explicit displays of queer sexuality in museums, specifically examining how the emotional habitus on sexual display is managed through unofficial museum policy in the late twentieth century. This period, sometimes referred to as the “culture wars,” marks a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of certain sexual display policies such as warning signs that continue to influence the ways in which sexual material culture is consumed in museums. The final section of the chapter juxtaposes the politics and performances of display in temporary sex exhibitions in mainstream museums to the controversy surrounding the display of sex toys at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. This section examines what happens to queer sex when it is displayed in a museum dedicated to representing queer lives and what this means for the application of queer theory in museum practice. The chapter ends by examining theoretical ruminations on the supposed death of queer theory and argues that now is not the time to abandon queer theory, and that now more than ever, theorists and museum practitioners need queer praxis.
Peter A. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789888083268
- eISBN:
- 9789888313907
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay ...
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First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.Less
First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go’s Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson’s pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson’s narrative is “Uncle Go”, pen-name of the sexually libertarian but avowedly heterosexual editor of a popular magazine, whose “agony uncle” columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand’s gays, lesbians and transgenders (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand’s first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence from Uncle Go’s advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson expands his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men, but also those from lesbians and transgenders, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand’s modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identity were first communicated to the wider community.
Yetta Howard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252041884
- eISBN:
- 9780252050572
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041884.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, ...
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Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.Less
Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.
Jennifer Tyburczy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226315102
- eISBN:
- 9780226315386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315386.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Sex Museums is the first book to comprehensively explore what happens when museums display sex. It demonstrates how museum debates about what sex is and how to manage it have been integral to ...
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Sex Museums is the first book to comprehensively explore what happens when museums display sex. It demonstrates how museum debates about what sex is and how to manage it have been integral to defining the parameters of sexual normalcy and for silencing non-normative voices as they relate to gender, race, and sexuality. The book traces a genealogy of museum exhibitions to examine the influence of display on the history of sexuality and to explore four interrelated themes. First, it treats the museum context (of the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries) as a highly influential site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity and the categories of “normalcy” and “perversity.” Second, it analyzes a group of present-day museums, called sex museums, as explicit spaces that combine pedagogy and public entertainment to redefine what “sex” means. Third, it examines the successes and failures of sex museums and describes the pleasures and dangers associated with exhibiting dissident sexualities. Fourth, it proposes the seemingly paradoxical assertion that all museums are already sex museums, even as a diverse array of sexualities have been historically marginalized from the museum’s visual field. Sex Museums therefore illuminates the heteronormativity (and in some instances, the homonormativity) of most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public sexual display projects (what the author calls “queer praxis”). Thus, the book develops theoretical innovations in queer, gender, critical race, performance, and museum studies with practical applications for collection, curatorship, policy management, and visitor services in museums.Less
Sex Museums is the first book to comprehensively explore what happens when museums display sex. It demonstrates how museum debates about what sex is and how to manage it have been integral to defining the parameters of sexual normalcy and for silencing non-normative voices as they relate to gender, race, and sexuality. The book traces a genealogy of museum exhibitions to examine the influence of display on the history of sexuality and to explore four interrelated themes. First, it treats the museum context (of the nineteenth- through the twenty-first centuries) as a highly influential site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity and the categories of “normalcy” and “perversity.” Second, it analyzes a group of present-day museums, called sex museums, as explicit spaces that combine pedagogy and public entertainment to redefine what “sex” means. Third, it examines the successes and failures of sex museums and describes the pleasures and dangers associated with exhibiting dissident sexualities. Fourth, it proposes the seemingly paradoxical assertion that all museums are already sex museums, even as a diverse array of sexualities have been historically marginalized from the museum’s visual field. Sex Museums therefore illuminates the heteronormativity (and in some instances, the homonormativity) of most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public sexual display projects (what the author calls “queer praxis”). Thus, the book develops theoretical innovations in queer, gender, critical race, performance, and museum studies with practical applications for collection, curatorship, policy management, and visitor services in museums.
AnaLouise Keating
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252037849
- eISBN:
- 9780252095115
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252037849.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This lively and thought-provoking study is written in the traditions of radical U.S. women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, ...
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This lively and thought-provoking study is written in the traditions of radical U.S. women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women-of-color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and the author's own personal and pedagogical experiences, the book develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, the book calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.Less
This lively and thought-provoking study is written in the traditions of radical U.S. women-of-color feminist/womanist thought and queer studies, inviting us to transform how we think about identity, difference, social justice and social change, metaphysics, reading, and teaching. Through detailed investigations of women-of-color theories and writings, indigenous thought, and the author's own personal and pedagogical experiences, the book develops transformative modes of engagement that move through oppositional approaches to embrace interconnectivity as a framework for identity formation, theorizing, social change, and the possibility of planetary citizenship. Speaking to many dimensions of contemporary scholarship, activism, and social justice work, the book calls for and enacts innovative, radically inclusionary ways of reading, teaching, and communicating.
Jennifer Tyburczy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226315102
- eISBN:
- 9780226315386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315386.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The introduction shows how all museums are already sex museums and makes periodization claims on how and why the book pinpoints key museum events to trace and structure a genealogy of debates about ...
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The introduction shows how all museums are already sex museums and makes periodization claims on how and why the book pinpoints key museum events to trace and structure a genealogy of debates about sex in museums. It defines key terms such “performance,” “museum,” “sex,” and “display” with display conceived of as a technique for disciplining sexuality both within and outside museums. The introduction also shows how the history of the normalizing force of the museum has always been paralleled by another history—a queer history—one in which the display of unruly objects of non-normative sex (and risk-taking curators) rebel against museum norms. Thus, in addition to forging a genealogy of the normalizing influence of the museum on the history of sexuality, the introduction also foregrounds display as a materialization of queer theory and as a form of queer praxis. The author’s methodology is likewise described as “queer praxis,” an interdisciplinary methodology for curatorial labor in museums and a mode for understanding the work of queer scholars through grounded research methods such as ethnography, interviews, participant observation, and self-reflexive approaches to archival research.Less
The introduction shows how all museums are already sex museums and makes periodization claims on how and why the book pinpoints key museum events to trace and structure a genealogy of debates about sex in museums. It defines key terms such “performance,” “museum,” “sex,” and “display” with display conceived of as a technique for disciplining sexuality both within and outside museums. The introduction also shows how the history of the normalizing force of the museum has always been paralleled by another history—a queer history—one in which the display of unruly objects of non-normative sex (and risk-taking curators) rebel against museum norms. Thus, in addition to forging a genealogy of the normalizing influence of the museum on the history of sexuality, the introduction also foregrounds display as a materialization of queer theory and as a form of queer praxis. The author’s methodology is likewise described as “queer praxis,” an interdisciplinary methodology for curatorial labor in museums and a mode for understanding the work of queer scholars through grounded research methods such as ethnography, interviews, participant observation, and self-reflexive approaches to archival research.
Jennifer Tyburczy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226315102
- eISBN:
- 9780226315386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315386.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The cultural and rhetorical influences of globalization work in multiple directions on the display of sexual cultures. This chapter focuses on the influence of popular U.S. culture and discourse on ...
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The cultural and rhetorical influences of globalization work in multiple directions on the display of sexual cultures. This chapter focuses on the influence of popular U.S. culture and discourse on El Museo del Sexo (MuseXo) in Mexico City as the curators’ approach to museum signage allowed for an analysis of the flow of sexual ideas and objects in this direction. Taking a cue from MuseXo’s displays, the author focuses on the ways in which US-Mexico relations, specifically in the wake of the cultural exchanges facilitated by the signing of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, may have contributed to the new discourse of sexual identities for the practicing sexual subject in Mexico City today. The chapter critiques the circulation of global queer discourse in Mexico City to interrogate the processes by which sexual rhetorics, particularly those oriented toward homonormative versions of Western gay consciousness and the LGBT political movements of the United States, are received and appropriated. The author refers to the transnational codification of sexual identity discourse as the “sexual modern” and proposes the use of this term to refer to (homo)normative display practices that textually manifest prescriptive sets of social codes for articulating cosmopolitan queer subjectivity.Less
The cultural and rhetorical influences of globalization work in multiple directions on the display of sexual cultures. This chapter focuses on the influence of popular U.S. culture and discourse on El Museo del Sexo (MuseXo) in Mexico City as the curators’ approach to museum signage allowed for an analysis of the flow of sexual ideas and objects in this direction. Taking a cue from MuseXo’s displays, the author focuses on the ways in which US-Mexico relations, specifically in the wake of the cultural exchanges facilitated by the signing of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1992, may have contributed to the new discourse of sexual identities for the practicing sexual subject in Mexico City today. The chapter critiques the circulation of global queer discourse in Mexico City to interrogate the processes by which sexual rhetorics, particularly those oriented toward homonormative versions of Western gay consciousness and the LGBT political movements of the United States, are received and appropriated. The author refers to the transnational codification of sexual identity discourse as the “sexual modern” and proposes the use of this term to refer to (homo)normative display practices that textually manifest prescriptive sets of social codes for articulating cosmopolitan queer subjectivity.
Jennifer Tyburczy
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226315102
- eISBN:
- 9780226315386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226315386.003.0007
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Queer scholarship has emphasized the construction, interpretation, and development of archives and has foregrounded the politics of historiography. This final chapter brings these fields together in ...
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Queer scholarship has emphasized the construction, interpretation, and development of archives and has foregrounded the politics of historiography. This final chapter brings these fields together in order to suggest and model a curatorial tactic that grounds queer theory in a register of actual practice called “queer curatorship.” Queer curatorship is as an experimental display method that stages alternative spatial configurations for two distinct purposes: to expose how traditional museums socialize heteronormative relationships between objects and visitors; and to cope with ethically fraught objects of queer cultures—which in this chapter takes the form of leather whips as objects with historical ties to both gay leather/kink culture and antebellum slavery. Chapter six unpacks this method for displaying the history of sexuality and analyzes the histories of eroticism and discipline as they crisscross on the surfaces of two objects: an eight-minute, experimental film by Isaac Julien called The Attendant and a sword sheath and whip that was discovered at the Leather Archives & Museum and that is believed to have been used as an instrument of nonconsensual torture on an antebellum Louisiana plantation.Less
Queer scholarship has emphasized the construction, interpretation, and development of archives and has foregrounded the politics of historiography. This final chapter brings these fields together in order to suggest and model a curatorial tactic that grounds queer theory in a register of actual practice called “queer curatorship.” Queer curatorship is as an experimental display method that stages alternative spatial configurations for two distinct purposes: to expose how traditional museums socialize heteronormative relationships between objects and visitors; and to cope with ethically fraught objects of queer cultures—which in this chapter takes the form of leather whips as objects with historical ties to both gay leather/kink culture and antebellum slavery. Chapter six unpacks this method for displaying the history of sexuality and analyzes the histories of eroticism and discipline as they crisscross on the surfaces of two objects: an eight-minute, experimental film by Isaac Julien called The Attendant and a sword sheath and whip that was discovered at the Leather Archives & Museum and that is believed to have been used as an instrument of nonconsensual torture on an antebellum Louisiana plantation.
Madhavi Menon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695904
- eISBN:
- 9781452953656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being ...
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Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.Less
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.
John Ibson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226576541
- eISBN:
- 9780226576718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226576718.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships ...
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This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships of various sorts. John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic New Englander and World War II veteran, queer by experience and self-identification, wrote The Gallery, widely acclaimed upon its 1947 publication as one of the best novels inspired by the war. Distinctive in its innovative structure, its graceful expression, and its not needing scenes of battle to capture war’s trauma, the novel, set in Naples, was also singular in its depiction of men’s intimacy--in particular, but not only, among men like Burns himself who had sex with each other. Though some critics denounced the novel’s sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, this new topic and attitude within American fiction was largely either acclaimed or simply ignored. In contrasting American and Italian cultures, the novel was also distinctive in its sweeping critique of modern life, with Burns heralded as a rising star. The chapter is largely based on Burns’s extensive war correspondence, every review The Gallery received, and the author’s interviews with Burns’s surviving younger brother, himself also a veteran of the war.Less
This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships of various sorts. John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic New Englander and World War II veteran, queer by experience and self-identification, wrote The Gallery, widely acclaimed upon its 1947 publication as one of the best novels inspired by the war. Distinctive in its innovative structure, its graceful expression, and its not needing scenes of battle to capture war’s trauma, the novel, set in Naples, was also singular in its depiction of men’s intimacy--in particular, but not only, among men like Burns himself who had sex with each other. Though some critics denounced the novel’s sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, this new topic and attitude within American fiction was largely either acclaimed or simply ignored. In contrasting American and Italian cultures, the novel was also distinctive in its sweeping critique of modern life, with Burns heralded as a rising star. The chapter is largely based on Burns’s extensive war correspondence, every review The Gallery received, and the author’s interviews with Burns’s surviving younger brother, himself also a veteran of the war.
John Ibson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226576541
- eISBN:
- 9780226576718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226576718.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The Mourning After closes with a provocative interpretation of the content and continuing popularity of John Knowles’s 1959 novel A Separate Peace. Much like Knowles himself, whose queer sexuality ...
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The Mourning After closes with a provocative interpretation of the content and continuing popularity of John Knowles’s 1959 novel A Separate Peace. Much like Knowles himself, whose queer sexuality was mostly unacknowledged during his lifetime, the powerful attachment between the novel’s two main characters, boys in late adolescence on the verge of World War II service, has rarely been seen for what it clearly is, says Ibson, a male love story of rare power and grace. Love and sex between American males and females would soon be much more openly acknowledged and celebrated in American literature and life, during the 1960s and beyond; but in mainstream America the closet door would remain closed tightly for a much longer time for those drawn to members of their own sex.Less
The Mourning After closes with a provocative interpretation of the content and continuing popularity of John Knowles’s 1959 novel A Separate Peace. Much like Knowles himself, whose queer sexuality was mostly unacknowledged during his lifetime, the powerful attachment between the novel’s two main characters, boys in late adolescence on the verge of World War II service, has rarely been seen for what it clearly is, says Ibson, a male love story of rare power and grace. Love and sex between American males and females would soon be much more openly acknowledged and celebrated in American literature and life, during the 1960s and beyond; but in mainstream America the closet door would remain closed tightly for a much longer time for those drawn to members of their own sex.
Peter A. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9789888083268
- eISBN:
- 9789888313907
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888083268.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter describes the formative importance of the Uncle Go columns in Plaek for the origins of gay and lesbian community publishing in Thailand. The decline and end of the Uncle Go columns is ...
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This chapter describes the formative importance of the Uncle Go columns in Plaek for the origins of gay and lesbian community publishing in Thailand. The decline and end of the Uncle Go columns is also noted. The importance of commercial print media in the development of Thailand’s gay, lesbian and transgender (kathoey) cultures and communities is detailed.Less
This chapter describes the formative importance of the Uncle Go columns in Plaek for the origins of gay and lesbian community publishing in Thailand. The decline and end of the Uncle Go columns is also noted. The importance of commercial print media in the development of Thailand’s gay, lesbian and transgender (kathoey) cultures and communities is detailed.
Benjamin Kahan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226607818
- eISBN:
- 9780226608006
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226608006.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital ...
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The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital role in the field-imaginary of sexuality studies. This historical etiological approach recovers a multiplicity of patterns, models, and categories of sexuality, recording their sites of production, tracing synchronic relations between sexual formations, and theorizing the contours of these sexualities by attending to the accounts of their origins. At its broadest, this project seeks not to rationalize what Eve Sedgwick calls “the unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexuality, but to understand how their coexistence occurred. This book contends that historical etiology is a crucial tool — if not the crucial tool — for periodizing and narrativizing the invention of sexuality. It provides an account of the process by which the gender of object choice becomes the basis of classification and definition for sexuality and a description of the simultaneous speciation of what Michel Foucault calls “minor perverts” who fit “no order”: zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and numberless more. These minor perverts bring into focus largely vestigial models of sexuality, making visible the formation of and competition between different models of sexuality and helping us to imagine it otherwise.Less
The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality theorizes a historical etiological method as an alternative to the epistemological approaches that play such a vital role in the field-imaginary of sexuality studies. This historical etiological approach recovers a multiplicity of patterns, models, and categories of sexuality, recording their sites of production, tracing synchronic relations between sexual formations, and theorizing the contours of these sexualities by attending to the accounts of their origins. At its broadest, this project seeks not to rationalize what Eve Sedgwick calls “the unrationalized coexistence of different models” of sexuality, but to understand how their coexistence occurred. This book contends that historical etiology is a crucial tool — if not the crucial tool — for periodizing and narrativizing the invention of sexuality. It provides an account of the process by which the gender of object choice becomes the basis of classification and definition for sexuality and a description of the simultaneous speciation of what Michel Foucault calls “minor perverts” who fit “no order”: zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, and numberless more. These minor perverts bring into focus largely vestigial models of sexuality, making visible the formation of and competition between different models of sexuality and helping us to imagine it otherwise.
Bryant Keith Alexander
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036514
- eISBN:
- 9780252093555
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036514.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, ...
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This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, but are also those that elude while stabilizing meaning. In other words, at the moment we examine the Rocky Horror Picture Show or an online dating site, we establish a set of assumptions regarding who people are; yet, we develop this interplay of subjectivities that presumptively iterates binaries without ever challenging how heterosexuality is nothing more than a construction of the masculine ideal. The chapter beckons us to not get too comfortable with our learned sense that we know what masculinity is. It turns our assumptions regarding masculinity topsy-turvy and forces us to recognize that whether you are a Rasta, rude boy, martial artist, womanizer, athlete, or soldier, masculinities are defined social constructions that vary across culture, context, and community.Less
This chapter tests the limits of understanding what masculinity means or tries to mean. It insists that queer masculinities are those that are not only suspicious, resistant, or out of the ordinary, but are also those that elude while stabilizing meaning. In other words, at the moment we examine the Rocky Horror Picture Show or an online dating site, we establish a set of assumptions regarding who people are; yet, we develop this interplay of subjectivities that presumptively iterates binaries without ever challenging how heterosexuality is nothing more than a construction of the masculine ideal. The chapter beckons us to not get too comfortable with our learned sense that we know what masculinity is. It turns our assumptions regarding masculinity topsy-turvy and forces us to recognize that whether you are a Rasta, rude boy, martial artist, womanizer, athlete, or soldier, masculinities are defined social constructions that vary across culture, context, and community.
Yetta Howard
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252041884
- eISBN:
- 9780252050572
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041884.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This book’s conclusion epitomizes this book’s claims with an analysis of Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), a film falling under New Queer Cinema’s non-redemptive, underground narratives of ...
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This book’s conclusion epitomizes this book’s claims with an analysis of Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), a film falling under New Queer Cinema’s non-redemptive, underground narratives of queerness. Ugliness as the negative operates as both literal and conceptual. It refers to an inherent erotic tangibility in older media processes of photographic documentation—the use of negatives—and it describes the ways that lesbian desire becomes defined through heroin addiction. This chapter shows how queer erotics communicates as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be properly “developed.” The deeply counterintuitive possibilities of ugliness here reinforce the book’s larger argument about the importance of nondominant expressions of difference that queer female sexuality requires.Less
This book’s conclusion epitomizes this book’s claims with an analysis of Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), a film falling under New Queer Cinema’s non-redemptive, underground narratives of queerness. Ugliness as the negative operates as both literal and conceptual. It refers to an inherent erotic tangibility in older media processes of photographic documentation—the use of negatives—and it describes the ways that lesbian desire becomes defined through heroin addiction. This chapter shows how queer erotics communicates as a photographic negative, that is, a desire paradigm without the ability to be properly “developed.” The deeply counterintuitive possibilities of ugliness here reinforce the book’s larger argument about the importance of nondominant expressions of difference that queer female sexuality requires.
J. Keith Vincent
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780824866693
- eISBN:
- 9780824876937
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824866693.003.0015
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) was a key figure in feminist studies and queer theory between Japan and the U.S. In her late essay, “The Renaissance of a Discipline,” she asks fundamental questions about ...
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Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) was a key figure in feminist studies and queer theory between Japan and the U.S. In her late essay, “The Renaissance of a Discipline,” she asks fundamental questions about what it means to do queer or feminist work with a focus on a culture other than one’s own. Herself a Japanese Americanist in a field born from Japan’s “homosocial” desire to emulate and come closer to the British Empire, Takemura looks to Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the ambivalent founding father of her field, as a model for a new kind of comparative literature described by Gayatri Spivak (1942– ) in her book, Death of a Discipline. By drawing connections between Sōseki and F. O. Mathiessen (1902–1950), the closeted gay man who founded American Studies with his 1941 book American Renaissance, the essay examines the foundations of both American and Japanese Studies, and imagines their queer rebirth.Less
Takemura Kazuko (1954–2011) was a key figure in feminist studies and queer theory between Japan and the U.S. In her late essay, “The Renaissance of a Discipline,” she asks fundamental questions about what it means to do queer or feminist work with a focus on a culture other than one’s own. Herself a Japanese Americanist in a field born from Japan’s “homosocial” desire to emulate and come closer to the British Empire, Takemura looks to Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the ambivalent founding father of her field, as a model for a new kind of comparative literature described by Gayatri Spivak (1942– ) in her book, Death of a Discipline. By drawing connections between Sōseki and F. O. Mathiessen (1902–1950), the closeted gay man who founded American Studies with his 1941 book American Renaissance, the essay examines the foundations of both American and Japanese Studies, and imagines their queer rebirth.
Nikki Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Authored by Nikki Sullivan, this chapter examines John Money’s establishment of the model of gender identity/role (G-I/R), which has been at once highly influential and largely misunderstood. Given ...
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Authored by Nikki Sullivan, this chapter examines John Money’s establishment of the model of gender identity/role (G-I/R), which has been at once highly influential and largely misunderstood. Given that his conception of G-I/R was foundational to his understanding and “treatment” of intersex, transsexuality, and what he saw as “atypical” erotic desires and practices, as well as to his critique of feminism(s), liberationism, and other critical movements, a close reading of Money’s account of G-I/R and its uptake (by, for example, radical feminists, liberal feminists, gay liberationists, queer theorists, trans theorists/activists, feminist philosophers of the body, and new materialists) is long overdue. This chapter provides a close critical engagement with Money’s often contradictory claims about G-I/R and its attribution, arguing that while neither simply constructionist nor purely deterministic, Money’s formulation of G-I/R exemplifies what the feminist scholar Linda Nicholson has called “biological foundationalism.”Less
Authored by Nikki Sullivan, this chapter examines John Money’s establishment of the model of gender identity/role (G-I/R), which has been at once highly influential and largely misunderstood. Given that his conception of G-I/R was foundational to his understanding and “treatment” of intersex, transsexuality, and what he saw as “atypical” erotic desires and practices, as well as to his critique of feminism(s), liberationism, and other critical movements, a close reading of Money’s account of G-I/R and its uptake (by, for example, radical feminists, liberal feminists, gay liberationists, queer theorists, trans theorists/activists, feminist philosophers of the body, and new materialists) is long overdue. This chapter provides a close critical engagement with Money’s often contradictory claims about G-I/R and its attribution, arguing that while neither simply constructionist nor purely deterministic, Money’s formulation of G-I/R exemplifies what the feminist scholar Linda Nicholson has called “biological foundationalism.”
Lisa Downing
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226186580
- eISBN:
- 9780226186757
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226186757.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that ...
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Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that compromises the proper, life-giving “nature” of reproductive sexuality and thereby threatens the social order. It argues that, at the fantasy level of Money’s system, paraphilia is understood as leading to individual and social death, in the intellectual historical context of a biological and psychological worldview in which the theory of “biophilia” was proliferating. The chapter explores Money’s wish to attain a “paraphilia-free” society, alongside his paradoxical call for “a pluralistic democracy of sexualism,” showing that his writing on paraphilia reveals one of the tensions at the heart of his “sex-positive” liberalism and libertarianism. For Money, and many who influenced and follow him, the possibility of the figure of the “paraphiliac citizen” is not admitted. Using insights from queer citizenship studies, the anti-social turn in queer theory, and what Judith Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminism,” the chapter undertakes a critique of the bio-normativity of this premise and the conservative paradigm of health and harm on which it rests.Less
Authored by Lisa Downing, this chapter focuses in detail on one key aspect of John Money’s work on paraphilia, namely the idea that paraphilia is the dangerous and deadly form of eroticism that compromises the proper, life-giving “nature” of reproductive sexuality and thereby threatens the social order. It argues that, at the fantasy level of Money’s system, paraphilia is understood as leading to individual and social death, in the intellectual historical context of a biological and psychological worldview in which the theory of “biophilia” was proliferating. The chapter explores Money’s wish to attain a “paraphilia-free” society, alongside his paradoxical call for “a pluralistic democracy of sexualism,” showing that his writing on paraphilia reveals one of the tensions at the heart of his “sex-positive” liberalism and libertarianism. For Money, and many who influenced and follow him, the possibility of the figure of the “paraphiliac citizen” is not admitted. Using insights from queer citizenship studies, the anti-social turn in queer theory, and what Judith Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminism,” the chapter undertakes a critique of the bio-normativity of this premise and the conservative paradigm of health and harm on which it rests.
Jeffrey Meek
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474403894
- eISBN:
- 9781474430951
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474403894.003.0013
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the ...
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This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the men that used the nation’s urban spaces for soliciting sex, for pleasure or for money. The effeminate homosexual, in particular the male prostitute, was marked out by his failure to perform expected norms of masculinity, and his deviance was perceived to be inscribed upon his body. Attitudes towards the effeminate homosexual continued in the post-war period and such men were the continued subject of scrutiny and derision from wider society and from homosexual men, the latter group perceiving effeminacy to be a discreditable form of homosexual identityLess
This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the men that used the nation’s urban spaces for soliciting sex, for pleasure or for money. The effeminate homosexual, in particular the male prostitute, was marked out by his failure to perform expected norms of masculinity, and his deviance was perceived to be inscribed upon his body. Attitudes towards the effeminate homosexual continued in the post-war period and such men were the continued subject of scrutiny and derision from wider society and from homosexual men, the latter group perceiving effeminacy to be a discreditable form of homosexual identity
Elizabeth Currans
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041259
- eISBN:
- 9780252099854
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041259.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter examines two distinct although related responses to the devaluation of queer women’s lives: Oakland’s Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride and the New York Dyke March. Each gathering presented a ...
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This chapter examines two distinct although related responses to the devaluation of queer women’s lives: Oakland’s Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride and the New York Dyke March. Each gathering presented a viable paradigm for social interaction that contested heterosexual norms. Participants held space for distinct yet complementary visions of dyke solidarity and in the process created two unique public cultures, one focused on a politics of deviance and the other on a politics of care. Both frameworks contested dominant value systems privileging consumption and abstract moral standards over the well-being of women, lesbians, queer people, and people of color.Less
This chapter examines two distinct although related responses to the devaluation of queer women’s lives: Oakland’s Sistahs Steppin’ in Pride and the New York Dyke March. Each gathering presented a viable paradigm for social interaction that contested heterosexual norms. Participants held space for distinct yet complementary visions of dyke solidarity and in the process created two unique public cultures, one focused on a politics of deviance and the other on a politics of care. Both frameworks contested dominant value systems privileging consumption and abstract moral standards over the well-being of women, lesbians, queer people, and people of color.
