Suzanne Bost
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042799
- eISBN:
- 9780252051654
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042799.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and ...
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Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.Less
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.
Gabriele Griffin and Doris Leibetseder (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526138569
- eISBN:
- 9781526152138
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526138576
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This volume is concerned with the ways in which bioprecarity, here understood as the vulnerabilization of people as embodied selves, is created through regulations and norms that encourage ...
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This volume is concerned with the ways in which bioprecarity, here understood as the vulnerabilization of people as embodied selves, is created through regulations and norms that encourage individuals to seek or provide bodily interventions of different kinds. We explore this in particular in relation to intimacy and intimate labour, such as in the making of families and kin and in various forms of care work. Advances in biotechnology, medical tourism, and the visibilization of minoritized communities have resulted in unsettling the norms around the gendered body, intimate relations and intimate labour. Bodily interventions have socio-cultural meanings and consequences both for those who seek such interventions and for those who provide the intimate labour in conducting them. The purpose of this volume is to explore these. This exploration involves socio-cultural questions of boundary work, of privilege, of bodily ownership, of the multiple meanings of want (understood both as desire, for example, the desire to have children or to change one’s bodily appearance; and as need - as in economic need - which often prompts people to undertake migration and/or intimate labour). It also raises questions about different kinds of vulnerabilities, for of those who engage, and those who engage in, intimate labour. We use the term ‘bioprecarity’ to analyse those vulnerabilities.Less
This volume is concerned with the ways in which bioprecarity, here understood as the vulnerabilization of people as embodied selves, is created through regulations and norms that encourage individuals to seek or provide bodily interventions of different kinds. We explore this in particular in relation to intimacy and intimate labour, such as in the making of families and kin and in various forms of care work. Advances in biotechnology, medical tourism, and the visibilization of minoritized communities have resulted in unsettling the norms around the gendered body, intimate relations and intimate labour. Bodily interventions have socio-cultural meanings and consequences both for those who seek such interventions and for those who provide the intimate labour in conducting them. The purpose of this volume is to explore these. This exploration involves socio-cultural questions of boundary work, of privilege, of bodily ownership, of the multiple meanings of want (understood both as desire, for example, the desire to have children or to change one’s bodily appearance; and as need - as in economic need - which often prompts people to undertake migration and/or intimate labour). It also raises questions about different kinds of vulnerabilities, for of those who engage, and those who engage in, intimate labour. We use the term ‘bioprecarity’ to analyse those vulnerabilities.
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.
Suzanne Bost
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252042799
- eISBN:
- 9780252051654
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042799.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Analyzes the multiplication of autobiographical subjects in Rechy’s memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman) as well as in his fiction, an interactive CD-ROM he helped produce, and performance art ...
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Analyzes the multiplication of autobiographical subjects in Rechy’s memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman) as well as in his fiction, an interactive CD-ROM he helped produce, and performance art inspired by Rechy. These texts revolve around queer communal spaces, prefiguring contemporary theoretical work by Samuel Delaney and Judith/Jack Halberstam. Though Rechy and his characters claim to be narcissists, a vast web of connections links them to a cacophonous network of people, streets, parks, bars, animals, deserts, dirt, and garbage. Landscapes and seemingly marginal characters take the foreground at points and blend with the life of the supposedly central male protagonist. These blended agencies, the author argues, depersonalize the self.Less
Analyzes the multiplication of autobiographical subjects in Rechy’s memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman) as well as in his fiction, an interactive CD-ROM he helped produce, and performance art inspired by Rechy. These texts revolve around queer communal spaces, prefiguring contemporary theoretical work by Samuel Delaney and Judith/Jack Halberstam. Though Rechy and his characters claim to be narcissists, a vast web of connections links them to a cacophonous network of people, streets, parks, bars, animals, deserts, dirt, and garbage. Landscapes and seemingly marginal characters take the foreground at points and blend with the life of the supposedly central male protagonist. These blended agencies, the author argues, depersonalize the self.
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.
Joanne Begiato
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526128577
- eISBN:
- 9781526152046
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526128584.00006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this ...
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This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)Less
This introduction offers a rich overview of the scholarship on the histories of the body, emotions, and material culture as they relate to gender. It explains how Manliness in Britain develops this work to understand how bodies, emotions, and materiality helped construct masculinities in the long nineteenth century. It shows that a queer history approach, combined with theories of emotional bodies and emotional objects, offers a new way to think about manliness and unmanliness. The introduction is divided into three sections. It summarises histories relating to ‘being’ a man, focusing on the embodied qualities of manliness and on self-control, the primary means by which men were supposed to achieve idealised manly behaviour. It then assesses the scholarship relating to three domains in which manliness was understood to be performed and tested: war, home, and work. (135 words)
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.
Doris Leibetseder
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526138569
- eISBN:
- 9781526152138
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526138576.00011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of ...
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This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of seeking ART (Mamo 2007, 2013; Armuand et al., 2017). The bioprecarity of queer and transgender people is produced by the enactment of certain kinds of categorical framing (Foucault 1966, 1976; Summerville, 1998) in the laws regulating ARTs. Prohibitive laws in some states are often circumvented by going abroad. This chapter therefore argues that queer and trans people’s bioprecarity also results from the intimate labour queer and transgender people have to undertake to overcome prohibitive laws and hetero- and cisnormative medical institutions as shown e.g. in studies about trans people’s experiences with ART (James-Abra et al., 2015, Armuand et al., 2017).Less
This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of seeking ART (Mamo 2007, 2013; Armuand et al., 2017). The bioprecarity of queer and transgender people is produced by the enactment of certain kinds of categorical framing (Foucault 1966, 1976; Summerville, 1998) in the laws regulating ARTs. Prohibitive laws in some states are often circumvented by going abroad. This chapter therefore argues that queer and trans people’s bioprecarity also results from the intimate labour queer and transgender people have to undertake to overcome prohibitive laws and hetero- and cisnormative medical institutions as shown e.g. in studies about trans people’s experiences with ART (James-Abra et al., 2015, Armuand et al., 2017).
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.
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.
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.