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Doing Being Deviant

Heather Love

in Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

This chapter assesses the politics of contemporary queer studies, considering its longstanding difficulties with the ordinary and the everyday. Addressing recent debates in the field regarding the ... More

This chapter assesses the politics of contemporary queer studies, considering its longstanding difficulties with the ordinary and the everyday. Addressing recent debates in the field regarding the politics of anti-normativity, it traces how queer studies turned the descriptive study of deviance into a normative injunction to be deviant. It argues that the field of queer studies has fundamentally misunderstood the politics of deviance studies, which aimed not to disrupt social norms but instead to recognize and create space for marginal communities and practices. The chapter argues that strong claims about the stabilizing function of empirical methods should be understood in the context of disciplinary rivalry between the humanities and the social sciences. The field of queer studies has often understood itself as outside of disciplinary regimes of knowledge, and opposed to the university. But a more realist account of the field’s history and current entanglements will allow it to come to terms with the paradoxes of institutionalization and the material basis of its research practices.Less

Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and Lucrative in Doris Wishman’s Roughies

Finley Freibert

in ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman

This chapter examines the presence of bisexuality in the content and marketing of Wishman’s roughies of the 1960s and frames Wishman’s engagement with bisexuality though tracing the cultural history ... More

This chapter examines the presence of bisexuality in the content and marketing of Wishman’s roughies of the 1960s and frames Wishman’s engagement with bisexuality though tracing the cultural history of bisexuality within the historical context of the American sexual revolution. Reviewing gay and bisexual histories to show that queer audiences and urban spaces of sexual media consumption formed a significant and overlooked social context for the sexploitation film, Wishman’s earlier roughies, The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965) and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), are examined for formal and narrative techniques that centralized bisexual female protagonists. Wishman’s later roughie Too Much Too Often! (1967) is argued to reflect a bisexual address in not only its formal and narrative elements, but also its advertising techniques spanning newspaper ads, pressbook details, and the film’s trailer.Less

The Hospitable Aesthetics of Alison Bechdel

Vanessa Lauber

in The Comics of Alison Bechdel: From the Outside In

The birth of queer studies as an academic discipline is defined by its break from LGBT politics, with the goals of marriage and military service pitted against radical queer liberation. In broad ... More

The birth of queer studies as an academic discipline is defined by its break from LGBT politics, with the goals of marriage and military service pitted against radical queer liberation. In broad strokes, LGBT studies produces sexual orientation as a category, while queer studies seeks to upend categorical thought. Alison Bechdel’s unique insight into that tension arises from her complex and nuanced attempts to represent marginalized identities in a form that has been itself marginalized. Her politics of the outsider cannot be cast off in a dismissive reading of her popularity in the cultural imagination, nor hewn from the longer history of her formal innovation. Taken as a whole, the paradoxical and yet co-constitutive relationship between the queerness of her forms and the mainstream popularity of her texts performs a sort of queer world-building. To the extent that her work cultivates empathy or community, it does so not only, perhaps, in the service of identity-based movements or bald market capitalism, but also by modeling a more radical, relational aesthetic that illuminates the ongoing power of queer critique.Less

Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American “Others”

Lucille Cairns

in What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, ... More

This chapter focuses on a key text by the French pioneer of queer studies, Marie-Hélène Bourcier: Sexpolitiques: Queer Zones 2 (2005). Bourcier analyses the role of one central European institution, the French Republican state, in relation to nation-state rights of sexual and other marginalized groups. She arraigns the resistance of L’Université française to “imported” intellectual paradigms such as cultural studies and queer. She interrogates the role of the openly gay politician Delanoë (dubbed the ‘homo republicanus’). Further, she links contemporary French xenophobia and Republican sexual democracy, and exposes the clash between French feminist politics and queer. Bourcier excoriates Republican universalism, but my own critique of her multiple critiques will explore the dangers of another form of universalism, viz. a conceptual universalism that posits “Queer” as the correct theory of politics.Less

Abandoning the Past: Effacing History and Confronting Silence

Jonathan Fenderson

in Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s

This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences ... More

This chapter pierces the existing scholarly silence around Hoyt Fuller’s sexuality by exploring how sexual politics shaped both the life and afterlife of the editor. It maps the ways that silences around Fuller’s sexuality have been (de)constructed across time and space. It identifies exactly who helped manufacture these silences, speculates about factors that led to their production, gestures to the contexts out of which they emerged, and illuminates rare moments when some of these silences were punctured. By mapping the production (and shattering) of silences, the chapter offers insight into the ways movement activists responded to Fuller’s sexuality. His intimate life--as a man who had sex with other men (and women)--troubles conventional wisdom about the movement and Black nationalism, more broadly. The chapter argues that instead of being simplistic, dogmatic, or uniform in their thinking, movement participants thought about sexuality in complex, varied, and inconstant ways.Less

The Gods Know How to Run This World

Jorge García-Robles

in The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico

This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory ... More

This is an maginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Burroughs explores the culture of Mexico and studies Aztec and Maya history half-heartedly, living contentedly with Joan and the children. The couple lives a self-destructive lifestyle, and tragedy strikes when Joan is shot by Burroughs accidentally. The section includes a piece by Burroughs himself, “My Most Unforgettable Character.”Less

Thai Print Capitalism and Uncle Go in Transnational Queer History

Peter A. Jackson

in First Queer Voices from Thailand: "Uncle Go's Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians and Kathoeys"

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 ... More

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

Introduction Maurice through Time

Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai

in Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice'

The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only ... More

The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only influenced the direction of Forster studies but also exemplified wider disciplinary trends. It illustrates how, by addressing previously overlooked themes and contexts such as feminism, Aestheticism, allegory and body-soul relations, the present volume offers a ground-breaking examination of Maurice and its legacies, sharpening critical appreciation of this under-discussed work and expanding recent revisionist attention to the novel in new modernist scholarship. The fact that the novel can be read divergently, from various approaches including but not limited to those informed by the author’s own sexuality and the representation of same-sex desires in the text, and in different contexts and afterlives, not only signals its protean texture but also prompts us to reconsider our assessments of Forster the writer. What emerges from the volume, the Introduction suggests, is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon. Providing an overview of the volume’s three sections – interpersonal relationships, contemporary contexts and afterlives – the Introduction summarizes the contours of a new multifaceted understanding of Maurice set out in the volume.Less

Askance, athwart, aside: the queer plays of actors, auteurs and machines

Brad Epps

in Performance and Spanish Film

This chapter juxtaposes the Spanish ‘comedia de mariquitas’ [‘poofter comedy’] No desearás al vecino de quinto (Ramón Fernández, 1970) with Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (2004). By dissecting ... More

This chapter juxtaposes the Spanish ‘comedia de mariquitas’ [‘poofter comedy’] No desearás al vecino de quinto (Ramón Fernández, 1970) with Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa (2004). By dissecting Alfredo Landa’s performance in No desearás al vecino de quinto, the chapter studies how the actor’s on-and off-screen persona as modern-day everyman and his flamboyant character highlight the split between actor and his craft. It also shows how this performance brings to fore a queer performance of identity that dovetails with the ‘queer sensibility’ of Martel’s directorial hand. While insisting on the multiple positions available to queerness, particularly in two films that seem to teeter on its edge, this chapter questions what it can mean to perform humanity through utterances, gestures and glances, through objects, positions, and gestures.Less

What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?

Laure Murat

in What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic ... More

This chapter focuses on Ratatouille (2007), the story of Remy, a rat who becomes a chef. This spectacular animated movie could be read as a coming-out story, where the rat embodies the symbolic lonely gay, refined as an object of disgust, excluded and successful. Ratatouille is also a story about race, species and nationality in contemporary France. In this context, Queer studies is an appropriate tool to address a series of questions to this American reading of “old France” and its stereotypical symbols: is the French kitchen a metaphor of the “melting pot” where immigrants elaborate recipes whose basic principle is precisely to “mix” ingredients? Is the motto “anyone can cook” the culinary equivalent of French universalism, assuming that anyone can become French if they simply adopt French culture as their own?Less

Un-homing Asian American Studies: Refusals and the Politics of Commitment

Anita Mannur

in Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and ... More

Conversant with the previous chapter’s emphasis on the corporate, neoliberal university, Chapter 5 meditates on the ways in which Asian American studies is often diluted at the curricular and programmatic levels. This chapter also considers how other interdisciplines—namely Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies—face similar crises with regard to funding, appointments, and co-optations.Less

Girlfriends, Boyfriends, and Bright Young Things

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

The chapter explores Cunard’s circle of bohemian friends as it gives an analysis of women’s independence and the identification of that independence with lesbian sexuality. The chapter also examines ... More

The chapter explores Cunard’s circle of bohemian friends as it gives an analysis of women’s independence and the identification of that independence with lesbian sexuality. The chapter also examines Cunard’s relationship to Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Louis Aragon, rereading Huxley’s fictional portrayal of Cunard as femme fatale and his engagement with English primitivism. Cunard’s contributions to Vogue and avant-garde aesthetics and leftist politics are also investigated.Less

When Revolution Is Not Enough: Tracing the Limits of Black Radicalism in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and In Another Place, Not Here

Laurie R. Lambert

in The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the ... More

This chapter analyzes Dionne Brand’s poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), and her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). While Chronicles pinpoints the misrepresentation of the Grenada Revolution in anti-revolutionary narratives emanating from American imperialism, In Another Place highlights how structures of healing and alternative epistemologies of black radicalism are developed between queer women who are on the margins of both the postcolonial Caribbean nation and the revolution intended to subvert American imperialist forces. Brand’s writing interrogates the black radical tradition in search of a radical feminist politics that can account for gender and sexuality alongside race and class.Less

The touch of reading in Hollinghurst’s early prose

Angus Brown

in Alan Hollinghurst: Writing Under the Influence

Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked ... More

Before publishing The Swimming-Pool Library in 1988, the most substantial piece of writing that Alan Hollinghurst had completed was his 1977 Oxford M.Litt thesis. This early academic work is marked throughout by careful reading and a preoccupation with bibliography. This preoccupation grew into an obsession that characterizes the rather readerly eroticism of Hollinghurst’s first novel. Hollinghurst’s formative attention to the book as a student and a novelist offers a rare invitation to revisit both the hermeneutics and materiality of reading through the possibility of touch. Building on recent work in queer studies concerning touch and reading, this chapter presents a speculative blueprint for the queer mechanisms that underpin the structure of The Swimming-Pool Library and the intimacy of reading in Hollinghurst’s early work.Less

The Space–Time Continuum of the ‘Dangerous’ Body: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Securityscapes in Kyrgyzstan

Nina Bagdasarova

in Surviving Everyday Life: The Securityscapes of Threatened People in Kyrgyzstan

From the perspective of large parts of Kyrgyz society, 'non-traditional' relations do not only pertain to ethnically mixed couples but equally to same-sex partnerships. This chapter takes a look at ... More

From the perspective of large parts of Kyrgyz society, 'non-traditional' relations do not only pertain to ethnically mixed couples but equally to same-sex partnerships. This chapter takes a look at the securityscapes of individuals from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in Bishkek, who face similarly dire consequences if their sexual orientation or gender preference is found out. Their everyday life in public thus often resembles a continual masquerade. The chapter focusses, in particular, on an LGBT nightclub in the capital city. It argues that the stress of having to keep disguising oneself may occasionally excite moments of excess and frenzy, of experiencing one's 'true' self only in a temporary act of transgressing the norms of profane life.Less

Queer nationalism and colonial Ireland: Ulysses and At Swim, Two Boys

Alison Garden

in The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016

This chapter turns to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) to examine their (meta)modernist engagements with Casement and Ireland’s queer (post)colonial politics. ... More

This chapter turns to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) to examine their (meta)modernist engagements with Casement and Ireland’s queer (post)colonial politics. Casement is mentioned by name in both texts and is a figure that can be read, in many ways, as embodying Ireland’s own peculiar relationship to empire and anti-colonial nationalism. Both novels depict Irish nationalism as a curiously queer phenomenon and rereading Ulysses through Jamie O’Neill’s novel reveals a latent homoerotic energy in the Irish revolutionary generation and Irish nationalism more broadly.Less