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Introduction: Southern, Feminist, Queer: The Archive of Southern Lesbian Feminism

Jaime Harker

in The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon

The introduction situates the literary movement of Southern lesbian feminism within Southern Studies, histories of feminism and lesbian feminist, and queer studies, and suggests that the archive of ... More

The introduction situates the literary movement of Southern lesbian feminism within Southern Studies, histories of feminism and lesbian feminist, and queer studies, and suggests that the archive of Southern lesbian feminism revises and challenges each scholarly speciality.Less

An Uncommon Project

Laura Doan

in Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War

Recent queer history has begun to demonstrate that “queer” is very much a historical and historicized category. New work on the variations of sexuality has shown what a queer historical practice—as ... More

Recent queer history has begun to demonstrate that “queer” is very much a historical and historicized category. New work on the variations of sexuality has shown what a queer historical practice—as an epistemology and a methodology—might look like. However, progress in the development of queer historical practice belies the persistence of an “uncomfortable tension” between lesbian/gay history and queer studies. This chapter examines the results of the border crossings between academic history and queer studies in order to clarify what is at stake in determining how or if the history that outsiders produce differs from that of professionals. Some queer critics fashion a historical practice to suit their arguments and show little inclination to deepen their understanding of its range and diversity. Some trained historians, on the other hand, construe queer historical work as cultural criticism and miss opportunities to engage with bold queer theorizing of historicity, transhistoricism, temporality, and change.Less

Science Fiction Worlding and Speculative Sex

Alexis Lothian

in Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge ... More

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge between the discourse of “world-making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance and the idea of “world-building” common in science fiction studies. Delany’s fiction shows how the narrative tactics of science fiction, a genre whose most popular literary and media versions have tended to proffer timelines reliant on unmitigated heterosexuality, can turn against assumptions that the future must be straight, or at least arrived at through heterosexual reproductive logics. In Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), speculative iterations of 1970s and 1980s public sex cultures use genre tropes to reimagine sexual and racial temporalities in response both to the histories of enslavement and to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.Less

Introduction

Clare Croft

in Queer Dance

The Introduction offers key modes of entry into the larger project, both the anthology and the performance documentation and interview material on the website. First, the essay situates the larger ... More

The Introduction offers key modes of entry into the larger project, both the anthology and the performance documentation and interview material on the website. First, the essay situates the larger stakes of the project, identifying key impulses, including the centering of feminism, the representation of a range of queer geographies, a gathering of both concert and social dance forms, and a commitment to anti-racist and postcolonial work. Second, the essay positions Queer Dance relative to a range of definitions of queer. Third, the essay considers the larger ramifications of the project for both dance and queer studies. Finally, the essay concludes with an overview of the project, including offering possible pairings of the works that encourage “promiscuous engagements,” a spectatorial mode described as particularly queer in its openness to how work—both written and performed—might collide into provocative meaning-making.Less

Conclusion: On Cross-Cultural Contacts and Queer Desire

Katsuhiko Suganuma and Siu-lun Wong

in Contact Moments: The Politics of Intercultural Desire in Japanese Male-Queer Cultures

Chapter 7 discusses the future implications as well as the challenges provoked by the research findings of this book. Drawing on Elspeth Probyn's concept of the desire to ‘belong’, the chapter ... More

Chapter 7 discusses the future implications as well as the challenges provoked by the research findings of this book. Drawing on Elspeth Probyn's concept of the desire to ‘belong’, the chapter suggests the need of shifting our analytical focus from identity to desire in the context of cross-culturation. This book's analyses of Japan's queer contact moments with the West shed light on the desire to make sense of one's being through the process of adapting, rearticulating, shifting, and redefining binary oppositions such as local/global, Asia/West, and self/other. It is argued that the case studies in this book follow the footsteps of several queer beings and their desire to belong somewhere that they have yet to reach; each step being part of surface tensions through which they constitute their desires – the desires to put their lives in motion.Less

Sovereignty, Sexuality, and the Will to Knowledge

Cynthia Weber

in Queer International Relations

This chapter suggests that the discipline of international relations and the field of transnational/global queer studies suffer from mutual neglect. The effect of this mutual neglect is that ... More

This chapter suggests that the discipline of international relations and the field of transnational/global queer studies suffer from mutual neglect. The effect of this mutual neglect is that international relations underappreciates how sexuality functions in international relations theory and in foreign policy and that transnational/global queer studies underappreciates how sovereignty functions in transnational/global queer studies and in foreign policy. This book puts these two scholarly fields in conversation to begin to correct this problem. It argues that by putting (transnational/global) queer studies scholarship and (queer) IR scholarship in conversation around sexuality and sovereignty, not only do a plethora of sexualized and sovereign national, regional, and international figurations and their stakes for IR and for queer studies come into focus. So, too, do what this chapter calls queer logics of statecraft that confirm, contest, and extend understandings of how the will to knowledge about sexualized sovereign subjectivities functions in domestic and international games of power.Less

A Genealogy of Queer Native Literatures

Lisa Tatonetti

in The Queerness of Native American Literature

This chapter offers a provisional history of the authors, genres, and subjects of queer Native studies, narrating a map of relationships and thereby providing a much needed genealogy of the field. It ... More

This chapter offers a provisional history of the authors, genres, and subjects of queer Native studies, narrating a map of relationships and thereby providing a much needed genealogy of the field. It exhumes and invigorates genealogical connections, and as a way to demonstrate that the seeming renaissance of the twenty-first century stems from deep and abiding roots and long-standing Indigenous intellectual traditions. It also contributes to the ongoing conversation about queer images and texts in Native American and Aboriginal literatures.Less

Who’s Your Daddy?: Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region

Gayatri Gopinath

in The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power

This chapter examines the interrelationships among queer studies, diaspora studies, and area studies, with particular emphasis on the possibilities for a comparative queer studies project that is ... More

This chapter examines the interrelationships among queer studies, diaspora studies, and area studies, with particular emphasis on the possibilities for a comparative queer studies project that is routed and rooted in and through each of these fields. It considers the notion of the region as a way of interrogating the boundaries and presumptions of these disciplines as well as mapping sexual topographies in this transnational moment. It also places Tejaswini Niranjana's work, Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad, in conversation with the recent queer studies work on critical regionality in order to show how regional analyses can be used to foreground alternative solidarities and affiliations in the shadow of resurgent nationalisms and globalization. Finally, it explores the particular regional logic of gender and sexuality in Kerala, South India, and its representation, translation, and circulation in national and transnational circuits.Less

Brer Soul and the Mythic Being: Toward a Queer Logic of Dark Sense

Tavia Nyong'o

in Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Challenging accounts of black gender and sexuality that equate radicalism with misogynistic and patriarchal values, this chapter looks to the subversive cinema and performance art of the 1960s for ... More

Challenging accounts of black gender and sexuality that equate radicalism with misogynistic and patriarchal values, this chapter looks to the subversive cinema and performance art of the 1960s for prefigurations of the gender and sex nonconformity of today. Placing in counterpoint the theater and cinema of Melvin van Peebles and the performance and conceptual art of Adrian Piper, this chapter foregrounds the role of a funk epistemology in both cases. Contemporary queer and transgender art and aesthetics can only gain, this chapter argues, by acknowledging these works as sources of fabulation.Less

The Native 1970s: Maurice Kenny and Fag Rag

Lisa Tatonetti

in The Queerness of Native American Literature

This chapter analyzes Maurice Kenny’s early poetry from 1970s queer journals such as Fag Rag. Fag Rag is categorized as a gay male porn magazine because of its inclusion of essays with erotic content ... More

This chapter analyzes Maurice Kenny’s early poetry from 1970s queer journals such as Fag Rag. Fag Rag is categorized as a gay male porn magazine because of its inclusion of essays with erotic content and photographs and drawings of male bodies and sexual acts. Through the recovery and analysis of Kenny’s writing from Fag Rag, this chapter expands the understanding of the Native literary canon, showing that the current rise of queer Native studies and Two-Spirit critiques have their roots in an earlier time and in unexpected venues. Kenny’s writing from the periodicals of the gay cultural renaissance also highlights the ways in which Two-Spirit texts have offered new ways of reading, seeing, and imagining the world.Less

Queering Heterosexualities?: Metrosexuals and Sexually Fluid Straight Women

James Joseph Dean

in Straights: Heterosexuality in Post-Closeted Culture

This chapter highlights queered and nonnormative heterosexualities among the Black and White straight men and women. Bringing a queer studies perspective to bear on the narratives of the straight ... More

This chapter highlights queered and nonnormative heterosexualities among the Black and White straight men and women. Bringing a queer studies perspective to bear on the narratives of the straight interviewees, it analyzes the nonnormative practices of some straight men by focusing on the emergence of metrosexual identifications among them. Queered straight identifications, in contrast, are a development exclusively found among the women featured. These women described their sexual experiences with other women, which ranged from same-sex desires and fantasies to sexual encounters with bisexual women, lesbians, and other straight women as well. Queered straight identifications reveals the limit of binary thinking in that it misses the complexity of sexual identifications in post-closeted contexts, where some women define themselves as straight but have same-sex desires and experiences that complicate simple binary understandings of people as either heterosexual or homosexual.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

Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture

Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley

in Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration

This chapter presents a roundtable discussion on the intersections, divergences, and collisions between trans/queer politics and critical theory in service of abolishing the prison industrial ... More

This chapter presents a roundtable discussion on the intersections, divergences, and collisions between trans/queer politics and critical theory in service of abolishing the prison industrial complex. Working from recent interventions in critical prison studies that focus on the specificity of dis/ability, sexuality, and gender, the participants discuss the ways in which Derrida, Fanon, and Foucault push the analysis beyond legal comfort, prison reform, and constitutional fetishism. They consider a wide range of questions from the viability of contemporary formations of “queerness as anti-normativity” for the project of prison abolition, to the innocent/guilty binary as it appears in current mainstream political immigration debates and AIDS Action Now! and ACT UP HIV/AIDS activism, to the questions that arise with “neoliberal queer inclusion” in the carceral state. The responses pay careful attention to the perceived and possibly real antagonism between deconstruction and the materiality of prison, and they consider the moments when deconstruction can work in the interest of queer/trans, disability, race, and gender prison abolition activists.Less

Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil

Sam See, Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat

Christopher Looby and Michael North (eds)

in Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

The Young and Evil’s queerness undergirds its most consummately modernist ambitions: to renovate myth for modern purposes and to create folklore for a burgeoning ethnic community.

Class Dismissed

Allan Bérubé

in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

This essay describes how, in the mid-1990s, Berube was deeply involved in his research on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Beyond the reflections and writing it provoked about how class shaped ... More

This essay describes how, in the mid-1990s, Berube was deeply involved in his research on the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. Beyond the reflections and writing it provoked about how class shaped his own life experience, this work also pushed Berube to think deeply and analytically about how class operates in society. Here, in an address to an academic queer studies conference, Berube moves back and forth between historical episodes and personal experience as ways of illustrating the pervasiveness of class, even as class often gets dismissed in the United States as inconsequential. He calls for making class central to how queer scholars frame their work. Berube asks tough questions of himself and others, including “Whose [class] position do I want to make stronger by doing my intellectual work?”Less