This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to (...) Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. (shrink)

Biohacking involves individuals determining, developing, and directing relevant activities to meet their personal biological goals. Biohacking fertility is a resilient method that trans and genderqueer people use to meet their reproductive and family-planning needs in the face of historic medical marginalization and oppression. In this study, nine participants were recruited from three different Facebook groups specific to queer and trans fertility, family planning, pregnancy, and parenting. Each participant’s posts and comments to their respective Facebook group(s) were analyzed, followed by (...) interviews with participants. A total of 1,155 Facebook posts were collected. Biohacking activity—understood as a web of activity including gathering information, applying knowledge to personal circumstances, and sharing personal experiences and knowledge—was found in each of the three groups. Participants identified these online groups as safer spaces to learn more about their own fertility and find community. Participants were active in these groups to biohack their fertility at home and to become empowered at the doctor's office or fertility clinic, ultimately achieving agency in their fertility and family planning. (shrink)

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows (...) how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today. (shrink)

The history of modern and contemporary art provides many examples of the "queering" of cultural and social norms. It has been tempting to consider this process of subversion and transgression, or "outlaw representation", as well as related performances of "camp" or other gay inflections of the dominant forms of representation, to be the most creative mode of queer cultural production. Whether or not this is true in the history of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, we can identify a historical (...) process in modern culture that has worked in the opposite direction--namely, the constitution of aesthetic ideals, cultural norms that claim validity within an entire society, which have been based on manifestly homoerotic prototypes and significances. There has been little subversion or camp in these configurations. Indeed, perhaps there has been a surfeit of idealizing configuration and normalizing representation. But as Johann Joachim Winckelmann's art history and Immanuel Kant's aesthetics might suggest, such idealization can be no less queer than camp inflections or outlaw representations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queer Coal:Genealogies in/of the BloodKathryn YusoffIntroductionAn inhuman equationA genealogical account of coal ± a solar line of descentSolar -/- plant -/- coal ≤ plant minor/miner ≠ bloodlineFossil fuels are dark and patient and have a history that is in/of the blood. Fossil fuels are pockets of sunshine that have a solar line of descent. Fossil fuels are a chemical “blood knowledge” (Cixous 1991, 103) that coheres at the (...) seam, coal face, plant, and picket line.A genealogical account of coal in the Anthropocene must go in two directions: into the specificities of bodies, sites, and political formations in which coal comes to matter and through inhuman agency and its continuance notwithstanding the human (as if the human, like Bataille has claimed, is a roundabout for energy, a mere diversion of the forces of the cosmos). If the global claim for geologic force in the Anthropocene is realised through the liberation of vast standing stocks of fossil fuels by major powers, then slicing through Anthropocenic monumentality requires a deliberately minor/miner cut, which is made here through underground passages, sexual politics, and queer solidarities to explore the inter-implications of substances and subjects in coal mining; explicitly, mining is considered as an aesthetics, method, and epistemology that elaborates on an inhuman sociality of the blood; it is a sociality whose passages are specifically located within the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain. I focus on these minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) stories of solidarity and violence amidst the broader landscape of coal as a defining social materiality in political, judicial, and class powers. While Anthropocenic [End Page 203] discourses claim a global instantiation on behalf of humanity, the planet, and the species-being, this blood knowledge of coal can be considered as an instantiation or a fleshy reminder of the geontological forces of black rocks and their inheritances; what René Char called “its reality of earth, its matter-emotion” (Char quoted in Blanchot 1995, 108) in the corporeal impregnation of an incorporeal universe. In these messy personal-political subjectivities that are entangled with fossil fuels, something might be said about how to begin to apprehend the geontological coordinates of the Anthropocene and the possible forms of sociality that the inhuman enacts (and incites) in ways that eschew its universalising claims.In this process of joining coal to its somewhat unexpected sociopolitical formations—in terms of queer and minoritarian support for the British coal miners—I want to say something about a biopolitics that is subtended by geology (and this is why there is/and will be/blood). This is a biopolitics that moves away from the governance of life and death into a consideration of how the geosocial formations of fossil fuels constitute the very possibilities for certain types of social, sexual, political, and labor arrangements. To study the geosocial matrix as it pertains to both power and possibility is not to add the geologic (or inhuman) as a supplement to an already existing biopolitical conceptualization. Rather, it is to register that the geologic is a mode of material expression that is already active within these formations, yet often bracketed out, and its political potential as a dynamic power within socialities, underplayed. Such an understanding of the permeable materiality of fossil fuels might just bear on the reconceptualization of the Anthropocene as an epoch characterized by a differentiated corporeal geology of/in the blood, rather than as a universal stratigraphic trace in some future geologic record.Against the Promethean trust of the Anthropocene, I follow Hélène Cixous’s dream in The Book of Promethea of “writing fire in the fire” (Cixous 1991, 134); an account made in proximity to the desirous intersection of experience. Such a mode of feminist geophilosophy seeks out the form of the underground—the underground as a way of being or a “thing state” (Lispector 2014, 109)—closing the gap between writing and being written. What follows is a fragmented genealogy that begins in the general conditions of inhuman matter and ends up in the specifics of the British coal mining strike in the 1980s. First, some mining methodology and Anthropocene drill sites.Some Drill Sites... (shrink)

Here I discuss the conceptual structure and core semantic commitments of reason-involving thought and discourse needed to underwrite the claim that ethical normativity is not uniquely queer. This deflates a primary source of ethical scepticism and it vindicates so-called partner in crime arguments. When it comes to queerness objections, all reason-implicating normative claims—including those concerning Humean reasons to pursue one's ends, and epistemic reasons to form true beliefs—stand or fall together.

This paper explores comedy as a queer pedagogical form that subverts problematic representational tropes of queerness pervading mainstream depictions of queer experience. Articulating ‘form’ less as a fixed arrangement of characters, images, objects, and ideas, and more as a kind of formation that positions these in dynamic relation to the wider context in which comedies are encountered, we mobilise the idea of queer pedagogical forms to capture how comedy can foster new modes of thinking about (...) and embodying queerness for, and with, audiences. Drawing on specific examples from Schitt’s Creek and Derry Girls, we document the potential of specific comedic modalities (e.g. irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and slapstick) to foster alternative representations of queerness, in which normative tropes are poked fun at, problematised, and reimagined. Through these examples, we demonstrate how comedies can enable us to ‘laugh ourselves out of the closets’ we live by, feel, navigate, and embody. (shrink)

ExcerptQueer theory has a problem. This problem does not belong uniquely to queer theory, for it is common to and has consequences for all theory— social, psychological, literary, natural scientific, or otherwise—that seeks categories for the explanation of human phenomena. Queer theory, however, encounters and embodies this problem in uniquely significant ways. Queer theory seems, in fact, to have developed largely out of the friction generated by this problem in other earlier forms of theory—and may thus, ironically, (...) contain the only adequate answer to it.1 This problem is also hardly new, for it has exercised philosophers and critics from Kierkegaard to Feyerabend, from Kant to Žižek, from Schelling to de Man, Adorno, and Butler. It is the misery and the majesty of all theory. It is the tyranny of the universal over the particular. (shrink)

This article explores the queer qualities of feminist scientist Donna Haraway's ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. In the first part, the article investigates the similarities between ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and the ideas circulating in queer theory, including the hybridity of identity, and the disruption of totalizing social categories such as ‘Gay man’ and ‘Woman’. In the second part, it is argued that ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ evinced a decolonial feminist form of queerness. The article references the African-American, Chicana and Asian-American (...) feminist sociology, theory, literature and history that ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ takes up. The article does not wish to position Haraway's white-authored text as an authoritative voice on decolonial feminist queerness, instead arguing for the role of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ as a bibliographical work that readers may reference in their exploration of decolonial feminist beginnings of queer theory. (shrink)

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer (...) of color coalitional politics. Our tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Foucault and the Discourse of Sex‐Desire Power and Pleasure Reading Foucault on Pleasures Foucault's Use of Pleasure The Turn to Ancient Greco‐Roman Ethics Why Embrace an Ethics of Pleasures? References.

Drawing on 10 years of activism in Turkey’s trans movement and seven months of fieldwork in Istanbul on mutually formed mother and daughter relationship among trans women, this article looks at alternative understandings of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory. How can we engage alternative family making processes and non-normative formations of time with memory transmission rather than merely identify ‘inter-generational’ memory in advance with pre-established non-normative systems? Or can we talk about ‘inter-generational’ memories without knowing what ‘generation’ really means? Inspired by (...) these questions, Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory and narratives of self-identified trans mothers and daughters, in this article the author discusses the conceptualization of ‘queer postmemory’ in order to think critically on unmarked temporal and familial dimensions in the study of collective and personal memory. While refusing to position memory as an outcome of predetermined temporal frameworks within normative understandings of family, the author looks at strangely remembered things through glimpses of other types of time, other types of relationalities and other types of inheritability. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to save "the sexual" from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of (...) these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce's movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency. (shrink)

There is surprisingly scant research on queer subtext in The Wicker Man (1973). I suggest Lord Summerisle, who was portrayed by Christopher Lee, is a queer-coded villain. On the night Willow MacGregor deflowers an adolescent named Ash Buchanan, Summerisle observes a pair of copulating snails, quotes Walt Whitman, and envisions Howie alone in his bedroom. Most terrestrial snails are considered hermaphrodites and liking Whitman, who was probably queer, was historically a code for homosexuality. Summerisle recites Whitman’s poem (...) celebrating animals that ‘do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins’ or make him ‘sick’ discussing their ‘duty’ to the Christian God. The scene implies Summerisle wishes to deflower Howie the way Willow deflowers Ash, and mate with him like the snails. Summerisle resents Howie because his conservative Christianity prevents them from becoming lovers. Summerisle wants to believe Howie will reincarnate as his apple crops; he and his followers intend to consume his flesh and drink his blood in the form of fruit. Like Dracula, whom Lee was famous for playing, Summerisle seeks to penetrate Howie with his teeth in a metaphor for sex. (shrink)

A beginning question can organize our thoughts on Kara Keeling’s book, Queer Times, Black Futures. It is a question unasked explicitly in the book but one that lies implicit on each page: why should finance capitalism monopolize the future? For Keeling, the answer is undoubtedly that finance capitalism should not monopolize the future because it is wedded to a narrow conception of time that assumes linearity, predictability, and output. The goals of finance capitalism are to increase the bottom line (...) of corporations in efficient fashion and to position all forms of unknown futurity as a major threat to profit. But despite efforts of predictability, finance capitalism’s futurity lies in speculation; capitalism is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:36 Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Sonny Nordmarken Queering Gendering: Trans Epistemologies and the Disruption and Production of Gender Accomplishment Practices Those who are deemed “unreal” nevertheless lay hold of the real, a laying hold that happens in concert, and a vital instability is produced by that performative surprise. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Beginning in the 1960s, scholars began to theorize gender as (...) a contextually specific process rather than a universal category reflecting an essential pre-discursive sex. Two interrelated traditions developed: a discursive approach, which theorized gender as performative, and an interactionist approach, which investigated the interactional achievement of gender. For Judith Butler, “what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.”1 Gender is therefore performative : it is a series of effects produced through the repetition and citation of stylized acts, which are named via and thus produced through discourse ; discourse also produces the defining limits of subjects.2 Candace West and Don Zimmerman theorized gender as a “routine, methodical, 1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 2. Butler, Gender Trouble; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Sonny Nordmarken 37 and recurring accomplishment” produced in social interaction.3 They observed how, in the relational process of “doing gender,” social actors display gender, presenting an appearance to others, who attribute gender by interpreting this appearance. In this article, I investigate how actors interactionally challenge and construct discursive structures in order to contribute to scholarship that analyzes the role language plays in such interactions.4 Following Sandy Stone, who suggests that transsexuals are not a class, nor a third gender, but a genre, “a set of embodied texts,” who, through their interpretation, might potentially disrupt dichotomous sexuality and gender categories, I examine the spaces in which the discursive and the interactional merge to investigate how gender minorities, as simultaneous subjects, texts, social actors, and cultural workers, queer hegemonic gender practices.5 I argue that members of trans linguistic communities and gender nonconforming individuals queer the normative gender process in two ways: by productively linguistically communicating third-person gender pronouns and by disruptively inhibiting gender’s hegemonic attribution. Lal Zimman has made parallel observations, explaining linguistic gender self-determination practices as a new cultural phenomenon, focusing on terminology for types of gendered persons, grammatical gender forms (i.e., pronouns), and lexical items that relate to embodied sex.6 My analysis builds on Zimman’s observations using sociological, performance 3. Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender & Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 126. 4. For example, see Mimi Schippers, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2007): 85–102. 5. Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 296. The term “gender minorities ” encompasses individuals identifying with gender identity terms other than those they were assigned and individuals with gender nonconforming appearance. 6. See Lal Zimman, “Transgender Language Reform: Some Challenges and Strategies for Promoting Trans-affirming, Gender-Inclusive Language,” Journal of Language and Discrimination 1, no. 1 (2017): 84–105; Lal Zimman, “Trans People’s Linguistic Self-Determination and the Dialogic Nature of Identity,” in Representing Trans: Linguistic, Legal, and Everyday Perspectives, ed. Evan Hazenberg and Miriam Meyerhoff (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2017). 38 Sonny Nordmarken studies and performativity frameworks to theorize these practices. By approximating new gender pronoun-attribution norms that bring a trans queer paradigm to life in interactions and by disregarding their perceptions of each other’s bodies, actors accomplish gender pronouns linguistically, override hegemonic gender attribution norms, and reorganize gender accountability. These practices institutionalize a new interpretive frame and accountability structure through which social actors create and recognize a variety of gender expressions, identities, and pronouns, reworking performativity to produce gender minorities as subjects. I argue that this gendering-queering is a form of disidentificatory gender accomplishment. In addition, I... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the DiasporaDavid William Foster (bio)Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. xxvii + 242 pp.Is "queer" a particularly relevant denomination for Puerto Rican cultural production because of the deep and abiding contradictions of Puerto Rican society, which swings back and forth between two dominant parties (statehood vs. commonwealth status), (...) but with a firm imaginary in a party that cannot seem to win elections (independence)? Or is it because of the peculiar relationship it has with the U.S. mainland, which hardly prizes its Spanish-speaking heritage and its quality as a nation of people of color? Or is it simply because, as Puerto Ricans profit from the dynamics of queer American society they only seem to exist in greater abundance than in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil? Can the influence of American feminism account for the appreciable concentration of Puerto Rican lesbians? Does the possibility of unrestricted residence in the United States. mainland enhance access to a wider array of movement politics, performance spaces, publications venues, and university and other institutional positions than would be possible in Puerto Rico or in any other Latin American society? Finally, does the stateside training of so many outstanding Puerto Rican scholars like Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes simply mean that there is a larger pool of critical voices to register, analyze, and—yes—promote Puerto Rican queers? Certainly, whatever the other reasons, it was the availability of the latter that allowed us to give a particularly prominent representation of Puerto Ricans in the 1994 Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook.Let me underscore from the outset that La Fountain-Stokes's point of reference is the extensive representation of Puerto Rican queers in American society, a large majority of whom write in English, work with U.S.-based institutions, and publish in English-language and U.S.-based forums. While some may move back and forth between the mainland and the island and publish in Spanish outside the mainland (in Puerto Rico or elsewhere), the emphasis of his study is on Puerto Rican queers in the U.S. Indeed, as La Fountain-Stokes articulates at the outset of his study, his purpose is to overcome the elision of sexuality in examinations of mainland-island patterns of migration [End Page 66] and to "transform Puerto Rican migration studies paradigms by showing how attitudes toward stigmatized forms of same-sex sexuality and gender variance provoke and affect migration, and how artists, writers, filmmakers, dancers, choreographers, and performers have documented and discussed this fact" (ix).La Fountain-Stokes, who is himself a highly accomplished queer Puerto Rican writer and a scholar with well-established credentials in the field, makes use of a range of three theoretical perspectives in organizing this study: (1) the sociohistorical question of migratory patterns between the U.S. mainland and the island of Puerto Rico, a question that has mostly been cast in political and economic terms, but which the author insists must be revised in terms of an inventory of sexualities and sexual identities that are exercised and performed in terms of the differences between life in one or another locale and, one might add, in terms of the experience of life in the United States in differing locales; (2) the question of theorizing sexuality, particularly the axis/continuum between heterosexual and nonheterosexual and the continuum between different and differing instantiations of the nonheterosexual, but primarily between gay and queer; and (3) theoretical postulates relating to queerness that may or may not intersect and collide with matters of national and/or ethnic identity. The very phrase "queer [Puerto] Ricans" is structurally ambiguous: are we talking about Puerto Ricans who are queer (as opposed to Puerto Ricans who are not queer, a restrictive qualification), or are we talking about all Puerto Ricans, one of whose characteristics is that they are queer, an extensive qualification)? La Fountain-Stokes's inventory of analysis makes clear that the former is the basic emphasis of his research, but the actual performative content of many of the examples of cultural production he... (shrink)

‘Bioethics still has important work to do in helping to secure status equality for LGBT people’ writes Timothy F. Murphy in a recent Bioethics editorial. The focus of his piece, however, is much narrower than human rights, medical care for LGBT people, or ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rather, he is primarily concerned with sexuality and gender identity, and the medical intersections thereof. It is the objective of this response to provide an alternate account of bioethics from a Queer perspective. (...) I will situate Queer bioethics within Queer studies, and offer three ‘lessons’ that bioethics can derive from this perspective. These are not definitive rules for Queer bioethics, since it is a field which fundamentally opposes categorizations, favoring pastiche over principles. These lessons are exploratory examples, which both complement and contradict LGBT bioethics. My latter two lessons – on environmental bioethics and disability – overlap with some of Murphy's concerns, as well as other conceptions of LGBT bioethics. However, the first lesson takes an antithetical stance to Murphy's primary focus by resisting all forms of heteroconformity and disavowing reproduction as consonant with Queer objectives and theory. The first lesson, which doubles as a primer in Queer theory, does heavy philosophical lifting for the remainder of the essay. This response to Timothy F. Murphy, whose work is certainly a legacy in bioethics, reveals the multiplicity of discourses in LGBT/Queer studies, many of which are advantageous – even essential – to other disciplines like bioethics. (shrink)

: Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not merely consequent to (...) compulsory heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge. (shrink)

Utilizing examples from recent art, we critique Greta Gaard's argument that an inclusive ecofeminism must account for the role played by erotophobia in oppression. We suggest that while Gaard offers valuable insight into how fear of the erotic contributes to maintaining heteropatriarchal institutions, it fails to account for forms of oppression specific to lesbians. Moreover, Gaard's analysis unwittingly reinforces the conceptual, hence political, economic, and social invisibility of lesbians that, following Marilyn Frye, we argue is not merely consequent to compulsory (...) heterosexuality, but constitutive of it. Lastly, we sketch a lesbian erotic whose potential for generating conceptual dissonance within heteropatriarchal value dualism contains the seeds of a creative "sensibility" out of which a genuinely queer ecofeminism might emerge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange by Helen PalmerTrevor Norris (bio)Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-4744-3414-0Helen palmer is senior lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Kingston University in London and the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014). Her research examines queer theory, performance, literary modernism, gender, aesthetics, and (...) feminist and Afrofuturist fiction. Queer Defamiliarisation explores these ideas and also includes part of Palmer’s literary creative response to James Joyce. The project here is an inquiry into reading, thinking, writing, and pleasure and considers how language can change us when we experience the relationship between naming and the performance of identity as a material boundary: the places where our bodies, behavior, and language are subject to violence in gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms. Palmer also suggests how our own and others’ experiences of violence might be bound up with an aesthetics of linguistic and formal complexity, and she reimagines the difficulty of naming for violently excluded identities by reviewing a range of complex experimental and avant-garde literary works in which new identities can emerge. Showing us how we might understand the materiality of bodies, sense making, and desire in emancipa-tory ways, Palmer attunes us to a phenomenology of reading in which we [End Page 217] recognize how argument undergoes metamorphosis by always being a hybrid of theory, criticism, cultural history, appropriation, memoir, and experimental form. Palmer’s wide-ranging arguments speak about the porosity and mutual embeddedness of our selves, our language, our bodies and environments, and the queer processes of world creation that act on and emerge from these things. Placing her work with other texts that rethink gender, personhood and ecology through new materialisms is productive, therefore, and readers might find value in looking at Queer Defamiliarisation alongside Donna Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble, Timothy Morton’s (2019)Humankind, and Rebecca Tamás’s (2020) Strangers inasmuch as they think through the ethics and emergence of relatedness and examine what it means to play, be alongside, care for, and nurture other beings and their worlds. Palmer’s project stays with the kind of “serious and... lively” trouble that allows “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Haraway 2016, 4).The fertile landscape is mapped out in three introductions whose themes are explored in four chapters. Palmer transforms the early-twentieth-century Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization as literary and aesthetic device, the “paradoxical process that... restores sensations to things through a [linguistic] distancing that is also a re-proximation, an approximation, a touching” (9), by reading early- to mid-twentieth-century literary and cultural theorists such as Shklovsky, Brecht, and Jakobson through the ideas of contemporary queer, feminist, and decolonial scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Rosi Braidotti, and Vicki Kirby. She questions how the estrangement of naming operates for those whose bodies are not normatively gendered, racialized, and sexualized in relation to dominant forms of representation and power and explores concerns with and for queer, trans, decolonial, and feminist aesthetics. Throughout, she encourages us to think of the strangeness of language in relation to an ethics and an erotics of radical sympathy with the stranger because it is in the “continuous movement and continual transformation” (13) of naming, and categories of naming, that an emancipatory ethics can be found. This is a timely intervention by Palmer given current anxieties around naming gender and sex, and her argument seeks to move beyond “unhelpful binaries” to acknowledge the “infinite variations and permutations of existence and experience” (14).Palmer productively combines Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation from Queer Phenomenology (2006) with the psycholinguistic registers of Jakobson’s “contiguity and displacement” to suggest that queer defamiliarization is a performance of language and naming that “cleaves through and between sameness and difference,” “knocking signifiers loose and ungrounding bodies,” leading to “perceptual shifts and corporeal responses” that can “materially en-gender newness” (Palmer 17). From the start of the section “Spectaxa” (152), Palmer foregrounds the materiality of her text in increasingly modernistic excess to illustrate what we have been reading and... (shrink)

On November 4, 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, and accordingly same-sex marriage was banned under the state constitution. Proposition 8 is now being considered by the Supreme Court. The proposition has sparked national debate about the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens’ sexuality and corresponding rights; calling into question the practice of allocating rights and privileges on the basis of sexuality and family form. Proponents of the proposition, who can be classified as predominantly socially conservative, (...) want to maintain the status and privileges of marriage for heterosexuals; arguing that allowing same-sex marriage threatens the legitimacy, sanctity and strength of traditional heterosexual marriage . This article examines the extent to which three Californian pro-same-sex marriage organizations (Equality California, Join the Impact, and the Courage Campaign) have challenged and/or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses in their effort to gain access to the rights and privileges that are currently administered through marriage. (shrink)

This paper takes as its queer object a serialized podcast. With its story about John B. McLemore, a clockmaker from Woodstock, Alabama, S-Town is a blockbuster success from the producers of Serial and This American Life. Against both affirmative and negative reception of S-Town – responses that tend to position the podcast either as transcending or as reproducing the idea of a backwards or lagging South – this paper argues that S-Town is an intermedial narrative incorporating various media that (...) themselves comprise competing temporalities. Indexing these alternative temporalities are the intricate designs of clocks and sundials that tell of mythological time and seasonal and diurnal rhythms. There are also tattoos and other inscriptions that mark both bodies and sundials. My argument attends to the animate and inanimate forms narratively contained within the podcast, touching on Rebecca Schneider’s idea of “interanimation” and Elizabeth Freeman’s challenges to “chrononormativity” in the process. From within this intermedial structure, John emerges as an intermediary whose engagement in processes of self-objectification and historical re-enactment complicates a normative timeframe and confounds conventional subject/object relations. Through a consideration of what I call the queerly intermedial form of the S-Town podcast, the essay looks beyond both discrete forms and regional/national concerns to gesture toward the significance of broader networks and spheres for thinking about time, space and being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 67 Leila J. Rupp Queer Dilemmas of Desire The dilemmas of desire confronting young women in contemporary US society are all too familiar. In the face of the persistent double standard that separates sluts from good girls, young women mobilize a variety of strategies: they lack desire, deny desire, restrain desire, police desire, and sometimes embrace desire. (...) They confront expectations to be sexy but not too sexual even as they insist on the right to be just as sexually active as men. Even in the hookup scene on college campuses, potentially liberating in its facilitation of noncommittal sexual encounters, young women worry about hooking up too much. It is a familiar story, but one that most often leaves behind young women with queer desires. Where they do appear, there are hints that they are not as likely to suppress their desires as straight women, no doubt because it is hard to ignore one’s desires when they fly in the face of heteronormative expectations. But it is also hard to come to grips with queer desires, and that is why the dilemmas I explore here are different. Unlike young straight women working to control their desires, the queer students whose stories I tell report awareness and acceptance of their attractions, sometimes from a very young age. Yet they encounter other kinds of dilemmas, especially uncertainty about the boundary between erotic love and intense friendship, a dilemma harking back to an earlier world of romantic friendship. And in the end, despite a contemporary social context in which nonnormative sexualities are more visible than ever before, 68 Leila J. Rupp experiencing queer desires continues to elicit confusion. Much has changed, but much has not. We know a great deal about straight dilemmas of desire. On the one hand, the double standard that separates sluts from good girls has persisted, despite the loosening of restrictions we associate with the sexual revolution of the long 1960s. In the face of slut shaming, young women continue to mobilize a variety of strategies, which Deborah Tolman has documented so eloquently in Dilemmas of Desire. Young women of color face additional obstacles to enjoying their desire, as the Latina girls we encounter in Lorena Garcia’s Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself make clear through their policing of their own and other girls’ sexuality in the face of racist stereotypes of unrestrained sexuality and teenage motherhood.1 On the other hand, a whole raft of commentators depict young women increasingly insisting on the right to be just as sexual as men. From Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs to Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex to Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls, critics lament young women embracing sex as a form of empowerment.2 The tension arising from the contradictory responses of young women to the demands placed on their sexuality is nowhere clearer than in the ongoing debate about the impact of hookup culture on women. Is hooking up good for women because it allows them to be sexual while pursuing their studies and career goals unencumbered by intimate relationships, as Hannah Rosin has suggested? Or is it, as Kathleen Bogle first argued in Hooking Up, exploitative in fashioning sexual encounters around men’s preference for sex without commitment? Or is it somewhere in between, with some 1. See Leora Tanenbaum, Slut! Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (New York: Berkeley Books, 2002); Sarah A. Miller, “’How You Bully a Girl:’ Sexual Drama and the Negotiation of Gendered Sexuality in High School,” Gender & Society 30, no. 5 (2016): 721–44; Deborah L. Tolman, Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Lorena Garcia, Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 2. Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005). See also Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (New York: HarperCollins, 2016); Nancy Jo Sales, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of... (shrink)

Two-Spirit men's sexual conquest stories—or what I am calling sexual coup stories—narrated more than just the sexual encounter. In fact, actual sexual acts are often secondary to the circumstances producing the sexual encounter. In this study, coup stories serve as a form of data revealing the ways in which sexual conquest is a sociosexual practice thoroughly embedded in broader Native community values and cultural patterns for the movement of bodily desire across landscapes predating humanist intellectual and moral intervention. Thus, (...) the intra-acting agencies of Native sexual circulation provide the opportunity to enact a culturally specific form of material-discursive order that when viewed from the epistemological metropole look highly entropic . Yet, Native sexual ontology realizes itself in the phenomena of a sexual circulation whose material-discursive practices appear to be disordered from the highly ordered humanistic center. (shrink)

The emergence of queer ideas has unsettled other forms of exploring gender and sexuality, in particular feminism. In response, feminists have been significant critics of queer ideas. This book, through the contribution of important US and UK writers, seeks to explore the debates between feminist and queer theorizing in order to seek out interconnections between the two; they identify new directions in thinking about sexuality and gender that may emerge out of and at the interface.

This book analyses contemporary gay "pig" masculinities, which have emerged alongside antiretroviral therapies, online porn, and new sexualised patterns of recreational drug use, examining how they trouble modern European understandings of the male body, their ethics, and their political underpinnings. This is the first book to reflect on an increasingly visible new form of sexualised gay masculinity, and the first monograph to move debates on condomless sex amongst gay men beyond discourses of HIV and/or AIDS. It contributes to existing (...) critical histories of sexuality, pornography and other sex media at a crucial juncture in the history of gay male sex cultures and the HIV epidemic. The book draws from fieldwork, interviews, archival research, visual analysis, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies, using empirical, critical, and speculative methodologies to better think gay "pig" masculinities across their material, affective, ethical and political dimensions, in a future-oriented, politically-inflected, reflection on what queer bodies may become. Spanning historical context to empirical and theoretical study, Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures will be of key interest to academics and students in sexuality studies, film, media, visual culture, cultural studies, and porn studies concerned with masculinities, sex and sexualities and their circulation across an array of media. (shrink)

The ongoing global pandemic of Covid-19 has exposed SARS-CoV-2 as a potent non-human actant that resists the joint scientific, public health and socio-political efforts to contain and understand both the virus and the illness. Yet, such a narrative appears to conceal more than it reveals. The seeming agentiality of the novel coronavirus is itself but one manifestation of the continuous destruction of biodiversity, climate change, socio-economic inequalities, neocolonialism, overconsumption and the anthropogenic degradation of nature. Furthermore, focusing on the virus – (...) an entity that holds an ambiguous status between the ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ – brings into question the issue of the agentiality of non/living matter. While the story of viral potency seems to get centre stage, overshadowing the complex and perverse entanglement of processes and phenomena which activated these potentials in the first place, the Covid-19 pandemic also becomes a prism that sheds light on the issues of environmental violence; social and environmental injustices; more-than-human agentiality; and ethico-political responses that the present situation may mobilise. -/- This article serves as a written record of joint conversations between artists and researchers in the working group ‘Non/Living Queerings’ that formed part of the online series of events ‘Braiding Friction’ organised by the research project Biofriction. The article strives to capture the collective effort of braiding and weaving a variety of situated perspectives, theoretical toolboxes, knowledges and experiences against the background of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the text focuses on the issues of crisis, ‘amplification effect’, viral agency and the changing notions of humanity. (shrink)

In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or “ Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non- factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport (...) to state facts.1 Define semantic realism to be the view that ascriptions of meaning are apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, and are, at least in some instances, true. Semantic realism, thus defined, is a form of cognitivism about semantic judgement, according to which judgements ascribing meaning express beliefs, states apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues against semantic realism, and in favour of a form of semantic non-cognitivism. However, another form of opposition to semantic realism accepts that semantic judgements express beliefs but asserts that those beliefs are systematically and uniformly false.2 This cognitivist form of opposition to semantic realism is similar to the error-theoretic form of opposition to moral realism mooted by J.L. Mackie in the first chapter of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. In this paper I will investigate whether there is a plausible analogue of Mackie’s “argument from queerness” that can be used to make a case for an error-theory of semantic judgement. In §2 I set out what I take to be Mackie’s argument from queerness against moral realism. In §3 I argue that there is no straightforward and plausible analogue of that argument that would justify an error theory about ascriptions of meaning. In §4 and §5 I defend the argument of §3 against an objection developed in a recent paper by Daniel Whiting. (shrink)

Queer objects are crucial to the narrative strategies of Dennis Cooper’s George Miles cycle where they support his exhaustive inventory of what it means to have a sexual type. In Frisk, Cooper transforms some objects into media to blur the boundaries between the writing subject and the objects he desires. The snuff photos, seen at too young an age, form the point of reference for Dennis the narrator’s erotic life but they acquire their force in a looping narrative (...) structure that calls into question their status as representation as well as their capacity to communicate. The novel thus elicits a new theorization of the relation between objects and media that discloses the stakes for fiction in a queer subjectivity that takes the self as another object at the same time as it probes the limits of realism. I situate Cooper in a genealogy of autofiction that extends back to Marcel Proust and Jean Genet and forward to J.T. LeRoy, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Sheila Heti. The essay concludes by contrasting Cooper’s narrative achievements to the collapse of the writing subject into the autobiographical self in the more recent examples. (shrink)

Queer cinema takes shape between experimental film, the intimate diary form, art video, documentary, dream fiction, recording and militant video-tracts. In the introductory article, we address several dimensions of this creation : one reflects a practice in queer art according to localized experience, as in the films of Hervé Guibert, David Wojnarowicz, and Raphaël Vincent or the photographic work of Del LaGrace Volcano, based on the experience of AIDS or trans-identities. Another dimension is the attempt to constitute (...) a sexual cinema, with Hans Scheirl or Maria Beatty : these are explorations of an exploded, « de-gendered » body, which directly connects moving images to chemical and bodily transformations, inner mental sensations, jouissance and deterritorialized sexual practices. Lastly, we discuss in more general terms the emergence of a queer cinema which serves as a site for the elaboration of a counter-cinema, a withdrawal from cinema which casts a hegemonic gaze on subaltern political subjects. The documentary genre is then hollowed out from within by this decolonizing gesture. (shrink)

_The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research_ represents the editors’ intention to disrupt cycles of thinking about the place of queer theory in educational research. The book aims to encourage dialogue about the objects and subjects of queer research, the forms of politics incited by the use of queer theory in education, and the methodological approaches used by scholars when queering. The contributions to this book come from those who find queer theory problematic, (...) as well as from those who continue to see a productive place for queer research in education, however that may be defined. The editors have collected contributions that attend to the boundaries that are placed around queer research in education by researchers themselves, and by peers, ethics committees, funding bodies and university and government bureaucracies. Considering how key researchers in gender and education identify with, or deliberately distance themselves from, queer theory, this collection grapples with the contemporary cultural politics of doing queer theoretical work in different education spaces and places. In short, it seeks to disrupt what people think they already know about the ‘place’ of queer theory in education. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. _. (shrink)

Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity suggests that if existentialism is vulnerable to accusations of solipsism and nihilism, this is because Sartre failed to approach ambiguity from the proper angle. Of all the forms of ambiguity described in this text, the most troubling conjoins human separateness with connection. From the essays of the 1940s to her lectures on literature during the 1960s, Beauvoir struggles to articulate the ethics of this form of ambiguity. Her refusal to deny the “anti‐social” aspect of existence (...) finds echoes in today's tensions between feminists and queer theorists. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics (...) and epistemology of placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 757 Ramzi Fawaz How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation Let me begin with two stories. In spring of 2013 I organized a semester -long, undergraduate film series at George Washington University titled “Acting Up: Queer Film and Video in the Time of AIDS.” At semester ’s end, after (...) participants had watched nine films about the AIDS epidemic —among them classic AIDS documentaries, activist videos, and mainstream Hollywood productions—I chose to conclude the series with the 1991 documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Silverlake Life documents a year in the lives of Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, a gay couple living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s who share an HIV diagnosis. At the time I made the selection, I did not realize that Silverlake Life documents one of the most devastating lived experiences of the AIDS epidemic ever filmed: during the course of taping, Tom, the initial documentarian, becomes gravely ill and dies on camera while lying in bed after a week-long convalescence. Reviewing this scene before our official screening, I found myself overwhelmed by intense feelings of anxiety. On the one hand, I felt a deep responsibility to expose my students to the aesthetic and political work of this daring documentary, and on the other, to protect them from witnessing forms of suffering that might traumatize them more than illuminate the social history of AIDS. When we convened to discuss the film, many students expressed how devastated they were by what they had seen. Rather than shutting down conversation, however, the depth and intensity of their viewing 758 Ramzi Fawaz experience galvanized an extraordinary conversation about the ethics of documenting the lives (and deaths) of people with AIDS. What they witnessed expanded the very possibilities of what they could feel about issues of collective concern such as the AIDS epidemic, while also transforming their ability to reconsider productive encounters with pain, suffering, and trauma. In my fear of negatively impacting students, I had forgotten both their capacity to respond with generosity and openness to traumatic images as well as my own careful curation of nine previous films and the attendant conversations held around them, which had laid a groundwork of shared affective openness to difficult content. One year later, as a newly minted assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I taught a large lecture course on American fantasy. In the fourth week of class, I screened The Wizard of Oz as part of a unit on the Hollywood musical, and I devoted a lecture to a gay and lesbian interpretation of this classic film. I highlighted the movie ’s camp aesthetics, its gender play and drag elements, and its derailing of traditional heterosexual romance plots. As a gay man well versed in queer media scholarship, I took it for granted that this was a pleasurable but patently obvious interpretation of a film that I assumed most people recognized for its exuberant and visually spectacular gayness. Yet as I spoke, I sensed a visceral tension build in the room. Half the students seemed mesmerized by the possibility of a queer aesthetic underlying the movie, while the other half frowned at me in silent fury, outraged by my daring to desecrate the presumed innocence of a childhood escape. The seething resentment of this latter group was confirmed for me when, weeks later, my teaching assistants disclosed that numerous students had expressed feelings of anger and frustration that my interpretation had “ruined” their pleasure in a beloved film of their youth. This circumstance prompted me to confront my students the following week: microphone in hand, I strolled the room and asked students to account for their feelings of discomfort. I wanted them to explain why their personal pleasure in The Wizard of Oz hinged on the diminishment of alternative viewing possibilities, including unexpected queer delights in transparently “straight” narratives. Students were clearly jolted out of their complacent belief that no one would hold them accountable for their perspective, or that their view might have political or ethical consequences: yet the resistance of some to being called... (shrink)

These essays highlight the shifting sets of relationships which determine the forms taken by desire. They argue that the spread of the subject within and across geographic, ethnic, class and gender boundaries makes a difference to the ways in which desire is theorized, experienced and represented.

Radical feminism has critiqued heterosexuality both as a primary means through which people are constituted as women and as men, and as inherently oppressive for women. Two recent developments challenge this critique: the concept of “virgin” heterosexuality, a form of heterosexuality in which the performance of heterosexual sex, with or without sexual intercourse, is voluntarily chosen, and “queer” heterosexuality, a concept derived from postmodernist and queer theory, which does not only reinscribe, but also actively subverts and disrupts, (...) oppressive categories of gender and sexual orientation. This article analyzes the attempts made in “virgin” and “queer” theory to rehabilitate heterosexuality, and finds both fundamentally flawed from a radical feminist perspective. It ends by considering why such rehabilitatory attempts are currently being made, and what they reveal about heterosexuality. (shrink)

This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I trace (...) how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the seemingly incompatible epistemologies of sex offered by dominance (‘governance’) feminism and queer theory. While these bodies of work, especially when applied to US legal and political activity on prostitution, are commonly viewed as divergent sparring partners, I propose a ‘convergence’ of the two in the form of a revived and enhanced sex-positive feminism. If dominance feminism is the ‘theory of no’ to heterosexuality’s male gender power, and if queer theory is the (...) ‘theory of yes’ to the defiant possibilities of sex, sex-positive feminism is a ‘theory of maybe’: it examines practices of gender and sexuality in multiple contexts to find the ways in which heterosexuality can sometimes reify, and other times resist, the transfer of eroticised dominance and submission to political practices of patriarchy. After tracing the split between feminism and queer theory and arguing for a ‘sex-positive queer feminism’, I use the example of prostitution to consider some theoretical and practical implications of this shift in feminist lenses. (shrink)

Call for Paper The 2014 publication of three of Jeremy Bentham’s extensive manuscript papers on sexual nonconformity as _ Of Sexual Irregularity and Other Writings on Sexual Morality _ has inspired a wide range of new scholarship on the relationship between utilitarianism and queer theory and history. Bentham’s sexual nonconformity papers demonstrate that the experiences of pleasure and pain are individual to each person, and thus, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" necessitates the maximal toleration of as many (...) experiences of happiness as there are persons, rather than a normative or hierarchical delineation of acceptable forms of happiness. Bentham asserts that differences in sexuality and gender must be accounted for in epistemology, law, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and theology, and addresses these differences in the context of oppression on the basis of race, gender, class, religious dissent, disability, and animal species. In the context of Bentham’s sexual nonconfor... (shrink)

Accelerationism offers a uniquely robust theory of the future as a subject for political contestation. In this way, it is surprisingly close to the concerns of queer theory. Like queer theory in its engagement with temporality, acclerationism works to describe the causal relations between past, present, and future. However, where queer theory attributes agency to affect and aesthetics, accelerationists look to rational control. In this contribution, I demonstrate that accelerationist rationality undoes itself, involuting into a form (...) of demonic possession that might also be the basis for a queer future-working. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 81-101 [Access article in PDF] Sex without Sex, Queering the Market, the Collapse of the Political, the Death of Difference, and AIDS: Hailing Judith Butler Brett Levinson It is interesting to note that in Judith Butler's study of the social construction of sex, Gender Trouble (as well as in the sequel, Bodies That Matter), one finds barely a trace of sex. Or to put matters more (...) bluntly: in Butler's study of gender critiques that avoid or dismiss the matters of hetero- and homosexuality, in her examination of the relationship of gayness and lesbianism to feminism, and in her exposition of a politics of queerness--as to fucking, not a word. This omission is not tangential to Gender Trouble. It determines Butler's entire undertaking. 1. The (In)difference of Performance By illustrating that sex, like gender, is a social construction, Butler strives to tear not sex but both sex and gender from biological essentialism. For as Butler insists, as soon as we imagine sex (woman/man) as naturally given, and gender (feminine/masculine) as a product of social forces, we fall into the very gender essentialism that we seemingly called into question. This is because the sex/gender binary makes sex the ground of gender: a woman may be masculine or feminine, and she may subvert the social norms that demand that women act in a certain manner. But throughout all of these gender reversals, she remains a woman. Her behavior, therefore, is either far from her sex (if she is subversive) or close to it (if she conforms). But in either case, it is measured in terms of that sex, which stands as the essence or foundation of the conduct. Hence, within such a discourse, gender stereotypes do not actually emerge as social (thereby deconstructible) constructs since the substructure (sex) of their edifice is given prior to production.This thesis, which ultimately reveals that the sex/gender split reproduces the woman/man binary--the foundation of sexism--opens the way for one of Butler's most renowned interventions: her theory of performativity. Butlerian performance traces the intersection of Derrida's concept of mimesis and Foucault's understanding of power. Derrida argues that if a mark (in writing) or a sound (in speech) is to form part of a language, it must be iterable. Language hinges on social conventions, and social conventions on repetition, ritual. Repetition, therefore, does not follow (from) a pregiven [End Page 81] [Begin Page 83] sign but is a condition of its possibility: a sign must be repeatable before it is a sign. 1Derrida often translates these ideas into an analysis of "the citation," a fact Butler fully exploits. An articulation, Derrida argues, must be a priori citable (again, iterable) if it is to function as an articulation, as a "speech act." This means that deviance, miscitation, recontextualization, and the possible transformation or loss of an enunciation--any or all of which could occur via a citation--belong essentially to that enunciation. The repetitions that yield rituals, habits, and then norms are the same iterations that undermine those norms. But this is true not only for speech. It holds as well for the law: the citing, execution, reading, writing, and acknowledgment of the law, hence the possibility of the law's shift and even disappearance, pertain to the law's groundwork.Gender Trouble posits patriarchy and compulsive heterosexuality as two such citable laws. And as laws, they are powerful but not inevitable. Indeed, because the law of normalcy harbors its own deviance as a condition of its public emergence or deployment, this normalcy opens the way for its own transgression. One is indeed subject to the law of the norm. But this subjection cannot not grant the very alternative agency/subjectivity it strives to suppress.Hence for Butler, queer types such as the "femme" or the "butch," as they perhaps flaunt (through dress, bodily image, or public demonstration) the constructed character of their own sexual identities, recite and dis-cover the constructed, artificial... (shrink)

This co-authored contribution takes the form of a dialogue between Carmen Dell’Aversano and Florian Mussgnug. The two discussants explore the concepts of parenthood, reproduction and care in the context of the unfolding global environmental crisis. Arguing from the perspectives of queer theory, literary studies and climate justice, they call for new strategies and attitudes towards procreation, beyond the strictures of colonizing frames of knowledge and hegemonic cultural practices. More specifically, Dell’Aversano and Mussgnug move the debate around assisted reproductive (...) technologies in new, speculative directions that are centred on shared vulnerability and kinship, and which remain fully attentive to human and non-human relations and shared responsibilities on a warming planet. (shrink)

This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads (...) Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Identifying (with) the Queerness of Melville’s PierreNeill Matheson (bio)James Creech. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.James Creech’s Closet Writing/Gay Reading is a remarkable book in several ways. First, it offers a significantly new interpretation of Melville’s enigmatic novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which has increasingly been viewed as marking a crucial turning point in Melville’s career, gaining the status of (...) a major if equivocal work of nineteenth-century American fiction. Creech’s reading of Pierre adds much to previous work on homosexuality in Melville’s writings, making an important contribution to the history of Melville criticism. Supported by a shrewd, detailed analysis of the novel, and some surprising extratextual evidence, he argues compellingly that Pierre is preoccupied with the closeting of gay identity and with the tenuous possibilities for homosexual self-expression in a repressively heterosexual culture. Nevertheless, as its subtitle suggests, Pierre is a work that advertises its own ambiguity with a high degree of ironic self-awareness. Creech’s claims about it, made with a certain bravado, though accompanied by many hesitations and caveats, seem at times to diminish the complexity with which the novel itself explores the problem of identity.In addition to its interest as a reading of Pierre, Closet Writing/Gay Reading also represents a provocative statement within the wider context of critical and theoretical work on homosexuality, staking out a position that resists both the problematizing of identity performed by queer theory and the historicizing aims of much recent gay studies work. Creech elaborates the notion of “identificatory” or “camp reading” with great self-consciousness about its place in the critical landscape, so that it is as much a reaction to various theoretical positions as a stance in its own right. It is the combination of this critical hyperawareness, as if continually looking over one’s shoulder, and a kind of willed innocence with respect to interpretive problems that is most extraordinary, and it is worth exploring further.If one of the book’s aims is to add to a theory of the closet, it is also concerned with describing a poststructuralist theory that is in complicity with the suppression or emptying-out of homosexual meaning. Creech’s argument that deconstruction in particular has been blind to homosexual content contains in its margins a personal narrative of his own emergence from a theory closet. One of the strategies of Creech’s reading is to make his coming-out story converge with the one that he attributes to Pierre: his unambiguous claim for Pierre’s gay identity is simultaneously an avowal of a critical approach no longer in conflict with his own sexual identity. He alludes to his early and lingering attraction to deconstruction, the subsequent discovery that its influence, inhibiting unequivocal identity claims, prevented him from affirming his sexuality, and his tentative, incomplete, but increasingly assured rejection of that influence. Creech [End Page 30] asserts more than once that an analysis of Pierre’s impossible mourning would be valuable, but the story of his own critical history begins to sound like an account of the identifications, losses, and self-reproaches typical of melancholia. In this light Closet Writing/Gay Reading is interesting not because it is itself representative of recent gay criticism, but because it is a highly original, idiosyncratic, and suggestive response to a representative set of critical pressures surrounding the problem of identity.The central methodological claim of Closet Writing/Gay Reading is that identification is the form of reader response necessary to bring closeted homosexual meaning to light. Creech argues that the task of gay literary criticism is to counter the reductiveness of traditional, straight criticism by “putting homosexuality back in its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored, within which it has only been allowed an encrypted and ciphered status, or out of which it has been abstracted” [29]. Gay literary criticism faces the interpretive problem of recovering homosexual meaning that may have become nearly invisible through the combined effects of the restrictive cultural imperatives under which the author was writing and the reductiveness of later criticism... (shrink)

Introspective crocodiles and exhibitionist writers, queered gender and temporality, critiques of capitalism and canon, experimental form and technique, speculative storylines traversing the citysca...

Phenomenological interviews with queer women in rural Nova Scotia reveal significant forms of trauma experienced during labour and birth. Situating the accounts of participants within both phenomenological and intersectional analyses reveals harms enabled by structurally embedded heteronormative and homophobic healthcare practices and policies. Our account illustrates the breadth and depth of harm experienced and outlines how these violate core ethical principles and values in healthcare.

In recent years, questions regarding the ontological status of the human have been raised with renewed interest and imagination within various fields of critical thought. In the face of biotechnological findings and increasingly advanced technologies that connect as well as disturb settled boundaries, whether geographical or bodily, not to mention philosophical questionings of traditional western humanism, the boundaries of the human subject have been contested. The human body, traditionally imagined as closed and autonomous, has been opened up to a world (...) of forces and agencies that are strange, other and often deeply disturbing when viewed from an anthropocentric standpoint. Rather than close down anxieties concerning such boundary transgressions and ontological uncertainties, scholars – not least within areas such as feminist, posthumanist and queer theory – have argued that here lie possibilities as well as an ethical urgency to rethink the human subject, its world(s) and its others. Indeed, what might it mean to view the world from positions that do not take the pure and autonomous human form as its starting point? And what ethical considerations does such a viewpoint demand of us? (shrink)

Gay marriages (as such) are not as yet allowed anywhere but the demand for them is increasing. Most countries take a liberal attitude towards marriage: few obstacles are put in its way. But objections to gay marriages continue to be raised. These objections are refuted and the case for gay marriage is assessed through the prism of various forms of liberalism. The normative argument for allowing gay marriage is shown to be both strong and consistent with many of the values (...) upheld by the opponents of such unions. (shrink)