Inspired by a Danez Smith poem, this essay is a ‘little prayer’ for LGBTQIA+ people and organizers to be able to collectively grieve the family and friends they have lost, the relations they had to end, the social privileges they never had, or lost before and after sharing their queerness. It argues for the militant force of this slow-paced, ghostly, and ambiguous grief in queer lives, and in the LGBTQIA+ movements in Turkey and elsewhere. The author draws on (...) 4 years of organizing at Boysan’s House – a living memory space, and community hub in Istanbul – and the 12-hour oral history conducted with Mother Sema, who has been mobilizing her motherhood and her grief as a pro-LGBTQIA+ organizer since 2006. The essay suggests that ambiguous grief can be relearned and re-membered as a radically transformative force that is already constitutive of queer communities. It situates the histories and presents of Mother Sema and Boysan’s House amid diverse experiences of resilience and resistance through motherhood, queer kin making, and mourning. In so doing, the essay builds on the militant activisms of the Saturday Mothers/people, the Peace Mothers, the organized family members of LGBTQIA+ people, and the trans communities in Turkey. It is thus an inquiry into ways of housing and transforming ambiguous grief in the LGBTQIA+ movement, in the post-July 2016 coup attempt Turkey. (shrink)

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical (...) history. As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice. (shrink)

This article introduces the problem of inexistence to studies in genre and gender, providing a hermeneutic point of reference for literary history and trans theory. It seeks to negotiate the affinities and disaffinities between queer and trans by foregrounding the latter’s struggle for existence against the former’s mobilization of a rhetoric of negative relationality, while at the same time preserving the bonds of intimacy across and beyond the coalition of LGBTQIA+. Such queer intimacy is read in relation to (...) a haptic technology of queer close reading, enabling differentially sexed bodies to imaginatively inhabit each other. I begin by considering how Djuna Barnes’s close, haptic readings of Henry James and Marcel Proust enact a reversal of sex, but I consider how the affective evidence of these trans moments do not amount to trans existence but raise the ethical necessity of holding open the difference between the ephemeral trans experiences within cis existence and the real struggle for trans existence of trans subjects today. Such a divide, however, is simultaneously held against the moments of intimacy that are capable of being produced across cis and trans subjects through such close reading and cross-inhabitation of bodies. To read trans literary history before trans, I thus propose the notion of trans inexistence through an interpretation of Jacques Maritain’s figure of the “angel” and Hegel’s “beautiful soul.” By situating Barnes’s and Jean Genet’s own characterizations of their transfeminine characters in terms of the angel in a post-Romantic, Catholic context, I interpret the trans angel as a figure of inexistence, tied to a minimal transcendence from the terms of history and materiality, including the sexed body. Finally, I consider how Genet’s phenomenology of proprioception draws together the problems of queer intimacy, haptic reading, and trans inexistence. In analyzing how Genet and his characters cross-inhabit each other’s bodies via proprioceptive mimicry, I unfold both the vast potential and the limits of the intimacies constructed across cis male and transfeminine lives and the accompanying role played by the literary mode of romance. (shrink)

After nearly fifty years as settled constitutional law, the federally protected right to an abortion in America is now a thing of the past. The Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has left Americans without a guaranteed right to access abortion--and the cost of that upheaval will be most painfully felt by individuals who already struggle with access to resources: the poor, black and brown communities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ population.Pulling together the experiences, expertise,and perspective of more (...) than 30 writers, thinkers, and activists, Aftermath: Life in Post-Roe America offers a searing look at the critical role Roe has played in improving women's and pregnant people's lives, what is at stake as it is overturned, what a future without Roe may look like, and what options exist for us to secure reproductive freedom in the future.With contributions from Jessica Valenti, Soraya Chemaly, Michele Goodwin, Alyssa Milano, Ruby Sales, Heather Cox Richardson, Robin Marty, and others, this anthology is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of reproductive rights in America--and beyond. (shrink)

It would be an almost comical understatement to say that, throughout my graduate study in philosophy and subsequent years of teaching and writing, I found myself engaging with the works of Jeremy Bentham somewhat infrequently. Beyond flavorful anecdotes about mummified heads and jabs about stilted nonsense in my undergraduate Intro to Ethics courses—as we segued into extended discussion of John Stuart Mill, of course—Bentham’s direct and recognized role in my philosophical activities has been pretty much nonexistent. With all that said: (...) as a sexual- and gender- nonconforming aesthetician and LGBTQIA+ educator and wellness professional living in what is now a post-Roe United States, I found Carrie D. Shanafelt’s Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (2021) to be rich, captivating, and at times, even genuinely comforting. -/- Shanafelt’s short book is equal parts history of philosophy, philosophical history, biography, and queer manifesto, written in an accessible manner that successfully balances scholarship with readability. I could easily see Uncommon Sense engendering rich discussion in graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses of various sorts—though I can just as easily see portions of the book’s content generating various rumbles of controversy, at least at some of the institutions I’ve taught at before. (See, for example, Chapter Four, titled ‘Bentham’s Queer Christ.’) Any anticipatory worries of short-sighted reactionary takes aside, the book would absolutely serve well as the central focus on an entire course, supplemented by a range of literature and scholarly material from philosophical aesthetics, queer studies, political theory, and more. Honestly, I would love to teach that class. (shrink)