Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary (...) approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western (...) hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools (...) could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

In the present condition of planetary environmental crises, violence, and war, entire ecosystems are annihilated, habitats turn into unliveable spaces, and shared “more-than-human” vulnerabilities get amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns, while the Anthropocene-induced anxiety, anger, and grief are manifested in popular-scientific narratives, art, culture, and activism. Grounded in the theoretical framework of queer death studies, this article explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as (...) they are interwoven through contemporary art. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold. (shrink)

From Editors' Introduction: "With our invitation to turn over (re-turn) hospitality in these times Marietta Radomska’s response combines her own research within the emerging field of Queer Death Studies6 with a detailed reading of the coronavirus disease pandemic. In her essay, “Viral queerings, amplified vulnerabilities”, Marietta seeks to subvert normative and simplified understandings of our present. Following the thread that the pandemic affects some bodies more than others, Marietta highlights how “the exploitation and degradation of nature mixed with (...) intensifying socio-economic inequalities directly contribute to the emergence of zoonoses”. Untangling the myth of the containable body and human-exceptionalism, Marietta challenges which lives are considered grievable drawing our attention to “more-than-human necropolitics”. In queering the pandemic she asks us to “reimagine the ways we relate to human and nonhuman others, perhaps in a more hospitable register”." Edited by Yvonne Billimore and Jussi Koitela. (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)

The aim of this book, by providing a set of conceptual tools drawn from critical theory, is to open up questions and new problems and new research agendas for the study of environmental politics.

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the (...) other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (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)

Global Justice: The Basics is a straightforward and engaging introduction to the theoretical study and practice of global justice. It examines the key political themes and philosophical debates at the heart of the subject, providing a clear outline of the field and exploring: the history of its development the current state of play its ongoing interdisciplinary development. Using case studies from around the world which illustrate the importance of the debates at the heart of global justice, as well as (...) activist campaigns for global justice, the book examines a wide range of theoretical debates from thinkers worldwide making it ideal for those seeking a balanced introduction to global justice. (shrink)

Most donated organs in the United States come from brain dead donors, while a small percentage come from patients who die in “controlled,” or expected, circumstances, typically after the family or surrogate makes a decision to withdraw life support. The number of organs available for transplant could be substantially if donations were permitted in “uncontrolled” circumstances–that is, from people who die unexpectedly, often outside the hospital. According to projections from the Institute of Medicine, establishing programs permitting “uncontrolled donation after circulatory (...) determination of death,” or uDCDD, throughout the United States has the potential to provide 22,000 more donation opportunities annually. In contrast, U.S. controlled donation after circulatory determination of death, or cDCDD, cases have increased progressively over the past decade from 87 to 848 donors, but currently account for only 10.6 percent of all deceased donors. Following the IOM recommendations, several projects exploring the feasibility of uDCDD were funded by the federal government, including a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration that supported a pilot project in New York City in which the authors of this article participated.A key feature of our protocol, and indeed of many uDCDD protocols, is the initiation of preservation methods such as chest compressions and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation shortly after death in order to perfuse and preserve the donor's organs. Critics of uDCDD argue that the means of determining death deviates from generally ascribed principles. They assert that reinstituting circulation in order to preserve organs has the effect of “undoing” the prior determination of death. The result is that cDCDD is widely accepted and practiced routinely even though it only marginally increases the number of organs available for transplantation, and uDCDD is widely considered unacceptable despite being ethically embraced and proven to significantly increase organ donation opportunities in other countries. This article explores the evolution of this counterintuitive state of affairs and calls for a policy that, in line with the IOM report, allows for both cDCDD and uDCDD protocols. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:34 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. James Bliss Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies Literary theory continues to be received by some as if it were an alien or antagonistic presence from whose leaden and reductive grasp it is imperative to keep literature protected. It is rare, however, that it is the literary, as such, that is (...) being protected, rather than a certain comfortable accommodation with it—not irreducible strangeness and surprise, but the security of knowing that one’s expectations will be fulfilled and one’s competence as a reader rewarded. The pleasures of accommodation and immediate assimilation are the first that theory asks us to forego—which may do as much to make it seem forbidding and “inhumane” as anything it actually proposes. —Elizabeth W. Bruss1 I. Theory Not for the first time, we find ourselves building new genres. Pursuing new writings. Not for the first time, the theoretical and the literary envelope, eclipse, and rearticulate one another. What’s more, the theoretical has been a mode of artistic practice for so long that every page is a palimpsest, a sedimentation of sedimentations of conceptual frames— swirled, spiraling genealogies. Fluent in invented tongues, in the idioms 1. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 483. 35 James Bliss Books Discussed in This Essay Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. By Stephen Best. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Queer Times, Black Futures. By Kara Keeling. New York: NYU Press, 2019. of invention, in the fluid looseness of disintegrated discourses, our works turn singular. The monograph as signature. The page promises to freeze the text, the object, the artwork, the lifeworld, the performance, and in that stillness to teach us its movements. New moves, secret passageways, lines of escape and gaps in the walls of institutions that die, dissolve, and ossify around and inside us. And here we are. The permanent apocalypse that racial capitalism has been for most life has reached the quadrangles of the college campus. What are we even doing anymore? In the great and dreadful remaking of higher education, as students face permanent indebtedness as the cost of entry into a world without work, what is the ethical impetus for our researches and the systems within which we publish? What are the ethics of critical cultural studies in a debt mine? By what arithmetic do we benefit the students we teach to “steal from the university ” when the university is so much more adroit at stealing from them (and us)? At the same time that the contours of our professional lives are, apparently, unraveling, we find ourselves in (another) new renaissance in Black studies and Black study. We find ourselves within (another) new moment of textual production around the trio of race/gender/sexuality— that is, around Blackness or around Black feminism. 36 James Bliss Or, Black invention—where the Black female, femme, feminine, and maternal operate as synecdochic figures for a species of poiēsis.2 In the 1980s, Jacques Derrida wryly called California the “state of theory” as a function of its tectonic instability.3 In the 2010s, Blackness became the state of theory as a function of its coincidence of death and life, ending and beginning, absence and excess, apocalypse and invention. Blackness, in this instance, is as material as it is metaphor, a projection of meaning across both the great ephemeral skin and the body as flesh. This piece emerges from a sense of the necessity and the hazards of an intellectual history of a moment during which, to take a suggestive phrase from Jared Sexton, “Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”4 But already language presents an issue. What is the relationship between Sexton’s “theory” and the “theory” found in the epigraph from Elizabeth Bruss? Or, between Sexton’s “theory” and Lewis R. Gordon’s “theory,” as Sexton borrows from Gordon’s “Theory in... (shrink)

COVID-19 has caused far-reaching humanitarian challenges. Amongst the emerging impacts of the pandemic is on the dynamics of human trafficking. This paper presents findings from a multi-methods study interrogating the impacts of COVID-19 on human trafficking in Sudan—a critical source, destination, and transit country. The analysis combines a systematic evidence review, semi-structured interviews, and a focus group with survivors, conducted between January and May of 2021. We find key risks have been exacerbated, and simultaneously, critical infrastructure for identifying victims, providing (...) support, and ensuring accountability of perpetrators has been impeded. Centrally, the co-occurrence of the pandemic and the democratic transition undercut the institutional and governance capacity, limiting the anti-trafficking response and exposing already vulnerable groups to increased risks of human trafficking. Findings point to increased vulnerabilities for individuals with one or more of the following identities: migrants, refugees, females, and informal labourers. (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)

In _Animacies_, Mel Y. Chen draws on recent debates about sexuality, race, and affect to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives. Toward that end, Chen investigates the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal. Within the field of linguistics, animacy has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, sentience, or liveness. Chen turns to cognitive linguistics to stress how language habitually (...) differentiates the animate and the inanimate. Expanding this construct, Chen argues that animacy undergirds much that is pressing and indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates to biosecurity concerns. Chen's book is the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory. Through analyses of dehumanizing insults, the meanings of queerness, animal protagonists in recent Asian/American art and film, the lead in toys panic in 2007, and the social lives of environmental illness, _Animacies_ illuminates a hierarchical politics infused by race, sexuality, and ability. In this groundbreaking book, Chen rethinks the criteria governing agency and receptivity, health and toxicity, productivity and stillness—and demonstrates how attention to the affective charge of matter challenges commonsense orderings of the world. (shrink)

Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation (...) of prisoners as workers and as "raw material" for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. -/- Contents -/- Introduction: Death and Other Penalties Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman -/- Part I. Legacies of Slavery -/- Excavating the Sedimentations of Slavery: The Unfinished Project of American Abolition Brady Heiner -/- From Commodity Fetishism to Prison Fetishism: Slavery, Convict-leasing, and the Ideological Productions of Incarceration James Manos -/- Maroon Philosophy: An Interview with Russell Maroon Shoatz Russell Maroon Shoatz -/- Part II. Death Penalties -/- In Reality-from the Row Derrick Quintero -/- Inheritances of the Death Penalty: American Racism and Derrida's Theologico-Political Sovereignty Geoffrey Adelsberg -/- Making Death a Penalty: Or, Making "Good" Death a "Good" Penalty Kelly Oliver -/- Death Penalty Abolition in Neoliberal Times: The SAFE California Act and the Nexus of Savings and Security Andrew Dilts -/- On the Inviolability of Human Life Julia Kristeva (translated by Lisa Walsh) -/- Part III. Rethinking Power and Responsibility -/- Punishment, Desert, and Equality: A Levinasian Analysis Benjamin S. Yost -/- Prisons and Palliative Politics Ami Harbin -/- Sovereignty, Community, and the Incarceration of Immigrants Matt S. Whitt -/- Without the Right to Exist: Mass Incarceration and National Security Andrea Smith -/- Prison Abolition and a Culture of Sexual Difference Sarah Tyson -/- Part IV. Isolation and Resistance -/- Statement on Solitary Confinement Abu Ali Abdur'Rahman -/- The Violence of the Supermax: Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetics of Prison Space Adrian Switzer -/- Prison and the Subject of Resistance: A Levinasian Inquiry Shokoufeh Sakhi -/- Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley. (shrink)

:This article focuses on historical queer cultural geographies of masculinities and to do so it focuses on two cases/places. The first is an archival case/place: a partial assembly of documents of beats and their uses during and in the wake of Gay Liberation in Australia. The second is a literary case/place: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a canonical twentieth-century imbrication of male homosexuality and geography. This article will seek to rationalize the mobilization of these two asynchronous cases/places through (...) the insights that both afford, when brought together, for elaborating contributions that queer readings of Nietzsche can make to contemporary queer theories of space, time and masculinities. (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)

Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation (...) of prisoners as workers and as “raw material” for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. (shrink)

This article emerges from a wider study on bicultural film archiving practice. It focuses on Jonathan Dennis as a subject of archiving, and as a distinctive archivist himself in relation to a specific archive at a particular moment. Dennis practice differed significantly from North American and European conventions contemporaneous with his life work. The charismatic founding director of Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision Jonathan Dennis became a conduit for tensions and debates during the 1981–2002 period in relation to indigenous and (...) non indigenous presentation of archival materials. This resulted in a film archive and curatorship practice which differed significantly from that of the North American and European archives he originally sought to emulate. As a Pākehā with a strong sense of social justice he argued for an awareness of geographical location and cultural context in his work. He supported a philosophical shift in archival practice, by engaging indigenous peoples in developing creative and innovative exhibitions and programmes from the 1980s period until his death.Note: From 1988 the official name for the New Zealand Film Archive was Ngā Kaitiaki o ngā Taonga Whitiāhua. Since August 2014 the institution is called Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, New Zealand Archive of Film, Television and Sound Ngā Taonga Whitiāhua Me Ngā Taonga Kōrero to acknowledge the acquisition of the state-owned Television NZ Archive and Sound Archives from Radio NZ. For brevity’s sake the Archive is referred to throughout as NTSV.Key: NTSV PP JD refers to the NTSV Personal Papers of Jonathan Dennis. (shrink)

In response to recent events that demonstrate the persistence of racial trauma, this essay revisits James Baldwin's claim that racism is a symptom of fundamental human tendencies and constraints. For Baldwin, we cannot understand the legacy of racism if we do not take seriously all too human attempts to evade, and deflect, death and its intimations. To flesh out this component of Baldwin's thought, I engage with the thought of Georges Bataille, an author who thinks generally about the fraught (...) relationship between the preservation of life and our responsiveness to suffering. To test the insights that Baldwin provides on racial matters, this essay engages recent discussions in black studies and queer theory around futurity, racial difference, and the category of the human. I maintain that we must think “the human” and racial difference together, as a tension-filled relationship, in order to understand the limits and possibilities regarding our efforts to change the order of things. (shrink)

This article is driven by death. Thematically, death serves as a figure in the central creative works I discuss: Samuel R. Delany's sword-and-sorcery novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, one of the first novels to deal directly with the AIDS pandemic,1 and Lou Reed's songs, especially the proto-punk "Heroin" and the queer soul song "Coney Island Baby." Meanwhile, the argument's methodology also concerns death. As many theorists and critics have discussed,2 the field of queer (...) studies has seen, for at least the past few decades, a general division between a methodology that isolates queerness as a singularly significant figure of identity and a more intersectional queer studies that figures sexuality within a... (shrink)

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explores the connection between the binaries of heterosexuality/homosexuality and the utopian/apocalyptic. In doing so, she exposes the commonplace of a “fantasy trajectory toward a life after the homosexual.”1 In this narrative model, once the queer has completed its function of purging the symbolic of its sins, the character is eliminated from the text as part of the emergence of a postnarrative hetero-normative utopia. In a similar vein, Lee Edelman’s “Against Survival: Queerness (...) in a Time That’s Out of Joint,” an essay on the quintessential revenge tragedy, Hamlet, notes that the revenger’s death ensures a return of society’s idealized vision of the future.2... (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools (...) could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

The biopolitics of empire : slavery and "the Muslim" -- The biopolitics of settlement : temporality, desire, and civilization -- Foucault and queer theory -- Society must be destroyed -- Queer terror -- Bibliography.

In his contribution, “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies,” Robert McRuer calls for the recognition of the points of convergence between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory. McRuer points out ways in which minority identity groups such as people with AIDS, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, and those with so-called disabilities, whose status has been described by others as “impaired,” have resisted this judgment by calling its ideological underpinnings into question. He contends that a critical (...) alliance between AIDS theory, queer theory, and disability theory will ultimately help us to realize the full range of different kinds of bodies and corporeal experiences, while also combating the application of normativizing judgments. (shrink)

In this timely book L.W. Sumner addresses these issues within the wider context of palliative care for patients in the dying process.

The future is kid stuff -- Sinthom-osexuality -- Compassion's compulsion -- No future.

This study examines what Social Studies teachers can learn from Gay-Straight Alliances (GSA) in terms of the content that club members examine and the queer pedagogical approaches they employ. Find...

The roots and evolution of two concepts usually thought to be Western in origin-musica mundana (the music of the spheres) and musica humana (music's relation to the human soul)-are explored. Beginning with a study of the early creeds of the Near East, Professor Meyer-Baer then traces their development in the works of Plato and the Gnostics, and in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Previous studies of symbolism in music have tended to focus on (...) a single aspect of the problem. In this book the concepts of musica humana and musica mundane are related to philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of religion and are given a rightful place in the history of civilization. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The term queer has recently come into wide use to designate distinctive emphases in the politics and the intellectual study of sexuality. This article explores the unfortunate irony that most work falling under the rubric of queer theory has been undertaken largely at some remove from the discipline of sociology, despite the pioneering role that an earlier generation of sociologists played in formulating influential conceptions of the social construction of sexuality. The article suggests important continuities between the earlier (...) sociological theories and recent queer theory, but also analyzes the new challenges that queer theorists have posed by insisting on the indispensability of questions of sexual "marginality" to the larger understanding of social and cultural organization. The article concludes by suggesting how sociologists might engage with such a project. (shrink)

Beginning with the role of the Sex Pistols’s “God Save the Queen” in Lee Edelman and J. Jack Halberstam’s debates about queer death and failure, I follow a musical motive from the Pistols track to its reappearance in Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 “Delete Yourself .” In this song, as in much of ATR’s work from the 1990s, overlapping queer and Afro-diasporic aesthetics condense around the idea of death or “bare life.” ATR’s musical strategies treat this (...) class='Hi'>death as a form of de-intensification and divestment— not, as in Edelman or the Pistols, as a form of negation . I will show that ATR’s musical recontextualization of the Pistols’s riff mirrors the political recontextualization of queerness and queer death from negation to disinvestment. Pushing this misprision or sticky interface between cyberpunk, queer, and Afro-diasporic musical aesthetics, I use ATR’s music to consider how queer death might work as a political response to neoliberal demands to invest in “normal” life. I first discuss the traditional concept of death as negation in both the Sex Pistols song "God Save the Queen," and in Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam’s formulations. I then argue that Atari Teenage Riot's song “Delete Yourself” describes a neoliberal, biopolitical concept of death, death as carefully administered divestment. Finally, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of drugs, and Ronald Bogue’s Deleuzian reading of death metal to identify and explain how “MIDIjunkies” and “Into the Death” complicate the biopolitical/neoliberal management of death by reworking traditional black/queer critical aesthet- ics. In these songs, ATR undermine biopolitical neoliberalism’s demand to invest in and intensify regular “normal” life: rather than treating death as a nadir of intensity, they intensify it–that is, they go into the death. This strategy of going “into the death” is one possible queer necropolitical response to neoliberalism. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for (...) critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion. (shrink)

This article analyses the representational stakes of queer of colour performance, by taking the case study of the Cocoa Butter Club: queer of colour cabaret night in London. Within a British landscape that has silenced queer subjectivities of colour at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, I explore the potential of QPOC performance to redress historical erasure. To enact their presence, I argue that the Cocoa Butter Club’s performers showcase their collective disidentification from the scripts pre-assigned (...) to their bodies within the European imagination. By doing so, they disrupt hegemonic representations of queerness and racialised otherness, making room for a multitude of queer of colour becomings kept otherwise invisible from public view. Such disidentifications unleash ‘ghosts’ into the public space, spectres of elided subjectivities and unresolved coloniality within a city that likes to think of itself as a post-racial LGBT haven. Drawing on ethnographic material and interviews with performers, I analyse what happens when such queer of colour hauntings reach the audience’s gaze. I consider their unsettling effects in relation to the white gaze, as well as their empowering function in relation to desiring QPOC subjects, seeking reflections of themselves in spectatorship. (shrink)

This article provides an introductory guide to queer scholarship in religious studies and theology. It also outlines approaches to queer studies and how they have been, and might be, appropriated in religious studies and theology. Finally, the article argues that greater clarity is needed when naming projects as “queer,” given that the terms “queer,” “queer theory,” and “queer studies” cover such a wide variety of approaches.

This article argues that the influence of heteronormativity on the conceptualization of women and technology in feminist constructivist technology studies creates serious problems for the analysis. This research aims to understand the coproduction of gender and technology in society, but does not approach the two elements in a symmetrical fashion. Hence, ethnographic studies can only exemplify how the gender of technology producers is reflected in the technology created. Masculine gender identity is stabilized as a cause for the masculinity (...) of a technology that is shaped by social relationships. The criticism is fleshed out in a close examination of case study accounts of ethnographies among producers and users of technology. It is argued that a habitual reproduction of heteronormativity, present in the surrounding culture and in the technological communities studied, has prevented the adoption of approaches to the subject conducive to the objective of this feminist research. Acknowledging that destabilizing gender can undermine the critical thrust of feminist critique, the paper turns towards queer theory for ideas about how to produce criticism that does not rely on the stability of identity. The article closes with suggesting how a queer feminist approach could contribute to different readings of life with technology. (shrink)

Had only from the early feminist social status and rights of women, the pursuit of development to the differences between women and men and the women's own recognition of the unique construction of identity. In the era of globalization, migration and cultural identity of the nation's more to gender studies of fuzzy multi-development of this condition, topics at the forefront of contemporary gender studies is that female homosexuality and the resulting strange phenomena. Both theoretical research projects has begun (...) to attract the attention of domestic scholars, and the status quo may be carried out with appropriate domestic comparative study. Continuing its author's previous work on cultural studies, the present essay offers a theoretic reflection on the origin and development of Western feminism in the context of cultural studies. To the author, contemporary feminism has long shifted its emphasis from pursuing women's social right and position onto the level of identifying themselves as female and constructing their own unique identity different from male. In the current age of globalization, the large-scale immigration and the obscurity of national and cultural identity enable gender study to develop in a pluralistic orientation. The main focus of contemporary gender studies is put on lesbian and queer studies, which have already attracted the attention of domestic scholars and which will be further carried out in comparison with the current Chinese practice. (shrink)

This study focuses on the ancient commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo by Olympiodorus and Damascius and aims to present the relevance of their challenging and valuable readings of the dialogue to Neoplatonic ethics.

Science at the Club explores the architecture of the nightclub space as a nucleus for queer testimony, relating it to a judiciary courtroom. This performance challenges legal doctrines of forensic identification and the binary of life and death, by transforming biological and forensic material into ephemeral essences within the performance of the dance floor. Divided into a case study surrounding my performances at nightclubs, research courses taken in human remains recovery and visits to various burial sites of South (...) Texas, I pull from a variety of interdisciplinary studies relating to queer death theory, building on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ in relation to the human corpse, racial politics in science and the biological arts in a nightclub context. Science at the Club creates a catalyst platform challenging racial and scientific histories of the body and land within the current US political climate, while exploring questions of resurrection and disintegration with a focus on the language of forensics and identity. (shrink)