Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2009"

PROGRESS AND POLITICS IN THE INTERSEX RIGHTS MOVEMENT Feminist Theory in Action

Abstract: Since 1990, when Suzanne Kessler published her groundbreaking feminist analysis of the understanding of gender among clinicians treating children with intersex, many academic feminists have produced important scholarly work on intersex and intersex rights.1 A notable few have also lent their energies to actively working for intersex rights in medical and mainstream social arenas. Although the intersex rights movement and feminist scholarship on intersex have both progressed considerably since 1990, there remains theoretical and political irresolution on certain key issues, most notably those involving intersex identity and the constitution of gender. This essay considers the progress made in intersex rights since 1990 and delineates important points of contention within feminist intersex scholarship and intersex politics. We argue that in the last fifteen years much progress has been made in improving medical and social attitudes toward people with intersex, but that significant work remains to be done to ensure that children born with sex anomalies will be treated in a way that privileges their long-term well-being over societal norms. We also argue that, while feminist scholars have been critically important in developing the theoretical underpinnings of the intersex rights movement and sometimes in carrying out the day-to-day political work of that movement, there have been intellectual and political problems with some feminists’ approaches to intersex. The authors have a foot in both camps considered here — academic feminism and intersex rights work. We are academic feminists who also worked

Capitalism and Global Queering: National Markets, Parallels Among Sexual Cultures, and Multiple Queer Modernities

Abstract: This essay considers the role of market economies in global queering, the transnational proliferation of new male homosexual and male-to-female transgender identities and cultures. Early accounts of global queering highlighted the culturally homogenizing effects of transnational capitalism, representing new queer sexualities beyond the West as cultural imports from the United States. But international similarities among queer cultures also emerge from parallel processes of sex-cultural change produced by national-level forms of capitalism. Case studies from Thai queer history trace market-induced cultural parallels to earlier decades of the twentieth century, before the post–Cold War intensification of globalizing processes. These studies confirm the importance of the market in global queering. They also reveal that international commonalities reflect emergent parallels among multiple queer modernities and result as much from local responses to similar economic conditions as from foreign cultural influences. The alternative narrative of queer histories beyond the West presented here decouples the spread of capitalism from cultural Westernization. It highlights moments where queer subjects have enhanced their autonomy vis-a-vis local heteronormative traditions by creative engagements that take advantage of opportunities provided by the growth of the market economy.

Looking for M—: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future

Abstract: Daniel Peddle’s film The Aggressives makes perceptible an intolerable yet quotidian violence, as the index of our time. Putting queer theories of temporality into proximity with anticolonial ones, this essay seeks to remain aware of what in The Aggressives escapes attempts to contain it yet nonetheless can be felt and perceived even though—or especially if—it remains unrecognizable or unintelligible to our current common senses. We can think of what escapes these operations as the content that exceeds its expression, that through which poetry from the future might be perceived yet not recognized. Poetry from the future interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and it is an index of a time to come in which what exists potently, even if not (yet) effectively, today but escapes us will find its time.

Imperatives of Normality: From "Intersex" to "Disorders of Sex Development"

Abstract: In May 2006 the U.S. and European endocrinological societies published a consensus statement announcing a significant change in nomenclature. No longer would nineteenth-century variations on the term hermaphrodite , or the more newly introduced term intersex , be used in a medical context to describe “congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical”; instead the preferred term henceforth would be disorders of sex development (DSDs). The announcement met with significant controversy, which I here examine in terms of the historical convergence of the treatment of homosexuality and intersex. The contemporary association of homosexuality with intersex risks obscuring genuine medical concerns unique to the treatment of intersex conditions and the consequences for affected individuals. At the same time, we must reckon with the ways that the complex and persistent identification of homosexuality with intersex has shaped the motivations both for the prevailing standard of care that has been so harmful and for the organized resistance to these practices in the intersex movement. Michel Foucault’s understanding of the power of “normalization” can help us make sense of the history of medicalization and its pernicious effects, but in addition can allow those with intersex conditions and their allies to understand the positive possibilities that the change from intersex to DSDs can bring.

Situating "Fluidity": (Trans) Gender Identification and the Regulation of Gender Diversity

Abstract: Drawing on Butler’s theory of gender performativity, which conceptualizes the discursive production of the gendered subject and the corresponding “constitutive instabilities” of such reiterative practices, I provide an empirical sociological examination of how individuals negotiate potentially unintelligible identities in their daily lives and the extent to which these practices call into question the conceptual dichotomization of stability and fluidity. While transsexed bodies, histories, and identities may “exceed” the limits of intelligibility, trans individuals are engaged in the process of meaning making—creating coherence both for themselves and for others. The present theorizing of (trans)gender identification has not fully explored the interaction among social expectations, individuals’ attempts to be credible, and the structural limitations on intelligible gender identifications. In addition, despite theoretical arguments resting on the compulsory, regulatory nature of gender regimes, gender fluidity is often situated as counter to such regulation. By exploring the negotiated identifications of transsexed respondents across different interactional spaces and the structural rules and norms which frame such presentation choices, this article theorizes the contextual regulation of (trans)gender diversity and the corresponding production of situated identification. Further, in examining this negotiation, the concept of fluidity is interrogated in order to complicate the analytic dualism of fluidity/stability and the corresponding dichotomous positioning of transsexed individuals as either blurring or reifying the boundaries of the gender binary.

What Can Queer Theory Do for Intersex

Abstract: In this essay I explore how queer theory might account for postsurgical intersex bodies of diminished genital tactility. In other words, I evaluate whether a critique of surgery’s effects is possible from a queer theoretical perspective on the body. I contend that for this purpose queer theory must do more than focus on bodily sensations such as pleasure, shame, and touching. The essay makes four key claims: first, that the desensitized postsurgical body cannot be accounted for by a queer discourse in which sexual pleasure is a form of hedonistic activism; second, that a queer discourse of shame enables a degree of critical engagement with the surgical creation of atypically sensate bodies; third, that pleasure and shame are both queer sensations, and queer theory’s assumption of a sensorial basis to cultural critique, which is exemplified by the queer touch, flounders when confronted with the desensitized intersex body; fourth, that if queer theory is figured as a kind of reaching—but not necessarily touching—then it can be of greater use in accounting for the problematic yet ambivalent effects of intersex surgery.

Quantum Sex: Intersex and the Molecular Deconstruction of Sex

Abstract: The intersex movement in the past two decades has challenged social, medical, and academic conceptions of sex and gender. In the same period, genetic studies of sex determination, largely derived from research on intersex conditions, has revolutionized long-standing theories of sex determination. This current molecular genetics research is upending ancient sexist prejudices in biology. It also elucidates the dizzying complexity of biological sex that is well beyond simplistic sex binarism and involves multiple interactions between genes and environment.

Transnationalism and Homophile Political Culture in the Postwar Decades

Abstract: This article grows out of a larger project on homophile internationalism that linked Europe and North America organizations, activists and writing during the post-war decades. More than just participating in a North Atlantic exchange, these homophile activists had a global vision, one that sought to uncover, explore and archive same-sex intimacies worldwide. Utilizing travel writing, ethnographic studies and personal memoirs homophiles produced a popular anthropological account of homosexuality, one they implicitly linked to Cold War human rights discourse, liberal law reform, and normative social claims.

Arrival at Home: Radical Faerie Configurations of Sexuality and Place

Abstract: Radical faerie culture produces modern sexual minorities by mediating their racial and national relationship to histories of colonization. Radical faeries arose in the US by forming itinerant rural gatherings--and, over time, landed rural sanctuaries to host them--where they sought to liberate an authentic gay subjectivity grounded in indigenous cultural roots. I examine the formation of rural sanctuaries and gatherings as sources for gay liberation by investigating how they are structured as spaces of homecoming. Radical faeries who travel to gatherings and sanctuaries arrive at home--despite neither originating nor remaining at these sites--when they find in rural spaces and in tales of indigeneity a self-acceptance and shared nature that grants new belonging to settled land. I narrate key moments when practices of rural mobility and emplacement call gay men home to authentic subjectivity and radical community, by means of loving communion, multigenerational rural ties, indigenous spirituality, and a newly indigenized relationship to settled land. My argument arises from reflexive ethnographic interpretation of the quotidian practices of gatherings and sanctuaries. My ethnographic attention marks the integrity of radical faerie culture as a creative mediation of the racial, national, and colonial conditions of sexuality. My analysis calls queer studies to attend more deeply to the intersectionality and coloniality of sexual minority formations in settler societies, and to let ethnographic interpretation mark both how normative power relations condition sexualities and how sexual subjects creatively engage them.

The Somatechnics of Intersexuality

Abstract: We live in a world in which “the body” is conceived as a malleable substance in a state of potential transition and, moreover, the vast majority of bodies are experienced as “wrong”: they have too few (or too many) limbs or digits; they (or parts of them) are the wrong size, the wrong age, the wrong color; they are “sexually ambiguous”; they bear the wrong ethnic markers; they inhibit particular identities and/or aspirations; they simply do not seem “right.” Surgery, then, becomes a way to put things right, to restore order. While the writing to date on modificatory surgeries is immensely varied, the vast majority is subtended by a conception of medical practices and procedures as technologies separate from the bodies they seek to modify. In this model, the body is a fleshly substrate that simply is prior to its enhancement or mutilation by the technologies that transform its original state. This article deploys the term somatechnics to think through the varied and complex ways in which bodily-being is always already shaped by technes—from, for example, the surgeon’s knife to the discourses that justify and contest the use of such instruments. I argue, then, that the conceptions of, debates around, and questions about specific modificatory practices are themselves technologies that shape corporeality at the most profound level. In doing so I aim to make a critical intervention into, and open up new spaces for reflection in, existing debates about the somatechnics of intersexuality.

Queer Family Romance: Writing the "New" South Africa in the 1990s

Abstract: This essay examines the often overlooked role that the idea of gay rights played in producing the new imaginary of the postapartheid “rainbow nation”—and its neoliberal economic order. I suggest that the figure of the gay person became an embodiment of political change, symbolically mediating conflicts within multiracial modernity in South Africa’s emergent public culture, and I analyze the work done by queer “minor characters” in novels by Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), and Disgrace (1999) all tell the story of white, middle-class Anglo–South Africans whose struggle to adjust to the new era includes dealing with the revelation that their children are not straight. These novels dramatize how the narrative of the nation as a raced, heterosexual family romance was in crisis after apartheid, and reconstitute their families in queer new configurations—raising questions about the flexibility and persistence of the trope of reproductivity. These texts ask how whites are to “come out” as national subjects and indicate that sexuality alone cannot be the grounds for reinventing race and nation without an attention to systemic economic injustice.

QUEER KINSHIP AND AMBIVALENCE Video Autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between queer thought and kinship through a study of video autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung. I propose the concept of ambivalence as a useful point of departure for grappling with the conflicted political, affective, and conceptual terrain of LGBT kinship. Through close textual analysis of four video autoethnographies, I extend existing sociological, anthropological, and philosophical scholarship on LGBT family and kinship to consider audiovisual production as a specific and productive kinship practice. Queer film and video autoethnography offers unexpected and insightful accounts of queer relationality. In contrast with dominant North American family narratives and imagery concerned with continuity, heredity, and the closed white, heteronormative North American intimate sphere, Carlomusto’s and Fung’s works probe the moments where kinship breaks down: illness and death, migrant experience, and family secrets. Through a doubled formal and thematic emphasis on fragmentation, discontinuity, and affective ambivalence, these extraordinary works help us understand kinship otherwise, or queerly.

Gay Marriage and Pulp Fiction: Homonormativity, Disidentification, and Affect in Ann Bannon's Lesbian Novels

Abstract: Currently, most explorations of homonormativity privilege political interpretations. In contrast, this essay brackets political analysis of homonormativity’s effects in order to attend more closely to the affect that helps motivate homonormative choices. Though from an external, critical perspective, particular alliances with dominant power structures may often look like blatant and cynical attempts at self-advancement, there is abundant evidence that they are more often experienced as emotionally driven, personal choices that are different from political ones and superior to them as guides for intimate behavior. Attending to this dimension of homonormative experience not only shifts current queer conversations about norms but also extends the relevance of such conversations back into the past. Ann Bannon’s midcentury lesbian paperback novels are rich sources of information about the socially produced emotional situations that helped push Cold War–era gay and lesbian people into alliances with heterosexist institutions and values such as marriage. In Bannon’s novels, “gay marriage” appears as a kind of representational shorthand for a happy resolution to what I suspect was the common midcentury gay dilemma of how to be both erotically and emotionally deviant, and socially conventional. Bannon depicts that dilemma as a painful suspension between simultaneous disidentifications with heterosexuality and queer abrasiveness to dominant cultural norms. Thus exploring the fantasy of gay marriage in these pulp fictions not only sheds historical light on the affective dimensions of homonormativity but also raises theoretically significant questions about the definition and political ramifications of disidentification.

The De-Fusion of Good Intentions: Outfest's Fusion Film Festival

Abstract: Film festivals matter. They play a significant role in not only bringing together films but also defining and shaping a community.1 The why, how, and who behind film festival organizing and programming profoundly affect the festival’s atmosphere, determining what films screen, what audiences attend, and how films are presented. But there is little reflection on these subjective practices and their effects, which is why, frankly, queer film festivals drive me batty. It’s not that I don’t see enough representations of nerdy Middle Eastern (oops, Southwest Asian) American femmes committed to radical feminist of color politics who also heart Hello Kitty and Ralph Macchio. Rather, it’s because I get disoriented by the way I am interpellated into the festival’s mission and how I am part of the expectations of that space. And for a queer people of color film festival there are endless competing expectations: Celebrate identity while pushing the boundaries on which that identity is based. Increase visibility by representing the multiplicity of queers of color while breaking down and challenging the very premise on which enduring essentialist racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes are based, as well as affirming the power of representation itself as a political tool. Educate audiences about issues facing queer people of color and challenge them with different kinds of work while entertaining them with films that are not too heavy. The festival is often considered a place to build solidarity, an autonomous “safe” space where issues can be engaged with openly. White people are expected to both support and stand up to the responsibility of educating themselves, but at the same time not take up too much space. The festival is also a place for networking, where artist-

EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOISTER Victorian England's Queer Catholicism

Abstract: The cultural construction of Roman Catholicism in England shifted in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from being constituted as a series of acts to being understood as a subjectivity experienced as authentic interiority. Even as various British Victorian figures, for example John Henry Newman, engaged in particular ways with both nonmajoritarian religious and sexual identities, Catholicism thus prefigures the admittedly uneven consolidations of sexuality that Michel Foucault has identified in the last third of the century. Thus an understanding of religious history is central to a history of sexuality.

Intersex Practice, Theory, and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract: The present article seeks to bring together ideas from legal, medical, social science, artistic, and activist perspectives, through dialogue among the four authors. Sarah Creighton is a gynecologist working with women who have atypical genital development or intersex conditions. Julie Greenberg is a professor of law whose work on gender and sexual identity has been influential both within the United States and internationally. Del LaGrace Volcano is a visual artist whose work engages with gender variance. Katrina Roen is an academic who approaches her research on both transgender and intersex from a social science perspective, informed by queer and feminist theorizing. Although the prior work of the four authors clearly indicates a shared commitment to change the situation of intersex people, the mechanisms for such changes are far from clear. Any changes will, however, surely be facilitated by ongoing communication and collaboration across the various perspectives and disciplines represented here.

Queer (AND) Animal Theories

Abstract: Nonhuman nonheteronormativity presents a profound challenge not just to identity forms but more importantly to disciplinary habits of thinking of human subjectivity as the default form of social agency. To elaborate this point, this essay surveys how some recent books, including Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People , Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet , Alice A. Kuzniar’s Melancholy’s Dog , and Jens Rydstrom’s Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweeden, 1889–1950 , take as their subjects intimacies that belie hetero/homosexual along with non/human binaries. Grounding queer theory in a cross-species continuum is not the overall purpose of any of these texts, but an effect produced through the alignment of these authors’ very different examinations of sex relations as shared by social animals. Ranging from the bizarre (fish threesomes) to the raunchy (bestiality in the cowshed), and even more ordinary combinations of both (dogs’ dry-humping), the forms of sociality accruing in these discussions lay foundations for new biopolitical (as opposed to disciplinary) knowledges, prompting further inquiry into what happens to all of us when animals do it un like they do on the Discovery Channel.

Introduction: Lessons from the Octopus

Abstract: The paternalistic surgery-centered model of intersex treatment has been incisively critiqued in recent years. Feminist and antihomophobic analyses have shown how traditional medical protocols privilege male genitalia and heterosexual relationships, in particular through the assumption that penis-vagina penetration within the context of heterosexual marriage is proof positive of a successful surgical outcome. And queer analyses have begun to show that the dichotomous ossification of a patient’s gender identity — another clinical goal — is both unrealistic and politically objectionable. First-person testimonies by patient advocates have largely substantiated these critiques of medical practice. There seems, then, to be a clear narrative of contestation and subsequent change emerging in the treatment of intersex. In other words, we have learned “lessons from the intersexed,” as Suzanne Kessler puts it, initially about genders and gonads, but subsequently about the meaning of ethical patient care.1 Yet, the history of intersex treatment, which now includes the recent history of its ethical critique, is marked by a curiously disjointed temporality. If there is a lesson to be learned from the intersexed, it is structured by multiple deferrals: the deferred revelation of the outcome of David Reimer’s medical management, on which much intersex treatment has been based; the now seemingly self-evident barbarity of surgical procedures that for years appeared reasonable to many clinicians and parents; the difficulties of choosing treatments, even with informed consent, that will have effects at once long-lasting and unpredictable; the inherent latency in follow-up studies of clinical outcomes, with or without surgery; the dilemma of surgical improvement whereby progress for future patients requires the use of experimental techniques on patients in the present; the stubborn asynchrony between cultural change in gender politics (and sexual politics) and con-

Imagined, Desired: Coming of Age with Queer Ethnographies

Abstract: It has been fifteen years since the publication of Kath Weston’s essay “Lesbian/ Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology.” We have more than transcended her astute observation that there was a time when researchers, especially anthropologists, rushed to gather data and left theory for a rainy day in efforts to build the base of the emerging field of what is today regularly called queer studies.1 It is well known that Weston’s review marked a significant moment in the fields of queer studies and anthropology. Among other things, its inclusion in the Annual Review of Anthropology represented “an institutionalizing move” on the part of the anthropological community to contribute to “the theory explosion” in queer studies.2 In addition, Weston was instrumental in reminding anthropologists and

Chitra Ganesh's Queer Re-Visions

Abstract: Be it between lovers or empires . . . Buried narratives, or marginal figures typically excluded from official canons of history, literature, and art, inspire me. These include botched love stories, present-day imperialism, lesser-known Hindu/Buddhist icons, nineteenth-century European fairy tales, girl rock, and contemporary visual culture such as Bollywood posters, anime, and comic books. The visual lexicon of purses, hookahs, broken clocks, and dismembered limbs that propels the series “How Amnesia Remembers Roxanne” is as informed by queer comic and zine culture as it is by the mythic figures of Alice and Pandora. I use the framework of comics to provide a familiar point of entry into a disjunctive tale that privileges the dissonance between text and icon, rather than a unity of illustration and text. Automatic writing, and an emphasis on unofficial registers of language (proverbs, anecdotes, text messages, or love letters) are central to my practice and emerge from dissecting myths to retrieve critical moments of abjection, desire, and loss. Much of my visual vocabulary engages the term junglee (literally “of the jungle,” connoting wildness and impropriety), an old colonial Indian idiom (still) used to describe women perceived as defiant or transgressing convention. Layering disparate materials and visual languages, I suggest alternative narratives of sexuality and power in a world where untold stories keep rising to the surface. In

A Class Act: Ryan Landry and the Politics of Booger Drag

Abstract: In “A Class Act,” Karen C. Krahulik returns to the scene of her community history of Provincetown, Massachusetts, but uses a different methodology to assess the relationship between gentrification and transgression. Remaining within, but not confined by, the fields of history and oral history, Krahulik turns also to queer theory and performance studies to examine how artistic expression can be disruptive of Provincetown’s seemingly facile slide toward homonormativity. In one section Krahulik assesses how the star of her essay, Ryan Landry, converted an underprivileged childhood into a successful form of “white trash” performance called, “booger drag.” In another section she analyzes not only the subversive content, but also the timing of Landry’s performances in a town that once was, but is no longer, necessarily queer. Analyzing Provincetown’s history in the context of Landry’s vexed iterations, allows Krahulik to provide a much more nuanced analysis of change over time in one of this country’s most renowned gay resort meccas.