Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2010"
TL;DR: For Native studies, the authors argued that the logics of settler colonialism and decolonization must be queered in order to properly speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonisation, and heteropatriarchy that affect all peoples.
Abstract: Queer studies highlights the importance of developing analyses that go beyond identity and representational politics. For Native studies in particular, queer theory points to the possibility of going beyond representing the voices of Native peoples, a project that can quickly become co-opted into providing Native commodities for consumption in the multicultural academic-industrial complex. The subjectless critique of queer theory can assist Native studies in critically interrogating how it could unwittingly re-create colonial hierarchies even within projects of decolonization. This critique also sheds light on how Native peoples function within the colonial imaginary-including the colonial imaginary of scholars and movements that claim to be radical. At the same time, Native studies can build on queer of color critique's engagement with subjectless critique. In the move to go "postidentity," queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the indigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects. With respect to Native studies, even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how identities are shaped by settler colonialism. Thus a conversation between Native studies and queer theory is important, because the logics of settler colonialism and decolonization must be queered in order to properly speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy that affect all peoples.
240 citations
TL;DR: The authors reinterpreted historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects.
Abstract: Settlement conditions the formation of modern queer subjects and politics in the United States. This essay newly interprets the settler formation of U.S. queer modernities by inspiration of Jasbir Puar's critique of homonationalism. Puar argues that homonationalism produces U.S. queers as regulatory over the racialized and sexualized populations targeted within the imperial biopolitics of the war on terror. I explain homonationalism as a quality of U.S. queer modernities having formed within a colonial biopolitics, in which the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produces modern sexuality as a function of settlement. This essay reinterprets historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects. Modern queer projects enact this biopolitics when their normatively non-Native and settler form distances Native people from sexual modernity, even as they seek modern sexual freedoms in the settler state. Homonationalism arises here, as one effect of settlement's naturalization and defense in U.S. queer modernities, and as one means by which the continued colonization of Native peoples and land shapes the imperial projections of the United States and its subjects. Settler homonationalism may be destabilized by marking and challenging its historical formation and holding queer projects accountable to Native struggles for decolonization.
181 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics is asserted, and an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories is proposed.
Abstract: One of the strongest aspects of emergent queer of color critiques is their ability to employ a multiplicity of tactics to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized) strategies. Yet the absence of Native peoples and histories in formulating these emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people and an analysis of ongoing colonialism for Native nations have largely been left out of queer of color critiques points to a major rupture in these theories. Native people, then, must disidentify with the very critiques that claim to be decolonial and counter hegemonic interventions for queer people of color in order to build viable theories for Native communities. Drawing on the Cherokee basketry tradition of doubleweave, in which two independent yet interwoven designs result, this essay asserts the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics, and invites an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories that can strengthen our theories and practices.
157 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw on ethnographic interviews with Israeli and Palestinian queer activists in Israel to interrogate the centrality of the politics of visibility in "mainstream" queer activism and suggest that queer Israeli activists' reliance on visibility as a political strategy is embedded in and supportive of the racist discourses of Israeli nationalism and the violent practices of the Israeli state.
Abstract: In this essay, I draw on ethnographic interviews with Israeli and Palestinian queer activists in Israel to interrogate the centrality of the politics of visibility in "mainstream" queer activism. I suggest that queer Israeli activists' reliance on visibility as a political strategy is embedded in and supportive of the racist discourses of Israeli nationalism and the violent practices of the Israeli state. I argue that the "checkpoint," rather than the "closet," offers a more productive metaphor against which queer activists and thinkers might organize their efforts. I conclude with a discussion of the subversive potential of queer Palestinian activism as a politics that challenges multiple oppressions and undermines, rather than naturalizes, the racist, antidemocratic logic of the nation.
62 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that what Spaniards saw as a religious duty was actually a form of gendercide, the destruction of an entire third gender, and explored the various strategies employed to accomplish this gender-cide.
Abstract: Prior to contact with Europeans, California Indigenous peoples maintained a culture of three genders: male, female, and joya . Spanish missionaries and soldiers, however, viewed joyas as practicing "the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies" and reported that "we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants." I argue that what Spaniards saw as a religious duty was actually a form of gendercide, the destruction of an entire third gender, and explore the various strategies employed to accomplish this gendercide. Ultimately, this gendercide-while severely destructive to both joyas and the indigenous community-was unsuccessful, and I further argue that we are experiencing a renaissance of joyas in the form of two-spirited indigenous peoples.
59 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines figures of archives in Alison's Bechdelah's 2006 memoir Fun Home as occasions for reimagining the queer potentiality of historical narrative. But their focus is on the museum-like family house, the father's home library, and the childhood diary.
Abstract: This essay examines figures of archives in Alison's Bechdel's 2006 memoir Fun Home —the museum-like family house, the father's home library, Alison's childhood diary, and the public libraries she frequented as a young adult—as occasions for reimagining the queer potentiality of historical narrative. While the memoir begins with a schematic distinction between fact and falsehood, nature and artifice, later chapters revise that view, in part by identifying within the queer archive the counterhistorical impulse Derrida calls archive fever. Informed by that ceaseless drive, Fun Home provides an opportunity to investigate the archive's relation to identity and history.
51 citations
TL;DR: This paper argued for a modern queer Cherokee aesthetic that is both responsive to the contemporary experiences of gender and sexuality-variant Cherokees and inspired by the late Mississippian category of "anomaly" as a queer-inclusive tribal model for belonging.
Abstract: Recent laws against same-sex marriage in the Cherokee Nation provide the backdrop for this analysis of alternative models of Cherokee sexual diversity. Rather than seek identifiable historical precedent that is largely unavailable in the historical record and vehemently denied by the predominantly Baptist Cherokee majority, this essay argues instead for a modern queer Cherokee aesthetic that is both responsive to the contemporary experiences of gender- and sexuality-variant Cherokees and inspired by the late Mississippian category of "anomaly" as a queer-inclusive tribal model for belonging.
43 citations
TL;DR: One of the unexpected reminders of the continued anxiety elicited by queer bodies emerged in the final stages of preparing this manuscript for publication when the image we had selected for the cover was vetoed by Duke University Press.
Abstract: One of the unexpected reminders of the continued anxiety elicited by queer bodies emerged in the final stages of preparing this manuscript for publication when the image we had selected for the cover was vetoed by Duke University Press. The intended image was the one on the following page: Heaven and Earth, by Kent Monkman (Cree/English/Irish), one of Canada’s most celebrated contemporary multidisciplinary artists and a man of great generosity, who was more than happy to offer permission for us to reproduce the image for this issue. This particular painting offers important ironic commentary on the sexualized history of colonialism, but it also reverses perceived power dynamics, repositioning the familiar status of Native bodies (often those of women) as submissive victims of the colonial erotic to assertive and enthusiastic agents of unashamed sexual subjectivity while also intimating the penetrability of white male bodies. It’s certainly a provocative painting — while a casual first glance might presume a moment of transparent sexual violence, a closer look challenges this assumption. Are the men smiling? Is the Indian pinning the white man’s arms behind him, or is he helping to remove his lover’s shirt? The wounded bison isn’t running away — if anything, s/he is distracted by the curious scene that is taking place elsewhere on the land. (And both bow and arrow quiver are absent from the painting, so the agent of injury isn’t necessarily one of these men.) And then there’s the erection. The unobtrusive, barely noticeable white penis rising up to greet the prairie sky. While not something to which we paid much attention (in fact, most of us didn’t even notice it until the controversy arose), it became the center of intense interest to Duke University Press. It was deemed unsuitable for reproduction in the books catalog, and then subsequently it was dropped as the cover image altogether, with the suggestion that it be replaced by a less provocative image. The justifications for this decision revolved around the public nature of that particular penis: Duke argued that while content inside the journal had a context that readers knowingly engaged, an image circulating more publicly on the outside cover was “out of context” and thus legally problematic.
36 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the relationship of performative practices to a politics of identification, and examine the links between political performativity and the performative construction of identity in the context of the Black Laundry movement.
Abstract: The essay discusses the Israeli queer activist group Black Laundry that emerged in 2001 following the outbreak of the second Intifada. The analysis underscores Black Laundry's move away from the assimilationist politics of the LGBT community in Israel with its narrow understanding of identity politics in terms of group interests, for which the group substituted a "politics of identification" rooted in a marginalized sexual and gendered positioning. Focusing on the group's practices, and reading them for their political and theoretical implications, the essay examines the relation of performative practices to a politics of identification and inquires into the links between political performativity and the performative construction of identity. More broadly, it interrogates how sexual and gender dissidence translates into identification across national and ethnic divides. Finally, the group's insistence on linking queer and feminist issues with the struggle against the occupation, together with its emphasis on bodily practices and utterances, is shown to have far-reaching implications for the very understanding of political agency.
35 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined two works by the Israeli director Eytan Fox, Florentin, a television serial, and The Bubble, a feature film, and found that they negotiate the interplay between queerness, the Israeli state, and the Israeli military occupation.
Abstract: This essay examines two works by the Israeli director Eytan Fox— Florentin , a television serial, and The Bubble , a feature film—and the highly divergent ways they negotiate the interplay between queerness, the Israeli state, and the Israeli military occupation. Reading Fox's works symptomatically, the essay proposes that Florentin and The Bubble can be understood as indexes of the changing Israeli political landscape of the last decade—both the vacillating landscape of gay rights and visibility within the nation-state and the changing landscape of Israeli occupation and Palestinian struggle that the Oslo process of the 1990s made possible. In keeping with the tradition of symptomatic reading, the analysis pays close attention to storylines and populations that Fox has excluded from these works, arguing that Fox's representations of gay Israeli life are intimately enmeshed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even at moments when, through cinematic silence, the conflict is implicitly disavowed.
26 citations
TL;DR: The introduction to this special issue of GLQ analyzes the intricate and most complex dynamics defining the relationship between what can be called "queer politics" and "the question of Palestine/Israel".
Abstract: The introduction to this special issue of GLQ analyzes the intricate and most complex dynamics defining the relationship between what can be called "queer politics" and "the question of Palestine/Israel." It sets the parameters for the theoretical questions raised by the following essays, reviews, and interviews, and offers a broad sociopolitical and cultural context that frames the discussion and grounds it historically. Discussions of "queerness" (and sexual politics more extensively) are essential for our understandings of national movements, colonial oppression, new technologies of state surveillance, and new modes of racial/ethnic/religious segregation. This is true as a general rule, and it is certainly the case for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the complex set of ideologies and technologies that help sustain and regulate the separation between Jews and Arabs/Palestinians, occupiers and occupied. The discourses about gay rights and sexual tolerance, on the one hand, and the strict state regulation of sexual behaviors, identifications, and bonds, on the other, both come to crisscross and complicate the more common and openly discussed concerns associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as national security, militarism, border control, colonial oppression, terrorism, secularism, religious conviction, and ethnonational self-determination. Indeed, as clearly demonstrated by the following essays, sexual politics and most specifically issues concerning queerness, which might initially seem marginal in this context, do in fact play a central role in both facilitating and transgressing the current hostile and oppressive relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.
TL;DR: In this article, three queer Palestinian activists discuss the complexity of their identities and politics and the major challenges facing their work and the strategies they employ to address them, including the need to forge a queer agenda in the context of military occupation and state-governed racism.
Abstract: One of the most important contributions of this special issue of GLQ is the forum for three queer Palestinian activists to speak about the complexity of their identities and politics. In this roundtable conversation, these activists make clear that while they do not speak for all Palestinian LGBTQs, and that they do not necessarily agree among themselves on strategies or details (the women's rights approach of Aswat is different from the queer activism of Al-Qaws), they do succeed in laying out the major challenges facing their work and the strategies they employ to address them. Most central among these challenges is the need to forge a queer agenda in the context of military occupation and state-governed racism.
TL;DR: In this paper, Massad argues that Arab intellectuals from every critical horizon (nationalist, Islamist, liberal, Marxist, psychoanalytic, secular, or feminist) have adopted without reflection Western views of modernity and progress, thereby internalizing a Western assessment of their culture as "decadent", their hierarchical positioning as "backward, and their inferiority on the civilizational scale whose telos is democracy and freedom".
Abstract: Joseph Massad’s Desiring Arabs is without question an erudite, wellresearched monograph that seeks to show the “influence and impact that Orientalism has had in shaping the Arabs’ own perceptions of themselves and each other since the [earlynineteenthcentury] Arab Renaissance to the present” (48). Whether or not one agrees with his basic premise, there is no denying that Massad displays a thorough command of the key Arabic and Western sources relevant to his project and that he is familiar with the medieval and contemporary literature on sexuality in the Arab world, be it Islamist or secular. The monograph is divided into three parts, each consisting of two chapters. The first part provides an overview of the ways Arab intellectuals (from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1990s) have endeavored to recover their own literary, philosophical, and theological past to construct an “Arab culture” (turath) and civilization that would affirm the rights of Arabs to belong to the Western project of modernity. Massad argues that Arab intellectuals from every critical horizon (nationalist, Islamist, liberal, Marxist, psychoanalytic, secular, or feminist) have adopted without reflection Western views of modernity and progress, thereby internalizing a Western assessment of their culture as “decadent,” their hierarchical positioning as “backward,” and their inferiority on the civilizational scale whose telos is democracy and freedom. At the same time, Arabs, according to Massad, have also internalized Western Victorian attitudes toward sexuality that privilege heterosexuality and devalue all nonnormative sexual expression or
TL;DR: The authors examines the construction of Two-Spirit identity in three contemporary narrative films, Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing, arguing that despite each story's focus on a queer Native protagonist, by their conclusions each film fractures Two-spirit identities.
Abstract: This essay examines the construction of Two-Spirit identity in three contemporary narrative films, Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes , and The Business of Fancydancing , arguing that, despite each story's focus on a queer Native protagonist, by their conclusions each film fractures Two-Spirit identities. Whereas Big Eden elides indigenous identity, Johnny Greyeyes and The Business of Fancydancing segregate indigeneity from queer sexuality, thereby relegating queerness entirely to off-reservation spaces. As this essay demonstrates, when the films' protagonists cross reservation lines, they literally leave behind their queer lovers and figuratively abandon all that those lovers represent when the storylines turn nearly exclusively to familial and cultural ties. As a result, such films suggest that the boundaries of nation in indigenous contexts are constructed and maintained by the heteronormative gaze and that Two-Spirit people are therefore forced to choose between sexual and national affiliations. This theme of division, in which indigenous affiliations with tribe and nation are split from expressions of queer sexuality, demonstrates how contemporary representations of Two-Spirit identities in narrative film continue to mirror the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. In the case of Big Eden , Indian people, and thus any potential for actual Two-Spirit erotics, vanish completely under the weight of colonial desires; in the case of Johnny Greyeyes , though the aftermath of settler violence is both highlighted and healed by invoking a Two-Spirit relationship, articulations of Two-Spirit desire are bounded by the walls of the prison; and, finally, in the case of The Business of Fancydancing , regulating settler logics, which long degraded and denied Two-Spirit cosmologies, are replicated and, in fact, reinvigorated by deploying a gay imaginary that rests on dominant constructions of queerness.
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of gay male reviewers' responses to major commercial publishers' expanded offerings of fiction by and about gay people during the 1970s reveals how reviewers constructed a machinery of gay-identified criticism, negotiated new definitions of gay identity, and forged a community of gay intellectuals and authors intent on using their own mainstream success to make evident to all the creativity and value of contemporary gay life.
Abstract: An analysis of gay male reviewers' responses to major commercial publishers' expanded offerings of fiction by and about gay people during the 1970s reveals how reviewers constructed a machinery of gay-identified criticism, negotiated new definitions of gay identity, and forged a community of gay intellectuals and authors intent on using their own mainstream success to make evident to all the creativity and value of contemporary gay life. By decade's end, this gay literary elite had developed ideas about gay cultural politics and the proper relationship between activism and commercial cultural production that differed distinctly from those of gay political organizations and other gay activists. These developments sketch a richer and more complicated story of the evolution of gay identity and gay politics-particularly the politics of visibility-after Stonewall.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that there is a tension between radicalism and liberalism, assimilation and separatism, and the role of professional or hierarchical organizations within the LGBT movement, and that professional organizations are also deeply problematic because of how they suppress dissent and radicalism.
Abstract: Queer and radical criticisms of the LGBT movement have existed since the movement's origins. Indeed, within any movement there are tensions between radicalism and liberalism, assimilation and separatism, and the role of professional or hierarchical organizations. Examining three recent publications on the LGBT movement, I argue that within the LGBT movement there is a tension between queer radicalism and professionalism (which is often conflated with homonormativity and assimilation.) As the national LGBT movement grew, it inevitably developed professional, formal organizations. Although a necessity in maintaining movement coherence and focus, professional organizations are also deeply problematic because of how they suppress dissent and radicalism. Professional organizations also incorporate corporate diversity culture, which is often staffed and led by white professionals and targets only visible and fundable identities such as race and gender.
TL;DR: The Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003) film by Sharif Waked as discussed by the authors introduces a slew of beautiful young men striding down a catwalk to the sound of heavy beat music, wearing "the latest in checkpoint fashion": a tight mini black jacket that exposes a flat stomach in a sudden opening of a hidden side zipper, a white T-shirt with a large heart-shaped opening exposing most of the chest, and many more articles of designed clothing, all partially covering, but mostly exposing, the top part of the body.
Abstract: In his seven-minute film Chic Point: Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints (2003), Palestinian artist Sharif Waked introduces a slew of beautiful young men striding down a catwalk to the sound of heavy beat music, wearing "the latest in checkpoint fashion": a tight mini black jacket that exposes a flat stomach in a sudden opening of a hidden side zipper, a white T-shirt with a large heart-shaped opening exposing most of the chest, and many more articles of designed clothing, all partially covering, but mostly exposing, the top part of the body. In her reading of this piece, Hochberg argues that in drawing attention to the body of the Palestinian who is stopped daily at Israeli checkpoints for long and humiliating searches, and resituating this body in a radically different context (fashion show, or perhaps strip show?), Waked resists common representations of the Palestinian as (always and only) a victim of military inspection, turning him instead into an object of desire well aware of his desirability. Furthermore, focusing on the most common search routine practiced by the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint, the lifting of Palestinian shirts to ensure that they are not strapped with explosives, Waked gives this practice a new, and explicitly homoerotic, interpretation, presenting it as a means for Israeli soldiers to "check out" Palestinian men, who "dress up for the occasion." In Waked's film, Hochberg concludes, the Israeli soldiers' treatment of the Palestinian body as a "security threat" and the Palestinian's forced cooperation function as pretexts for underlying hidden and forbidden (homoerotic) desire, here exposed as the subtext of a toxic national conflict sealed in heteronormative sexual perceptions of masculinity and its absence.
TL;DR: The Moving Image Review as mentioned in this paper provides an overview of the films and videos that were produced and that have subsequently been appropriated and re-worked by contemporary filmmakers for a variety of purposes.
Abstract: In the age of AIDS, film and video became one of the principal means for grief-stricken activists and artists to bear witness and make sense of the epidemic and the loss of their lovers and friends. This Moving Image Review comprises short texts that provide an overview of the films and videos that were produced and that have subsequently been appropriated and reworked by contemporary filmmakers for a variety of purposes. In re-viewing these works from a distance, the authors revise old assumptions about the nature of these films and videos and the people and the activist movement that they depict. Roger Hallas provides a counterpoint to this examination by acknowledging the importance of the film "archive" created by less recognizable independent and experimental queer filmmakers. Jim Hubbard, seeking to articulate the different strategies and aesthetic of AIDS activist video as opposed to film , finds some surprising similarities. Debra Levine, reviewing preserved tapes of ACT UP demonstrations and placing these alongside the more recently produced ACT UP oral history videos, concludes that participants in the demonstrations were driven by a compulsion to demonstrate kindness and care toward their fellow ACT UP members as much as they were motivated by anger (as their acts are commonly interpreted). And Paul Sendziuk offers a reassessment of Philadelphia , Hollywood's first big-budget film to address the topic of AIDS and homosexuality, arguing for the need to understand the historical circumstance of its production and its intended mainstream audience.
TL;DR: In this article, Braun's short film Gevald (2008) is a lesbian love story set in a diverse Jerusalem drag club, against a backdrop of local Orthodox Jewish antigay protests.
Abstract: Netalie Braun's short film Gevald (2008) is a lesbian love story set in a diverse Jerusalem drag club, against a backdrop of local Orthodox Jewish antigay protests. While the film portrays queerness as secularist, its portrayal of the complexities inherent in the intertwining conflicts in the Holy City ends up telling a more complicated story.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors read the long poem Tokinish by the Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens and argued that it is precisely this proprietary feature of desire, being claimed by the lover as "mine," that translates the poem's Native speaker from an unrecognizable status into a fully human subject.
Abstract: In this essay I read the long poem Tokinish by the Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens. Stevens borrows passages of prose description from Roger Williams's 1643 Narragansett lexicon, A Key into the Language of America , as well as the earlier text's structure of facing columns of English and Narragansett words. Appropriations from Williams's lexicon introduce the figure of translation into the poem and also allow Stevens to create echoes between present and past. The poem concerns two types of contact: contact as historical phenomenon in the Americas and contact as contemporary sexuality. Stevens brings these two types of contact into relationship, so that the speaker's sexual and romantic experiences are echoed in the ethnographic commentary appropriated from Williams's text. I argue that Stevens uses these echoes to describe queer desire in colonial, proprietary terms, but that it is precisely this proprietary feature of desire, being claimed by the lover as "mine," that translates the poem's Native speaker from an unrecognizable status into a fully human subject. I also argue, with Stevens, that the way we unthinkingly speak about our desires using colonial metaphors of contact, conquest, exploration, and possession demonstrates the ongoing impact of the history of colonialism in North America.
TL;DR: Flanders's 2005 documentary Zero Degrees of Separation subtly weaves together two seemingly distinct narratives: the settlement of Palestine in the 1950s by a hopeful generation of pioneering Jewish immigrants and the challenges of gay Israeli-Palestinian relationships in contemporary Israel/Palestine as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Elle Flanders's 2005 documentary film Zero Degrees of Separation subtly weaves together two seemingly distinct narratives: the settlement of Palestine in the 1950s by a hopeful generation of pioneering Jewish immigrants and the challenges of gay Israeli-Palestinian relationships in contemporary Israel/Palestine. By innovatively interlacing archival footage shot by Flanders's own grandparents as early as the 1920s with interviews conducted with Israeli and Palestinian queers in 2002, Flanders demonstrates the mutual implication of these narratives. This essay examines how through the unique temporal collision of these two historical moments, prominent tensions of the current conflict are made visible in the haunting utopian images of the early Zionist movement. By filtering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of sexuality, Flanders's film deconstructs certain constitutive myths of the modern nation-state, offering an intimately personal glimpse into questions seminal to both the political genealogy of the current conflict and the quotidian lives of Israelis and Palestinians: human rights violations, violence, the policing of bodies, the geopolitics of Israeli expansion, the politics of mobility, and the mapping of Western colonial ideologies onto racialized conflicts—both between Israelis and Palestinian and within the Israeli community itself between Jews of Arab (Mizrahim) and European (Ashkenazim) descent.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the silences that surround issues of same-sex desire in and out of the poetry of Joy Harjo and conclude that "Suspicioning" examines the silence that surrounded these issues.
Abstract: "Suspicioning" examines the silences that surround issues of same-sex desire in and out of the poetry of Joy Harjo.
Journal Article•
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In the formative years of the developing cultural relations between the Mi'kmaq of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and European Judeo-Christian missionaries, Father Chrestien Le Clercq systematized Mi'Kmaq written language in order to convert the Original People as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In the formative years of the developing cultural relations between the Mi'kmaq of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and European Judeo-Christian missionaries, Father Chrestien Le Clercq systematized Mi'kmaq written language in order to convert the Original People. More recently, collaborations between scholars such as Mi'kmaq Hieroglyphic Prayers: Readings in North America's First Indigenous Script , by Murdena Marshall and David L. Schmidt, have begun to translate and reinterpret this script using contemporary decolonial methodologies that privilege Indigenous survival. In "Puo'winue'l Prayers: Readings from North America's First Transtextual Script," I continue this conversation while engaging the script from a multiracial, visual-textual, Two-Spirit perspective.
TL;DR: Bilen et al. as discussed by the authors use a series of mid-twentieth-century texts as refashioning the plantation into an intrinsically queer cultural space, a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South.
Abstract: Over the past decade some very exciting things — and some very queer things — have been happening in U.S. southern studies. Invigorated by a wholesale reassessment of the region’s place in the world, the “New Southern Studies” offers novel approaches to the U.S. South’s histories and mythologies. Part and parcel of this reassessment has been an increased attention to “sexual otherness” in southern lives and letters.1 Michael P. Bibler’s superb new book, Cotton’s Queer Relations, makes a significant and deft contribution to these scholarly conversations, in no small part because it addresses forthrightly same-sex intimacy in one of the South’s most important and most troubling cultural institutions, the plantation. Too long steeped in the sentimental muck of “moonlight and magnolias” (think Gone with the Wind’s opening, prewar scenes at Twelve Oaks), the southern plantation is, Bibler helps us to see, a more complicated imaginative space, one whose perverse logics may paradoxically give rise to progressive social ends. At the heart of this earnest book is an argument about power differentials. Bibler reads a series of mid-twentieth-century texts as refashioning the plantation “into an intrinsically queer cultural space — a space where queer southerners appear to live, sometimes freely and openly, as central players in the story of the South” (2). Over some three hundred pages, Bibler posits and pursues three figurative models of same-sex intimacy: among white men of the planter class, among plantation mistresses and African American maids, and among black revolutionaries. Because such intimacies subvert the “heterosexualized, paternalistic