Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2011"

Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections

Abstract: This essay suggests that thinking, and feeling, with toxicity invites a recounting of the affectivity and relationality—indeed the bonds—of queerness as it is presently theorized Approaching toxicity in three different modes, I first consider how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in the recent panic about lead content in Chinese-manufactured toys exported the United States This analysis, while seeming at first to hover somewhat outside queerness, is completed in the next section, where I interweave biopolitical considerations of immunity into an account of the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning, rendered in the first person The essay ends by suggesting that the queering and racializing of material other than human amounts to a kind of animacy Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification Theorizing this animacy offers an alternative, or a complement, to existing biopolitical and recent queer-theoretical debates about life and death, while the idea of toxicity proposes an extant queer bond, one more prevalent today than is perhaps given credit Such a toxic queer bond might complicate utopian imagining, as well as address how and where subject-object dispositions might be attributed to the relational queer figure

Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future

Abstract: This essay advances a series of critical points in queer theory. First, a text is queer, regardless of the queerness of its authorial persona, if it carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex. This is argued in relation to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) and David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996). Second, the understanding of sexuality in queer theory has been compromised by the confusion of sexuality with gender. Despite the liberalization of LGBTIQ gender identities, some sexual identities are still stigmatized as paraphilias (formerly perversions) or identity disorders. Queer theory needs to reconsider sexuality in the Freudian sense of polymorphous-perverse, in its ungovernable, compulsive, and unconscious dimensions. Third, “the antisocial thesis” and the relation of queer theory to queer politics are discussed with regard to Lee Edelman’s book No Future (2008).

Remarks on "Queer Bonds"

Abstract: In these closing comments from the “Queer Bonds” conference (subtitled “A Symposium on Sexuality and Sociability”), the author suggests that the “sociability” staged at the conference itself depended on a certain forgetfulness, a certain “failure of transmission,” that may also be the condition of any sociability. She suggests that there is also a sociality at stake in human relationality that does not imply the intimate connotations of sociability. This sociality derives from the constitutive conditions of the body itself—a body always given over to others, which exists in a field of social norms and depends on those norms, and those others, for its survival. The ontology of the body is thus a social ontology: we are all over each other, and that is true from the start. The generalized condition of precariousness that characterizes all bodies—and that makes the possibility of both violence and eroticism their constitutive condition—is nevertheless differentially distributed and also politically exploited. Queer theory has played a special role in bringing to light this differential distribution of precariousness, and this means that queer theory is from the outset implicated in politics, indeed in political activism, and cannot be separated from its enactments. We exist in a relation of “queer bonds” with—and are obligated to—those “we” may never know or recognize.

Blood under the Bridge: Reflections on "Thinking Sex"

Abstract: This article reflects on the intellectual and political circumstances of the publication of Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." In particular, the article considers the context of the feminist "sex wars" of the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a detailed account of several of the period's key events, publications, and debates. The article also reflects on the relation between this moment in the history of feminism and the history of GLBT and queer scholarship over the past several decades.

Thinking Trafficking, Thinking Sex

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Gayle Rubin and Emma Goldman, this article argues that campaigns past and present against trafficking (popularly understood as the trafficking of women into prostitution) constitute displaced conversations about and interventions into heterosexuality, the major site of struggle over sexuality in the past 150 years. These campaigns situate their critiques of heterosexuality outside conventional heterosexual intimacy and marriage by carving off an allegedly unique and dangerous zone (in public, for money, at the hands of strangers) in which sex is exchanged for money and livelihood. These efforts to \"draw the line\" between disapproved and expected forms of exploitation and inequality (sexual and nonsexual) are filled with contradiction and incoherence, particularly in regard to the sexual culpability of men or women. Recent international law (2000) recasts trafficking by defining it as a crime of labor exploitation (not prostitution) that can harm any person (not just women and girls). Despite this reframing, the melodramatic narrative used to tell the story of trafficking subverts the new laws by highlighting sexual danger, innocent women, and male lust as the causal factors in trafficking. Critiques of heterosexual intimacy, institutions, and economies are redirected to the exceptional and the sexual in contemporary campaigns against trafficking, despite the progressive elements of recent law.

DISABLING SEX Notes for a Crip Theory of Sexuality

Abstract: This article attempts to "think disability" using the theoretical framework laid out by Gayle Rubin in her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." After considering how Rubin's essay was already arguably engaged with a disability politics (or, more broadly, a politics of embodiment), it reads "Thinking Sex" alongside another 1984 text, Deborah A. Stone's book The Disabled State , arguing that Stone's text, like Rubin's, is concerned with how capitalism sorts bodies and behaviors into dominant and subordinated categories. The Disabled State , however, can also be read as anticipating, from a disability studies perspective, queer analyses (such as Licia Fiol-Matta's book A Queer Mother for the Nation or Jasbir K. Puar's Terrorist Assemblages ) that do not emerge until much later—analyses stressing the uneven biopolitical incorporation of seemingly marginalized subjects into the contemporary state. The article concludes with reflections on sex surrogacy and the Netherlands, using that location as an exemplary site for examining the complex and contradictory position of disability and sex in relation to the contemporary state.

Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies

Abstract: Through a consideration of the ephemeral archives of queer racialized feminine subjects, this essay considers how current debates in queer theory on the relationship between sociality and the sexual are transformed by the specifics of race, gender, location, and embodiment. In the process, it asks us to face unruly sexual fantasies of violence, abjection, and servitude that likewise trouble our psyche and sexual lives.

José Garcia Villa's Modernism and the Politics of Queer Diasporic Reading

Abstract: Regarded as the first anglophone Filipino literary modernist, Jose Garcia Villa (1908–1997) has typically been seen as an aesthetic formalist who refused to place literature in the service of national or ethnic politics. This essay rethinks this presumption by pursuing a queer diasporic approach to Villa’s early fiction and essays of the 1920s and 1930s, focusing in particular on his queer critiques of gender and sexual normativity in the Philippines and of social assimilation in the United States. Situating Villa’s engagements with nonnormative eroticism within a transnational context structured by U.S. colonialism and migration, the article contends with and resists the seductions of U.S. homonationalism while seeking to decolonize some of the critical assumptions informing the relation between the queer present and the queer(ed) past.

Visibility and Its Discontents: Queer Television Studies

Abstract: This review essay considers three recent publications that collectively demonstrate developments in queer television studies. According to the author, these works provide circumspect progress narratives, tempered by awareness that LGBTQ visibility does not exist in any historical congruity with LGBTQ social and political realities. Taken together, these publications suggest that LGBTQ studies and television studies can make odd bedmates, as scholars negotiate between queer theory’s postidentity politics and a marked nostalgia for a politics of visibility—the emboldening, visceral pleasures of watching and seeing queers on TV, and believing that it matters.

The Epistemology of Ethnography: Method in Queer Anthropology

Abstract: This essay explores methodological dilemmas in queer anthropology by reviewing three recent queer ethnographies: Mary Gray’s Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America ; Mark Padilla’s Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic ; and Gloria Wekker’s The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora . The essay aims to illuminate the epistemology of queer studies more broadly by focusing on a key paradox of ethnographic method: the binary of theory and data that is simultaneously made and unmade in ethnographic research and writing. In a newly transnational queer studies, ethnography has become a source of knowledge of non-Western, local, or cross-cultural sexual practices and formations. Each of the three ethnographies under review makes an important intervention in transnational queer studies: linking local sexual practice to global capital flows, disrupting static notions of self and sexual subjectivity, and showing the mobile and active processes of queer community production. By critically examining their use of method—not only anthropology’s hallmark method of participant observation but also its methods of interpretation, of writing and analysis—the essay queries the epistemological ground of our desires for sexual knowledge (data) that might exceed queer studies’ theoretical categories.

Thinking Sex with an Androgyne

Abstract: This article puts Gayle Rubin's 1984 article "Thinking Sex" in dialogue with Earl Lind's 1918 book Autobiography of an Androgyne . Rooted in different historical moments, the two works address distinct debates about the nature, politics, and ethics of sexual and gender variance. Taken together, they remind us that our varied attempts to label, describe, and explain gender and sexuality—to define them, knit them together, and tug them apart—have a complex history shaped and stamped by the particular contexts in which they evolved. The two historical texts pry us out of the familiar and thereby position us, in a sense, to anachronize the present, to see our own ways of seeing the world as contingent, curious, and changeable.

Thinking sex ethnographically

Abstract: The influence and staying power of Gayle Rubin's essay "Thinking Sex" reflect her success in taking the insights of empirical studies of sexuality—particularly, historically informed ethnography—and drawing out their intellectual and political implications so as to permit an astonishingly interdisciplinary engagement. Part of what Rubin has given social scientists (as well as ethnographically minded humanists) is a model of how to link discourse and representation to the domain of practice as enacted within the lived worlds of erotic communities that are marked by their own rituals, politics, institutions, and spatial configurations.

Are the Lips a Grave

Abstract: This essay articulates a queer feminist ethics of eros by rereading Luce Irigaray through a Foucauldian lens. After an inquiry into Irigaray’s absence from queer theory, the essay makes a case for Irigaray as a resource for queer thinking by exploring the philosophical antifoundationalism she and queer theorists share. Focusing specifically on the antisocial thesis of queer theory, especially in the work of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley, the essay first examines the contentious relation between feminist and queer conceptions of sexual ethics before addressing new possibilities for a queer feminist ethics. Reading Irigaray’s ethics of eros through an ethical Foucauldian lens, the essay accomplishes three objectives: (1) it analyzes the virtually unexplored relation between Irigaray and Foucault to make the case for a queer Irigaray; (2) it unravels the aporetic knot of sexual ethics at the heart of queer feminist splits; and (3) it deepens our philosophical understanding of sexual difference and erotic desubjectivation in modernity by elaborating a queer feminist ethics.

The 1001 Seances

Abstract: This essay, written in 1976–77, is concerned primarily with James Merrill’s long poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which was published in 1976. The poem tells of many nights spent by Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, in communication with a spirit named Ephraim, whose messages they spell out on a Ouija board. The poem also includes fragments of a second story, a retelling of a lost novel of Merrill’s. In her essay Sedgwick talks about the poem’s structure, likening the spacing of fragments of Ephraim’s voice throughout the poem with the spacing of fragments of the lost novel, but she contrasts the pointedness of the novel’s plot with the looser repetitious structure of the poem’s nightly seances. To show that this pointedness is characteristic of Merrill’s novelistic writing, Sedgwick also looks at two actual novels that Merrill had published years earlier, The Seraglio (1957) and The (Diblos) Notebook (1965). In both novels, as well as in the lost novel embedded in the poem, the plot is dominated by a central, climactic, sadomasochistic scene of real or symbolic castration. Sedgwick distinguishes the fixity of this novelistic theme of castration from a different thematic range in the poem’s language, which has to do “with the behaviors of liquids, with currents, obstruction, diffusion, and circulation.” She explores this thematic range in the relation between Ephraim and his mediums, Merrill and Jackson, in which there is more play, variously shifting among flattery, voyeurism, gossip, pedagogy, love, fear, and neglect. The thematics of liquids, she suggests, includes the thematics of fixation but does not synthesize it. “It spaces, distributes, circulates it.” There is, she says, a formal impartiality to the distribution throughout this long poem of its many disparate elements, but there is also an awareness of wastage, of moments “intently and beautifully” improved, “then how quickly squandered.” Sedgwick suggests that Merrill’s long poem is formally exciting because it is “so knowing, so inventive, and so trusting about that wastage.” Sedgwick is describing the poem itself when she quotes it as saying that Merrill and Jackson, through their Ouija board seances with Ephraim, became “a set of / Quasi-grammatical constructions which / Could utter some things clearly, forcibly, / Others not.” (This abstract was written by HAS, with apologies to EKS.)

Re: Thinking Sex from the Global South Africa

Abstract: This article investigates Gayle Rubin's 1984 article "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" as a piece of "traveling theory." It takes a key concept, "hierarchies of sexual value," and its representation in a famous graphic, "the charmed circle," to see what aspects of sexual politics in South Africa Rubin's concept can illuminate, both for the moment in which the essay was written and for the present. While the worlds Rubin's essay can describe have shifted, the essay's analytic power holds.

A Girl's Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge

Abstract: The GLQ Gallery features Allyson Mitchell’s 2010 installation for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, A Girl’s Journey into the Well of Forbidden Knowledge . In a plus-sized version of a sculpture gallery, two large ladies, in luminescent gold and silver, face two walls of books, attached to each other and to a giant crochet brain overhead by a crochet rope that links their crotches to the brain. Mitchell recreated a version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives reading room in Brooklyn by covering the walls of the gallery with trompe l’oeil wallpaper made from drawings of the books on the shelves. In addition to photographs of the installation, the GLQ Gallery features examples of Mitchell’s original drawings. In a brief commentary on the installation, Ann Cvetkovich discusses how Mitchell brings lesbian feminist history and culture to a larger public and creates an “archive of feelings” through the affective labor of redrawing the Lesbian Herstory Archives shelves. The Gallery also features Mitchell’s Deep Lez I statement, a manifesto that calls for a return to lesbian feminist culture as a resource for contemporary queer cultures.

The Time Has Come to Think about Gayle Rubin

Abstract: This article is a personal testimonial to Gayle Rubin, delivered as an introduction to her keynote address at the 2009 "Rethinking Sex" conference convened in her honor at the University of Pennsylvania. It makes a few brief remarks on Rubin's contribution to the development of transgender studies.

QUEER MEDIA LOCI IN BANGKOK Paradise Lost and Found in Translation

Abstract: In the Western popular imagination, Bangkok is a "gay paradise," a city that affords cheap and easy access to exotic "boys." This reputation for sex tourism as well as a local cultural tolerance for homosexuality and transgenderism is a common representation of queer Bangkok in English-language media. This article juxtaposes Thai media and lived experience to displace, recontextualize, and expand the prevailing Western view. It argues that Western gazes that depict Thailand as especially tolerant of homosexuality and gender variance may in fact inhibit the free expression of Thai male-bodied effeminacy. Finally, this article argues that the hypersexualization of Thais and new regional alignments are molding local desires and subjectivities away from the West toward East Asia.

Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 1982

Abstract: The following images and text are taken from Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, the program designed by Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson and published in conjunction with the ninth “Scholar and the Feminist” conference, “Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” held at Barnard College on April 24, 1982. Better known as the Barnard Sex Conference, the conference was a key event in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. Organized by Carole Vance to explore the politics of sexuality, the conference was picketed by antipornography groups. While these protesters focused their objections on issues of pornography, S/M, and butch/femme, the conference addressed a much wider array of questions about women’s experiences of sexuality, some of which are represented here. No ordinary conference program, the Diary included Vance’s invitation to presenters, a coauthored “Concept Paper” that described the conference’s aims and guiding questions, a list of speakers and schedule of events, as well as minutes from planning meetings, bibliographies of suggested reading, and a page devoted to each workshop. The Diary was, as Gayle Rubin writes in her article in this volume, “intended to be something of an archival document.” Each speaker created a page in the Diary to represent her workshop; many of these included a “postcard” featuring some image that she found meaningful personally or in the context of the workshop. These images added to the visual impact of the program, which was designed by Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson. With its striking images, its combination of politics, scholarship, and personal reflection, and its moments of insight, polemic, and humor, the Diary remains a compelling record of feminist collaboration. In the days leading up to the conference, members of antipornography groups contacted the Barnard administration and issued a warning about what

Queer Family Romance in Collecting Visual Culture

Abstract: The essay presents a model of “queer family romance” (adapted from Freud’s concept of family romance) in historical practices of collecting visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though queer collections of visual culture and queer family romance are independent variables, the essay addresses their intersection. The first part briefly outlines how queer collections, regardless of the stylistic and iconographic affiliations of particular objects, are constituted in “family resemblances” among objects that tend, overall, to inflect the entire array in terms of nonstandard sexualities and erotic attractions. The second part considers how Freud handled the question of family romance in his most notable treatment of a famous historical artist, Leonardo da Vinci, and suggests that a concept of queer family romance, though overlooked by Freud, might extend and improve the Freudian account of Leonardo’s sexual subjectivity (as well as his subjectivity as an artist) and go some way toward explaining why Leonardo’s art played a paradigmatic role in later collections of queer visual culture and why Leonardo occupied a major place in later family romances of artistic subjectivity. The third section considers an example of the intersection of queer family romance and the collection of visual culture, namely, the collection of paintings, objets d’art, and other items of visual and material culture gathered and exhibited by William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey from about 1795 to about 1820. The essay concludes by suggesting that queer family romance in collecting visual and material culture constitutes a possible matrix of queer bonding that might supplement, or even provide an alternative to, the social relations of juridical kin or real biological family; because queer families constituted extrabiologically (i.e., in activities of generating cultural forms) can function psychically and socially as family in the fullest sense, they deserve more attention in contemporary debates about the legal-political status—even the very identity—of nontraditional family structures.

Queering the black atlantic, queering the brown atlantic

Abstract: This essay reviews two books, M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures , both of which focus on the intersections of queer studies with diaspora studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. These books help forge the burgeoning field of "queer diasporas," which works against the genealogical and heteronormative reproductive logic of conventional diaspora studies. At the same time, the field of queer diasporas also provincializes queer studies by considering how questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization affect bodies and sexualities as they circulate outside the metropolitan West—across the Black Atlantic to the Caribbean in Alexander's case and across the Brown Atlantic to various locales of the South Asian diaspora in Gopinath's study. As sexuality travels in the global system, we witness its transformation into many other things: a discourse of development; a dialectic of Enlightenment; an emblem of democracy, progress, and liberation; a tale of racial, religious, or cultural barbarism; an index of the human, human rights, and human rights abuses.

Love and Anger: Scenes from a Passionate Career

Abstract: Gayle Rubin's reputation as a star academic and public intellectual has been based on her cool brilliance. But her public and professional reception has also been marked, positively and negatively, by the ambivalence generated by strong feeling. This article describes Rubin's affective surround in an effort to outline the impact of passionate engagement in feminist and queer politics and scholarship.

Call for Papers—on Barbara Johnson In Memoriam Barbara Johnson

Abstract: D. A. Miller’s “Call for Papers” is an homage to Barbara Johnson on the occasion of a memorial service held for her in Berkeley. She was, for Miller, a “critic’s critic”: in a posthumous response to her “Bringing Out D. A. Miller,” a review of his book Bringing Out Roland Barthes , he reads the inscriptions of her own desire to be read the way he read Barthes. The essay suggests the queer bond between two academics of the same generation whose sexuality informs their work in very different ways.

The “beached whale”

Abstract: This article briefly traces the fraught relationship between feminism, sexuality studies, and black feminism. I argue that as sexuality studies, through "Thinking Sex" in particular, began to follow feminism's lead—yoking blackness to a history separate from that of feminism's historical grounding—we have moved further from an exploration of blackness's centrality in queer studies discourse about the body and its erotic desires.

An Archive of Intimacies: A Conversation with Sarah Schulman

Abstract: In the following interview, renowned writer and cultural activist Sarah Schulman discusses her role as the cofounder and coordinator (with Jim Hubbard) of the ACT UP Oral History Project. The Oral History project, which is ongoing, creates a vibrant archive of numerous filmed and transcribed interviews with surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. Schulman’s discussion of her project reveals the patchwork of individual identities, political priorities, and talents that contributed to the significant successes of ACT UP as an agent of social change while also revealing the affective dimensions of constituting and maintaining an archive.

QUEER STUDIES IN QUEER TIMES Conference Review of “Rethinking Sex,” University of Pennsylvania, March 4–6, 2009

Abstract: This review essay considers the "state of the field" of queer studies, as pondered by participants in the conference "Rethinking Sex." Held at the University of Pennsylvania, March 4–6, 2009, "Rethinking Sex" honored the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gayle Rubin's generative essay "Thinking Sex." Participants demonstrated the expansive reach and range of queer studies as it has evolved in the twenty-five years since, attended to its limits, and argued for enlarging its frame to gain traction in our own vexed political moment.

The Part That Has No Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss

Abstract: Hinged to a conversation between the author and her friend and colleague (now deceased) in Australia in 1993, this essay examines an ethical and conceptual gap that opens between an analytic that focuses on the disruptive nature of enjoyment in heteronormative orders and the distributional price of exceeding the Law in settler normativities. It pivots on the claim that the general availability of intensified potential, like the general availability of enjoyment, doesn’t negate the specific social (dis)orderings that differentiate and then treat different bodies differently. It asks what purchase might accrue conceptualizing this conversation as an instance of a “queer bond.”

Outside the Hollywood Canon: Preserving Lesbian Moving Images

Abstract: By examining restoration projects completed by the Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation—a collaboration between Outfest and the UCLA Film & Television Archive—this essay articulates the unique challenges that the preservation and conservation of lesbian moving images have historically posed for traditional archives.