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Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2017"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Švankmajer et al. as discussed by the authors used a tree root that looks oddly human to lighten his wife's mood and presented it to her to care for the rootbaby as if it were a human infant.
Abstract: Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová’s 2000 surrealist film Otesánek (Little Otik), based on a Czech folktale of the same name, begins in a gynecologist’s office, where Mrs. Hárakóva is in the midst of receiving the news of yet another negative pregnancy test. During this process, Mr. Hárakóva looks out the window: he sees a baby being spooned from a large tank, weighed, wrapped in paper, and sold like a fish to a pair of waiting hands. When the couple arrive home, dejected, he cuts into a watermelon: there is another baby inside. Bitterly disappointed by their lack of success at conception in the midst of a world apparently filled with pregnant women, the couple go to their country cabin to recuperate. Mr. Hárakóva, working in the garden, unearths a tree root that looks oddly human: as a gesture to lighten his wife’s mood (what a gesture!), he trims and polishes it to look like a child, and presents it to her. Mrs. Hárakóva is, however, not so much lightened as obsessed. She begins to care for the rootbaby as if it were a human infant, and

76 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that black sexuality presents a "problem for thought" within humanism and Afro-pessimism, and that humanism continually attempts to integrate blackness into humanity, as a way to make suffering intelligible (structural adjustment).
Abstract: This article argues that black sexuality presents a "problem for thought" within humanism and Afro-pessimism Humanism continually attempts to integrate blackness into humanity, as a way to make suffering intelligible (structural adjustment); Afro-pessimism, rightly critiquing this structural adjustment, is unable to articulate "particularity" or "difference" (since fungibility presumes an object stripped of human qualities, such as identity) The article analyzes the "murder" of Steen Keith Fenrich as a being trapped within the crevices of this methodological problem Onticide is presented as a procedure for contending with the double bind of humanism and creating intellectual space for an (im)possible violence

48 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The work of as discussed by the authors explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world.
Abstract: This article brings together world-systems analysis, which explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world. Zooming out from the metropolitan and national frames that have dominated sexual historiography, this article operates at a different scale and order of magnification to explore forms of sexuality shared in whole and in part across the world. My theorization of the sexual world-system aims to understand the encounter between object choice as the organizing dimension of sexuality and its collision with other sexual knowledges and organizations: intimacy, bodily practice, positionality, sexual acts, behaviors, desires, and so forth. Reading across literary, sexological, legal, and religious archives, I examine the relationship between these varieties of sexual knowledge in order to contribute to a comparative study of sexuality and to write sexuality into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "geoculture."

37 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: H.D.'s Tribute to Freud, a 1956 account of her analysis in the 1930s, posits two kinds of time: clock-time and historical time as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: H.D.’s Tribute to Freud , a 1956 account of her analysis in the 1930s, posits two kinds of time. One is an intractable temporality that she calls “clock-time,” the unceasing movement of history toward a traumatic future—above all, the threat of Sigmund Freud’s impending death and the encroachment of the Nazis on Vienna. Against this murderous imposition, the memoir embraces a temporality defined by brevity and contingency—we might call it momentary time or ephemeral time. As such, this queer text speaks to queer theory’s oppositions between normative and nonnormative time and their attendant modes of reading—for example, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” which compares rigid, knowing-in-advance interpretation with an affectively rich, temporally fluid hermeneutics. Reparative reading offers one way to understand Tribute to Freud , but H.D. can also hone our understanding of “Paranoid Reading” because both texts demonstrate the collapse of distinctions between ephemeral time and historical time.

34 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper explored the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sexual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological conditions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities.
Abstract: The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sexual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological conditions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities. It notes that the majority of these statutes have been enacted within the past three decades and most contain language that explicitly exempts animal husbandry and veterinary medicine from prosecution. The article explores the legislative politics that produce these exemptions and exposes an underlying ambiguity: in the age of industrial reproduction, the "accepted practices" of animal husbandry can be distinguished from bestiality only through legal fiat. The structure of the laws exempts human sexual contact with animals when it reproduces biocapital and produces "perverse" bestialists and "normal" farmers as mirrored categories, distinguished not by their relations to animals but by their relations to capital. Finally, the article reads this insight against the biopolitical theorist Giorgio Agamben's concept of anthropogenesis and notes that such exemptions reveal a limitation in his theory. In place of the timeless ritualism of Agamben's "anthropological machine," the article argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure, the critical role of sexual violence and reproduction, and processes of trans-speciative procreation.

26 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors take up Henry David Thoreau's vexed relation to the ascetic imperatives of nineteenth-century capitalism in the context of his determination, as he says in Walden, to ''love the wild not less than the good''.
Abstract: What does sex radicalism look like—for queer theory but not only queer theory—in a critical dispensation tuned less to the liberatory promises of sex than to matters of biopower? This article takes up Henry David Thoreau's vexed relation to the ascetic imperatives of nineteenth-century capitalism in the context of his determination, as he says in Walden, to \"love the wild not less than the good.\" It tracks Thoreau's interest in the wild as part of his career-wide effort to imagine carnal life away from the forms of biopolitical coding and optimization that he understood to be captivating his body more and more completely. As against these imperatives of maximized bodily instrumentalization—crosswired to whiteness, labor, reproductivity—Thoreau tests out the possibilities of a more errant carnality, a \"wildness\" that, I argue, both is and is not an expression of what, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be called \"sexuality.\" Doing so, he helps us bring into focus some of the knotty conceptual dilemmas of our own queer theoretical moment, in which the impulse to nurture traditions of sex radicalism sits sometimes uneasily alongside renderings of sex as a key element of imperial racialization and biopoliticized control.

25 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article used the case of Alan Turing to unpick the epistemological consequences of conceptualizing practices in oppositional terms, a tendency pervasive among historians and queer specialists alike, revealing the paralyzing effects of polarization but also, and perhaps more urgently, the paramount importance in forging any number of pathways in creating queer narratives of pastness, including the unmaking of history.
Abstract: If we are serious about producing knowledge of the past in all its complexity—that is, as something we think that we know already as well as pastness in all its radical strangeness—it is vital to grasp the epistemological consequences in conceptualizing practices in oppositional terms, a tendency pervasive among historians and queer specialists alike. Using the case of Alan Turing to unpick this oppositional logic reveals the paralyzing effects of polarization but also, and perhaps more urgently, the paramount importance in forging any number of pathways in creating queer narratives of pastness, including the unmaking of history. Accounting for the messiness and complexity of our movements through the labyrinth of history and memory calls for recognizing the boundaries of praxis as delineated and mutable, conflicting and intertwined.

24 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The crisis of kinship is foundational to the sexual economy of slavery as discussed by the authors, and incest is a sexual construct of slavery that paradoxically enables the emergence of queer sexual and kinship affiliations.
Abstract: “The Crisis of Kinship: Queer Affiliations in the Sexual Economy of Slavery” reexamines the discourse of queer kinship in order to take up Sharon Holland’s call that queer studies has yet to reckon with the institution of slavery. I consider how the crisis of the oedipal drama—namely, unknown parentage and incest—is foundational to the sexual economy of slavery. Rather than a taboo that finds heterosexual resolution, incest is a sexual construct of slavery that paradoxically enables the emergence of queer sexual and kinship affiliations. I ground my reading in the nineteenth-century short story “Le Mulâtre,” by the African American author Victor Sejour. “Le Mulâtre” takes me to unwieldy genealogies of kinship, incest, and same-sex desire. Here, I look to the sexual epistemologies of Vodou religious practices in Haiti; I engage pre-Freudian theories of Oedipus by Johann Jakob Bachofen, who situates Oedipus in the sexually promiscuous space of the swamp. In all, an examination of incest and miscegenation in slavery reveals a repressed racialization of the Oedipus complex.

23 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss two high-profile Norwegian cases involving the Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Oystein Maeland, who served as chief of the Norwegian police from 2011 to 2012, and point out how specific formations of gay surrogacy work to simultaneously produce legitimate citizens out of commissioning parents and children, as well as a superior and exceptional nation-state.
Abstract: Transnational surrogacy and the reproductive practices it entails raise interesting questions about genetic relatedness, kinship formation, and the stratification of reproductive labor and rights. This article discusses two high-profile Norwegian cases involving the Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Oystein Maeland, who served as chief of the Norwegian police from 2011 to 2012. While surrogacy is illegal in Norway, the article demonstrates how newspaper debates on both cases discursively decentered the illegality of surrogacy practices and instead developed notions of “good” and “bad” practices, positioning surrogacy in California as ethically regulated, while surrogacy in India was framed as fraught with ethical issues and exploitative. The article concludes that the two cases point to how specific formations of gay surrogacy work to simultaneously produce legitimate citizens out of commissioning parents and children, as well as a superior and exceptional nation-state.

18 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of sexual economy and argue for a consideration of the "late effects" that subtend the sexual economies of India.
Abstract: In 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed a writ petition against the Indian government to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic HIV and cancer medications. Rather than framing queer politics in India as a matter of state-sanctioned citizenship in which queers rally for legal rights, “Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India” considers this case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of sexual economy. I argue for a consideration of the “late effects” that subtend the sexual economies of India—that is, material mechanisms of delay in access that run counter to the putative logics of flexibility and mobility that inform India in a postliberalization milieu. I show how the liberalized Indian state is mediated by transnational formations and global imperatives of capitalism, and in turn manages local sexual economies that seek to preserve heteronormative logics of essentialized Indianness. While economic liberalization after the 1990s closely parallels the emergence of burgeoning gay visibility in India, my aim is to theorize the fault lines rather than the compatibility between sexual politics and economic imperatives of growth that mark the accelerated development of an “incredible” or “shining” India.

17 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors offer a history of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work, which they call "amorous regard" of his fashion photography.
Abstract: Obviously, glamour is queer. But has this always been true? This article offers queer histories of capitalism and interwar glamour through an analysis of George Platt Lynes's photographic work. Lynes, an American photographer for Conde Nast publications, was one of numerous queer photographers, including Baron de Meyer, Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst, who defined a queer aesthetics of fashion photography in New York, Paris, London, and Hollywood in the years before World War II. I historicize what Lynes called the "amorous regard" of his fashion photography through an analysis of his male nudes and the sexual history for which they are a visual record. In this article, I show how both Lynes's fashion images and his male nudes emerged from a marketimbricated queer kinship network to produce a discourse of interwar glamour that accommodated both dominant readings of heteronormativity and resistant readings of queer, white, belonging.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that fatness is a ''congealed form of history that hurts,'' and argue for the possibility of a fat present/presence and the new fat hermeneutics required to notice the same.
Abstract: This article argues that queer theory must depart from three temporalities often attributed to fat bodies even in queer circles and theory—most notably by Lauren Berlant in the much-lauded Cruel Optimism. It asserts that figural exploitations of fatness have been too quickly accepted and demands that we rethink how we \"figure\" the matter of figure. Against fat temporalities that work according to the logics of fort/da, Nachträglichkeit, \"before and after,\" or, as Berlant puts it, fat as a \"congealed form of history that hurts,\" this article turns to often-ignored work on fat by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A sustained reading of Sedgwick's poem \"The Use of Being Fat\" becomes the way through which this article argues for the possibility of a fat present/presence and the new fat hermeneutics required to notice the same. Queer theory will be left with two important methodological questions. First, how will accounts of queer affect weigh the import of fat and size, especially given the near ubiquity of homonormative abjections of fatness? Second, how will largesse live as and within queer readings and hermeneutics in such fat times

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Annie Leibovitz's postmortem photograph of Susan Sontag in A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 publicizes its subject in the same visual space that protects its privacy, writing over its contemporaneity with a series of more legible nineteenth-century and modernist visual codes, just as it aspires to write over celebrity spectacle with the intimate and sustained gaze of contemplation and witness as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Annie Leibovitz’s postmortem photograph of Susan Sontag in A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 publicizes its subject in the same visual space that protects its privacy, writing over its contemporaneity with a series of more legible nineteenth-century and modernist visual codes, just as it aspires to write over celebrity spectacle with the intimate and sustained gaze of contemplation and witness. This process of writing over is not just spatial but temporal, anchored in moments of rupture, suture, and recursivity, as well as in strategies through which the apparently static image aspires to acknowledge, touch, and potentially rework its usable pasts. The volume’s collective use of “temporal asynchrony” constitutes a queering of the latent teleologies of linear sequence (from the teleology of heterosexual reproduction to the inscription of ideas of social order broadly), and in terms requisite to Leibovitz’s project to redescribe kinship as queer or lesbian history.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored the discussion generated from the screening of Kumu Hina, a documentary about a Hawaiian Māhū in the Beijing Queer Film Festival and a brief history of ku'er media culture and discourse in China.
Abstract: Although scholars who work on Asia and those who work on indigenous studies have both critiqued the epistemic structure of queer studies for particularizing the non-West and thus supporting the domination of the West, they are hardly in dialogue. This article offers a rethinking of queer theory and practice useful to both area studies and indigenous studies by exploring the discussion generated from the screening of Kumu Hina, a documentary about a Hawaiian Māhū in the Beijing Queer Film Festival and a brief history of ku’er (queer) media culture and discourse in China. Thinking beyond the binaries of West/East and white/indigeneity, this article calls for a kind of transversal queer alliance that does not equate “cultural specificity” with cultural authenticity but critically uses it as an entry point to reveal the structural hierarchy between the local and the global, the particular and the universal.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality as mentioned in this paper, in which he leveraged a particularly misogynistic white masculinity to achieve his queer interventions.
Abstract: As a gay man directing straight hardcore pornographic films in the 1970s, Zebedy Colt smuggled a certain queer eros into the visual culture of heterosexuality Indeed, he belonged to a queer cohort of hetero-pornographers whose subversive flourishes have gone largely unrecognized by porn studies and queer studies scholars, in part because of the incomplete archives generally used to narrate and analyze pornography Yet Colt's work, in such films as The Devil Inside Her (1976), Sex Wish (1976), Virgin Dreams (1977), and others, was a reactionary queer cinema, in which he leveraged a particularly misogynistic white masculinity to achieve his queer interventions This article attends to both his implantation of queer desire into the heart of normative heterosexuality and the gender and racial politics that allowed heteromasculinity to absorb those seeming challenges without any threat of veering toward a queer utopian horizon

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the television serial drama Ima VeAbbaz (Mom and Dads ), whose protagonists are two gay men who have a child with a straight woman, and argue that the show manages to deviate from the usual representation of the gay father, thereby offering an ideological alternative to conventional and conservative (even if accepting) perspectives on gay parenting.
Abstract: Over the past decade, LGBT figures have become increasingly visible on Israeli television in its various channels and genres, especially cis-gendered gay men. In recent years, however, the representation of gay people on Israeli television has undergone a considerable shift, whereby many television texts feature gay men as fathers. These texts usually present gay parenthood as a positive phenomenon and sometimes even as more successful than heteronormative parenthood. The recasting of gay parenthood as positive is achieved through various devices, some of which are familiar from other places around the world, while others touch on unique features of Jewish-Israeli reality. In this article, I lay out the various strategies through which gay fatherhood is recast as positive on Israeli television and present the possible costs of this positive (and normative) representation of gay fatherhood. I focus on the television serial drama Ima VeAbbaz ( Mom and Dads ), whose protagonists are two gay men who have a child with a straight woman. I argue that the show manages to deviate from the usual representation of the gay father, thereby offering an ideological alternative to conventional and conservative (even if accepting) perspectives on gay parenting.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argue that Strachey's prose style is a kind of planned obsolescence, in the model of manufacturing schemes to promote demand for yearly updates, and that the continual drive for innovation we think of as modernism is the same demand for novelty in any other commodity.
Abstract: Lytton Strachey's first major work, Eminent Victorians, made a revolutionary gesture by giving the lives of its famous subjects ironic treatment, atypical of the serious genre of biography. His highly stylized lives were readable, but his campiness brought critical backlash from the institutional gatekeepers. This dismissal took the same form of homophobic panic that attended writers of aestheticism. Engaging recent constellations of queer style and queer temporality, I argue that Strachey's prose style is a kind of planned obsolescence, in the model of manufacturing schemes to promote demand for yearly updates. Planned obsolescence gives us a new way to look at innovation in styles and canon formation. The continual drive for innovation we think of as modernism is the same demand for novelty in any other commodity. Strachey's work disrupts the conservative modernist reaction to the perceived threat of commodity culture and calls into question its preservation of hierarchies of distinction. Strachey emphasizes momentary pleasure, not the future, and this opens an aesthetic resistance to the collusion of literature and the marketplace, both in its impact on aesthetic form and in its institutionalization in literary studies.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper examined the Istanbul Ansiklopedisi, the never-completed, lifetime labor of love of the mid-twentieth-century Turkish historian Resad Ekrem Kocu.
Abstract: How might current theories of the queer archive, its ephemeral, idiosyncratic, and fetishized contents, and its affective relation to the past and present, need amending to accommodate non-Western contexts and their differing histories and cultural scripts of sexuality? This article addresses such questions by examining the Istanbul Ansiklopedisi , the never-completed, lifetime labor of love of the mid-twentieth-century Turkish historian Resad Ekrem Kocu. The entries and illustrations in the eleven extant volumes turn out to be a veritable treasure trove of queer history, queer longing, and queer affect — one that nonetheless managed to pass itself off as acceptable reading material for any number of middle-class Turkish families. Facing the systematic erasure of Istanbul’s centuries-old tradition of male homoerotic culture from the official and state record, Kocu makes his encyclopedic enterprise the covert home for a queer archive that, in refusing to disappear, becomes a queer politics.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Aztlan Unprotected: Reading Gil Cuadros in the Aftermath of HIV/AIDS as discussed by the authors examines what the gay Chicano writer Gilcuadros, whose work depicts queer and Chicana/o communities living with HIV/ AIDS in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, teaches us today, in a historical moment when the virus remains an urgent health concern among young, queer Latino men.
Abstract: “Aztlan Unprotected: Reading Gil Cuadros in the Aftermath of HIV/AIDS” examines what the gay Chicano writer Gil Cuadros, whose work depicts queer and Chicana/o communities living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early 1990s, teaches us today, in a historical moment when the virus remains an urgent health concern among young, queer Latino men even as the dominant culture locates the crisis in the past. Challenging health care inequities and interrogating conceptions of “healthy” sexuality, Cuadros’s 1994 collection of prose and poetry, City of God , is profoundly relevant at a time when comprehensive health care access for vulnerable populations remains tenuous. Reading Cuadros in the purported aftermath of HIV/AIDS prompts us to face who can access the protection of a recognized political community (whether Aztlan or white gay communities) and who is left unprotected.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The erotic life of racism has materialized in my own life, in the way my expectations that sexual or romantic partners be out was always situated within structures of race, or in the ways I have been fetishized as a black man as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: You know that you are learning something when ideas disorganize you. The three books I review here forced me to rethink, to borrow from Sharon Holland’s (2012) recent book, how “the erotic life of racism” has materialized in my own life — in the ways my expectations that sexual or romantic partners be out was always situated within structures of race, or in the ways I have been fetishized as a black man. Perhaps most disturbingly, these texts led me to wonder: “Am I a snow queen?”1 That racism has an erotic life or that eroticism is shaped by racism are not wholly new ideas, of course. Yet, as Holland (2012: 14) observes, these realities seem to have become largely estranged in both critical race theory and queer studies. Jeffrey McCune’s Sexual Discretion, C. Riley Snorton’s Nobody Is Supposed to Know,

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Engebretsen as mentioned in this paper provided a valuable view on queer lives prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which would lead to increasingly strict political regulations, and it is highly meaningful that Queer Women in Urban China came out in 2014, the year that the Chinese government was about to unleash a nationwide repression against women's rights activists.
Abstract: While the field of queer China studies is definitely growing, we are still short of indepth ethnographic research with nuanced analyses of the variegated meanings and strategies an LGBT individual may conjure up in daily life. This monograph on Beijing lalas (the Chinese coinage of “lesbians”) is thus more than welcome in many senses. We may begin with the issue of timeliness. The ethnographic materials Elizabeth Engebretsen provides are culled primarily from 2004 to 2006, which may seem to render the scenarios in the book somewhat outdated. Quite the contrary, however, the book offers a valuable view on queer lives prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which would lead to increasingly strict political regulations. Moreover, it is highly meaningful that Queer Women in Urban China came out in 2014, the year that the Chinese government was about to unleash a nationwide repression against women’s rights activists. It is against this backdrop that Engebretsen argues ardently at the end of the book for future research, advocacy, and outreach initiatives at once within and beyond academe (163). Indeed, the term precarity takes on significance in specific social contexts, which need to be articulated by fine ethnographic works such as this one. According to the same logic, ethnographic methods are always derived from, and embedded in, given social conditions. It follows that both the capacities and limitations of a certain method may reveal the contours of those social conditions. Engebretsen does research chiefly in lala bars, salons, private gatherings, and nongovernmental organizations. She is not privy, however, to the kinds of


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: MillerYoung as discussed by the authors argues that women might love sex, but their primary objective is making money, and this ability is what gives them cultural currency and is key to theorizing their subjectivity.
Abstract: about agency in the United States. These women might love sex, but their primary objective is making money — this ability is what gives them cultural currency and is key to theorizing their subjectivity. This narrative shows that discussions of subjectivity benefit tremendously from taking the relationships between labor and sexuality and labor and agency into account. By centering labor, MillerYoung deftly sidesteps debates about whether pornography can be feminist and instead shows us that economies of desire are mutable and can be manipulated to find spaces of survival and even pleasure. This perspective is an important addition to black feminist sexuality studies. Audiences interested in American studies, labor history, the history of pornography, black feminism, and sexuality studies should take note of this important book.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Kotef as mentioned in this paper argued that the movement of others may be restricted because this restriction is not conceived as an infringement upon freedom, but primarily, as the containment of a security problem.
Abstract: Time and again we find the idea that stability, and with it the possibility of moderated movement, is based on a particular relation to the ground (appropriation, ownership, settlement . . .). On the one hand, those who have land . . . are not merely entitled to move in it freely; . . . their movement is free movement and must therefore be protected. On the other hand, the movement of others may be restricted because this restriction is not conceived as an infringement upon freedom, but primarily, as the containment of a security problem. — Hagar Kotef

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Sexual Outlaw as discussed by the authors is a prose documentary of a Chicano gay writer whose reputation as a documenter of the seedy sexual underworld of hustlers and tricks has set the tone for discussions about his work.
Abstract: Known for his controversial first novel, City of Night (1963), John Rechy is a Chicano gay writer whose reputation as a documenter of the seedy sexual underworld of hustlers and tricks has set the tone for discussions about his work. Interrogating this characterization, the present article takes up the subtitle to Rechy’s sixth novel, The Sexual Outlaw (“a prose documentary”), as a way to analyze the novel’s generic and formal choices. While tracing the continuities between this text from 1977 and his earlier best-selling novels, the article locates this genre-bending novel in the context of the boom in LGBT documentaries of the time. Putting Rechy’s text in conversation with the contemporaneous documentary Word Is Out (1977), by Peter Adair, the article establishes The Sexual Outlaw as both a response to and a parody of these landmark films, specifically by shedding light on the invisible and oft-forgotten outcasts of the LGBT community, those young outlaws of the working class who cruise and define themselves against the white and affluent “Mr. Middle of the Road” trope so exalted in Adair’s documentary.