Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2018"

The Black Ecstatic

Abstract: Building on Jose Esteban Munoz's theorization of ecstasy as a site of queer of color desire, relational practice, and utopic possibility, this essay conceptualizes what I call the black ecstatic as a hermeneutic for analyzing post–civil rights black queer poetics. My theorization of the black ecstatic attends specifically to the interrelation of political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction in contemporary black queer cultural production. As an affective and aesthetic practice, the black ecstatic eschews both the heroism of black pasts and the promise of liberated black futures in order to proffer new relational and representational modes in the ongoing catastrophe that constitutes black life in modernity. Against the backdrop of civil rights retrenchment, the War on Drugs, the AIDS crisis, and the US carceral state, this essay analyzes the recent film Moonlight and the poetry of Essex Hemphill, a black gay writer and AIDS activist. In so doing, it shows how, across literary genres and media platforms, the black ecstatic instantiates formal innovations to black queer expressive forms and encourages willful exuberance as an affective disposition and relational ethic that enables black life and liberation in the catastrophic present.

The Affective Commons: Gay Shame, Queer Hate, and Other Collective Feelings

Abstract: Abstract:Through Indigenous critiques of the commons, this article asks what forms of collectivity might be built against the drives of settler-sovereignty. By centering various scales of forced removal and its resistance, I offer a reading of Gay Shame, a queer direct action group based in San Francisco, and its work confronting the hypergentrification of the Bay Area propelled by the tech industry. While positive attachments and shared identification are argued to be necessary for a liberatory politics, in contrast Gay Shame builds an affective commons through negative relationality. Indeed, the Left's attachment to love as the revolutionary affect persist, yet here I center organizing where a desire for struggle collects around bad attitudes. To this end, how might queer hate delineate the ways the traffic in good feelings accelerates racial capitalism's motors of accumulation and dispossession?

Introduction: the queer commons

Abstract: Ideas and practices of “the commons” have been urgently explored in recent years in attempts to forge alternatives to global capitalism and its privatizing enclosures of social life. Contemporary queer energies have been directed to commons-forming initiatives that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics: from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures. However, such instances of queer political action and imagination have rarely been recognized within extant discourses of the commons. This introduction sets out differing genealogies of thought within scholarship on the commons and, building on the work of the performance studies scholar Jose Esteban Munoz, it asks how, if at all, it is possible to theorize a queer commons.

Bad Reading: The Affective Relations of Queer Experimental Literature after AIDS

Abstract: This essay argues that queer experimental literature provides a hermeneutic mode to resist the gentrification of LGBTQ literature in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. Queer experimental literature elicits "bad reading," affective relations of reading that disrupt the corporeal norms that fuse readers into the heteronormative public sphere. Bad reading conjures new economies of social and erotic relation in historical moments when queer belonging is foreclosed, stigmatized, or forgotten. Locating bad reading beside paranoid, reparative, and postcritical reading, the essay situates queer reading within the wider social field from which it emerges. To do so, I turn to Samuel Delany's experimental AIDS writing. Delany rewrites academic discourses of deconstruction, forcing critics to confront their affective and historical implication in the AIDS crisis. He uses queer experimental literature to recuperate the radicalism of queer eroticism disavowed by mainstream gay literature and safe-sex discourses alike. The Mad Man (1994) contests the conceit that experimental literature is politically solipsistic and affectively unpleasant by inviting readers into the incipiently social relations of queer eroticism. The novel's provocations of bad reading condense an affective archive of unsanctioned queer hermeneutics, which have been elided in disciplinary debates over critical reading.

“Wages for Housework Means Wages against Heterosexuality”On the Archives of Black Women for Wages for Housework and Wages Due Lesbians

Abstract: Abstract:In the mid-1970s, two autonomous groups within the International Wages for Housework movement formed to address black (and) lesbian struggles over social reproduction: Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWfWfH) and Wages Due Lesbians (WDL). These groups foregrounded and mobilized reproductive workers often rendered disposable or superfluous to heteronormative reproductive imaginaries. By charting the conceptual impropriety of \"housework\" and \"lesbian\" that emerge within these archives, this article highlights the tensions and coalitional possibilities that come to the fore in struggles against housework through the analytic and organizational centering of nonheteronormative socialities. Concurrently, BWfWfH and WDL are situated in relation to contemporaneous neoliberal invocations of a \"commons\" threatened by racialized, nonheteronormative reproduction. The article argues that the intellectual and political archives of these groups evince the inextricability of social reproduction and queer politics, while also signaling the horizon of a \"queer commons\" that refuses fidelity to some of the founding assumptions of commons discourse.

Queers Read This!LGBTQ Literature Now

Abstract: This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, "Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now" takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick's foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel , as well as the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzuldua, and other queer writers of color in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay orients its readers to the ways that queer reading and queer literature have sustained, shaped, and redefined queer life.

Queerness and Video GamesQueer Game Studies and New Perspectives through Play

Abstract: At the intersection of queerness and video games stands the experience of play. Though queer studies has yet to explore video games in depth, this digital interactive media form has much to say about queerness and the relationship between technology and contemporary LGBTQ lives. Video games represent an immensely popular and widely influential form of cultural production that both reflects and enacts social expectations around gender and sexuality. This makes games an important site of investigation for queer studies scholars. Yet the resonances between video games and queerness go far deeper than the representation of characters on screen or the identities of players. Queerness and video games share an ethos that can be fundamentally characterized through play. The language of play is not only the language of games; it is also the language of BDSM and other queer communities, where kink and sex parties are “play parties” and individual erotic practices are known by names like “anal play,” “bondage play,” and “puppy play.” In an implicit sense, the importance of play already underlies much of queer experience and existing queer theory scholarship. Playfulness ties sexual expression to the queer desires of childhood in the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009). It luxuriates in the jouissance of pleasure and rejects the use-value of sexual reproductivity in Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004). The vibrant tomorrows, always “not yet there,” of José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) are built through make-believe. Each of these examples demonstrates how play is already central to queer studies, and how play has the power to both disrupt and reimagine worlds. Placing queerness in dialogue with video games brings play to the fore. The politics of play are complex and often contradictory — and no subject of study illus-

Secreto a Voces: Excess, Performance, and Jotería in Juan Gabriel's Vocality

Abstract: Abstract:Juan Gabriel is arguably the most successful Mexican singer, songwriter, and producer of the last three decades of the twentieth century. One could begin measuring his success through the numerous Billboard, Grammy, Latin Grammy, and MTV awards, and more than fifteen hundred gold, platinum, and multiplatinum records. The excesses one witnesses in Juan Gabriel's commercial success are analogous to the stylistic excesses one observes in his vocality and the performance of his musical persona. This article focuses on these excesses and examines them in relation to mainstream ideas about masculinity in Mexico and Latin America. Relating Juan Gabriel's symbolic excess in performance to the Marxist idea of surplus, this article takes the singer's vocality as a case study to theorize the notion of jotería as a libidinal economy of excesses that puts in evidence the contradictions, silences, and absences of the Mexican and Latin American heteronormative fantasies.

Preface: Fragment from the Sense of Brown Manuscript

Abstract: Brown Commons is meant to signify at least two things. One is the commons of brown people, places, feelings, sounds, animals, minerals, flora, and other objects. How these things are brown, or what makes them brown, is partly the way in which they suffer and strive together but also in the commonality of their ability to flourish under duress and pressure. They are brown in part because they have been devalued by the world outside their commons. Their brownness can be known by tackling the ways that global and local forces constantly attempt to degrade their value and diminish their verve. But they are also brown insofar as they smolder with a life and persistence, they are brown because brown is a common color shared by a commons that is of and for the multitude. This is the other sense of brown that I wish to describe. People and things in the commons I am rendering are brown because they share an organicism that is not solely the organic of the natural as much as it is a certain brownness, which is embeddedness in a vast and pulsating social world. Again, not organic like a self-sufficient organism, but organic in that objects within that world touch and are copresent. The Brown commons is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse, to move beyond the singular and individualized subjectivities. It is about the swerve of matter, organic and otherwise, the moment of contact, the encounter and all that it can generate. Brownness is about contact and nothing like continuous. Brownness is a being with, being alongside. The story I am telling about a sense of brown is not about the formation of atomized brown subjects but, instead, about the task, the endeavor, not of enacting a brown commons but, rather, about knowing a brownness that is our commonality. Furthermore, the brownness

Beside Women: Charles Dickens, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Reparative Lesbian Literary History

Abstract: This essay traces a lesbian literary history from the works of Charles Dickens and Algernon Charles Swinburne through the 1950s and 1960s. In discussing the former's Bleak House (1853) and the latter's 1866 volume Poems and Ballads , the essay demonstrates the emergence of a structure of lesbian literary and erotic practices that is useful for thinking about lesbian literary history as well as its future. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on reparative reading and the school of queer optimism exemplified by Jose Esteban Munoz's Cruising Utopia undergird the approach to Victorian literature that allows for its reclamation for lesbian use. Furthermore, the essay demands a return to the terminology associated with lesbianism, rather than queerness, because of the woman-centeredness of the texts at hand, structural elements drawn from lesbian sexual and relational practices, and the insufficiency of the term queer in attending to the relationship between these texts and normativity. I suggest that the lesbian reparative ethical, aesthetic, and erotic character of these texts can be seen in their focus on intersubjectivity and radical empathy that blurs the boundaries between self and other. The essay focuses on three primary structures—death and disease ("lesbian bed death"), "the urge to merge," and "possession"—in authors ranging from Dickens and Swinburne to Patricia Highsmith and Elizabeth Bishop to articulate the ethics of the lesbian merge as well as its potential dangers and, moreover, to argue that the risk of subsuming oneself in another is at the heart of reparative reading.

Queers Read What Now

Abstract: This essay reconsiders the common trope of gay and lesbian reading from the vantage of racial difference as an entry point into thinking the possibility of comparative queer of color literary history. While testaments to reading as crucial to gay and lesbian identity formation abound, such reflections and the literary canons they produce do not account for racialized readers or literary traditions. This neglect becomes evident when examining women and queer of color anthologies as well as scenes of reading in three texts published from the advent of explicitly LGBTQ2 of color literature to the present: Audre Lorde's biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Craig Womack's (Muscogee-Creek and Cherokee) novel Drowning in Fire (2001), and Janet Mock's memoir Redefining Realness (2014). Although these narratives imagine and claim other cultural histories and frames of reference that render queer and trans of color existence and eroticism possible, intelligible, and valuable, they remain within the logic of reading as textual mirroring and self-identification, which precludes comparative modes of reading and occludes the definitional challenges posed by queer of color critique. Returning to Lorde and renovated theories of comparative racialization, I close by gesturing toward the subjective vulnerabilities and (dis)identifications as well as the institutional changes necessary for comparative queer of color literary histories to flourish.

Offsetting Queer Literary Labor

Abstract: “Offsetting Queer Literary Labor” asks how LGBTQ+ people and other feminists navigated late twentieth-century changes in print technology in the period from roughly 1965-1990, a period during which typesetting was first computerized and then all but abandoned as part of the pre-print process. I do this by way of an encounter with the writings of Marxist-feminist poet Karen Brodine. The labor relations that surround the typesetting computer are part and parcel of the revolutionary working-class and queer socialist feminism that Brodine elaborates across her writing and that she worked for tirelessly in her life. Through a reading of her poetry, journals, and political activities, I argue that late-twentieth century US gender and sexual categories, as well as novel forms of queer intimacy, were forged through the material relations of print-related wage work. Rather than claiming to queer these texts or this history, this article argues that the concrete forms of feminized labor that attend literary technologies have been and continue to be the basis for the category of “LGBT literature.”

"Dead Addicts Don't Recover": ACT UP's Needle Exchange and the Subjects of Queer Activist History

Abstract: Abstract:At the start of the 1990s the New York chapter of the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was essential to the continuation of needle exchanges, which provide clean syringes to injection drug users without disap-probation or discipline and have been shown to reduce rates of HIV transmission. ACT UP's participation in needle exchange was part of an effort to build connections between political actors, especially across race and class lines, as the group sought a more expansive understanding of who was affected by HIV/AIDS. These efforts have been largely overlooked in the recent attention to ACT UP's legacy. This article asks what the history of ACT UP's needle exchange might tell us not only about the history of HIV/AIDS and public health but also about the ideals of health and recovery in defining the subjects, forms, and historiography of queer activist history.

Queering Commons in Turkey

Abstract: The dossier section contains shorter writings that allow the reader to appreciate varied objects of study, and the potentially wide field of subjects and methods, relevant to the theme of a queer commons. From sound art and the internet, to urban activism and relationality, contributors present case studies, think pieces, and a poetic, epistolary exchange. In sum, these writings demonstrate the multiplicity of queer commons.

"Finding the Lines to My People": Media History and Queer Bibliographic Encounter

Abstract: Abstract:This article examines the materiality, construction, and circulation strategies of LGBTQ information interfaces within a longer genealogy of media practices that troubles the Internet's predominance in understandings of queer self-formation. It focuses on a particular bibliographic project: A Gay Bibliography (1971–80), produced by Barbara Gittings, an activist who was the coordinator of the American Library Association's Task Force on Gay Liberation. The article examines the role of bibliographies in the gay liberation movement's broader information activism and develops a longer history of \"queer bibliographic encounters\" that connects these older practices on paper to theorizations of queer youth and online media in the present. Methodologically, the article analyzes a collection of several hundred letters sent to Gittings to request the bibliography, in order to examine the affective economies of information interfaces in LGBTQ contexts. The article argues that the prevalence of bibliographic encounters across \"old\" and \"new\" media provides a model for understanding how information interfaces construct the subjects and stakes of social movements across time, and for imagining new forms of knowledge mobilization open to the persistent unbelongings of social movement participation.

The Sum of All Questions: Returning to the Clit Club

Abstract: Abstract:Founded in New York City in 1990, the Clit Club was a nightclub and performance venue that offered a sex-positive, racially, economically, and culturally-mixed queer space of encounter for self-identified lesbian, gay, and trans people for over twelve years. Drawing from archival material and responses to a questionnaire previously sent to Clit Club staff, this article provides an introduction to the space, affect, and practices at the Club, and riffs on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's concept of the undercommons, and the improvisational and renegade space it opens up. We posit the Clit Club as a sexual \"undercommons\" that, through the care of its dedicated staff, created a landscape of open possibilities for sexual play and social intimacy in its tiny, hot, crowded spaces. The polyvocality of this coauthored article mirrors the Clit Club's own expression and negotiation of multiple and at times divergent perspectives among its staff and extended family. Returning to the Clit Club today also entails naming the structures that contributed to its absence from queer history, while recognizing the nuanced ways in which the Club resisted the glare of visibility and capture.

Why We Forget the Pulse Nightclub MurdersBodies That (Never) Matter and a Call for Coalitional Models of Queer and Trans Social Justice

Abstract: Like many articles that explore the Pulse nightclub shooting, I begin here with outlining the “bare life” (Agamben 1998) of events of what has been described as the deadliest attack on LGBT persons in US history (Swanson 2016). Shortly after 2 a.m. on Sunday, June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen, a twentynineyearold, USborn security guard in Florida, entered the Orlando Pulse nightclub on “Latin Night,” an evening catering to LGBT Latinx communities. Mateen was heavily armed with an assaultstyle ri e and a handgun. He opened re on the patrons in the club. It was not until three hours later, around roughly 5:15 a.m., that police reported that Mateen was dead. In those three hours, Mateen shot 102 people, fortynine of whom would die (Zambelich and Hurt 2016). Nearly nine months later, the violence and murders of the Pulse nightclub shooting have all but disappeared from mainstream public discussions about LGBT violence. Importantly, those who were murdered by Mateen share something in common with other queer and trans murders that seem to drift from public memory: they were young, poor or working class, queer, Latinx, black, and/or gender nonconforming (City of Orlando 2016). In this piece I explore how the “forgetting” of the Pulse nightclub murders re ects a core structural aw of the LGBT paradigm: these are bodies that never mattered. Positioning the Pulse nightclub murders in a broader sociopolitical context, I explore in this piece why, as evidenced in the amnesia of the Pulse murders, we must discard the “LGBT” paradigm of “community” when attempting to refer to

The Pulse Nightclub and the State of Our World

Abstract: The most common interpretations of Omar Mateen’s murder spree explained his actions in terms of his declared allegiance to ISIS and the homophobia presumed by that allegiance. The New York Times reported, “It was the worst act of terrorism on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001, and the deadliest attack on a gay target in the nation’s history” (Alvarez and PérezPeña 2016). President Barack Obama seemed to endorse this interpretation as well, stating, “In the face of hatred and violence, we will love one another. . . . We will not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead we will stand united as Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us” (ibid.). Donald Trump used the occasion to argue that Muslims should be barred from entering the country’s borders (ibid.). Hillary Clinton called for a “redoubling” of efforts to stop terrorism in the United States and abroad (ibid.). All the comments assumed not only the exceptional but also the foreign nature of homophobia within the United States. The narrative of Mateen as a terrorist for ISIS was undermined by men who said that Mateen had messaged them via apps like Grindr and Jack’d as well as by another man who claimed to be Mateen’s lover. According to the latter, what was advertised — by Mateen and others — as an attack in the name of the socalled Islamic State was in fact the result of a man rejected by potential and actual lovers at the Pulse. What was particularly interesting were the responses that did not condition his acts on whether he belonged to ISIS or whether in fact he was gay but on the social aggression that led him to kill the clubgoers. For instance, in his blog post Jack Halberstam (2016) wrote, “In other queer clubs, on other nights, other bodies have fallen victim to the toxic masculinities that imagine violence as the solution to shifts in the status quo that might shake up hierarchies of sex and gender. But on this night, in this club, the target of steroidfueled, militaristic, narcissistic, deeply con icted masculinity was a group of mostly Latino gay men.” Also, in his article about the killings, the novelist Justin Torres located that toxicity within the borders of the United States. As he stated, “Outside, there’s a world that politicizes every aspect of your identity. There are preachers, of multiple faiths, mostly selfidenti ed Christians, condemning you to hell. Outside, they call you an abomination. Outside, there is a news media that acts as if there are two

How to Block the Extractive View

Abstract: Abstract:The dossier section contains shorter writings that allow the reader to appreciate varied objects of study, and the potentially wide field of subjects and methods, relevant to the theme of a queer commons. From sound art and the internet, to urban activism and relationality, contributors present case studies, think pieces, and a poetic, epistolary exchange. In sum, these writings demonstrate the multiplicity of queer commons.

To Punk, Yield, and FlailJulie Tolentino’s Etiolations and the Strong Performative Impulse

Abstract: Abstract:At the intersection of social practice art and queer failure discourse, performativity pulses with possibility. This article tracks this strong performative force that undergirds theorizations of queer failure, social success, and performance. The author examines Julie Tolentino's community engagement project, The Magical Order (2014), which brings these divergent discourses together. Her collaboration with Larkin Street Youth Services, which serves homeless youth in San Francisco, explored weaker modes of engagement that bring to the fore the sense of force embedded in performativity. Tolentino and her collaborators renegotiate the strong performative impulse by punking, yielding, and flailing. Punking not only reworks genealogies of performance for social practice but also emphasizes mere survival over successful thriving. Yielding renegotiates how the precariat relate to institutions beyond antagonism, as they succumb to institutional forces without losing a sense of self. Flailing nuances failure as the former tracks the unbecoming and temporary nature of punk survival and institutional yielding. These verbs collectively offer a lexicon that directs us to the limits of both social practice and queer aesthetic discourses, highlighting the need to place these two conversations together in order to rework theorizations of performativity and examine the queer possibility of less.

Maternal Failures, Queer Futures: Reading The Price of Salt (1952) and Carol (2015) against Their Grain

Abstract: Abstract:This article offers a comparative analysis of Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel, The Price of Salt, and Todd Haynes's 2015 film adaptation, Carol, to bear witness to the often-overlooked history of pre-Stonewall queer parenthood and to imagine a more radical future of queer kinship. My reading illuminates how the textual strategies of metaphorical substitution and narrative replacement used to imagine postwar lesbian romance consequently render lesbian motherhood and queer desire as seemingly incommensurable. In the core narrative present in both texts, the arc of lesbian romance is portrayed in and against parent-child bonds, while the employment of a mother-daughter erotic reinscribes racial and gender norms. In contrast to Highsmith's pulp novel, which eventually satirizes the mother-daughter bond in its camp machinations, Haynes's lyric period film inspires feelings of grief for Carol's maternal losses and asks audiences to enter into a melancholic relationship to the absent presence of queer parenthood. Reading these texts against their grain of white neoliberalism, the essay thus calls for a reimagining of the pleasures and necessities of child rearing in diverse queer communities today, arguing that contemporary queer culture's radical resistance of white supremacy must incorporate the fight to protect and celebrate all forms of LGBTQ family formation.

A Playlist for Pulse

Abstract: When I rst heard of the tragic loss of lives during “Latin Night” at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, I scrolled through the Internet, reading a variety of social network posts describing the tragedy, texts sent in pleas for help, and memories shared by loved ones. I was especially drawn to videos captured on smartphones recorded seconds before the shooting began. I was drawn to viewing these videos over and over was because of the familiar musical soundscape that forms the space of “Latin Night” that registers for so many of us. One video I watched over and over was taken by Brenda McCool on her smartphone. McCool was one of those killed that night at Pulse. It is likely that one of the last things McCool saw was this beautiful couple dancing to “Brujería” by El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico. Every story I read about McCool included family and friends who expressed how much she loved to dance and how often she attended Pulse with her gay son and friends. From the very rst time I clicked play to watch McCool’s video and heard “Brujería,” I thought to myself, “I’ve been to that club.” I have never been to Pulse’s “Latin Night,” but I have, been there. Every YouTube video that captured Pulse that night and every dedication seemed to carry the iconic sounds of “Latin Night” in any city’s neighborhood gay club, be it Esta Noche in San Francisco or Plaza in Los Angeles. I think most of us who have been to a \"Latin Night\" would agree that there are particular songs that create this sonic formation of queer Latinidad, that no matter whether we are driving down the street listening to our iTunes or at some public event, even one song can take us back to Latin Night. The spirit of that collective kinship formation spun through all our bodily connections to the musical sounds of queer Latinidad and that made many of us feel especially close to those souls making beautiful

Imagining Queer Life After Death

Abstract: On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen killed fortynine people and injured ftyeight more at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, called Pulse. Mateen’s Pulse shooting has been described as the deadliest incident of violence against sexual minorities in the United States and marked the largest singleperson mass shooting in US history at the time. Additionally, federal law enforcement of cials and various media outlets labeled this shooting as the most deadly terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. The public conversation, which initially centered on Mateen’s homophobia, as well as racism and gun control, shifted signi cantly when Mateen invoked ISIS as a motivation for his killings. Public discourse then focused on radical Islamic terrorism and political ideology as explanations for the shootings. And later, when reports of Mateen’s (homo)sexual proclivities and clandestine practices emerged from the shadows, the FBI claimed that it had no proof that Mateen was gay and would therefore continue to investigate him as a person connected with Islamic terrorist groups. The emphasis on Mateen’s closeted samesex attractions recalls descriptions of the predatory sexual invert. Considering and fully engaging both sets of imagery is a worthwhile enterprise, especially if we are concerned with how identities are produced and how they reify social norms and the identity categories that de ne them. However, what seems more interesting at this moment is how such an articulation of Mateen’s monstrous race and sexuality actually reinscribes a speci c kind of normalcy of the victims and substantiates a theodical justi cation for violence.1 Put another way, taxonomizing him as a monster actually erases the queerness of the entire situation, including the victims and the sociopolitical relations that produce violent behaviors and fatalities. Such a move, I think, is a travesty that results in the erasure of (nonidentitarian) queerness from our futures. Inability and unwillingness to recognize the intersectionality of the violence establish and incriminate a de nitive demonized other at the same time that they erase the queerness of everyone involved. As federal law enforcement and the media dubbed Mateen an Islamic terrorist, the queer people of color who died at Pulse — predominantly queer Latinx folks — became legitimized as

GLQ Forum/AftereffectsThe Pulse Nightclub Shootings

Abstract: This special GLQ forum offers a range of responses to the murders of fortynine people — and the injuring of many more — that took place in the early morning hours of June 12, 2016, at Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando, Florida. While acts of violence — everyday and spectacular — have long histories in queer and trans communities (threatening trans and queer people of color with double, triple, quadruple forms of jeopardy), one guiding question for this collection of contributions revolves around what is at stake in responding to and unpacking violent and publicly mediated events after the fact, after the events have faded from public consciousness yet when their aftereffects still haunt many of us.1 In the days following the shootings, an overdetermined set of framings was put in motion, suturing the Islamic State to gay cruising websites in an effort to impart motivations to the massacre. These sliding signifiers reminded many of us of the unruliness that is public culture alongside the need for continued interruptions of its imaginaries and narrative turns (Cohen 2007). In initially proposing a GLQ response to the Pulse shootings, I had in mind a collection that would foreground critically feminist, queer, and trans readings in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. I had assumed a set of diagnostics would be deployed that placed critique — with its pithy precision — front and center. And that by the time the fall 2016 presidential election took place, the collection would be already completed and on its way to the printers. Other

Monstrous Children of Pregnant Androids: Latinx Futures after Orlando

Abstract: Torres, Lourdes. 2016. “In Remembrance of the Orlando Pulse Nightclub Victims.” Latino Studies 14, no. 3: 293 – 97. link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41276016 00124. Vázquez, Charlie. 2016. “Can We Stop Erasing Latinos from the Orlando Massacre Narrative?” Latino Rebels, June 17. www.latinorebels.com/2016/06/17/canwestop erasinglatinosfromtheorlandomassacrenarrative/. Walsh, Mary Williams, and Liz Moyer. 2016. “How Puerto Rico Debt Is Grappling with a Debt Crisis.” New York Times, July 1. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/business /dealbook/puertoricodebtcrisisexplained.html.

The Orlando(s)cene

Abstract: that not only tug at my heart but also color, infect, and orient the way I walk the city — the city that I am physically traversing while dwelling in two others? How can these deaths, miles and months apart, come together while I amble and inhabit the Village? Walking is living. In this case, walking is remembering and thinking of the dead. I am walking not toward something but within a pool of messy memories, media images, and encounters. It is a kinesthetic expression of sadness and despair. All these questions march alongside and inside me as I mourn and remember. Orlando, Manila, and New York. I dwell in places and scenes littered with the contradictions of modernity, cruel inhumanity, quiet aspirations, desperate dreams, and the cold architecture of urban emotions. I map this pastiche of events, and remember faces and voices of people, some alive, some dead, etched in my movement as I struggle to inhabit these three cities in my mind.