Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2019"
TL;DR: The GLQ forum celebrated the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Abstract:This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's \"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\" The forum opens with Cohen's reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article's haunting subtitular question—\"the radical potential of queer politics?,\" and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.
32 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the principal outlines of the encounter between queer theory and decolonial thinking are delineated, with no pretensions of reaching definitive answers, and the potential of this encounter, and what might it produce, is explored.
Abstract: Abstract:This article aims to accompany the voyages of different theories by seeking to delineate the principal outlines of the encounter between queer theory and decolonial thinking. In a preliminary way, with no pretensions of reaching definitive answers, it formulates questions such as: Could this encounter between decolonial thinking and queer theory produce something else that might be thought of as \"decolonial queer\" (as enunciated in this article's title)? Or are these theories incompatible, given that the term queer, rendered in English, signals the very sort of geopolitics that decolonial thinking attempts to counter? Is there any commonality between these proposals? What is the potential of this encounter, and what might it produce? And what sorts of movements would a queer decolonial reading design?
26 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a series of implicit theories of the couple are explored, ranging from French feminist critiques of asymmetrical heterosexual relationships to triadic accounts of the queer as couple's sexual and racialized Other.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay excavates from within the history of feminist and queer theory a series of implicit theories of the couple, ranging from French feminist critiques of asymmetrical heterosexual relationships to triadic accounts of the queer as couple's sexual and racialized Other. We turn to four integers—one, two, three, and zero—to comprehend the shifting relationship between the Couple and the Queer, constructing a queer numerology that attends to the numerical patterns that can be said to characterize coupled relationality in different historical moments. Taking cues from Lee Edelman as well as recent Afro-pessimist scholarship, we approach the Couple not as a sociological category, but as a structure of being, and the Queer, not as an identitarian category but as an (non)ontological position. Drawing from a diverse archive of texts from 1970s Italian feminism to Daoist philosophy to early psychoanalytic theories of the anus, we take a step back from the post-structural logic that has animated queer studies since its inception, developing a structuralist methodology that insists on the ontological and ethical significance of the position we call the zero.
22 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue for the continued promise of Stryker's critique in producing knowledge around the queerness of gender directly out of the material, embodied livelihood of trans people, arguing that Strykers' critique can be seen as a turning away from the way she had earlier theorized gender and transness through the lens of her embodied knowledge and affect.
Abstract: Abstract:In \"Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin,\" part of the 2004 forum \"Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender,\" Susan Stryker underlined a critical way in which trans people had become exceptionalized by a certain strand of queer theory, serving as figures for the antibinary subversion of gender that left sexual subjectivity off the hook in accounting for itself as a default cis category. This abstraction into figuration was, precisely, a turning away from how Stryker had earlier theorized the queerness of gender and transness through the lens of her embodied knowledge and affect. Reading Stryker's mobilization of rage in a wider history of trans women and trans women of color's critiques of queer movements, we argue for the continued promise of Stryker's critique in producing knowledge around the queerness of gender directly out of the material, embodied livelihood of trans people.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors understand slowness as an embodied method that black queer women mobilize to articulate their place within gentrifying neighborhoods oriented around speed and its byproduct: white heteromasculinity.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay understands slowness as an embodied method that black queer women mobilize to articulate their place within gentrifying neighborhoods oriented around speed and its by-product: white heteromasculinity. It follows the women as they participate in a queer dance party dedicated to slow jams, examining how they use slowness to theorize and take pleasure in the party as black queer women. As the party gets more popular, however, the music gets faster, the crowd gets whiter, and black queer women's deployments of slowness shift as they see the party capitulating to a model of success in the neoliberal city that depends on black queer aesthetics even as it disavows black queer subjects. The essay subsequently situates black queer women's conscious practices of slowness within a longer genealogy of black negotiations of the temporal, arguing that black and black queer management of space-time necessarily expands juridical-economic formulations of what David Harvey describes as the \"right to the city.\" In so doing, it argues for more acute attention to the racialized queer mechanics of temporal as well as affective and embodied capital as important terrains on which black queer subjects make themselves intelligible within neoliberal spaces that function through their removal.
20 citations
TL;DR: This article revisited the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" and explored the shifting contexts in which it has been received, and explored its shifting contexts.
Abstract: Abstract:This article revisits the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of \"My Words to Victor Frankenstein\" and explores the shifting contexts in which it has been received.
19 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued for a discursively and material significant separation of "transgender" from the LGB(T)Q acronym, if only to examine the category for its full, often-precarious, and complicated realities.
Abstract: Abstract:The author reflects here on a 2004 GLQ forum titled \"Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender,\" which focused on the relationships between gender, sex, and sexuality as intertwining and diverging categories of analysis. The essay contends specifically with the role of the category transgender in these relationships. By focusing on histories of funding for LGBTQ organizations, especially the philanthropic response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the author demonstrates how gender and sexuality remain importantly intertwined both theoretically and practically while trans and gender-nonconforming communities remain sidelined. Through examining this institutional history in conversation with theoretical debates about \"transgender\" as an object of inquiry in queer studies, the author argues for a discursively and material significant separation of \"transgender\" from the LGB(T)Q acronym, if only to examine the category for its full, often-precarious, and complicated realities.
19 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reexamine the long-held association of homosexuality with a radical erotics of death from the vantage of queer of color critique and show how racist violence itself might stem from the disavowal of the urge to dissolution that homosexuality is said to represent.
Abstract: Abstract:Drawing on the writings of Georges Bataille and Leo Bersani, this essay reexamines the long-held association of homosexuality with a radical erotics of death from the vantage of queer of color critique. While notions of suicidal ecstasy, self-shattering, and masochistic jouissance have played a central role in the theorization of homosexuality's transgressive potential, accounts that center homosexuality's desubjectivizing negativity have often been charged with a failure to attend to questions of racial difference and the limits they pose for an erotics and ethics grounded in risk and violence. This essay sets philosophical and psychoanalytic readings of (homo)sexuality's thanatology against the necropolitical realities of racist violence in order to think through, while refusing to abandon, the possibility of a nonwhite erotics of self-shattering. To do so, it analyzes the case of Luka Magnotta, the so-called Montreal gay cannibal killer, who murdered, decapitated, and committed acts of cannibalism and necrophilia on the corpse of Jun Lin, an Asian international student. In reading this case, however, the essay aims not only to demonstrate the racialized distribution of risk but also to show how racist violence itself might stem from the disavowal of the urge to dissolution that homosexuality is said to represent. The essay suggests, in turn, that this disavowal might be read as part of the ongoing conversion of homosexuality into a form of life, a process usefully illuminated by the phenomenon of gay twinning, in which gay men pursue sexual relations with what appear to be their mirror images made flesh. Grounded in notions of sameness and self-duplication, twinning dramatizes the abnegation of homosexuality's suicidal erotics and demonstrates the relations of complicity that bind the work of self-preservation to the reproduction of orders of racial difference that threaten to erupt into murderous violence.
18 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a travesti assemblage is formed from three different but interconnected sections: the first is a life story of a young working-class Peruvian woman, Sandra; the second is an exploration of the encounter of an ethnographer and an informant; and the third section introduces the queer art of lying.
Abstract: Abstract:This article is a travesti assemblage. It is formed from three different but interconnected sections. The first is a life story of a young working-class Peruvian travesti, Sandra. My reading of this particular travesti narrative is an attempt to mark a queer existence or presence in and against worlds, institutions, and collectives that historically have attempted to erase such an existence. The second is an exploration of the encounter of an ethnographer and an informant. This second section attempts to undo and displace, through dialogue with dreams and nightmares, some of the certainties that the ethnographic encounter has come to imply. The third section introduces the queer art of lying, another form of aesthetic and political reflexivity, and rethinks all I have presented thus far by exploring its limits. The article concludes with a critical plea for engaging with the queer art of lying, in order to imagine new forms of travesti survival, and less cruel ways of travesti death.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reflect on the contents and the afterlife of a 2007 special issue of GLQ, "Queer Temporalities", and describe the process of inventing the GLQ roundtable discussion and writing a manual for how to edit a special issue.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay reflects on the contents and the afterlife of a 2007 special issue of GLQ, \"Queer Temporalities.\" It also describes the process of inventing the GLQ roundtable discussion and writing a manual for how to edit a special issue of the journal.
13 citations
TL;DR: The GLQ forum celebrated the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Abstract:This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's \"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\" The forum opens with Cohen's reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article's haunting subtitular question—\"the radical potential of queer politics?,\" and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.
TL;DR: The authors re-examine No Future and the debates surrounding it in two ways: first, it resituates Edelman's contributions to queer theory in relation to deconstructive theories of rhetoric, irony, and linguistic materiality, unpacking the de Manian strands of No Future that critics have tended to ignore.
Abstract: Abstract:Since its publication in 2004, Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive has sparked some of the most heated debates in literary and cultural studies. Yet most engagements with Edelman's text—whether positive, negative, or neutral—tend to resort to paraphrasing and summarizing the book's ideas rather than analyzing its language. Countering this tendency, this essay reexamines No Future and the debates surrounding it in two ways: first, it resituates Edelman's contributions to queer theory in relation to deconstructive theories of rhetoric, irony, and linguistic materiality, unpacking the de Manian strands of No Future that critics have tended to ignore; second, it uses the deconstructive dimensions of Edelman's work to engage in a closer reading of No Future's rhetoric, focusing on the text's ironic use of rhetorical questions. By attending to these overlooked features of No Future, the article demonstrates how Edelman's assertions are insistently tempered by forms of ambiguity, ambivalence, nuance, and irony that challenge critics' dominant conception of the book as intractable and totalizing.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors respond to Duggan's "The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies" (1995), which was published in an early issue of GLQ and argue that queer studies scholars often produce stories about queer studies that are strikingly at odds with what the field actually looks like on an institutional level.
Abstract: Abstract:This article responds to Lisa Duggan's \"The Discipline Problem: Queer Theory Meets Lesbian and Gay Studies\" (1995), which was published in an early issue of GLQ. In arguing queer theory's disinterest in empirical research in the 1990s, Duggan's article seems to anticipate Laura Doan, Valerie Traub, and Heather Love's recent critiques of queer studies' anti-empiricism. However, although ostensibly in line with Duggan's argument, most of this recent work lacks Duggan's attention to how specific institutional practices give shape to the field. In emphasizing discursive debates over material institutional practices, I argue that queer studies scholars often produce stories about queer studies that are strikingly at odds with what the field actually looks like on an institutional level.
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TL;DR: The authors argue that Nelson's refusal of the binary of normative/antinormative is salutary, but that her reliance on Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse raises difficult questions about the meaning of historical forms of queer experience and feeling in the era of gay marriage.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay situates Maggie Nelson's 2015 memoir The Argonauts within the context of the 2015 US Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage and contemporary debates about the politics of antinormativity in queer studies. I argue that Nelson's refusal of the binary of normative/antinormative is salutary, but that her reliance on Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse raises difficult questions about the meaning of historical forms of queer experience and feeling in the era of gay marriage.
TL;DR: Neko Case's most original compositions, a reductionist materialism attendant to the agency of the nonhuman complements rather than forecloses an older materialist tradition insistent on antagonism between conflicting interest groups as the motor engine of history and the social as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Abstract:Few contemporary artists channel the utopian impulses of the nonhuman turn with more creative energy than Neko Case. In her work, the untraceable movements of poisonous gases, the uncanny desires of tornadoes, and the recalcitrant withdrawal of subatomic particles envision an array of transits, elusions, and exit strategies so often denied to the subjects whose bodies, trajectories, and affective lives are policed by the regulatory cultural and institutional forces endemic to heteronormative biocapitalism, particularly poor and marginalized women. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist new materialism as well as its critics, this essay considers the implications of these imaginings. On the one hand, the modes of agency that Case's songs invoke frequently entail a circumvention or suppression of specific political interests, making them susceptible to antifeminist and settler-colonialist appropriations; on the other hand, her work potentially offers a vision of the political that refuses to take human action as the inevitable starting point for its theories of power and domination, an increasingly urgent task in an age of ecological catastrophe, when the lives of earth's most vulnerable gendered and racialized subjects are irreducibly enmeshed in precarious planetary networks of biodependencies that include the actions of microbes, tornadoes, and atoms alike. In Case's most original compositions, a reductionist materialism attendant to the agency of the nonhuman complements rather than forecloses an older materialist tradition insistent on antagonism between conflicting interest groups as the motor engine of history and the social.
TL;DR: In this article, a series of suicide plots in which the risk of undoing does not indicate a refusal of one's existing life as much as it performs a fantastic desire to live a different one are discussed.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay concentrates on a series of suicide plots in which the risk of one's undoing does not indicate a refusal of one's existing life as much as it performs a fantastic desire to live a different one. Willa Cather's short story \"Paul's Case\" (1905), Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991), and Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman (2014) help us think about how suicide functions as a sustaining fantasy and a queer narrative strategy. In each, the main character's retreat into suicidal fantasy is not limiting but productive: it creates a space of protection for otherwise damaged individuals, allowing them to imagine an alternative configuration as/at the end of their world. This essay thus makes the counterintuitive claim that the suicide plot should be read non-tragically. It considers how acts of self-annihilation force us to think about the binding narratives of gendered and sexualized person-hood. If these narratives most readily seem to forward a critique of the hetero and sexist norms for life, they also offer a compelling argument about how the use of death works to imagine new forms, narratives, and possibilities of living.
TL;DR: In this article, a renewed ontology of the couple via an autoethnographic account of human-animal cohabitation is proposed, based on a close reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's infamous dismissal of the pet in A Thousand Plateaus.
Abstract: Abstract:Queer thinking to date has tended to write off the couple form as foundationally normative. This essay offers a renewed ontology of the couple via an autoethnographic account of human-animal cohabitation: my own coupled raising of a dog. Through a close reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's infamous dismissal of the pet in A Thousand Plateaus, \"Anthropomorphism, Normativity, and the Couple\" proposes that the mundane enigma of being in the world as and with an animal affords an opportunity for apprehending the couple as one of the commonest social forms through which the intermeshing of the simultaneously personalizing and impersonalizing fields of sociality and sexuality is registered and negotiated. In order to secure a differently queer critical purchase on the couple formation, the abject figures of animal studies and queer studies—the pet and the couple—are thought unphobically together, thereby instantiating the radical claims of those fields via a posthumanist perspective unbound by conventional claims to identity, agency, and alterity.
TL;DR: This paper pointed out the importance of humanistic discourse on AIDS through embodied, cultural interventions and pointed out discursive backlash that humanistic discursive discourse often solicits via a critique of Arlene Croce's review of Still/Here.
Abstract: Abstract:This thought piece reflects on David Román's 2000 GLQ article \"Not-about-AIDS\" as an important intervention in which he critiques other intellectuals and public figures who have proclaimed or celebrated the \"end\" of AIDS because of combination therapy. I repeat and extend this critique into the present, questioning the lack of memory and discourse on AIDS in contemporary US culture. Like Román, I insist on the importance of humanistic discourse on AIDS through embodied, cultural interventions. Moreover, I point to discursive backlash that humanistic discourse often solicits via a critique of Arlene Croce's review of Still/Here. Finally, I point to the importance of platforms such as GLQ to continue a critical dialogue on how AIDS is discussed.
TL;DR: The Beebo Brinker Chronicles as mentioned in this paper is a trans-masculine series of lesbian pulp novels written by Ann Bannon, and it has been read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay explores Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp series \"The Beebo Brinker Chronicles\" through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon's texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo's masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness — now widely read as a transgender text — Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall's Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon's series provides a vital intervention in the \"case study\" framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon's work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre's treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.
TL;DR: A body of work rigorously interrogates how gender and sexuality, in their intersections with race, class, colonialism, and political economy, structure processes of international migration and bordercrossing as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Since its emergence in the early 2000s, the interdisciplinary field of queer migration studies has challenged the heteronormative assumptions that have traditionally circumscribed academic, activist, and policy discourses on international migration.1 Building on theoretical and methodological insights from across the social sciences and humanities, this body of work rigorously interrogates how gender and sexuality, in their intersections with race, class, colonialism, and political economy, structure processes of international migration and bordercrossing. Examining issues from the challenges facing binational samesex couples and LGBTQ refugees to queer diasporic cultural production, transgender migrant activisms, and queer migrant labor organizing, queer migration studies seeks to center the experiences of queer and nonheteronormative migrants while attending to the ways in which sexuality as a regime of power shapes all migration processes.2
TL;DR: The GLQ forum celebrated the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Abstract:This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's \"Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\" The forum opens with Cohen's reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article's haunting subtitular question—\"the radical potential of queer politics?,\" and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.
Abstract: Abstract:Focusing on photographs by Nilbar Güreş, a visual and performance artist, this article analyzes how her images deconstruct and reimagine the various identities of the Turkish nation and Western discourses of homosexuality at once. By depicting seemingly conventional women in traditional settings (such as the living room and the mosque) and imbuing them with a queer currency of desire, Güreş calls into question the stability of national and cultural narratives about these women's lives as well as the stereotypes of an increasingly globalizing queer culture. Through close readings and cultural and political contextualization, the article positions her work vis-à-vis the tensions between global and local, rural and urban, traditional and marginal, and argues that her images form a visual archive of local queer aesthetics that positions itself in opposition to both national discourses of gender and sexuality in the contemporary Turkish context and Western-centric discourses of queerness.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the post-9/11 wars represent a major context in which queer theory can help us reexamine conflict, trauma, and embodiment in non-western bodies and sexualities.
Abstract: Abstract:Drone warfare is only the most prominent of a series of social and technological developments leading to remote and abstracted forms of injury and death. In response to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar's connecting of queer theory with \"permanent war\" in \"Queer Theory and Permanent War,\" the present article examines the way in which queer scholarship can productively engage with non-Western bodies and sexualities. Considering sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, it draws on the work of Puar, Achille Mbembe, and others to argue that the post-9/11 wars represent a major context in which queer theory can help us reexamine conflict, trauma, and embodiment.
TL;DR: The authors revisited "Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies" (2016), a special issue coedited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, examining how the articles both engage with and disavow "queer" and "area" while giving critical and locational specificity to both terms.
Abstract: Abstract:This essay revisits \"Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies\" (2016), a special issue coedited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel. It considers both the overall aims of the issue, including that of reading the politics of queer and area studies as \"coincident,\" and the signal contributions of articles from the issue (e.g., on the question of temporality). The essay examines how the articles both engage with and disavow \"queer\" and \"area\" while giving critical and locational specificity to both terms.
TL;DR: This paper discussed the scholarly importance of Kath Weston's 1995 essay "Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration" and found that Weston successfully captured geographic potentials and anxieties that continue well into the present day for queers and their diverse spatial coordinations.
Abstract: Abstract:This dialogue overviews the scholarly importance of Kath Weston's 1995 essay \"Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration.\" Situating the article within its historical moment and tracing its influence across contemporary queer theory and its subfields, our conversation finds that Weston facilitated new avenues for considering matters of sexual geography, regionalism, and metronormativity for a wide variety of queer subject-positions. Discussing the article's use of earlier media as it now relates to twenty-first-century technologies, we find that Weston successfully captured geographic potentials and anxieties that continue well into the present day for queers and their diverse spatial coordinations.