GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies current issue

A CLASS ACT: Ryan Landry and the Politics of Booger Drag

Krahulik, K. C. — 2008-11-25

In "A Class Act," Karen C. Krahulik returns to the scene of her community history of Provincetown, Massachusetts, but uses a different methodology to assess the relationship between gentrification and transgression. Remaining within, but not confined by, the fields of history and oral history, Krahulik turns also to queer theory and performance studies to examine how artistic expression can be disruptive of Provincetown's seemingly facile slide toward homonormativity. In one section Krahulik assesses how the star of her essay, Ryan Landry, converted an underprivileged childhood into a successful form of "white trash" performance called, "booger drag." In another section she analyzes not only the subversive content, but also the timing of Landry's performances in a town that once was, but is no longer, necessarily queer. Analyzing Provincetown's history in the context of Landry's vexed iterations, allows Krahulik to provide a much more nuanced analysis of change over time in one of this country's most renowned gay resort meccas.

TRANSNATIONALISM AND HOMOPHILE POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE POSTWAR DECADES

Churchill, D. S. — 2008-11-25

This article grows out of a larger project on homophile internationalism that linked Europe and North America organizations, activists and writing during the post-war decades. More than just participating in a North Atlantic exchange, these homophile activists had a global vision, one that sought to uncover, explore and archive same-sex intimacies worldwide. Utilizing travel writing, ethnographic studies and personal memoirs homophiles produced a popular anthropological account of homosexuality, one they implicitly linked to Cold War human rights discourse, liberal law reform, and normative social claims.

ARRIVAL AT HOME: Radical Faerie Configurations of Sexuality and Place

Morgensen, S. L. — 2008-11-25

Radical faerie culture produces modern sexual minorities by mediating their racial and national relationship to histories of colonization. Radical faeries arose in the US by forming itinerant rural gatherings--and, over time, landed rural sanctuaries to host them--where they sought to liberate an authentic gay subjectivity grounded in indigenous cultural roots. I examine the formation of rural sanctuaries and gatherings as sources for gay liberation by investigating how they are structured as spaces of homecoming. Radical faeries who travel to gatherings and sanctuaries arrive at home--despite neither originating nor remaining at these sites--when they find in rural spaces and in tales of indigeneity a self-acceptance and shared nature that grants new belonging to settled land. I narrate key moments when practices of rural mobility and emplacement call gay men home to authentic subjectivity and radical community, by means of loving communion, multigenerational rural ties, indigenous spirituality, and a newly indigenized relationship to settled land. My argument arises from reflexive ethnographic interpretation of the quotidian practices of gatherings and sanctuaries. My ethnographic attention marks the integrity of radical faerie culture as a creative mediation of the racial, national, and colonial conditions of sexuality. My analysis calls queer studies to attend more deeply to the intersectionality and coloniality of sexual minority formations in settler societies, and to let ethnographic interpretation mark both how normative power relations condition sexualities and how sexual subjects creatively engage them.

SITUATING "FLUIDITY": (Trans) Gender Identification and the Regulation of Gender Diversity

Davis, E. C. — 2008-11-25

Drawing on Butler's theory of gender performativity, which conceptualizes the discursive production of the gendered subject and the corresponding "constitutive instabilities" of such reiterative practices, I provide an empirical sociological examination of how individuals negotiate potentially unintelligible identities in their daily lives and the extent to which these practices call into question the conceptual dichotomization of stability and fluidity. While transsexed bodies, histories, and identities may "exceed" the limits of intelligibility, trans individuals are engaged in the process of meaning making—creating coherence both for themselves and for others. The present theorizing of (trans)gender identification has not fully explored the interaction among social expectations, individuals' attempts to be credible, and the structural limitations on intelligible gender identifications. In addition, despite theoretical arguments resting on the compulsory, regulatory nature of gender regimes, gender fluidity is often situated as counter to such regulation. By exploring the negotiated identifications of transsexed respondents across different interactional spaces and the structural rules and norms which frame such presentation choices, this article theorizes the contextual regulation of (trans)gender diversity and the corresponding production of situated identification. Further, in examining this negotiation, the concept of fluidity is interrogated in order to complicate the analytic dualism of fluidity/stability and the corresponding dichotomous positioning of transsexed individuals as either blurring or reifying the boundaries of the gender binary.

THE GENDERCATOR, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BLOGOSPHERE

Lawless, J. — 2008-11-25

This essay is a collection of statements, thoughts and opinions that exploded across the internet in response to a controversy that occurred during the 2007 LGBT film festival season. Catherine Crouch's short, The Gendercator, is the first film to be accepted and then removed from San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival, the longest running festival of its kind. The censorship of the film due to community pressure, and the transphobic storyline Crouch created raises central questions of community and identity/post identity politics – personal experience versus group representation, strategies for creating institutional spaces where queer identity formation can both develop and change, and problems that occur when grassroots organizations gain cultural cache that allows mobility for some but not for others.

I became involved when I was invited to sit on a panel with Crouch and others following the screening of The Gendercator at Outfest in Los Angeles. Rather than offer a personal account of the panel, a reading of the film, or analysis of the varying viewpoints and decisions made surrounding The Gendercator, I have relied on "blogosphere" and cyber world to tell this story. They rivaling voices from the LGBTQIA community beautifully convey all of the salient, ironic, painful, political and humorous positions as is. I have added my own positioning on key issues along the way. These are in the footnotes rather than the main text. This is not a strategy to perform the impossible act of journalistic "neutrality," but a conceptual move to contribute to the already loud and disharmonious cacophony surrounding The Gendercator. My contributions can be read as post blog postings, extending the web based conversation into another dimension, material based text.

QUEER (AND) ANIMAL THEORIES

McHugh, S. — 2008-11-25

Nonhuman nonheteronormativity presents a profound challenge not just to identity forms but more importantly to disciplinary habits of thinking of human subjectivity as the default form of social agency. To elaborate this point, this essay surveys how some recent books, including Roughgarden's Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, Donna Haraway's When Species Meet, Alice A. Kuzniar's Melancholy's Dog, and Jens Rydström's Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweeden, 1889-1950, take as their subjects intimacies that belie hetero/homosexual along with non/human binaries. Grounding queer theory in a cross-species continuum is not the overall purpose of any of these texts, but an effect produced through the alignment of these authors' very different examinations of sex relations as shared by social animals. Ranging from the bizarre (fish threesomes) to the raunchy (bestiality in the cowshed), and even more ordinary combinations of both (dogs' dry-humping), the forms of sociality accruing in these discussions lay foundations for new biopolitical (as opposed to disciplinary) knowledges, prompting further inquiry into what happens to all of us when animals do it unlike they do on the Discovery Channel.

QUEER CONVERSIONS

Pellegrini, A. — 2008-11-25

SIX FEET UNDER, ABOVE, BEYOND

Sullivan, M. J. — 2008-11-25

PERFORMING THE ETHICS OF CONVERSATION

Payne, R. — 2008-11-25

AFTER THE FIRE: INDIA IS BURNING

Shahani, N. — 2008-11-25

FROM FAGS TO DUDES: Rethinking the Construction of Adolescent Masculinities through Sexualizing Discourses

Gray, M. L. — 2008-11-25

HOW I CAME TO LOVE...

Gutierrez, L. G. — 2008-11-25

About the Contributors

2008-11-25