GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies recent issues

HEAVEN AND EARTH: From the Guest Editors

Justice, D. H., Schneider, B., Rifkin, M. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

INTRODUCTION

Justice, D. H., Rifkin, M., Schneider, B. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

This special issue proposes that dialogue between Native studies and queer studies can contribute to our understanding of the U.S. nation-state, Native polities and peoplehood, and the complex role of culture(s) in political expression and identification. Native and queer studies have, together and separately, worked to theorize and defend various kinds of diversity as well as individual and collective self-representation in the face of totalizing state legalities and ideologies, and this special issue is devoted to the intersections of those sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant, interventions. In the introduction, each of the issue's three editors writes about his or her own "take" on the import of the collection. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) places the collection in the context of Native lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit activism, and the scholarship that has grown out of that activism. He warns that times may well be getting worse rather than better for this kind of scholarship and activism, and encourages readers to understand the collection as a rallying call to further and more complex and critical work. Bethany Schneider places the collection in the context of the history of U.S. Indian policy, arguing that readers may well need a primer in how the state has furthered the project of genocide through the violent control of Native genders and sexualities. Mark Rifkin explains why the collection, with its particular focus on the state, seemed so important at this particular moment, and discusses the excitements and troubles of the interface between Native and queer studies. He introduces the essays and asks readers to imagine what it might look like to indigenize queer studies.

QUEER THEORY AND NATIVE STUDIES: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism

Smith, A. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

Queer studies highlights the importance of developing analyses that go beyond identity and representational politics. For Native studies in particular, queer theory points to the possibility of going beyond representing the voices of Native peoples, a project that can quickly become co-opted into providing Native commodities for consumption in the multicultural academic-industrial complex. The subjectless critique of queer theory can assist Native studies in critically interrogating how it could unwittingly re-create colonial hierarchies even within projects of decolonization. This critique also sheds light on how Native peoples function within the colonial imaginary—including the colonial imaginary of scholars and movements that claim to be radical. At the same time, Native studies can build on queer of color critique's engagement with subjectless critique. In the move to go "postidentity," queer theory often reinstantiates a white supremacist, settler colonialism by disappearing the indigenous peoples colonized in this land who become the foils for the emergence of postcolonial, postmodern, diasporic, and queer subjects. With respect to Native studies, even queer of color critique does not necessarily mark how identities are shaped by settler colonialism. Thus a conversation between Native studies and queer theory is important, because the logics of settler colonialism and decolonization must be queered in order to properly speak to the genocidal present that not only continues to disappear indigenous peoples but reinforces the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy that affect all peoples.

DOUBLEWEAVING TWO-SPIRIT CRITIQUES: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies

Driskill, Q.-L. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

One of the strongest aspects of emergent queer of color critiques is their ability to employ a multiplicity of tactics to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized) strategies. Yet the absence of Native peoples and histories in formulating these emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people and an analysis of ongoing colonialism for Native nations have largely been left out of queer of color critiques points to a major rupture in these theories. Native people, then, must disidentify with the very critiques that claim to be decolonial and counter hegemonic interventions for queer people of color in order to build viable theories for Native communities. Drawing on the Cherokee basketry tradition of doubleweave, in which two independent yet interwoven designs result, this essay asserts the necessity of Two-Spirit critiques that centralize Native peoples, nations, identities, land bases, and survival tactics, and invites an alliance between Native studies and queer studies through doubleweaving theories that can strengthen our theories and practices.

MY FATHER, CYNTHIA CONROY

Gould, J. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

This personal essay discusses the life and death of the author's father, who late in life changed genders to become a "trans-woman." The essay deals with the author's conflicted feelings about this transformation.

SETTLER HOMONATIONALISM: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities

Morgensen, S. L. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

Settlement conditions the formation of modern queer subjects and politics in the United States. This essay newly interprets the settler formation of U.S. queer modernities by inspiration of Jasbir Puar's critique of homonationalism. Puar argues that homonationalism produces U.S. queers as regulatory over the racialized and sexualized populations targeted within the imperial biopolitics of the war on terror. I explain homonationalism as a quality of U.S. queer modernities having formed within a colonial biopolitics, in which the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produces modern sexuality as a function of settlement. This essay reinterprets historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects. Modern queer projects enact this biopolitics when their normatively non-Native and settler form distances Native people from sexual modernity, even as they seek modern sexual freedoms in the settler state. Homonationalism arises here, as one effect of settlement's naturalization and defense in U.S. queer modernities, and as one means by which the continued colonization of Native peoples and land shapes the imperial projections of the United States and its subjects. Settler homonationalism may be destabilized by marking and challenging its historical formation and holding queer projects accountable to Native struggles for decolonization.

SUSPICIONING: Imagining a Debate between Those Who Get Confused, and Those Who Don't, When They Read Critical Responses to the Poems of Joy Harjo, or What's an Old-Timey Gay Boy Like Me to Do?

Womack, C. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

"Suspicioning" examines the silences that surround issues of same-sex desire in and out of the poetry of Joy Harjo.

VISIBLE SEXUALITIES OR INVISIBLE NATIONS: Forced to Choose in Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing

Tatonetti, L. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

This essay examines the construction of Two-Spirit identity in three contemporary narrative films, Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing, arguing that, despite each story's focus on a queer Native protagonist, by their conclusions each film fractures Two-Spirit identities. Whereas Big Eden elides indigenous identity, Johnny Greyeyes and The Business of Fancydancing segregate indigeneity from queer sexuality, thereby relegating queerness entirely to off-reservation spaces. As this essay demonstrates, when the films' protagonists cross reservation lines, they literally leave behind their queer lovers and figuratively abandon all that those lovers represent when the storylines turn nearly exclusively to familial and cultural ties. As a result, such films suggest that the boundaries of nation in indigenous contexts are constructed and maintained by the heteronormative gaze and that Two-Spirit people are therefore forced to choose between sexual and national affiliations. This theme of division, in which indigenous affiliations with tribe and nation are split from expressions of queer sexuality, demonstrates how contemporary representations of Two-Spirit identities in narrative film continue to mirror the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. In the case of Big Eden, Indian people, and thus any potential for actual Two-Spirit erotics, vanish completely under the weight of colonial desires; in the case of Johnny Greyeyes, though the aftermath of settler violence is both highlighted and healed by invoking a Two-Spirit relationship, articulations of Two-Spirit desire are bounded by the walls of the prison; and, finally, in the case of The Business of Fancydancing, regulating settler logics, which long degraded and denied Two-Spirit cosmologies, are replicated and, in fact, reinvigorated by deploying a gay imaginary that rests on dominant constructions of queerness.

POETRY AND SEXUALITY: Running Twin Rails

Stevens, J. T. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

"AND THROUGH ITS NAMING BECAME OWNER": Translation in James Thomas Stevens's Tokinish

Dowling, S. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

In this essay I read the long poem Tokinish by the Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens. Stevens borrows passages of prose description from Roger Williams's 1643 Narragansett lexicon, A Key into the Language of America, as well as the earlier text's structure of facing columns of English and Narragansett words. Appropriations from Williams's lexicon introduce the figure of translation into the poem and also allow Stevens to create echoes between present and past. The poem concerns two types of contact: contact as historical phenomenon in the Americas and contact as contemporary sexuality. Stevens brings these two types of contact into relationship, so that the speaker's sexual and romantic experiences are echoed in the ethnographic commentary appropriated from Williams's text. I argue that Stevens uses these echoes to describe queer desire in colonial, proprietary terms, but that it is precisely this proprietary feature of desire, being claimed by the lover as "mine," that translates the poem's Native speaker from an unrecognizable status into a fully human subject. I also argue, with Stevens, that the way we unthinkingly speak about our desires using colonial metaphors of contact, conquest, exploration, and possession demonstrates the ongoing impact of the history of colonialism in North America.

NOTES TOWARD A THEORY OF ANOMALY

Justice, D. H. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

Recent laws against same-sex marriage in the Cherokee Nation provide the backdrop for this analysis of alternative models of Cherokee sexual diversity. Rather than seek identifiable historical precedent that is largely unavailable in the historical record and vehemently denied by the predominantly Baptist Cherokee majority, this essay argues instead for a modern queer Cherokee aesthetic that is both responsive to the contemporary experiences of gender- and sexuality-variant Cherokees and inspired by the late Mississippian category of "anomaly" as a queer-inclusive tribal model for belonging.

PUO'WINUE'L PRAYERS: Readings from North America's First Transtextual Script

Cruz, L. E., Driskill, Q.-L. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

In the formative years of the developing cultural relations between the Mi'kmaq of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and European Judeo-Christian missionaries, Father Chrestien Le Clercq systematized Mi'kmaq written language in order to convert the Original People. More recently, collaborations between scholars such as Mi'kmaq Hieroglyphic Prayers: Readings in North America's First Indigenous Script, by Murdena Marshall and David L. Schmidt, have begun to translate and reinterpret this script using contemporary decolonial methodologies that privilege Indigenous survival. In "Puo'winue'l Prayers: Readings from North America's First Transtextual Script," I continue this conversation while engaging the script from a multiracial, visual-textual, Two-Spirit perspective.

EXTERMINATION OF THE JOYAS: Gendercide in Spanish California

Miranda, D. A. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

Prior to contact with Europeans, California Indigenous peoples maintained a culture of three genders: male, female, and joya. Spanish missionaries and soldiers, however, viewed joyas as practicing "the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies" and reported that "we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants." I argue that what Spaniards saw as a religious duty was actually a form of gendercide, the destruction of an entire third gender, and explore the various strategies employed to accomplish this gendercide. Ultimately, this gendercide—while severely destructive to both joyas and the indigenous community—was unsuccessful, and I further argue that we are experiencing a renaissance of joyas in the form of two-spirited indigenous peoples.

AFTERWORD

Holland, S. P. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

RELIGION, IDENTITY, AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

Runions, E. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

This essay reviews four books on the role of religion in shaping state policy, political rhetoric, and activism for and against same-sex rights in the United States. These books are instructive in thinking through relations between race and religion, sexuality and race, religion and rights, freedom and democracy, public and private, church and state. They show that the boundaries between church and state, public and private, identity and rights, race, sexuality, and religion are not as clear as they might seem. The solutions they offer push far past demands for identity-based rights. Indeed, all of them explore how identity is problematically tied up with religion, in ways that facilitate the limitation rather than expansion of rights. Together they outline a queer activist agenda.

DIACRITICISMS!

Bourque, K. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

NOT QUITE ENOUGH TROUBLE WITH NORMAL

Keenaghan, E. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

"NOT SIMPLE HOMOPHOBIA": AFRICAN SAME-SEX DESIRES, POLITICS, AND THE LIMIT OF HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS

Walcott, R. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:15 PST

SACRED SEX: A MOST DIVINE LOVE

Joy, E. A. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

DESIRE. TRUST. ESCAPE!

Vukadinovic, V. S. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

COMMEMORATION AND QUEER MIGRATION

Chavez, K. R. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

"THE FUTURE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE": MIEVILLE'S QUEER DUREE

Rosenberg, J. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

A NEW QUEER COMPANION FOR THE CLASSROOM

van den Oever, R. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

QUEERING DIVERSITY?

Montegary, L. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

About the Contributors

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:20:16 PST

EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOISTER: Victorian England's Queer Catholicism

O'Malley, P. R. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:18 PDT

The cultural construction of Roman Catholicism in England shifted in the middle decades of the nineteenth century from being constituted as a series of acts to being understood as a subjectivity experienced as authentic interiority. Even as various British Victorian figures, for example John Henry Newman, engaged in particular ways with both nonmajoritarian religious and sexual identities, Catholicism thus prefigures the admittedly uneven consolidations of sexuality that Michel Foucault has identified in the last third of the century. Thus an understanding of religious history is central to a history of sexuality.

LOOKING FOR M--: Queer Temporality, Black Political Possibility, and Poetry from the Future

Keeling, K. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:18 PDT

Daniel Peddle's film The Aggressives makes perceptible an intolerable yet quotidian violence, as the index of our time. Putting queer theories of temporality into proximity with anticolonial ones, this essay seeks to remain aware of what in The Aggressives escapes attempts to contain it yet nonetheless can be felt and perceived even though—or especially if—it remains unrecognizable or unintelligible to our current common senses. We can think of what escapes these operations as the content that exceeds its expression, that through which poetry from the future might be perceived yet not recognized. Poetry from the future interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and it is an index of a time to come in which what exists potently, even if not (yet) effectively, today but escapes us will find its time.

GAY MARRIAGE AND PULP FICTION: Homonormativity, Disidentification, and Affect in Ann Bannon's Lesbian Novels

Carter, J. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:18 PDT

Currently, most explorations of homonormativity privilege political interpretations. In contrast, this essay brackets political analysis of homonormativity's effects in order to attend more closely to the affect that helps motivate homonormative choices. Though from an external, critical perspective, particular alliances with dominant power structures may often look like blatant and cynical attempts at self-advancement, there is abundant evidence that they are more often experienced as emotionally driven, personal choices that are different from political ones and superior to them as guides for intimate behavior. Attending to this dimension of homonormative experience not only shifts current queer conversations about norms but also extends the relevance of such conversations back into the past. Ann Bannon's midcentury lesbian paperback novels are rich sources of information about the socially produced emotional situations that helped push Cold War-era gay and lesbian people into alliances with heterosexist institutions and values such as marriage. In Bannon's novels, "gay marriage" appears as a kind of representational shorthand for a happy resolution to what I suspect was the common midcentury gay dilemma of how to be both erotically and emotionally deviant, and socially conventional. Bannon depicts that dilemma as a painful suspension between simultaneous disidentifications with heterosexuality and queer abrasiveness to dominant cultural norms. Thus exploring the fantasy of gay marriage in these pulp fictions not only sheds historical light on the affective dimensions of homonormativity but also raises theoretically significant questions about the definition and political ramifications of disidentification.

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE IN-BETWEEN: A Graduate Student Forum on Being Queer in Media Studies

Juhasz, A., Ma, M.-Y. S. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

Six graduate students working within media studies reflect upon their experiences and studies evidencing a shared attention to the "in-betweens" of identity formation, graduate school, disciplines, and professional practices. All seek and speak with a queer voice to address how power plays out in graduate school, often in the minute exercises of discipline and learning understood through sexual metaphors. The authors also exhibit a noteworthy interest and investment in popular culture that leads each to consider the larger implications of their intellectual work.

TO A QUEER DEGREE

Moore, C. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

QUEER MOTHER OF COLOR

DeClue, J. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

THE BIG SELL

Cho, A. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

ALREADY DOING QUEER STUDIES, STILL

Seymour, N. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

MAPPING QUEER OF COLOR METHODOLOGY

Zepeda, S. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

GOING BOTH WAYS: BEING QUEER AND ACADEMIC IN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES

Beard, D. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

IMAGINED, DESIRED: Coming of Age with Queer Ethnographies

Herbst, L. E. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

In this review I introduce readers to three exemplary ethnographies. All three contribute not only to anthropological and queer studies literatures but also to discourses and critiques of globalization, transnationalism, and neoliberalism. Further, these works destabilize notions of what constitutes ethnography in the general field of queer studies and demonstrate that queer anthropology is imperative to consider in present and future developments in queer theory, methods, and analyses. These texts argue that it is time to move beyond the search for that which is "queer" as emerging from "tradition." They demonstrate that social constructions of queer subjectivities are ever-changing and emerging in contemporary historical contexts, often in relation to the nation-state and against hegemonic Euro-American notions of what is considered "queer."

THE WORLD-MAKING PRACTICES OF QUEER YOUTH

Faris, M. J. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

MOVING ACROSS AND BEYOND BOUNDARIES

Kelly, R. C. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

POSTURE OF THE PHALLUS

Van Leer, D. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

NEW SPELLINGS OF "OUR" CARIBBEAN(S)

O'Connell, G. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

LIVE TO TELL

Rodriguez, R. T. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

About the Contributors

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 11:51:19 PDT

CAPITALISM AND GLOBAL QUEERING: National Markets, Parallels among Sexual Cultures, and Multiple Queer Modernities

Jackson, P. A. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

This essay considers the role of market economies in global queering, the transnational proliferation of new male homosexual and male-to-female transgender identities and cultures. Early accounts of global queering highlighted the culturally homogenizing effects of transnational capitalism, representing new queer sexualities beyond the West as cultural imports from the United States. But international similarities among queer cultures also emerge from parallel processes of sex-cultural change produced by national-level forms of capitalism. Case studies from Thai queer history trace market-induced cultural parallels to earlier decades of the twentieth century, before the post-Cold War intensification of globalizing processes. These studies confirm the importance of the market in global queering. They also reveal that international commonalities reflect emergent parallels among multiple queer modernities and result as much from local responses to similar economic conditions as from foreign cultural influences. The alternative narrative of queer histories beyond the West presented here decouples the spread of capitalism from cultural Westernization. It highlights moments where queer subjects have enhanced their autonomy vis-à-vis local heteronormative traditions by creative engagements that take advantage of opportunities provided by the growth of the market economy.

QUEER FAMILY ROMANCE: Writing the "New" South Africa in the 1990s

Munro, B. M. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

This essay examines the often overlooked role that the idea of gay rights played in producing the new imaginary of the postapartheid "rainbow nation"—and its neoliberal economic order. I suggest that the figure of the gay person became an embodiment of political change, symbolically mediating conflicts within multiracial modernity in South Africa's emergent public culture, and I analyze the work done by queer "minor characters" in novels by Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. None to Accompany Me (1994), The House Gun (1998), and Disgrace (1999) all tell the story of white, middle-class Anglo-South Africans whose struggle to adjust to the new era includes dealing with the revelation that their children are not straight. These novels dramatize how the narrative of the nation as a raced, heterosexual family romance was in crisis after apartheid, and reconstitute their families in queer new configurations—raising questions about the flexibility and persistence of the trope of reproductivity. These texts ask how whites are to "come out" as national subjects and indicate that sexuality alone cannot be the grounds for reinventing race and nation without an attention to systemic economic injustice.

QUEER KINSHIP AND AMBIVALENCE: Video Autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung

Pidduck, J. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

This article explores the relationship between queer thought and kinship through a study of video autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung. I propose the concept of ambivalence as a useful point of departure for grappling with the conflicted political, affective, and conceptual terrain of LGBT kinship. Through close textual analysis of four video autoethnographies, I extend existing sociological, anthropological, and philosophical scholarship on LGBT family and kinship to consider audiovisual production as a specific and productive kinship practice. Queer film and video autoethnography offers unexpected and insightful accounts of queer relationality. In contrast with dominant North American family narratives and imagery concerned with continuity, heredity, and the closed white, heteronormative North American intimate sphere, Carlomusto's and Fung's works probe the moments where kinship breaks down: illness and death, migrant experience, and family secrets. Through a doubled formal and thematic emphasis on fragmentation, discontinuity, and affective ambivalence, these extraordinary works help us understand kinship otherwise, or queerly.

CHITRA GANESH'S QUEER RE-VISIONS

Gopinath, G. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

THE DE-FUSION OF GOOD INTENTIONS: Outfest's Fusion Film Festival

Rastegar, R. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

SUBLIME SHAME

Kuzniar, A. A. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ISN'T THE PERSONAL

Stein, J. A. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

MASTERS OF THEIR DOMAIN

Schorb, J. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

THE CONTEXTS OF WITNESSING OF HIV/AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Hoad, N. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

ON THE RECEIVING END

D'Alessio, N. N. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

HOW TO BRING YOUR BOYS UP QUEER

Cardozo, M. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

THE OUTER CIRCLE

Bennett, C. — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

About the Contributors

Wed, 20 May 2009 13:29:12 PDT

INTRODUCTION: LESSONS FROM THE OCTOPUS

Morland, I. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

PROGRESS AND POLITICS IN THE INTERSEX RIGHTS MOVEMENT: Feminist Theory in Action

Dreger, A. D., Herndon, A. M. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

Since 1990, when Suzanne Kessler published her foundational feminist critique of the modern-day medical treatment of children with intersex, much has changed in intersex politics, practice, and theory. This essay traces some key points of progress and considers in particular the relationship of academic feminism and intersex advocacy; proof of and reasons for success in intersex medical advocacy; and intersex identity politics, especially with regard to the nature-nurture debate and terminology (intersex versus hermaphroditism versus disorders of sex development). The authors are university-based academic feminists who have worked intensively as volunteers and as paid directors at the Intersex Society of North America, the longest-running and best-known intersex advocacy and policy organization. In this work, they draw on the published literature as well as their own activist and academic experiences. They argue that, in the last fifteen years, much progress has been made in terms of improving the medical and social attitudes toward people with intersex, but that significant work remains to be done to ensure that children born with sex anomalies will be treated in a way that privileges their long-term well-being over societal norms. They also argue that, while feminist scholars have been critically important in developing the theoretical underpinnings of the intersex rights movement and sometimes in carrying out the day-to-day political work of that movement, there have been intellectual and political problems with some feminists' approaches to intersex.

IMPERATIVES OF NORMALITY: From "Intersex" to "Disorders of Sex Development"

Feder, E. K. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

In May 2006 the U.S. and European endocrinological societies published a consensus statement announcing a significant change in nomenclature. No longer would nineteenth-century variations on the term hermaphrodite, or the more newly introduced term intersex, be used in a medical context to describe "congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical"; instead the preferred term henceforth would be disorders of sex development (DSDs). The announcement met with significant controversy, which I here examine in terms of the historical convergence of the treatment of homosexuality and intersex. The contemporary association of homosexuality with intersex risks obscuring genuine medical concerns unique to the treatment of intersex conditions and the consequences for affected individuals. At the same time, we must reckon with the ways that the complex and persistent identification of homosexuality with intersex has shaped the motivations both for the prevailing standard of care that has been so harmful and for the organized resistance to these practices in the intersex movement. Michel Foucault's understanding of the power of "normalization" can help us make sense of the history of medicalization and its pernicious effects, but in addition can allow those with intersex conditions and their allies to understand the positive possibilities that the change from intersex to DSDs can bring.

INTERSEX PRACTICE, THEORY, AND ACTIVISM: A Roundtable Discussion

Creighton, S. M., Greenberg, J. A., Roen, K., Volcano, D. L. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

The present article seeks to bring together ideas from legal, medical, social science, artistic, and activist perspectives, through dialogue among the four authors. Sarah Creighton is a gynecologist working with women who have atypical genital development or intersex conditions. Julie Greenberg is a professor of law whose work on gender and sexual identity has been influential both within the United States and internationally. Del LaGrace Volcano is a visual artist whose work engages with gender variance. Katrina Roen is an academic who approaches her research on both transgender and intersex from a social science perspective, informed by queer and feminist theorizing. Although the prior work of the four authors clearly indicates a shared commitment to change the situation of intersex people, the mechanisms for such changes are far from clear. Any changes will, however, surely be facilitated by ongoing communication and collaboration across the various perspectives and disciplines represented here.

THE HERM PORTFOLIO

Volcano, D. L. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

QUANTUM SEX: INTERSEX AND THE MOLECULAR DECONSTRUCTION OF SEX

Rosario, V. A. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

The intersex movement in the past two decades has challenged social, medical, and academic conceptions of sex and gender. In the same period, genetic studies of sex determination, largely derived from research on intersex conditions, has revolutionized long-standing theories of sex determination. This current molecular genetics research is upending ancient sexist prejudices in biology. It also elucidates the dizzying complexity of biological sex that is well beyond simplistic sex binarism and involves multiple interactions between genes and environment.

WHAT CAN QUEER THEORY DO FOR INTERSEX?

Morland, I. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

In this essay I explore how queer theory might account for postsurgical intersex bodies of diminished genital tactility. In other words, I evaluate whether a critique of surgery's effects is possible from a queer theoretical perspective on the body. I contend that for this purpose queer theory must do more than focus on bodily sensations such as pleasure, shame, and touching. The essay makes four key claims: first, that the desensitized postsurgical body cannot be accounted for by a queer discourse in which sexual pleasure is a form of hedonistic activism; second, that a queer discourse of shame enables a degree of critical engagement with the surgical creation of atypically sensate bodies; third, that pleasure and shame are both queer sensations, and queer theory's assumption of a sensorial basis to cultural critique, which is exemplified by the queer touch, flounders when confronted with the desensitized intersex body; fourth, that if queer theory is figured as a kind of reaching—but not necessarily touching—then it can be of greater use in accounting for the problematic yet ambivalent effects of intersex surgery.

THE SOMATECHNICS OF INTERSEXUALITY

Sullivan, N. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:09 PST

We live in a world in which "the body" is conceived as a malleable substance in a state of potential transition and, moreover, the vast majority of bodies are experienced as "wrong": they have too few (or too many) limbs or digits; they (or parts of them) are the wrong size, the wrong age, the wrong color; they are "sexually ambiguous"; they bear the wrong ethnic markers; they inhibit particular identities and/or aspirations; they simply do not seem "right." Surgery, then, becomes a way to put things right, to restore order. While the writing to date on modificatory surgeries is immensely varied, the vast majority is subtended by a conception of medical practices and procedures as technologies separate from the bodies they seek to modify. In this model, the body is a fleshly substrate that simply is prior to its enhancement or mutilation by the technologies that transform its original state. This article deploys the term somatechnics to think through the varied and complex ways in which bodily-being is always already shaped by technés—from, for example, the surgeon's knife to the discourses that justify and contest the use of such instruments. I argue, then, that the conceptions of, debates around, and questions about specific modificatory practices are themselves technologies that shape corporeality at the most profound level. In doing so I aim to make a critical intervention into, and open up new spaces for reflection in, existing debates about the somatechnics of intersexuality.

THE USES OF ABJECTION

Kurnick, D. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

TRANSPARENT FIGURES

Snediker, M. D. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

OF LESBIANS AND TECHNOSPERM

Briggs, L. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

PROGRESSIVE HAUNTINGS

Castelli, E. A. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

SCRIPTING SEX IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST

Chiang, H. H. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

HIGH MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY AND COERCION

Klosowska, A. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

SUPERBAD SEX OBJECTS

Casid, J. H. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

THE FIGURE OF THE BLACK FEMME AND HER RADICAL ELSEWHERE

Macias, S. I. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

OF CANINES AND QUEERS

Peterson, C. — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST

About the Contributors

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:54:10 PST