GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies recent issues

EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOISTER: Victorian England's Queer Catholicism

O'Malley, P. R. — 2009-08-24

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. — 2009-08-24

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. — 2009-08-24

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. — 2009-08-24

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. — 2009-08-24

QUEER MOTHER OF COLOR

DeClue, J. — 2009-08-24

THE BIG SELL

Cho, A. — 2009-08-24

ALREADY DOING QUEER STUDIES, STILL

Seymour, N. — 2009-08-24

MAPPING QUEER OF COLOR METHODOLOGY

Zepeda, S. — 2009-08-24

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

Beard, D. — 2009-08-24

IMAGINED, DESIRED: Coming of Age with Queer Ethnographies

Herbst, L. E. — 2009-08-24

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. — 2009-08-24

MOVING ACROSS AND BEYOND BOUNDARIES

Kelly, R. C. — 2009-08-24

POSTURE OF THE PHALLUS

Van Leer, D. — 2009-08-24

NEW SPELLINGS OF "OUR" CARIBBEAN(S)

O'Connell, G. — 2009-08-24

LIVE TO TELL

Rodriguez, R. T. — 2009-08-24

About the Contributors

2009-08-24

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

Jackson, P. A. — 2009-05-20

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. — 2009-05-20

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. — 2009-05-20

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. — 2009-05-20

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

Rastegar, R. — 2009-05-20

SUBLIME SHAME

Kuzniar, A. A. — 2009-05-20

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ISN'T THE PERSONAL

Stein, J. A. — 2009-05-20

MASTERS OF THEIR DOMAIN

Schorb, J. — 2009-05-20

THE CONTEXTS OF WITNESSING OF HIV/AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA

Hoad, N. — 2009-05-20

ON THE RECEIVING END

D'Alessio, N. N. — 2009-05-20

HOW TO BRING YOUR BOYS UP QUEER

Cardozo, M. — 2009-05-20

THE OUTER CIRCLE

Bennett, C. — 2009-05-20

About the Contributors

2009-05-20

INTRODUCTION: LESSONS FROM THE OCTOPUS

Morland, I. — 2009-02-25

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

Dreger, A. D., Herndon, A. M. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

QUANTUM SEX: INTERSEX AND THE MOLECULAR DECONSTRUCTION OF SEX

Rosario, V. A. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

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. — 2009-02-25

TRANSPARENT FIGURES

Snediker, M. D. — 2009-02-25

OF LESBIANS AND TECHNOSPERM

Briggs, L. — 2009-02-25

PROGRESSIVE HAUNTINGS

Castelli, E. A. — 2009-02-25

SCRIPTING SEX IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST

Chiang, H. H. — 2009-02-25

HIGH MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY AND COERCION

Klosowska, A. — 2009-02-25

SUPERBAD SEX OBJECTS

Casid, J. H. — 2009-02-25

THE FIGURE OF THE BLACK FEMME AND HER RADICAL ELSEWHERE

Macias, S. I. — 2009-02-25

OF CANINES AND QUEERS

Peterson, C. — 2009-02-25

About the Contributors

2009-02-25

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