Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

This article offers a re-reading of Goodrich’s essay, ‘Law in the Courts of Love’. My contention here is that the idiom of love that Goodrich provides us with in this essay cannot address the complexity of sexuality and sexual politics that inhabit our contemporary ‘technoscientific’ culture. In so doing, I will juxtapose his essay with Laven Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, ‘Public Sex’. This article will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I will evaluate and review Goodrich’s genealogical approach to law and the image of justice that arises out of his approach. The second section will be a re-reading of Goodrich’s ‘Law in the Courts of Love’ through feminist and technoscientific discourses. Its aim is to problematise and re-think not only the idiom of feminine justice that Goodrich offers, but also to question the presuppositions upon which his work is based, primary presuppositions surrounding issues of privacy, sexuality and sexuated rights. Finally, in the third section I will conclude by suggesting that the re-figuration of justice necessitates a re-figuration of the relationship that law has with time and space.

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Despite campaign promises to be the most “gay-friendly” Republican president, since assuming office, Donald Trump has been proactive in what many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocates call a “rollback” of gains made during the Barack Obama administration, shocking many observers and bringing sexual and gender politics to the fore. How can we make sense of the contradictions and consequences of Trump's sexual and gender politics? I argue that examining the transnational processes of democratization, political homophobia, and homonationalism illuminates the significance of the administration's actions. A democratization approach reveals how Trump's reversal of Obama-era policies and appointment of conservative judges signifies a greater effort at de-democratization through the contraction of citizenship rights and weakening of the judiciary; political homophobia clarifies how the administration legitimizes its governance through opposition to LGBT people and issues with the appointment of openly homophobic and transphobic individuals to prominent positions; and homonationalism, or the entry of certain queer subjects into the nation at the expense of racialized “others,” aptly characterizes forms of queer inclusion still taking place under Trump. For these reasons, putting Trump's sexual and gender politics in transnational perspective can help us better understand this moment in U.S. politics.

How to Do History with Pleasure Tyler Bradway (bio) A review of Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. In the final paragraphs of The History of Sexuality Vol.1, Michel Foucault imagines a future society looking back on ours with bewilderment. This society, organized by a "different economy of bodies and pleasures," will be perplexed at our infatuation with confessing the "truth" of sexuality and at the ways our devotion to this illusion subjects us to the ruses of power (159). Foucault conjures this future in order to encourage his readers to reflect on the present. But if we were to take Foucault's narrative more seriously, how exactly would this society relate to its sexual past? How might sexuality mediate, even instigate, its historical imagination? Could a critical reanimation of a society's erotic past inspire resistance to the ruses of power that dominate its present? These are the kinds of questions encouraged by Elizabeth Freeman's provocative contribution to recent debates in queer temporality, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Freeman outlines an affectively-based relation to history that encounters the past in the present and registers this encounter through the sensations of the body, particularly through pleasure. Time Binds elaborates this affective historiography ("erotohistoriography") through a vast archive, but it primarily focuses on experimental films from the era of New Queer Cinema (predominately in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s) that denaturalize and formally reconstruct queer relations to time. Freeman's analysis provides a welcome counterpoint to queer, psychoanalytic, and Marxist historicisms based in melancholia and trauma. Her greater insight, however, is to reveal how erotic historicisms can "jam whatever looks like the inevitable" by maintaining a "commitment to bodily potentiality that neither capitalism nor heterosexuality can fully contain" (173, 19). Even as Time Binds gives us hope that today's radical energies will lie dormant for future generations, it makes a compelling argument that queers might turn to the recent and long past to challenge the strictures of this present, now. Why has queer theory turned to "time" as a primary category for analysis, and why is queer theory in general in a "retrospective mood," as Michael Warner recently put it ("Queer") ? The answer to both questions lies in the paradoxical mainstreaming of queer theory within the humanities, which has occurred in the shadow of a pervasive neoliberalization of sexual politics. On the one hand, queer theory now has an institutional past. A radical discourse that emerged out of a direct-action movement fighting for AIDS awareness, queer theory now has journals, anthologies, and introductory courses for undergraduates. On the other hand, its (highly uneven) assimilation within the humanities has taken place alongside a mainstreaming of the LGBT movement itself. The latter receives unequivocal scorn from queer theorists precisely because it has, for the moment, supplanted the radical activism of the AIDS era. The mainstream LGBT movement exemplifies, according to José Esteban Muñoz, the "erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination" in favor of a pragmatic assimilation into heteronormativity (21). Indeed, we can glimpse the willful jettisoning of queerer politics in the privatization of a public sex culture, the commodification of queerness into a market niche, and the drive for LGBT inclusion within nationalist citizenship, symbolized by efforts to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and legalizing gay marriage. In short, "homonormative" polices—to use Lisa Duggan's term—have become the endgame of sexual politics. Consequently, it has fallen to queer theory and, as Freeman demonstrates, queer artists to foster an historical relation to a non-normative past, to spit on the scrubbed visions of middle-class "respectability" espoused by the mainstream, and to imagine alternative forms of belonging beyond those sanctioned by heteronormativity. Queer theories of time are thus split between a collective challenge to sexual politics that would wave a "mission accomplished" banner and an internal discussion about how to best mount this challenge.1 For example, Lee Edelman's polemic No Future (2004) famously refuses any attachment to homonormative discourses of futurity, particularly those crystallized through the reproductive figure of the Child. But he also urges queer theory to embrace negation—the...

This article explores Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters series of 1964–5 and the ‘Having Wonderful Time Wish You Were Here’: Postcards to Charles Henri Ford exhibition at the Iolas Gallery (New York, 1976). Ford’s editorship of View magazine (1940–7) is well known in scholarship on surrealism’s reception in America, but less frequently explored are the ways in which his later artistic and curatorial practice self-consciously continued the publication’s mission of promoting a queer and partisan identity for the movement. Ford does more than simply enable surrealism to resonate further than its epicentre. He intervenes at the level of historiography, an intervention, this article argues, which is implicated in his efforts to rethink the movement’s sexual politics. Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s scholarship on queer temporalities, this article considers how Ford’s anachronistic recourse to surrealism in the 1940s and again in the 1960s, long after the movement had passed its expiry date, aligns linear narratives of avant-gardism with a recalculation of its customary heteronormativity.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by c

Featuring a provincial spinster named Adela, who eventually becomes a man named Juan, Jaime de Armiñán’s My Dearest Señorita (Mi querida señorita, produced by José Luis Borau, 1971) became the first Spanish film to deal with the topic of transsexuality. Resorting to allegorical readings, previous scholarship has associated the film’s hermaphrodite with the Francoist cultural and ideological anomaly. While acknowledging the film’s progressive political critique of the Francoist regime, others have seen the protagonist’s eventual integration into heterosexuality as a symptom of the film’s conservative gender and sexual politics. This article moves from a focus on identity politics to an emphasis on queer subjectivity and from an allegorical reading to an emphasis on the film’s revolutionary stylistic choices. I read the film from a queer subject position that points towards a political form of a ‘becoming subjectivity’ that escapes, if only partially, a representational form of politics and the logic of identity. By focussing on seemingly inconsequential fragments and transitory details, this article explores how the film self-referentially mobilizes a queer body and subjectivity at key moments.

For transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, and gender nonconforming people, emergent media technologies offer new outlets for self-representation, outlets that often last for only a brief moment. This article examines trans culture on the website Tumblr during the period from March 2011, when the authors began researching the platform, to May 2013, when Yahoo! paid creator David Karp over a billion dollars for the site. Through auto-ethnographic dialogue about the loose social networks within Tumblr to which the authors contributed during this phase, the article explores ephemeral aspects of self-representation at the intersection of postmodern art practice, sexual politics, and queer subjectivities. From at least 2011 to 2013, people collectively oriented in opposition to dominant discourses of gender and sexuality used Tumblr to refashion straight cisgender norms and to create everyday art in a hybrid media space.

Evelyne Accad, The Wounded Breast: Intimate Journeys through Cancer (Spinifex Press) North Melbourne, Victoria, 2001. Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (University of Chicago Press) Chicago, 2001. Alison Bartlett and Gina Mercer (eds), Postgraduate Research Supervision (Peter Lang Publishing) New York, 2001. Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas and Claudia von Werlhof (eds), There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate GkbaKzati6on (Zed Books) London and New York, 2001. Susan Blackburn (ed.), Love, Sex and Power: Women in Southeast Asia (Monash Asia Institute) Clayton, Victoria, 2001. Ann J. Cahill, Rethinking Rape (Cornell University Press) Ithaca and London, 2001. Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddem (eds), Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, Victoria, 2001. Patricia Crawford and Judy Skene (eds), Women and Citizenship: Suffrage Centenary (Centre for Western Australian History, University of Western Australia) Nedlands, WA, 1999. Jane Duran, Worlds of Knowing: Global Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge) New York and London, 2001. Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation (Ryee Publishing) Derwood, MD, 2001. Yolanda Estes, Arnold Lorenzo Farr, Patricia Smith and Celia Smyth (eds), Marginal Groups and Mainstream American Culture (University Press of Kansas) Kansas, 2000. Berenice Malka Fisher, No Angel in the Classroom: Teaching through Feminist Discourse (Rowman & Littlefield) Lanham, MD, 2000. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzena (eds), Women Writing 1550-1750 (Meridan) Melbourne, Victoria, 2001. Sarah Gamble (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism (Routledge) London and New York, 2001. Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell University Press)Ithaca and London, 2001. Jan Gothard, Blue China, Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia (Melbourne University Press)Carlton, Victoria, 2001. Darlene M. Juschaka (ed.), Feminism in the Study of Religion: a Reader (Continuum) London and New York, 2001. Barbara Kamler, Relocating the Personal: a Critical Writing Pedagogy (State University of New York Press)Albany, 2001. Joanna Liddle and Sachiko Nakajima, Rising Suns, Rising Daughters: Gender, Class and Power in Japan (Zed Books) London and New York, 2000. Anthony McMahon, Taking Care of Men: Sexual Politics in the Public Mind (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, 1999. Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (University of New South Wales Press) Sydney, 2001. Sylvia Martin, Passionate Friends: Mary Fullerton, Mabel Singleton, Miles Franklin (Onlywomen Press) London, 2001. Robert Morrell (ed.), Changing Men in Southern Africa (University of Natal Press) South Africa, 2001. Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Nanative Repair (Cornell University Press) Ithaca and London, 2001. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis and London, 2001. Roberta Rosenberg (ed.), Women's Studies: an Interdisciplinary Anthology (Peter Lang Publishing) New York, 2001. Carol Siegel, New Millennial Sexstyles (Indiana University Press) Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000. Susan Sheridan, Who Was That Woman? The Australian Women's Weekly in the Postwar Tears (University of New South Wales Press) Sydney, 2001. Hilda L. Smith and Berenice A. Carroll, Women's Political and Social Thought: an Anthology (Indiana University Press) Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000. Denise Thompson, Radical Feminism Today (Sage) London, 2001. Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory: a Reader (Edinburgh University Press) Edinburgh, 1999.

This article focuses on the relations between the two geo-temporal categories – Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and West/Europe – in discussions about sexual politics, homophobia, tolerance, and nationhood. It contributes to the existing literature about homonationalism and sexual nationalisms by introducing CEE to the debate's geographical loci, so far mostly invested in West/Europe and its relations to Islam. It argues that it is important to consider CEE in sexual nationalism debates because of its framing as the European (homophobic) Other in the emerging discourses of ‘homoinclusive Europe’. This article introduces the concept of leveragedpedagogy, which captures the specificity of the West/Europe – CEE discourses of sexual liberation, advancement, and backwardness. Leveraged pedagogy is a hegemonic didactical relation where the CEE figures as an object of the West/European ‘pedagogy’, and is framed as permanently ‘post-communist’, ‘in transition’ (i.e. not liberal, not yet, not enough), and homophobic. Such ‘taking care of’ CEE, it is argued, is a form of cultural hegemony of the Western EUropean liberal model of rights as the universal.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Introduction

This article revisits Anthony Smith's landmark collectionMyths and Memories of the Nation(1999) from the perspective of recent developments in cultural memory studies. It argues for a more clearly demarcated distinction between myths and memories which acknowledges cultural memory as a site of new experiential perspectives that often work against the authority of myths, seen as the unquestioned truths about the collective past. Drawing on studies of modern memory cultures, it presents a dynamic and generative model that construes memory in terms of cultural practices of remembrance. It shows that memory is not an unchanging legacy but rather a malleable resource for making shared stories about the past. Where Halbwachs (1925) presumed that social frameworks precede and shape memory, remembrance is presented here as a cultural force that helps to redefine social frameworks and to create links between hitherto unconnected imagined communities.

This paper takes Dongguan city, Guangdong Province, China, as a case study to explore how informal employment participates in shaping urban cultural memory. Combining desk research, secondary literature, and fieldwork interviews, this study introduces a triple theoretical perspective: applying a threefold theoretical perspective: functional linkage theory to frame the concept of informal employment; Lefebvre's “space production” theory to analyze how labor practices shape urban space; and Halbwach’s “collective memory”, which explains how daily labor is transformed into shared cultural memory; and analyses several cases. The study revealed that informal employment in Dongguan shapes the collective memory of the city as a cultural force through repetitive practice, spatial embedding and group interaction. However, urban renewal and governance have challenged the continuation of these memories, resulting in the dissolution and burial of some memories. The conclusion of this paper points out that informal employment should be understood not only as an economic phenomenon but also as an integral part of urbanization and identity construction, offering a renewed perspective on the link between informal employment and urban development.

In this essay, I consider the contradictions that emerge when ruins are used to commemorate societal traumas in preserved concentration camps, decommissioned prisons, excavated torture centers, derelict cemeteries, residual bomb sites, abandoned slave trading castles, and blighted neighborhoods.Ruins work affectively to invoke the milieu or situation of the trauma, deploying the visible residue of that trauma on the landscape. While ruins appear to be the perfect vehicle for commemoration, seeming to invoke an “appropriate” melancholic response, ruins are not reliable signifiers of pain. Rather, our ease with ruins reflects a historically complex engagement with a multiplicity of satisfactions alongside our grief and condemnation. Moreover, memorial ruins are palimpsests, layered texts with contradictory histories. As a result, these “lieux de memoire” often invoke feelings and meanings that complicate their commemorative functions.All of this draws our attention to the ways in which any discussion of ruins at trauma memorials necessarily invites a discussion of site-specificity. What is the value of siting the horror exactly where we are standing? Are site-specific memorials morally superior or more socially efficacious than their off-site counterparts? What compels us to build memorials at (or to make pilgrimages to) trauma ruins? What do we mean when we say that a landscape is haunted by the events that have transpired on that site?The essay concludes with a discussion of the ways that space and place are differentially deployed by Pierre Nora, Michel de Certeau, and Yi-Fu Tuan to emphasize the interplay between aesthetic, geographical and cultural forces at work in our understanding of the ways that ruins are used within memory culture.