Heteronormative Logic Research Articles

Soukaz in space: visuality, protest and appropriation in the films of Lionel Soukaz

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, Lionel Soukaz has deployed his camera as a sledgehammer against the limits of bourgeois pseudo-toleration and its normative models of identity and citizenship. Yet the relatively disparate nature of scholarly and curatorial engagement with his œuvre has largely occluded analysis of the evolutions in his filmic practice, and, notably, his engagement with the politics of space. Bringing his films into dialogue with the writings of Henri Lefebvre, the author analyses the treatment of spatiality across Race d’ep (1979), La Marche gaie (1980) and the Journal Annales (1991–2013). Drawing on Edin Kinkaid’s reading of Lefebvre, Montgomery approaches film as a medium for reframing and dismantling the abstract space of modern capital. Soukaz’s critique of republican universalism reveals the cis- and heteronormative logics of abstract space, operative in an illusory binary between public and private. His films blur the boundaries of the embodied subject, at once opposing the creeping co-optation of queer lives by capital, and the pathologising discourses to which they have been historically subjected. Yet this revolutionary project often falls short of its own liberatory promise. Montgomery asks how we might engage with Soukaz’s challenging legacy, at a time when new strategies of visual resistance are urgently needed.

Discussing the relationships between homoparenthood and health.

The present article aims to bridge the gaps or deepen the debate to discuss the relationship between homoparenthood and health. This essay is anchored in specific literature. We seek to work on the following questions throughout the text: (i) How is the central theme of this discussion historically outlined? (ii) How does homoparenthood appear in scientific health production in general? (iii) What sociopolitical dimensions emerge around homoparenthood-health relationships? and (iv) What are the limitations and possibilities for exercising reproductive rights between same-sex couples? Among the conclusions, we underscore the challenge of facing the strangeness of homoparenthood against the idea of the so-called called "normal" family based on heteronormative logic. Even in countries with some legal apparatus assuring the rights to homoparental families, their members suffer prejudice, discrimination, and violence.

Transsexual men and pregnancy: an integrative literature review.

Promoting sexual and reproductive health in the context of transmasculinity constitutes a new issue for health service organisation. This integrative review sought to understand the current evidence on pregnancy in transsexual men in the context of sexual and reproductive health care. From a search of the BVS, PubMed, Science Direct, Scopus, Capes, SciELO and PEPSIC databases, from 2010 to 2020, a sample of 11 articles was selected, treated by content analysis and grouped into four analytical categories: health services - positive experiences; cis heteronormative health services; implications of pregnancy for transsexual bodies; and repercussions of gender-affirming therapy and pregnancy. A cis heteronormative logic was found to predominate in health care, leading to negative experiences during antenatal care and childbirth among transsexual men. Their unique health needs during the pregnancy-puerperium cycle should include mental health care. It is suggested that strategies be adopted to build capacity in health professionals with a view to respectful, inclusive perinatal care for this population group, as well as further studies on the subject.

Saúde de LGBTQIA+ na atenção básica de saúde: uma revisão de escopo

ABSTRACT The LGBTQIA+ population still faces many difficulties in accessing health services and obtaining effective care and assistance. This article provides an analysis of the academic literature on the LGBTQIA+ population’s access to Primary Health Care (PHC) services in Brazil. To this end, a scoping review was conducted in order to identify studies on subjects where literature reviews are still scarce and where different study designs may be possible. As for the results, it was observed that scientific production on access to PHC for the LGBTQIA+ population is still incipient. It emerged that, despite the political gains made through the struggle of social movements, the health process for this population is still permeated by a heteronormative logic that disregards identities and gender orientations and, consequently, imposes major barriers to accessing healthcare services.

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Queering the Global Filipina Body: Contested Nationalism in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Abolish Species: Notes toward an “Unfenced Is,” Part I

Despite its provenance in racial paradigms of colonial research, the notion of species has proved to be remarkably resilient and adaptable to post-racial frameworks of thought. Species has survived both the death of the subject and the cancellation of man. In their ascendance over nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of life, white environmentalisms have re-legitimated this keystone of biological racism by deploying species as if it were an ideologically agnostic articulation of a meaningful grouping. This article unsettles the common portrayal of species as a culturally unmarked and racially neutral concept, whose function is to denominate what remains of the planet. Working against the orthodox definition of species as the “basic unit of biodiversity,” I apprehend species as a form of onto-epistemic incarceration that has been imposed, globally, as the dominant mode of biological understanding and, subsequently, as the prevailing structure of representation used to account for environmental loss and abundance. In excess of its taxonomic function, species serves as an instrument that, practically and ideationally, converts flesh into potential wealth. This investigation begins by checking the conventional presumption that captivity is incidental to species and examines how, on the contrary, species is productive of capture, whose economic and epistemic dimensions are mutually enriching. This critical reappraisal then moves toward an argument for the abolition of species, made on the basis of four overlapping grounds. First, the institution of species enforces mono-lingualism and consolidates white entitlement to bestow a universal name on everything living. Second, species normalizes extractive incarceration as a means of accumulating value. Third, species secures Euro-American hegemony over the way difference is “objectively” defined—restrictively, in terms of heteronormative logics of reproduction that, in turn, lend coherence to projects of racialization. Fourth, the notion of species enforces a normative paradigm for processing environmental loss that blocks perception of the colonial violence that it reproduces.

Who Gets to Be a #TruvadaWhore

Abstract In 2012 the FDA’s approval of Truvada as a type of HIV preventative health care (PrEP) generated a considerable amount of criticism. This discourse was exemplified by the #TruvadaWhore campaign, in which gay men used the hashtag to reclaim this derogatory term and made information on PrEP more accessible. Although this campaign is queer in its rejection of heteronormative logics, it also highlights the limitations of queer identity politics. The #TruvadaWhore campaign masks differences of power and privilege among MSM. It presumed that a critique of slut shaming could function universally across race, despite the racial myths about Black hypersexuality that have existed throughout modernity, and undergird the ongoing regulation of Black bodies, both queer and straight. Ultimately, this article calls for a queering and reimagining of such activism as an intersectional and coalitional project through an exploration of the question: who gets to be a #TruvadaWhore?

Rethinking the heteronormative foundations of kinship: the reification of the heterosexual nuclear family unit in Singapore’s COVID-19 circuit-breaker restrictions

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 global pandemic necessitated nationwide lockdowns in many countries and Singapore was no different, announcing an eight-week ‘circuit-breaker’ in the beginning of April 2020. When it ended, the Singaporean government announced that restrictions on physical interactions would be eased in three phases. In Phase 1, all physical interactions between households continued to be disallowed with exceptions made for visits to parents and grandparents so that families could provide mutual support to one another. This article argues the permissibility of certain interactions hierarchised social ties according to a heteronormative logic where heteronormative kinship structures were elevated above others – thus excluding multiple constituencies that either did not have access to these kinship structures or for whom they did not provide support. Reading this instantiation as part of a larger reification of the heterosexual nuclear family unit in Singapore, this article posits that the demonstrable inability of heteronormative kinship to fulfil everyone’s support needs signals the urgency of rethinking extant heteronormative foundations of kinship in Singapore. Queering kinship in this way extends the existing body of queer studies scholarship in Singapore which has largely focussed on the effects of heteronormativity on LGBT lives by demonstrating how heteronormativity shapes non-LGBT lives as well.

Matter Out of Place: The Legacy of Strange Encounters in Asian American Studies

ABSTRACT This article takes the occasion of celebrating the theoretical long durée of Strange Encounters to think about two radically different forms of strange encounters. At the moment when Strange Encounters is celebrating its 20th anniversary it is important for feminists and scholars of race and ethnicity to reflect on the possibilities that Ahmed's work has provided for our critical perspectives about contemporary formations of race, gender and sexuality. The article considers two case studies: an art installation titled Enemy Kitchen by Michael Rakowitz and the memoir Know My Name by Chanel Miller. The article begins by thinking through what it means to form eating publics that often draw strangers together. Intimacy formed through strangers in this context is to be understood as generative and enabling. The kinds of intimacy that are enabled and formed through encounters with the stranger, I argue, are constitutive of positive social change that implicitly jettison the heteronormative logic of familial and familiar intimacy to imagine social worlds and possibilities in which radically different possibilities for coming together – via acts of shared commensality – are imagined and realized. The paper then moves to a different example of the encounter with the stranger, Chanel Miller's memoir. Using Ahmed's work, I explore what it means to confront strange encounters that involve coming into proximity with strange bodies that actually mean to harm women of colour. I shift from thinking about the enabling possibility of coming into contact with strangers to examine the latent violence of the encounter with the stranger that is structurally embedded in the rape survivor narrative. Together, these two examples allow me to ask how Ahmed's work has generated possibilities for a critically engaged form of social critique in Asian American Studies that takes on the challenge of confronting different forms of injustice.

La construcción mediática del colectivo LGTB+ en el cine blockbuster de Hollywood. El uso del pinkwashing y el queerbaiting

Introducción: El pinkwashing y queerbaiting son estrategias de marketing utilizadas por las grandes productoras de cine de Hollywood para ser percibidas como industrias tolerantes con respecto a la diversidad sexual y así atraer a audiencias LGTB+. Su objetivo es limpiar su imagen ante acciones negativas, como las denuncias que desde 2013 viene haciendo la asociación GLAAD en sus informes anuales debido a la falta de diversidad sexual en los largometrajes tipo blockbuster. Metodología: Las películas que conforman la muestra son: Black Panther, Jurassic World: El reino caído, Star Wars: Los últimos Jedi, Thor: Ragnarok y La bella y la bestia. Para su estudio se ha utilizado un análisis crítico del discurso (ACD). Resultados: Estos largometrajes, en los que se eliminó cualquier mención explícita a la diversidad sexual a pesar de haber sido promocionados como “gay friendly”, contaron con una participación muy reducida de personajes LGTB+, quienes fueron presentados mayoritariamente de manera estereotipada y como antítesis del héroe/heroína heterosexual. Discusión y conclusiones: A pesar de publicitar la inclusión de personajes LGTB+ durante la campaña de promoción, estos largometrajes se enmarcan en la lógica heteronormativa y eliminan referencias explícitas a la diversidad sexual para evitar las posibles pérdidas económicas.

‘Nemeses! Dragons! Symbolism!’: queering the fantasy hero narrative in Nimona

ABSTRACT Of the available narratives in fantasy fiction, the noble hero clashing with a maniacal villain – often over a helpless damsel – is easily recognisable and easily critiqued for its reliance on patriarchal, heteronormative logic and binary notions of good and evil. Noelle Stevenson’s charmingly queer graphic novel Nimona takes the additional step of reorienting the familiar commitments, relations, and actions of the fantasy hero to invite its characters (and readers) to reimagine the human beyond the parameters of what the genre typically allows it to be. This article reads Nimona as a ‘monster’ figure whose presence instigates the reformulation of fantasy masculinity made available to both ostensible hero and ostensible villain. It analyzes the consequences of Nimona’s marginalisation and the implications of Stevenson’s representation of queer trauma. Ultimately, I suggest that through the comics medium, Stevenson reinvents the fantasy genre as a site of inquiry that encourages self-reflection and asks all who engage it what we have overlooked in its traditionally straight world.

Diversidades sexuales e identidades de género: entre la aceptación y el reconocimiento. Instituciones de Educación Superior (IES)

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the heteronormative logic that mainstreams relationships between the different actors constituting the university community (whose incongruity is expressed in everyday practice) and to raise the need to recognize and re-signify the relationships with people with non-hegemonic sexual orientations and gender identities as a fundamental aspect for achieving gender justice. Which involves people, education institutions, and society in general. Although the emphasis is placed on non-hegemonic sexual orientations and gender identities, a complex epistemological perspective is assumed in which gender and sexuality are intertwined with other patterns of domination such as ethnicity, race, social class, age, among other.

‘Forgetting’ to survive: Black Jamaican masculinities in Canada’s seasonal agricultural worker program

This article contributes to the debates on masculinities and their use of ‘forgetting’ as agency by examining how Black Jamaican farmworkers transform and adapt themselves to survive the layers of oppression experienced in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). This is set against the understanding that Jamaican migrant farmworkers have long internalized some of the dominant narratives of masculinity in terms of being the main source of economic provision and head of the home, which serves as major reference points in their negotiations and performance of masculinity. But there is a marked suppression of dominant patriarchal tenets, which sees the farmworkers ‘transgressing’ gender expectations/practices in the process of social reproduction. Therefore, the transnational spatial (re)arrangement in which the farmworkers find themselves challenges the hetero-normative logic in which they have supposedly been socialized in Jamaica and the institution of patriarchy that informs their masculinity. I find that the process of ‘forgetting’ utilized by migrant workers influences and informs the performances and representations of gender in the SAWP, marked by the suspension of specific masculinities at least while workers are in Canada. Unlike other studies which focus on farmworkers experience of the present, the research population is made up of Jamaicans migrant workers – now living in Jamaica – with previous SAWP experience in Ontario.

Amor, masculinidades e resistência: uma leitura queer

Resumo O estranhamento, o anormal, as diversas expressões de gênero e o abjeto que caracterizam o queer, na medida em que possibilitam novos olhares, sobretudo pela pluralidade de identidades que revelam, desafiam a heteronormatividade, colocam em crise a suposta identidade viril masculina e fazem com que se desconfie das normatividades, das ordens e do que a elas corresponda. Com aporte na teoria queer, a par dessas possibilidades de pensamento, a proposta deste trabalho é apresentar algumas reflexões acerca da experiência amorosa vivida entre os adolescentes Camilo e Cosme, narrada no romance O amor dos homens avulsos, do escritor Victor Heringer, publicado em 2016. A experiência amorosa vivida entre as personagens, quando lida sob a perspectiva do estranhamento queer, mostra-se libertária, ainda que enfrente brutalidades decorrentes dos preconceitos construídos e perpetrados pela lógica heteronormativa. O amor presente na narrativa é tomado como prática de resistência à hegemonia heterossexual, especialmente em um contexto político opressor, e como combate à masculinidade tóxica, fonte de desumanização.

“Feel in Your Body”: Fat Activist Affects in Blogs

This article interrogates how body positive and fat activist blogs offer alternative ways of feeling one’s body, using the Finnish More to Love ( MTL, 2009–2013) and its successor PlusMimmi ( PM, 2013–) and the American Queer Fat Femme Guide to Life ( QFF, 2008–) as its examples. We investigate how these blogs, despite their differences, invite their publics not only to feel positive about their own and others’ norm-exceeding bodies, but to feel in their bodies. While previous studies have criticized body positive discourses for employing a simplistic language of choice and relying on heteronormative logics of feminine attractiveness, they have not paid specific attention to how exactly body positive media attract and engage people affectively. In this article, MTL, PM, and QFF’s strategies of inviting their followers to feel in their bodies are analyzed in the context of three key themes: exercise, fashion, and sex. We argue that when explored through the framework of affect, fat activist blogs do not present body positivity simply as a matter of choice but offer a space to feel through the affective contradictions of inhabiting a fat feminine body in a sizeist society. At their best, body positive blogs open up spaces of comfort which can be radical for bodies accustomed to discomfort.

Queering the Debate: Analysing Prostitution Through Dissident Sexualities in Brazil

Abstract The aim of this article is to contrast prominent discourses on prostitution and human trafficking to the context of prostitution in Brazil and local feminist discourses on this matter, understanding their contradictions and limitations. I look at Brazilian transgender prostitutes’ experiences to address an agency-related question that underlies feminist theorizations of prostitution: can prostitution be freely chosen? Is it necessarily exploitative? My argument is that discourses on sex work, departing from sex trafficking debates, are heavily engaged in a heteronormative logic that might be unable to approach the complexity and ambiguity of experiences of transgender prostitutes and, therefore, cannot theorize their possibilities of agency. To do so, I will conduct a critique of the naturalization of gender norms that hinders an understanding of experiences that exceed the binary ‘prostitute versus victim.’ I argue how both an abolitionist as well as a legalising solution to the issues involved in the sex market, when relying on the state as the guarantor of rights to sex workers, cannot account for the complexities of a context such as the Brazilian one, in which specific conceptions of citizenship permit violence against sexually and racially marked groups to occur on such a large scale.

Análise de discurso de gênero em Silicone Blues

O objetivo dessa pesquisa foi compreender os efeitos de sentidos produzidos sobre gênero em quatro tirinhas da série Silicone Blues da cartunista Laerte. O corpus de análise foi constituído por quatro tirinhas sobre transgeneridade da série, analisadas a partir da Análise do Discurso de Michel Pêcheux. Essa pesquisa, de caráter qualitativa, foi realizada entre janeiro e abril de 2014. Silicone Blues, através do humor, propicia reflexões e critica a lógica heteronormativa compulsória que articula como indissociados: o sexo (biologia), o gênero (determinação de atitudes de homens e mulheres) e a orientação heterossexual (atração por pessoas do mesmo sexo) pressupondo características fixas, imutáveis e diferenciais para homens e mulheres. No entanto, Silicone Blues não rompe definitivamente com a heteronormatividade, mas se apresenta como uma pièce de résistance transgênera, ou seja, um desafio ao que se estipula como normal para os sujeitos.

The organisation of sexuality and the sexuality of organisation: A genealogical analysis of sexual ‘inclusive exclusion’ at work

This article problematises sexual inclusion in the workplace by theorising the social and historical processes that underpin heteronormativity in organisations. Drawing on a genealogical analysis of sexuality and inclusion in four Italian social firms that support the work and social integration of disadvantaged individuals, the article provides an in-depth analysis of the historical conditions affecting the management of sexualities in organisations. The analysis exposes the fragility and contradictory character of the notion of inclusion by illustrating how efforts to ‘include’ are often grounded on normative principles. It also shows how heteronormativity works, in practice, to moderate different modalities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer inclusion, recreating hierarchies and binaries within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. The article discusses how the power of heteronormativity produces specific meanings of inclusion within which some lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer workers are included and normalised, and others remain excluded because they do not conform to normative conventions and flaunt their ‘diversity’. The necessity of taking a queer perspective on ‘inclusion’ that scrutinises the heteronormative logic is also discussed. The article concludes by shedding light on how, within a heteronormative regime shaped by neoliberal predicaments, ‘inclusive’ organisations might continue to exclude lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals.

Unsuitable for Children? Adult-erated Age in Underground Graphic Narratives

Abstract This article explores expressions of eroto-abject desire in two collaborative graphic narratives: Kathy Acker, Diane DiMassa, and Freddie Baer’s Pussycat Fever (1995) and David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook’s 7 Miles a Second (1996). Reflecting the resistance to heteronormative logics of age categorization, “adult-erated age” names the ways that childhoods in the texts are adult oriented but also characterizes how they, in their respective contexts, revise and reflect notions of impurity and being worsened as singularly queer ways of being and representing. This is accomplished by turning to traumatic memory and ill embodiment via graphic textual form.

Representation of homoaffective relationships in Brazilian telenovelas

The presence of homosexual characters in Brazilian telenovelas has been gaining prominence in recent years and arousing intense debates in society. The aim of this study is to analyze the representation of homoaffective relationships in telenovelas from the perspective of their presence, relevance and discussion. This study consisted of the analysis of the scenes of homosexual couple Teresa and Estela in the telenovela Ambitious Women (GLOBO NETWORK, 2015), in comparison with the literature and other same-gender relationships in telenovelas. The analysis evidences an increase in the representativeness of homoaffective relationships in telenovelas, however the representation of these relationships still remains subjected to a heteronormative logic.