Heteronormative Logic Research Articles

About the relation between transgender people and the organizations: new subjects for studies on organizational diversity

The “Organizational Diversity” field concentrates studies on the experiences of groups that are different from the archetypical male, white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied and western worker. When analysing the studies regarding gender relations, however, one perceives their concentration on the dynamics between men and women localized in developed western countries. Transgender persons are persons whose identity and/or gender expression differs from what is socially attributed to their bodies, breaking with the heteronormative logic. In Brazil, where only the bodies within this discourse are legitimate, this group is systematically excluded from a myriad of spaces including the formal job market. Therefore, the experiences of these people at and with work are invisible to organizational diversity's theory and practice. To explore this issue, this study analyses the perceptions that the transgender person maintains about their relations (1) with their professional history, (2) with other people in their work environment, and (3) with organizational policies and practices. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were made with six transgender persons that work in organizations. From these narratives, it was found that the person's level of passing usually influences their relations and that the ignorance regarding transgenderity permeates all three domains of relations. The conclusions are: (1) the relations with work are marked by opportunity restrictions; (2) the relations in the job hold the person responsible for their on intelligibility and safety; and (3) the relations with the organization vary according to the way it faces transgenderity and its own voice systems.

It’s a family business!: Leadership texts as technologies of heteronormativity

This article contributes to the recent scholarship in Critical Leadership Studies by tracing several heteronormative logics entangled within contemporary leadership discourse. As a popular and profitable industry, mainstream leadership studies utilize the fields of psychology and business management to support their claims of successful practices. This situates leadership discourse as a natural, objective, and value-neutral science, rendering its inherently biased and exclusionary assumptions and applications largely unexamined from a critical lens. In response, this analysis illustrates how leadership serves as a technology of heteronormativity by describing prominent and interconnected themes in several of the bestselling leadership books in the United States. Using queer and poststructural theoretical frames in conjunction with critical discourse analysis, three themes are analyzed which illuminate how leadership discourses: rely on heteronormative familial logics, use generational paradigms that position leadership within heteronormative time and space, and promote and privilege (hetero)reproduction through ideas of legacy and role modeling. These themes within leadership coalesce to form decidedly heterosexist/heteronormative discursive practices, disrupting the notion of leadership as an ideologically neutral discourse.

Patently Queer

In 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed a writ petition against the Indian government to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic HIV and cancer medications. Rather than framing queer politics in India as a matter of state-sanctioned citizenship in which queers rally for legal rights, “Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India” considers this case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of sexual economy. I argue for a consideration of the “late effects” that subtend the sexual economies of India—that is, material mechanisms of delay in access that run counter to the putative logics of flexibility and mobility that inform India in a postliberalization milieu. I show how the liberalized Indian state is mediated by transnational formations and global imperatives of capitalism, and in turn manages local sexual economies that seek to preserve heteronormative logics of essentialized Indianness. While economic liberalization after the 1990s closely parallels the emergence of burgeoning gay visibility in India, my aim is to theorize the fault lines rather than the compatibility between sexual politics and economic imperatives of growth that mark the accelerated development of an “incredible” or “shining” India.

Queer Korean cinema, national others, and making of queer space in Stateless Things (2011)

ABSTRACTThis article examines the spatial politics and aesthetics of queer Korean cinema through a close reading of Stateless Things (Jultak dongsi, Kim Kyung-mook, 2011). The focus of this article is twofold. Firstly, it explores the way in which the film experiments with both narrative and formalistic elements in critiquing South Korean national logic of progress and their ethnocentrism. Secondly, it delineates the queer use of space in the film. Through a careful examination of the film, this article argues that the virtue of queer Korean cinema lies in its ardent effort to reinstate the history of socially marginalized people on screen and to disclose the aspects of queer lives that cannot be subsumed under the heteronormative logic of progress.

Sex, ‘Race,’ and Betrayal: Kalinda Sharma and Bisexual Feminist Politics

ABSTRACTThe bisexual woman is a key site of contestation in theorizing a feminist sexual politics. Paradoxically, she can be situated as either a source of liberation or a source of oppression. Acknowledging this ambiguity, the author examines to what extent female bisexuality can theorize a liberatory feminist sexual politics from three angles: pleasure and desire, queer alliance building, and ‘race.’ Challenging bisexual stereotypes, the author shows how bisexual women are framed within a phallocentric lesbian feminist consciousness and considers how the racialization of bisexuality complicates its radical potential. The author considers the threatening nature of bisexual women through Hemmings’ theory of the bisexual ‘double agent’ and the character of Kalinda Sharma from the CBS television series The Good Wife. The author uses these productive limitations of bisexuality to imagine a liberatory feminist sexual politics, exploring to what extent the unbiased nature of bisexual desire defies misogyny and heteronormative logic.

Resisting Genealogy: Diasporic Grief and Heterosexual Melancholia in the Israeli Films <em>Three Mothers</em> and <em>Late Marriage</em>

The article explores the relationships between diaspora and nationalism, heterosexuality and queerness in two Israeli films: Three Mothers (Dina Zvi-Riklis, 2006) and Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili, 2001). These films reconfigure home as both nation and diaspora outside the heteronormative logics of the family, kinship, and hetero-patriarchal inheritance and genealogy. Although the films are about heterosexual romances, I argue that they offer a radical critique of both national and diasporic narratives that rely on a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction, and which therefore exclude non-heteronormative sexuality and desire. They expose and challenge the politics of the Oedipal organization and normative kinship systems by deploying modes of melancholia to reimagine and reassemble new forms of desire, identification, pleasure, and belonging to spaces such as home and family, diaspora and nation, which have traditionally denied anti-heteronormative existence. The films link ethnic to heterosexual melancholia and show that the loss of the diasporic past conceals the even deeper and more hidden loss of queer familial sexual ties.

Moren er Død, Moren, Leve...

Gay men are carrying a history as being suspected as potential pedophiles and non-suited parents, and while the reproductive technology of transnational gestational surrogacy makes it possible for gay men to become parents within heteronormative logics, the constructions of families without a mother are looked upon as problematic at best. Through field observations and interviews with gay men, who have been or who are involved in transnational surrogacy I explore how gay men fragmentize the notion of the mother in to several positions. The article argues that the gay men are reproductive vulnerable and are negotiating and fighting for the possibility to become legible as parents inside a heteronormative and homophobic framework. This relies on their ability to diminish the mother. By activating and using misogynic and colonial discourses and strategies, the gay men eradicate the kinship positions of the surrogate and the donor, thus giving discursive and affective life to gay men’s possibility to embody motherhood and parenthood.

Provincializing Intersex: US Intersex Activism, Human Rights, and Transnational Body Politics

Provincializing IntersexUS Intersex Activism, Human Rights, and Transnational Body Politics David A. Rubin (bio) How are debates about intersex—an umbrella term for individuals born with “atypical” sex characteristics—shaped by the politics of difference and struggles for sexual and gender justice in a multicultural, transnational world?1 How do activist and academic critiques of the medicalization of “bodies in doubt” rearticulate the meaning and materiality of human rights in neoliberal landscapes?2 How do geopolitics, colonial legacies, consumer citizenship, and biopower inform and mitigate contemporary intersex politics? And how might transnational feminist perspectives contribute to critically rethinking the local and global travels and trajectories of the intersex movement? In the space opened up by these questions, this article explores how US debates about intersex are shaped, challenged, and interrupted by global activism and transnational feminist perspectives.3 Acknowledging that the term “transnational feminism” is contested, I employ it here as an intersectional set of understandings, tools, and practices that can attend “to racialized, classed, masculinized, and heteronormative logics and practices of globalization and capitalist patriarchies, and the multiple ways in which they (re)structure colonial and neocolonial relations of domination and subordination.”4 Transnational feminisms both draw from and are aligned with other traditions of feminist praxis (including postcolonial, women-of-color, Indigenous, materialist, queer, and poststructuralist feminisms). Challenging “monological and monocausal approaches to subjectivity and power” and refusing “colonial logics of similitude,” they do not presume that all sexed/gendered subjects around the globe are essentially the same or that sex/gender is separable from other axes of difference.5 Transnational feminist perspectives are therefore distinct from, and critical of, cosmopolitan and internationalist celebrations of “global sisterhood.” Furthermore, they do not view capitalist globalization’s cross-border flows (of people, goods, capital, and information) as either inherently liberatory or exclusively exploitative. Instead, transnational feminist [End Page 51] analytics focalize the shifting, unstable, but vital interdependencies between nation-states, political economies, social formations, and subjects—revealing these entities to be fundamentally contested, non-natural, non-identical across space and time, and laced with contradictions.6 Recognizing that “there is no such thing as a feminism free of asymmetrical power relations,” transnational feminisms “involve forms of alliance, subversion and complicity within which asymmetries and inequalities can be critiqued.”7 Utilizing transnational feminist perspectives, I argue that US-based intersex advocacy risks reiterating structures of US and global Northern dominance when it does not self-reflexively interrogate its own politics of location in relation to transnational histories of imperialism, neoliberalism, and biopower. In her reading of Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of the “politics of location,” Caren Kaplan argues that practicing ethical accountability in transnational contexts requires acknowledging “the historical roles of mediation, betrayal, and alliance in the relationships between” various subjects in diverse locations.8 Drawing on Kaplan’s intervention, I investigate how human-rights discourse, colonial legacies, biopolitics, and neoliberal ideologies contour the locational politics of US intersex activism. I do so by examining two crucial events in the history of the Intersex Society of North America (isna), an advocacy group that became, during the tenure of its existence (1993–2008), the most highly visible and influential intersex activist organization in the world: isna’s failed attempt to lobby for the inclusion of intersex surgery in the US Congress’s 1997 federal ban on “female genital mutilation” (fgm); and isna’s influence on two 1999 decisions by the Constitutional Court of Colombia to rework the definition of informed consent and limit doctors’ capacity to perform normalizing genital surgery. I contend that transnational feminist perspectives provide indispensable tools for analyzing the politics of location of US intersex activism and, ultimately, for provincializing and decolonizing the intersex imaginary. I use the term “intersex imaginary” to refer to shared yet situated ways of imagining intersex bodies.9 The intersex imaginary is a site of political struggle and contestation. US and Western understandings of intersex are historically and geopolitically particular, not universal. In the English language, for instance, the term “intersex” assumes an analytic separation between sex, gender, and sexual orientation that is not indigenous to many cultures around the globe.10 For this reason, articulations of the intersex imaginary can falsely...

Against the grain: Teaching Transgender Human Rights

Mirroring the course objectives of my senior undergraduate Transgender Human Rights seminar, this article seeks to challenge trans rights politics. Many rights advocates emphasize the symbolic value of formal acknowledgment of, and protection for, gender identity. I argue that trans rights are achieved through the production of deserving subjects according to colonial, heteronormative, nationalist and capitalist logics. Rights discourses are injurious to a significant number of trans and two-spirit individuals and communities because they obscure relations of governance. Rights ought not to be the driving force of ‘trans-’ efforts to cultivate broader relations of political solidarity to challenge interlocking systems of power.

‘My Rainbow Family’—Discomfort and the Heteronormative Logics

Many consider Scandinavian countries to be tolerant and liberal with regard to homosexuality and same-sex parenthood. Nevertheless, heteronormative assumptions of ‘the normal family’ still dominate. The participants in this research project have grown up in rainbow families,1 and this article focuses on how they negotiate and work on heteronormativity and representations of ‘normal’ family life in ways that challenge and alter these assumptions. Their work reveals a continuum of practices ranging from concealment and non-disclosure to being very open and proactive in representing their families. In analyzing the data, I employ Sara Ahmed’s (2004) work on comfort/discomfort, and discuss the discomfort of working on the heteronormative logics. The 25 participants in this project come from Denmark and Norway, and range from 15 to 45 years of age (most are between 20 and 25). In interviews and written autobiographies, they spoke and wrote about their families, parenthood and their parents’ sexual orientation.

The Queer Time of Creative Urbanism: Family, Futurity, and Global City Singapore

Singapore's rise as a ‘global city’ has attracted much scholarly attention, especially as its government has recently turned to ‘creative city’ strategies. In line with critiques made of other global and creative cities around the world, important critiques have been leveled that the city-state's developmental efforts are bureaucratic, hierarchical, narrowly economistic, and, most importantly, socially polarizing. This paper demonstrates that Singapore's global/creative city project is also heteronormative and, further, that this heteronormative logic is tied in fundamental ways to broad forms of social polarization. The drive to attract ‘foreign talent’ to the city-state as a key prong in attaining future economic growth has resulted in significant changes in sexual citizenship over the last decade. Efforts to shake off an authoritarian image and foster a creative economy have led to the liberalization of the government's approach to public expressions of homosexuality. Yet discriminatory legislation and policy that excludes gays and lesbians from full citizenship has been maintained. Further, Singapore maintains a bifurcated migration regime that invites ‘foreign talent’ and their families to become part of the national family through naturalization, while ‘foreign workers’ have no route to future citizenship and are prohibited from bringing dependents with them, as well as from marrying and/or having children locally. Through a coercive politics of constrained im/mobility, this alien surplus labour force is set on an alternative developmental path that precludes intimacy, love, and familial connection. Building on recent work on the notion of ‘queer time’, this paper calls attention to the ways in which the city-state's developmental aims are underpinned by an exclusionary notion of reproductive futurity, and argues that a queer theoretical approach adds much to critical efforts to undermine the Singapore government's illiberal politics of pragmatism.

What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity and Queer Childrearing in Lackawanna Blues and Noah’s Arc

What Child Is This?: Closely Reading Collectivity and Queer Childrearing in Lackawanna Blues and Noah’s Arc Vincent Stephens (bio) Collectivity is a deeply embedded strategy in African American culture that has historically functioned as a response to challenging social and economic conditions. From the mid- to late twentieth century and beyond, African American “families of choice”—intimate associations of biological and nonblood relatives cohabiting and sharing household responsibilities—have been a primary mode of collectivity that has challenged the hegemony of the heterosexual nuclear family. The nuclear structure’s preeminence as an exemplar of U. S. affiliative ideals belies the postwar economic and racial biases that limited its material accessibility, engineered the failure of such structures to foster stability and health, and obscures the functionality of other household models. Renewed critical attention to the alternative modes of kinship African Americans have cultivated is essential to understanding how diverse households provide emotional and material sustenance. “What Child is This” examines two cultural depictions of African American “families of choice” in order to challenge two modes of white sexual normativity. First, my reading of the “othermothering” and “exchange relationships” represented in the autobiographical telefilm Lackawanna Blues challenges white heteronormative logic that black conformity to the nuclear family will resolve racialized economic and social gaps. Second, my reading of same-sex couple parenting in the series Noah’s Arc is a rejoinder to “queer negativity,” a white homonormative strain of queer theory opposed to various forms of sociality but lacking critical attention to the historically subversive role of alternative kinship structures for African Americans. Both readings address the devotion of nonbiological adults to child figures within these families and elucidate the enduring utility of extended family households as unique nexuses of care for African American adults and children. Conceptualizing Collectivity Cornel West’s provocative statement on the value of “black culture” warrants close critical scrutiny for its encapsulation of collectivity’s symbolic utility for African Americans: The genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness. These buffers consisted of cultural structures of meaning and feeling that created and sustained communities; this armor constituted ways of life and struggle that embodied values of service and sacrifice, love and care, discipline and excellence. In other words, traditions for black surviving and thriving under usually adverse New World conditions were major barriers against the nihilistic threat. (40) [End Page 235] This excerpt’s ideological essence could be interpreted either as a nationalist statement rife with essentialist presumptions or as a benign statement of cultural pride. I read it as an acknowledgement of the psychological and behavioral toll of white supremacy, racism and class subordination. West places African American “counterpublic” formations, generated by African Americans for their sustenance as integral to “African American identity” and acknowledges the “linked fate” of blacks, tied to a shared national experience. Significantly, the quotation does not imply that all blacks have or have had an interchangeable experience; there is room for variance. The compelling subtext of his statement is that black racial pride is not benign or ornamental but the embodiment of the specificity and urgency of institution-building among African Americans. The import of his statement here is significant, since the social gaps and the resultant psychological nihilism he addresses in the larger article remain integral to African American life. Communal values, particularly “service and sacrifice, love and care,” are important because African Americans have generated traditions worth acknowledging as a heritage. Understanding community in terms of the intimate relations formed through erotic relationships, friendships and living arrangements localizes and grounds community. The United States is arguably transitioning from traditional to modern and postmodern intimacies, and a hallmark of this transition is a social recognition of the pluralized ways people form and sustain intimate relations (Plummer 8–9). This transition raises important questions about the ways certain intimate relations are socially valued over others. The heterosexual nuclear family comprised of a man and woman who divide gender roles and reproduce has been the central social ideal of intimate relationships since the post...

Exploring online identity representation: a response to ‘heteronarrative analysis’

This paper represents a response to Kaufmann's article in this issue on the subject of heteronarrative analysis. The author highlights three elements of Kaufmann's argument to be especially persuasive: the use of narrative as an organizing principle of identity; the propensity of identity to be inflected by heteronormative logic; and the use of photographic and electronic media to disrupt identity. This analysis concludes with a suggestion that emerging methodologies designed to explore gender and identity should be carefully interrogated at the philosophical level of understanding if they are to provide useful insights.

QUEERING THE BLACK ATLANTIC, QUEERING THE BROWN ATLANTIC

This essay reviews two books, M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred and Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, both of which focus on the intersections of queer studies with diaspora studies, area studies, and postcolonial theory. These books help forge the burgeoning field of “queer diasporas,” which works against the genealogical and heteronormative reproductive logic of conventional diaspora studies. At the same time, the field of queer diasporas also provincializes queer studies by considering how questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization affect bodies and sexualities as they circulate outside the metropolitan West—across the Black Atlantic to the Caribbean in Alexander's case and across the Brown Atlantic to various locales of the South Asian diaspora in Gopinath's study. As sexuality travels in the global system, we witness its transformation into many other things: a discourse of development; a dialectic of Enlightenment; an emblem of democracy, progress, and liberation; a tale of racial, religious, or cultural barbarism; an index of the human, human rights, and human rights abuses.

The Racialization of White Man's Polygamy

This paper offers a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, elucidating certain racist and nationalist formations that are implicit in the historical valorization and enforcement of heterosexual monogamy. It tracks the white supremacist and heteronormative logic that conditions the widespread disdain toward polygamy, and that renders it fundamentally different from familial configurations that are associated with national identity. Relating political and philosophical doctrines to the archival documentation and insights of contemporary legal and cultural historians of anti-polygamy sentiment, it elucidates the racial Anglo-Saxonism of Hegel's ruminations on marriage and on the state, and highlights its reverberation within the political philosophy that justified the criminalization of polygamy and its supporting institutions in the nineteenth century and in contemporary immigration policy and same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada and the United States.

John Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation

John's Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation Ivy Schweitzer (bio) Recently, scholars have begun to question the Age of Reason's idealization of and dedication to dispassionate reason, and to chart what one collection calls, somewhat infelicitously, the "emotional history of the United States" (Stearns and Lewis). In his investigation of early American affect, Peter Coviello argues that the nation emerges in the rhetoric of its important polemical writers, Jefferson, Paine and Wheatley, not from particular "state dictates" or political theories, but through the strategic evocation of potent emotions of loss and separation that enable a quite disparate and widely separated colonial populace to bond together imaginatively as a unified whole (441–42). This "odd civic intimacy" not only precedes and makes possible the political constitution of the new nation but it establishes the capacity for impassioned response as a prerequisite for virtuous republican citizenship. This requires a reconsideration of the standing of women and people of color, who were traditionally excluded from participation in the public realm because of their perceived link with untrammeled emotion (Coviello 457, 443). A "seminal" precursor of this emotional collectivity, according to Coviello, is John Winthrop's famous address, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered in the spring of 1630, probably at Southampton to a band of Protestant dissenters on the eve of their departure to establish a "purified" commonwealth in the new world.1 What Jefferson "retrieves" from this lay sermon, in Coviello's account, is an early blueprint for American exceptionalism in which affect is central "to the mutuality that defines a civic body" (462). While "exceptionalism" may indeed be a legacy of the visionary Puritan leader, Winthrop does not dwell on the "agonizing affection" Jefferson invokes at the dramatic climax of his initial version of the Declaration of Independence, which Coviello analyzes so adeptly, but on a form of Christian love indissolubly entangled with classical, early Christian, and [End Page 441] Renaissance friendship discourses and the legal language of contract to which these give rise.2 In fact, the multivalent exchange Winthrop recommends to his followers, which he extols as "a most equall and sweet kinde of Commerce,"3 more nearly and unwittingly presages the imperial economic vision Tom Paine vividly painted for indecisive colonists in 1776 in his widely circulated pamphlet "Common Sense." In passionate prose, Paine urges separation from England, so that the colonies can free themselves from a heartless "Parent Country" to become a "continental" nation able to "carry our friendship on a larger scale" and to "claim brotherhood with every European Christian," and whose master "plan is commerce" (19–20). For Paine, and for many an eighteenth-century treaty-writer, "amity" between nations not only indicated the cessation of conflict but was the necessary precursor of America's real purpose: economic development through trade. A close examination of the sources and dynamics of Winthrop's vaunted "charity" reveals the imbrication of friendship as social and spiritual affiliation and commercial relations. It also discloses a strategic slippage characteristic of early Protestant culture between the homo-normative logic of friendship and the heteronormative logic of marriage that produces a curious effect: the oscillation between friendship's "ideal" but masculine egalitarianism and the gendered hierarchy of marriage. What may have been radical in Winthrop's day, as we will see, for later generations ratifies a conservative social agenda in which women are the "equals" of men in neither marriage nor friendship. Contexts for Winthrop's "Charity" Winthrop founded his famous plan or "model" for the "City upon a Hill" he envisioned in New England on an understanding of love, in the original Greek agape, which early Church fathers called Christian brotherhood or fellowship. The Vulgate renders this form of affiliation as caritas, while the Geneva and King James Bibles sometimes translate it as "charity." 4 What emerges from the scholarly debate over nomenclature is an understanding of Christian agape and caritas that is tangled up in the shifting and diverse meanings of the ancient Greek term philotes and the philia and amicitia of later classical philosophers, not to mention the other prominent human affect the Greeks called eros.5 David Konstan argues that [End Page 442] Christian writers generally...

Consuming Compassion

This article explores media coverage of male figure skaters who have died of AIDS-related illnesses, and the implication of the “AIDS crisis in figure skating” in ongoing struggles over HIV/AIDS policy in Canada. Although the Canadian media and public framed their responses to the crisis in terms of tolerance and compassion, the author shows how these responses reinforced a heteronormative logic of Canadian citizenship. Moreover, the author suggests that the performances of compassion and tolerance that emerged in the figure skating story are less evidence of the superior moral nature of Canada, as public discourse frequently suggests, than illustrations of the ways in which the struggle to define a distinct Canadian identity relies on narratives that imagine Canada as more compassionate and tolerant than the United States.