Queer Context Research Articles

Zen Closets

This article explores John Cage's “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham,” a love poem dedicated to the poet's longtime partner. Though scholars of Cage's writing and music tend to ignore the queer context in which his work was created, this study attempts to reconcile the poet's art with his life. As a homosexual couple in the postwar period, Cage and Cunningham observed a closeted silence throughout their lives together, preferring to refer to one another as collaborators rather than romantic partners or lovers. While such strategies were not uncommon, the couple's use of Zen philosophy to imbue their silent relationship with an almost religious purpose distinguishes them from many others. Indeed, the poem embodies this situation well. Offering, at one moment, a glimpse into the couple's private life, at the next, the piece consistently subverts this gesture through various avant-garde techniques. In fact, in its unusual use of typography and its experimental performance history, Cage's mesostic reimagines the space and terms of traditional love poetry — much like his relationship with Cunningham reworked traditional gender roles. By bringing these aspects of Cage's life and work to light, this article aims to provide scholars with a fuller understanding of postwar queer poetics.

Queer Contexts of Polish Literature

Queer Contexts of Polish Literature

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.

From Jailhouse Rock to Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go: George Michael and the New Man

This article looks at the intersection between men’s fashion, ambiguous masculine identities and the emerging media form of music video in the AIDS-darkened early 1980s. It asks two questions: firstly, what enabled sartorial features in masculine fashion and grooming previously associated with queer-identifying men to cross over into the mainstream fashion culture of the 1980s? Secondly, how was it that in the startlingly homophobic climate of this ‘age of AIDS’, sexually ambiguous figures such as Wham!’s George Michael became such popular style role models? The article addresses these questions by arguing that Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock (1957) – a strong stylistic influence on Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go by Wham! in 1984 – is an example of the Camp trace that remains when Camp aesthetics are removed from explicitly queer contexts. It argues that Jailhouse Rock is a dramatization of situational homosexuality, a mid-twentieth-century understanding of same-sex attraction between straight-identifying men, a precedent that permits the homoerotic group dynamic of Wham!. The article then explains how fashion worn by Michael in Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go – namely British designer Katherine Hamnett’s CHOOSE LIFE slogan T-shirt, and an alternative costume in which the colour pink is most prominent – demonstrates an intersection between fashion and politics for gay men in the 1980s. It also discusses Michael as an example of the New Man, an advertising and media trope of the 1980s that represented a blurring between queer masculine style and a new straight stereotype.

“Big Luther” discourse: cultural longing and the signification of Luther Vandross in African American popular culture

ABSTRACT With a catalog that stretches from the 1960s into the early 2000s, Luther Vandross is highly esteemed internationally and across multiple generations of music fans. For many, he is essential to the soundtrack of their emotional lives. His stylings are such a large part of the Black cultural imaginary in the United States that, since the 1980s, Vandross has been figured in literature, film, Hip Hop lyrics, and television shows to convey romantic sentiments or a seductive mood in heterosexual and queer contexts. But in some cases, he is admonished and fat shamed, and held up as a symbol of the ways in which “good health” eludes the African American community statistically. I want to linger in that ambivalence and highlight the various shades of meaning that have been attached to Vandross’ fat (and sometimes slim) body in narratives produced for mass culture and smaller targeted audiences. To that end, I take up “Big Luther” discourse as an analytical framework to examine artistic and communal articulations that weaponize “care” and “concern” for Vandross, including the 1996 film The Nutty Professor, a 2006 episode of the animated sitcom The Boondocks, and Divabetic, a diabetes awareness organization that his mother was involved in establishing after Vandross died in 2005.

The Refusal to Refuse: Bisexuality Trouble and the Hegemony of Monosexuality

This paper both revisits and productively draws on Judith Butler’s theory of sexuality offered in Gender Trouble, to consider how this foundational queer theory text inadvertently works to contain and bracket plurisexualities such as bisexuality. I consider how Butler at once rejects the idea of originary bisexuality provoked by psychoanalytic discourse on polymorphous perversity yet subsumes bisexual oppression into that of homosexuality. I interrogate Butler’s monosexual presumptions to extend their notion of the heterosexual matrix to account for an operational hetero/homo binary that both excludes plurisexuality as its Other and obscures this exclusion. Following this theoretical line, I consider how the asymmetric hetero/homo binary has been coded along the lines of comedy/tragedy in culture, and in contrast how bisexuality and other plurisexualities are often rendered impossible. I suggest that plurisexualities, representing a refusal to refuse the originary prohibition, “haunt” both straight and queer contexts alike.

After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective

After a Post-Heterosexual Mormon Theology: A Ten-Year Retrospective

Queering Whole Person Care

This workshop is the product of a research study exploring the strategies that queer people develop to navigate hegemonic, heteropatriarchal health care systems, and ways that nurse education can incorporate a narrative-based, whole person care approach to understanding and supporting the needs of queer patients. This mixed-methods study included interviews with queer people, nurse educators and practicing nurses; textual analysis of queer health narratives; close reading of queer, feminist and cultural theory; and autoethnography.Some of the questions that we will explore are: How do queers use personal narratives to help navigate health care systems not designed to see/meet their needs? How do queers challenge dominant power structures in medicine? What does whole person care look like in a queer context? What would nurses like to see included in nursing education, and what do queers want health providers to know? What are the key pedagogical challenges in attempting such communication?The stories that queer people carry with them to medical encounters are a rich and underutilized resource for health care providers, and a tool for patients trying to manage serious or chronic illness. We will explore methods for including storytelling in nursing education as well as patient care, and participants will engage in a narrative medicine/autoethnographic exercise.We hope participants will leave our workshop with a better understanding of queer peoples' experiences of health care, and ways that queers and nurses can work together for better health outcomes.

Queer and Asian: Redefining Chinese American Masculinity in The Wedding Banquet (Ang Lee, 1993) and Red Doors (Georgia Lee, 2006)

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese American men were subjected to different forms of discrimination and exclusion. The Chinese community was construed as a bachelor community, on the outskirts of the U.S. nation-state, and its men were symbolically emasculated. Consequently, Chinese American masculinity comes both as a site of submission and resistance, in which queer Chinese Americans meet the difficult challenge to conform neither to the Chinese nor to the American identity that cultural representations offer. This article explores Chinese American masculinity as a site of negotiation and resistance to such representations. To do so, we use the concept of “queer,” defined by David Eng and Alice Hom as “a political practice based on transgressions of the norm and normativity rather than a straight/gay binary of heterosexual/homosexual identity” (Eng and Hom 1998: 1). Firstly, in his movie The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee tackles the theme of Chinese Americanness through the prism of a Chinese American closeted homosexual character. This allows us to discuss how Chinese American masculinity and identity are defined, explored, and negotiated in a queer context. On the other hand, the concept of queer can also be used as a theoretical tool which allows us to explore Chinese Americans’ imagined community and identity. This is done through the prism of Georgia Lee’s movie Red Doors, and more especially Ed, the suicidal patriarch of the family. We thus analyze the movie’s queering of ethnicity which reconfigures representations of Chinese Americans.

What Phoenix'sjoteríais saying: Identity, normativity, resistance

AbstractThis article questions queer theory's investment in antinormativity and anti-identitarianism by applying a queer multimodal discourse analytic approach to the ethnographic context of queer, bilingual Mexicans/Latinxs in the US Southwest. The article explores the complexity of ways that norms are taken up and resisted (or not) in discourse, with particular attention to the activist use of discourses about community and identity. A close analysis of several texts illuminates how language practices and social practices—as seen, for example, in advertising strategies, participation in annual LGBTQ Pride festivals, and activism surrounding the undocuqueer movement—become invested with social meaning among queer Mexicans/Latinxs. (Antinormativity, queer theory, bilingual, sexual identity, community, Latinx, jotería)*

Queer Contexts in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

Queer Contexts in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand

The Mis diagnosis of Critique

Eve Sedgwick's diagnosis of "theory" as "paranoid" has been utilized to authorize a range of critical interventions, including the most recent call by Rita Felski for a new era of "postcritique" (2015). The status of Sedgwick's essay in shaping contemporary discourse—"arguably the origin of the reading debates" (Love, 2017)—makes it a crucial site for exploring the current denunciations of "critique." In spite of the tremendous popularity of the "paranoid" diagnosis, there has been a total absence of any attention to the "queer" context of Sedgwick's essay. The disregard for this queer context is significant for how it facilitates the habitual misreading of Sedgwick's critique. However, rather than attributing strategic decontextualization to the agenda of contemporary "postcritical" readers alone, my own inquiry is interested in how Sedgwick misdiagnoses her own intervention and, specifically, the ways in which Sedgwick's particular framing of the problem—as between "paranoid" and non-"paranoid" reading—fatally constrains any useful hypostatization of critique's limitations. In addition to a close engagement with the terms of Sedgwick's "paranoid" diagnosis, this essay contextualizes Sedgwick's intervention in hermeneutics, and Queer Theory specifically, in order to challenge the two major avenues of Sedgwick's critical reception: in the reading debates, as "reparative" against "theory" tout court, and by Affect Theory, as beyond sexuality and therefore "post-psychological." In an effort to sharpen the terms of the current reading debates, this essay further locates Sedgwick's intervention in a broader tradition of "practical critiques," by which I mean interventions made by critics against a theoretical apparatus that seems, to them, to compromise the "quality" of reading. This essay maps contemporary critical discourse onto two categories, "sociological" and "speculative" reading, in order to explain the differences between interpretive paradigms.

Childfree by Choice

ABSTRACTIn this article, the author blends research, queer theory, clinical material, and anecdotal evidence to explore the topic of voluntary childlessness—particularly for women—and the stigma associated with it. Her aim is fourfold: (a) to shine a brighter light on those who are childfree by choice—a population that, to date, has received inadequate attention in psychoanalysis; (b) to expose the stigmatization of a group that falls outside the margins of normativity in a society that is pronatalist (one that encourages increasing birthrates); (c) to propose a move away from rigid categories and, instead, consider childlessness within a queer context; and (d) to raise awareness among psychoanalysts and help bridge a gap in the literature.

Shakespearean Pedagogy and Copious Paradox: How Might we Queer Shakespeare’s Work?

Despite opposition to ‘queering the text’ by established Shakespeare critics, this essay sets out to ponder the possibility of teaching Shakespeare in a queer context. The essay begins by examining the social and sexual conditions of the early modern period, making the observation that there were a wide variety of sexualities, moral attitudes, and sexual practices at that time, and that often the early modern moral codes of conduct contradicted each other. It then traces the significance of the rhetorical device of paradox through Lyly and Castiglione, and examines the method of Elizabethan rhetoric, which involved ‘copia’ (the elaboration of one idea into a variety of ideas through language) and its associated variety of meanings. The essay then turns to the text of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, observing that its subject matter—the love of an older woman for a younger man—may have reflected the early modern heterosexual fear of women’s sexuality—and continues to baffle male critics today. Finally, turning to the poem itself—analyzing it in terms of ‘copia’ and paradox—the conclusion suggests that perhaps there was a relationship between Shakespeare’s use of these rhetorical techniques and the sexuality of his time.

Queer subjectivities within political scenes: Traumatic relations, exposed vulnerabilities

This article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.

Black Girls Queer (Re)Dress: Fashion as Literacy Performance in Pariah

Abstract As the many works on the vast scholarly landscape of fashion studies has shown, we underestimate the significance of fashion and style as a tool at our peril. Fashion has much to tell us in an analysis of and intervention into systems of power and domination historically, sociologically, economically, and rhetorically. Merging this claim with another, that the sociopolitical stakes of fashion deepen within a Black queer context, this article employs literacy theory, fashion theory, Black feminism, and Black queer theory to examine how the adornment performances of Alike Freeman, a Black queer girl who is the main character of director Dee Rees’s Pariah, disrupts rigid representations of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Such interventions, I argue, show how fashion functions as a literacy performance toward the pursuit of protection and desire. Through analysis of these literacy performances I demonstrate that the intersections of literacy and Black queer identity in the film require an understanding of literacies that are inclusive of, but not exclusive to, writing, reading, and traditional forms of literacy. Through dress, and in some instances undress, Alike refashions representations of Black girlhood and racialized masculinities that have held discursive prominence. Alike’s use of dress is situated on a genealogy of Black girls’ literacies actualized for self-definition, self-affirmation, self-love, and other pursuits and expressions of freedom.

Sticky stories: Joe Orton, queer history, queer dramaturgy

This paper investigates the resonances of Orton’s work for contemporary queer audiences. By presenting potential reasons for the rise and fall in popularity and visibility of Orton’s work for queer and gay audiences through the 1980s and 1990s, this paper looks to the queer context in which Joe Orton’s work developed in order to explore the queer social history into which it fits. This sense of queer history is linked to contemporary notions of queer theorising about temporalities and queer dramaturgy, which offers potentially novel ways of engaging with Orton’s work queerly without twisting it to fit a ‘neat’ reading, in part because such readings tend to ‘smooth out’ the more difficult elements of the work. In particular, the paper explores the theatrical form of farce, often articulated as conservative, in relation to queer positions, which are quite the opposite. In so doing, the paper, by way of queer temporalities and work on queer dramaturgies, sketches out a reading strategy that does not ignore Orton’s more difficult or stickier elements, in particular his treatment of women and race.

Just like heroin: science, pornography, and heteronormativity in the virtual public sphere

ABSTRACTThis article employs a critical queer lens to explore representations of science, medicine, and pornography in the virtual public sphere. Using peer-reviewed scientific studies from a variety of fields and reading them alongside popular online sources, the article argues that scientific research is routinely deployed in ways that reinforce heteronormative hierarchies and categories. Moreover, this misrepresentation works to erase problematic trends and issues extending far beyond the world of pornography, including labour abuses, queer invisibility, and the commodification of the female body. This study builds on a body of feminist and queer literature that has called attention to the role of science in the production of heteronormativity. This literature and the specific issue of pornography are situated within the context of queer and feminist scholarship in the public sphere. The conclusions offered by this research have implications not only for issues relating specifically to science and pornography, but also for larger questions concerning the relationship between scientific knowledge and public discourse. Through its analysis of porn science and heteronormativity in public discourse, this research calls for greater queer critical attention to heteronormative hierarchies within the virtual public sphere.

Outside the LGBTQ “Safety Zone”: Lesbian and Bisexual Women Negotiate Sexual Identity across Multiple Ecological Contexts

ABSTRACTThis mixed methods study analyzed how bisexual (n = 241) and lesbian (n = 204) women qualitatively describe the settings in which they feel most positive and negative about their sexual identities. Secondly, the authors quantitatively assessed lesbian and bisexual women on identity-related processes (e.g., outness, negative feelings about identity) and standardized measures of acceptance and engagement with lesbian and bisexual communities and people. Compared to lesbian women, bisexual women were more likely to describe feeling most negative with family members and sexual minority peers, most positive when with allies, and were less likely to describe feeling positive “everywhere.” Bisexual women were less open and had more negative feelings about their sexual identity than lesbians but were accepting of and engaged with lesbian and bisexual communities. Lesbians were only accepting of and engaged with lesbian communities. The discussion focuses on the changing role of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer contexts and the unique challenges faced by bisexual women.

Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play

How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? Why is it important to explore straight versus queer contexts of play? And what does it mean to play together with others ove ...