Critical Queer Research Articles

Gendering Girl Groups, Queering Female Femininities: SNH48 as a Chinese Queer Pop Scene

ABSTRACT Existing scholarship tends to understand East Asian girl groups’ gender presentations as objects for the male gaze. This research questions this androcentric tendency by capturing the heterogeneous gazes and female genders and sexualities enacted and negotiated in the development of Chinese idol girl groups. With SNH48 as a case study, we employ critical queer discourse analysis to explore the queer tropes, operation mechanism and self-engineering of this feminine-presenting band that has been shaped by both transnational Asian and local Chinese influences. We demonstrate that the feminine sensibilities of girl groups situated within heteronormative, consumer-driven societies can invigorate certain forms of female queerness in complex, including at times discriminatory and problematic, ways.

Queering Integration in an Explanatory Sequential Mixed Methods Study: A Case Study of Same-Sex Marriage Legislation in Taipei and Hong Kong

Queering mixed methods involves using queer theories to challenge the heteronormativity inherent in mixed methods designs. This article outlined attempts to apply queer critiques of heteronormativity and homonormativity at each integration stage of a mixed methods study, from design, methods to data analysis, and reporting. It reported an explanatory sequential mixed methods study, with 647 survey responses and 70 interviews, exploring the impacts of same-sex marriage legislation on same-sex couples in Taipei and Hong Kong. It illustrated how queer concepts of heteronormativity and homonormativity, specifically queer critiques of same-sex marriage, the privilege of monogamy, and monosexism, shaped the mixed methods research design. It discussed the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of conducting LGBQ+ inclusive mixed methods research beyond the Global North.

Emotional accountabilities: Affective autoethnography and writing queer judgments

Queer encounters with legal accountability generate a range of tensions and paradoxes. In law, accountability materialises as a core feature of legal systems that seek to hold individuals and institutions responsible for their behaviour according to a set of predetermined state criteria. Queer scholars have approached legal logics of responsibility with scepticism as these logics are indexed by heteronormative state criteria. Queer legal work holds space for queer critique without necessarily abandoning normative criteria. It navigates queer scepticism through critiques, refusals, and calls for legal accountability across individual, interpersonal, and institutional contexts. This is emotional work. In this paper, I demonstrate narratively how emotions pervade how we (as queer legal scholars) imagine, conceptualise, and approach socio-legal questions of violence, discrimination, inequality, and exclusion facing LGBTQ + people and how we (as queer people, lawyers, and activists) work with or against legal institutions to seek accountability and realise our rights. This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach to invite scholars, lawyers, activists, and judges to explore the law’s capacity to both remedy and effect harm against LGBTQ + people by taking seriously how emotions mutually co-construct the normative dimensions of LGBTQ + rights alongside the critical forms of accountability rights claims generate. I do this through a close reading of R v Green, an Australian criminal law case that deals with “defences” for homophobic violence. Emotion offers an analytic lens to expose personal (queer person), scholarly (queer academic/lawyer), and political (queer activist) entanglements with various accountabilities generated by the case. I use affective autoethnography to draw together the normative and analytic dimensions of emotions across personal, scholarly, and political registrations of accountability by discussing the process of writing a “queer judgment” of R v Green . The queer judgment, as an exercise in accountability, is an affective object of law, method of critique, and space for ethico-political engagement. This creates space to pursue legal accountability in terms of care and imagination while also questioning or broadening the terms by which such accountability is delivered in law.

Fetishism, metaphor, and queer translation

Abstract This article looks at Ta-wei Chi’s short stories “Yinwei wo zhuang” 因為我壯 (“Because I am strong,” 1995) and “Xiang zao” 香皂 (“Soap,” 1996) and their English translations by Fran Martin, “I’m Not Stupid” and “The Scent of HIV” in a 1998 issue of AntiThesis: A Transdisciplinary Postgraduate Journal by the University of Melbourne. These texts provide a unique example of Chi’s challenging of the presuppositions about what cultures hold unacceptable or unspeakable within the context of cultural prejudices or taboos in 1990s Taiwan. Through a close reading of the two short stories in both Chinese and in their English translations, this article demonstrates that the translations indicate a complex, hybrid process that engages questions of contesting heteronormative, hegemonic values of the target culture while at the same time negotiating the challenges of the source texts within the larger context of translating queer literary texts from Chinese into English. Drawing on Marc Démont’s three modes of translating queer texts, I argue that Martin’s translations index an amalgam of minoritising translation and queering translation. This article proposes that a queer critique of an existing translation helps expose the hidden (re)workings of cultural, linguistic and sexual hegemony in a queer literary text that can be potentially explored or exploited. Furthermore, by shedding light on the production of readings, this article argues that queer translation draws attention to multiple potentials to undo the binaries that have authenticated and naturalised our language, knowledge and ways of thinking about sex and sexuality.

Queering Militarism in Israeli Photography

This article, Queering Militarism in Israeli Photography, examines Adi Nes’s Soldiers series, a body of work that interrogates the intersections of queerness, militarism, and nationalism within Israeli society. By employing a distinctive “military circus” aesthetic, Nes challenges the rigid heteronormative and hyper-masculine archetypes embedded in Israeli military identity. His staged photographs depict soldiers in circus-inspired performative poses, blending military discipline with elements of the carnivalesque to subvert conventional representations of military masculinity. This approach creates spaces where queerness, vulnerability, and fluid identity defy the rigid confines of nationalist narratives. Using queer studies frameworks, performance theory, and postcolonial critique, this article analyzes Nes’s depiction of soldiers as both military subjects and circus performers, examining how these representations disrupt the “naturalness” of gender, power, and identity within the Israeli national ethos. Through a close reading of key images—such as the fire-breathing soldier, the acrobat on a tightrope, and the strongman figure—this article argues that Nes critiques homonationalism and exposes the co-optation of LGBTQ+ identities into militaristic frameworks. His images juxtapose exaggerated masculinity with homoerotic and introspective vulnerability, positioning the queer body as both a participant in and a subverter of the national narrative. Drawing on contemporary queer theory—including José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification”, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories of queer shame and performativity, and perspectives on temporality, failure, and counterpublics following Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Michael Warner, and Sara Ahmed—this article frames queerness as an active site of resistance and creative transformation within the Israeli military complex. The analysis reveals how Nes’s work disrupts Zionist masculinities and traditional militaristic structures through a hybrid aesthetic of military and circus life. By reimagining Israeli identity as an inclusive, multi-dimensional construct, Nes expands queer possibilities beyond heteronormative confines and homonationalist alignments. This merging of critical queer perspectives—from the destabilizing of discipline and shame to the public visibility of non-normative bodies—posits that queer identities can permeate and reshape state power itself, challenging not only the norms of militaristic nationalism but also the boundaries of Israeli selfhood.

Inhabiting Everyday Utopias: Trespassing Gender and Species Binaries at the Time of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT Our goal, in this article, is to connect feminist and queer critiques of the Anthropocene to practices of queer and transfeminist activism that have had a transformative impact on Italian social and material landscapes. In doing so, our work retraces the ground-breaking role that initiatives such as the Collettivo Anguane, the Collettivo Intersexioni, and the animal sanctuary Ippoasi, have played since the mid-2000s in opening spaces of commonality across genders and species. These spaces of co-habitation have shaped tangible forms of resistance ‘outside’ the Anthropocene and its divisive mindset by ushering in ‘everyday utopias’ – places in which new mental cartographies and sustainable practices intertwine. This article, co-authored by an academic and an activist, also inhabits a collaborative, and perhaps utopian, space that muddles the conventions of scholarship and lived experiences.

Trans rights, queer times: in search of a new hope

ABSTRACT Using a socio-legal lens, this paper will offer a feminist and queer critique of the development of LBGTQ+ rights discourse in Scotland in the last decade. It offers a reading of recent cases specifically on trans rights, in the areas of gender recognition, and equality-based rights under the Equality Act 2010. I will argue that Scottish government legal and policy interventions have leaned into rights-based identity politics through their attempts at progressive reforms on trans inclusion and gender recognition. Such attempts have been legally challenged by those opposed to reform, and have been adjudicated by courts taking a ‘balancing approach’ to apparently competing rights. While to some degree useful for advancing trans recognition and equality, the competing rights framework has resulted in trans justice claims being narrowed, defeated and/or dismissed. This reliance on rights, with variable results, suggests that the possibility of feminist queer hope for the progressive potential of law seems limited by the scope for its hostile appropriation and transformation. Analysing recent litigation in the UK, with particular focus on Scotland as a case study, this paper explores what hopes for future Scottish queer politics might look like in the shadow of legal rights.

Toward a Theology of Trans Opacity: Trans Studies’ Critique of Queer Theory in Conversation with Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Revelation

While it is generally known that the disciplinary origins of feminist and queer religious studies are enmeshed with the production of anti-trans feminisms, theological legacies of this historical entanglement remain largely unaddressed. Although later feminist and queer theologies might not explicitly take up these anti-trans positions, trans identity is still often instrumentalized in its incorporation into queer and feminist theological discourse for rhetorical and methodological gain without attention to the subjectivity and self-understanding of trans people themselves. This article argues that the theology of Karl Barth, when read with his feminist and queer critics, provides resources for critiquing this kind of trans instrumentalization in his doctrine of revelation and critique of natural theology. Moving beyond either reactionary dismissal or instrumentalized incorporation, this article instead argues for a right to opacity for trans people in Christian theology and practice resourced from Barth’s theology.

“I Don’t Expect the University to Support Queers”: Identity Management and Ambivalence toward Institutional Support for Queer University Students in China

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 17 participants, this study explores the experiences of Chinese queer university students in managing their queer identity on campus. A range of strategies is outlined, including passing, covering, being implicitly out, and being explicitly out. This study also presents participants’ expectations regarding institutional support, as well as their ambivalence toward it. While participants expressed various expectations of university support, they simultaneously considered institutional support difficult or impossible due to the campus climate and broader political context. Informed by queer theory and the concept of heteronormativity, this paper engages in a queer critique of Chinese higher education, examining the manifestations of heteronormativity at both institutional and interpersonal levels. Situated within the context of Xi Jinping’s presidency, which has reinforced political control over higher education in China, this study examines the impact of intensified authoritarianism on the campus experiences of queer university students. In this challenging environment, the study highlights a unique facet of contemporary China, providing empirical insights into the power dynamics among queer individuals, educational institutions, and the party-state.

Ghosts in the machine: Black feminist and queer critiques of reproductive justice in Finland

We discuss reproductive justice in the context of Finland, a Nordic welfare state often considered as having achieved exceptionally high ethical standards in reproductive health and overall justice. Every now and then, however, this reproduction is interrupted by ghosts in the machine: the problems, past and present, of marginalised, racialised, and/or otherwise non-normative people whose presences provoke specific Finnish hauntings, seething presences of reproductive injustice that suggest something is to be done. Instead of offering data analysis, this article aims to envision transformative reproductive justice futures through processual, collaborative theory development. This study uses an intersectional lens to understand how interlocking systems of oppression shape our lived experiences through an interdisciplinary, ethical analysis that suggests that what is required to resolve such hauntings is moral vigilance and care for a consistent reproductive justice orientation in global solidarity. Specifically in Finland, it requires the willingness to disavow the imperative to protect Finnish whiteness and active and meaningful solidarity across differences. Building on Black feminist and queer thought, we urge queer white people who may be tempted to become enfolded by homonationalism to take a more encompassing view of reproductive justice for a more sustainable welfare state ethic.

Questioning Sexual Diversity in Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name and Brent Hartinger’s Geography Club

This paper discusses sexual diversity exposed in Andre Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name and Brent Hartinger’s Geography Club. Both novels tell stories about sexual orientation and its impact on the daily lives of the main characters, who are high school students. In Call Me by Your Name, Aciman depicted Elio as a teenager who admires people of the same sex, and in Geography Club, Russell Middle Brook disguises his sexual orientation because he is gay. Using Sociology of Literature as an approach, more specifically queer theory as a means of carrying out queer criticism, this research aims to discuss sexual diversity exposed in these two fictions. It also talks about the heteronormative pressures experienced by the two figures above during their high school years as students who had different sexual orientations. The research results show that although schools and society always emphasize diversity, sexual diversity is not yet accepted. The heteronormative pressure that the experience of Elio and Russel comes from their close environments, such as parents, friends, and school. Elio and Russel need to keep their true sexual identities because showing sexual diversity for high school students is taboo. They also have to keep their sexual orientation to safeguard their lives from rejection and bullying. Selecting the two novels as the data sources helps to understand each text individually and acknowledge how different authors approach similar themes.

To assault the hidden abode of reproduction

The following article is intended to offer a historical account of the institution of the family in order to situate the abolitionist proposals and the Black feminist and queer critiques emerging during the second half of the twentieth century. The first section presents value-form readings of social reproduction, specially focusing on the 2013 article written by Maya González and Jeanne Neton, “The Logic of Gender”, to conceptualize the family as a “unit of privatised care”. Throughout the second section, the text lays out a periodisation of the emergence and historical changes that the family undergoes through the reconfiguring of social reproduction in a broader sense to locate the political approaches of the classical workers’ movement and its constitutive exclusions. Finally, the text presents two situated critiques of the family elaborated from its margins.

“Unruly Vernacular Riverfront”: Eileen Myles's Queer Persistence in the Changing Climate of New York

Abstract This essay reads the poet Eileen Myles's recent turn to climate activism as an extension of their queer critique of predatory urban change on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they have lived since the 1970s. Myles's climate activism opposes the demolition of Manhattan's East River Park to facilitate one of New York City's first large-scale climate resiliency projects. Myles argues that residents’ desires should shape climate resiliency planning priorities. I read Myles's earlier poems and essays to describe how the queer persistence and the attention to the “now” of urban change that they develop in response to New York's housing crisis in the 1980s during the early era of AIDS inform their climate activism. I argue that the environmental humanities tools needed to represent climate change on an urbanizing planet are inextricable from a queer theory approach to sustaining desire and loss amid precarity, as becomes apparent through Myles's writing.

Conceptualising queer activist critiques of Pride in the Two-Thirds World: Queer activism and alternative Pride organising in South Africa, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Shanghai

This article explores queer critiques of LGBT Pride in the ‘Two-Thirds World’, drawing from ethnographic data, focussing on under-researched contexts and analysing common and divergent themes in queer critiques of Pride globally. Criticisms of corporate involvement and capitalist appropriation of Pride are replicated in the case studies; there is also a complex politics of necessity, precarity, and pragmatism. ‘Mainstream’ Prides reflect and can exacerbate racial and class divisions and be a well-rewarded career path for its organisers. The article analyses the radical politics of ‘alternative’ queer Prides and argues for the importance of continually tracing the ideological impacts of Pride, engaging with the dynamics of global capitalism, and highlighting the struggles of queer grassroots activists.

Queering children’s rights: a critical queer analysis of the UNCRC

ABSTRACT While there is increasing attention for LGBTQIA+ concerns within human rights, the legal instruments and academic discussions regarding children’s rights remain largely silent on issues involving sexuality and gender. Due to pervasive protectionist narratives and heteronormative assumptions governing modern childhood, children’s rights implicitly limit the expression of (queer) children and lack the tools and guidance to navigate complex queer disputes. In this context, this paper explores the world’s leading document on children’s rights – the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – from a queer theoretical perspective, uncovering how children’s rights are interwoven with social constructs surrounding gender and sexuality. In doing so, this paper first explores the relevance of queering the UNCRC and sets out a queer theoretical framework within the human rights context. Through this lens, finally, the paper discusses three overarching areas of queer critique within the UNCRC: 1) the construction of childhood, 2) child sexuality and gender and 3) the normalising impacts of restrictions on child agency on queer children. It concludes that the UNCRC has great potential to catalyse the implementation of LGBTQIA-focused protections, but more work is needed to clarify and strengthen the legal position of the queer child within its ambit.

Queer Experience in Turkey

This study explores the possibility of critical agency of queer subjects in Turkey in terms of challenging and subverting normative structural constraints. These constraints are attested through expansive use of the concept of habitus including class, gender, family, ethnicity and religion. Our field study in which in-depth interviews have been conducted detected two types of habitus in the life experiences of queer subjects: critical and conservative. While the former enables critical agency, the latter undermines this possibility. On this ground, it is argued that exhibiting critical habitus appears to be the precondition of performing critical agency. We conclude that having multiple minority identities, education, and involvement in organizations develop a critical habitus enhancing critical queer agency.

Subjects without history? Sexual citizenship, queer temporality, and postcoloniality in Mozambique

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationships among queer histories, minority rights, temporal regimes and the promise of sexual citizenship in contemporary Mozambique. It critiques the dominant and conservative view that LGBTIQ+ Africans are “subjects without history,” or “out of time,” to use Rahul Rao’s influential phrasing. Based on archival and oral history research, the article argues that LGBTIQ+ Africans do not necessarily fit in the temporality of the nation but rather live in constant friction and negotiation with it, sometimes insisting on their inclusion in the official history, sometimes creating their own story and imaginations of the past. By comparatively analysing two historical moments – the revolutionary post-independence period, from the mid- to late 1970s, and the “decriminalisation” of homosexuality, in 2015 – the article advances a queer critique of national historiography, gesturing to the possibility of (and perhaps the need for) a plural queer memory for Mozambique.

Anniversary memories, a lost critic, and queer future multitudes of critical/cultural studies

ABSTRACT This essay remembers Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies’ (CC/CS’s) queer engagement with the discipline. Its anniversary also conjures memories of queer critical/cultural scholar Daniel Brouwer, tragically lost in 2021. These intersecting memories amplify the archive of LGBTQ critical/cultural studies as resource for queer multitudes in the field to come, where traces of past and future imaginings might mobilize across and between generations of queer critics.

Dismantling structural and individual cisgenderism in Illinois libraries: a descriptive research study on cisnormativity, transprejudice and biases against transgender and nonbinary populations

PurposeRecent library and information science literature suggests transgender and nonbinary populations are not treated, served and represented on an equal or equitable basis as cisgender populations are in libraries. This article aims to assess the prevalence of bias and inclusion efforts in Illinois libraries.Design/methodology/approachThis quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive study utilizes a critical queer theory lens and includes a Likert scale survey with a demographic question on gender identity to measure four constructs and determine if there is a relationship between gender identity and bias, inclusion efforts, and knowledge of transgender and nonbinary user needs.FindingsResults suggest respondents' biases reinforce structural cisgenderism in Illinois libraries and may account for the unequal conditions trans and nonbinary populations experience. Additionally, there is a correlation between cisgender-identifying Illinois LIS professionals and biased attitudes and behaviors, use of inclusive practices, and knowledge of transgender and nonbinary user needs.Originality/valueThis study contributes quantitative data, analysis and practical implications to a body of predominantly qualitative library literature on transgender and gender diverse experiences in libraries.

Marry or not for democracy and love: Dialogic framing in the Taiwan marriage equality movement and countermovement

Dialogic framing means that the frames are constructed through interaction among multiple parties in a discursive system with socio-cultural specificities. The meaning of a frame is articulated through such dialogic interaction and under constant contestation. We used the marriage equality movement in Taiwan as a case study and demonstrated how dialogic framing could advance the understanding of framing in the digital mobilization of collective actions. Analyzing Facebook posts by opposing advocacy groups, we identified “collective identity” and “rights” as two dominant frames. Marriage equality activists framed legalizing same-sex marriage as a testament to the democratic progress of Taiwan and a validation of gay and lesbian people’s right of love. The countermovement challenged this framing by arguing that equalizing gay love to heterosexual marital love violated the civil rights of the silent majority. The queer critique of marriage as state-sanctioned regulation of sexual citizenship and the very state power being critiqued are also constitutive of the dialogic framing of collective actions for or against same-sex marriage on social media.