Queer Culture Research Articles

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Ecstatic Abundance: Queer Temporalities in LGBTQ Studies and Music Education

Abstract Attempts to normalize (some) variant sexualities assume that normativity leads at least to tolerance. Because it occurs in relationship to preestablished norms, normativity is achieved through assimilation. Judith Butler’s (1993) theory of performativity demonstrates this in terms of gender/sexuality by which the gendered/sexualized subject is produced as an effect of repetitions of coercive (heterosexual) norms that precede the subject. Operating within a temporal logic of norms first, the subject second, performativity cites the past, projecting heterosexual subjects into the future, leaving queer subjects nowhere, unless we resignify those norms for an assumed transgressive future. Queer subjects must go along to get along: to be normal, but “the trouble with normal” is that it obviates queer culture (Warner, 1999), bequeathing to queer subjects no past. In response to the double bind of no future and no past, I posit queer temporalities of LGBTQ studies and music education as saturated abundant presents in terms of Deleuzian becoming in the queer time of the infinitive: to become. Eliding the past and future, the infinitive is just before and just after. I argue LGBTQ studies, expressing a queer ethic of kinship, activates Sara Ahmed’s (2006) “refusal to inherit” the norms of lack, and asserts ecstatic abundance as an exuberant queer erotic. Using Philip Auslander’s (2004) performer-centered approach, I analyze Cris Williamson’s (1975) song, “Shooting Star” as ecstatic abundance, contingently constituting LGBTQ studies as unquenchable, inexhaustible, unruly.

Editorial

Editorial Kristin Stapleton The articles in this special issue work toward what guest editor Jing Tsu calls an “interconnected global history” of Chinese language politics. Professor Tsu’s introduction offers an overview of the subject and points out emerging perspectives and analytical approaches. The creation of a national language was seen by many political activists as a key step toward unifying the Chinese nation. Jin Liu’s article analyzes the place of local languages—or fangyan—in the thinking of twentieth-century language reformers. Mårten Söderblom Saarela explores the overlooked history of alphabetic schemes for Chinese that employed Chinese characters or Manchu script rather than Western letters. Flora Shao uses the genre of folk song to examine the tense intersection of dialect studies and linguistic nationalism in the 1920s. Gina Tam, who organized the 2015 Association for Asian Studies panel at which most of these essays were originally presented, concludes the special issue with a study of dialect history after 1949, analyzing how the relationship between a new standard spoken language (Putonghua) and dialects was understood by aspiring scientific Marxist linguists. Associate editor Zhao Ma worked with Professor Tsu to oversee the editorial process for this special issue. The issue also presents three book reviews: Yun Xia reviews Lisa Tran’s study of marriage and monogamy in twentieth-century China, Alvin K. Wong reviews Petrus Liu’s work on queer cultures in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic of China, and Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley reviews David Pietz’s history of the Yellow River. [End Page 209] Copyright © 2016 Twentieth-Century China

Experience of Exclusion: Tamil Cinema and Male to Female Transgender Community

The Male to Female (MtF) Transgender community emerges as the most visible queer culture in India. Cinema provides viewers the ideologies and beliefs sensationally through celebrities and distorts reality. The primary objective of this study is to describe the role of Tamil Cinema on Social exclusion of MtF Transgender community of Tamil Nadu. The study based on the face-to-face survey analysis of 416 MtF Transgender individuals of Tamil Nadu. The study shows that Transgender people are significantly excluded from family and forced to drop out from school and largely involve in sex work and begging for living because of their transgender identity. The perception of the Transgender community clearly describes that Tamil Cinema negatively propagates and maintains the dominant ideology about Transgender people in society. The control of communication mutes the Transgender community and the unequal power relationship drives them to the multidimensional social exclusion in Tamil Nadu.

Queer theory, neoliberal homonormativity and social utility for queer writing on youth (suicide)

Contemporary sexual citizenship is governed by neoliberal concepts of selfhood that both encourage subjects to manage their own risk and that establishes risks by creating hierarchies of affluence, self-commodity and belonging. These risks relate to the ways in which LGBT self-harm and sexuality-related suicide are conditioned and normalised, with continuing high rates of suicidality. While neo-liberal formations of sexual selfhood have created the conditions for writing and making sense of fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for the legalised expression and representation of non-heterosexuality, they continue and exacerbate risks that can lead to the cultural formations associated with youth suicide. The fact that non-heterosexual youth have traditionally made use of the ‘logics’ of non-normative sexuality given in queer writing calls for an ethical approach to the ways in which narratives of non-heteronormative sexuality are written. This article presents a framing account of how contemporary neoliberal forms of ‘homonormative’ queer cultures serve as a backdrop and context for queer creative representations that may be utilised as forms of support, frameworks for identity norms or projections of queer lives that can, arguably, exacerbate risks of suicide. It examines some of the ways in which we can come at the conditions that make queer youth suicide possible and thinkable from a queer culturalist angle, allowing us to consider how suicide risks are creatively represented, produced, or contributed to.

A Praxis of Contextualized Controversy

Research Article| October 01 2015 A Praxis of Contextualized Controversy Hugh Ryan Hugh Ryan Hugh Ryan is a writer whose work focuses on queer culture, history, and writing itself. He is also the founding director of the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, an organization that uses queer art to explore and share queer history. His writing can be found in Vice, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and other venues. He also is delighted to sit on the board of advisors for QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Twitter: @Hugh_Ryan. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (2015) 2 (3): 94–99. https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.2.3.0094 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Hugh Ryan; A Praxis of Contextualized Controversy. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1 October 2015; 2 (3): 94–99. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/qed.2.3.0094 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressQED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 Michigan State University2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The ethics of shared embodiment in queer, feminist and lesbian pornography

This article discusses contemporary queer, feminist and lesbian porn film culture in Europe. I argue that this film culture invites a particular kind of embodiment, enabled by new media technologies, but also anchored in queer and feminist political and aesthetic legacies. Taking the Swedish short film collection Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn (2009. Stockholm: Njutafilms), in which I myself participated as one of the filmmakers, as my main example and borrowing from film scholar Laura U. Marks, I propose that queer, feminist and lesbian porn calls forth an ‘ethics of shared embodiment’. This is an ethics capable of accommodating heterogeneity and disagreements that lie at the heart of the film culture. This ethics is not about leaving conflicts behind or reaching a fixed goal, such as a formula for what queer, feminist and lesbian porn is or should be. Borrowing from José Esteban Muñoz, I instead claim that this ethics is about reaching out for and casting pictures of a goal. It is about trying out various paths while simultaneously being able to harbour difficulties and failures along the way.

Queer Male (Post)Soviet Narratives in Interviews by Rita Ruduša and Fiktion by Klāvs Smilgzieds

One culture within a culture is the culture of LGBT people in Latvia or, to use a contemporary designation, queer culture. In Latvia, queer culture is still practically invisible. In this paper I will analyse two types of queer narratives: documentary life stories collected by Rita Ruduša in her book Forced Underground (2012) and the manuscript of a collection of 12 short stories by Klāvs Smilgzieds (2014), originally published serially during the 1990s in an under ground Latvian gay magazine. Both types of texts employ different emphasis talking about queers in Soviet and post-Soviet life. Ruduša’s interviews reflect on the situation of being in the closet and on fear and loneliness, while Smilgzieds’ stories celebrate the male body, casual sex, and unfulfilled loves. While Ruduša’s interlocutors (mostly gay men, more or less closeted) construct their narratives to seem acceptable to straight women, Smilgzieds, a closeted bisexual himself (or, as he calls himself in Latvian, divdabis), uses various modes of narrative (parable, miniature, pornographic prose) to express both his experience and imagination. Both Ruduša and Smilgzieds reveal the slow changes in consciousness taking place in Latvia in its transition from a Soviet to a post- Soviet society that result in actions such as the decriminalization of male homosexuality, the existence of LGBT organizations and clubs, the use of queer issues as topics for tabloids and TV shows etc. The habitus of gay people is changing very slowly as a consequence. In this paper the construction of queer Latvian narratives is analysed in comparison to other queer narratives.

Carnal fantasizing: embodied spectatorship of queer, feminist and lesbian pornography

A reinvigorated transnational queer, feminist and lesbian porn film culture has emerged during the last decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article discusses spectatorship in this film culture in the contexts of Pornfilmfestival Berlin, the Club LASH in Stockholm and the production of the feminist porn film collection Dirty Diaries (Engberg, Sweden, 2009). Analyzing research subjects’ accounts of film experiences in terms of embodied spectatorship (Sobchack), habituation (Williams) and fantasy (de Lauretis), I propose an understanding of porn spectatorship as an embodied and psychic engagement shaped, but importantly also continuously reshaped, by personal histories and social contexts. I argue that viewer engagement in porn is not limited to identification with certain characters or roles and that desire and fantasy are not coherent or always consistent with political views or identities. Nevertheless, social identities and/or personal experiences and practices may have impacts on different subjects' engagements in porn scenarios.

Matt Cook and Jennifer V. Evans, editors. Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945

Matt Cook and Jennifer V. Evans, editors. Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945

Orgasmology / Love and money: queers, class, and cultural production / Queer youth suicide, culture and identity: unliveable lives?

It is by now a critical commonplace that sexuality is central to the production of modern subjectivity. But as Annamarie Jagose reminds us in Orgasmology, sexuality has also functioned throughout t...

Queer cities, queer cultures: Europe since 1945

Introduction Matt Cook (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) & Jennifer Evans (Carleton University, Canada) Pasts 1. The Queer Margins of Spanish Cities, 1939-2010 Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds, UK), Rosa Maria Medina Domenech (University of Granada, Spain) & Isabel Velez (independent scholar) 2. Capital Stories: Local Lives in Queer London Matt Cook 3. The Queer Road to Frisind: Copenhagen 1945-2012 Peter Edelberg (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) 4. Harmless Kisses and Infinite Loops: Making Space for Queer Place in 21st Century Berlin Jennifer Evans 5. From Stalinist Pariahs to Subjects of 'Managed Democracy': Queers in Moscow 1945 to the Present Dan Healey (University of Oxford, UK) 6. Queer Amsterdam 1945-2010 Gert Hekma (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) 7. Ljubljana: The Tales from the Queer Margins of the City Roman Kuhar (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) 8. Mapping/ Unmapping: The Making of Queer Athens Dimitris Papanikolaou (Oxford University, UK) 9. Istanbul: Queer Desires between Muslim Tradition and Global Pop Ralph Poole (Salzburg University, Austria) 10. Queering Budapest Judit Takacs (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) 11. Two Cities of Helsinki? One Liberally Gay and One Practically Queer? Antu Sorainen (Academy of Finland) 12. Paris: 'Resting on its Laurels'? Florence Tamagne (University of Lille, France) Closing Reflections 13. 'Gays Who Cannot Properly be Gay'. Queer Muslims in the Neoliberal European City Fatima El-Tayeb (University of California, San Diego) 14. Seeing Like a Queer City Tom Boellstorff (University of California, Irvine)

The New Woman: Sexology, Literary Modernism, and the Trans Feminine Remainder

This article begins by tracing the figure of gender inversion from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's mid-nineteenth-century celebration of the “woman's soul confined in a man's body” to Edward Carpenter's early twentieth-century disavowal of the effeminate “of the extreme type,” whose gender nonconformity confirms the normativity of the mass of “normal” masculine homosexuals. Carpenter's disavowal voices both an orientalist distaste for the “mincing effeminacy” of British colonial subjects and an affirmation of the “somewhat masculine” women who are pursuing their rights in “civilized nations.” This article argues that this freighted figure of inversion obscures the theories of embodiment found in sexological case studies themselves, which ground the experience of sex in sociality and sensation. The sexological invert provides the foundation for a trans feminine stock character that modernist novels install to represent the cultural redefinition of “woman” and “man” in the early twentieth century. Aldous Huxley's Farcical History of Richard Greenow is an orienting example of this tendency. Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, in contrast, reflects a modernist current grounded in queer and trans street culture. The novel's heroine, the queen Divine, recalls the theories of embodiment outlined in the case study narratives. Ultimately, the “New Woman” demonstrates that sexology provides the narrative template for the twentieth-century medical diagnostic for transsexuality. From the early twentieth century, novels disseminate this abstract and singular definition of transsexuality and also recover the various and complex narratives of sexed embodiment first found in the case studies.

‘Bush camp’? The Topp Twins and Antipodean camp

Abstract This article extends Nick Perry’s concept of Antipodean camp – that there is a camp style common to settler popular cultures of Australia and New Zealand – by also considering possible differences between the two cultures and by re-emphasizing camp’s relation to gay and queer cultures. The Topp Twins, lesbian, anarchist, variety entertainers, are discussed as an act that both extend and challenge Perry’s ideas and the traditional association of camp and gay male culture. The article finishes by considering the degree to which they articulate a particularly New Zealand style, which I refer to as ‘bush camp’.

Lavender Mandarin in the sites of desire: Situating linguistic performances among Taiwanese gay men

This paper explores how those with same-sex desire in Taiwan reconfigure Mandarin linguistic practices as western constructions of gay culture are now circulating globally. Ethnographic methods are employed to examine the linguistic stylization that enables Taiwanese gay men use to formulate identities. The nascent emergence of identity markers is first introduced. This study shifts its focus to the context in the study of gay language to avoid circularity. Three primary linguistic stylizations widely practiced among gay cliques are retrieved as (1) kinship soap opera; (2) geisha memoir; (3) celebrity stardom to illuminate the relationship between language and subjectivity. This study illustrates how these vernacular utterances and linguistic stylizations producing collective resources of resistance, accommodation and pleasure are discursively constructed and represented in a localized site in the intersection of an increasingly globalized queer culture.

LGBTQ Oppression and Activism in Russia: An Interview with Igor Iasine

Two decades ago (ten years earlier than the Lawrence v. Texas decision in the United States) consensual sex between men was decriminalized in Russia. Muzhelozhstvo (man lying with man) had been a criminal act since 1933, when Stalin’s regime reversed the Bolsheviks’ decriminalization of homosexuality after 1917. According to Laurie Essig, the legal prohibition of same-sex eroticism in Soviet Russia pertained to men, whereas women’s same-sex desires were often pathologized and subject to forced psychological or medical intervention. Following the collapse of the USSR, Russian queers enjoyed a period of relatively greater freedom from persecution, and a number of LGBT organizations, bars, and queer public spaces, media, and events appeared. At the same time, the fixity of hetero/homo identity familiar to so many in the West did not catch on in a sexual culture both more fluid and less prone to examination and disclosure. Western-style queer politics were greeted by some as liberatory, by others as awkwardly foreign. Queerness had for decades been cast as a Western degeneracy. Actual same-sex lives and desires resisted examination, publicity, and labeling where outing would endanger jobs and safety even after decriminalization. Essig and others have noted the tensions of foreign and homegrown movement paradigms, fixed and fluid sexual identities, and privacy and disclosure about sexuality that have characterized the development of queer culture in Russia since the 1990s. In the fall of 2001, I gave a presentation at a gender and communication conference in Moscow on gay and lesbian language use in Russian. I was initially

Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies

Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Kathryn Kein 671 Kathryn Kein Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), the Humor Studies Caucus held a panel titled “Female Comedians and the Critical Power of Laughter.” After listening to presentations on Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, and Black women comedians’ 1960s comedy albums, one audience member asked the panel if the classic theories of humor—Freud’s theory of the joke, Bergson’s thoughts on laughter (all conceived of in relation to the work of men)—applied when analyzing female comedic performers. One panelist immediately responded that she found none of those theories useful to her work on female comedians , and that instead she used queer theory to aid her analysis. This exchange at ASA points to many of the questions that scholars of humor and feminism are currently facing as they work to address a dearth of scholarship dealing with women, feminism, and comedy. The nods in agreement around the room spoke to the notion that scholarship on the topic of women in comedy is not merely filling in gaps, but breaking new ground. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have been relatively silent on topics involving women and/in comedy.1 The meager 1. See Susanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004); June Sochen, ed., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); John Limon, “Skirting, Kidding: Ellen Degeneres and Paula Poundstone,” in 672 Kathryn Kein scholarly space devoted to feminism and humor is likely shaped by the fraught relationship women and feminism have had with humor in our cultural imagination. Women have long battled a perception that they, as a sex, are biologically not funny. Men have always vastly outnumbered women on stand-up stages and in comedy writers’ rooms. Former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts recalled that star John Belushi, being of the “chicks-aren’t-funny” school, often requested that the women writers be fired.2 In her bestselling Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls that the gender imbalance of the sketch comedy teams at Chicago’s Second City were due to the fact that directors believed “the audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.”3 In his 2007 piece in Vanity Fair brashly titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens went so far as to call women and humor “antithetical.”4 In particular, feminist women have been painted as humorless and unable to take a joke. In The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed, defining her figure of the feminist killjoy, observes that “feminists are typically represented as grumpy his Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 2. For further accounts of women comedy writers’ and performers’ experiences, see Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). 3. Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011), 87. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair 557 (2007): 54 Books Discussed in This Essay All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. By Rebecca Krefting. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. By Linda Mizejewski. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. By Jennifer Reed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kathryn Kein 673 and humorless.”5 In a variation of the age-old joke, when a jokester asks, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” the respondent doesn’t say “How many?” but instead deadpans, “That’s not funny.” In different ways, the three books reviewed in this essay take up the conversation at ASA and tackle these same questions: How do we analyze humor produced by (and for?) women when our understanding of humor is decidedly male? What omissions have the gendered assumptions about humor caused in scholarship on feminism? How does humor work to address these assumptions? And how does the backdrop of these assumptions influence the comedy...

A Queer Thing

The article focuses on the 2010 art exhibition Swallow My Pride (SMP), a visceral response to the commercialization of gay culture in Cape Town and a critique of notions of queerness and its visibility in the public sphere. SMP brought local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex artists together to reflect upon queerness through methodology and an appeal to the personal. In the exhibit, queerness functioned as a strategy to articulate difference, challenge heteronormativity, and problematize gender identifications. The artworks brought a fresh focus to the courage, suffering, humor, intelligence, and enormous variety of local queer culture. The article investigates how the exhibition, as a queer archive, embraced a critical history of sexuality and gender in the present moment, as well as acknowledging absent voices and narratives, which have been previously silenced and unnamed.

Archiving Peripheral Taiwan

This article extends debates on the place of Taiwan on our scholarly canvas by highlighting the region's unique status at the intersections of various margins—geopolitical, sociocultural, and historiographical. Using press reports of renyao (“human prodigy,” a Chinese category of transgenderism) in the post–World War II period as the foci of analysis, this article supersedes existing readings that tend to emphasize the lifting of martial law in 1987 as the turning point that enabled the flourishing of queer cultures and politics in late-capitalist Taiwan. The media attention showered on Zeng Qiuhuang, arguably the most famous renyao in the 1950s, reveals and captures a reciprocal chimera effect whereby the margins of sexuality and the periphery of “China” and “Chineseness” converge into the mimetic recalcitrant traces of the past. The prodigy of the human—renyao—configures the basis of archival imagination on which the prodigy of historical na(rra)tion—Taiwan—emerges with distinctive tempos and visibility from the seemingly authentic repertoire of empirical retrieval, recovery, and access.

I Do?!: A Panel Discussion on Queer Cultural Activism

I Do?!: A Panel Discussion on Queer Cultural Activism