Queer Figure Research Articles

Queer Terrorists, Terrorist Queers: The Sexual Politics of Turkey’s War on Terror

How do the so-called wars on terror impact queer lives and politics? This article addresses this question by exploring the racialized gender and sexual politics of Turkey’s own brand of war on terror and its ramifications for LGBTQI+ lives. Building on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war and public culture analysis, I reveal how the political construction of Kurdish militants as queer figures goes hand in hand with state terrorization of LGBTQI+ people in contemporary Turkey. I anchor my analysis in a novel counterinsurgency trope—“terrorists in skirts”—a trope popularized by the state-controlled media for psychological warfare purposes. I argue that the voyeuristic media fascination with cross-dressing militants is both symptomatic and constructive of an Islamist-nationalist authoritarian regime where terrorism and gender and sexual nonnormativity are violently conflated in state discourse and practice.

Ángeles Vicente’s 1911 sapphic scandals: queer intermedia and transatlantic gender history

ABSTRACT Ángeles Vicente (1878–1918) was a Spanish-born author who lived most of her life in Argentina. Starting in 1907, she was a prolific author and released several important texts during the Spanish Silver Age (1898–1936). In 1911, she was involved in several scandals, related to gender and sexuality, which received extensive coverage at the time of their occurrence. This paper explores Vicente’s scandals in 1911, drawing on the methodology of queer intermedia, to explore networks of queer world-building at the dawn of identarian politics related to sexual orientation and gender expression. Using the past as a resource to explore potential futures, we argue that understanding the lives and work from queer figures of past eras, particularly in different cultural and social locations, is vital to creating a robust knowledge of the universe of possibilities that accompany gender and sexual non-normativity.

Queering the Postcolonial Auto/biography: Doubleness and Unspeakability in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

Examining representations of queer subjectivities as minor subjectivities, this essay compares J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother to investigate the emergence of queer postcolonial auto/biography in the late 1990s. The two texts use a similar hybridized form (a blurring of autobiography and third-person biography) to represent marginalized queer subjectivities in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa and Antigua, respectively. In doing so, they redefine the notion of the minor as an anti-colonial poetics and a non-normative lived experience. Both narratives, published in the same year (1997) and composed in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and after the end of Apartheid, engage with related themes of doubleness, secrecy, and unspeakability to reveal the double consciousness of queer figures silenced and rendered minor as a result of internalized shame through the taboo on non-heteronormative desires. This essay analyses the intersections between postcolonial and queer dimensions of minor subjectivities in order to understand how the minor position of the queer subject in postcolonial societies is pluralized through strikingly similar literary strategies. Coetzee and Kincaid offer new possibilities for world literature through the publication of queer postcolonial auto/biographies which celebrate, facilitate, and complicate the plurality of minor identities and narrative viewpoints – especially the minor subjectivities and poetics surrounding queer postcolonial lives.

Paths of Honey: Jonathan Son of Saul in Hebrew Women’s Queer Poetics

ABSTRACT: This article charts a poetic conversation between three Hebrew women poets, Rachel Bluwstein, Yona Wallach and Sivan Beskin, surrounding the biblical figure of Jonathan, son of Saul. It traces the way in which the women poets reclaim and revise the figure of Jonathan against the grain of an androcentric intertextual tradition, in which the male-bond appears as a metonym of male superiority. The three poets’ shared fascination with Jonathan transposes the biblical intertext from the realm of male-exclusivity into a much more open field of meaning featuring gender-fluidity, pleasure, trauma, and queer temporality. The article reads the poetic conversation surrounding the queer figure of Jonathan as a cross-generational collaborative endeavor of queer appropriation and reconstruction. Sustaining this collaboration is an intertextual network that spans beyond the three poets and the biblical text, encompassing a wide range of multilingual classic and modern cultural intertexts, through which various queer cultural contents interact with each other ultimately confounding national and heteronormative time and space.

A “Queer” Mother of Nations: Reproductive Futurism and the Maccabean Mother of Seven

Abstract This article explores the presentation of the Mother of Seven Sons in 2 and 4 Maccabees and her reception in some rabbinic literature. It uses as a framework queer theory, particularly Lee Edelman’s concept of reproductive futurism. Ultimately, it argues that the texts’ simultaneous emphasis on the Mother’s maternal body and her masculine behaviors constructs her as a queer figure. This queerness enables her to effectively resist the physical and cultural violence of the Roman imperial project.

Loving in Queer Time: Rahel Varnhagen's Life and Letters

Abstract: In this essay I argue that the salonnière Rahel Levin Varnhagen's extended singlehood and Jewishness made her a queer figure in early nineteenth century Berlin. While her non-normativity was initially compelling to Berlin's social elite, the Napoleonic Wars engendered antisemitic, patriotic impulses among her friends that left Varnhagen isolated from her social circle. However, out of this alienation came the opportunity to forge intimate friendships with other women who were also rejected or stigmatized by Berlin's elite. Varnhagen's correspondence with Rebecca Friedländer and Pauline Wiesel reveals how loneliness opened a space for queer expression that destabilized contemporary notions of sexual normativity. In analyzing Rahel as a queer figure and exploring the tensions that arose from this status, I examine the intersectional boundaries of belonging that emerged within early-nineteenth-century Prussia's shifting sociopolitical landscape.

Monsters with family and tradition: queering family in Central Russia’s Vampires

ABSTRACT This article analyses the web series Central Russia’s Vampires (streaming platform Start, since 2021) as a site of articulating queerness on screen in contemporary Russia. I zoom in on the layers of family and tradition that lie at the core of the show and argue that by exploring them through the trope of the vampire – an immortal, subversive, queer figure – the show offers a non-normative spin on the patriarchal treatment of these topics in contemporary Russian hegemonic discourse. I demonstrate that the queering of family and tradition in the show happens on three levels. First, the series delivers a complex cartography of intertextual and multimedia references and produces a queer family with a cultural tradition of media presence that extends far beyond the show. Second, the series queers the idea of ‘traditional families’ that animates current Russian hegemonic discourse by portraying a family of Others – the vampires – who fit into majority scripts and are literally part of Russia’s tradition due to their centuries-old age. Finally, Central Russia’s Vampires queers the family and tradition on the level of genre, by producing a special New Year episode that normalises families of Others within Russian holiday-season films.

Marriage equality & intersectionality

AbstractThe goal of this study is to understand the extent to which a diverse group of sexual and gender minorities understood the landmark Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality as personally impacting them. Prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) figures have argued that marriage is an oppressive institution and that legalizing same‐sex marriage would not benefit the most marginalized members of the community, particularly Black people. Until now, there have been few resources for comparing these claims of scholars and activists with those of members of the communities they claim to represent. Guided by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, this study centered LGBTQ people of color's lived experiences. A purposive sample of 99 LGBTQ people in Chicago, New York City, and San Francisco were asked whether and how the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) personally impacted them. Most participants described an emotional impact. Relatively few criticized marriages as “heteronormative” or unfit for LGBTQ people. Black participants were less likely than participants of other races to criticize marriage as an institution. Moreover, Black and Latinx participants articulated a more expansive, equality‐focused understanding of the right to marry than the Court itself articulated. They described the marriage decision as carrying the potential to empower and elevate their identities in various contexts. For these people, the marriage equality movement was centrally about equality rather than marriage.

Indeterminacies: Queer Tales of Love and Suffering

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty.

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

The Omega Machine

The following is the script for a performance developed in tandem with artist and performer Gabe Rubin and painter Jacqueline Humphries for her show jHΩ1:) at Wexner Center for the Arts in October 2021. Humphries’s work blurs the line between the painterly expression and the automated simulacrum. Her paintings in this show included 3D printed blacklight flat sculptures that resemble paintings that use as a base layer text encoded (ASCII) versions of earlier paintings with novel features palimpsestically overwriting them, such as Greek letters, Möbius strips, emoticons, and brand names. Our script ties together Humphries’s innovative practice with debates regarding the relative indeterminacy of the subject in comparison to the algorithm and artificial intelligence – debates which are linked to related questions as to the possibility of chance and spontaneity within seemingly closed discourses such as those interpreted by psychoanalysis, discourses famously encoded by Jacques Lacan into algorithms – and psychoanalysis itself. For the event, we invented a character for Gabe Rubin named Absinthe Omega, a brand ambassador for automated painting, to serve as a queer figure who might dramatize these issues while also fading into and out of the ground of painting itself as if they were a kind of subjectile substrate to these antinomic debates.

The Trouble with Sumner Welles: Sexuality, Race, and the Limits of Mythmaking in Queer History

Sumner Welles occupies a queer place in American history. Despite his prominence, his reputation among diplomatic historians has been overshadowed by the sex scandal that occasioned his demise. Conversely, he has attracted cursory attention from scholars of the history of sexuality. This article examines that historiographic dialectic. By analyzing literature about Welles, conducting a close reading of sources that catalogued Welles's sexuality, and applying an intersectional lens to the scandal that ended his career, this article seeks to redress historiographic misunderstandings and omissions about Welles. Additionally, this article explores ethical questions historians must contend with when analyzing historical queer figures.

Critical aunty studies: an auntroduction

ABSTRACT Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of nuclear families, it is little surprise that they are overlooked. Rather than fixate on their marginality, this introduction demonstrates how aunties become abundant figures to think kinship, desire, aesthetics, and politics. Examining academic and arts-based discussions of aunties, the special-issue editor connects labor associated with aunties to aesthetics they are known for. In addition to being embodied, fleshy, working figures, aunties offer methodological optics for critical study and strategies for navigating academic institutions.

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation

We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation

Il terzo sesso a teatro

The rise of a different gender incorporating the feminine and the masculine is a phenomenon occurring in many cultures and in nearly all historical ages, but it assumes unique features in Naples. In fact, the culture of the femminiello is deeply rooted in Neapolitan tradition. It is a tricky figure to categorize as it embeds different forms of sexuality, thus remaining highly distinctive and intimately entwined with the tradition. The essay attempts to illustrate how Neapolitan dramaturgy has treated this remarkable queer figure. It also aims to point out how, in the plays examined, the character of the femminiello has exerted a crucial function in the rising debate on gender minorities, becoming somehow the (Neapolitan) ambassador of the struggle for the emancipation of subjects “outside the sexual norm”.

“Naming Their History”

“Naming Their History”

Queering “The Children's Movement”

Abstract This essay argues that the queer figure of the child that crops up curiously in (post–)Umbrella Movement Hong Kong is a defining political signifier for characterizing the city's youthful protesters and imagining alternative futures for Hong Kong. In many mainland Chinese media outlets, the youthfulness of the Hong Kong demonstrators is often emphasized to critique their fixation on the Western ideology of democracy. For the young resisters and their sympathizers, childishness connotes a different script of identity: it entails a narrative of temporal suspension in the face of assimilation into a Chinese homogeneity. By, for example, comparing the political star Joshua Wong to Peter Pan, who refuses to grow up, or by assigning uniform-wearing grade-school students the role of “the keepers of the Umbrella Movement,” prodemocratic cultural narratives keep alive the possibility of a political alterity that resists the neoliberal, temporal mandates of Hong Kong's government and mainland China. Theorizing that possibility in the context of temporal, queer, children's, and postcolonial studies, this essay contends that the future of resistance in Hong Kong will follow a lateral horizon, a sideways course that will put minor dissenters into new and nonheteropatriarchal relations with the existing order of the city.

APPALLING BODIES: QUEER FIGURES BEFORE AND AFTER PAUL’S LETTERS. By Joseph A.Marchal. New York: Oxford UP, 2019. Pp. xi + 311. Cloth, $99.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 2 p. 216-216 Short Reviews Of Recent Publications: Gender & Sexuality Studies APPALLING BODIES: QUEER FIGURES BEFORE AND AFTER PAUL’S LETTERS. By Joseph A. Marchal. New York: Oxford UP, 2019. Pp. xi + 311. Cloth, $99.00. First published: 08 August 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15216Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue2June 2021Pages 216-216 RelatedInformation

Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal

Reviewed by: Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters by Joseph A. Marchal Teresa Hornsby joseph a. marchal, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures before and after Paul’s Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Pp. xi + 311. $99. I have always been an admirer of Joseph Marchal’s work; I often refer to him as the Robin Williams of biblical studies. His work is brilliant, at times manic, evocative, provocative, exhaustive, and at times exhausting in its depth. The introduction to Appalling Bodies (“Prelude: Before and After”) and the first chapter (“Touching Figures”) are excellent resources that give genealogies/trajectories of how M. sets out to grapple with the intersections of history and queer theory, while looking forward to the potential of disruption found through the lens of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. M.’s emphasis here is that, while [End Page 153] various approaches to “queer” subjects in biblical studies (i.e., historical [Bernadette Brooten], or queer theory [David Halperin, Judith Butler]) have been necessary, they have not been effective in disrupting the biblical proliferation of heterosexist essentialism, or of the “untroubled use of the Bible as timeless, eternal, primordial” (p. 23). M. sets out to juxtapose those queer beings launched by Paul (androgynes, eunuchs, slaves, and barbaric foreigners) with more recent marginalized and punished identities: “drag kings or trans butches, or people with intersex conditions, or those engaged in BDSM practices, or those targeted as terrorists” (p. 28). Each chapter thereafter deals with “touching” these figures within and beyond Paul’s letters: androgyny and female masculinity in Corinthians; eunuchs and intersex conditions in Galatians; the slave and the sexual bottom in Philemon; and foreign barbarians and terrorists in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians. M. seeks to expose the crevices and instabilities in Paul’s literary bodies and to manipulate those instabilities by connecting Paul’s appalling bodies to our present marginalized bodies; this is to illustrate that biblically constructed norms can be “malleable, contestable, and . . . transformable” (p. 24). Further, the anachronistic juxtapositions seek to form coalitions for undoing what has been done by “the biblical.” (Briefly, “the biblical” troubles the kind of periodization with which historians can be obsessed—the term encompasses all that the Bible has touched—past, present, and future; see discussion of “the biblical” on pp. 17–18). Each chapter adeptly weaves modernist historiographical methods with postmodern critique. In the second chapter, “A Close Corinthian Shave,” M. draws upon biblical historical works on the women prophets in Corinthians, then augments this with his own considerable examination of androgynes in the ancient world through the lens of postmodern sex and gender theory. This provides an elegant segue to the topic of female masculinity as observed in more recent “gender-troubling figures, including butch lesbians, female-to-male trans men, transgender butches, and drag kings” (p. 50). By juxtaposing, anachronistically, the Corinthian women prophets with recent figures of feminine masculinity, M. seeks to highlight their shared features “shaped by their practices of gender, sexuality, and embodiment that depart from oppressive perspectives (then or now)” (p. 66). Not only does observing the Corinthian women prophets inform interpretations of “dyke boys,” and so on, but dyke boys and so on should also inform constructions of the Corinthian women. In the third chapter, “Uncut Galatians,” M. uses the juxtaposition of castrated bodies (Paul’s sarcasm of cutting in 5:12) and intersex bodies that have been made to conform to a constructed binary through cutting. Within this conversation comes a word of caution: these “touches across time” can damage as much as heal (p. 111) just as biblical texts always have. M. builds upon the central tenet that the biblical is a cog of the machinery that produces norms that denigrate some bodies in relation to others, and the anachronistic juxta-positions are necessary to trouble that production. That “troubling” is increasingly complex in chap. 4, “Use,” where M. demonstrates the ubiquity of the sexual utility of slaves. Again, M. engages in solid historical inquiry that demands that ethical readers confront the horrifying atrocities, including the glossed over sexual use of enslaved people that Paul condones in Philemon. M. writes, “[I]nterpretative depictions of a benevolent Paul and a...

A Wilting Whisper of Antjie Somers: A Meditation on the Witchery and Gender-Nonconformance of Afrikaans Folklore Figure Antjie Somers

In this article, I go on a journey with Antjie Somers, a gender-nonconforming, Queer, stigmatised, witch-like figure well known among Afrikaans people. Bringing permutations of their story into conversation with writing about outcasts like witches and Queer people, I consider the parallels that might be drawn between the experiences and knowledge of such ostracised, unconventional figures. By considering how the stories of abuse and marginalisation of Antjie, Queer people, and (other) witches coincide and overlap, I speculate about the root of the widespread violent reactions toward them. This leads me to reflect on the various similarities between their ambiguity and non-conformance and how this uncontainable queer(y)ing of binaries exposes the fear of the unknowable that upholds (hetero)normativity. I also consider how Antjie's story and the story of other queer figures might be able to guide us in the present toward a powerfully recuperative language of storytelling.