Queer Genealogy Research Articles

Queer Performativities in Pakistan

The essay that follows is part of a larger queer genealogy project that aims to fashion “the theoretical organization and methodological perspective of genealogy” into a tool for understanding how the discursive practices and processes of state and religion (which hinge on conceptions of majority/minority) have turned notions of sexuality and sexual categories (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transgender), as well as all other “minority” positionalities including religious and sectarian ones (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Shia, Sunni, Ahmedi), into performative objects of study, analysis, and disciplinary control in the postcolonial, modern Muslim state of Pakistan. A similarly twinning effect occurs via neo-imperial mechanisms mobilized in the so-called liberatory promises marshalled on behalf of formerly colonized queer-identified subjects. To cast a “queer eye” on the dominant landscape of citizenship within Pakistan, then, is to address not only the growing body of work by queer-identified creators, but also to develop a reading practice that allows for an “interrogation of … the limits of a politics of visibility and representation” conferred on unequal citizens of various nation-states. Reading “queerly”, I will, in this essay, situate three exemplary performatives of gendered and sexual citizenship within global circuits of power including social media platforms, reflecting on what constitutes not just Pakistani, but also Pakistani-diasporic identity and its cross-racial, sexual, and feminist transnational promise.

Anatole France, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce A Queer Genealogy of “The Dead”

This essay re-situates James Joyce’s story “The Dead” in the alternative intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century European religious skepticism, its reexamination of the historical origins of Christianity, and its fresh reinterrogation of the epochal transition between the pre-Christian and the Christian worlds. Taking a cue from Richard Ellmann’s suggestion that it was Anatole France’s “The Procurator of Judea” that inspired “The Dead”, the essay argues that just as France had written a revisionist story about the disappearance of Jesus from the history, so did Joyce write a similar story, about a failed Annunciation and the death of God. Further, the essay identifies Oscar Wilde’s Salome as a twin text of France’s and triangulates it with France and Joyce, showing how Wilde’s play had excavated this same territory and provided a recent Irish precedent for restaging a New Testament dialogue, for redramatizing the contest between female pagan voice and prophetic Christian voice, and for reviving a sustained pagan rhetoric of “the dead”.

Queer Chicana Feelings, Longings, and Community ThroughMosquita y Mari

Queer Chicana Feelings, Longings, and Community Through<i>Mosquita y Mari</i>

Folk Survivals, Spurned Witches, and Thwarted Inheritance, or, What Makes the Occult Queer?

Over the past few years there has been an explosion in popularity of so-called ‘occult’ practices like astrology and tarot, particularly among left-leaning people who tend to politicize their investments as forms of counterhegemony. In ethnographic fieldwork among queer occultists in Montreal, I explore how practitioners imagine themselves to be divesting from legacies of violence, opting instead for apparently queer genealogies of knowledge that are known in terms of the ways they have been repressed. Framing the occult as a historiographic mode, this article lays bare how certain knowledge practices emerged as the disciplinary excess of the regulatory ideal of modernity, and how this putative opposition offers an appealing location for social critique. Turning to literature on Victorian scientific cultures, I show how the occult becomes legible as always already about epistemic crisis and the struggle between sanctioned methods of inquiry. Put in conversation with queer temporality scholarship, this crisis may offer an allegory for queer historical encounter that explains its appeal among queer people, wherein the rubric of legitimacy or ‘truth’ is apprehended as an effect of power. The pervasive claim among my informants that queer people are ‘naturally’ drawn to the occult, and the emphasis on finding alternative routes/roots in order to disrupt heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy locates this phenomenon within cultural conversations about historical repair, and the extent to which we can divest from what we inherit in favour of something else.

Why the ‘Ideal Victim’ Persists: Queering representations of victimhood in human trafficking discourse

The image of a young, victimised woman bound and gagged for implied sexual exploitation persists in the imagination, promotional material, and reports of the anti-trafficking sector. She is presented as the ‘ideal’ victim, and while people who have experienced this undoubtedly exist, many victim accounts deviate from this prescriptive path. Why then does the image of a universal, ideal victim endure? This paper argues that the idealised subject of contemporary trafficking law is not merely a symptom of uncritical representation, but intrinsic to the formation of anti-trafficking law. Often feminised, she becomes a tool for maintaining heteronormative and white nationalism, but one which never existed beyond her confines of anti-trafficking law. To unearth her production, I present a queer genealogy of the human trafficking subject from British campaigns against white slavery in the late nineteenth century to contemporary law. A queer reading of this history demonstrates that rather than preceding laws, the ideal victim serves to personify cultural anxiety over race and gender housed in anti-trafficking policy. This is essential because without contending with this history and restrictive definition of victimhood, it would be impossible for current trafficking law in developed countries to adequately protect LGBTQ+ and irregular migrants who often do not conform to idealised forms of victimhood. Furthermore, a critical analysis of the ideal victim is essential to moving away from a hierarchical evaluation of victimhood altogether.

Desi Butch (Where the ’Twain Shall Meet)

The terms “desi” and “butch” are difficult to define separately but open up new possibilities for thinking sexuality and borders when located next to each other on the page. “Desi” can mean people from South Asia, and gestures toward land as home. “Butch” can mean queer masculinity, female masculinity, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual women’s subcultures. This article uses autoethnography to experiment with desi and butch next to one another to think about what desi queer and trans masculine genealogies and experiences might tell us about transnational logics of sexuality, space, home, and body. The article thinks through desi, butch, and desi butch as potential analytics of sexuality, movement, masculinity, intimacy, and desire, and attends to the work of the risks and costs of these shared terms. What does desi butch do to spatial modes of intimacy, alienation, care, fragmentation, and genealogy, in multiple vocabularies of land and home? The author asks after the complicated affects, temporalities, and desires signaled by desi butch as a category that troubles and has trouble with heteronormative border regimes and futurities across geohistories of North America and South Asia. This includes questions of translation, embodiment, and citizenship. Attending to their own desires, orientations, and experiences, the author asks what forms, spaces, and practices of care and collectivity are made possible through desi butch as negotiations of borders, and experiences of melancholy and alienation produced by different lines.

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems &amp; Artifacts

Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems &amp; Artifacts

Femslash fandom and the cultivation of white queer genealogies: Longing for histories, reading for futures

The recent surge in fan activity around historical figures like Emily Dickinson and Anne Lister reveals an ongoing desire for and investment in cultivating queer histories as a way of addressing the harms of erasure. This popular recovery project, however, reproduces existing hierarchies insofar as it most commonly makes wealthy, white histories legible, leaving others unclaimed and unrecognized. Despite these current tendencies, I offer "too close reading" as a fan-inflected scholarly methodology that holds the possibility of helping readers better recognize less overt forms of queerness across media and in the archives.

Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder

Reviewed by: Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America by Brigitte Fielder Tabitha Lowery (bio) Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America brigitte fielder Duke University Press, 2020 308 pp. Brigitte Fielder's Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America expertly navigates new discussions centering on nineteenth-century representations of racialization in the United States. Particularly, Fielder unpacks constructions of race to show their relations between racialized bodies and domestic spaces of family and nation. Race should not merely be traced biologically, she argues, but [End Page 267] through "interpersonal relations at multiple scales" (4). She builds on the critical race scholarship of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Omi, and others who have paved the way for critical attention to the social constructions of race. Literature and visual culture from the nineteenth century show how constructions of race did not simply follow genealogical lines of descent. White women in particular could have their racial identities questioned due to the racialization of their child. Additionally, constructions of race in the nineteenth century also followed nonbiological relations of adoption, which often reproduced race based on white women's adoption into Native American communities. Fielder aptly describes this trajectory as "horizontal kinship," which allows a deeper exploration into the complexities of race formation in the nineteenth century. Kinship relations expand our comprehensions of race as it shows the "taxonomic project of comparison and the importance of kinship relations for assigning bodies to racialized groups" (5). With guided introductory materials before each chapter, the book lays out the critical theory that Fielder successfully employs throughout. Her focus on the theoretical underpinnings of race provides a refreshing take on the ways we ignore the complexities of historical representations of race in contemporary race theory. A welcomed feature of Fielder's book is the attention to the acknowledgments page. Exemplifying the ways relationships and networks influence lives, she urges readers to consider how important relations to biological and nonbiological family and colleagues are. She acknowledges the "academic generosity" of many of her colleagues, mentors, parents, and partner while identifying how each of these groups and individuals helped shape her projects and thinking. Building and sustaining ethical communities, she explains, is an important feature to academic life and can be observed from acknowledgment pages. Ultimately, Fielder brings to the fore an important but often neglected style of writing that proves very useful to audiences unfamiliar with the scholars in any field. She explains, "My life and work and learning and writing about any of the things I discuss in this book have always been done—and will continue to be improved by—relation to others" (ix). The acknowledgments page exemplifies the comradery that academics should create when ethically sustaining communities of learning. The introduction begins with Kate Chopin's well-known "Désirée's Baby" to show how race follows a queer genealogy. This section establishes [End Page 268] one of the main tenets of the book's argument—that racial transfer can move "backward" from child to mother. After Armand sees his and Désirée's baby is visibly Black, he assumes Désirée must be racially mixed. Even though Armand eventually learns of his own Black ancestry, he presumes his whiteness while reracializing Désirée because of her relation to her child. The queer genealogy of race is a significant contribution to critical race studies as it suggests that race in the nineteenth century was read in more ways than through biology. Indeed, Fielder suggests that race in the nineteenth century was not as fixed and was instead changeable through its relations. Consequently, she critiques discussions surrounding nineteenth-century white womanhood that center around white woman's purity and ability to (re)produce whiteness. Fielder seizes the opportunity to show the precarious nature of white womanhood in the nineteenth-century literary context using figures from personal narratives, novels, plays, images, and other media sources. Queer genealogies of race ultimately deconstruct "settler colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks with which racialization has most often been imagined in the United States" (15). Theoretical frameworks from Black feminism, Native studies, and queer theory guide...

We Other Fairies

The ontology of characters onstage has long been a concern of performance theory, but the stakes of this hauntological question for the characters themselves is rarely addressed. How and why do queer beings both corporeal and ethereal inhabit the stage, and how do they communicate with us (and each other)? In the metatextual context of a general exam, as my writing style wanders between poetry and prose, research and reflection, I diarize my journey through this question and the ways ritual, performativity, and the carnivalesque function to bring forth these spirits onto our plane. I play off of Michel Foucault’s musings on “other Victorians” to demonstrate how plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Zanna, Don’t!; Shakespeare’s R&amp;J, Three Mysterious Women; and Lenin’s Embalmers illustrate the queer politics of memory, performance, and affect. The theatrical memory machine restages queer genealogy in ways that traditional methods of memorialization in Western culture do not. Furthermore, the thin veil between realities during these performances allows queer utopic visions that entice performers, audiences, and characters alike.

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

Archiving an Epidemic: Art, AIDS, and the Queer Chicanx Avant-Garde

The biopolitics of languaging in the cybernetic fold: a decolonial and queer ear to the cosmo-poetics

ABSTRACTPrompted by Susan Sontag’s ‘The World as India’ (2002), in which the young employees at outsourced call centres in India figure the distinction between human and machine, this article explores languaging as a biopolitical process of racialization and speciation in an era of cybernetics. To this end, the article engages with Caribbean critic Sylvia Wynter and Asian American writer Margaret Rhee, whose works illuminate human linguistic practice as decolonial and queering modes of engendering and inhabiting the more-than-human world. First, this article attempts a decolonialist intervention into posthumanist performativity in conversation with Wynter’s theory of homo narrans, and especially her hypothesis on the cybernetic autopoiesis of diverse cosmogonies. Then, the article discusses Margaret Rhee’s poetry Robot, Love (2017) and her Kimchi Poetry Machine project (debut 2014), which engage with poetry as an intimate interaction between human and machine against a backdrop of the queer genealogy of artificial intelligence and the fractured affinities between robots and Asian Americans. In conclusion, this article calls for a decolonial approach to posthuman linguistic performativity, which is less a territory for securing humanity than a decolonial and diasporic feminist technology of listening to difference – which I call cosmo-poetics.

Sexual violence and male prisons: an Australian queer genealogy

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the history of sexual violence in Australian male prisons. It traces a genealogy of sex between incarcerated men from the penal colonies to the 1990s, drawing on a range of criminal justice and sexological and cultural records to show how sexual violence inflected both conceptions and experiences of homosexual prisoners. We outline how these inmates shifted from being perceived as an institutional threat to a victim of the institution, an uneven process propelled by competing and contradictory ideas about the constitution and practice of sexual behaviours, identities and power behind bars.Before the decriminalisation of sex between consenting adult males, Australian authorities tended to emphasise the dangers such men posed in the penitentiary. At its height in the mid-twentieth century, such alarmism culminated in the creation in 1957 of a homosexual-only gaol in Cooma, New South Wales. From the 1970s onwards, and influenced by contemporary gay, feminist and prisoner’s rights movements, ideas about menace slowly gave way to a focus on vulnerability. Political agitators, the judiciary and prison officials increasingly framed gay prisoners as victims of sexual violence, the targets of aggressive heterosexual inmates from whom the state was unwilling or unable to offer protection. This history of sex between inmates, the carceral state and the criminal justice system reveals that the prison was a crucial setting for the public recognition of sexual violence between men. Shifting and unstable concepts that linked the homosexual with danger and violence shows the discursive overlap between sexual violence and men seeking sexual intimacy and the competing and contradictory thinking and practices linking affective desire, identities, sex between men and homosexuality with coercion and risk.

Dante Spinning Forward

Dante Spinning Forward Gary Cestaro medieval queer "The world only spins forward." This is a line from a great modern classic, a new member of the canon and a play dear to my heart, Tony Kushner's Angels in America. It comes as close as anything to a thematic statement of the whole and moral of the story. Though seriously and even obsessively engaged with the past, Kushner's 1991 play—the expression of a queer, post-modern medievalism—insists on the future. I'm tempted to adopt Kushner's adage as my own here to characterize my contribution to this conversation about Dante, pedagogy, and ideology. I have for years been steadily engaged as teacher and scholar in two fields, Dante Studies and LGBTQ Studies, sometimes as distinct entities but often, too, as they intersect—or collide. An enterprise that no doubt strikes some as inherently contradictory. I'm currently at work on a book, long in the making, called Dante's Queer Genealogies, which claims that the poet's interactions with non-normative modes of gender and sexuality shape the Comedy in fundamental ways. I do this work not out of some personal need to identify with a distant past or any self-inflating quest to bend history to my will. Reading and contemplating Dante's texts sparks my imagination and speaks to my soul much in the same way it does for many of you, I imagine. Of course in Dante we are confronted with a society and psychology significantly different from our own. But I prefer not to see the poem as an artefact so alien that it demands of the modern reader, just for basic appreciation, a wholesale suspension of disbelief [End Page 127] and distorting leap out of current reality. Peter Hawkins's comments in this forum on Charles Singleton are fascinating in this regard. The poem may be in some senses incompatible with modernity, but it seems like a stretch to declare the modern heart, as Singleton does, no longer unquiet. I feel Dante can speak directly to us, while agreeing with Peter that the excitement and pleasure of reading and teaching the poem lie in how we respond to him—in "talking back to the Commedia." Perhaps I'm just saying that between us and Dante there is disjuncture and continuity. Gender and sexuality are part of Dante's vast universe and provide for me a focus of study, a foothold in that intimidating expanse. We are also living in a moment when long-held assumptions about the stability of gender and desire are under siege in ways that can feel unprecedented. Surely teaching and writing about literature is meant to create a dialogue between past and present, allowing ancient texts we value to speak in the here and now. Partly I'm interested in showing that our current polemics around gender identity and sexuality have a long history, and may not always be as radically novel as most assume. I also want to frame Dante as an important chapter in the history of sexual subjectivity while affirming his relevance for what is surely a queer future. down with Dante! In 2012 the Italian human rights NGO Gherush92 called for the elimination of Dante from school curricula with a blast of a headline on their website: "VIA LA DIVINA COMMEDIA DALLE SCUOLE, OVVERO RAZZISMO ISTITUZIONALE MASCHERATO DA ARTE."1 Needless to say, this garnered some reaction and press coverage, including an article in the Guardian by Alison Flood, "Divine Comedy is 'offensive and discriminatory,' says Italian NGO."2 The charges will come as no surprise to students of Dante: racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia. Gherush92 focuses on the poem's propagation of anti-Semitic stereotypes—Jews as killers of Christ, justly revenged in the destruction of the Second Temple—and points to portraits of Judas in Satan's mouth (Inf. 34), Caiaphas crucified (Inf. 23), and the picture of Christians being scorned by Jews in Par. 5 (though, interestingly, no mention of Par. 7), for them part of the same tradition that will give [End Page 128] us the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Russian pogroms, and Italy's 1938 racial laws...

Genealogies of Queerness on the Modernist Stage: But Where's the Performance?

Genealogies of Queerness on the Modernist Stage:But Where's the Performance? Joseph Cermatori (bio) Performing Queer Modernism by Penny Farfan. Oxford University Press, 2017. 154 pp. Cloth $99.00, paper $34.95. In this slender, often handy volume, Penny Farfan charts notable instances of performance from 1890 to 1930 to argue that queerness, broadly construed, was a central, animating force to the broader modernist ethos of the period. At the same time, she also demonstrates that modernist performance helped disseminate queer ideas of gender and sexuality among its audiences, acting as a form of discourse in Foucault's sense. In under ninety pages, excluding endnotes, Farfan looks at a wide range of materials, including commercial stage plays by Arthur Wing Pinero and Noël Coward, landmark instances of modern dance by Loie Fuller and Vaslav Nijinsky, and less mainstream playwriting by Djuna Barnes. She builds on recent scholarship by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Nick Salvato, among others, who have sought to uncover queer genealogies of modernist literature and drama. Farfan's desire to focus on performance, however, sets her apart from most of these forerunners, with the exception of Salvato, whose Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance (Yale 2010) receives passing mention in a pair of footnotes. Still others have trained a more formalist or conceptual lens onto the relationship between queerness and modern aesthetics—for example, Leo Bersani in his essay "Is There a Gay Art?" and [End Page 417] his writings on Proust, Genet, Henry James, and so on. By contrast, Farfan's work is more empirical: she draws on eyewitness testimonies, critical reportage, archival documents, and a substantial, though sometimes unwieldy, amount of secondary criticism. Full of astute observation, Performing Queer Modernism is most innovative in its sections on dance. In a chapter on Loie Fuller's 1897 Fire Dance, for example, Farfan attends to Fuller's conspicuous butchness, her unusual upper-body strength, her noted resemblance to Oscar Wilde, her tortoise-shell spectacles, and her "burned-out eyes," damaged by overexposure to phosphorescent lights (37). In this analysis, Fuller's queerness results less from her costumes' campy, art nouveau extravagance, replete with "feminized natural themes, sensuous flowing lines, and shimmering colors" (36), than from her uncanny ability to inhabit certain liminal spaces, between "the homely and the frightening, the abstract and the real, masculine and feminine, past and present, onstage and offstage" (38). The chapter admirably incorporates Fuller into a larger context of modern Salomes (e.g., Wilde, Max Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, Maud Allan), noting Fuller's special appeal to female and gay male spectators. Similarly, in her chapter on Nijinsky and Afternoon of a Faun (1912), Farfan concentrates on the ballet's final image, in which the titular faun gradually lowers himself onto a scarf he has seized from a fleeing nymph. For other critics, this movement has implied both sexual fetishism and a preference for masturbation over sexual intercourse. Farfan reads it instead, alongside the famous bas-relief-style flatness of Nijinsky's choreography, as throwing "autonomous, nonreproductive male sexuality into relief on the modernist stage" (48). Surveying the erotics of Nijinsky's face, eyes, body, and rumored bisexuality, she shows that Nijinsky's performances helped fuel the spread of dissident sexualities in the time of modernism. These analyses are persuasive and extensively supported. The same is true for the chapters on drama, which are also illuminating, though they deal noticeably less with embodied performance in the usual sense. Instead, Farfan borrows W. B. Worthen's notion of "dramatic performativity" (23) to illuminate the ways dramatic texts can enact their own performative departures from heteronormative narrative conventions. As a result, the studies of Pinero, Coward, and Barnes's plays concentrate more on dramaturgy than on how these works transpired physically on the stage. At times Farfan does reconstruct aspects of the plays' onstage lives, though these details are not always foregrounded. For example, [End Page 418] with Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing the role of Paula Tanqueray in Pinero's 1893 society drama The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, she touches on a few elements of staging as they were recorded in artist sketches and publicity photographs, noting Campbell's ineffable "aura of fin...

Queer Genealogies across the Color Line and into Children’s Literature: Autobiographical Picture Books, Interraciality, and Gay Family Formation

Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes. My Americanist contribution, however, zooms in on a recent development of autobiographical works that establish narratives of origin beyond normative boundaries of race and heterosexual reproduction. A number of predominantly white queer parents of black adoptees have turned their family history into children’s read-along books as a medium for pedagogical empowerment that employs first-person narration in the presumable voice of the adoptee. In Arwen and Her Daddies (2009), for instance, Arwen invites the reader into a story of family formation with the following opening words: “Do you know how I and my Dads became a family?” My analysis understands these objects as verbal-visual origin stories which render intelligible a conversion from differently racialized strangers into kin. I frame this mode of narration as ‘adoptee ventriloquism’ that might tell us more about adult desires of queers for familial recognition than about the needs of their adopted children.

A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman's Chroma and Maggie Nelson's Bluets

Derek Jarman's Chroma and Maggie Nelson's Bluets are interdisciplinary autobiographical texts that explore the limits of articulacy and create new queer and feminist genealogies of meaning. This paper argues that these experimental projects communicate embodied experiences, including the effects of loss and AIDS-related illnesses, by interrogating our understandings of perception and color.

A Performance between Wood and the World: Ludwig II of Bavaria's Queer Swans

In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky'sSwan Lake(1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lakeconfirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as NeuschwansteinorNew Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires.

Listening to color: a set of propositions on pain as feminist aesthetic

This performative text asks whether it is possible to imagine an antisocial feminist aesthetic that does not invoke the wounded body. Its form – numbered propositions that engage with critical theory, literature, and memoir – riffs on that of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a key interlocutor for this question of aestheticizing embodied pain. How does Nelson’s genealogy of blue model a methodology for a “queer genealogy of femininity,” to borrow Jack Halberstam’s term? How does looking at color in this way offer an approach to narrating trauma, one that displaces the primacy of the visual? Turning to the work of Christina Crosby, Toni Morrison, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as drawing upon the author’s experience as a volunteer for a peer listening hotline, this essay considers the implications of “listening to color” for minoritarian knowledge formations and feminist praxis.

Queer Theory, Sex Work, and Foucault’s Unreason

During the late nineties, leading voices of the sex worker rights movement began to publicly question queer theory’s virtual silence on the subject of prostitution and sex work. However, this attempt by sex workers to “come out of the closet” into the larger queer theoretical community has thus far failed to bring much attention to sex work as an explicitly queer issue. Refusing the obvious conclusion—that queer theory’s silence on sex work somehow proves its insignificance to this field of inquiry—I trace in Foucault’s oeuvre signs of an alternate (albeit differently) queer genealogy of prostitution and sex work. Both challenging and responding to long-standing debates about prostitution within feminist theory, I offer a new queer genealogy of sex work that aims to move beyond the rigid oppositions that continue to divide theorists of sexuality and gender. Focusing specifically on History of Madness (1961), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality Volume I (1976), I make the case for an alternate genealogy of sex work that takes seriously both the historical construction of prostitution and the lived experience of contemporary sex workers.