Queer Liberation Research Articles

Rethinking ‘Healthy Masculinity’ Training From a Queer Boys+ Perspective

ABSTRACT Contemporary discourses on feminism’s role in Australian boys’ lives focus on how feminism might guide strategies that train boys to resist negative or ‘toxic’ performances of masculinity and instead encourage them to strive for a ‘healthy’ or ‘positive’ masculinity. In this article, I question whether training young people to attach themselves to a particular masculinity is aligned with a commitment to queer politics or serves the interests of boys, particularly queer boys or gender-diverse young people. I begin by tracing unsettled contests over masculinity's ontological foundations, including the roles of biology, identification, ‘gendered’ traits, and affective attachments. Through the method of autoethnography, I then explore issues that arise in the logic and implementation of common desires to train boys into ‘healthy’ men. I argue that, drawing on a queer liberation tradition, feminism can be an invitation to solidarity and freedom as well as a ‘way out’ or ‘refuge’ from the regulatory policing of gender norms associated with boyhood. I suggest a detachment or disaffection with masculinity does not have to lead to an identity crisis and can instead be part of a feminist killjoy survival kit [Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press].

Actional Orientalism

Through an analysis of the 2014 video game Dragon Age: Inquisition, this essay brings two contemporary problematics into dialogue—the neoliberal gamification of society and the logic of queer liberalism—to suggest that they converge upon a common, long-standing animus: the figure of the massified Oriental. The massified Oriental haunts Asianness, and retains East and Southwest Asia as its primary cultural referents, but the deterritorialization of Orientalism as an epistemic apparatus locates Orientalism in the realm of affect rather than geography. Thus, this paper proposes a heuristic of “actional Orientalism,” which draws attention to the procedural and discursive production of agency and the consequent narrative validation of that agency, contrasting agentic players against their objectified, thingified, and massified gameworlds. Whereas in Tara Fickle's “ludo-Orientalism,” wherein racialization is premised upon the otherness of the type of risk-taking and play, actional Orientalism draws on whether the racialized figure is capable of agency at all, finding within the Oriental the complete absence of the bounded, liberal, choosing subject. Dragon Age: Inquisition deploys actional Orientalism on full display, offering liberal transgender representation contingent upon acceptance of an individualist affect, requiring the full abjection of massified, Orientalized, queer others to enable this representation to survive.

“Instagram is like a karela”: transnational digital queer politics and online censorship and surveillance in India

Abstract This article explores transnational queer political flows and negotiations in Indian queer/trans communities on Instagram, situating this in its limits and restrictions as a public sphere that is corporate- and state-governed and subject to conditions of profitability, censorship, regulation, and algorithmic disciplining. Using insights from 23 in-depth interviews with queer/trans women and non-binary Instagram users and community organizers across India, I argue that binaries of Western/Indigenous, global/local, authentic/inauthentic are insufficient to understand Indian queer digital politics. I instead explore the political utility of agentic reclamations and negotiations of queer/trans identity by marginal queer/trans users. At the same time, drawing on participant experiences of content moderation, censorship, and corporate and state surveillance, I examine how the potentials of Instagram as a site to mediate articulations of a radical politics of queer liberation are restricted, thwarted, and reconfigured by platform design and policing.

Clashing Decolonial and Sociocultural Factors: Revisiting Palestinian Queer Liberation Using the Events of Summer 2019

ABSTRACT Starting in the summer of 2019, a series of events saw queer Palestinians taking to the streets and appearing in mainstream Palestinian culture and media at an unprecedented scale. Drawing on 53 interviews with queer Palestinians, activists and nonactivists, this article critiques the queer organizing around these events as it appears in the two largest queer Palestinian organizations alQaws and Aswat. Because most research and activism on queer life in Palestine centers either the decolonial discourse against “homonationalism” within the Israeli nation-state expansion project and the Palestinian queer opposition to it, or the anti-orientalist critique of Western interventionist internationalization of queer rights, participants’ opinions and lived experiences challenge the scholarly and grassroot organizing tendency to ignore queer lives and voices who believe that targeting the sociocultural aspects of their queerness is an equally viable strategy for creating change. In doing so, this article sheds a new light on the clashing sociocultural and decolonial approaches—whereby clash refers to the debates regarding the ideologies and practices Palestinian activists and scholars find most ideal for their queer liberation.

Possibilities for Rural Queer Liberation: Toward a Queer Rural Place-Based Pedagogy

Combining queer pedagogy and critical pedagogy of place, a queer rural place-based pedagogy centers rural queer student experiences to foster rural queer liberation.

The role of engagement with BL manga on queer young people’s sense of belonging

There is limited qualitative research about the role of engagement with Boys Love (BL) manga on queer or questioning young people. The present study aimed to explore the motivations for consuming Boys Love (BL) manga and the outcomes of engagement with this type of material on queer young people’s sense of belonging. Semi-structured interviews were held with nine queer young people who consumed BL manga to explore their experiences and perspectives regarding BL manga. Two research questions were posed: (1) What are queer young people’s motives for consuming BL manga? and (2) What are the outcomes of engagement with BL manga on queer young people’s sense of belonging? Using thematic analysis, five main themes were identified in the data: a comforting and safe environment, self-acceptance, connection and relatedness, hopes for the future, and queer liberation. The findings suggest that engagement with BL manga counteracts participants’ loneliness, promotes their sense of belonging and liberates them from heteronormativity as they relate to bisexual, gay and queer characters portrayed in BL manga. The findings thus imply the importance of integrating queer-related content into educational spheres and providing learning grounds for exploring sexuality for young queer individuals.

Radical Incrementalism and the Queer Institution in Campus Climate Studies

In this article, I examine campus climate studies through radical incrementalism and queer pragmatism. As a statistician and institutional researcher, I embrace data-informed decisions to promote resource reallocation and policy formation. Yet, as a queer person, I have misgivings about incrementalism as a dominant strategy that aligns queerness with interests of the state (or in this context, the institution). I use campus climate studies as a vehicle to illustrate the epistemological and practical implications of radical incrementalism and a queered institution, relying on both my own queer embodiment and my expertise in campus climate studies. My intended audiences include administrators with positional power at colleges and universities, especially those with influence concerning campus climate studies and data-informed decision making. I also direct my conversation to researchers who conduct campus climate studies, including institutional researchers and assessment professionals, academic scholars, and consultants. Lastly in this article. I also provide clarity and disruption for queer people who exist in higher education and who engage in the campus climate landscape to illuminate often silenced discourse concerning tensions and opportunities for queer liberation in the academy. I begin my article with my theoretical groundings, including radical incrementalism and queer pragmatism. I then provide an overview of campus climate studies in higher education, including federal mandates from the Department of Education, the campus climate industrial complex, and data trauma through deficit-based assessment. I close my conversation with hope and queer agency.

Self-Care: Seeking Queer Liberation from the Medical Gaze and Genetic Fatalism

Genetic diagnostics are radically and rapidly changing perceptions of health. Individuals with identifiable pathogenic genetic differences are now being made into cultural mutants. Unlike other forms of embodied difference, these diagnostics rely on a high statistical probability of developing a disease, known as genetic risk. As such, individuals with a mutation are often subjected to perform the same clinical labor as those who are already sick with a disease, which can involve invasive medical surveillance, preventative surgeries, and family planning. Self-Care is my artistic attempt to reckon with these biotechnological ruptures in identity caused by the rising use of genetic diagnostics in medicine. Using my body, Self-Care weaves a narrative about health, gender, and identity that seeks to resist the confines of the medical gaze. The work features a specially designed chest binder housing living BRCA1 mutant breast cancer cells, which allows the artist to take on the caring responsibilities of their cancer before it emerges in their body. Building off the artwork, this paper explores contemporary issues surrounding Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer Syndrome in global healthcare systems. Traversing the boundaries between sick and healthy, male and female, and parent and child, this paper sets out to both present the scholarly research surrounding Self-Care and provide a platform of critical self-reflection for the artwork to question how best we can care for ourselves and others.

“Fearing your own queer self”: Depictions of Diasporic Queer Experience in Grace Lau’s Poetry

The intersection of migrant and queer experiences constitutes one of the core motifs of The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak (2021), the debut poetry collec- tion by Grace Lau, a Chinese Canadian poet. Through a series of interconnected vignettes, Lau provides an insight into her experiences as both a Canadian and a Chinese immigrant, a lesbian and a failed model child, an aficionado of traditional Chinese culture and an en- thusiast of contemporary Western popular culture. The mosaic of experiences illustrates the complexity and intricacy of the author’s identity/ies. Through the analysis of three poems (“The Levity,” “The Lies That Bind,” and “My Grief Is a Winter”), supported with references to the theoretical works on Asian North American writing and queer Asian mi- grant experience, the article discusses Lau’s depictions of queerness and her experiences as a Chinese immigrant in relation to the Canadian LGBTQ+ community, white queer liberalism, and internal politics of the Chinese diaspora. It proposes to see Lau’s poetry as an example of biomythography, a form of autobiographical writing showcasing how encounters with different communities shape the subject. In the process of disentangling her complex ties with the Chinese diaspora, the white Canadian LGBTQ+ community and her own family, Lau reveals the impact of her interactions with those different groups as she can finally express her identity as a queer Chinese Canadian.

In Loving Memory? Indecent Forgetting of the Dead in Continental Sister-Books and Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love

Medieval nuns and anchorites (recluses) were spiritually and economically bound to pray for the dead, no matter their feelings towards the departed, who frequently appear to them in visions. This article charts medieval enclosed women’s attempts to intervene in this economy by forgetting souls. Staging a generative conversation between medieval women’s writings and Marcella Althaus-Reid’s (1952–2009) ‘indecent theology’ (queer liberation theology), this essay scrutinizes medieval female-authored texts for indecent forgetting (socially and economically disruptive forgetting). It juxtaposes a Middle English visionary text, A Revelation of Love by anchorite Julian of Norwich (1342/1343–c. 1416), with the mid-fourteenth-century Middle High German sister-book (compilation of nuns’ lives) of the Dominican convent of St Katharinental in Diessenhofen (in present-day Switzerland) and the early sixteenth-century Middle Dutch sister-book of Diepenveen (in the present-day Netherlands), originating from a Devotio Moderna convent of Augustinian canonesses regular. Heeding Althaus-Reid’s call, it dissects how forgetting unsettles systems of sanctioned spiritual and economic exchanges. I first examine how the sister-books forget certain souls and define their own terms for their participation in this system. I then turn to how Julian enlists all believers for her intercessory duties but also misplaces souls. Throughout, this article considers how these texts prise open space for medieval women within indecent theology. Ultimately, it illustrates how medieval women’s negotiations of their economic conditions supply a fertile ground for considering larger concerns of defiance, community, and the charity that binds together the living and the dead.

Introduction to special issue: queer liberalisms and marginal mobilities

ABSTRACT The aim of this special issue is to unpack the tenuous relationship between queer liberalisms and marginal mobilities within contested political contexts in the Global South and North. Establishing the special issue’s thematic and theoretical framework, it firstly, theorizes “queer liberalism” as a mode of governance and a critique and contextualizes the term within a genealogy of queer politics. Secondly, it discusses “marginal mobilities” as an analytical framework that expands the purview of how the (im)mobilities of LGBTIQ+ people are co-constituted by queer liberal governance and approached within scholarly, activist, and political debates. This Introduction further charts this special issues’ interdisciplinary contributions which address three overarching themes: (a) the paradox of queer neoliberal policies and politics in the LGBTIQ+ asylum context; (b) the in- and exclusions of non-heteronormative subjects and/within the nation-state; (c) the in- and exclusions of LGBTIQ+ refugees within societal spaces in the asylum country.

Anti-gender Politics in Queer Times:

In the last few decades, much of queer theory and sexuality studies has been engaged in analyzing and resisting the – often partial and exclusionary – assimilation of queer subjects into the cultural and economic fabric of the nation-state. As illiberal anti-gender rhetoric and politics (re)surface across Europe, it might seem as though queer theory ought to reconsider its critiques of queer liberalism and homonationalism – in the face of neo-fascist threats and LGBT-free zones, recourse to liberal ideals of human rights and national acceptance may assume increasing credibility and even urgency. But can anti-gender politics really be so neatly opposed to “progressive” values of gender equality and gay rights, as supposedly modeled by Nordic countries? This article seeks to complicate this apparent opposition between anti-gender politics and homonationalist rhetoric by tracing the racist and nationalist tendencies that transverse both projects. I argue that not only does the homonationalism or anti-gender politics binary disintegrate under scrutiny, but the binary framing itself works to further narratives of national exceptionalism that are parasitic upon, and reproduce, racialized exclusions. In particular, I rethink Norwegian homonationalism as a neoliberal assemblage in light of contemporary anti-gender rhetoric and policies, so as to understand how homonationalism and anti-gender politics not only coexist, but co-constitute each other in these times which are at once profoundly queer and deeply homophobic.

Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema

Beyond queer liberalism: marginal mobilities and the future of queer politics

ABSTRACT In this afterword, the author revisits and highlights some of the main arguments and analyses raised throughout the special issue. To do that, he focuses on an incident that took place during World Pride 2021, which was held in both Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. As two gay Ugandan activists with refugee status in Germany were on their way from Copenhagen to Malmö to take part in the LGBT Refugees Summit, they were detained for two hours by Swedish police for not having their passports on them. In light of this incident and thinking alongside the various critiques and analyses in this special issue, the author highlights the structural and lingering contradictions inherent in queer liberal politics, their complicity in reproducing violent border and migration policies, and the need for different analytical frameworks that foreground intersectionality, constantly revise their political efficacy, and maintain the radical potential of queer politics.

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Evil and Complicated Queers through History

Corporate India after Section 377: haphazardness and strategy in LGBTQ diversity and inclusion advocacy

It is increasingly common for advocates for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) workspace benefits and protections to argue for equitable treatment by utilizing the ‘business case’, or the argument that fostering a diverse and inclusive workspace promotes positive economic outcomes for multinational corporations (MNCs). Utilizing this discourse is particularly important in countries like India, where LGBTQ workers in the private sector have few to no legal protections. As such, a discourse that sutures human rights to business imperatives becomes a primary means of articulating LGBTQ precarity. In this contribution to the ‘Queer Precarities’ themed section, this article seeks to hold in tandem a critical analysis of this arguably neoliberal discourse of LGBTQ precarity with an ethnographic account of ‘following’ the business case into the diverse spacetimes in which it is performed. Drawing from ten-months of fieldwork primarily among MNCs in Bengaluru’s offshore information technologies (IT) industry beginning hours before the Indian Supreme Court read-down the colonial-era anti-sodomy law Section 377, this article describes how corporate organizations responded to the ruling and how these responses, often haphazard and experimental, provided moments for various LGBTQ diversity and inclusion (D&I) advocates to make claims on global capital. In placing criticism of queer liberalism into dialogue with geographic and anthropologic inquiries into globalizing business knowledge and practice, this article argues for moving beyond queer theoretical concerns of normativity to consider moments of maneuver available to actors otherwise unequally incorporated into the global distribution of labor.

Into Law's Artifice: Postwar Policing, Sexual Difference, and the Epistemic Gap

Vice Patrol analyzes how reconfigurations in postwar gay public life, psychiatric research, and policing surveillance technologies recast Americans’ chimerical commitments to purging sexual vice. Before a more radical, visible queer liberation movement emerged after 1969, vice enforcement was not a monolithic project but rather a conglomeration of newly empowered post-Prohibition liquor agents, policing units, and judicial institutions. Enforcement practices and institutional priorities generated inconsistencies over policing sexual difference, creating conflicts that became embedded in judicial processes, themselves fraught with institutional pressures and contradictions. These legal and administrative configurations did more than enforce existing law regulating sexual deviance; they actively produced identifiable targeted groups believed to be predisposed to sexual criminality. Vice Patrol’s insights are urgent; they reveal and explain the historical, institutional, and political processes of negotiating human expression into criminal acts requiring state policing intervention. The intrusive tactics that Lvovsky chronicles did not disappear; they were redirected, which is best articulated in the liberal disillusionment with “urban renewal” and with the Nixon administration's “War on Crime” that targeted “high crime” areas in urban communities of color, propelling forward racialized mass incarceration.

“They just need to empower themselves:” reproducing queer (neo)liberalism in LGBTS Empowerment discourses of representatives of LGBTS Human Rights NGOs in Ghana

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how LGBT empowerment is discursively constructed within the material context of postcolonial Ghana, arguing that LGBT empowerment emerges as a contentious site of “glocalized assemblage” that condenses multiple meanings and spatio-temporal histories of colonization, gender, and sexuality to produce contradictory and paradoxical effects on Sassoi. I explain how neoliberal frames of governmentality are embedded in LGBT-centred empowerment programmes through discursive evocations of community, personal responsibility and human rights education. In conclusion, I argue for queer (post)colonial approaches to LGBT empowerment that open up spaces for radical imaginations to social change in Ghana and across the Global South.

Quiet politics: Queer organizing in corporate Singapore

How could queer activism for social change be possible in an authoritarian but neoliberal environment? What does neoliberalism imply for queer struggles in non-Western contexts where liberal democracy is absent or non-existent? This article introduces the concept of ‘quiet politics’ to establish a new theoretical lens for understanding queer organizing under global capitalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data on the rise of corporate diversity activism in Singapore, it analyzes how queer employees navigate the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism in multinational corporations. The concept of quiet politics helps us understand the nuanced ways in which queer subjects ‘quietly’ mobilize themselves through a negotiation of neoliberalism, queer politics, and the authoritarian government that persecutes homosexuality. In doing so, this article challenges the Western notion of queer liberalism and sheds new light on the complex entanglement of neoliberal capitalism, corporate diversity, contentious politics, and queer activism from a global perspective.

The Violent Homo, Nationization in Tomer Heymann's Paper Dolls and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract What if the discursive and political recognition of queer liberation colludes with a nationalist agenda to produce a unified statehood? Postcolonial and transnational feminists have critiqued the political mobilization of GLBTQ rights within the context of nation-state modernity. The politics of queer inclusion and its institutional, normative production of subjects deemed to be (un)acceptable promote the modernity of progressive nations, but also justify state violations of sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities. This article examines Tomer Heymann's documentary film Paper Dolls and Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to articulate how the queer subjects in both texts play a role in and resist Israel's and India's optimization of Jewish and Hindu nations. I juxtapose the film and the novel to demonstrate that their focus on nonnormative, gender-variant subjects works differently: the film absorbs nationalist paradigms, whereas the novel critiques Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim ideology. I argue that queer world-making intervenes in the paradoxical exercise of the recognition of queer rights in the service of the exclusionary policies of emerging nationalisms.