Queer Liberation Research Articles

Queer feminist interruptions to internationalising UK higher education

AbstractThis paper considers queer feminist interruptions as a way to halt, reverse and rethink internationalisation in UK higher education (HE). These points of intervention are situated within the queer development studies literature, which provides a framework for understanding internationalisation practices alongside other strategies of Western extraction, critical of claims that internationalisation is important for enhancing diversity. Throughout, the paper confronts the problematic, colonial narratives of global LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) human rights progress as framed by the global north, and how UK internationalisation strategy often reproduces or doubles‐down on these narratives. The central questions addressed are: (1) how does queer liberation help academics think differently about promoting, participating in and developing UK HE internationally? (2) What can academics learn from those working to centre queer feminist practices in their transnational research and teaching? In conversation with critical internationalisation studies scholarship, this paper contributes to ongoing research about internalisation with a queer sensitivity. As such, the paper highlights the limiting binary logics and heteronormativity in internationalisation, as well as new directions for collaboration across communities working for radical liberation on campus beyond agendas of inclusion.

Airway Queerance

Airway Queerance

Queer as in Abolition Now!

Abstract “Queer as in Abolition Now!” introduces the special issue “Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition.” The issue brings together scholars, artists, and writers working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical activist movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition. Drawing on methodologies from the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts, contributors offer fresh vocabularies and analytical lenses to the ongoing work of constructing liberatory futures without prisons, police, or the tyranny of colonial gender systems.

Transgender tanka

transgender tanka Rodolfo Avelar (bio) if i were to fleeinto a mountain range& listen to her& be sure to water herwould she grow out of me then? [End Page 67] Rodolfo Avelar Rodolfo Avelar is a poet and artist from Fresno, CA. They hold a Bachelor of Arts from Fresno State, where they studied English Literature and Creative Writing. Their poetry projects queer people of color into science fiction, the future, outer space, and queer liberation. They are a MFA candidate in poetry at UC Riverside. As a Milkweed 2019 summer intern, they designed and edited book length poetry manuscripts. Their work can be found at the Acentos Review, COUNTERCLOCK, and elsewhere. They hope to publish, edit, & teach poetry, perfect their desk set-up, and play some video games along the way. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

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

‘It’s easy to mistrust police when they keep on killing us’: A queer exploration of police violence and LGBTQ+ Victimization

ABSTRACT Almost 50 years after the Stonewall riots, queer liberation and police resistance are still inextricably intertwined. International hate crime statistics around the globe show increasingly high rates of LGBTQ+ victimization and criminalization by law enforcement. This qualitative research aims at evaluating whether queer theories of visibility and performativity could serve as useful tools to investigate the problematic dynamics between police and young queer individuals. For this purpose, online interviews were carried out with a sample of 20 young queer individuals from different European countries. Findings revealed that performing non-heteronormative bodies and behaviours is associated with being perceived as risky, dangerous and deviant. The correlation between queerness and deviance leads to a number of detrimental consequences, including police over-policing and criminalizing young LGBTQ+ individuals in public spaces, queer people underreporting hate crime incidents for fear of secondary victimization, and overall scepticism and mistrust towards the criminal justice system. Thus, this research not only affirms the importance of including queer voices in criminological research, but it also reveals the insidious nature of police violence against the LGBTQ+ community, which has long been neglected in queer studies.

A Clarification

In my article in Radical History Review 138, “The Very Quintessence of Persecution: Queer Anti-Fascism in 1970s Western Europe,” I argued that “transgender and gender-nonconforming people and cisgender lesbians” led the way within 1970s European LGBT+ movements in connecting queer liberation, anti-fascism, and anticapitalism, and developing what I argue was a uniquely queer anti-fascism.1 I would like to clarify after publication that this was also the case for West Germany’s Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW). On page 69 of my article, I referred to HAW queer anti-fascists as “trans and cis lesbian feminists,” “lesbians and trans people,” and “trans and cis feminists.”2 I intended to include gender-nonconforming activists in these formulations (within a broad notion of trans), but I have since received feedback that my formulation was confusing and led some to believe I was calling the Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin’s Feminist Group (Femnistengruppe) a transgender women’s group or a cisgender lesbian’s group, neither of which would be accurate.The Feminist Group is an example of how gender-nonconforming queers led the way, along with transgender women and cisgender lesbians, in developing queer anti-fascism within HAW and in other European queer movements. The Feminist Group was founded as an organizing and social space for gender-nonconforming femmes who embraced revolutionary Marxism and reclaimed the German term Tunten for themselves. Tunten is historically a German slur, similar to English words such as sissy, used against effeminate queers. It connotes that the person being verbally attacked is specifically an effeminate man and is therefore usually used against gay men and as a transphobic slur against trans women and non-binary people. Members of the Feminist Group wore femme clothes and took femme names but most did not identify as trans women at this time. That does not say or mean anything about how they may have identified later. It is of course possible that some may have later come out or identified as trans women, trans*, non-binary, genderfluid, or another gender identity. This question is beyond the scope of my research here, but the Feminist Group itself was not founded as a trans women’s group. The Feminist Group was also not a cis lesbian group. Cis lesbians mostly, but not exclusively, organized within the HAW Women’s Group (Frauengruppe).3The members of the Feminist Group saw their own femme gender presentation as a challenge to bourgeois morality and therefore capitalism itself because they argued that fixed gender roles were a product, at least in part, of heteropatriarchal capitalism. They rejected gender roles and expectations all together in a way that they understood to be revolutionary and confrontational.4 They were not the only group where queer anti-fascists organized within HAW. Cis lesbian anti-fascists organized within the Women’s Group before queer socialists and intersectional activists were pushed out, and HAW’s explicitly revolutionary communist political position meant that queer anti-fascism was a part of discussions at regular plenary and group meetings at least before the cis male majority moved the organization away from political radicalness in the mid-1970s.Defining the gender and sexual identities of historical queer groups is never simple. Transgender studies problematizes rigid definitions of gender and distinctions between transsexuality, gender nonconformity, and gender variance today and in the past.5 I understand the members of the Feminist Group to be gender nonconforming, and in this paragraph on page 69 of my article, I attempted to include them under the umbrella of “trans” in line with what Susan Stryker has called “transgender phenomena,” which she has used to get at diverse gender practices including “transsexuality and crossdressing, some aspects of intersexuality and homosexuality, cross-cultural and historical investigations of human gender diversity, [and] myriad specific subcultural expressions of ‘gender atypictality.’”6 However, I regret my formulation here because it caused confusion and was out of step with the relatively clearer formulation I had used in my introduction and elsewhere (“transgender and gender non-conforming people and cisgender lesbians”7) and which I further defined in endnote 4 where I clarified that “transgender, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming are not exclusive terms. The reference highlights the contributions of overlapping identities marginalized within the LGBT+ movement.”8

Supporting LGBTQ2S Youth Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

We are in the midst of a movement led by BIPOC* young people that seeks to address the deeply ingrained racism that has always existed in our society. In times like this, we are reminded of Marsha P. Johnson and Jewelle Gomez, who stood on the front lines for queer liberation while surviving at the intersection of racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Today LGBTQ2S* BIPOC youth are leading movements for substantive change, while navigating multiple marginalized identities within prevailing systems of oppression. The resulting mental health consequences for youth within this community have been thoroughly evidenced.1–3 Yet mental health disparities continue to persist and are exacerbated by deficit-based approaches to treatment for youth within this community, rather than strength-based approaches. Ultimately, these prevailing mental health disparities highlight the need for an updated examination of the literature on caring and advocating for LGBTQ2S BIPOC youth, whose experiences are broad-ranging and dynamic.

A conversation about fat activism among activists in community with Nolose

ABSTRACT Informed by the FaT GiRL Roundtables in FaT GiRL: A Zine for Fat Dykes and the Women Who Want Them, a group of US-based queer and transgender fat activists from diverse races, classes, ages, disabilities, and geographies, some associated with or in community with members of the queer and transgender fat liberation organization, Nolose, discuss fat activism. Activism discussed includes work in burlesque, community organizing, daily interpersonal work, work in higher education, organizing or funding community events, fat culture-making, exercise, and both online and in-person mutual aid and education. Participants raise relationships and events that led them to become fat activists, and talk about challenges in fat activism including the widespread belief that fat people can become thin people, racism and cissexism, internalized oppression, “body positivity” decentering superfat people and people of color and centering smaller white cisgender women. Included is the poem “Impostor Syndrome” by Dr. Sydney Lewis. Participants also talk about opportunities for action, powerful and effective strategies and tactics of fat activists, and possible futures of intersectional radical fat activism; these include mutual aid online organizing, centering Black fat femme people and politics in fat liberation analysis, multiple accessible ways of organizing, and organizing both with cultural and relationship-based work.

Breaking the binary by coming out as a trans scientist

Institutions need experts in racial justice and queer liberation to shoulder the burden of advocating for scientists from under-represented groups, says Robin Aguilar. Institutions need experts in racial justice and queer liberation to shoulder the burden of advocating for scientists from under-represented groups, says Robin Aguilar.

“You Cannot Oppress Those Who Do Not Exist”

Reports in April 2017 regarding a state-initiated wave of homophobic persecution in Chechnya attracted worldwide outrage. Numerous witnesses spoke of arrests, abuse, and murders of gay men in the republic. In response, a spokesman of Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov, claimed that “you cannot … oppress those who simply do not exist.” In this article, with the antigay purge in Chechnya and in particular the denial of queer existence as their starting point, Brock and Edenborg examine more deeply processes of erasure and disclosure of queer populations in relation to state violence and projects of national belonging. They discuss (1) what the events in Chechnya tell us about visibility and invisibility as sites of queer liberation, in light of recent discussions in LGBT visibility politics; (2) what the episodes tell us about the epistemological value of queer visibility, given widespread media cynicism and disbelief in the authenticity of images as evidence; and (3) what role the (discursive and physical) elimination of queers plays in relation to spectacular performances of nationhood. Taken together, the authors’ findings contribute to a more multifaceted understanding of the workings of visibility and invisibility and their various, sometimes contradictory, functions in both political homophobia and queer liberation.

State Involvement in LGBT+ Health and Social Support Issues in Canada

For the first time, the broad health issues, needs and concerns of LGBT+ people in Canada were taken up by the federal government’s Standing Committee on Health in 2019. The findings of their consultations with LGBT+ Canadians produced a report that at once captures the breadth of input received, and provides an opportunity for accountable state response to LGBT+ health needs in the form of research, education, policy, funding and programming, yet questions arise as to the socio-political approach that will ultimately be taken. This focus on the health of LGBT+ Canadians follows decades of grassroots and sometimes state-funded research on this very issue. This study undertook a critical content analysis, premised on the queer liberation theory of The Health of LGBTQIA2 Communities in Canada report issued by the Standing Committee on Health. Although the report, for the most part, covers a breadth of broad LGBT+ health issues (a noted shift from the predominance of HIV/AIDS), the depth to which the Standing Committee took up and absorbed such issues is far less apparent. The heavy emphasis on entry-level recommendations by which to take up important LGBT+ health issues undermines a more progressive, liberationist approach that would more effectively address these concerns.

Mapping lesbian and queer lines of desire: Constellations of queer urban space

The path to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) liberation has been narrated through a claim to long-term, propertied territory in the form of urban neighborhoods and bars. However, lesbians and queers fail to retain these spaces over generations, often due to their lesser political and economic power. What then is the lesbian–queer production of urban space in their own words? Drawing on interviews with and archival research about lesbians and queers who lived in New York City from 1983 to 2008, my participants queered the fixed, property-driven neighborhood models of LGBTQ space in producing what I call constellations. Like stars in the sky, contemporary urban lesbians and queers often create and rely on fragmented and fleeting experiences in lesbian–queer places, evoking patterns based on generational, racialized, and classed identities. They are connected by overlapping, embodied paths and stories that bind them over generations and across many identities, like drawing lines between the stars in the sky. This queer feminist contribution to critical urban theory adds to the models of queering and producing urban space–time.

Perverse Politics, Postsocialist Radicality: Queer Marxism in China

Abstract This article offers a queer postsocialist lens to theoretical contestations around neoliberalism, socialist legacies, capitalist reform, and the Chinese state. I foreground a queer Marxist position by situating Chinese capitalist developmentalism in global racial capitalism. I examine a recent GLBTQ hiring event in Shanghai alongside publications and personal involvement with the socialist organization “Queer Workers.” Based on this analysis, I contend that, rather than taking the Chinese state’s leftist legacies for granted, queer Marxism should be read as critical Marxism in the global postsocialist present. In the Marxist perspective, the sexual politics of queer liberation is inherently anti-statist and anti-capitalist. Further, queer Marxism in China, while remaining tied to postsocialism and the afterlife of the Cold War, should be situated within the broader struggle against racial capitalism. Groups like Queer Workers should be taken seriously as they are actively making space for historically and geographically grounded postsocialist radicality on their own terms.

“For opacity”: Queerness and Latinidad in Justin Torres’ We the Animals

This article examines the investments of Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals (2012), with Latinidad, queerness and masculinity under the framework of opacity proposed by Edouard Glissant. I argue that Torres’s novel employs opacity—the refusal to be legible to the gaze of a dominant Other—as a way of grappling with the tensions between Latinx and queer identities and textualizing the relationship between queerness and other forms of structural marginalization. I read the novel’s aesthetic strategies in relation to opacity and the institutionalization of creative writing and consider the politics of the novel within a genealogy of US Puerto Rican coming-of-age novels and their relationship to the literary market. Finally, I read the relationships among masculinity, queerness and Latinidad the novel presents and illustrate how it ultimately presents a blueprint for Latinx queer liberation.

LGBTQ + community organizations under neoliberalism in Ontario, Canada: Contradictions and disconnects

This study examines the impact of neoliberal policy—which introduces competition for funding and pressure to professionalize and bureaucratize—on the working conditions and precarity of a purposive sample of southern Ontario (Canada) organizations dealing with LGBTQ + health. Findings from semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 20 community-based organization stakeholders and government bureaucrats confirmed that neoliberal policy pressures these organizations to professionalize and bureaucratize, while restricting political advocacy. Queer Liberation Theory’s three central tenets of anti-assimilationism, solidarity across movements, and the political economy of queer health are used to understand the situation and possible futures for third-sector organizations within the LGBTQ + movement.

Sweetarts: The Politics of Exclusion, and Camping Out with Susan Sontag at the Met

Camp, historically a coded communication of queer identity has been recently dragged out of the closet and into the limelight with the exhibition “Camp, Notes on Fashion” (2019) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. While a lot of the fashion that was on display was kitschy, and certainly fun and clever, some of it left the exhibition vulnerable to criticism that it was not actually Camp. Also, an exhibition like this while overtly very gay-positive brings up many issues about the packaging and presentation of queer culture. This essay involves a review of the exhibition itself as well as an examination of the criteria for inclusion or (sometimes deliberate) exclusion of key elements of Camp: the abject, consumerism, and queer liberation to name a few. As well as what self-appointed arbiter of Camp, Susan Sontag inadvertently communicated about her own conflicted relationship with what would eventually become queer culture in her 1964 Partisan Review essay “Notes on Camp,” which formed the theoretical bedrock of this exhibition. Research methodology employs “grounded theory” which seeks to broaden the parameters of “data” to include ethical concerns and the voices of non-dominant groups, who are traditionally excluded from economic evaluations, and normative mainstream concerns. Research methods involve an experiential review of the exhibition itself, as well as a deeper exploration of the themes on display, and an analysis of visual rhetoric and elements of queer political theory that were brought up by this type of display within this venue. As the definition of Camp is political, contextual and in a state of constant evolution, the examination of this in a museum setting provides a rich locus for analysis from queer, visual culture and social theory perspectives. In the spirit of the original Sontag article, a “Camp” list better situated in contemporaneity is also included.

50 Years after Stonewall: The Legacies and Memory-making of the 1969 Riots

Deconstructing Stonewall in France What is “Stonewall”? A small bar in Manhattan. An historical event marked by rioting and police violence. A metonym for the radical turn in queer liberation. A romanticized, white-washed discourse riding the channels of U.S. imperialism, erasing and reconfiguring local mobilization histories in its path. A mythical rereading of the past that reflects the social and political power of the people who created it. It is, undoubtedly, all of these things and muc...

Cis-Hetero-Misogyny Online

This article identifies five genres of anti-queer hate speech found in The Australian’s Facebook comments sections, exposing and analyzing the ways in which such comments are used to derogate cisgender and (often) heterosexual women. One may be tempted to think of cis-het women as third-party victims of queerphobia; however, this article argues that these genres of anti-queer speech are, in fact, misogynistic. Specifically, it argues that these are instances of cis-hetero-misogynistic hate speech. Cis-hetero-misogyny functions as the “law enforcement branch” of a cis-hetero-patriarchal gender order. Given the existence of such an order, it is clear that cis-het women’s liberation is inextricable from queer liberation (and vice versa). This article argues that to facilitate allyship and challenge this gender order—the order that elicits such hate speech acts—we need an epistemological revolution in the way we recognize and re-cognize human difference.

Legitimating Violences: The ‘Gay Rights’ NGO and the Disciplining of the Sri Lankan Queer Figure

Sri Lanka has debated the decriminalization of homosexuality for several decades, but never with more vigour than in 2017, when the government considered this legislative change. This project was eventually abandoned, inspiring fierce opposition by local ‘LGBT’ non-governmental organizations (NGOs), resulting in an escalation of advocacy work in the country. This article interrogates the capacity ‘LGBT’ NGOs possess to (re)produce forms of structural violence and reify new idioms of normativity as they seek to emancipate the queer figure. The site of conflict between the state and civil society is rife with the problematics of nation and capital, for the NGO reifies ethno-nationalism and capitalist social cleavages. Meanwhile, reliance on material support from the Global North renders these organizations enmeshed in transnational neoliberal politics. In negotiating the narcissistic desires of state and global hegemonies, and the crisis of legitimacy that emerges through these encounters, NGOs demarcate a specifically interpellated figure as the normative ‘LGBT’ citizen, thereby collapsing a range of queer desires to flat, restrictive ontologies that exclude many. Using interviews, informal conversations and observations gleaned through an ethnography on genders and sexualities in Sri Lanka, this article explores the institutional politics of queer liberation in Sri Lanka, enmeshed as they are in the myriad complexities of postcolonial neoliberal modernity.