Queer Love Research Articles

Hyphae Networks of Queer Love

Set against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic future where as a result of infections due to rapid mutations in most earthly organisms, human civilisation has significantly declined, the Danmei Novel Little Mushroom by Shisi narrates the tale of a mushroom on a quest to recover the spores stolen by some humans. At the beginning of the novel the mushroom attempts but is unsuccessful in saving the life of an injured human, however, in the process the mushroom absorbs the human’s genes and memories, and is able to shapeshift into a human form called An Zhe and thus sets on a course towards the location of human civilisation whereby he encounters Lu Feng the other protagonist of the novel. The research paper examines how this work of speculative science fiction embodies the concepts of post-humanism and queer masculinity and rejects the narratives of strict binaries and the superiority of the human race over others. The paper highlights the novel’s attempt to move away from anthropocentric and heteronormative thinking as the novel engages in narratives that showcase queer love and queer masculinities in a positive way that does not conform and restricts itself to the boundaries set up by a backward society.

Artists' Statements: IJPS volume 11, issue 1

Ani Ganzala and Taya Mâ Shere first met in an artists’ commune on the sacred shores of Bahia, Brazil, and have remained close friends ever since. Their creative work is rooted in ancestral dreaming, earth reverence, and spiritual activism. The curation of Ani’s visual art with Taya’s music in this journal was sparked by their recent retreat time together. Ani’s two pieces featured here are: “Aruanda,” (this issue's cover art) which highlights the relationship between the Black Diaspora and botanical technologies for physical and spiritual healing; and “No mundo aquático dos peixes e réptais, nós sonhamos / In the aquatic world of fish and reptiles, we dream,” which depicts physical and spiritual connection through black and queer love. Taya Mâ’s music is deeply rooted in her ritual and spiritual practice. Her piece featured here, “solidarity,” is a love song for liberation, an invocation of interdependence, and a call for collective care across realms.

“Dressed like boys, hair trimmed, a nalla kutti otherwise”: construction of queer suicide in Indian online news media

Suicide is a significant newsworthy event, and the media often cover cases involving queer individuals. However, there is a notable lack of research on the quality of reporting of queer suicide cases within the Indian context. This article aims to address the existing gap in Indian online news media by investigating the portrayal of queer suicide via content analysis. Content analysis involves qualitatively condensing and interpreting data to extract key consistencies and meanings from a plethora of qualitative material. The newspapers considered span from 2005 to 2022, with data collection conducted in 2023. The author alone identified news articles on queer suicide and conducted the subsequent content analysis. The study reveals that reporting on queer suicide tends to divide queer couples into the gender binary and describes what it deems to be careless sexual conduct driven by obsessive queer love, which, in turn, is blamed for the suicide. Moreover, these reports often do the following: feature families who refuse to accept their children’s identities, adopt dread-filled tones, and cite experts who provide incorrect information while engaging in victim blaming. As a result, the quality of queer suicide reporting in Indian newspapers is deemed substandard and offensive. To address this issue, the study proposes the need for training and curriculum updates in journalistic courses. This way, reporters can develop the skills necessary to sensitively and respectfully report on queer individuals in general and on queer suicide in particular.

Narrative Plenitude in The Ultimatum: Queer Love

This essay explores the styles of lesbian representation on display in the Netflix reality series, The Ultimatum: Queer Love. From its inclusion of masculine, non-binary cast members, to its in-jokes about instantaneous lesbian intimacy and attachment, the series offers what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wished for twenty years ago: a narrative plentitude that succeeds in capturing the quotidian messiness of lesbian desire and commitment.

Dangai fandoms under crossfire: The making of queer love in a permeable and convergent media ecology

Dangai web series burgeoned in the People's Republic of China in the late 2010s and introduced mainstream audiences to a brand of semihomoerotic media culture. We develop an ecological analysis of dangai production by surveying the four processes of online literature creation, entertainment production, censorship and regulation, and fan participation. We propose two arguments on media convergence/permeability and on queer fandom disruption. First, permeability and convergence characterize the production processes around dangai, with heterogeneous fandoms communicating intersystematically. Diverse, interconnected networks of fans serve as the infrastructure for dangai circulation among different audiences and uphold an interpretative framework prioritizing participation. Second, the broad circulation of dangai in different fields of cultural production opens an apolitical pathway for queer media representation to gain legitimacy. This pathway hinges on the tension between state control and pleasure-driven participation rather than ideological claims of identity politics.

What is love? Love from sociological perspectives and queer love in Indonesia

Love is a narrative that takes a defined form, even in lived experiences. This raises the question of whether same-sex love that follows the traditional romance narrative can be rightfully considered queer. Arab Muslims live in a society strongly tied to Islamic restrictions where the subject of homosexuality is strictly forbidden and considered taboo. The ideal of being loved and loving someone almost universally aspired to. This paper examines the definition of love, provides insight into the perspectives on love from sociologists Durkheim, Marx, Sorokin, and Parson, and analyzes queer love in Indonesia. Through four short narratives, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of love for both heterosexual and homosexual individuals. The research employs a qualitative method, and the interviews were limited to four participants aged between 35 and 45 from Jakarta. The study affords participants considerable freedom in answering the provided questions. I conduct interviews at various locations such as shopping malls, restaurants, and coffee shops, following the interviewees' preferences. For privacy reasons, pseudonyms are used for all names mentioned in this paper.

Longing for Annabel: Queer Love and the Melancholic Critic

Abstract: This essay advances a queer reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" through reframing his relationship with the editor Rufus Griswold, who posthumously printed the poem to accompany his infamous obituary of the poet. I argue that the complicated personal and sexual lives of Griswold offer queer resonances to understand his attachments to the action and feeling of "Annabel Lee." Indeed, the history of Griswold's marriages provides insight into how desire and disavowal create screens for refused melancholic attachments. Narrating his ill-fated second marriage to Charlotte Myers, I show how Griswold's desire to present himself as a normative and proper subject belie an anxiety over what he ends up considering wrong object choice, arguing in his divorce affidavit that she "had been bound, in honor and law, not to receive any man's offer of marriage." What this saga of Griswold's fraught attachments illuminates is how a critic's own entanglements with their objects of study can become rich contexts to understand both their own disavowed attachments and the objects that call forth their interest. As such, I consider how the literary critic's orientation toward objects of critique may be compellingly plumbed and analyzed for ways to engage more directly with the concerns of affect studies, queer studies, and author studies.

Racism and the making of gay rights: A sexologist, his student, and the empire of queer love By LaurieMarhoefer, University of Toronto Press. 2022. pp. 334. $34.95 (soft/ebook). ISBN: 9781487523978

Racism and the making of gay rights: A sexologist, his student, and the empire of queer love By LaurieMarhoefer, University of Toronto Press. 2022. pp. 334. $34.95 (soft/ebook). ISBN: 9781487523978

Production Review: Sugar in Our Wounds

Bryan Schmidt reviews Penumbra Theatre of St. Paul's production of Donja L. Love's Sugar in Our Wounds. The production dates were February 23 - March 19, 2023. The director was Sarah Bellamy who is also President of Penumbra Theatre. In this review, Schmidt examines the production's emphasis on visually and aesthetically embracing the major themes of queer love, familial bonds, and racial violence. Content Warning: Please note that this review contains discussions of adult situations and racial violence as seen in the production.       

Duet on the Theme of “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar

Research Article| June 01 2023 Duet on the Theme of “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar Miriam Petty, Miriam Petty Miriam J. Petty is an associate professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film and associate dean for academic programs in Northwestern’s Graduate School. She writes and teaches about race, genre, stardom, and performance. Her award-winning book, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood explores the limits and possibilities of black stardom during the “golden age” of mainstream U.S. cinema. Petty’s work has appeared in Genders, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal for Cinema and Media Studies, and as a co-chair of SCMS’ Committee on Antiracism, Equity, and Diversity. Petty is currently at work on Madea’s Baby, Tyler’s Maybe, a monograph charting the industrial and cultural appeals of Tyler Perry’s films and plays, from 1998 to 2019. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Joshua Chambers-Letson Joshua Chambers-Letson Joshua Chambers-Letson is a professor of Performance Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University and the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (winner of the 2019 Outstanding Book Award from the Association of Theatre in Higher Education and the 2019 Erroll Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award from ATHE); co-editor of José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown with Tavia Nyong’o and of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital with Christine Moke; and series co-editor of NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series with Tavia Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini. JCL is currently at work on a monograph about the art of queer love and loss. They are presently the 2022-2023 Thinker in Residence with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.15 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Miriam Petty, Joshua Chambers-Letson; Duet on the Theme of “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 15–22. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.15 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search I have been thinking about our strange, shared attachment to the rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar (both stage musical and its film adaptation). Especially our attachments to the characters of Judas and Mary Magdalene, and their exchange in the song “Everything’s Alright.” In the 1971 Broadway production, the role of Judas was performed by two Black actors: Carl Anderson (who also played the role in the film) and Broadway legend Ben Vereen. Mary Magdalene was embodied on stage and screen by iconic Japanese American performer and 1970s disco hitmaker Yvonne Elliman. We both grew up listening to the musical, though its telling with our respective orientations in performance studies and film and media studies that your preferred version was the original motion picture soundtrack (1973) and mine was the Broadway cast recording (1971). But what we both seemed to share, as children, was an attachment to the complex blackness of Anderson... You do not currently have access to this content.

‘Cheerful AND Profound!’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Buster Keaton

Inspired by Buster Keaton’s sporadic but crucial presence in Elizabeth Bishop’s writing, this paper examines her artistic ideal of comic surrealism through the lens of queer phenomenology. Keaton’s slapstick comedy serves as a nice cinematic parallel to Bishop’s understanding of ‘real wit’ as ‘usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous’. Taking the oft-cited 1964 letter and Bishop’s ‘Keaton’ (late 1950s) as points of departure, I carry out an intermedial analysis of the Keatonesque elements in Bishop’s comic surrealist poems that blur the demarcation between a brutal reality and a dream world of endless possibilities. These poems bring about a sudden flash of self-awareness of our own contingency, ultimately to reorient us towards what I call queer love. The formal, thematic associations that I draw between the two artists illuminate not only the poet’s surprisingly quirky, experimental sides, but her subtle deftness in addressing political issues around gender, sexuality, class, and race.

“Just like everyone else:” queer representation in postmillennial Bollywood

ABSTRACT On 6 September 2018, after decades of queer activism, the Supreme Court of India declared unconstitutional the centuries-old law against sodomy, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Shelly Chopra Dhar’s Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (How I felt when I saw that Girl, 2019) and Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyaada Saavdhan (Be Extra Wary of Marriage, 2020) were the first two popular Hindi-language films, on same-sex love and desire, to be released after the scrapping of 377. We note the significance of Ek Ladki and Shubh Mangal to destigmatizing non-normative sexualities as well as the identitarian impulse of these films to name, illuminate, and mainstream queer love. We examine these films as they intervene in the broader field of representation and make complex maneuvers to normalize same-sex love and coax the consent of mainstream audiences. They do so by incorporating queer identity and same-sex love in ways that render it non-threatening to the heteronormative status quo. The intertextual allusions to popular Hindi cinema, however, carry queer transgressive potential as they allow for a claiming of a genealogy of queer desire in Hindi cinema.

Queer Voids

Queer Voids

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.

PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean

PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean

Politics and Poetics

Politics and Poetics

"Just be careful": Sexual Desire and Autism in YA Novels

<p class="first-line-indent-western">The past two decades have witnessed a rise in the number of autistic characters in YA literature, particularly autistic protagonists. In line with progress made by researchers and the self-advocacy from organizations and activists that have brought nuance in our understanding of autism, YA novels are offering more diverse representation of the spectrum, even if there is still room for improvement – for instance, the inclusion of more non-white autistic characters, non-binary people, and queer love stories. Autistic characters are now romantic leads in their own rights, and authors explore the way they experience sexual desire and sexuality through their neurodifference (e.g., the need to accommodate their heightened sensory sensitivities). Their desirability is also underlined through the loving eyes of their love interests, sometimes in the form of alternating narratives. All this counters the societal tendency to desexualize autistic people, and disabled people in general. This article explores how desire emerges from a mix of alterity and kinship in my primary corpus: all the love interests are neurotypical and they recognize the differences of the autistic characters while also sharing some of their special interests and feeling out of step with the world. It also considers how authors make use of autistic traits, such as sensory hypersensitivities and doing extensive research on topics of interest, to invite readers to take their time and be well informed when it comes to sexual intimacy.

A House Unsettled by Trynne Delaney

Reviewed by: A House Unsettled by Trynne Delaney Wesley Jacques Delaney, Trynne A House Unsettled. Annick Press, 2022 [360p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781773216959 $19.95 Reviewed from digital galleys R* Gr. 9-12 In the wake of her father's very public arrest, biracial teen Asha is forced to move from the city to what is clearly a haunted house in the Maritimes with her estranged white mother. At first, Asha prefers small-town rumors about the ghosts of the old family home over dealing with any rumors about her father, but her relationship with her mother is still floundering, especially because of her mom's suspicious new boyfriend. Asha decides to shift her attention to a new friendship with her neighbor Cole and dive deep into the eeriness of her house and the town's lore, which unveils some complicated connections to both the white and Black sides of her own family. While Cole is initially reluctant to believe Asha's reports of paranormal happenings, ghostly possessions make a decades-old queer love story, a subsequent murder mystery, and heartbreaking racial injustice hard to ignore just as Asha is coming to terms with her feelings toward Cole and Cole is rethinking their gender. Through tense conversations about identity and hard-fought intimacy, the novel explores the ghastly legacies of racial and sexual injustice. Ultimately, Asha's decision to burn the house down is both an overly neat but wholly reasonable conclusion to this thoughtful reflection on how bigotry of the past informs the hauntings of the present. Copyright © 2022 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now

Touching the Past, or Reading as If It Matters Now Tyler Schwaller (bio) There are certain works that have so transformed my ways of thinking that I sometimes forget what it was like to think otherwise. Dr. Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women is one of those texts. As I teach in both academic and ecclesial settings about the Bible and sexuality, I draw regularly upon the materials and insights of Dr. Brooten's work and of course cite her appropriately. However, the content has become so familiar to me that I sometimes forget the sheer scope of the book's impact. This opportunity to spend substantial time again with the text has illuminated for me that Love Between Women is not only an important work that I cite for evidence, but also one that I cannot and do not think apart from, as Dr. Brooten's arguments have so fundamentally shaped the ways I think about sex, gender, and sexuality in the ancient world and its implications for contemporary discourses and debates. It is truly an honor to be able to reflect on the impact of this transformative work. I will admit that it made me somewhat anxious to present as part of this retrospective special section, as I have felt a tension between the manner in which I think I am supposed to speak "as a scholar" and what I really want to say, which is perhaps more confessional. But even as Dr. Brooten's Love Between Women has certainly sharpened my scholarly sensibilities, its influence has been deeper and farther-reaching for me. So, I would like to share in terms of my experiences with the text, which begin with the personal and extend beyond academe to workshops I have taught on the Bible and sexuality with church groups. These workshops have taken place primarily in United Methodist contexts.1 Further, I have drawn [End Page 177] upon Dr. Brooten's work while engaging in ecclesial juridical settings convened to enforce the United Methodist Church's anti-queer policies. This leads me to reflect in two directions: first, toward celebration and gratitude for Love Between Women and second, toward ethics of interpretation, scholarship, pedagogy, and sex. I initially encountered Love Between Women soon after coming out as gay, as I was still thinking through my relationship to the church and to the Bible. I experienced the commentary on Rom 1:18–32 especially as freeing.2 Without being able to name at the time what felt deficient, I had been left unsatisfied by mainstream progressive interpretive strategies aimed at affirming same-sex desire and relationships. I was familiar with two primary approaches, sometimes working in tandem: claiming that homosexuality is a modern category, thereby presuming biblical texts have nothing to say on the topic as we know it, and/or contending that ancient condemnation of same-sex desire is really a critique of pederasty (as if that were the only same-sex relationality known in the ancient world). These possibilities for claiming that modern queer relationality was unknown to biblical writers and so freed from scriptural scrutiny was first introduced to me in the published debate between Dan Via and Robert Gagnon, which I purchased and read in secret in high school.3 Such line of thinking was reinforced when I encountered Foucault in college and learned his claim that homosexuality emerged as a discrete concept only in the modern period. While I appreciated the call to think contextually, not generalizing categories of desire across time and space, I was unsatisfied by the notion that the best defense for queer love today would be the impossibility of its imagination in the past. What felt so freeing about reading the commentary in Love Between Women was to let go of the intellectual gymnastics and simply name things as they are: Paul does not like same-sex desire, full stop. But Paul draws upon contemporaneous thought to make an argument fundamentally rooted in the assumption of women's subordination.4 Recognizing that I could not support the underlying logic and so did not feel beholden to the argument, I acknowledged for myself the need to look elsewhere, to consider...

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral

Choosing Threat, Embodying the Viral