Queer Memory Research Articles

Funny Boy, postmemorial potentialities, and the queer diasporic Sri Lankan novel

ABSTRACT As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory as “postmemory” in line with Marianne Hirsch’s theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch’s framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka.

No Strangers: Older Gay Men in the Films of Ventura Pons

In a career spanning more than five decades Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons (Barcelona, 1945) has directed over 30 films. His eclectic filmography does not easily fit categories or labels of any kind, including queer cinema. However, the frequent presence of gay male characters and same-sex desire in his films is significant, especially given the advanced age of a very high proportion of those men. Pons’ camera does not shy away from presenting their bodies as both desirable and desiring, older bodies that don’t hide away from the camera. Starting with a re-reading of Amic/Amat (1998) from the perspective of aging studies, the article focuses on key examples of older gay and queer men in his work, with special emphasis on films that Pons directed in his sixties (Forasters (2008), A la deriva (2009), Mil cretins (2010)). It identifies recurring themes and tropes in this context, such as cross-dressing, memory or inheritance and finds that the filmmaker’s interest in queer memory is closely linked to arguably the main preoccupation of his work: the cultural history of Catalonia.

Subjects without history? Sexual citizenship, queer temporality, and postcoloniality in Mozambique

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationships among queer histories, minority rights, temporal regimes and the promise of sexual citizenship in contemporary Mozambique. It critiques the dominant and conservative view that LGBTIQ+ Africans are “subjects without history,” or “out of time,” to use Rahul Rao’s influential phrasing. Based on archival and oral history research, the article argues that LGBTIQ+ Africans do not necessarily fit in the temporality of the nation but rather live in constant friction and negotiation with it, sometimes insisting on their inclusion in the official history, sometimes creating their own story and imaginations of the past. By comparatively analysing two historical moments – the revolutionary post-independence period, from the mid- to late 1970s, and the “decriminalisation” of homosexuality, in 2015 – the article advances a queer critique of national historiography, gesturing to the possibility of (and perhaps the need for) a plural queer memory for Mozambique.

In Queer Memory: Mediating Queer Chinese History in Digital Video Documentaries

This article examines the digital and cinematic mediation of queer memory in four independent Chinese documentaries: Queer China, “Comrade” China (dir. Cui Zi’en 2008), Our Story (dir. Yang Yang, 2011), We Are Here (dir. Shi Tou and Jing Zhao, 2016) and Shanghai Queer (dir. Chen Xiangqi, 2019). All these films have been made by queer identified filmmakers and have used the digital video documentary format as an activist strategy; all have strived to record China’s queer history in the post-Mao era. However, because of the filmmakers’ gender and sexual subjectivities, together with the historical and social contexts in which these films were made, the four documentaries remember China’s queer history in different ways. Together, these documentaries contest a heteronormative and a homonormative narrative of Chinese history by constructing alternative memories; they also insert queer people’s voices and experiences into that history. All these mediations testify to the heterogeneity of queer people’s experience, as well as the overdetermination of queer memory as a result of a contingent assemblage of factors such as time, place, technology and filmmaker’s gender and sexual subjectivities.

Richard the Lionheart, Contested Queerness, and Crusading Memory

This article explores King Richard I of England (r. 1189–99) and the medieval and modern historiography on the subjects of 1) his contested sexuality and 2) his participation in the Third Crusade (1187–92). In addition to demonstrating that the evidence of his queerness is both considerable and unambiguous, the article investigates how Richard’s political and cultural legacy has been used and re-used, how his status as an English national hero has been increasingly called into question, and how modern anxieties about the medieval crusades have driven the need to reconfigure his historical memory. It also briefly touches upon questions of ‘religious’ versus ‘secular’ violence, transhistorical Christian-Muslim relations, and the problematic and enduring mythology of the crusades in modern and post-Brexit Britain, especially in regard to the epistemological legacy of the Western Christian world, its historical empire-building and other projects in which the crusades have played a major role, and the ongoing reckoning and reshaping of these ideas. Lastly, it proposes new concepts of premodern queer memory and the academic practice of queer history, and calls for the creation of an analytical space that assertively centres these complexities.

Homonationalism, LGBT desaparecidos, and the politics of queer memory in Argentina

Although homonationalism is a fundamental category in queer studies, it has never been used to understand the history of the Argentine lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender movement and the emergence of a hegemonic queer memory based on the self-representation of Argentina as a “European-like” and “white” nation that often claims to be different from “the rest” of Latin America. This article examines the history of the Argentine construction of whiteness to understand hegemonic queer memory today and analyze why the 1976–1983 dictatorship has been hyper-memorialized, while state violence against queer people in democratic times is downplayed. We also refer to homonationalism to understand the success of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender rights revolution and present a discussion of the relationship between lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender politics and the construction of queer memory. As homonationalism shaped the formation of a hegemonic queer memory in the twenty-first century, alternative memories of police harassment of travestis and homosexual men after and before the dictatorship have been hidden in plain sight through reframing, displacement, temporal transpositions, and other forms of scripting.

Unsettling homocolonial frames of remembrance: Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer interventions at the museum

This article considers a Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer protest at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a flashpoint that exposes problems with how memory-making institutions are incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer issues into their programming and/or collections. The protest brings into relief the museum’s investment in a homocolonial framing of remembrance for the way in which the telling of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer ‘progress’ is entangled with a settler colonial political economy wherein the tokenistic inclusion of some queers into the sexual citizenry happens alongside the dispossession, devaluing and criminalizing of others. I then undertake some preliminary ‘curatorial dreaming’ upon two other interventions–commentaries uploaded to a digital story bank by a Two-Spirit and an Indigenous queer museumgoer, and the short film Woman Dress by Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand. Along with the protest, the commentaries and the film unsettle homocolonial frames of remembrance and provide critical openings towards decolonial queer memory work at the museum.

Anamarija Horvat. Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television

Abstract

Queer Memory Beyond the Archive: Reading LGBTQ Pasts on Screen Towards Queer Futures

A review of Anamarija Horvat’s 2021 book, Screening Queer Memory: LGBTQ Pasts in Contemporary Film and Television, in which she sets out to examine how queer memory is represented on and created by contemporary US and UK film and television. In this review, the author examines the claims and goals of the book, as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

Between Archives

AbstractDrawing on critical aging studies, this article argues that queer relations inform understandings of loss, family, and belonging. What happens when older adults review, rehearse, and reappropriate historical texts? What is possible when archives serve as a space of dialogue? How do aging and death impact queer memory transmission? The article analyzes research methods while examining queer family as a tool for intergenerational collaboration. This work rethinks designations of “generation” and “aging” by applying nonheteronormative frameworks.

Quare Memory in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy

This essay adapts David Cregan's concept of ‘queer memory’ – a form of memory defined ‘by exclusion rather than inclusion’ – to the author of The Quare Fellow, analysing narrative gaps in Brendan Behan's Borstal Boy in order to better understand its construction of cultural memory. Situating Borstal Boy within a growing canon of Irish writing on coercive confinement, the essay contends that draft versions act as an important component of textual memory, as can be seen by the more explicit portrayal of queer sexuality in Behan's drafts. Both in its transgressive portrayal of queer masculinity, and in the ‘quare’ narrative strategies used to incorporate this material into the published text, Borstal Boy presents an author whose ‘quareness’ is a key part of his literary aesthetic.

Správa z konferencie ALMS Conference Berlin 2019: ,Queering Memory - Archives - Arts - Audiences’

The conference, organised by the Berlin-based Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld, was focused on the position of queer memory in the contemporary memory institutions such as museums, archives and specialized collections as well as the expression of queer-related topics in art.

Hacia un cuerpo marica: una reflexión situada sobre investigación, memoria queer/cuir, infancia sexo-disidente y trols

Este artículo busca construir una primera aproximación reflexiva desde categorías provenientes del pensamiento sexo-disidente y el análisis cultural a una serie de experiencias de investigación situadas y relacionadas con derivas identitarias vinculadas a la construcción de conocimiento desde perspectivas teóricas propias de la subversión sexo-genérica. Para esto se desarrollará una propuesta de escritura vinculada al concepto de interruqción (val flores) que pretende establecer relaciones entre ciertas trayectorias de investigación sobre memoria queer y representaciones culturales en el sistema científico con la posibilidad de una construcción auto-histórico-teórica (Gloria Anzaldúa) anclada en la recuperación de una enunciación sexo-disidente proveniente de la infancia marica.

Broken Records: Materiality, Temporality, and Queer Belonging in Mexican Drag Cabaret Performance

Author(s): Tenorio, David | Abstract: In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsivais, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

Politics of negative affect: intergenerational hauntings, counter-archival practices and the queer memory project

The article advances theorisation about intergenerational hauntings and affect theory, to argue that the intergenerational transmission of affect is not only autonomous and non-intentional, but that affective politics can be intentionally mobilised in order to challenge silenced histories of abuse, violence, and shame. Focusing on the installation Romantic Detachment by Naro Snackey, an Indisch (Indo-Dutch) artist, the article explores how counter-archival practices insist on evoking negative or unhappy affect by engaging in embodied performances of human and non-human bodies, aiming to surprise and shock at the visceral level. By reworking and reconceptualising old family photographs that represent the ‘good old days’, Snackey’s installation ferociously resists normative representations of family, loyalty, heterosexual kinship and happiness, insisting instead on creating a counter-narrative to conventional forms of Indisch memory work. This queer memory project invests in reimagining queer Indisch futurity, which is otherwise repressed by post-colonial racialised regimes of citizenship imposed on interracial subjects.

The Marching Dunstans: performing memory, queering memory

The Marching Dunstans were a group of over 100 people in the annual Pride March in Adelaide, South Australia, in 2015, the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in this state. The Marching Dunstans dressed in either safari suits or pink shorts and white T-shirts, signature 1970s costumes of Premier Don Dunstan, the socially progressive Premier who oversaw decriminalisation and many other progressive changes. The Marching Dunstans constituted a queer intervention into the collective memory of this period of social change and the inspiring leadership of Don Dunstan. This article documents the role of the various mnemonic technologies and the affects that these generated. These included the dress, placards, badges, marching, voice and spectacle. It argues that, as an embodied performance of queer memory, The Marching Dunstans created space for a radical queer community politics for the present.

‘Parallel Games’ and Queer Memories: Performing LGBT Testimonies in Northern Ireland

This essay explores how the notion of ‘parallel games’ works to queer memory in two productions of Northern Ireland's first publicly funded gay theatre company, TheatreofplucK, led by artistic director Niall Rea: the testimonial monologue D.R.A.G. (Divided, Radical and Gorgeous) (2012), written by Rea, and the performed archive installation, Tr<uble (2015), written by Shannon Yee. As post-conflict memory works, both productions trouble a progressivist understanding of ‘moving on’ from the conflict: instead of memories being harnessed to the ethno-nationalist template established by the Belfast Agreement, the plays ‘move’ memory work in different directions at the same time, giving rise to a diverse set of emotions.

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill

Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by Qwo-Li Driskill

Spectacles of shame: Ryan Murphy as curator of queer cultural memory

In the anthology Queer Shame, edited by David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub, 'the personal and the social shame attached to eroticism' is taken to task in relation to the larger contemporary discourse surrounding gay pride (understood in terms of activism and cultural production), while being seen as a defining characteristic of queer history, culture and identity. Shame, as theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Halperin and others, is predicated on a larger issue of queer people's access to discursive power, which Sedgwick herself had theorized in The Epistemology of the Closet. Such a conceptualizing of queer culture and queer politics begs the interrogation of how queer shame is contained and negotiated in contemporary popular culture. One of the most successful auteurs working in film and television today, Ryan Murphy's opus is marked by a constant dialogue with queer cultural artifacts. The excitement that his productions generate is typically predicated on his use of queer cultural objects, especially as they are rearticulated for mainstream audiences. This paper investigates the inherent shame of queer memory as embodied in Murphy's show American Horror Story through reference and negotiation of queer icons, filmic traditions and on-screen bodies. Utilizing queer and film theory as its framework, this paper treats Murphy's queer vernacular as the uncanny that destabilizes conventions of both the horror genre and mainstream television, in turn legitimizing and exploiting 'shameful' queer categories such as trauma, excess, diva worship and camp through the language of popular television and the bodies that populate it. Finally, this essay evaluates the productive power of Murphy's repository of 'disgraceful' bodily images-allegorical and literal-in furthering a critical remediation of the vernacular of queer shame.

Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida

Queer Memory: Loss, Martyrs, and Memorialization in Southern Florida