Queer Movements Research Articles

Czy dyskurs transseksualistyczny ma jednoznacznie wyzwalający czy ambiwalentny charakter?

Transsexuality, which refers to the conflict between gender and physical sex, can pose a challenge to feminist theory(ies) as well as to queer theory(ies) and queer movement. The aim of this essay is therefore to analyze the status of transsexual discourse within feminism, with the focus on Judith Butler's reflection, and within queer theory. The question, raised at first by Henrietta Moore, is if those who operate on their bodies and identities do really overthrow sexual difference and gender or maybe they are simply imprisoned in their murderous arms. It is being underlined that transsexual people can really point at instability and discontinuity of gender identities. However, this is somewhat problematic as, from the pragmatic point of view, it may cause a lot of problems to them, i.e. by limiting their access to proper medical treatment.

THE VIEW FROM THE SHORTBUS, OR ALL THOSE FUCKING MOVIES

This article takes the recent success and notoriety of John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006) as the occasion for an overview of “real” sex as a recurring motif and practice of commercial, nonpornographic cinema of recent years. Diverse in their generic modalities and, even more crucially, in their national and cultural origins, these films constitute a cinematic “counterpublic” along the lines Michael Warner prescribes for human and textual communities, recalibrating the relations among sexuality, visuality, and representation as they play out for public audiences and in the emphatically public, innately collaborative medium of cinema. “Counterpublic” also emerges as an apt descriptor of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, and indeed, Shortbus owes much of its uniqueness to its overt (indeed, explicit) interbraiding of New Queer tropes and intertexts with the formal and political dispositions of other “real sex” films. If, however, the film's felicitous coalition of these two lineages accounts for part of its utopian merriment and subversive zeal, Shortbus also reprises some of the cultural and political myopias (particularly in relation to gender and race) that the New Queer movement often had trouble transcending. The complex reflections and critiques of an American public that are embedded in the film's script, mise-en-scène, and processes of production are essential to the film's compatibility with other “real sex” films, where the invocation and interrogation of the “real” so often bears national and social as well as sexual weight. At the same time, in its very internationalism and stylistic heterogeneity, this cinematic counterpublic refuses any single model of the public, the political, the sexual, or the real, and sets ever-new horizons for the subversive potential of sexual images in cinema.

James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground

Research Article| September 01 2007 James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground Mikko Tuhkanen Mikko Tuhkanen East Carolina University tuhkanenm@ecu.edu Mikko Tuhkanen is assistant professor of English at East Carolina University and has published essays in American Literature, diacritics, Modern Fiction Studies, GLQ, African American Review, and elsewhere. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Language Notes (2007) 45 (2): 123–131. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-45.2.123 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mikko Tuhkanen; James Baldwin on the American Express and the Queer Underground. English Language Notes 1 September 2007; 45 (2): 123–131. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-45.2.123 Download citation file: 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 Books & JournalsAll JournalsEnglish Language Notes Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 Regents of the University of Colorado2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Cluster 3: Queer Movements in Time and Space You do not currently have access to this content.

The Body, Sexuality and Precarity

The focus group held in Bologna on 2 October 2005 revolved around the relationships between ‘body’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘precarity’, which are concepts at the heart of the reflections and political agenda of the feminist and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (GLBTQ) movements in Italy.

At What Price the Media Spotlight?

The essay looks at the LGBT/Queer movement in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this time, when AIDS activism was at its peak, began a number of processes, which continue to have an effect on the LGBT and Queer movements in the USA. Through an analysis of the New York Times' coverage of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), one can observe the process through which media certified a certain type of activism (mainly lobbying, court cases) as 'grown up' and 'effective', and direct action (protests, visibility actions, etc.) as 'childish'. At the same time, the more conservative strands of the gay/lesbian movement began to eschew more radical groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, even though it was these groups that breathed new life into the movement during the AIDS crisis. I argue that, since this time, one can see the development of two distinct movements in the US (though they are often thought of as one): the gay movement and the Queer movement.

Reflections on the Language of Rights from a Queer Perspective

The language of rights has been of great value to queer movements, particularly in the context of claim making vis-a-vis the state. There are however iv Sexuality Matters 0Prelims37.5.qxd 02/11/2006 16:10 Page iv IDS Bulletin Volume 37 Number 5 October 2006 v significant limitations of the rights language that need to be recognised. This article focuses attention on these, drawing on the experience of PRISM (People for Rights of Indian Sexuality Minorities), a queer activist forum based in Delhi, India. The rights language pushes us into a limiting framework of identity politics. It also allows other progressive movements to offer their support from a ‘safe’ distance. A narrow use of the rights language runs the danger of maintaining the discourse of the status quo, offering escape routes from addressing more directly intersectionality, heteronormativity and its subservions. The article makes a case for rooting the rights language in queer/feminist politics in order to allow for a more transformatory engagement with sexuality

Cultural rhetoric in coming‐out narratives: Witi Ihimaera's The Uncle's Story

ABSTRACT: The novel The Uncle's Story by New Zealand Maori Witi Ihimaera tells a story within a story, recounting the coming out narratives of two Maori gay men who lived 25 years apart in the same family. The novel is examined in light of Bacon's (1998) discussion of the possibility of a cultural rhetoric of the queer movement for liberation. Representations of self in the two Maori gay men's stories both challenge and sustain essential notions of sexual identity and contemporary theories of rhetorical practice. Ihimaera's fictional representations of coming out capture the complexity and nuance of coming‐out experiences in a way that expressivist accounts of actual coming‐out stories may obliterate or obscure. In this novel Ihimaera extends the artistic representation of gay culture he presented in Nights in the Gardens of Spain in a way that does not fall apart under close scrutiny because it does not oversimplify what happens in the same way that truth‐telling often does.

In other words: queer voices/dissident subjectivities impelling social change

This essay emerged from the authors’ presentation at an invited session of the 15th Annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies (QUIG) at the University of Georgia, Athens, 3–5 January 2002. They presented on the conference theme, ‘Vision, Voice & Virtuality: (Re)Conceptualizing Qualitative Representation.’ Their work here encompasses their response to the conference organizers’ invitation to grapple with (re)conceptualizing qualitative representation. Their goal is to explore the (re)presentation of voices and subjectivities that are engaged in Queer processes for social change. First they question whether Queer can be adequately articulated. They then posit that emerging Queer theory and the actions it invigorates are significant, galvanizing contemporary intellectual and political forces that power social change. Blurring the lines of bounded, intact, stable and essential identity categories—such as straight, lesbian, and gay—they give examples from their qualitative research, including autoethnographic accounts that indicate that the Queer movement has shifting, multiple and overlapping sites of education and resistance. These sites textualize everyday life; contest hetero‐hegemony; resist readings that exclude or defame Queers and non‐normative identities; allow the development of oppositional practices; and make commitment to social change in an environment of hope and possibility. Finally, they explore some characteristics of Queer qualitative research, and suggest future directions for infusing theory with ‘justice to come.’

Retrenchment from a Queer Ideal: Class Privilege and the Failure of Identity Politics in AIDS Activism

In the decade following the 1969 Stonewall Riots, identity politics in New York City enabled the construction of a socially and recreationally defined homogeneous gay identity. But contrary to common self-congratulatory accounts that have made their way into the social scientific literature, this gay identity was woefully unprepared to launch an effective political response to AIDS in the 1980s. The AIDS activism movement which did finally emerge in the form of ACT UP/New York was born from within the gay identity, but it embraced a more expansive coalitional politics. Its amplified vision called for a critique not only of medical research procedures and public funding initiatives but also of the larger political-economic and social structures that had translated a medical emergency into a social catastrophe. This more expansive politics gave rise to the Queer movement, premised less on essential identity than on affinity of commitment. But this political evolution was not internally uncontested: the more privileged white middle-class men within ACT UP resisted any movement away from a narrowly medical approach to AIDS for those with access. The resulting conflict eventually crippled ACT UP, perhaps irrevocably. Some gay and queer geographical theorizing has learned from the Queer movement and has embraced the politics of affinity, in that it has been willing to incorporate in its analyses an investigation of the ways in which gay identity politics is implicated in the wider systems of stratification along axes of gender, race, and class. But most gay geography remains trapped in the rather narrow vision of identity politics.

The Gardens of Spain is Not a Restaurant

New Zealand Maori Witi Ihimaera's newest novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, tells the story of a Pakeha (Caucasian) man (David Munro) and his coming out to his wife, his parents, and his colleagues at university where he is Director of Film Studies. lhimaera's novel is examined in light of Bacon's discussion of the possibility of a cultural rhetoric of the queer movement for liberation (World Englishes, 17(2)). Ihimaera exploits elements of fiction – structure, language use, characterization, tone – in order to counter conventional notions of gayness, Maori‐ness, and heterosexuality. The novel is an artistic representation of gay culture that does not fall apart under close scrutiny because it does not narrow or oversimplify what happens. Nights in the Gardens of Spain tells truth about David Munro's life even if it didn't happen.

Getting the story straight: coming out narratives and the possibility of a cultural rhetoric

This paper begins with a belief that rhetorical practices play a central role in the construction of self. Specifically, this study explores how the ‘coming out’ stories of lesbians provide a means of negotiating both individual and collective identity within a cultural context that emphatically marginalizes everything ‘queer.’ As stories about rhetorical selves, coming out narratives may also serve political functions, locating rhetoric within the cultural forces of identity management and community building. My paper will explore the work that such narratives do for identity and community politics by emphasizing the mechanisms through which such representations of self sustain, as well as challenge binary logics of sexuality, essential notions of identity, and contemporary theories of rhetorical practice. By giving voice to members of a viable counter‐culture, and analyzing stories that trace individual women’s movement from the private closet to the public sphere, this paper enhances cross‐cultural studies and rhetorical theory and practice. This rhetorical tradition, I argue, is at the core of community building activities, and an understanding of the conventions for such rhetorical performances of identity is essential to any understanding of the culture and politics of the queer movement for liberation.

In defense of queer nation: Fromidentity politicsto apolitics of difference

In this essay a distinction is drawn between the gay and lesbian liberation movements and the more recent queer movements. Advocates for the liberation movements generally have argued that gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals are not radically different from heterosexuals. Representatives of the new movements, in contrast, have argued that queer individuals are unique and that oppression is not justified based on sexual differences. The paradoxes of traditional identity politics are examined. Queer activists construct a collective identity based on differences rather than similarities. Queer Nation, by reconceptualizing the notion of identity, transcends the essentializingand totalizing nature of identity politics.