Queer Perspectives Research Articles

Composting (in) the gender studies classroom: Growing feminisms for climate changing pedagogies

Drawing on our experience co-teaching an undergraduate unit called “Gender and Environment,” we argue for an expansive feminist approach to teaching climate change that embodies the content of the unit in its classroom practice. This requires: (a) understanding the classroom not as separate from the phenomenon of climate change but as one of its sites, striated by the diverse bodies, histories, and other materialities that comprise it; (b) a rigorous understanding of climate change as a feminist issue, inseparable from crises of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchal power, and violent body normativities; and (c) a commitment to responsive and accountable pedagogies. Here, the feminist environmental humanities concept and method of “composting” (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018) helps describe how environmental matters can be mulched together with key social justice concepts and insights in order to nourish new possibilities for climate change pedagogies. Composting thus becomes a metaphoric guide for how we configure the work of teaching climate change—not as masterful dissemination of privileged knowledge but as a co-worlded pedagogy that learns from intersectional, anticolonial, queer, and crip perspectives. This pedagogy thus also contributes to growing more accountable and responsive feminisms within and beyond the classroom. The first half of this article explores how an understanding of both climate change and composting manifest in the context of our co-taught unit. In the second half, we offer a scrapbook—produced with care and joy but necessarily condensed and incomplete—that exemplifies some of the ways that we put this framing into practice.

Failing Homonationalism? Gay Israeli Eurovision Geeks Negotiating Nationalism and Masculinity

ABSTRACT In 2019, the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) was hosted in Tel Aviv. Like other national contests such as the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, the ESC is a political event. For gay Israeli men who are ESC fans, this was an opportunity to become more integrated in the gay and national communities through homonormativity and homonational processes. However, as this case study shows, Israeli gay men ESC fans mostly rejected homonational masculinity in favor of a counterhegemonic identification, self-characterized as “ESC geeks.” In that, they adhered to their marginal space and adopted a subversive queer perspective. Analytically, this means that homonationalism should not be considered a political form of normalizing power that is accessible to all gay men. Rather, it is a process that produces manifold, including queer practices, and it can no longer be seen as accessible to all LGBTs, or as something into which LGBTs are duped.

Consensus and Diversity in the World Trade Organization: A Queer Perspective

When the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, it was seen as representative of a new era in international law, which claimed to be more functional and cooperative than the Cold War years. Fast forward to 2022, most commentators proclaim that the WTO is in “crisis.” For over two decades, its membership has struggled to reach decisions and, in 2019, the WTO was “dejudicialized” by the United States blocking consensus on appointments to the Appellate Body. In seeking to understand what went wrong, some commentators have focused on the operation of the WTO's consensus procedure and, in particular, the way it can afford states a veto power. In this essay, I take a different approach by considering how the discursive effects of consensus decision making have played into some of the problems facing the WTO today. Inspired by Gibson-Graham's work on “queering the economy,” I do so by unmooring queer theory from its base of gender and sexuality and applying queer insights to a discourse analysis of statements made in relation to the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which lasted from 1986 until 1993 and culminated in the agreement to establish the WTO. I show how the use of consensus decision making served to cultivate an intolerance of economic difference by giving rise to discourses of worldwide sameness and agreement. Finally, I consider what a queerer approach to trade-related decision making might look like.

Commentary: Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses

Commentary:Something Out of Nothing—Making Traffic in Kisses Kiki Loveday and Susan Potter Video: Traffic in Kisses This video is available at https://youtu.be/cJ0G40YZwPs. And then I had a sudden image: a dog lying somewhere very still, and a child, first looking at it, and then, compulsively, nudging it. Why? to see whether it was alive; because if it moves, if it can move, it lives. This most primitive, this most instinctive of all gestures: to make it move to make it live. So I had always been doing with my camera … —Maya Deren, Letter to James Card, April 19, 1955 Making Things Move We were curious about what would happen. In early cinema there is a genre known as the kiss film or kissing films, and the genre's emergence indicates already that certain shared expectations are forming about what might happen. Typically two figures, conventionally legible as a man and a woman, are framed in a medium shot (Figure 1). They may interact on screen, appear to talk to each other, perhaps court one another, before kissing, either once or several times in less than a minute of screen time. A popular attraction of early cinema, kiss films are historically important because they point to early film's intermediality, the traffic in entertainers and entertainments between stage and screen.1 More significantly, for our purposes, as a genre they are evidence of the intensification of the modern regime of sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century.2 Kiss films are regarded by Linda Williams as "the screen's first sex act," standing in for the "whole of sex that can be seen" while "permanently poised on the brink [End Page 37] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Still, The New Kiss (Edison, US, 1900), remediated in Traffic in Kisses (Love-day and Potter, 2022). of carnal knowledge."3 Kiss films also instantiate early cinema's sexualization of public space, a process entangled with early cinema's forensic gaze of the body (Figure 2).4 We were curious about what would happen if we worked together on a creative assemblage of kiss films, if we attempted to model a lesbian audiovisual and historiographical practice while offering a queer perspective on the aesthetic, social, and disciplinary functions of kiss films in the history of early cinema. Produced across several weeks by exchanging, responding to, and assembling a series of image and sound sequences, Traffic in Kisses remediates some of the most iconic kiss films produced between 1896 and 1905. Drawing inspiration from queer collage films such as The Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, US, 1991), Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, US, 1992), Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang, 1996), and Grosse Fuge (William Comstock, US, 1998), the resulting video tests out some ideas about the circulation and emergence of erotic and sexual discourses in early cinema, and the mobilization of—and resistance to—a filmic gaze articulated to concepts and categories such as the homoerotic, the Sapphic, lesbian, or, in some cases, trans*.5 In keeping with the [End Page 38] exquisite paradigm, we have not revised the video. It exists as an artifact of our research process and collaboration. Our scholarly work differently addresses the relation between cinema as popular medium and the representation of sexuality. Susan's work has investigated early cinema's participation in the consolidation of sexuality as a modern regime of power. She has argued that sexually legible figures in silent cinema are only the belated and most visible signs of an expansive array of knowledges, practices, aesthetic forms, and genres.6 In relation to the unruly period of early cinema, she has argued that certain kinds of homoerotic and Sapphic visual pleasures persist even as emergent genres such as the kiss films and other experiments in mise-en-scène and editing can be understood as fugitive signs of the emergence of new models of sexual identity. Kiki's work, in contrast, assumes a post-queer perspective to historicize the dual meanings of lesbian that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century: of sexual "deviancy," and of femxle authorial genius. She considers how scholarly discourses and canons produce...

Queer Perspective on Sexuality and Normality in Folk Legends

Queer Perspective on Sexuality and Normality in Folk Legends

Sex Stereotyping towards Black Gay Man in Moonlight Movie: A Queer Study

This study seeks to find sex stereotypical act towards black gay men from Berry Jenkins' Moonlight (2016) using the Queer perspective. Sex stereotyping is an act when someone has a preconceived conception of how someone should be, act, or behave based on that person’s sex. Moonlight discusses Chiron's struggles with sexuality and personality, including his increasing physical and emotional violence. By adapting queer theory perform by Judith Butler's book Bodies That Matter: In the Discursive Limit of “Sex” it answered the aim of the study. In their book, Butler explains and breaks down the performativity of sex and body and how culture shapes them. In doing this study, both textual and film visual analysis will be applied to the following discussion: 1) determine forms of sex stereotyping in Moonlight; 2) reveal sex stereotyping towards black gay men exist in society in Moonlight. Throughout the analysis, sex stereotyping that happened toward Chiron struggling to cope with his culture as a black gay man formed Chiron’s alienation, heteronormativity, and homophobia. This act of stereotypical sex based on their skin color represent a backlash against their people.

«The ghosts are themselves the future»

The paper aims to broaden the critical account of Chiara Fumai’s work in thema-tic and methodological terms, integrating the queer perspective as critical insight into the artist’s work. This addition enables a more exhaustive framework of analysis by bringing to light a dense thematic complexity, otherwise unexplored. Furthermore, it presents the advantage of not competing with the critical paths opened until now, rather resonating with them. The first part of the paper is de-voted to an overview of Fumai’s artistic biography through a works’ selection analysis. This overview is preparatory to the critical proposal emerging in the second part, where the author considers the feminist critical lecture of the artist’s work and propose to flank it with conceptual tools derived from queer theory.

Reproductive justice for the haunted Nordic welfare state: Race, racism, and queer bioethics in Finland.

The Nordic welfare state aims to offer universal healthcare and achieve good health, bar none. We discuss past and present moral blind spots in welfare state bioethics through reproductive justice and queer bioethics, particularly focusing on race and racism, based on ethnographic data from Finland. Globally portrayed as aspirational and mostly uninterrogated, it is crucial to have a thorough bioethical evaluation of a Nordic model informed by Black and queer perspectives. We have come to conceptualize the Finnish welfare state as haunted. We fear that the seemingly non‐racial racial hygiene continues to haunt bioethics of the welfare state as structural racism. A key cause for this concern is the lack of racial awareness in public politics and the reluctance in discussing racism due to the national agenda of color‐blindness. This crucially compounds to our findings that medical professionals prefer to think they operate on “purely medical” reasoning as opposed to nuanced ethical contemplation, the latter associated with “social issues” that allegedly cannot be resolved and are outside medical interest. We discuss how the bioethical aftermath of eugenics remains unresolved. Racist, classist, sexist, ableist, and cis‐ and heteronormative stratification of reproduction requires a nuanced moral compass for Nordic welfare state bioethics, not “strictly medical practice.” We suggest queer bioethics as a moral theory for recalibrating this compass, joining forces with other justice movements to tackle racism in healthcare and further to interrogate racism, sexism, ableism and cis‐ and heteronormativity in bioethics.

Minority Stress for Care Experienced Young Queer People: A Case Study.

Young people who are placed in out-of-home care are amongst the most vulnerable in our community. Removed from or rejected by their families, they must learn to live with carers who may be strangers. They may have experienced the trauma of abuse or neglect. Post care, they may experience further social isolation and marginalisation due to limited social capital. These challenges are compounded for queer young people placed in out-of-home care. This study adopted a case study approach to explore the lived experience of two young adults growing up queer in and out of out-of-home care in Australia. Our investigation was framed by two complementary theoretical frameworks. The first, a model of minority stress, is informed by queer perspectives and enabled an exploration into the adverse impact of enduring stigma and prejudice associated with homophobia and transphobia on young people’s capacity to thrive. The model of social capital was then employed to inform an analysis of relationships between queer young people in out-of-home care and trustworthy adults. The findings suggest that queer young people growing up in out-of-home care experience minoritised stress, with lasting negative implications. The presence however, of trustworthy adults who challenge dominant heteronormative assumptions and work to support queer young people can be experienced as stabilising and restorative.

Drag Attack

Halfway between a transformation that performatizes the most stereotyped becoming of women and the drag queen as a mythical being, a demigoddess of nightlife, in which transformation rarefies the concept of identity toward other possible genders, Tatu Vuolteenaho (1968, Yivieska), a Finnish transvestite-drag queen, organized a series of underground nighttime parties called Drag Attack from 2013 to 2019 in various gay clubs in Spain. Tatu's happening parties proposed a precarious, do-it-yourself cross-dressing that reclaims the figure of the monster in a shift that goes beyond the subversion of gender binaries to embody a subversion of humans, invoking nonbinary beings that refer to magical, queer, and posthuman figures in relation to art history, pop culture, and recent thought. According to Tatu Vuolteenaho, “Drag queen, drag king, drag freak . . . drag can be anything. We question gender, beauty, race, and condition to the point where spectators can start to wonder whether they are looking at a real human being.”The peculiar aspect of Drag Attack is that it was also proposed as a horizontal collaborative experience of strange community cross-dressing in which the participants cross-dressed in accordance with the concept of each event, in a context such as the commercialized consumption of the pink market. In this way, participants queered the homonormative gay spaces of the nighttime scene. The capacity to transform into a strange other is collectively performatized through body makeup and clothes, playing with the idea of vague, degenerated nonbinary identities and personifying aliens, cyborgs, hybrids, witches, or other queer beings that, on other occasions, refer to seraphim, tetramorphs, and ectopic-eyed archangels with undefined identities. While the gender embodied by the transformations of Tatu Vuolteenaho and the participants frequently passes to a second plane, all the characters performatize, independently of their possible gender, the monster-feminine in a vindication of this minority other as a subversive strategy of binarism. The monster-feminine in Drag Attack, far from being a universal neuter, is a form of being in the world, of being by being drag. Drag here is embodied as the capacity to transgress the very concept of identity. This performative work allows us to rethink the category of the monster from a postgender, posthuman, and queer perspective, as a “deformation and malformation” of the normative mind-body canon. Queering gender refers to the idea of the monster in such a way that the monster is queer par excellence. It is, in its potential threat to humans, what is supposed by a questioning of liberal humanism and its gender binarism. Tatu Vuolteenaho reclaims the drag queen and the transvestite as witches, as gender-dissident beings, performatizing and embodying a queer witch, the fairy as a witch, sister of desires, pleasures, and orgies that accompany cis-women witches in the covens of popular esoteric imagination. Music, dance, altered states of consciousness, desire, and pleasure were conjured in community meeting spaces for the celebration of the other and the electronic fits and outburst of Drag Attack.

A Mythological Nudist Lost in Swedish Suburbia: A study of the Nix’s masculinity and media-loric function in the manga series Oblivion High

This article explores the visual representation and function of the folkloric Scandinavian nix in the manga series Oblivion High (2012–2014) published by the manga studio Ms Mandu. The aim of the research is to investigate how a well-known folkloric image develops and to consider the nix’s portrayal of masculinity. The article is a critical cultural study based on feminist and queer perspectives on visual culture and folklore studies. The article concludes that the nix in Oblivion High must update his desirability through spectacular clothing and change of musical instrument to meet the contemporary Western heteronormative masculinity ideals. His weakness to the metal iron ties into the nix’s association to fairies and the construction of the nix’s underwater realm is connected to Norse mythology with the appearance of Aino from the Finish national epos Kalevala, Nornorna and hints of the Norse god Odin. Furthermore, the androgynous art style of shōjo manga (a sub-genre aimed at female teenage readers) creates a heterosexual female gaze pattern, while the imagery of a bishōnen (beautiful boy) connects the character Nix to the literary trope of the ‘pretty boy,’ leaving hegemonic masculinity unchallenged.

Queering Islam and Muslim Americanness

AbstractIn the United States’ current cultural and political climate, stereotypes of Muslims, such as the destructive terrorist and oppressed burqa-clad woman, are ever-present. For Muslim Americans, breaking outside of these stereotypes is fraught: merely contesting these stereotypes is insufficient for inclusion. Muslim Americans are often required to construct central aspects of their identities—particularly religion, gender, and sexuality—so they become acceptable to mainstream American sensibilities, thus becoming “good” Muslims. This essay theorizes an alternative to this good/bad binary by imagining a “queer” Muslimness through Usama Alshaibi’s 2011 film Profane. Profane centers on Muna, a Muslim Arab-American professional dominatrix who attempts to reconcile her perverse sexuality with her religious identity. In doing so, she unravels understandings of both her role as a dominatrix and her Muslim identity, questioning the boundaries of these categories. Using queer of color critique and feminist theorizing on BDSM, this essay examines how Muna demands recognition of her Islamic sexuality and perverse Islam, navigating tensions as she disidentifies with these categories. While her attempts at recognition inevitably fail, Muna continues to insist on Islamic sexuality/perverse Islam by consuming the jinn that haunts her throughout the film. This essay demonstrates how Muna’s refusal to succumb to tensions of essentialized identity—particularly through linking religion and perverse sexuality—works to refute the standard monolithic view of Muslim American identity. Ultimately, in emphasizing how nonnormative and perverse religious practice helps build queer perspectives on identity, this paper expands queer theory’s burgeoning analyses on Muslim identity.

TOWARD QUEER POTENTIALITIES IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE

Arguably, from the invention of adolescence at the beginning of the 20th century, developmental theory has served as the foundation of disciplinary study and professional practice with children and youth across the global West. Despite their founders’ assertions that development is culturally constructed, in educational and youth work practice contexts stage-based trajectories of normative human growth are largely erroneously accepted as ahistorical, apolitical, naturally occurring, and universally applicable. This paper presents critiques of developmentalism from historical, reconceptualist, and queer perspectives, calling into question the underlying principles of normalcy and abnormality that run through the developmental project. We pay particular attention to the potential of queer theory as an analytic to deconstruct developmentalism in the context of child and youth care, opening new possibilities for critical engagement with children and youth outside the context of development.

Queer is as Queer Does: Queer L2 Pedagogy in Teacher Education

AbstractWhat does it mean to queer the L2 classroom and why does it matter? Building on inclusive pedagogical approaches, this paper considers what queering looks like/sounds like/feels like in the context of two case study classrooms where language teachers learned about Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) methods in a novice Mandarin language context. Data include recorded videos and transcriptions, focus groups, fieldnotes, and survey responses. We analyze practice from these two workshops for the ways gender and sexuality were addressed in the teacher education classroom. Through queer analysis, we discovered that the most fully embodied student engagement was related to disruptions in what might be expected in both form and content. As TPRS teacher educators widened critical agendas beyond queer characters in classroom stories, they included nonnormative L2 approaches that were humorous, surprising, and inclusive of translanguaging as well as pop up connections to languages and cultures in change. This study suggests that L2 teacher education from a queer perspective offers teachers and learners opportunities to deconstruct and question what is conceived to be normal and instead imagine languages and pedagogies for what is possible, equitable, and inclusive.

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Introduction: Critical Criminology for the 21st Century

Looking to Critical Criminology to Centre Gender and Violence Against Women in State Crime Studies

AbstractThe state is over‐represented as a perpetrator of violence against women, yet it receives little attention in the state crime/crimes of the powerful literature. In line with the goal of this special issue, the focus here will be to introduce state‐perpetrated gender‐based violence and demonstrate the utility of including gender as an analytic concept for understanding the pervasive and prolonged harms perpetrated by states that disproportionately harm women and girls. Furthermore, I argue for a more integrative approach to the study of state crime/crimes of the powerful, to better include other innovative critical criminological approaches such as queer perspectives, rural criminology, and more in‐depth race analysis to mention but a few.

Infecting the Welfare State – The Swedish Play Kurage and the “AIDS Crisis”

The article focuses on the Swedish documentary theatre play Kurage (2020) in which three protagonists look back on how Sweden handled the “AIDS crisis” in the 1980s. In doing so, the play challenges the narrative of exceptional social conditions in Sweden and delivers a queer perspective on welfare state politics. Specifically, in the aesthetic conception of the play, the complex relation between welfare state and illness comes to the fore. I argue that Kurage not only builds on persistent metaphors of illness in literature but also expands epidemic narratives and thus exposes mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in the welfare state. Finally, the article investigates in what ways pathology, medical institutions, or in a more general way: the understanding of medicine as a “neutral” science play a part in eliminating bodies, writing them out of the body politic and thus allowing for suffering and disappearing.

Mari Mutare

Mari mutare is a transdisciplinary design research project about biocompatible prostheses inspired by the early Christian being called Green Man, a human-plant hybrid that represents the nature-culture continuum. These objects are intended to address human exceptionalism from a post-anthropocentric, feminist and queer perspective. The aim of Mari mutare is to explore the multiplicity of subjectivities in ourselves and, consequently, to influence the perception of others. Arising from the emerging field of synthetic biology, speculative design methodology supports this proposal and it materialises through transhackfeminist biopractices as tools for creating knowledge and projecting other possible futures. The experiments are conducted around the Petri dish as an epistemic object. The dish contains a symbiotic assembly of human and plant cells that interpenetrate, digest and partially assimilate while grazing the categories of kingdom, species, gender, culture and nature. While this process materialises, human subjects test their future limbs aided by an augmented reality (AR) filter, as a proxy for the physical reality, to hack into self-reflection and subjectivity, thus projecting themselves beyond the self. This project is currently a work-in-progress and is supported by Pro Helvetia, Hangar Barcelona (EU Biofriction programme), Utopiana Geneva and Hackuarium.

“We Work Hard, We Play Hard!”—Fictional Gayspeak in the Italian Dubbing of “The Simpsons”: A Queer Audiovisual Translation Study

Despite being an animated sitcom, The Simpsons is a satire of contemporary American society and culture. This article intends to apply a queer perspective to Audiovisual Translation Studies, in line with what Flotow (2019) defined the third approach to gender-focused audiovisual translation, that is, the investigation of gay and queer source texts and their treatment in the target text. This study deals with the process of sexualisation of fictional gay men through fictional gayspeak. The analysis focuses on excerpts where the Italian dubbing departs from the original, and the strategies that have been used to reproduce gayspeak into Italian. The investigation rests on the idea that translation is a gender-constructing activity implying the queering of the target text, which is a process that varies from language to language.

Unravelling the Queer Space: Understanding Sexuality through the Works of Janice Pariat

The project entitled “Unravelling the queer space: Understanding sexuality through the works of Janice Pariat” to examine the elements of sexual being from a queer perspective. There is always a politics that happens within the space of one’s sexual and spiritual prominence. Thereby, a binary construction always happens and a stereotypical connotation happens for the same. Homosexuality is always subjected to suppression and non-normative within the society that upholds homophobia, heteronormativity and hetero-centrism. These are the results of the culturally imposed norms on the society. Understanding the deviance that happens in one’s sexuality is an important area of concern. Talking about these aspects free from bias and prejudice is the freedom that can be gained. Society always has a violent approach towards people who deviate from the accepted norms leading to marginalization. One of the important factors that sideline with this idea is the impact of religion on an individual. Spiritual space and belief system are induced right from the childhood. Religious texts clearly define sexualities that deviate from the expected norms as abnormal or a taboo. The study is to break down the binary existence of one’s sexual and spiritual space and how the deviance in sexualities pave way to attain a new spiritual growth.