Queer Politics Research Articles

Beyond homocolonialism: working towards queer decoloniality in Bangladesh

AbstractThe queer movement in Bangladesh suffered a crisis in 2016 with the murder of two activists, leading to an unwanted hyper-visibility in wider society, and a chilling effect on activism. We detail what it means to think beyond postcolonial critiques of international LGBTQ rights, briefly explaining the realities and limits of queer politics in Bangladesh, focusing on sexual health infrastructures and the emergence of legal citizenship for the “third-gender” hijra population. We argue that these dimensions of queer existence remain circumscribed, and that a public discourse of sexualities remains difficult to create as a terrain for equality. We explore whether the framing of ‘decolonial’ is useful here, conceptualized as a process of working through the postcolonial critique of western structures of financial and sexual frameworks, towards an understanding of crisis that requires reading colonialism in its later evolution in the context of nationalism, neoliberal development, and religious fundamentalism.

Rethinking ‘Healthy Masculinity’ Training From a Queer Boys+ Perspective

ABSTRACT Contemporary discourses on feminism’s role in Australian boys’ lives focus on how feminism might guide strategies that train boys to resist negative or ‘toxic’ performances of masculinity and instead encourage them to strive for a ‘healthy’ or ‘positive’ masculinity. In this article, I question whether training young people to attach themselves to a particular masculinity is aligned with a commitment to queer politics or serves the interests of boys, particularly queer boys or gender-diverse young people. I begin by tracing unsettled contests over masculinity's ontological foundations, including the roles of biology, identification, ‘gendered’ traits, and affective attachments. Through the method of autoethnography, I then explore issues that arise in the logic and implementation of common desires to train boys into ‘healthy’ men. I argue that, drawing on a queer liberation tradition, feminism can be an invitation to solidarity and freedom as well as a ‘way out’ or ‘refuge’ from the regulatory policing of gender norms associated with boyhood. I suggest a detachment or disaffection with masculinity does not have to lead to an identity crisis and can instead be part of a feminist killjoy survival kit [Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press].

“Instagram is like a karela”: transnational digital queer politics and online censorship and surveillance in India

Abstract This article explores transnational queer political flows and negotiations in Indian queer/trans communities on Instagram, situating this in its limits and restrictions as a public sphere that is corporate- and state-governed and subject to conditions of profitability, censorship, regulation, and algorithmic disciplining. Using insights from 23 in-depth interviews with queer/trans women and non-binary Instagram users and community organizers across India, I argue that binaries of Western/Indigenous, global/local, authentic/inauthentic are insufficient to understand Indian queer digital politics. I instead explore the political utility of agentic reclamations and negotiations of queer/trans identity by marginal queer/trans users. At the same time, drawing on participant experiences of content moderation, censorship, and corporate and state surveillance, I examine how the potentials of Instagram as a site to mediate articulations of a radical politics of queer liberation are restricted, thwarted, and reconfigured by platform design and policing.

Queer Renaturalisations: Guy Hocquenghem’s Contradictory Nature Politics, Between Identity and Desire

Queerphobic discourses variably frame nature as defined by reproductive heterosexuality or as defined by unruly desires that civilised heterosexuality promises a progress away from. This article argues that both these politicised determinations of nature follow the logic of ‘renaturalisation’ – a strategy that invokes nature and the natural to reinforce a normative process – and that the ambiguity in nature discourses stems from the conflictual construction of queerness as both social and antisocial. Because queerness oscillates between being a recognisable identity and a critique of everything social, nature discourses used to justify heteronormative ontologies are contradictory and must change according to the context of the argument. Excavating a theory of renaturalisation from Guy Hocquenghem, this article suggests that queer politics should take nature seriously not because nature is inherently progressive or conservative but because this very duality materialises through cultural anxieties around queerness.

Theorizing Sexuality Politics of Neoliberalism: A Queer Sociological Approach

ABSTRACTThis article provides a critical overview of neoliberalism scholarship from a queer sociological perspective. Despite mainstream neoliberalism scholarship neglecting sexuality as a system of intersecting power relations, sociologists of sexualities have explored how neoliberalism reshapes the state, market, society, and subjectivity concerning sex, intimacy, and sexual politics. Highlighting the intersection of the sociology of sexualities with transnational feminist and queer studies, as well as critical race studies, I advocate for a refined understanding of sexuality as integral to neoliberalism's operations with empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. I suggest areas for future research to further develop this understanding, including the emphasis on the variegated nature of neoliberalism, its ambivalence and contradictions, and its promiscuous convergence with other political, social, and cultural formations. This article ultimately calls for a queer political economic analysis in the continued engagement with neoliberalism and its interactions with sexuality politics to understand new global challenges and social transformations, including shifting geopolitics, digital and platform economies, and climate and reproductive crises.

Coming Out as Undocumented: Identity Celebrations and Political Change

By focusing on the notion of ‘coming out as undocumented’, this concept paper critically explores whether identity politics has the potential to transform dominant ‘illegalisation’ processes. It argues that although the coming out strategy has helped make marginalised communities more visible and audible, it does not necessarily help disrupt dominant stigmas. Drawing upon insights from Disability Studies and Fat and Queer Politics, it suggests that the celebration of stigmatised identities through coming out events does not necessarily disrupt and transform unequal systems. What is needed is a radical shift in focus: from identity celebration to political projects, from an ‘unliveable’ present to an inclusive tomorrow.

Queer/Green collaboration as a radical response to climate crises: foregrounding the green stripe

This article has two aims. Firstly, to highlight a general marginalisation of queer and trans voices within the environmental/ecological movement. Secondly, to identify and explore some contemporary efforts to overcome these tensions and forge closer alliances between queer and green politics. Drawing on queer and trans ecology literatures, we highlight the radical potential that closer synergy between the progressive goals and activities of environmentalist and LGBTQIA2+ politics can bring about. Examining the online content of a number of activist organisations and platforms, we highlight some of the ways in which the queering of green politics and the greening of queer politics are being given practical contemporary expression. In doing so, we highlight the space that this type of politics can create for a reimagining of alternative ecological futures and a more progressive political economy based around a transformation of relationships both within human populations and between humans and other-than-human species and ecologies.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Male Homosexuality in Malayalam Cinema: Contextualizing the Film Ka Bodyscapes (2016)

ABSTRACT Focusing on the Malayalam film Ka Bodyscapes (2016), this article attempts to historically trace and critically engage with the representations of gay sexuality in Malayalam cinema from the South Indian state of Kerala. It interrogates how Ka Bodyscapes brought to the forefront hitherto unexplored visual dynamics of the gay male body and homoeroticism on screen while troubling the heterosexual dynamics of the Malayalam film industry. By situating this film within the history of representation of male homosexuality in Malayalam cinema and the changing regimes of queer politics and feminist interventions in Kerala in the last decade, the article argues how the film’s radical visual representation of gay sexuality at the intersection of caste and religion problematizes the heterosexual family/state, thereby challenging the patriarchal masculinity that marginalizes women and sexual minorities in Kerala.

‘There’s Nothing Clinical About It’: LGBT Health and the Atmosphere of the Clinic

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, several former Australian AIDS Councils (turned LGBT health organisations) have opened dedicated primary healthcare clinics for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Operating at the intersection of medical practice and queer politics, these clinics try to enact a type of care that is attuned to the power relations between LGBT people and medicine. Drawing on the concepts of affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009, “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2 (2): 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005) and queer feelings (Ahmed 2014, The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09 × 4q), this article argues that senses of the feelings and emotions of LGBT people evoked by mainstream medical spaces are central to the design of LGBT clinics. This analysisis based on situated interviews with practice managers which examined the affective intent of LGBT clinics. By examining how practice managers consider location, the curation of art and health promotion materials, and the employment of peer workers, this article argues that LGBT clinics are helping to make LGBT health a tangible and meaningful subcategory of public health by designing spaces in which medicine can be encountered within a ‘queer atmosphere’.

Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art

Charles Eppley reflects on the “Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art” special series one year into the project. They discuss work already published in the series, highlight topics scheduled for publication, and share an invitation for future submissions. Further, the scope of the special series is contextualized in evolving cultural and geopolitical events.

It Is Easier to Hate Gay Shame than to Hate a Murderous World

Gay Shame is a direct-action collective that has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years. The group has never had any funding, and its members have met almost every week for decades and produced a wide range of interventions articulating an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, abolitionist queer politics. The author has been following the work of Gay Shame since its beginnings, engaging in related work in other cities and sometimes overlapping and collaborating with Gay Shame's members, since the early 2000s. Gay Shame's work has been prophetic. Compared to the other groups and people the author has worked with on this same intersecting set of concerns and interventions since the mid-2000s, Gay Shame has anticipated the conditions of reductive identity politics, the conditions of gentrification, and the methods of neoliberal co-optation with more accuracy and precision than anyone else. Again and again, Gay Shame has anticipated these conditions before others, making interventions that were often quite controversial because others were not yet ready to identify and name the contradictions and antagonisms that Gay Shame was naming. At this moment, when resistance is more necessary than ever, but groups and projects struggle under the weight of conflict, co-optation, and counterinsurgency, it is particularly useful to study how a group like Gay Shame has initiated and sustained this work.

Brittle bonds: queer relationalities in literary and cinematic forms in India

Abstract From factories to hostels, homes to neighbourhoods, how do embodied practices in stratified spaces shape the contemporary terrains of queerness in India? In this article, I analyse two recent cultural texts from India, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Pucchi (Sloppy Kisses, 2021) and Hansda Sowvender Shekhar’s (2018) novel My Father’s Garden, Speaking Tiger Books, Delhi, to engage with the fraught dynamics of relationality and queerness. My analysis contests any easy celebration of community – by foregrounding the movements of dispossessed protagonists who do not fit into the paradigm of the privileged subject of queer politics. Yet these texts capture the fleeting possibilities of reaching towards one another in spaces carved through the operations of exclusion and discrimination. I bring together two texts in which the direct references to sexual identities formed via governmental or non-governmental networks are largely absent; rather, they ask fundamental questions about the in-between terrain of the relational. The dynamics of distance and connection is opened up in complex ways in these cinematic and literary texts as they create imaginative idioms to explore the brittleness of queer bonds formed through the hierarchized operations of class, caste and ethnicity. Through an analysis of the formal aspects of these texts, and the practices of spectatorship and readership they facilitate, I seek to underline how formations of sexuality in India can be unpacked only through a close engagement with the critical discourse on gender, caste and ethnicity.

Postracial Queer Romance: A Close Reading of Anthony Bowens and Michael Pavano's Interracial Relationship in YouTube (and Beyond)

This essay is a close reading of YouTube's Michael & Anthony's video content in which mixed-race Black male pro wrestler Anthony Bowens and his white boyfriend Michael Pavano's romance is represented. The goal is to deploy queer of color critique to unpack how the interracial aspects of Bowens and Pavano's romance offer moments to question, critique, and reimagine the queer politics of interracial dating. Three themes emerge from this reading: reconstructing masc/femme coupling trope, counteracting interraciality, and optimism (and pessimism). This essay considers how Bowens and Pavano's romance reifies or resists postracialism working with the LGBTQ+ liberation movement.

Influence of the European Union on queer politics of Eastern Europe

Influence of the European Union on queer politics of Eastern Europe

Bed/Life: Chronic Illness, Postcolonial Entanglements, and Queer Intimacy in the Stay

In the conceptual sculpture titled, I Think We’re Alone Now (Host), Constantina Zavitsanos presents the bed as a site of desire, intimacy, and horizon for the sick/disabled queer body, bringing a multitude of meanings to the notion of “host.” This paper engages this artwork considering the politics and poetics of hosting and “the stay” as queer intimacies are formed in and with bodies—both in the chronicity of pathogenic presence effected through transnational flows of medical coloniality; and as an anti-colonial practice of disalienation, hospitality, and invitation into the erotic and social life lived in the space of the bed. I approach this work of disability scholarship through a feminist understanding that chronic illness is a condition of global entanglement within the colonial and postcolonial milieu of racial capitalism, its afterlives, and its historical traumas. To host challenges the notion that to be chronically sick and bedbound is an existence delimited by isolation and social death produced in the bedbound subject as one denied full entry into the western, liberal, public-political articulation of the human. I reflect on what it means to be a queer, brown, sick/disabled body and turn toward the possibilities of the bed as a material spacetime and hermeneutic for alternative expressions of aliveness through stillness and immobility as the entanglements of our histories and medical conditions also open space for our entangled practices of countermemory and ontological disobedience: how we refuse to be colonized objects of ruin. As settler colonial framings of illness evoke an always-already racialized diagnostic apparatus through which surveillance, impugnment, negation, and alienation are deployed via the medical industrial complex and the medical gaze as a subjugating mode of relation, bedlife is a vital counterpoint to this violence, a portal to crip fugitivity, existential and political affirmation, and connection. Finally, through encountering different artworks, this essay explores the linkages between intimacy and future-making, collapsing the space between queer desire for each other and one another’s bodies, and the particularly queer politics of desire for a world unbound by oppressive structures and the limitations of imposed binaries. Against what disability scholars Eli Clare and Eunjung Kim, among others, have critiqued as the hegemonic imperative toward cure, which seeks to get us out of bed and into capitalism’s racist and ableist coercive temporalities, this paper looks to the bed as a heuristic and material site for a radical politics of feminist carework, queer desire, crip time, and decolonial worldmaking. What it is to want — in all its senses, suggests there is a relevant kind of intimacy between what we are denied as sick and disabled queers in a heterosexist society founded on racial capitalism and colonial regimes of body, self and other—and how we share closeness, cultivating desire for each other and other possible worlds.

South African Food Studies

Abstract Introducing a special issue of Matatu titled “South African Food Studies,” this essay argues for the importance of food as a lens for understanding contemporary culture and society. More specifically, the essay advocates for recentring Global South contexts—in this case South Africa—in a ‘food studies’ conversation that has often been dominated by the American academy; it also underscores the vitality of the humanities, qualitative social sciences, and creative arts for transcending reductive ‘food security’ paradigms often applied in the Global South. The essay first examines the short story “Water No Get Enemy” by South African writer Fred Khumalo, introducing how a focus on food and eating can illuminate globalisation, xenophobia, resource conflict, and environmental change. From here, the authors introduce the evolving field of ‘food studies,’ then outline the eight academic, personal, and creative pieces that constitute this special issue, all authored by contributors from the African continent. Issues raised include the gendered and queer politics of food, breastmilk, and soil; the ongoing coloniality of neoliberal approaches to food inequality; the burdening of Black bodies; the role of so-called ‘ethnic restaurants’ in building transnational and multi-ethnic communities; and the heightened stakes of food access during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Book review: Srila Roy. 2022. Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India

Srila Roy. 2022. Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 280 pp., $26.95 (Paperback). ISBN 978-1-4780-1888-9.

Refusing the present to affirm the unknown future: after LGBTIQ rights in global queer politics

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon recent developments in international LGBTIQ rights law and activism to show how time and temporality are central to the growing international recognition of (and backlash to) sexual orientation and gender identity rights claims. Focusing on the manifestation of these temporal debates within the international backlash to the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014, the paper asks how we might think queer futures differently. It engages with Deleuzian temporal multiplicities to argue that simply countering linear narratives of LGBTIQ progress will not escape the logics of the present or account for injustices of the past. Instead, it is necessary to escape from those logics and conceive of the present as a dimension of the future even if we do not know what that future will be. This position of openness to the future makes clear how international institutions assume their own atemporality and shows how we might ‘affirmatively refuse’ structures of the present that are limiting, unjust or absurd. Using this framework, the paper identifies what elements might be required to think futures of LGBTIQ justice in a non-linear fashion, where the future is not tethered to the present or reliant upon a single path of progress.

Queer space making across greater Los Angeles: reimagining urban autonomy through collective care

This paper analyzes the lives of whom I call poli-creatives and how they reimagine space making and urban autonomy across greater Los Angeles through a queer and feminist praxis of collective care. Using women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and transnational feminisms, this paper introduces the concept of mycorrhizal assemblages. As a theoretical and analytical tool, it draws from subterranean webs of mycelial fungal strands to conceptualize how poli-creatives use their work to navigate their everyday socio-political economic conditions by building interconnected spaces and nurturing local queer, feminist, working class, immigrant communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and life-history interviews with five key poli-creatives, this paper discusses one kind of mycorrhizal assemblage rooted in informal spaces and practices; intimacy, trust, and vulnerability; and anti-surveillance and -policing. I show how these spaces do not depend on visibility and representation in public space, gayborhoods, nor the neoliberal state and formal institutions. Instead, I argue that although they are decentralized and ephemeral, they stay connected by a transnational and queer politics of local community building through DIY practice, holding spaces for embodied trauma, and divesting from institutional and settler-colonial state power. This study responds to the limitations within urban studies and discourses about queer communities by centering how poli-creatives use their transnational experiences, intimate communities, and embodied traumas and knowledges to lay down new soil for collective survival across greater Los Angeles and a future otherwise.

On Intersections of Power and Vulnerability: A Critique of Nollywood, Heteropatriarchy, and Ideologies of Motherhood

This article explores the representational politics of motherhood in Nollywood. It argues that a latent hetero-normative/patriarchal ideology shapes the construction of motherhood in Nollywood. Through a postcolonial media critique of both lived experiences and six purposively selected movies, I analyze the interplay of power and vulnerability in Nollywood’s portrayal of motherhood. Themes of heteropatriarchal fetishism, paradox of matripotency, and strategic silencing were identified. I propose a decolonial rethinking of normative ideologies, critique culturally sanctioned power imbalances, and invite more scholarship on queer politics and identities in Nollywood and postcolonial Nigeria. I conclude that to achieve equitable representation, Nollywood requires transformative reevaluation of how the mother-image is calibrated and negotiated. Producers must reflexively animate mother-affirming representations and critically examine the implied meaning of their portrayal of women/mothers.