Queer Politics Research Articles

Queering the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract Research on the Responsibility to Protect has become increasingly intersectional with over two decades of research; however, there remains a blind spot on the persecution of queer people. This is surprising given that queer people have been persecuted in atrocity crimes as far back as the Holocaust. While the field of genocide studies has recently begun to engage with this area, we frame queer persecution more broadly around the four R2P crimes. In this article we set out the rationale and urgency for including a queer lens in the prevention of atrocity crimes. This is not only about a focus on queer people; we argue for a queer politics and ethics that ceaselessly interrogates all relations of power. We outline the scale of the gap in academic research, policy and state understandings of R2P. Since R2P is often framed as a foreign policy matter by western states, with the global South as the object of R2P, we include two case-studies on escalating persecution against LGBTI+ people in Europe: the United Kingdom and Hungary. We argue that the R2P research and policy communities should remove what we call the ‘cishetronormative blindfold’ and engage more broadly with intersectional approaches to atrocity prevention.

‘Why wave the flag?’: (in)visible queer activism in authoritarian Kazakhstan and Russia

ABSTRACT Western queer politics aspires to increase the visibility of queer subjects who have been highly regulated in Kazakhstan and Russia. Drawing on three interview studies conducted in 2017 and 2018 in Kazakhstan and Russia, respectively, this article examines and compares narratives on queer activism in both countries. Our findings reveal how visibility has an ambivalent meaning for queer people in these cases. For many, public queer activism is perceived as vulnerable and risky, therefore alternative, less ‘visible’, methods of activism are preferred and deemed more useful. For example, participants in our studies mentioned using social media, signing petitions and taking part in educational initiatives as alternative forms of queer activism. The article deliberates the pursuit and applicability of representational visibility politics within queer activism in Kazakhstan and Russia’s fluctuating contexts.

Lesbian Solo Motherhood: Emma Brockes’s An Excellent Choice

The 1978 delivery of the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Brown, created what anthropologist Sarah Franklin termed a ‘bridge to new kinds of life’ – and, indeed, IVF and other forms of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) have facilitated a wide range of family formations, such as lesbians choosing to have children with the help of sperm donors. Much could be expected, then, of one particular memoir – Emma Brockes’s An Excellent Choice (2018) – which details Brockes, an English lesbian journalist living in the USA, becoming a solo mother by choice via sperm donation and Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). However, my paper combines close reading with queer and feminist criticism in order to suggest that Brockes’s attitudes regarding motherhood reveal a disengagement with queer politics in favour of an espousal of homonormativity – which is defined as a privatised, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them (Weiss, 2018). Such a positioning is a highly privileged stance that potentially ‘blots from view’ (Weiss, 2018: 111) the much more numerous and socially vulnerable members of the North American LGBT+ community.

Queer in Cyprus? The LGBTIQ Movement, Normativity, and Resistance in a Changing (Trans)national Landscape

The literature on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) politics has established the interplay between domestic and transnational norms and political tactics. However, knowledge about how local LGBTIQ activists understand, negotiate, and employ transnational LGBTIQ campaigns and tactics over time remains limited. This article builds on literature on the dynamics between national and transnational LGBTIQ politics. Based on interviews with Cypriot LGBTIQ activists, it examines how they adapt their perceptions and employments of LGBTIQ activism and politics when the transnational LGBTIQ movement interacts with local norms around gender and sexuality, and what the impact of this interaction is on the boundaries of LGBTIQ in-group exclusion and inclusion. The analysis of the interview material identifies three approaches toward transnational LGBTIQ politics that participants express over time: Ambivalence toward, acclamation of, and resistance toward transnational LGBTIQ politics. I argue that these different approaches show that the dynamics between national and transnational LGBTIQ activism and politics are not static and that the relationship between “norm” and “queer” is both messy and productive. I further argue that activists’ understandings, negotiations, and employments of transnational LGBTIQ campaigns and tactics in contentious contexts may reinforce and/or challenge national LGBTIQ politics’ normativization and queer emancipatory politics. Therefore, beyond contributing to discussions about the national–transnational relationship in LGBTIQ politics, the article demonstrates the importance of studying LGBTIQ activists’ views for gaining a well-rounded understanding of this issue.

Locating a shadowy state in queer, feminist politics

SummaryIn this commentary, part of a book forum on Srila Roy's (2022) book Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India, I argue that the feminist and queer movement, in response to the neoliberal turn in India, is not totally separate from the Indian state formations. In fact, a shadowy state emerges in the affective life of citizens as an expression of what Timothy Mitchell would have called “state effect.”

Making (and enduring) feminist relations

SummaryThis essay reviews Srila Roy's (2022) Changing the Subject. It notes the multiple dimensions along which she articulates feminist and queer politics in two organizations in West Bengal, India, including scale, space, and generation. Feminism and queer politics are co‐constituted from the Global South, across rural and urban relations, and through older and younger generations of activism. By examining two sites of the constitution of feminist and queer politics, she shows how “queer feminist governmentalities” and processes of subjectification emerge and entangle in different ways. The review goes on to ask several questions about understandings of the political. Finally, I engage her conclusions around critique as care. Roy's book offers a rich ethnographic contribution to debates over politics in neoliberal times.

Introduction to special issue: queer liberalisms and marginal mobilities

ABSTRACT The aim of this special issue is to unpack the tenuous relationship between queer liberalisms and marginal mobilities within contested political contexts in the Global South and North. Establishing the special issue’s thematic and theoretical framework, it firstly, theorizes “queer liberalism” as a mode of governance and a critique and contextualizes the term within a genealogy of queer politics. Secondly, it discusses “marginal mobilities” as an analytical framework that expands the purview of how the (im)mobilities of LGBTIQ+ people are co-constituted by queer liberal governance and approached within scholarly, activist, and political debates. This Introduction further charts this special issues’ interdisciplinary contributions which address three overarching themes: (a) the paradox of queer neoliberal policies and politics in the LGBTIQ+ asylum context; (b) the in- and exclusions of non-heteronormative subjects and/within the nation-state; (c) the in- and exclusions of LGBTIQ+ refugees within societal spaces in the asylum country.

Queer Politics of Naming and Figuration of the “Lesbian” in Maja Ma

In post-377 neoliberal India, with the emergence and proliferation of subscription-based video streaming platforms, the cultural field has undergone a sea change. In this complex, shifting, and evolving cultural terrain, representation of queer/lesbian women is becoming less uncommon. Maja Ma contributes to this growing cultural landscape by offering the representation of a “lesbian” who is also a Hindu mother, aunty, and wife. In this paper, I explore what the politics of naming—which has largely been avoided by films committed to the representation of queer women in Hindi cinema—offers the film’s “lesbian” protagonist, what it reveals about her complex figuration as aunty-mother-wife, and what naming offers relationalities that are forged, informed, and altered by the private disclosure as well as public revelation of her queerness. Drawing on queer cultural studies scholarship focused on India, as well as scholarship on the complexities of “lesbian” activism in India, I interrogate the shift that Maja Ma engenders in Indian queer cultural landscape, and the queer possibilities it offers this field, while paying attention to dominant norms of representation it aligns itself with.

Trusting and thinking anew

SummaryThis essay responds to the contributions to the forum centered on my book Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India. It addresses questions posed by the contributors, from the role of the state to the digital when it comes to a rapidly changing terrain of queer and feminist organizing in contemporary India. While the book rallied against defensiveness, in this commentary I revisit defensiveness as a queer feminist political affect. Through the provocations offered in this book forum conversation, I find renewed faith in asserting friction, inconvenience, ambivalence, and defensiveness as ways of expanding queer feminisms as ongoing sites of struggle, transformation, trust, solidarity, and hope.

Queer Trash

“Queer Politics & Positionalities in Sonic Art” series editor Charles Eppley speaks with Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman of Queer Trash, a curatorial platform based in New York City that features experimental art, music, and performance by LGBTQ2S+ artists. They discuss the concepts of queer sound and listening, methods of improvisation, queer identity and expression, tokenization and exploitation, DIY culture, and the limits of arts funding for queer sonic artists.

And Then Suddenly, It Was Simply Everywhere

This article offers an artistic reflection on the Queer Percussion Research Group Zine Collection (2023) through the concept of shimmering as a queer political and positional affect across light and sound. With over a dozen contributions that consist of artist publications, pamphlets, and experimental scores, the Zine Collection was produced by folks “interested in the intersection of queerness and percussion in a variety of contexts.” While glitter scatters across contributions from inside the clear plastic folio, this writing recounts the impact and implications of glitter’s trace as it moves between surfaces, bodies, and skins. Rather than declaring glitter as inherently queer, this work considers the ways that glitter—and other glistening things—“blur the body,” as Michele White writes, and disrupts normative presentations of gender. Its reflective surfaces thus become entangled with the slippages between the masculine/feminine binary, shifting the legibility of the (gendered) surface that might allow viewers to see otherwise. Thinking with and alongside glitter’s shimmering properties allows for a reconceptualization of queer, which might enable further forms of conceptual movement and framing that extend its theoretical capacity.

Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics

Asians Loving Asians: Sticky Rice Homoeroticism and Queer Politics

Selling the disciplined mind to achieve the disciplined body onlyfans, peloton and queer digital body art of the covid-era

This paper follows the figure of the ultra-healthy queer masculine subject as a unit of value across online fitness instruction and amateur netporn – two rising vernacular, digital performance genres of the Covid-era. Such performances exploit the vulnerabilities of attention to commodify a disciplined mind as a means toward selling a future-oriented, hyper-athletic, disciplined body. With Covid-19 and HIV/AIDS hovering at the edges of the frame, this paper draws on the queer politics of embodiment and digital intimacies to address disciplinary questions surrounding Performance Studies and its precipitating interrogations into digital media.

“I Want to Know What People are Saying”: Trans Youth Learning Critical Media Literacies to Negotiate Hate on Social Media

Abstract We draw on 37 interviews with a racially diverse group of 21 trans and queer teenagers to consider how they used social media to navigate dominant ideologies amid rapidly accelerating white supremacy, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, anti-transness, and anti-queerness in 2019-2020. The analysis emerges from a humanizing qualitative study of lgbtq+ youth digital life conducted in partnership with an interdisciplinary gender health program that provides holistic services. Employing grounded theory and intersectional theories of queer politics, we expand conceptualizations of queer critical media literacies. We find that youth in the study enacted critical media literacies to 1) anticipate the logics of hate by which they are oppressed; 2) unlearn dominant ideologies that structure privilege; 3) and rehearse responses to intersecting oppression. Understanding the ways youth negotiate dominant ideologies on social media can inform the design of critical media literacy teaching and learning to confront phobic forces in multiple youth-serving contexts.

Queer Politics in Times of New Authoritarianisms

ABSTRACT Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms in the last two decades have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. This introduction examines how different states, laws and communities have engaged with queer rights discourse with a range of outcomes. It argues that despite a spate of recent progressive legislations, there is no direct correlation between LGBTQI+ rights and liberal governance in South Asia. Framing contributions that take up different iterations of queer rights and authoritarianism in South Asia and its diaspora, the article outlines how LGBTQI+ actors’ negotiation of authoritarian regimes has produced fragile coalitions and new transnational formations.

Between ‘Cheeni’ and ‘Nupi Maanbi’: Transgender politics in Manipur at the intersection of nation and Indigeneity

ABSTRACT The 2020 crime thriller web series Paatal Lok featured a Nepali trans woman by the name of Mary Lyngdoh who is referred to as ‘Cheeni’ (a racial epithet for persons from India’s Northeast region and East Asia). The series has been lauded for its inclusive representation of a transgender actor, Henthoi Mairembam from Manipur, yet the choice of a Khasi name, ‘Mary Lyngdoh’, for a Nepali character as well as the use of ‘Cheeni’ as an alias raise multiple questions about racialization and queer politics in India. This arbitrary racialized characterization in Paatal Lok and its queer Northeast representation can serve as critical points of departure to examine the emerging LGBTQ politics in Northeast India. This paper attempts to highlight the convergences and incommensurability of LGBTQ politics in the region, particularly in Manipur, with that of mainland India. Against the backdrop of the history of militarization and conflict in Northeast India, LGBTQ individuals migrants from the region are further racialized in India’s metropolitan centers. This geopolitical alienation is felt by LGBTQ persons from the Northeast at the scale of the body. LGBTQ politics in Manipur represents a new form of resistance that introduces ‘Indigeneity’ as an identity and an epistemic category to counter the assimilationist projects of Hindutva’s authoritarian nationalism.

Changing Contours of Chinese Queer Perceptions and the Taiwanese Model

This study explores the transitions of queer understandings in China, which are considerably shaped by social, political, cultural and historical factors. While the Mao era silenced homosexuality, the reform era created new avenues for public discussions on sexuality, though they were confined to urban China. The representation of queerness in Chinese media like television, films, pop music, and so on, signifies the role of cultural identities having larger implications in a local and global context. However, queer voices in China have been subject to ambiguous yet persistent censorship. In this context, placing queer politics at the cross-strait tensions between China and Taiwan gives a better understanding of its soft power potential. Taiwan is the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, and queer politics has become an important soft power tool to enhance its democratic credentials in the international community. Strategic promulgation of a progressive queer policy in China will have potential benefits in enhancing its legitimacy in the international arena. The study assesses the state of LGBTQ rights in China and how the country traverses between the grey areas of allowance and disallowance in its approach to the queer question. It also explores the potential benefits of granting LGBTQ rights as a soft power strategy, taking a cue from the Taiwan experience and the constraints to attaining such status.

“Manlike, but Different Sex”: Genealogies of Trans Femininity in Milton’s Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT This article examines how Paradise Lost serves as a source for trans studies from the field’s inception in the 1990s. Susan Stryker cites Adam’s fallen lament as a conclusion to her landmark essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Mountain of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” but she uses his speech without attending to the troublingly misogynistic direction in which it turns. Two decades later, Karen Barad’s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings” reproduces large portions of Stryker’s essay while obscuring her Miltonic source material — as well as the distinction between the terms queer and trans. Following Stryker’s citation of Milton and Barad’s use of “My Words,” this article offers alternative genealogies of trans femininity in Paradise Lost, from Eve’s surgical birth to Adam’s prelapsarian pregnancy. I argue that the imposition of Eve’s labor pains and the denial of Adam’s feminization expose postlapsarian sex assignment as tragically cisgender. Moreover, the persistent masculinity of Milton’s angels renders them less resonant with trans femininity. Milton’s portrayals of sexual difference challenge the modern evangelical argument that transphobia is biblically sanctioned. It is Milton’s expansion of Genesis 2:23 in Paradise Lost that enables rather than restricts gender identities we would now call trans.

From Petitions to Demands, Restitution to Representation

From Petitions to Demands, Restitution to Representation

Artists in the Archives

Ulrike Müller's Herstory Inventory (HI) is a collection of over one hundred works on paper by “feminist” artists who were given “drawing assignments” that began with textual prompts taken from an archival list of T-shirts that Müller discovered in the collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). HI has also had multiple incarnations as a staged reading/live performance, audio installation, collective art project, art exhibition, and book, and its relay across media participates in a fascination with the archive that has pervaded LGBTQ culture, resulting in a proliferation of new archives that is one manifestation of the “archival turn.” This essay focuses on how Müller's HI uses the LHA as a point of departure for a creative practice that not only opens lesbian feminist archives to new visibility and new publics but also creates a transgenerational dialogue around lesbian feminist politics and representation — both honoring and reviving its history and subjecting it to critique. HI's engagement with the LHA's lesbian feminist commitment to archival autonomy provides an interesting case history for radical archival politics, as tensions between counterarchives and archival critique get played out through the tensions between lesbian and queer feminisms. Returning to the politics of representation and visibility that have been so central and vexing in lesbian feminism, HI puts art practices in conversation with archival ones. The project approaches the archive through abstraction and drawing, both practices of representation that resist the realisms of documentary media such as film and photography, to enact a queer politics of visibility.