Queer Positions Research Articles

Differently Chinese, Differently Queer: Queer Chineseness as Heuristic and Transnational Queer Imaginary

Abstract This article uses a duoethnographic approach to trouble the notions of queerness and Chineseness. Writing from two different social locations as transnational queer Chinese women based in the United States—one a Singaporean queer Chinese woman, another a Mainland queer Chinese woman—we critically interrogate and reflect on our life and fieldwork experiences at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, and class. We focus on transregional differences as well as inter-Asian connectivity to decenter the dominant Euro-American framework of queer theory, which assumes a universal, white queer position. Centering difference, misunderstanding, struggle, and tension in our writing, we reflexively unravel the (un)intelligibility and (im)possibilities of queer Chinese womanhood to complicate the notions of queerness and Chineseness. Joining current conversations on queer Asia, we explore the notion of queer Chineseness as a heuristic tool and a space for queer imaginary.

Bringing queerness to the surface: Truman Capote’s November 1971 screenplay adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Truman Capote occupied a queer position as an openly gay man adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the screen in the homophobic Hollywood system of the early 1970s. In January 1972, Paramount Pictures rejected Capote’s Gatsby screenplay and dismissed him from the film entirely. In this study, I investigate a tenuous claim that has circulated for decades: that Capote was fired from the project because he wrote Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker as queer characters. I argue that Capote deployed what Alexander Doty calls ‘working-within-the-system tactics’ to suggest queerness that would be apparent to viewers accustomed to interpreting media outside of dominant codes dictated by heteronormative conventions, while also using what licence he had to incorporate more explicitly queer moments. This article contributes to research on Capote’s manuscript with a close reading of queerness in the text, and an account of the personal and professional struggles related to queer identity that Capote faced while developing the script.

Identity in Feminist Cinema from the Perspective of Queer Theory: Take Blue is the Warmest Color as an Exemplification

Recently, queer theory has attracted more scholarly attention as an extension of feminist theory in terms of deconstructionism and postmodern contexts. Queer theory has been utilized by feminists as a significant theoretical framework in art criticism, with cinemas taken as a representation system and cultural practice for the manifesto of gender identity and gender equity. This research will take the prestigious lesbian cinema Blue is the Warmest Color as an exemplification to analyze the embodiment of queer theory, especially gender performativity and body writing, with the methodologies of case study and analysis of the representation of screen images from the perspective of semiotics. The research findings confirm the association between cinematic techniques and representation and the construction of gender identity from the perspective of queer theory and representation theory. Meanwhile, the research explores the expansion and application of body writing in the cinematic field, clarifying several intentions of the large proportion of the explicit and straight representation of women’s bodies in sex scenes. Overall, this research analyzes how the employment of various cinematic techniques and representation contributes to the construction of the protagonists’ gender identities which destroys the binary regulation of sexuality and heterosexual hegemony, as well as acquires the acknowledgment and acceptance of the spectatorship in terms of queer position.

Trans Chaplin

Trans Chaplin Rox Samer (bio) A body in process, in transformation, an incomplete body able to merge with other bodies—or other things—and create new bodies … this new body, for all its composite weirdness, strikes us as immediately recognizable rather than entirely alien: an insight into our own bodily experience, whether remembered from childhood or glimpsed in dreams. —Tom Gunning1 The lift of an eyebrow, however faint, may convey more than a hundred words. —Charles Chaplin2 In the weeks following my top surgery in December 2019, I enjoyed many a movie and television series with my care web.3 As my body healed and I turned my attention to preparing for the spring 2020 semester, including a course on US film history, I was taken with the most iconic and popular of historical media figures: Charlie Chaplin. The filmmaker's short films and silent features supported the recalibration of my body-mind as I prepared to re-enter the social world. They would also become films that I'd return to, that my own body would recall over the coming year, as I started taking testosterone and continued to transition with the minimal surveillance from cis society, quarantined at home with my cats and partner as my only witnesses. Chaplin's films, surprisingly, gave image to both the changes I yearned for and those I joyfully experienced. Until quite recently, transgender media studies has centered the study of transgender representation, meaning the analysis of film and television's few canonical trans characters. But the last five years have seen a renaissance in the field with a number of studies devoted to trans aesthetics, genre studies, [End Page 175] and industry studies revealing what is trans about the most mainstream, most popular, and oldest film and television fare.4 Among these, Cáel M. Keegan's Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (2018) demonstrates how the Wachowskis established a cinematic language for sensing beyond gender's dictated forms, and Quinlan Miller's Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (2019) reveals the camp humor of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms to be brimming with gender nonconformity or queer gender. Their archives and methods are welcome in contemporary trans political discourse where trans activists, journalists, and scholars' paranoid readings routinely cite anti-trans violence—particularly the murders of trans women of color. Time and again, this discourse reduces trans women of color to a signifier for white supremacist and transphobic violence.5 As Jules Gill-Peterson argues, it's high time we shed "the predictive control that is the hallmark of paranoia for the much messier and potentially more pleasurable terrain of perverse laughter."6 Trans life is teeming with awkwardness and joy. Thus, while it may sound antithetical to much popular trans discourse, we find ourselves addressed by much film and television, past and present, including the futures of science fiction and humor of comedy (and not only when the butt of jokes). Here I demonstrate how the silent film comedian Charlie Chaplin, through a pantomime of agile, embodied shifts across not only gender but also species and kingdom, gave early moving image to trans phenomenology. Cinema and media studies has long acknowledged how "queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexuals and straight positions."7 Here I show how trans positions, readings, and pleasures likewise exist beside and within those of cisgender scholars and spectators. In what Tom Gunning once called Chaplin's "cinematic body" and "plastic ontology" and what André Bazin called the character Charlie's "unlimited imagination in the face of danger" and "total indifference to the category of things held sacred," one can perceive a trans way of life in all its awkward sensational and somatic glory.8 This trans retrospectatorship, which not only decodes but also encodes meaning, invites further reencounters and models a media studies methodology that affirms the very possibility of gleeful transition in the present.9 [End Page 176] Chaplin's oeuvre is replete with fluctuating forms of queer gender. In several short films, Chaplin evokes the early-twentieth-century figure of...

Queering Nationalism: How Three Choreographers Redefine Israeli Patriotism

Many contemporary Israeli choreographers are politically at odds with the Israeli legislature’s priorities. In a culture premised on heteronormative masculine physicality, moreover, this dissociation is acute for choreographers identifying as queer. This article argues that by staking queer positions of defiance against gendered hegemonies, Gender Bender (2013) by Idan Cohen and Cowboy (2015) by Niv Sheinfeld and Oren Laor redefine twenty-first century Israeliness to reclaim a different kind of Israeli patriotism. Cohen uses queerness to critique Zionist nationalism; Sheinfeld and Laor’s parodic queer nationalism undermines patriarchal power structures. This article shows how theatrical dance critically claims space for Jewish queer subjectivity within historical and contemporary Israeli heteronormative nationalist discourses, which in turn impacts investigations of identity in Jewish and Israel studies. In an era that too-easily conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in frightening ways, these artists’ reclamations of what it means to be Israeli remind us how nuanced this conversation is.

"Between Utopian Longings and Everyday Failures": Imagining a Latin American Cuir Future

At present, the figure of the muxe occupies a queer position trapped between narratives of death and life that reaffirm both a notion of straight time and a state of coloniality. Through Guadalupe (2012), a graphic novel by the Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas and the cartoonist Odyr Bernardi, and the Mexican film Carmín tropical (2014) by Rigoberto Perezcano, I explore the possibility of a Latin American queer future that envisions other emancipatory models that do not reproduce hegemonic western LGBTQ identity politics. I argue that the possibility for this Latin American queer future lies in understanding queerness as a decolonial project that is always-already imbricated in a process of translation, linked to questions of temporality and space. I analyze the figure of the muxe as an outcome of strange temporalities and space—that is, as a result of puzzling past, present and future in a single moment of time. This allows me to detach the muxe from identity and to explore how their positionality could potentially help defuse a binary (male) hierarchy implicit in the state of coloniality through a queer temporality that ultimately could lead to what I call a cuir Latin American future.

Sticky stories: Joe Orton, queer history, queer dramaturgy

This paper investigates the resonances of Orton’s work for contemporary queer audiences. By presenting potential reasons for the rise and fall in popularity and visibility of Orton’s work for queer and gay audiences through the 1980s and 1990s, this paper looks to the queer context in which Joe Orton’s work developed in order to explore the queer social history into which it fits. This sense of queer history is linked to contemporary notions of queer theorising about temporalities and queer dramaturgy, which offers potentially novel ways of engaging with Orton’s work queerly without twisting it to fit a ‘neat’ reading, in part because such readings tend to ‘smooth out’ the more difficult elements of the work. In particular, the paper explores the theatrical form of farce, often articulated as conservative, in relation to queer positions, which are quite the opposite. In so doing, the paper, by way of queer temporalities and work on queer dramaturgies, sketches out a reading strategy that does not ignore Orton’s more difficult or stickier elements, in particular his treatment of women and race.

Conference Report: Women Who Kill in English-Speaking Cinema and TV Series of the Postfeminist Era

The topic of this conference does not, on the face of it, present anything new. Indeed, the last forty years have been overflowed with research on the figure of the murderous woman and the various types of characters associated with it (the jealous girlfriend, the monstrous woman). This conference, however, focused on the Postfeminist era and considered women who kill in the light of the recent shift in the queer position that has, for the last twenty-five or so years, encouraged a more flexi...

Monstrous Territories, Queer Propositions: Negotiating The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, between Australia, the Philippines, and Other (Island) Worlds

For the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (apt) (2015–16), Sydney-based artists Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra collaborated to present Ex Nilalang, a series of filmic and live portraits exploring Philippine mythology and marginalized identities. The artists’ shared Filipino ancestry, attachments to the Filipino diasporic community, and investigations into “Philippine-ness” offer obvious cultural connections to the “Asia Pacific” concerns of the apt. However, their aesthetic interests in inhabiting fictional spaces marked by the “fantastic” and the “monstrous”—alongside the lived reality of their critical queer positions and life politics—complicate any straightforward identification. If the Philippine archipelago and island continent of Australia are intersecting cultural contexts for their art, the artists’ queering of identity in art and life emphasizes a range of cultural orientations informing subjectivities, always under negotiation and transformation, and at once both the product of and in excess of these (island) territories.

The Counter-Conduct of Medieval Hermits

The hermit posed a challenge to a medieval Church that emphasized rule, order, and discipline since oversight of their life could be virtually non-existent. The writings of Richard Rolle, hermit, negotiates the space between Foucauldian exomolgesis and exoagouresis as Rolle strove to articulate the identity of the hermit without any kind of church endorsement. As well, he forged his life out of a struggle with concepts of medieval sin, specifically Pride, which placed him in a queer position in terms of relationships with his surrounding community. His way of life was highly influential in his local community, however, and, through manuscript dissemination, beyond. Because he experienced mystical visions without church oversight, his eremitic life and example inspired a movement toward lay, affective piety in the later Middle Ages. The hermit, in his case, challenges the medieval Church’s hierarchy in that hermits practice a form of living at a local level, placing them in dangerous, sometimes heretical, positions that force the Church to either absorb their practices or suppress them.

How the Right Usurped the Queer Agenda: Frame Co‐optation in Political Discourse

This article draws on a case study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and queer politics in Vermont to explain the conditions under which radical discourse gains and loses a public voice. In contrast to claims that the marginalization of queer discourse is due to silencing by LGBT rights activists or to litigation strategies, we argue that variation in queer discourse over time is the result of the co‐optation of queer discourse and goals by opponents. Extending the social movement literature on frame variation, we argue that opponents co‐opt discourse when they adopt aspects of the content of a movement's discourse, while subverting its intent. We show that conservative LGBT rights opponents co‐opted queer discourse. As a result, queer positions lost their viability as the discursive field in which those arguments were made was fundamentally altered. Because queer positions became less tenable, we see the withdrawal of queer discourse from the mainstream and alternative LGBT media. Our work both supports and builds on research on frame variation by demonstrating how discourse can change over time in response to the interplay between changing aspects of the political and cultural landscape and the discourse of opponents.

Queering the Politics of Global Sexual Rights?

AbstractTo be ‘politically queer’ at the beginning of the 1990s indicated opposition to the policing of identity and heteronormativity, and adherence to a politics that transcended liberal‐legal claims. More recently, queer activism and scholarship have largely focused on contesting the emergence of homonormative forms of nationalism and institutionalized rights‐based LGBT politics. However, to define a political intervention as queer on the condition that it explicitly adheres to one or other specific political project is possibly to overstate the case. The ‘queer signifier’ has travelled far beyond its local origins and, as a consequence, has shifted meanings in significant ways. In this essay, I consider current tensions concerning what it means to be politically queer, focusing on queer responses to the formation of sexual rights‐bearing subjects, and critically analyse the notion of sexual rights on which contemporary international mainstream sexual politics is based. Through this analysis I aim to draw attention to the entanglement of the normalization of sexual identities at a national level with current sexual neocolonial projects. Since the signifier ‘queer’ has spread in many different directions, I argue that it is precisely cultural translation that makes key alliances against both universalist and nationalist queer positions possible.

As performances discursivo-identitárias de mulheres negras em uma comunidade para negros na Orkut

Este artigo analisa performances identitárias de raça encenadas nos textos produzidos por negras em uma comunidade da Orkut. O estudo se embasa em concepções sobre os novos letramentos digitais e em Teorias Queer. Os dados foram gerados em uma comunidade da Orkut que discute temas sobre a população negra. Foram analisadas mensagens de um fórum para mulheres negras brasileiras. O arcabouço analítico é constituído pelos construtos alinhamento e enquadre, propostos por Goffman ([1979], 1998). Os resultados indicam que as performances identitárias das participantes são permeadas por sexualidade, gênero, raça, classe social e oscilam entre uma postura queer e performances essencializadas.

‘Violent Operations’: Revisiting the Transgendered Body in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve

This article examines representations of the transgendered body in Angela Carter's 1977 speculative fiction The Passion of New Eve. More specifically, it compares the depiction of a post-operative male-to-female transsexual (Evelyn/Eve), who has been subjected to forcible sex reassignment surgery, with a non-operative male-to-female transsexual (Tristessa), who elects to pass as a woman. The writing of Angela Carter (1940–1992) is commonly situated within the context of Second Wave feminism and her preoccupation with the exposure of femininity as an ideological construction is characteristic of this movement. However, Carter's work has more recently been revisited within the framework of queer theory, with Trevenna (2002) describing the ‘Butlerification’ of her writing. Prosser (1998) has noted how the transgendered subject has been figured as a ‘key queer trope’ and Halberstam (2000) has commented on the ways in which the transgendered figure has been read as revealing the ‘constructedness of all sex and gender’; in this context, The Passion of New Eve, with its focus on gender crossing and gender performativity, has been read as anticipating developments in queer theory. However, Carter's novel also features motifs which Prosser and Halberstam have identified as symptomatic of transphobic discourses, including the ‘exposure’ of the transgendered person as inauthentic and the depiction of sex reassignment surgery as an act of material and symbolic violence. Indeed, transgendered lives have been met with suspicion and hostility in some feminist contexts, sentiments given expression in Janice C. Raymond's (1979) assertion that ‘all transsexuals rape women's bodies’. With a focus on textual motifs of sexualised violence, this article seeks to revisit Carter's novel and its reception from the perspective of transgender theory; by questioning the recuperation of Carter's work as anticipating queer theory avant la lettre, this article seeks to explore tensions between feminist and queer positions on the politics of sexed identity.

New Avenues for the Politics of the Abject

Alberto Sandoval-Sinchez openly, creatively, and, in what I see as a and way, explains in his paper his fascination with abject body because, as he tells us, he has to. His writing, he says, is his way of keeping alive and of negotiating a body that houses I use words like kind and generous to describe what he's decided to present in such a dynamic and remarkably articulate way to a room of relative strangers because, unfortunately, I think that I can safely assume that loss of friends and loved ones to AIDS is something many of us here have learned to live with, to negotiate, and to try to explain to ourselves in an ongoing process of mourning. So I want to thank him for his work here, which proposes new ways of doing this. The body is foundation of this theoretical project; and writing, as a critical cultural practice, facilitates a politics of survival immersed in what Sandoval-Stinchez calls the deep and troubled muddy waters of abjection, with possibility of writing as a lifeline or umbilical cord to But what we've experienced here today is not just presentation of a theory or a politics of survival through abjection but an example of abjection as a performative act in disruption of typically dry academic conference or symposium paper, with inclusion of autobiographical information and a short performance in Spanglish, a language that always seems to remind me that identity is constantly in process of being made. Judith Butler has been instrumental in transformation of North American queer theory into a viable critical and theoretical position. At same time, she has expressed some reservations about potentially essentialist politics of this approach. She's emphasized importance of queer position as what she calls a specific reworking of abjection. In Bodies That Matter, she points out that

Researching Dissident Subjectivities: Queering the Grounds of Theory and Practice

Can gay male and lesbian academies conduct queer research within the heterosexual epistemological frameworks prevalent in the academy? In this article, Kenn Gardner Honeychurch argues that lesbian and gay male researchers need to challenge the ways in which the exclusionary epistemologies, methodologies, and texts of a heterosexually constructed social order have denied the possibilities of non-heterosexual knowledges, practice, and texts. He points the way toward the construction of a new epistemology, and in the process shifts the territories of research by advocating that research be designed, conducted, and analyzed from a "queer position." By taking a "queered position" in social research, the researcher challenges the dominant worldview in what may be known, who may be the knower, and how knowledge has come to be generated and circulated. In this way, lesbian and gay male researchers who declare their sexualities and study a subject of homosexualities contribute to more expansive cultural discourses.