Queer Potential Research Articles

The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play

This article identifies the queer potentialities of Goat Simulator by exploring how the gameplay mechanics can be understood as “stupid” and “Camp.” Moving away from representational notions of queerness, I argue that queering a game requires an alternative way to create and play. Often, the normative method of designing a videogame prioritizes technological precision and purposeful gameplay experiences. However, Goat Simulator does not fix its errors, nor does it have a cohesive narrative, instead it incorporates brokenness and goallessness as core gameplay mechanics. Goat Simulator embraces messiness as an alternative—and arguably queer—way to design and play a videogame. I conclude by arguing the importance of brokenness and stupidity as a useful pushback against normative game design and gameplay values of precision, perfection, and seriousness.

Queering Fashion’s Pathologies in Killing Eve 1

The rise of fashion as a star attraction in recent television serials points to the complex critical languages of fashion in fleshing out character and in shifting generic expectations. It also discloses the relation between fashion as commodity and fashion as an extension of self in a way that signals the queer potential of fashion on several fronts. Here I examine how fashion in Killing Eve (Waller-Bridge, 2018–2022) drives a form of queer attachment that speaks to the complicated terrain of a post-queer, post postfeminist critical moment. Throughout the series fashion is as a vehicle for the protagonist’s mercurial moods, from fun and playful to terrifying and anarchic, whilst also driving the audience’s visual pleasure and scopophiliac thrill. But the series is less interested in moral opprobrium of the protagonist’s excesses, either killing or shopping, than revealing “desire’s unruly attentiveness” (Berlant 2002, 72) through Eve's impossibly queer obsession with Villanelle: “I think about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing… I just want to know everything” (Thomas 2018). In queering our fantasmatic relation to fashion, from pleasure and ambivalence to novelty and disgust, Killing Eve dwells on the treacherous flux of our desires, alongside the underlying queerness of the commodity.

Stories that will make you blush? Erotic audio fiction on the verge between privacy and publicness

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the rapidly growing Swedish market of app-based audio erotic fiction through an analysis of two significant apps and publishers: Blanche Stories and Ava Stories. We explore audio erotica apps as devices of both literature, pleasure and intimate sonic connectivity. First, we discuss the specific affordances of the born-audio format, its flexible and mobile forms of listening and the consequences of this flexibility for audio erotica. Secondly, we move in on the content of these apps by taking a closer look at specific forms of erotization of books and literature present both in paratextual elements surrounding the stories, and in the stories themselves. Thirdly, we shift to a discussion of content regulation, marketing strategies and strategic framing of audio erotica apps as digital and sonic devices of pleasure. These apps and their content may be considered “safe” in a number of ways: They are framed as healthy and wholesome from a particular ethical, feminist standpoint by emphasising consent and disassociating with porn. They create intimate and, in a sense, private and safe spaces of listening. But they also carry interesting, queer potentials for mobile forms of sexuality and for public (or semi-public) sonic erotic experiences.

Maestro-Maestra

The controversy surrounding Todd Field’s Tár (2022) focused on its narrative of Lydia Tár’s moral turpitude and the ways in which it incited the kinds of public response collected under the term “cancel culture.” While that is certainly a boldly stated concern of the film, this essay argues that the representation of debates around cancel culture are in fact presented through a series of cliched public interactions, where there is little nuance and little surprise. Instead, Hardie suggests that in scenes that describe the infrastructural back space of Tár’s career, a more subtle and intriguing set of exchanges between women is shown. These exchanges are not exempt from the charge of turpitude, but rather are nuanced through their formal and contextual properties. They rely on the film’s citation of the prestige lesbian films of recent past, Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015) and Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019) through the presence of Cate Blanchett and Noémie Merlant and on a queer potential derived from these spaces of segregation and intensity. Tár uses this opposition of open and closed spaces to set the stage for its coda, where the cosmopolitan landscape of Tár’s life is supplanted by something more genuinely of the world.

Ta dziwna różnica, zwana płciową

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the way narratives are produced in contemporary feminism dominated by the paradigmatic split between feminist and queer theory. This results not only in the inability to produce new concepts revealing the common genealogies of feminism and queer, but also in an internal division within social movements. Meanwhile, French feminist theory from the 1970s provides evidence that the epistemological rupture thesis is untenable. Paradoxically, it is gender difference, based on and at the same time transcending the psychoanalytic model, that contains the queer potential capable of breaking this impasse. The discovery of this common heritage of feminism and queer could therefore abound in new alliances and solidarities, not only at the theoretical level. Keywords: French feminism, queer theory, gender difference, bisexuality

Princesses, Bad Little Boys, and Normal People

Abstract Adventure Time is an animated series and bildungsroman, centered on the primary protagonist, Finn, and the normative prescriptions of identity as represented in his growth. The series evolves to offer nuanced and alternative representations of fluidity and the queer body, and the current research investigates queer potentiality in this speculative fiction/fantasy text. By weaving together extant understandings of bodies and animation with theories of the queer body, this analysis uses fluidity to examine queerness in Adventure Time. Further, it proposes that the body is one site—along with constructs of family, gender, and time—where fluidity may represent queerness.

‘When you’ve got friends like mine’: Company as tragedy and the queer potentiality of friendship

My first experience with Company was the 2011 concert version, released in theatres across the nation the same month that marriage equality was passed in New York State. With so many people fighting so hard to get married, the answer to Company’s big question, ‘Should I get married?’, seemed obvious, and Bobby’s final outcome inevitable. However, as a queer, aromantic viewer who values the importance of friendship, the end was a tragedy: rather than celebrating his birthday with his friends, Bobby spent it alone, abandoning the relationships he had already cultivated for an empty romantic ideal. For a show about marriage, Company spends an inordinate amount of time showcasing friendship, such as Bobby’s platonic connection with Amy and his many birthday parties. Queer historians, such as Michel Foucault and Peter Nardi, have theorized the radical potentiality of friendship to undermine heteropatriarchal capitalism and build community. What does it mean to centre Company on friendship? What new possibilities could appear if we intentionally staged and read the show as a failure of community rather than a triumph of maturity? If we take Bobby’s final claim seriously – ‘Alone is alone, not alive’ – we are left condemning single people to less than full lives, including Sondheim, who spent most of his life ‘alone’, invested primarily in intense, deep and lasting friendships. A queer reading provides a liberatory if tragic analysis that Bobby was, in fact, never alone but instead, stuck in a society that undervalues community, friendship and chosen family.

Activation in the Moment of Pausing or Slowing

What could be activated when habitually enacted, perceived-as-linear timeframes are paused or slowed? What modes of queering become activated at these points and in what ways can these shift perspective within performance events? This article explores moments of pausing or slowing down as containing queer potential, offering opportunities to disrupt existing, and reveal alternative, modes of engagement. In these moments shifts in directionality, focus or time occur, revealing hidden microdetails and creating opportunities for unlearning and undoing. From this perspective performances and practices that invite pausing or slowing down will be considered as moments for queer activation. Queering does not require erasure of the past but approaching it anew, placing things in strange relations, and opening spaces for unknown futures. The article considers my own experiences as an audience member in performances by Sioned Huws, Goat Island and Ranters Theatre, where pausing or slowing down were used as performative strategies. Considered as being moments of queer pausing, I explore what they actually and potentially activated as inviting other ways of perceiving and inhabiting the (performance) world. These moments are interwoven with dialogic engagements with ideas about crip practices (Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2013; Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, eds, Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, New York University Press: New York, 2023), queerness and temporality (Elizabeth Freeman, Time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories, Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2010) and performativity and time (Stephen Bottoms and Matthew Ghoulish, eds, Small acts of repair: performance, ecology and Goat Island, Routledge: London and New York, 2007). The article also considers moments of my own and other's practices as neurodivergent performance-makers. Queer activation in this context dismantles conventional performance of control, masking and mastery and embraces the potential to be uncovered in moments of forgetting, exhaustion and making mistakes. Pausing or slowing down in these cases is often done from necessity, but when explored as a creative practice as well offers opportunities for queering that practice.

“Keeping Condition”: Gender Ambiguity and Sexual Citizenship of Queer Male Thai Classical Musicians

AbstractGender pluralism has become a rich scholarly topic in Southeast Asia, especially with the rise of LGBT mobilisations across the region in the past decade. Transgender ritual specialists dominate the field of study, with a growing body of literature on Southeast Asian queer expressive cultures. However, queer performances in several classical performing arts are often excluded from the scholarship due to the field's association with the “traditional”. In this article, I address this scholarly gap by examining the social lives of queer men in Thai classical string music. I focus on a strategy called kep aakaan or “keeping condition” in which the musicians in question carefully articulate and disarticulate their femininity to render their gender nonconformity ambiguous under the heteronormative gaze. Using ethnographic methods to investigate the lived experience of queer male musicians on and off the stage, I show that “keeping condition” is not just about managing the display of queer potential but is also closely intertwined with morality and citizenship. Drawing on the ideas of tacit subjects and contextual sensitivities, I argue that “keeping condition” exposes the fluidity in which queer musicking bodies move between queerness and heteronormativity in ways that are more reconciliatory than confrontational. By focusing on the complicities of queerness and heteronormativity, I argue that non-normative classical performing arts can be a productive site for critical gender, sexuality, and queer studies in Southeast Asia, cutting through the “traditional” and “modern” divide that looms large in the region.

Education mobility’s (gender) queer potentials for Chinese students in Australia

Education mobility’s (gender) queer potentials for Chinese students in Australia

Beyond a queer utopia: interrogating misogyny in transnational boys love media

ABSTRACT Boys love (BL) media, a transnational Asian genre centring on male couples, is gaining global attention and academic discussion. As a queer genre, BL has received much positive attention due to its challenging of heteronormativity in a particularly marginalized context. However, scholarship on BL has not sufficiently addressed the issue of misogyny that is intrinsic to BL media and industry. Pointing to this persisting gap in scholarship, we interrogate this misogyny through the lens of representation in BL texts and industry engagement with female fans that complicate the subversive politics associated with the genre. We argue that naming and exploring misogyny in BL is important for the political project of celebrating its queer potential. Affectively engaging with the genre as ‘fandom killjoys’, we discuss key examples from Thai, Chinese, and Japanese BL series to identify major trends in the transnational genre. We further examine how the Thai BL industry, in particular, commercializes fan practices and directs fan affect to generate profit. In so doing, we identify significant limitations of BL media and the BL industry, contributing to ongoing scholarship on BL and its political potential.

Rewriting the queer potential of She’s Gotta Have It

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the 2017–2019 comedy-drama Netflix series She’s Gotta Have It attempts to rewrite the past represented within the 1986 feature-length film of the same name through its portrayal of Black women’s sexuality. While lauded, the film was met with criticism of Spike Lee’s portrayal of women in the film as ultimately misogynist and homophobic, evidenced by Lee’s decision to show protagonist Nola Darling being punitively raped by one of her sexual partners as well as by the flat and stereotypical construction of the Black lesbian character, Opal Gilstrap. In contrast, the 2017 series introduces us to Nola Darling as a pansexual and polyamorous Black visual artist in a rapidly gentrifying Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This paper identifies sexual politics and self-representational strategies as two sites of nostalgic re-construction in which elements of the past are both reproduced and revised. For instance, Nola’s self-identification as pansexual and her sustained relationship with a reimagined and more robustly characterized Opal illustrate that Nola’s sexual desires are not bound by heteronormativity. At the same time, the series echoes the film in that the primary sexual and romantic conflicts revolve around the ways Nola’s Black femininity is juxtaposed with the Black cis masculinity of her three primary suitors. The use of self-representational strategies, primarily Lee’s signature 4th wall breaking, provides a sense of continuity through its nostalgic callback to Lee’s earlier works, while also allowing Nola to articulate the ‘new’ identities of polyamory and pansexuality which depart from the language used in the ‘86 portrayal. Relatedly, Nola’s work as a visual artist allows the show to prioritize Nola’s perceptions of her lovers and herself. Overall, this paper mobilizes Black feminist, lesbian, and queer analyses in service of identifying and complicating Lee’s efforts to recuperate misogynist and heteronormative gendered portrayals in a contemporary medium.

The Power of Qing: The Guardian Web Series and Queer Worldmaking in Chinese Danmei

This article examines the web series Guardian (dir. Zhou Yuanzhou, 2018) as exemplary cultural texts of Chinese danmei, which portrays homoeroticism and male queerness in postsocialist China within the contexts of increasing institutional and political homophobia. The textual evidence shows that Guardian constructs queer subtexts and brings out the queer potentialities of the seemingly nonhomosexual media production via the following strategic negotiations: first, by creating a bricolage of science fiction, fantasy, and superhero genres to contest the homophobic social reality; second, by portraying qing, a powerful emotional bonding in queer relationships, and magnifying same sex intimacy as normal, natural, and moral; and last but not least, by interrogating queer stereotypes through deconstructing essentialized gender boundaries and further transcending stereotypical gong-shou aesthetics in danmei. Its commercial values notwithstanding, Guardian exemplifies a critical representational terrain that envisions alternative, imaginative ways to reconfigure gender and sexual identities, rearticulate queer desires, and disrupt insidious gender politics and homophobic discourse. Importantly, Guardian signifies the danmei genre’s disruptive potential to offer abundant space for queer worldmaking, thereby challenging censored representations of homosexuality.

The Queer Lives of Victorian Feminist Criticism

ABSTRACT Histories of Victorian queer studies often start with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985). In these historiographies, sexuality remains the center of scholarly inquiries and eventually comes to stand for forms of “queerness.” Seeking to expand our understanding of “queerness,” this article traces alternative histories of Victorian queer studies through feminist historicist and postcolonial criticism in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing against the first wave of feminist criticism, these studies problematize the figure of the domestic woman and theorize her queerness through different lenses. By exploring the conflicting and often contradictory process of gender-making in the nineteenth century, feminist historicists foreground the “gender trouble” of the domestic woman and her queer potential. Such queer potential, however, is subsequently located in the context of English imperialism by postcolonial feminist scholars, who revisit the ambivalent relationship between domestic femininity and imperial ideology, thereby highlighting the intertwined processes of gender- and empire-making in Victorian England. Simultaneously building on and revising contemporary queer theory, these works not only constitute alternative histories of Victorian queer studies but also point to its possible futures.

Representing queerness: Modes, manners and methods

Emerging from the Queer Representation: Pasts, Presents and Futures conference that the guest editors organized in 2021 with the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the works in this issue theorize multiple ways queerness can be and has been represented on-screen, in print and online in recent years. In this introduction, the editors consider the myriad contexts at play in the construction of ‘queer’ and how ideas about queer temporality, spatiality, kinship and embodiment are surfacing in media across the world. Where each contributor to this Special Issue looks closely at specific examples of non-normative lives, gender non-conforming people and/or same-gender desires being depicted in media texts, the editors use this introduction to highlight the overlapping understandings of queer representation that these articles and reviews, as a collection, are proposing. Whether arising from narratives which subvert expectations of coming out as the sole way of legitimizing queerness, works which utilize colour and movement to signify queer potentiality or through queer performances which undercut established ways of being in the world, the authors and reviewers each posit a version of queerness, in this issue, that is capacious, expansive and plural. Together, as the editors explain in this introduction, their works probe what queer visibility means at a time when neither the presence of LGBTQIA+ stories on our screens nor the unending tide of worldwide anti-queer policies seem to be abating.

The Future Is Furby

The Future Is Furby

Cosmic Dancers, Cosmetic Shells: Exploring the Queer Potential of London’s Blitz in the Early Thatcher Era

This paper concentrates on the ways in which masculinity and male (homo)sexuality were challenged, depicted, and expressed within the New Romantic subculture of Margaret Thatcher’s first term (1979-1983). Centring on the subculture’s nucleus, the Blitz nightclub in London’s Covent Garden, which served as a safe space in which its clientele could explore their identities away from the prevailing Conservative ideology of the time, I examine the work of prominent figures who prompted reflections on attitudes towards mainstream gay visibility and the shift in representations of queerness within popular culture in Thatcher’s Britain. Considering the legacy of punk’s contradictory attitudes towards non-heterosexual identities and its ‘do-it-yourself’ ethos with questions of class, this paper questions the intersections of and tensions between identity and consumption under Thatcher. Tracking the rise of the young, arts-oriented demographic of the Blitz and those who facilitated the subculture’s move from outside, to inside of the mainstream popular music scene, namely Steve Strange of Visage and Boy George, I offer a queer reading of their output that illustrates the subversive subculture’s ability to bring non-heterosexual masculinities into mainstream popular music in early 1980s Britain, concurrently demonstrating that assessments of the subculture as being only aesthetically-oriented are too reductive.

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton

Whose geography, whose future? Queering geography’s disciplinary reproduction

In this commentary, responding to the prompt ‘re-imagining the futures of geographical thought and praxis’, I offer some provocations to queer this question of geography's future. I begin from moments of my queer experience in and of geography, from the recurring perception that I am ‘out of time’ in the discipline: that my ‘time’ and my ‘place’ in the discipline as a trans person have yet to come. Reflecting on the origins of this perception, I find that my present belonging in the discipline is foreclosed and deferred in part by the promise of a more progressive future. I refuse this discourse of the future – and the liberal progress narrative of geography upon which it relies – and instead approach the question of geography's future as a matter of disciplinary reproduction. Drawing on ideas of queer futurity, I situate the future as a site of queer potential in the present: an ever-present capacity for difference-making located in our embodied relations and practices. Doing so encourages us to transform our discipline by queering its reproduction in the here-and-now – by making a difference – rather than waiting for a progressive and inclusive future to come upon us.

JUST KEEP SWIMMING?

By bringing queer ecologies to bear on the blue humanities, this essay promotes a queer hydropoetic investigation that attends to the forms, aesthetics, and politics of pools. Pools are sites of aquatic enjoyment, sport, and revelation that have long been understudied within the blue humanities. We ask whether the promises and failures of swimming in these geographies can provide a queer heuristic in which submersion, immersion, and staying afloat subtend coming out, queer eroticism, and queer of color coalitional politics. Our tripartite examination engages the independent film Saved! (2004), the ecosexual documentary Water Makes Us Wet (2019), and the young adult novel and graphic novel adaptation of Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016/2019 and 2020, respectively). Our analysis of pools, as intimate bodies of water that capture media and literature alike, reorients the blue humanities to consider closer proximities and smaller scales of water’s queer potentiality.