Queer Practices Research Articles

Neither resistance nor commodification: Madrid’s LGBT Pride as paradoxical mobilization

ABSTRACTPride events and queer spaces have become, throughout the years, the loci of debates and conflicts. The relationship between emancipatory and activist origins, on the one hand, and an evolution toward commodification and mediatization, on the other, have polarized the debate, but for a few academic analyses arguing for simultaneous or paradoxical articulations. Madrid Pride has become one of the most significant events of its kind, experiencing in 2017 a dramatic expansion as it hosted the global WorldPride event. Madrid Pride is not free from conflicts, as 2016 Pride’s opening act, or pregón, was the target of a public outcry that managed to get the act’s main attraction canceled. This conflict is analyzed as a productive vantage point from which to argue that both resistance and commodification lie within queer spaces and times, as both emancipatory and capitalist practices intersect. I describe the 2016 pregón in order to argue for a nuanced analysis of the paradoxical duality within queer practices.

Queerying the Queer: A Puritan Christian’s Reading of Queered Sexualities and Identities in Selected African and African-American Queer Novels

This paper undertakes to read the queered sexualities and identities in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Damon Galgut’sIn a Strange Room and Sello Duicker’s Thirteen Cents from the critical lenses of a puritan Christian. The study, thus, deploys the Reader-Response and Queer theories as its theoretical frameworks. The study is motivated by the growing ideological spaces allotted to African queer studies; and aims to join the discussion by offering a puritan’s angle to the African queer arguments. Among the specific LGBTQ identities and sexualities interrogated in the paper include bestiality/zoophillia, phytophilliac or dendraphilliac, Spectorphilli, incest, rape/molestation, masturbation, polyamorous relationship, homoerotic, homosocial, and heterosexuality. These identities and sexualities are read or interpreted based on laid down Bible principles not necessarily to generate homophobic sentiments but rather to query the moral and didactic underpinnings of these practices in the light of societal mores, stability and progress of the human race, as problematised in the selected texts. The reading reveals that certain queer practices run counter to extant Bible precepts and do not make for a harmonious world order as they are seen to be products of dysfunctional societal institutions. Thus, they are predicated on exploitation, oppression, destruction and unequal, unbalanced and unnatural relationships.

Sesso, carta e palco

Although theatre and cross-dressing have represented the main way to explore sexuality and gender’s identities for Italian homosexuals movements (including the LGBT+ communities) during the 70’s, it is not clear how these movements’ magazines managed to become factories of queer theatre. Their pages, in fact, allowed to revise and imprint true life experiences, which were shared and gave rise to queer practices. Theatre, therefore, became a therapeutic and explorative instrument to fight against sexual and gender’s homogeneity.

Llámame Rey Bolllero. Los talleres Drag King desde las voces del activismo lesbiano y queer español

Los talleres Drag King son actos revolucionarios del lesbianismo feminista queer. Desde su surgimiento en los años ochenta se han asociado con las prácticas de resistencia, creación y difusión de los saberes lesbianos articulados en torno al género. El presente artículo aporta a la memoria colectiva un posible diseño de taller Drag King, y su potencialidad política, desde la visión que de los mismos tienen las lesbianas feministas queer españolas. La investigación para el diseño del taller se realizó empleando una metodología cualitativa. Se hicieron entrevistas individuales a seis personas con experiencias en los talleres drag desde su posiciones de talleristas o facilitadoras, participantes y/o ayudantes. El análisis de los testimonios personales de las protagonistas permitió estructurar un posible modelo de taller Drag King especificando objetivos, contenidos, metodología y evaluación. La propuesta diseñada, a partir de la investigación planteada, pretende contribuir al registro y la articulación de discursos y saberes en torno a las prácticas lesbianas y queer en el estado español.

Between here and “not here”: Queer desires and postcolonial longings in the writings of Dionne Brand and José Esteban Muñoz

ABSTRACTThis article examines the concepts of “not here” in Dionne Brand’s work and “not yet here” in José Esteban Muñoz’s work. These concepts are linked with queer desires, but also postcolonial longings and visions for other political and social possibilities. Both Brand’s and Muñoz’s writings rephrase and rearticulate various Third World social revolutions as part of their examination of queer possibilities, practices and narratives. Their work reinscribes and re-imagines histories and practices of marronage which have been central to Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics and narrative. A reading of Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here directly considers and examines its investments in marronage for constructing queer possibilities and futures. “Not here” references the historical and imaginative practices of Maroon flight that enables a rethinking of colonial histories and their interrelated structuring epistemologies of race, gender, sexuality and territoriality, and which enacts a move towards (re-)imagining queer possibilities and futures.

The Haunting Presence of Lost Futures in The Third Reel by S.J. Naudé

SummaryIn Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life he describes various small-scale utopian projects dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, including brutalist architecture, squats, industrial music and experimental film. According to Fisher, contemporary popular culture is mainly concerned with reworking these decades (instead of conceiving new utopian or formally experimental projects), partly because the 21st century is still haunted by these trajectories for the future that never realised. Fisher argues that the haunting of these lost utopian projects can be considered as fissures indicating alternatives to the accepting of contemporary capitalism as the only viable social structure. S.J. Naudé’s novel, The Third Reel, which is set in 1986-1990, references the utopian projects mentioned above. In this article, Fisher’s writing is used to read The Third Reel as a cultural product haunted by these lost visions of the future and their radical potential. Fisher’s theorisation of countercultural utopian projects during the 1980s is also supplemented by a discussion of the potentially radical queer practices of that decade, as represented in The Third Reel. The influence of the past on the present is explicitly thematised in the novel through references to Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus and characters’ attempts to recover their family histories. These attempts often prove to be complex and serve to vitiate any attempt to interpret the implications of history for the present in simple terms. This article thus speaks to Louise Viljoen’s in this issue and although it focuses mainly on Naude, overlaps in Koos Prinsloo’s oeuvre will be signalled.

‘I want my closet back’: queering and unqueering language in Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!

ABSTRACTThis essay examines how anxieties about language, gender fluidity, and queer desire intersect in Giannina Braschi’s 1998 bilingual novel Yo-Yo Boing!. Identifying the novel’s ‘translingualism’ (the ways in which its English and Spanish interact, transform, and enhance one another), as a key part of its textual difficulty, it argues that Braschi’s use of language constitutes a queer practice. That language is altered, however, in Tess O’Dwyer’s 2011 ‘translation’ of the novel into only English, which this essay reads as an integral part of Braschi’s highly self-referential postmodern play. Responding to its own characters’ anxieties, it ‘un-queers’ their language and thus mitigates the novel’s difficulty; this complements the strategy of its new publisher, AmazonCrossing, which hopes to appeal to a wide readership. Viewed as a complex, contradictory, collaborative whole, the two versions of Yo-Yo Boing! blur the lines between production and reception, interpretation and praxis, subverting the traditionally hierarchical relationship between original and translation to instead propose the latter as a condition of textual production.

Unbearable Fadistas: António Variações and Fado as Queer Praxis

Antonio Variacoes’s first single, Povo que lavas no rio/Estou alem (1982), offers a radical version of Amalia Rodrigues’s fado “Povo que lavas no rio” (1962). This article considers Variacoes as fadista in order to think fado as queer praxis. Though Variacoes's debut release was a commercial success, his turn as fadista provoked critical derision for what, I argue, is a trans formation of the genre’s gendered codes and practices. Variacoes's queer masculinity gives body and voice to the transgressive sexuality enmeshed within gendered and fetishized repertoires of fado that are most recognizable in the myths and voices of the genre's divas. This article locates Variacoes within a fado genealogy, from Maria Severa to Amalia Rodrigues, of performers who have similarly been unbearable in body and voice. The purpose of this is to draw attention to fado's affective dispersions of sex and reveal how the genre has coalesced in relation to queer tactics and people throughout its history.

Moda agênero: uma proposta de moda que desconstrói as fronteiras de gênero?

Este artigo discute a apropriação, pela indústria da Moda1 , das questões problematizadas por meio da teoria queer a partir da proposta de moda contemporânea agênero. Logo, pergunta-se: não seria a moda contemporâ- nea agênero mais uma ação de marketing desenhada pela indústria visando ampliar as possibilidades de mercado? Em outras palavras, mais um modismo que surge na esteira de um processo de gentrificação (domesticação) das reivindicações queer? Ao mesmo tempo, é preciso reconhecer que a leitura feita pela Moda dos agenciamentos queer – uma leitura que se manifesta, por exemplo, no conceito de agênero examinado aqui – pode trazer aportes interessantes para o trabalho de crítica da normatividade que vem sendo efetuado pelas práticas e teorizações queer.

Flânerie in the dark woods: Shattering innocence and queering time inThe Path

Focusing on The Path, this article aims at moving beyond the duality between the concepts of productivity and idleness in order to explore how the practice of gaming can escape heteronormative time. Positioning the gamer as a flâneur, I argue that The Path locates the player in a queer time through the fragmentation of its narrative, but also the shattering of heteronormative imagery – such as the figure of the child as pure and innocent – and its reappropriation in a queer text. Ultimately, this article argues that gaming has the potential to be considered a site of queer practice. In order to perform this reading, I first introduce my critical framework comprised from exploring how queer lifestyles detach themselves from normative time and focusing on the practice of flânerie as queer performance.

Queer(ing) Language in Yi Kwangsu’sMujŏng: Sexuality, Nation, and Colonial Modernity

AbstractThis article presents a queer reading of Mujŏng (Heartless, 1917) by Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950). Often touted as Korea’s first modern novel by virtue of its innovative vernacular language and concern with themes of individual subjectivity, this text illuminates the tension between the diverse modes of writing existing in precolonial Korea and the pressure to conform to a hegemonic modern form of written language. At the same time, the novel depicts a variety of romantic relationships—many outside the bounds of compliance with heteronormative notions of acceptable love—and the pressure on subjects engaged in these romances ultimately to comply with modern sexual norms. Thus the novel depicts the simultaneous constriction, in colonial context, of acceptable possibilities in the realms of language and sexuality. Nevertheless, Mujŏng also offers sites of resistance to these imperial reconfigurations. This article explores these sites, viewing the multifarious nature of the novel’s language as a form of queerness that mimics the queer sexualities presented in the course of the story. I argue that even as the politically tenable possibilities available under colonialism are diminished, the queer practices legible in Yi’s text offer the chance to forge new and empowering linguistic and sexual identities.

‘What is Pop Art?’ A Revised Transcript of Gene Swenson’s 1963 Interview with Andy Warhol

In March 2016 I came across a set of cassette tapes in the archive of critic and curator Gene Swenson, best remembered today for his defining interviews with the Pop artists, published in ARTnews in November 1963 and February 1964 as a two-part series titled ‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’. The cassette tapes contain recordings of Swenson’s original conversations with the Pop artists: raw material that, as it turns out, was heavily edited and reconfigured for publication, at points altering the meaning of the artists’ words by excising controversial and explicitly queer content. In what follows, I offer a partial transcription of the recording of Swenson’s original conversation with Andy Warhol. Warhol’s then-new studio assistant Gerard Malanga joined in for the conversation, along with two other friends named ‘John’ and ‘Rory’.1 The entire conversation runs 90 minutes, I transcribe here approximately 45 minutes. Bracketed ellipses indicate stretches of recorded conversation that are not included in this transcription, mostly inaudible banter. Swenson begins the interview by asking Warhol, ‘What do you say about homosexuals?’ – signaling from the outset the extent to which the published version was heavily redacted. Warhol’s response to Swenson’s question shapes his subsequent reflection on the interview’s chief question ‘What is Pop Art?’ For an analysis of this conversation, and of its implications for reconsidering the importance of Swenson’s queer practice, see Jennifer Sichel, ‘“Do you think Pop Art’s queer?” Gene Swenson and Andy Warhol’, published in this issue of Oxford Art Journal, pp. 59–83.

Shame: A genealogy of queer practices in the 19th century

Shame: A genealogy of queer practices in the 19th century

Queer and Trans Youth, Relational Subjectivity, and Uncertain Possibilities: Challenging Research in Complicated Contexts

This article addresses complications to how different disciplines define, study, and theorize sexuality, gender, gender identity, and other intersecting categories of subjectivity, like age, race, class, ethnicity, and so on. Categories that seem to get stabilized in empirical work are destabilized in theoretical and narrative research. These differences in key definitions and even refusal to make definitions mark how different disciplines approach research on gender identities and expression and sexualities. The contingency, relationality, and space-related aspects of gender and sexual identity, so key to humanities-based work and qualitative research, may not be amenable to measurement by some research methods. In trying to sort out methodological quandaries in quantitative work, complex subjectivities become a problem to work around, not focus on. What subjectivities mean to those who are developing them or grappling with their limitations may not get the same attention as more measurable things. This article advocates for thinking more capaciously about what counts as research, pushing for recognition of the work queer communities and theorists have been doing for generations and for the work that gender and sexual minority youth continue do now. Complexity, instability, and relationality have been queer practices for a long time, stimulating and responding to generative perversities.

The Queer Art of Biblical Reading: Matthew 25:31–46 (Caritas Christiana) Through Caritas Romana

AbstractThe place of eros in Christian theology has always been a contested one, not least because it is positioned as being at odds with agape, the kind of love that embodies gospel ethics. Matthew 25:31–46 calls us to “feed the hungry,” “quench the thirsty,” “shelter the homeless,” “clothe the naked,” and “visit the imprisoned” as emblematic examples of agapic love. This essay shows how a queer act, specifically that of a woman breastfeeding a starving man as depicted in the tradition of Caritas Romana, can fulfill the ethical demands in Matthew's pericope. It demonstrates how the action first narrated by Valerius Maximus and then represented by Paul Peter Rubens beautifully fulfills the Matthean agapic demands, and concludes that queer practices have the potential to fulfill the gospel demands, situating the erotic at the core of the agapic.

Unchained Succubus: A Queer New Institutional Analysis of U.S. Supreme Court Nomination Hearings

Modern Supreme Court nomination hearings are contentious political events, as evidenced by the four held during the 109th and 111th Congresses to confirm John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. Senators appear to raise suspicion of nominees purposefully through their questioning during Judiciary Committee hearings, connecting the label of “judicial restraint” with candidates who are male, white, straight, and prone to “reason.” Appointees thought to embody the feminine, nonwhite, queer, and emotional practices of “judicial activism” to offer a contrast. This dichotomous construction has made debates during the nomination process destructively reductive. A paradox thus emerges: by ignoring the importance of descriptive representation, the identity of potential justices to the Supreme Court becomes one of the most salient issues during the hearings; subsequently, this has resulted in senators using cues to create a caricature or “straw man” of nominees belonging to one or more minority groups in order to weaken and discredit otherwise qualified jurists and achieve a party “win” against the White House.

Hauras, korjaava ja parantumaton queer

Artikkeli tarkastelee queeria ajallisena ilmiönä ja kysyy mitä queer-ajattelu ja aktivismi ovat yhteiskunnallisesti ja kulttuurisesti ”parantaneet” tai korjanneet. Läpikäydyt esimerkit paikantuvat yhdysvaltalaiseen ja suomalaiseen lähihistoriaan sekä muutoksiin sukupuoli- ja seksuaalivähemmistöjen asemassa. Kirjoittaja kysyy miten reilu neljännesvuosisata, jonka voi sanoa pitäneen sisällään normaaliutta queeriyttäneitä aikoja, on vaikuttanut esimerkiksi kulttuurisiin representaatioihin ja joihinkin oikeuksiin mainituissa konteksteissa. Entä onko queer-keskustelussa itsessään näiden aikojen jälkeen korjaamisen varaa? Teoreettisesti artikkeli keskustelee erityisesti Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickin ja Sara Ahmedin ajattelun kanssa. Sedgwick näyttäytyy tekstissä yhtäältä queerin ajallisuuden, toisaalta reparatiivisuuden tai korjaavuuden teoreetikkona, Ahmed puolestaan pervon affektiivisuuden ja queerin potentiaalin haurauden ajattelijana. Kirjoittaja kyseenalaistaa myös queerin ulossulkevuuden ja ”oikeanlaisten” queer-subjektien ja objektien määrittymisen sekä homo–hetero-vastakkainasettelun hedelmällisyyden queerin ajattelun ja toiminnan lähtökohtana. Ylpeyden, häpeän takaisinottamisen ja enemmistöltä saadun tunnustuksen jälkeen artikkeli perää queerin tai pervouden parantumattomuutta ja parantumatonta määrittelemättömyyttä.

Will Internets eat brain?

Abstract ‘Will Internets eat brain?’ is developed from text in some of my recent video installations, performances and writing projects. The writing explores processes of performative assemblage(s) highlighting activities of accumulation, fragmentation and arrangement, together with everyday interactions between body, technology and the Internet. The text appropriates information retrieval and Internet searches taking the form of a series of cut ups and punctured narratives, SMS language/textese and netspeak. It is experimental, situated both within and against various discourses and protocols and established codes. A virus or infective agent, the writing takes up queer practices of dis-identification; the act of rejecting dominant and pervasive ideologies as a strategy to explore and disrupt entrenched power structures of language, image and words. It is stark, it frustrates, drawing to attention non-linearity, multiplicity-ness and nowotony. An algorithmic tone or voice runs throughout the text. Any singular discursive argument scrambles, lacks concentration or is faulty. ‘Will Internets eat brain?’ was commissioned by MAP Magazine, Glasgow, and presented for Glasgow Film Festival 2017. Earlier versions appeared at ISEA International Symposium on Electronic Art, Hong Kong and Arnolfini, Bristol.

Reading the West Sideways: Queering the Frontier in Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion

This essay argues for a queer practice of western writers, termed reading sideways. Using Jean Stafford's novel The Mountain Lion as a case study, this essay shows how allows previously marginalized women's narratives to emerge--narratives that, turn, debunk masculinist narratives of western conquest. Applying queer theory to The Mountain Lion reveals important connections regarding delay, death, and disenchantment that better inform of Stafford's text. By queering her main protagonist's development The Mountain Lion, Stafford subverts myth of masculinist frontier development. Throughout Jean Stafford's 1947 novel, The Mountain Lion, young girl protagonist Molly Fawcett presents an unsettling perspective of Colorado landscape. Usingthe foothills of Colorado Rockies as an artist's studio, Molly writes short stories and poems, collects flowers and insects, and, especially, takes pictures with her Brownie camera. As narrator notes, however, Molly's artistic vision is never straight; rather, it is always sideways: in her pictures sky took up more space than anything else and trees and buildings tended to be diagonal (209). In addition to her photographs, Molly's short stories and poems feature images of mutilation, characters with missing limbs, and moments of masochism. In each artistic move, Molly distorts her subjects, pushing outside center of frame. They are fragmented, continually undone, and out of reach. Turning her subjects sideways, Molly sees West with a queer eye, and, process, offers a perspective that destabilizes her viewers' relationship with supposedly fixed, mythic, Colorado landscape. This essay suggests that Molly's sideways vision of American West, which I read as a queer vision, provides a useful methodology for western writers. As Cathryn Halverson has argued, literary critics of American West have a reading when it comes to western writers; there has been great difficulty a literary tradition shaped by western women (Reading Problem 127). Part of problem, as Halverson has demonstrated, stems from western writers' own struggle to draw from other women's work, as many wrote isolation, with relatively few spaces of collaboration. Halverson proposes western writers alongside each other--intertextually, comparatively--as a potential solution to this critical impasse. Reading alongside, Halverson shows, offers a solid methodology for how literary critics might respond to western writers. It allows for shared histories, themes, and struggles to emerge, ripening possibility of identifying a literary tradition unique to western writers. In other words, while not ignoring difficulty of doing so, nor ignoring important differences, alongside advocates naming a comprehensive alternative literary tradition. The question of methodology has emerged as a central question study of western writers. Writing about this dilemma, Victoria Lamont notes, the increasing complexity of feminist work may have had unintended consequence of allowing master narratives to persist (Big Books Wanted 322). In particular, Lamont highlights problem of western writers into a feminized subcategory of domestic, communal, or sentimental (Westerns 3). This cordoning off has led entire groups of western writers to be ignored or explained away, such as writers of popular western. As a result, Lamont states, we tacitly endorse their continued exclusion from discussions of genre when we should be rethinking our understanding of genre order to account for them (Westerns 3). The problem facing feminist critics of American West, then, is two-fold. First, can we legitimately claim an oppositional, alternative narrative of western women's writing that does not reproduce equation of western women's writing as necessarily domestic or sentimental? …

Undoing citizenship. Undocumented queer activism and practices of rights

Abstract Within the emergence of migrant activism, the experience of UndocuQueers developed in San Francisco from 2011 challenges common assumption about practices in migrant movements through the intersections between queer and migrant claims. In order to understand their peculiarities, I will first analyse some of the salient characters of UndocuQueer activism. Then, I will focus on the web-series “Undocumented and awkward”, in order to discuss the intersectionalities proposed by the movement. In the third part, I will discuss how the series may be framed as examples of groundbreaking practices of citizenship. I will finally argue that UndocuQueer movement and its cultural production offer a ground-breaking example of political practices of rights and propose a promising perspective for a critical engagement with citizenship issues.