Queer Project Research Articles

Queer Theology and a Synodal Catholic Church

The emerging field of queer theology presents both a challenge and an opportunity to contemporary Catholic theology for deeper self-examination. In the context of a synodal Church, whereby the Catholic hierarchy consults and seriously considers the Spirit-guided insights of the sensus fidelium, queer theology can adequately respond to some of the challenges levied against Pope Francis’s inclusive vision. In order to do so, queer theology must be reframed as a project that stems from the lived experiences of the oppressed and their quest toward liberation. This article explores the field of queer theology and addresses some of the most contentious questions among theorists about the scope of the queer project. More importantly, the article synthesizes a historically conscious, eschatologically oriented, liberatory queer theology with Pope Francis’s synodal vision. The first part of this article explores contemporary theology on synodality. The second part explores the genealogy of queer theology. Finally, the third part constructs a Catholic queer theological framework that aids a synodal project. The conclusion will outline and explore some questions for future research.

Communication studies research and big data: always already queer

ABSTRACT “Big data” is neither unified nor stable, but instead offers opportunities for further exploration of queer methods. Communication studies scholars are particularly well suited to engage in this developing area. The potentials are illustrated in this article's description of an in-progress collaborative research project using artificial intelligence to examine public engagement with campus monuments and memorials at a large southeastern university. This discussion of an in-progress big-data research project, a collaboration between scholars of communication, public history/digital humanities, and geography, exemplifies the alignment of communication studies and emerging discussions in queer methods to a degree that we argue communication studies already is and has long been a queer project.

Reflexive Poetry

These four poems are excerpts from a multifaceted project entitled Queerly Faithful: A Queer-Poet Community Autoethnography on Identity and Belonging in Faith Communities. This project attempts to bolster and critique contemporary studies of queer and faith identities as they manifest in the lives of queer people of faith by approaching the subject with a queer sensibility (Holman Jones & Adams 2010: 204). One facet of this approach involved my use of poetry as a personal reflexive medium on the research process itself. The poems invite the reader into my experience as I wrestle with articulating methodology, theory framing, data presentation, and the questions and challenges of producing a fixed document to present the findings of a queer project that resists fixedness. By blurring the lines between poetry/narrative/storytelling and social science writing, I invite the readers “to become coparticipants, engaging the storyline morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually” (Ellis & Bochner 2000: 745). The poems, which are scattered throughout the research paper, nuance the traditional academic language and prose analysis in the paper and serve to challenge conceptions of ‘proper’ social science writing and position the writing itself as a method of inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima 2009; Richardson & St. Pierre 2005; Richardson 1993). The poems in isolation, as presented here, invite the reader to consider the strengths and challenges of social science research and articulate my struggle to honour the sacred stories of my participants through fixed language. The poems play with the questions: what does it mean to be a social justice researcher and how might our work, methodologically as well as topically, critique and undermine oppressive epistemologies that elevate and prioritize certain voices over others?

Archive of the (Mostly) Unspoken: A Queer Project of Caring for the Dead

ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Ann Cvetkovich's (2003. An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press) work on trauma and public affects, I explore contradictions in the public and private stories of my father's life, with a focus on the ways sexual, gendered and colonial power shaped the different narratives he revealed in extremity. My focus is on the development of a condoling methodology to explore this archive. Jack Francis (1918-2019) was a senior public servant in Canadian government during the anti-homosexual purges of the mid-twentieth century and a church archivist. As Cvetkovich (2003) argues, all archives serve as a technology of identity, and contain within them an ‘archive of feelings’ and narratives of collective life. I attempt to do justice to the intergenerational bond between a parent and child and my own commitments to de-colonial solidarity through reflecting on the connections between anti-homosexual regulation and colonial power. I hope this writing can open up what is often unfathomable in the lives that go before us, on the assumption that we can only reach for future worlds when we take seriously the fragmentary signs from the past.

The queer project of criminology Jeffery P Dennis, The Myth of the Queer Criminal

The queer project of criminology Jeffery P Dennis, <i>The Myth of the Queer Criminal</i>

Queernormativity: Norms, values, and practices in social justice fandom

What, if anything, is the queer project? Queer theorists have detailed the ways that gays and lesbians, and transgender people, de-radicalize a potentially queer upsetting of heteronormative systems. Homonormativity and transnormativity have been used to describe the ways that marginalized sexualities and genders are rendered heteronormative. These concepts are important, yet incomplete to capture the experiences of queer people for two reasons. First, they equate ‘normativity’ always with ‘ heteronormativity,’ surrendering the ability to define ‘the normal’ to heteronormative constructions. Second, they render invisible the work done by queer people to redefine the normative in ways that dismantle heteronormativity and affirm queer identities. Through interviews (n = 39), my study works to rectify these twin issues by illuminating the ways queer social actors actively work to redefine what it means to be normative, resulting in queernormativity.

КОНСТРУИРОВАНИЕ И ДЕКОНСТРУКЦИЯ ГЕНДЕРА В СОВРЕМЕННОМ ГУМАНИТАРНОМ ЗНАНИИ

The purpose of this article is to analyze the evolution of the concept of gender in social knowledge and the humanities. The term «gender» encompasses biological (sexual), psychological, social, cultural, symbolic aspects of human life. Even before the introduction of this term into scientific publications in the 1960s, the phenomenon itself was discovered in three types of knowledge: in psychology and psychiatry when studying various forms of sexuality and sexual identity, in anthropological and ethnographic studies, and in the feminist philosophy of culture. This largely determined the main directions in the study and understanding of gender for several decades. The theory of socio-cultural construction of gender played the main role. It developed in parallel with other critical and constructivist scientific concepts, which in no small part led to its adoption by «academics» and the inclusion of the gender perspective in the body of scientific research. However, along with the development of postmodern feminist philosophy, the concept of gender undergoes redefinition. The constructivist model of gender is displaced by the performative concept of Judith Butler. She argues that not only gender but the biological sex does not exist outside the cultural framework and power discourse. The binary matrix of gender, gender identity and heterosexuality is approved within the framework of the dominant discourse with the help of various regulatory actions (performatives). Butler rejects this model because she claims that bodies, sex and gender identity have different configurations. The performative concept of sex was actively used in the queer project, as it provided justification for rejecting the normative binary concept of femininity and masculinity and the corresponding heterosexuality. Today, queer includes political movement, research, art, and discursive deconstruction of normative heterosexuality. The variant of mosaic nature, hybridity and relativism of identity proposed in the queer project destroys the possibility of social and political transformations in the sphere of gender equality. Instead, queer activists advocate an elusive equality of opportunity to try on different identities at one’s own discretion. At the present stage, the theoretical radicalism of queer makes the development of new social programs unlikely, while they appear to be necessary. In contrast, gender theory (in its feminist, constructivist, and cultural-symbolic modes) has had a significant scientific and social impact. The use of the gender perspective in social knowledge and the humanities has provided better understanding of the individual and society. The principle of achieving gender equality has been accepted by the world community and has become part of many programs at the international and national levels. However, the problems in the understanding of the relation between sex and gender, discovered in performative and queer theory, become significant against a background of spreading biotechnologies (from sex reassignment surgeries to assisted reproduction). This requires wider research and further discussion among different schools.

Tulio Carella's Recife Days: Politics, Sexuality, and Performance in Orgia

This essay contextualizes the queer project undertaken by Argentinian playwright and critic Tulio Carella's alter-ego Lucio Ginarte in the performative narrative that makes up most of his hybrid diary, Orgia (1968; 2011). Ginarte's symbolic, sexualized occupation of Recife's downtown in 1960-1961 foreshadows the queering of public spaces and openly affirms the physicality and presentness of interclass and interracial gay sex in Latin America. The essay also shows how Carella's visibility in the bustling Buenos Aires literary and theatrical scene in the 1940s and 1950s all but disappeared in the wake of the Recife scandal and the subsequent publication of Orgia. With the author relegated to el closet de la critica (Molloy), his plays vanished from the stages.

Reading Blood Work is an Art Form: Toward an Embodied Feminist Practice of Veterinary Science and Care

What are the advantages of a concrete, embodied relationship between human subjects and their non-human objects of care for the veterinary process of knowledge production? The scientific reductionism that frames formal studies makes much of the knowledge gained in those studies questionable or severely limited, since many important factors of real life illnesses and their causation and cure are excluded from consideration for the sake of clinical control and traditional scientific objectivity. This essay narrates my experience with my mare Lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internet-based equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. Located between Feminist Science Studies and Critical Animal Studies, this project explores the notion of touch and raises questions about the biomedical field's present-day heavy reliance on visual diagnostics. What is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge "from nowhere" that conventional science believes in? How much of the alternative to this way of knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition?And finally, in observing and documenting the relationship at the heart of this venture around knowledge, my essay also suggest that this is a queer project where queerness is understood as the careful but radical reconfiguration of kinship in the context of Haraway’s recent call to “make kin, not babies.”

Approach that dares speak its name

Over the past two decades, queer has grown into an established critical approach to social science. Correspondingly, the term 'queer' has emerged as a recognised brand in the language of academia. This paper examines the potential risks that such linguistic institutionalisation poses for queer as a critical and emancipatory endeavour. Building on Billig's argument (2013) that the bias towards 'big nouns' in academic discourse tends to further entrench the power of academic elites, I draw a parallel between queer and CDA (Critical discourse analysis) as two emerging academic brands in order to determine whether queer is one such big noun and how this may affect the very capacity of queer scholars to commit themselves to critique and self-critique. I conclude by outlining a modest proposal to ensure that the term 'queer' remains available to be appropriated by whoever shares the premises and the aspirations underlying the queer project.

Jewish joke telling in Muttersprache Mameloschn: performing queer intervention on the German stage

This essay explores the central role of Jewish joke telling in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s play Muttersprache Mameloschn (first performed in 2012). Subversively revealing the problematic of essentializing cultural, national, and even sexual identity, Jewish joke telling figures as a performance of social and political resistance and disidentification in this play. Engaging with Jack Halberstam’s queer epistemology of failure and José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer disidentification, I propose that the act of Jewish joke telling by a young lesbian plays out as a new queer project of intervention in this play that confronts both antisemitism and culturally positioned sexual hegemony.

Scholars in Pursuit of Elusive Sexual Knowledge

Scholars in Pursuit of Elusive Sexual Knowledge Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Anybody interested in sex, the politics of sex, sexual identity, or sexual education in contemporary society needs a historical perspective. Such is the pedagogical principle that underlies Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. In response to a sex-obsessed yet sex-negative U.S. culture, she advocates a capaciously conceived sex education that constitutes a disposition towards sexual (2015, 122). Yet this is merely the political frame for a rich and scholarly contribution to the study of early modern sex, which is also, most importantly, a methodological intervention of relevance to anyone studying sex in any historical period.Above all, Valerie Traub's latest book is an impassioned call for all those studying the history of sexuality to confront shared methodological challenges. A key message is that different disciplinary approaches, which currently divide the field and its practitioners, are best acknowledged, recognized, and embraced. Traub urges us to capitalize on the difficulties and linger in moments of methodological or conceptual impasse (63). The book is an impressive, thorough probing of the challenges raised by a range of different approaches to thinking about sex in the past, which is essential reading for all, if sometimes difficult and discomforting. It is a text that puts us through our paces whatever our theoretical stance; whether literary critic, queer theorist, or historian, we will each in turn find the unspoken assumptions on which our own methodologies are based and the flaws of our conceptual premises exposed in uncompromising detail. Targeting queer temporality, for instance, Traub argues that its undoubted value in challenging teleological and hegemonic approaches to the past is undercut when scholars reject all chronology as heteronormative, and are unable therefore to appreciate the value of the historian's enterprise. We must acknowledge the ways in which empirical and historicist work (in history, anthropology, and sociology) has produced sophisticated scholarship that speaks directly to the questions driving the queer project, and to which, indeed, it is profoundly indebted (78). Turning her sights on historians, her discomforting critique of the widely adopted methodology of social contextualization lays bare its unfortunate consequences: it can be near impossible to study the physical reality and meaning of sex acts in the past, since all attention is focused at the level of the cultural discourses that organize sex into structures, identities, and relationships. We therefore lack a history of sexuality that knows what people did and what it meant, and Traub urges us to adopt a historicized understanding of sexual variation (focused on the study of sex acts), albeit one which avoids deploying presumptive knowledge about how sex happens, in what positions or with what body parts. Taking aim elsewhere at the history-as-affect approach whose potential she fully appreciates, she also poses the challenge: [M]ight the sensorium . . . be laden with unacknowledged epistemological freight? (134). She explores the risks of equating historical research with erotic encounter, and the possibility that the fantasy resolution it facilitates might lead a scholar away from the autonomy of the past (136).It is in the focus upon knowledge about sex as the object of her investigation, rather than sex on itself, that Traub articulates a productive new direction for historians of sexuality. The chapters consistently and variously put the methodological questions about how we approach the making of historical knowledge into dialogue with epistemological questions about what knowledge is and what sexual knowledge looks like in a way that reshapes our very concept of sexual knowledge as an analytical category. …

Herstory Belongs to Everybody or The Miracle: A Queer Mobile Memory Project

The Miracle is an artistic and activist queer project begun in 2004. This article takes the form of a transcribed interview between the founders of the Miracle and a graduate student volunteer. The authors, all participants in The Miracle, describe the queer bookmobile/mobile archives project as an intervention that seeks to protest the loss of queer community spaces in Los Angeles and Oakland, to temporarily disrupt the progress of gentrification and its attendant displacement of poor and minoritized communities, and to “redistribute” knowledge, literature, and information. The purpose of the article is to describe the activity as a memory project centered in a particular community and to continue a conversation between minoritized community groups and the archival profession in the mode of X, Campbell and Stevens’ 2009 contribution to Archivaria, “Love and Lubrication in the Archives, or rukus!: A Black Queer Archive for the United Kingdom.” In our work and in this article, we recognize that certain aspects of our practice are incommensurable with archival theory and professional archival standards of description, preservation, or access, but argue that genuine community-based work cannot take place exclusively in the remove of official institutions. Our alternative model of redistribution aims to meet people in the city, in their places of work, and all manner of public and private spaces as a project of memory preservation and political protest.

“O'er Pathless Rocks”: Wordsworth, Landscape Aesthetics, and Queer Ecology

. . . [the] queer project and the environmental project are always already connected . . . the questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with the questions and politics of the other-than-human-world. (4) . . . fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecology: queer ecology. (281) Our understanding of Romanticist landscape aesthetics has been—or at least should have been—reshaped over the past 10 years by advents in second-wave ecocriticism, and more recently by the emerging discourse of queer ecology. Queer ecology, broadly defined, is a subdiscipline of cultural theory devoted to framing ideas of queer sexuality with ideas of science and nature, and, conversely, a way of reading ecologically concerned texts through the framework of queer theory. To simplify, queer ecology reads the queerness of nature and the nature of queerness mutually. While the hermeneutics, foci, and methods of queer ecology are still in flux, it is clear that queer ecology provides a substantial intervention in readings of Romantic poetry, greatly freeing our ability to address the thematic complexities of landscape poetry despite our heteronormative and humanist aesthetic tendencies. Speaking to form, the methods of such an epistemological mode allow for readers to see the mimetic turn between certain brands of environmentalist criticism that aim toward the emancipation of the environment from human exploitation and the imaginative and performative readings of queer theory. The broader aim of this essay is to start putting these theories into practice, to see how they act as methods, and to explore how Romantic poetry can speak back to queer ecology and shape it in return. The landscape aesthetics of the two poems I address in this essay, William Wordsworth's “Nutting” and “The Thorn,” come more fully to life when queer ecology, with a language that can navigate between our ideas of sexuality and nature, is employed, while also raising questions about what queer ecology is and how it operates.

American Literary History and Queer Temporalities

Queer theory is particularly well positioned at the present time to lead a field-wide reconsideration of what we mean when we talk about literary history. Over the last two decades, queer theory has gained considerable legitimacy as a critical endeavor, and in that same time its foci have evolved from examinations of queer sex, sexuality, and politics, to even more ambitious inquiries concerning the nature of affect and of temporality.1 In not-fully-acknowledged ways, these more ambitious developments run parallel to a renewed scholarly interest in literary history and historiography, at the same time that these developments have already addressed some of the methodological questions that a new generation of literary historians is beginning to ask. The objective of this short paper is to demonstrate that the writing of literary history, as it is currently practiced, is structured by assumptions about history that queer theory at the present time has productively challenged and revised. This paper aims to unite these two fields—or, more precisely, to show how they may already be united in purpose if not in practice. American literary history in its current postexceptionalist moment is an ineluctably queer project.

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

Economic impact of special interest tourism on Cape Town: A case study of the 2009 Mother City queer project

Tourism is undoubtedly one of the foremost industries world-wide, generating jobs, contributing to the GDP of a country and offering exciting opportunities to explore unknown attractions and destinations. South Africa is the leading tourist destination on the African continent. Niche tourism, or Special Interest Tourism (SIT), as opposed to mass tourism, has been identified by the South African tourism authorities as the preferred way of attracting high-value tourists to this country. One of the identified niche areas is gay tourism. This tourism market segment is characterised by high numbers of single persons (some in a relationship), with considerable disposable income, the so-called DINKs &ndash; double income no kids group. Cape Town, with its excellent tourist attractions and facilities, its liberal attitude to people of all walks of life, and its customs, has developed into an important gay tourism destination for South African and international visitors. Being recognised internationally as a leading gay business and holiday destination, the question now arises as to the economic worth of this SIT market segment. The annual Mother City Queer Project (MCQP), which has been held in Cape Town since 1994, was an opportunity to measure the economic impact of this niche tourism sector. To establish the economic importance of the MCQP festival, and therefore the economic contribution to the GDP of Cape Town, businesses in the Mother City, (including those which cater for gays) and especially in close proximity to the 2009 MCQP festival site, were surveyed to establish the impact on their businesses of the festival. Festinos at the festival were also questioned on various personal aspects pertaining to their economic contribution to the festival. The survey results reveal that the one-night 2009 MCQP could have contributed as much as R26 million to the Cape Town economy, a significant injection, and proof of the importance of SIT tourism &ndash; in this case gay or &bdquo;pink‟ tourism.Key words: Tourism, niche tourism, special interest tourism (SIT tourism), gay tourism, economic impact, economic worth, MCQP.

Imagining the future of lesbian community: The case of online lesbian communities and the issue of trans

How lesbian communities and identities are currently envisioned and imagined affects the future constitution of these communities. The queer utopian project may not have succeeded in completely queering the mainstream or dissolving the need for separate identity groups based on sexual identity, but it has made the question of how those identity groups are constituted, and how they are negotiating and imagining their futures, more imperative. The legacy of the queer project can be seen in the coalitions of non-mainstream sexual identity groups. It can also be seen in challenges to the legacies of other utopian moments and discourses, such as lesbian separatism. Traces of lesbian separatism can be found in some contemporary lesbian events, communities, and forums. Challenges are made to lesbian communities by bisexuals, heterosexuals, and transgenders, which presents challenges for imagined lesbian futures, and poses the question of how diverse these communities will be, and how they will be constituted. In this article, I focus on the deliberations between pro- and anti-transgender activists and supporters in lesbian controlled online spaces, and the implications of these debates for the future of lesbian communities.

A Teoria Queer e a Sociologia: o desafio de uma analítica da normalização

Originada a partir dos Estudos Culturais norte-americanos, a Teoria Queer ganhou notoriedade como contraponto crítico aos estudos sociológicos sobre minorias sexuais e à política identitária dos movimentos sociais. Baseada em uma aplicação criativa da filosofia pós-estruturalista para a compreensão da forma como a sexualidade estrutura a ordem social contemporânea, há mais de uma década debatem-se suas afinidades e tensões com relação às ciências sociais e, em particular, com a Sociologia. Este artigo se insere no debate, analisa as similaridades e distinções entre as duas e, por fim, expõe um panorama do diálogo presente que aponta para a convergência possível no projeto queer de criar uma analítica da normalização.

Bodies that speak and the promises of queer: looking to two lesbian/queer bathhouses for a third way

In utilizing my ethnographic research on two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, Pussy Palace in Toronto and SheDogs in Halifax, I seek to show the centrality of queer and the concomitant promises of a queer project when it comes to bodily speech and sexual articulation. While many feminists have criticized queer as being regressive and ineffective, I explicate the ways in which the queering of space employed by the organizers of Pussy Palace and SheDogs enables the discursive and physical conditions for intelligibility among bathhouse patrons. The result is a body that speaks, a body that through its very specificity is recognized and affirmed.