Queer Publics Research Articles

Sex Panics: Queer (Counter)publics, Networking, and Sociality in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Previous studies on same-sex attractions and sexualities in general have explored various dimensions and the social and psychological implications of its existence in societies where they are rejected or accepted. While existing studies have addressed these phenomena in the broader context, this research focuses specifically on Nigeria. Recent investigations indicate that same-sex attraction is vehemently rejected in Nigerian society, both in physical and online spaces, reinforced by the enactment of the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA 2014) and prevalent homophobia. This implies that queer Nigerians put in efforts to ensure networking and sociality amidst these impediments. The current study examines the presence of queer Nigerians and the visibility of their sexualities as sex panic in Nigeria. It also examines the formation of queer publics and counterpublics in the country, and shedding light on the ways queer Nigerians navigate societal constraints through traditional and geosocial networking options.

Queer Studies Now; or, The (Political) Economy, Stupid

Abstract The 1990s witnessed the origin of a decades-long “discipline problem” in queer studies, a conflict between empirical and theoretical approaches, and the two monographs under review—lesbian and gay historian Marc Stein’s Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism and queer theorist Lee Edelman’s Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing—might seem like excellent candidates to reprise it. However, this review argues that the place where lesbian and gay history and queer theory have now caught up with one another is a structural one. What’s changed since the 1990s is less our disciplines and more the political–economic conditions that sustain them.What unites these two works in a common project, however, is the way each betrays an investment in the possibility—one might say, the hope—of political and social change.

Telling Hoosier Stories: Digital Queer Public History in Indiana and the Nation

ABSTRACT: The IMH interviews Dr. Eric Gonzaba, assistant professor of American Studies at California State University Fullerton, about his digital history projects, Wearing Gay History and Mapping the Gay Guides, and about doing digital queer public history in Indiana and the United States.

TikTok’s Queer Potential: Identity, Methods, Movements

This commentary piece considers TikTok’s queer potential in terms of the platform’s use and subversion for the purposes of queer movements and worldmaking. It considers how TikTok’s affordances, features, and algorithmic functionalities both facilitate and hamper the expression of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other diverse (LGBTQ+) identities and the formation of queer publics. As such, it proposes that queer methodologies, invoking multiple approaches infused with an ethics of care and attention to platform specificity, can be applied to examine the hurdles TikTok poses for LGBTQ+ people as well as how individuals appropriate the app for their purposes. By considering how queer identities, publics, and methods play out on TikTok, it becomes possible to locate the app’s existing and potential role in the realization of queer movements and futures.

Review: Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism, by Marc Stein

Review: <i>Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism</i>, by Marc Stein

Civic reasoning through paranoid and reparative reading: Addressing conspiracy theories within racialized and queer publics

ABSTRACT When classrooms fail to provide racially marginalized students with frameworks that explain their daily experiences, sometimes students turn to conspiracy theories, however inaccurate. This article links marginalized students’ critiques of society and paranoid readings of the world with civic reasoning. Through queer and critical race theory, this article offers practices within civics classrooms to address marginalized students’ turns to conspiracy theories, rethinking civic reasoning from students’ paranoid positionalities as targets of systemic oppression. These practices stem from my teaching a twelfth-grade civics course which centered conspiracy theories, and students’ distrust of the government and media. Recommendations for practice include providing terminology and documentation of marginalization; defining the line between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, science and pseudoscience; embracing fallibility as analytic virtue; and repairing students’ relationships to science and sources.

The Queer Public and Its Problem with Representation

The tension between demands for more and “better” queer media representation and queer theory’s antagonism toward identitarian politics has plunged the queer community into a debate about who and w...

Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin

This essay examines the interpretation of the lives and work of two queer men, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, at the Pendarvis Historic Site in the small town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Using this interpretation as a case study, the essay addresses how public historians might more fully incorporate the history of sexuality into historic site interpretative models. It suggests a number of strategies for helping visitors think critically about the history of sexuality and how our current understandings of sexual identity are not always useful or accurate ways of thinking about queer pasts.

London's nocturnal queer geographies

There are contradictory pulls in neoliberal cities. On the one hand there has been an acceptance of mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) identities, as celebrated for example through commercially sponsored and officially endorsed Pride rallies. On the other, real estate-led global city competitiveness is affecting our capacity to secure the heritage of queer publics, and for them to keep a foothold in the spaces they have historically occupied. Internationally, researchers are charting the effects of gentrification on neighbourhoods associated with LGBTQ+ communities. In the UK, since LGBTQ+ rights have been won in large part through European Union-led legislation, the trajectory of an increasing liberalisation of attitudes and legal protections is not guaranteed. Recent data shows losses of a wide range of cultural and social spaces, but the provision of LGBTQ+ nightvenues has suffered an even more dramatic fall than has been seen for pubs in the UK overall; and LGBTQ+ night-venues have suffered disproportionately in London’s wider losses of nightclubs and grassroots music venues, as they have been rapidly succumbing to commercial residential and infrastructure-led developments. If pubs, generally, are important to the social life of neighbourhoods, LGBTQ+ venues function as vital infrastructure for these groups, providing spaces of care and community against wider contexts of oppression and violence. In London, as in other cities internationally, increasing attention is being paid to LGBTQ+ heritage alongside that of other minority groups. But are these efforts in vain, given that t

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

The lesbian complaint: On kinship, genre and being public

This article discusses lesbian relationships dissolutions and the stories about them. Applying a narrative approach, the critical reading of breakup stories which are conceptualized as dramas by their participants seeks to problematize the distinction between private and public, respectable and scandalous, normative and deviant, and constructive and destructive in order to discuss queer publics and some longings that are attached to them. While the contingency between the institution of family and the politics of belonging in lesbian and gay lives has been intensively scrutinized and criticized by scholars and activists alike, questions regarding the forms of publics and belonging that emerge as a result of kinship failure are yet to be explored. Building on in-depth interviews and inspired by critical intervention into questions of counterpublics, I ask how intimate stories of relational dramas are narrated in an era of compulsory happiness.

Like “Some Long Lost Brother”: Allusions to Queer Public Sex in Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a text rife with ambivalences; as such, the book has been understood through numerous theoretical frameworks since its publication. Though critics offer diverging clai...

The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism by Paul Amar

<i>The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism</i> by Paul Amar

A Queer Public Sphere

A Queer Public Sphere

The Clinic and the Tearoom

Although the clinical and the sexual are commonly treated as antithetical realms of experience, queer commentary teaches that the clinic is a positively sexual space and that clinical intimacy is a creative form of sexual intimacy. Contrary to writers such as Engelhardt, the clinic is a space where queer publics are forged, and the barriers between moral friends and moral strangers potentially dissolve, but only to the extent that one is disposed to allow oneself to enjoy experiences of identification that confound the ideals of human dignity typically invoked in writings about sexual ethics on the one hand and clinical medical ethics on the other hand.

Disclosed and Willing: Towards A Queer Public Sociology

This article contributes to recent debates on ‘public sociology’, expanding the notion and interrogating its utility for those who simultaneously carry out activism and scholarship. The idea of public sociology has underpinned the conviction that knowledge can contribute to inclusion or exclusion, depending on how it is used. This article argues that commitment to public sociology implies abiding by the guiding principles of accountability, intersectionality, reciprocity and reflexivity, and further represents commitment to activism, embracing politics as an intended effect of knowledge production. Building on personal experience as researcher and activist in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement in Portugal, I also explore the epistemological and ethical impacts of taking on the role of scholar-activist. This offers a ‘double agency’ through which one may build and disseminate empirically grounded knowledge whilst maintaining a sense of social responsibility and political engagement. Bringing these ideas together, this article advances the notion of a ‘queer public sociology’: a critical framework that accounts for sexual diversity, and that acknowledges its politically situated character at the same time that it contributes to the dismantling of sexual prejudice and exclusion.

Ethics, Politics, and Host Space: A Comparative Case Study from the South American Chaco

This essay compares two communities of common origin that now dwell in separate rural lowland South American settings, one in the Bolivian Chaco and the other in the Paraguayan Chaco (maps 1 and 2). South America's Gran Chaco is sparsely populated, averaging one person per three square kilometers (Censo Nacional Indígena [Paraguay], 2002). Nevertheless, the present essay takes as its analytic-theoretical point of departure a phrase invoked by Michael Warner in his 1999 book on queer publics in New York City: “Urban space is always a host space” (1999: 190).

Queer Publics, Public Queers

This is the introduction to an issue of this journal. Fintan Walsh is the editor of this issue.

Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics: Direct action vomiting against homonormative consumerism

Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in mutually informing ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include liberatory theories and practices of embodied genders and sexualities in private and public, direct actions to visibilize and extend queer publics, and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race, disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among others. This article will critically analyze three cases of anti-consumerist vomiting, including an erotic performance, a punk zine, and a Pink Panthers direct action, to investigate the politics of queer anarchist autonomous publics that extend the anti-homophobic and antiheteronormative politics of queer counterpublics toward challenging homonormativity through intersectional anti-oppression and liberatory value-practices.

Cultivating Queer Publics with an Uncivil Tongue: Queer Eye's Critical Performances of Desire

This essay examines the civilizing rhetorics performed on Bravo's reality television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and the role they play in processes of queer worldmaking. We contend that despite charges of assimilation and depoliticization, Queer Eye enacts an “uncivil” tongue, opening up a discursive space for the circulation of nonnormative forms of desire. These performances of desire reimagine relationships between bodies, surfaces, spaces, and pleasure. In doing so, Queer Eye's uncivil tongue provokes a rethinking of desire itself—a strategy that, we argue, is integral to the cultivation of a queer public culture. This essay, then, extends critical scholarship pertaining to publics, performance, and queer worldmaking.