Queer Reading Research Articles

Queering the Rome Statute: Searching for the International Criminal Court’s Potential to Do Justice to Queer People

ABSTRACT The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is tasked with holding individuals accountable for the perpetration of the most heinous international crimes. However, the Rome Statute does not provide express grounds for protecting queer people. This article examines to what extent the ICC can protect queer people, by adding a queer reading to doctrinal interpretations to trouble and problematise uncritical legal protection. The crime of genocide and the crime against humanity of persecution serve as the main sources of study, in addition to international human rights law due to its connection with the Rome Statute. The queer reading demonstrates that despite the ICC’s ability to protect queer people in some ways, the interpretations of the Rome Statute are limited in their potential to do justice to queer people. As such, this article ventures out into a discussion on the possibility for the ICC to ever provide justice for queer people by navigating queer abolitionist critiques. It argues for an approach that de-centres the ICC, thereby creating space for legal transformation to resist queer erasure, whilst simultaneously looking for alternative (re)imaginings that queer abolitionism creates.

The Joy of Queer Science Fiction Reading, or: Will Queers Destroy Science Fiction?

The paper seeks to examine the connections between “queer reading” and “science fiction reading” from the perspective of readers’ recollections of their juvenile experiences of “looking for clues” in queer sf narratives. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, I discuss the idea of queer adolescent reading as a possibly transformative experience that offers exciting theoretical opportunities for academic scholarship on the fantastic. By turning attention to selected testaments of adolescent queer readerly experiences, written by both writers and fans, I hope to demonstrate both the personal (individual) and collective nature of queer self-recognition through these intense and affective engagements with sf texts. A closer examination of a collection of short essays in which authors reflect on the provocative idea of “queers destroying sf,”also based on individual recollections of engaging with sf as young readers, expands the discussion to incorporate fan activity and the question of queer canon-forming.

A comparative study on the transcultural (re-)reception of The Untamed and its queerness with Chinese characteristics

Abstract Drawing on Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities, this article explores the various transcultural interpretations of queer opacity, a Chinese variant of queerness within dan’gai web series. This study reveals that while viewers employ a shared interpretive strategy of queer reading to identify queer opacity, the effect of queer interpretation is contingent upon the queer interpretive subcommunities’ familiarity with Chinese culture. Moreover, different cultures possess sub-strategies of queer reading: visibility reading is often practiced in the global northwest to initiate visibility politics in society, while opacity reading is used in the global southeast in an unconfrontational manner within fictional worlds. By examining a layered interpretive phenomenon that involves transcultural reaction videos towards the Chinese dan’gai web series The Untamed (TU), alongside the danmu from Chinese viewers on these videos, this study contributes to scholarship on transcultural queerness through the lenses of queer opacity and transcultural reader reception.

The permeable reader: queer metalepsis and the novels of Barbara Trapido

ABSTRACT This article considers how contemporary women’s writing manipulates the novel form in order to represent reading and its effects. I propose that specific novels represent a potential permeability of readers – a latent capacity for an ambiguous yet hyperbolic overwhelming or undoing through reading. Focusing on work by Barbara Trapido, a UK-based South African novelist, I argue that such keen effects of reading are represented through transgressions of narrative boundaries, which are in turn tied to acts of reading linked to sexuality and gender. In order to make these arguments, I draw on and develop Michael Lucey’s concept of ‘queer metalepsis’, which involves a blurring of narrative levels that results from modes of queer reading in and of literary texts. In my development of the concept, queer metalepsis not only raises questions of how writing can represent the impacts of reading, but also questions of how – as readers and as literary critics – we approach our own responses to texts. I consider the variously theorised ‘inappropriate’, ‘attached’, ‘bad’, or ‘too close’ acts of reading celebrated in queer literary criticism and query my own attachments to Trapido’s novels throughout my analysis. The article seeks, finally, to emphasise reading as connective, and argue for the value of generous, invested acts of interpretation.

Molecular Rebellions. Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Aesthetics of Contamination in Trans Performance Art

ABSTRACT Hormones are molecular messengers in the body’s metabolism. They regulate, for instance, reproduction, digestion, organ systems and gene expression. The past century brought with it a proliferation of synthetic substances and other industrial chemical compounds, generally referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). These chemicals interfere with the hormonal systems of human and animal bodies alike and are able to, among other things, fundamentally disrupt, mimic or block the functioning of the hormonal system. In this article I investigate the forces of chemical toxicity and its impact on all living bodies on this planet from a queer and trans perspective. EDCs and specifically EDC discourses have a particular effect on queer- and transness. Applying queer reading and autoethnography, I want to think here with two performances by Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona about the impact of EDCs on our human bodies, our planet and the relations and imaginaries that emerge in Ala-Ruona’s work, blending transness and endocrine disruptors in ways different to those currently being suggested by life science and populist discourses. In my engagement with Ala-Ruona’s work I consider that his work not only materializes a new imaginary of embodiment but also demonstrates a multi-molecular, rebellious becoming with and through toxins that intervenes in the risk narratives commonly flanking EDC discourses.

Queere Lesarten von Adams Androgynie

ABSTRACT In the framework of queer readings, following feminist interpretations of the biblical creation accounts, Adam as an androgynous creature and the division of the double-faced first human are discussed. Within rabbinic literature two Jewish traditions are found which are based on Plato’s unique, strange myth of the circle-men in his work Symposium: First, it was imagined that the first human combined both genders in himself. Second, it was suggested that two persons were created in one. This has been illustrated by the double-faced image of the first human who finally has been divided. Already at the beginning of the 20th century the godlikeness of the “homosexual” was asserted in connection with Genesis 1,27. Now a queer rereading of this Bible verse is provided.

Exploring debates over “boys love” media in the Philippines: from misogynistic backlash to queer emancipation

ABSTRACT As a genre originally emerging from Japanese women’s popular culture and developing into a transnational phenomenon, debates over “Boys Love” (BL) media have increased in recent years. Within this article, we explore debates over BL through a case study of its reception in the Philippines, situating our analysis within the broader context of the Philippines’ heteropatriarchal culture. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis of traditional and new media discussions responding to the rise of BL fandom in the Philippines and qualitative interviews with 31 LGBTQ+ fans of BL, we reveal tensions between those who view BL positively and negatively. Through a feminist and reparative queer reading of our data, we contrast cisgender gay men’s dismissal of the genre as always already problematic due to its emergence from women’s culture with LGBTQ+ Philippine fans’ positioning of BL as an emancipatory media genre that combats homophobia. Ultimately, we argue that attempts by certain critics in the Philippines to downplay the queer emancipatory potentials of BL emerges from a misogynistic rejection of the contributions of women to Philippine queer culture. We conclude by calling for a more nuanced appreciation of BL’s queer interventions which recognises the genre’s deconstructive force.

‘Oh my god this is happening’: how Our Flag Means Death staged an empathic mutiny against the labour of queer reading practices

Our Flag Means Death ( OFMD) premiered to critical acclaim and unprecedented audience engagement. It can be argued that it is a romantic queer reading of historical facts. In this article, we reflect on the social function of storytelling and audience labour within the context of queer screen representations. We theorise queer reading as a practice of learning to recognise, identify and create patterns of semiotic resources. This practice is a reaction to a history of being erased or relegated to subtext. We argue queer reading is a particular form of audience labour, in that readers are asked to do extra work. This is especially important in cases where identities and communities are regularly symbolically annihilated. Season One of OFMD is a unique case study where we explore how the show achieves a low/easy labour environment for a vulnerable viewer and how this is an act of care and empathy.

Beyond Norms and Realities

This paper examines the film Everything Everywhere All at Once, portraying a Chinese-American family navigating complex familial dynamics. The film, featuring stellar performances by Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, and Jamie Lee Curtis, garnered Oscars and marked a historic win for Asian women in the Best Actress category. Beyond its sci-fi front, the movie transcends genre boundaries, contributing significantly to new queer cinema. This paper argues that the film disrupts essentialist notions of race, sexuality, and gender by exploring diverse themes. Drawing from queer theory, this paper analyzes the film’s problematization of gender norms and Asian American stereotypes, as well as the encouragement of critical spectatorship in viewers. The analysis identifies the film’s deliberate use of queer codes, inviting viewers to think beyond conventions. The film confuses normative thinking, as demonstrated through Ke Huy Quan’s character, Waymond, who blurred assignments of masculinity and femininity. Finally, the analysis extends this critique to Asian American representation, interrogating stereotypes associated with the model minority myth. Through the film’s well-crafted storytelling and excellent performances by actors, this paper’s analysis demonstrates how a queer reading can encourage thinking beyond ‘normal.’

Queer Césaire

This essay is a response to calls in Black studies in the last decade, by Jafari Allen and others, to excavate Black queer histories and experiences, including in archives where we least expect them. The author offers a queer reading of a foundational work in global Black literature often assumed to be irrelevant to such critical conversations: Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He puts Césaire’s poem in dialogue with one of the three sketches produced by the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam for the 1943 Cuban translation of the Notebook—a drawing at once surrealist and decidedly queer. Using Lam’s multispecies interpretations as method and guide, the author teases out the few yet remarkable queer fragments that appear in Césaire’s subsequent revisions of the Notebook. What if in addition to an anticolonial Black poet, we also thought of Césaire as a queer poet?

Pretty Young Gentleman: Margery Pinchwife's Queer Embodiment in The Country Wife

Abstract: Margery Pinchwife's cross-dressed appearance at the New Exchange in the third act of The Country Wife serves as a crucial turning point for the play's titular character, exposing her to queer pleasures and possibilities. By considering her within the context of the career and reputation of Elizabeth Boutell, who originated the role in 1675, and the ways in which breeches roles were constructed on the Restoration stage, Wycherley's naïve heroine proves to be a model of genderqueer embodiment, even as she is used as a pawn in the games of male homosociality that drive many queer readings of the play. A careful examination of the gender collages that Margery produces over the course of the play highlights her genderqueer potential, running counter to the commonly held view of her as little more than the silly, sheltered wife of a jealous and abusive husband. Rather, Margery stretches the boundaries of gender-sexuality despite the patriarchal hierarchies that try to contain her, illustrating the potential agency granted by gender non-conformity.

LGBT+ mainstreaming on strictly come dancing: Queering the norms of ballroom dancing

This paper proposes that LGBT+ mainstreaming on reality television programme Strictly Come Dancing creates space for audience demand for radical, authentic representations of same-sex desire and intimacy, both of which challenges normative representations of ballroom dancing. Integrating concepts of normativity and authenticity explored in existing scholarship, I argue against the encountering through a defensive stance, of reality TV’s normalization of queer narratives to promote authentic, inclusive representation. Focusing on dance-themed British reality TV programme for family entertainment, I draw on a queer reading of 285 newspaper articles on Strictly Come Dancing’s same-sex dance partnerships and 35 interviews with LGBT+ equality dancers in the United Kingdom, to conclude that active engagement with mechanisms of normalization can open up spaces for a reclamation of queer representation in its authenticity. The article makes a contribution to media and cultural studies and queer television scholarship through a troubling of anti-normativity, proposing a working with normativity to achieve queer inclusivity.

‘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.

A Queer Omission in Sir Orfeo

Abstract: Sir Orfeo is a retelling of the Orpheus myth that allows the hero to keep his bride. This paper counters readings of the poem as a vindication of married love by focusing on its reception in the shadow of a significant omission: both Virgil and Ovid state that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus gave up loving women; Ovid adds that Orpheus loved boys. The significance of these missing conclusions is explored for readers of the poem from its scribes to their patrons and their patrons' families. The paper shows the usefulness of a reception-oriented approach for queer readings of the text.

Green's Clues, or What's Queer about Clue?

Abstract This essay reckons with the representation of queer sexualities and modes of reading in Jonathan Lynn's Clue (US, 1985). The film, originally a box office flop that has become a cult classic, deploys the character of Mr. Green to concentrate and dispel its queer energies. Although he declares near the start that he is “a homosexual,” Green's sexuality is evacuated from the mystery narrative in a way that no other character's is. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and fan studies from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Juno Jill Richards, the essay argues that Clue is structured by its anxious, phobic reaction to Green's sexuality; that it both depicts and provokes paranoid queer readings; and that the movie's future depends on the imaginative re-creations and re-queerings of the modern fan culture that has sprung up around it.

Queer, Affect, Freedom: Queer Readings on Freedom and Politics in the Neoliberal Era

Queer, Affect, Freedom: Queer Readings on Freedom and Politics in the Neoliberal Era

Stimme, Name, Geschlecht.

Abstract This article aims to further discussions about a queer reading. An exemplary reading of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Novella without a Title (1803/1805) is particularly interested in the inconsistencies within in this text’s exploration of the multidimensional concept of “Geschlecht” (sex/gender, kinship, and the human species). A narratological queer reading in this sense lays thus open the openings and closures of the text.

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Explicating and Validating Queer Readings Among Sexual Minority Youth

ABSTRACT Scholars posit that media texts are polysemic (i.e., open to multiple interpretations) with popular media representing a social institution within Western cultures that spreads dominant societal values, norms, and expectations. Due to their marginalized position within society, sexual minority individuals (i.e., LGBQ+) are frequently underrepresented by mainstream media messages. One way in which marginalized individuals can challenge the dominant, heteronormative discourse is through subversive in which individuals interpret messages against heteronormative ideals (i.e., queer readings). Across two studies, a reliable and valid measure of the uses and gratifications of queer readings was explicated; revealing a four-factor, 20-item scale. Results contribute to the entertainment media and fan studies literatures by providing an understanding of the utility of queer readings in the experiences and development of sexual minority individuals, as well as presents numerous future avenues for inquiry.

Desire for Trans Ancestors

In this article, the relationship between the affective histories of queer and trans activism and the reading and writing of contemporary fictional trans literature is explored. The focus lies on the analysis of Jordy Rosenberg’s (2018) Confessions of the Fox, which allows for an investigation into how trans histories can be written and read. The article emphasizes the intricate interplay between literature and history, specifically examining the tensions and pleasures that arise from balancing authenticity and fictionality. Additionally, the role of literature as a medium for expressing emotions and inspiring activism is considered. Confessions of the Fox tells the story of a fictional transmasculine literary scholar who discovers a mysterious manuscript that reveals the trans identity of 18th century London’s infamous thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard. The narrative of Confessions of the Fox establishes an analogy between human bodies and written texts, specifically referring to the trans body. In this article, I argue that the narrative itself approaches the body and the manuscript through the affect of desire. Drawing on the concept of textual desire, as found in Roland Barthes' (1975) The Pleasure of the Text and in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985), the article analyzes the relationship between text and readership to trace pleasurable and ethical encounters with otherness. Overall, the article puts forward the idea to consider reading practices as a tool through which we can investigate the significance and ramifications of queer and trans histories and activism. Keywords: trans literature, historiographic metafiction, Confessions of theFox, textual desire, queer reading, trans reading, authenticity, trans literacy

The Art of Not Being Sexed Quite So Much: A Feminist Reading of Roland Barthes

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone.