Queer Reading Research Articles

“The self is embodied”: Reading queer and trans Africanfuturism in The Wormwood Trilogy

ABSTRACT This essay examines the politics of embodiment in The Wormwood Trilogy in relation to queerness, transness, and decoloniality, and how the struggles for embodied self-determination are metaphorically connected to the struggles for African liberation in Africanfuturism. I argue that The Wormwood Trilogy affirms African queer and trans relations to embodiment by not only proclaiming the embodiment of the self, but also recognizing the importance of transformation and (re)creation to embodied personhood. I conclude with the ways using Africanfuturism as theory can decolonize queer and trans intercultural futures.

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Performing a Brushstroke. Pop paintings on Abstract Expressionism

This paper aims at a queer reading of some mid-1960s Pop Art paintings, whose more or less direct subject is the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke. Queer hermeneutical instruments, like the concept of performativity, can account the strategies set up by Pop artworks in order to deconstruct the essentialist meanings associated to the image of the thick, gestural brushstroke typical of Abstract Expressionism. All along the Fifties and Sixties, details of abstract painting spread and got a centrality due to Rosenberg’s and Greenberg’s pervasive critical systems about painting. The former interpreted the brushstroke as the direct expression of the life and the action of the painter; the latter, as the “nature” of painting itself as pure color on surface. Countering this critical rhetoric, Lichtenstein artificially constructed flat images of the Expressionist brushstroke; Dine put into question its status of representation or reality; Rosenquist formulated food-like metaphors of abstraction, stressing its popularization in the mass media, and overturned the rhetoric of “natural” expressionist creation; Hockney camouflaged photographic figuration as a form of “drag abstraction”.

Sexual Identities in Africa: A queer reading of Chinelo Okparanta’s under the Udala trees

In Africa, queer sexual identities have received mixed feelings, leading to the debate in a bid to clearly define the legalization or non-legalization of it in various countries. And, looking at the current changing trends of this concept in Africa, the selected literary text happens to situate itself well within the fluid queer discourse. It follows then that the text provides the sub-plot of characters that have an overtly queer erotic and queer social bonding with some other characters. Consequently, the crust of this study is to draw on the broader queer concept in interrogating some pressing concerns of queer sexual identities in Okparanta‟s Under the Udala Trees. Among other things, the research demonstrates how contemporary works of fiction like Under the Udala Trees use their narratives to conceive space and language whose midpoint encompasses literary innovations and the significance of some experiences of queer individuals within an African setting. The study ultimately uncovers the literary merits of queer sexualities in Okparanta‟s Under the Udala Trees instead of simply portraying these sexualities as alternative solutions in adverse conditions to some individuals who cannot help being the way they are.

Boy crazy, but not in a straight way: The ‘truth’ about Larry in the One Direction fandom

This article explores the queer practices of a subgroup of One Direction fans known as Larries. The Larries believe that former One Direction boyband members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (referred to by the portmanteau ‘Larry Stylinson’) were, or are, in a relationship. This article draws on a digital ethnography with the Larry fandom conducted on Twitter across 2018 and argues that their digital practices involve queer reading strategies to disrupt heterosexual narratives and create space for queer desire. While Larries are invested in the ‘reality’ of the ship, we also suggest that their fan practices are oriented towards challenging dominant heterosexual logics. Larries do not simply seek representations of queer desire in popular culture but rather, through shipping Larry, create a community online that celebrates queer sexuality, whether actualized in popular culture or not. Our findings challenge typical representations of fangirls as heteronormatively ‘boy-crazy’. Far from understanding fangirls as a single monolithic group primarily motivated by heterosexual longing, this article argues that Larries encourage us to rethink gender, desire, the queer potential of fan practices and even the relationship between power and ‘truth’ in a ‘post-truth’ world.

Queering crimes of torture: A (re)imagining of torture in International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia jurisprudence

ABSTRACT International criminal justice mechanisms are guided by their mandates to hold individuals accountable for grave breaches of international humanitarian law. Within this body of law, a host of crimes are listed as prohibited, and if committed, could land individuals before national or international courts. While the legal categorisation of violence into discrete crimes serves the procedural justice of the courtroom, it simultaneously erases the overlapping, entangled, and messy practice of violence. In this paper, I engage in a queer (re)imagining of the legal category of the crime of torture, as defined and practiced at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). A queer reading of witness testimonies reveals the multiplicities and contingencies that constitute torture, but also exposes the logics of gender and sexuality that make the practice and prosecution of torture legible. I argue that the ICTY jurisprudence both erases and embraces the complicated ways that torture is practiced and embodied. A queer reading of this case offers opportunities to expand definitions and applications of torture in contemporary mechanisms of international criminal justice.

Destabilizing Gender and Genre: Queering the Body in Libertarias and Land and Freedom

Abstract Libertarias (1996) and Land and Freedom (1995) explore the complex situation of women militia during the Spanish Civil War. A queer reading of the female body in these films highlights wartime female masculinity (Halberstam) and female solidarity. In renegotiating worn expectations of sexuality and gender, the films question and ultimately redefine the wartime docudrama genre. The queering of gender and genre leads to alternative versions of history that upend the very idea of historical accuracy. The female bodies in the films transgress entrenched binary gender norms, thus creating a uniquely queer representation of female solidarity in the docudrama genre.

Editor's Introduction

Covid-19 has slowed a lot of things down—including our McCarthy conferences, which we're in the process of planning for the U.S. sometime in the 2021–22 academic year, and Dublin for June 2022—but not, apparently, McCarthy scholarship. Submissions to the journal have continued apace over the last year, even increasing over the typical average, so it's edifying to see that good thinking about good literature remains a touchstone.This issue brings together scholars from several different countries with a variety of new angles on McCarthy's work. Rachel Griffis leads the issue with a piece on Llewelyn Moss and Tom Sawyer, building on previous work that examines Twain's influence but more often focuses on Huck Finn. Joey Isaac Jenkins follows with an article exploring the relationship between interspecies violence and queer desire in the Border Trilogy, opening new possibilities for queer readings of McCarthy. Joakim Hermansson and Tore Rye Anderson both analyze the dialogue between the father and son in The Road—Hermansson emphasizing the dramaturgical rhythms evident in the use of the word “okay” and the creation of an “adulthood code” and Anderson engaging with the father's own storytelling in the novel, and how he creates a plot that moves him and his son forward. Finally, Ryan Crane's article on Blood Meridian offers a new reading of the judge's tale about the harnessmaker—a cryptic and often unaddressed section of the book—and the death of the kid by unpacking the influence of Frazer's The Golden Bough.This issue concludes with a review of Cambridge University Press's new collection Cormac McCarthy in Context, edited by Steven Frye, and reviewed here by Naomi Morgenstern.

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

"The Sex They Really Need:" Medicalization and Popular Interpretations of Homosexuality in Postwar Canada

With the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots having just past, it is astounding to see the leaps and bounds made by queer historians towards developing an understanding of homophobia in the American postwar period which led up to the riots. While the publicised, state-sanctioned homophobic purges of men and women from public service has been well documented in American history, the equivalent persecution of gay men and lesbians in Canada has gone largely unexamined. Much like other oppressive acts enacted by the Canadian government, the purging of those suspected of homosexuality has been left out of Canada's collective national history. That organisations such as the RCMP and CSIS act as arbiters of archival documentation detailing the means of constructing and detecting the homosexual other only complicates matters further. As such, researchers can be better served through the examination of auxiliary texts, or interviews with those affected by the purges. This paper opts for the former, utilising postwar medical periodicals, popular media publications, and audio recordings of postwar symposiums to unravel the proposed medical basis for state homophobia and demonstrate how scholarly research was appropriated by the press. Through utilising a queer reading of these texts and employing contemporary queer theory, it is revealed that gender anxiety was at the root of the purges and that constructions of homosexual men and women as subversive was the result of self-reinforcing cycles of information misinterpretation.

Edith Södergran’s Genderqueer Modernism

This essay reads Edith Södergran’s poetic subject in Dikter (Poems) (1916) as multiple and, in their complex negotiation and revision of the cultural body assigned female at birth, representative of a gender expansiveness that we can identify today as trans and genderqueer. These queer readings of Södergran’s poems seek to move away from traditional interpretations of her work while resisting the application of fixed meanings onto them. Locating potential manifestations, opposed to identifications, of trans expression can open up new possibilities for understanding the complexity of Södergran’s writing and how contemporary readers can consider their own positionality as they navigate and renegotiate their place in the queer worlds Södergran built. This essay argues that Edith Södergran’s avant-gardist world-building of materially and aesthetically genderqueer poetic subjects contributes to her own revolutionary brand of Finland-Swedish modernism.

The Social Importance of How Bodies Inhabit Spaces with Others: A Queer Reading of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2003)—is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger (2009), and culminating in The Paying Guests (2014), this phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion.

‘The Place of the Transfagbidyke is in the Revolution’

Developed from their public dialogue at the Edinburgh conference ‘Cruising the Seventies: Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now’ (March 2019), this article discusses the afterlives of the 1970s, and another seventies (the 1870s), within the political imaginaries of contemporary struggles in the UK and France. Building on our own engagement and observations as community activists, we discuss the influence of 1970s collectives and communes in present day queer organising; the animation of a trans antifascist poetics, such as the work of Laurel Uziell, in street protests; and the role of queer readings of Paris Communard Louise Michel in the imaginary of members of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests). We argue that a praxis of ‘queer hirstorical materialism’ that mobilises the queerness and genderqueerness of historical resistance is active in contemporary queer and trans struggles against neoliberal and right-wing governments and neofascists, and more broadly, for revolution.

What Was Boston Marriage? Sarah Orne Jewett and Biography

This essay reviews five years of scholarship on Sara Orne Jewett (c. 2014–19), with a focus on work foregrounding regionalism and on Queer readings. How does biography inform (or not inform) readings of Jewett's fiction? I conclude that new biographical work on Jewett and particularly her Boston marriage with Annie Adams Fields is needed. A dual biography of the two women has the potential both to deepen historical understanding of same-sex eroticism between women in the nineteenth-century United States and the nature of Boston marriage and to give impetus to new readings of Jewett's fiction.

Ekuni Kaori's Tears in the Night: The Brilliance of Queer Readings for Japanese Literary Studies

Ekuni Kaori's Tears in the Night: The Brilliance of Queer Readings for Japanese Literary Studies

Reading Hoda Hadadi in Tehran: The Implicit Articulation of Lesbian Identity in Iranian Children’s Literature

Reading Hoda Hadadi in Tehran: The Implicit Articulation of Lesbian Identity in Iranian Children’s Literature Massih Zekavat (bio) Sexuality in its full diversity has been expressed in Iranian lore and literature both explicitly and implicitly (Alfiyah and Shalfiyah, Astarābādī, Floor, Khānsārī, Najmabadi, Nakhshabī, Shamisa). Yet, as the modern notion of childhood and children’s literature emerged at roughly the same time as the heterosexual/homosexual divide consolidated, sexuality also receded from Iranian children’s literature.1 Besides religious considerations, censorship is another important reason. Publications are subject to censorship both before and after their release in Iran. For a book to be published, the manuscript must be licensed by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which often involves demands for modifications to ensure compliance with the law and sharia, yet this does not immunize the author and publisher against further liability in case authorities later find traces of transgression even in a licensed publication that might lead to a ban on the book and potential punishment for the parties involved. While unashamedly and avowedly heteronormative, Iranian children’s literature frequently attempts to eschew sexuality. Nonetheless, we seem to have both a pattern of slow emergence in the face of hostility and heteronormativity (as in the West in the 1960s) and a particularly pronounced version of those things due to religious beliefs and the political situation in Iran. Examples of this slow emergence include Azadeh Mohseni’s title story in Born in the Owl Month, Nooshin Zargari in Woody, and, in particular, Hoda Hadadi in children’s and young adult literature. Hadadi, writer, poet, and illustrator, was born in 1977 in Tehran. She has so far created almost sixty titles as author, illustrator, and author/illustrator and has won several distinctions and awards. Her books My Day with the Clouds, Deep in the Sahara (written by Kelly Cunnane and illustrated by Hadadi), Drummer Girl (with Hiba Masood), and Rainbow in My Pocket (written by Ali Seidabadi and illustrated by Hadadi) are available in English.2 [End Page 283] Responding to Caitlin L. Ryan and Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth’s call for queer readings of the works that are already on the shelf in hopes of advocating diversity and inclusiveness, I argue that Hadadi repudiates heteropatriarchy and subtly depicts an alternative paradigm of lesbian rapport in three of her books. Specifically, in her picturebook Goli and Zebra (2007) Hadadi censures the institution of heterosexual marriage, and in her young adult novel The Clown (2012/2013) she explores the joys of a homosocial bonding of characters in an unsympathetic and repressive context. Hadadi further depicts the jouissance of a lesbian rapport in her picturebook Two Friends through drawing on nature, investigating the philosophical, emotional, and ethical implications of lesbian sexual performance and creating a dialogic, rather than imitative, relationship between the text and illustrations. Taken together, these moves demonstrate a daring transgression that is even more impressive in an Islamic context where male homosexual practices are still subject to corporal punishment or even execution, and lesbianism is almost inconceivable. These three books fit different categories and genres and use different modes of expression. Their intended readers and arguably their social functions are also different. Hadadi starts with criticizing heteropatriarchy and exposing the devastating effects of a heterosexual marriage for women in her animal fable Goli and Zebra, where marriage does not lead to the realization of the protagonist’s self and her dreams. Her realist novel The Clown uses meticulous characterization and a socially located setting to offer a more pragmatic attitude to exploring resistance at a social level. Meanwhile, the picturebook Two Friends features unnamed protagonists in a natural setting not bound by time or place; it adopts an open-ended, psychological and individual perspective in order to address fundamental and philosophical questions. Reading these works together, I argue, sheds light on Hadadi’s revisionary project through which she attempts to break with the tradition, open a space for and give voice to the peripheries, and destabilize the ideology propagated by the repressive regime. The supposed asexual nature of children and the necessity of guarding their innocence postponed homosexual representations in children’s literature. At...

Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten

Reviewed by: Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time by Jeffrey Masten Caitlyn McLoughlin Masten, Jeffrey, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 368; 51 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $65.00; ISBN 9780812247862. Medieval and early modern scholars frequently reflect on their disciplinarity, yet only relatively recently have they begun to consider how various normative and powerful social systems have influenced the generation and fruition of their fields. Over the past two hundred years, these fields have operated under fairly homogenous and exclusive academic structures that value and uphold white, Eurocentric, and heteronormative systems of critical engagement and historical e/valuation. Contributing to a contemporary reckoning with just such an exclusionary pedigree, Jeffrey Masten considers the ways that exclusions have been enforced within philological considerations of early modern texts. In Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time, Masten explores the relationship between writing and sexuality, offering queer readings not only of particular philological practices and early modern modes of textual production, but, perhaps most notably, of letters themselves (the introductory material takes as a specific and convincing subject the letter Q). Masten argues that 'the study of sex and gender in historically distant cultures is necessarily a philological investigation' (p. 15), directly contributing to what he identifies as a re-emergence of scholastic engagement with premodern sexual identities. By coining the term 'queer philology', Masten necessarily aligns philology with 'sexual practices, the positioning of bodies and body parts, and "identities" that seem nonnormative, whether in their own time or, especially, from this historical distance' (p. 15), bringing welcome nuance to the established connection between language and identity. Masten's queer philology successfully attempts a self-reflection with the aim of highlighting how 'philology's manifold methods and rhetorics of [End Page 236] investigation are often themselves thoroughly implicated in the languages of sex, gender, and the body' (p. 18), and how often writing about language is itself inflected with and reliant upon language of heteronormative reproduction and familial systems. This work then, is of particular interest and use to scholars working on kinship systems, queer or otherwise. In addition to focusing on 'the implication of philological modes of analysis in discourses of sex/gender' (p. 32), the introduction and first chapter focus on early modern standardization practices that were only in their infancy in seventeenth-century Europe, and the various ways that compositors and editors hid or even erased instances of queerness, in premodern acts of straightwashing. The monograph's final section 'advocates explicitly for a more active engagement of editorial practice with philologies of sex, sexuality, and gender', but not before Masten's presentation of three lexicons in the body of the work (focused friendship, boy-desire, and sodomy) that concentrate on 'discourses that have become integral to historical analyses of especially male same-sex relations in early modern England' (p. 32). In these sections, Masten takes as his focus several works by and concerning Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd, among others. While many scholarly texts that operate under the 'queer theory' academic umbrella acknowledge and engage the importance of language in the construction—or more often, deconstruction—of identity, Masten moves beyond a fleeting or cursory concession, engaging the professional practices and scholastic enterprises that determine so completely contemporary conceptions of history and historical texts. Since its release in 2016, Queer Philologies has been overwhelmingly well reviewed, with most writers acknowledging its important contribution to new efforts in 'doing' early modern queer theory. The work's broader impact on the field of early modern drama studies was recognized in 2018 when Masten received the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award (Rice University). In 2021, Queer Philologies reminds of the continuing need to examine the often subtle but manifold ways that marginal experiences are embedded in language technologies and systemic culture more broadly. In this way, and although Masten primarily focuses on sexual identities, his study of queer philologies also illuminates the various ways that white, Western assumptions about language and culture dictate critical engagement with premodern history at large. Towards the end of the book, Masten specifically turns his attention to...

“Just a Couple of Queer Fish”: The Queer Possibilities of Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle

Abstract Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) is a foundational work of lesbian literature and has been characterized as a queer text. This essay begins with resistance to reading the novel as a wholly celebratory queer text because of how it positions a form of essentialized lesbianism against queer sexualities that are coded as deviant and abnormal. Nonetheless, Rubyfruit Jungle brims with queer narratives, queer scenes, and queer characters. In the essay’s second half, I draw on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s model of reparative reading to engage with potential queer readings the novel affords. I show how readers can recuperate the queer sexualities the novel documents in ways that the novel – with its specific historical and political positionality – did not or could not account for.

Desire for a Magnificent Seven: A Queer Reading of a Western Remake

Reflecting on his audiencing experience of Westerns between the 1960 and 2016 remake of the movie, The Magnificent Seven, the author reflects on the social justice mission of the film plot. He comments on the complex presentation of the racialized/ethnic other in Yul Brynner and Denzel Washington as lead bad-boys-turned good, in a homosocial band of renegade brothers. The author uses a line from Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black” as commitment to a stylized performance for justice. In the end, the author attempts to reconcile his queer desire for the cowboy figure, as a form of disidentification with a romanticized yet still violent character-type.

I Have A Remember When

This article begins with a reflection on a queer reading at Knife Fork Book in Toronto where an inter-generational moment, for me, went blank. It then recounts a few personal notes concerning the history of the gay bars of the 1970s. I also reflect on what the winning of gay rights has led us to, as observed by an older gay once designated an outlaw. Where is the locale of memory when architectural erasure has demolished the sites of our history and struggle? Can a recounting of gay historical events of the 1970s and early 1980s provide a sense of both the oppression and the vice arrests by the Metropolitan Toronto police force? These events ignited and gathered a gay rebellion to form a community with rights and a standing in law.