Queer Relationships Research Articles

Sexual Orientation Identity in Select African and African American Novels

This paper set out to interrogate Sexual Orientation Identity in select African and African American novels, using the Queer theory. Some heterosexual writers inadvertently dwell on queer relationships in their works. Toni Morrison in both The Bluest Eye and Beloved portrayed bestiality/zoophillia, phytophilliac or dendraphilliac, Spectorphilli, incest, rape/molestation, masturbation, polyamorous relationships, homoerotic, homosocial, and heterosexuality. Whereas, Damon Gulet’s In a Strange Room and Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents depicted lesbianism, homosexuality and bisexuality. With the likes of Geraldine in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Mr Lebowitz in Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, I agree with Tyson on biological essentialism, that the rest of the population is naturally heterosexual. I also agree with other critics that all human beings have the potential for sexual activity that does not fit into heterosexual framework. I share the opinion of social constructionism; that LGBTQ sexuality and heterosexuality are products of social, not biological forces; our societies are fast losing their mores, hence these evil practices. Since patriarchy is the law, no stiff penalty is effected on their wide spread jeopardizing habits. Queerness is a generational destroyer of both moral and humanity. This paper is emphatic that stiff penalties be brought on the practitioners of psychology of peadophile.

Love is Historically, Institutionally, and Societally Constructed: Using Intersectionality to Examine Racial Issues of Power and Privilege in Queer Relationships

How does interracial attraction expose power dynamics within both heterosexual and queer relationships in accordance with historical and institutional infringements on civil rights? With my research paper, I aim to unpack the power dynamics, present and historically constructed, within white-person of color relationships, as well as the desires for whiteness, cisheteronormativity, and assimilation inherent in them due to hegemonic, normative systems of superiority and dependency. I will use American court cases to demonstrate institutional infringements on queerness as well as scholarly articles which support my point that whiteness infiltrates every aspect of life including relationships and the dynamics which form them, with a specific focus on visibility.

Queer Relations between the American Dream and Postcolonial Resistance in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) kindled debates on 9/11 discourse by providing a third-world perspective on the historical tragedy. While centering on postcolonial and international complications surrounding 9/11, Hamid addresses homosexual and racial identity in the text. Based on existing scholarship reading the text as postcolonial resis tance, this essay aims to expand our view of 9/11 narratives by analyzing homosexual politics in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which has barely been recognized by scholars. This essay examines, on the one hand, the mentor-mentee relationship between the closeted gay character Jim and Pakistani immigrant Changez (hearkening back to Greek customs of homosexuality), and, on the other hand, it looks at their mentorship as sit uated within postcolonial discussions concerning the effeminization of Asia and the assimilation process within a diaspora. Approaching the novel as an American dream narrative reveals an underlying anxiety about American society’s rejection about Others as well as of homosexuality. This essay argues that The Reluctant Fundamentalist critiques a white nationalist discourse after 9/11 in which orientalist impulses supersede homophobia, excluding racial others and integrating white homosexuals as patriotic members.

Russia’s spectacle of “traditional values”: rethinking the politics of visibility

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of visibility in efforts to define “the people” in specifically gendered and sexualized ways. In doing this, it contributes to queer and feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, where visibility and invisibility, although central themes, are sometimes insufficiently problematized. In a case study of Russia’s contemporary project of “traditional values,” I show how the Kremlin-promoted heteropatriarchal definition of community relates to efforts to control the visibility of gendered and sexualized bodies, and how those regulations are resisted, with respect to queer visibility, on the one hand, and patriotic military visibility, on the other. I argue: (1) that efforts by states to define and delineate “the people,” involve the production of arrangements of visibility, regulating what gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies can appear in public, and how they are seen; and (2) that those who resist hegemonic conceptions of community seek to disturb and reorder those arrangements of visibility, by making visible bodies that have been rendered invisible or making already present bodies visible in new ways. However, such forms of embodied appearance will not necessarily come in the form of antithetical opposition, but may be more ambivalent.

A Marital First Responders Workshop for Confidants to Queer Relationships: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This study is the first to examine confiding about problems in marital and long-term committed relationships among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals. Areas explored included the prevalence of confiding relationships, the kinds of problems brought to confidant, and degree of stress confidants experience in this role. Prevalence data were presented both for a national sample of 301 LGBT individuals and in comparison with a nationally representative sample of 1,000 American adults. Findings showed a high prevalence of being a confidant among LGBT respondents, greater than in the general population, and a lower prevalence of being a confider. Of particular interest was the finding of a high degree of support that LGBT individuals provide to heterosexual relationships through the role of confidant. Relationship problems discussed with LGBT confidants were similar to those in the general population, as was the level of stress reported by confidants.

I’m No Princess

DC Super Hero Girls (DCSHG) is a trans-media franchise that includes not just screen media texts but a wide array of themed merchandise aimed at a multi-generational market. I argue here that key components of the franchise present a queered version of girlhood that critiques femininity as a gender role while presenting femaleness as encompassing a variety of signifiers, acts, and presentations that can be read as queer (particularly by the so-called big girls in the audience). This is evident in the representation of queer relationships that exist in the sexualized zone of the canonical material, allowing the DCSHG characters to inhabit a liminal proto-queer space between homosocial/gender non-conforming and lesbian that is considered more appropriate for young girls. I examine the way in which the DC Super Hero Girls franchise rejects and reforms familiar elements of comics, super heroism, and princess culture to create that space for girls.

The Queer Afterlife of Gossip

This article reveals the formative interplay between the queer art of gossip and poetic practice in James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, a sprawling verse trilogy composed with the unlikely assistance of a Ouija board. The poem’s extensive gossip with the dead is often dismissed as mere surface. Yet Merrill, the article contends, indulges in what he calls the Ouija’s “backstage gossip” both to establish a queer relationship to poetic tradition and to confront the pervasive menace of the Cold War discourse of the Lavender Scare, which haunts the trilogy’s 1950s origins. Arguing that midcentury American attitudes about sexuality inflect—productively as much as disastrously—the relationship of lyric privacy to gossipy publicity in Merrill’s poem, the article shows how gossip, in its rich afterlife in Sandover, emerges not so much as a normative threat to be overcome but as a mode of fostering and preserving nonnormative voices, converting the privacy imposed on the homosexual into the conditions for creating queer worlds. Gossip concomitantly provides Merrill with a model of poetic self-performance that at once pushes against and embraces New Critical ideals of lyric subjectivity—a way of telling one’s own scandalous story through someone else’s words, even words intended as hostile, discovering poetic and sexual pleasures where others see only anxiety and dread.

A queer relationship? The construction of a New Zealand LGBTQ community choir and its host church

ABSTRACTThis article examines how a secular lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community choir in New Zealand negotiates a relationship with sacred repertoire, and the church in which the choir is located. A mixed-methods study included semi-structured interviews with 26 current and past members, musical directors and a church representative. Themes that emerged included tensions between religion and an LGBTQ cultural secularism, intersections of reconciliation and affirmation and the identity constitutive uses of space. Findings suggest that although, as LGBTQ-identified people, secularism is an important identity, sacred music is pleasurable. The choir provides church-like functions, through a sense of community, ritual and an environment for spiritual reflection and the practice of values. The church location offers reconciliation for those with Christian backgrounds. Benefitting each other, the choir gives St. Andrew’s legitimacy in its identity as an LGBTQ-inclusive church, and the church space has a queering effect on the presentation of the choir.

Queer Relationality as Family: Yas Fats! Yas Femmes! Yas Asians!

ABSTRACTIn this essay, we, as queer subjects, share our embodied experiences to rearticulate and reimagine possible and impossible performances of queer relationality as family. We collaboratively pay careful and nuanced attention to our queer performative roles of becoming and being femmes as referring points of this critical queer engagement. To do so, we adapt methodological implications of autoethnography and intersectional reflexivity. Thereby, we take further steps to explore an anti-anti-relational landscape of queerness that works on and against hegemonic, heteronormative, and homonormative paradigms of relating.

Queer environments: Reanimating ‘Adam Scrivyen’

Integrating queer theory and ecocriticism, this essay reassesses the historical manuscript contexts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s shortest poem, commonly known as ‘Adam Scriveyn,’ while also reconsidering the text’s varied afterlives in contemporary scholarship, including its manifestations in printed editions and digital media. Attending to the material transformations of the poem across time invites close scrutiny of the medieval homosocial networks of textual production, and Elizabeth Freeman’s critique of chrononormativity helps to illustrate how the poet Chaucer, the London scrivener Adam Pynkhurst, and early copyist John Shirley are ‘engrouped’ into a queer collective bound together by intimate forms of co-dependency. Queer relationality in turn structures the literary and affective networks that contemporary medievalists construct by means of the poem itself. Both manuscript scholars and literary critics enact what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a ‘queer touch’ across time, inhabiting a temporality that incorporates the text’s previous readers and editors and even the animal body that gave its life to produce the parchment upon which the orginary text was written. This analysis examines the visual presentation of Pynkhurst’s handwriting on the website Late Medieval English Scribes and interactive online interface of the collaborative project Networks of Book Makers, Owners and Users in Late Medieval England. Instantiating the ‘trans-corporeality’ and ‘distributed agency’ of ecotheorists Stacy Alaimo and Jane Bennett, digital media not only (re)animates textual objects but also demonstrates how texts circulate through networked environments by means of human participants and more-than-human forces.

The Cultural Politics of Aspiration: Family Photography’s Mixed Feelings

This article describes the relationship between family photography, oral history, and feeling. The authors explore questions about affect and family photography in relationship to black, queer relationality and to Asian, diasporic subjectivities. They argue that the affective modality of family photography for marginalized subjects is that of ‘mixed feelings’, which they analyze through a focus on ‘aspiration’ as central to the visual and affective discourses of family photography, oral history, and diaspora. Working with recent work by Christina Sharpe and Tina Campt, the authors describe aspiration within family photography as indexing both the normative temporalities of capitalist futurity and, at the same time, a utopian technology of black futurity that enables the making of necessary futures outside of white supremacy and heteronormativity. The research is part of a larger photography and oral history project, The Family Camera Network, which the article describes.

Queering the war dead: gold star families and the politics of estrangement

ABSTRACTContemporary practices of mourning individuals lost to war violence assert correct and incorrect practices of grieving. Successful practices will emphasize the heroism and the sacrifice of the war dead, centralizing the role of American values in the act of dying for one’s country. To not honor the war dead successfully is seen as a betrayal of their sacrifice and an ethical failure. Through a critical reading of Gold Star Families and the identity politics surrounding acts of mourning, I argue that the social norms acting as guideposts for processes of mourning over-determine relationships and identities in ways that perpetuate a violence that is seen as redemptive. Working towards alternatives to these practices, I argue that a queer relationality can disrupt the idealized constructions of redemptive violence constitutive to notions of successful mourning. A queering of the war dead refuses to allow mourning to be dismissed as unsuccessful if grieving is anything other than the assignment of war hero, patriot, or the solidification of an American identity for those killed by war violence. Ultimately, I argue that acts of queering the war dead have potential to challenge the proliferation of dominant practices that tie a militarized redemptive violence to normalized identities.

Becoming NULL: Queer relations in the excluded middle

This article investigates how computational media have come to shape the form and function of identity in contemporary society, suggesting that these technologies have conscripted users into systems of compulsory identification with or as a set of discrete categories for the purpose of value extraction largely divorced from or in direct contradiction with a radical politics of difference. The author suggests we must begin to imagine how queer theory and queer life might rearticulate themselves in ways that engage with and within technical systems, that is, to imagine a queer technics that is explicitly situated within the logic of information. Taking up this task, the essay proposes a queer politics of subtraction through an investigation of the now ubiquitous relational database management system known as SQL, suggesting its use of the NULL marker opens space for a queer indeterminacy.

Decolonial Erotics: Power Bottoms, Topping from Bottom Space, and the Emergence of a Queer Sexual Theology

Indecent Theology has provided both Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology with new contours for rethinking bodies, power, dominance, and submission. With regard to the logic of dominance that radically pushes the margins of the margins into a form of inexistent living, I suggest a material turn to rethink the contours that are evoked with Indecent Theology. Materialism has long stood as a philosophy opposing the overwhelming dominance of language and the poststructuralist emphasis that has emerged as the ‘linguistic turn’. Considering ‘new materialism’ as a theoretical platform to reread Indecent Theology provides theologies and ethics an opportunity to re-imagine indecent methodologies through indecency, a sort of ethical perversion. I suggest an indecent turn in mobilizing materialism and kink as theories to reread indecent theology for a productive queer materialist sexual theology. The feminist liberation theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid pushes both feminism and liberation into new contours of power and submission and initiates new contours of queer sexuality into the discourse. When analysing Althaus-Reid’s work, we are brought to attention to the margins of the margins, an awareness of the struggle for power and control by those deemed less than. There are contours of power at and in the margins of the margins, those who occupy ‘bottom space’. From a kink/BDSM orientation, I propose to reread Alrhaus-Read’s feminist liberation theology as decolonial erotics that helps to generate a productive materialist queer sexuality. The overarching methodology of this article is a quasi-auto ethnographic investigation into the ways in which the contours of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability affect power and submission and in turn reframes both queer theology and queer sexuality that is rooted in the living out of a very particular theology and ethics, which is rooted in queer relating. Theology can neither materialize in a vacuum nor in isolation. An indecent turn to(wards) a queer sexual theology that is rooted in a queer relationality demands attention to the interdependence of queer relating that is materialized through the interdependency of the growing queer desires of bodies, power, dominance, and submission.

Fear of etiolation in the age of professional passion

ABSTRACTRecent analysis of academia credits neoliberalism for its destabilization. Neoliberalism alone does not explain academics’ conflicted attachments to a precarious professional life or the tendency to embrace normative conceptions of passion and shun professional decline. The quarantine on decline is analogous to the exemption that J.L. Austin imposed on theatre: both deny constitutive power to certain statements and harbor a fear of queerness. Four essays published in Text & Performance Quarterly illustrate how academics quarantine professional fears and doubts. A fifth finds that the deterioration of professional accomplishments loosens normative associations to make space for other, queer relations.

Smells Like Stars by D. Nandi Odhiambo

of history and the insignificance of the individual. In “Where I Am,” Andra Neiburga characterizes Latvians as “a people bound up and numbed by northern darkness .” Despite the inherent power of focal caricature, the people from whom we hear most often seem to feel or project that their lives are of little importance. They go about their daily tasks and are most often portrayed as provincial and old-fashioned, content with whatever small lives they live and small perspectives they gain. This is contrasted with the constant invasion of dramatic twists and instances of magical realism—a man escapes death via a flying sleigh, a woman fills a room with countless birds, a grandson speaks nonchalantly of his murderous plots. Being underwhelmed by the most overwhelming possible events, each character would no doubt say, “A short story is more than enough for you to hear about me! It wouldn’t be worth your time to hear any more than fifteen pages of my life, nor mine to tell it.” Yet despite this disillusionment with the significance of their stories, what all the authors seem to find equally significant is place. The Book of Riga contains stories linked not only to the city in its general, current existence but to specific buildings from the past and future of the city. Though the translations (handled by many hands) vary in quality, content, and style, they can all agree on one thing: “Riga was just Riga, nothing out of the ordinary.” And that is the highest compliment they can give. Linda Stack-Nelson University of Oklahoma D. Nandi Odhiambo Smells Like Stars Toronto. Book*hug. 2018. 240 pages. Part domestic drama, part investigative thriller, and all intersectionality, D. Nandi Odhiambo’s fourth novel foregrounds the tension of interracial and queer relationships against the backdrop of colonial legacy. The four characters in Smells Like Stars struggle to realize their dreams of love and success in Ogweyo’s Cove, a Pacific tourist haven. Told through the eyes of an omniscient narrator,theKenyan-bornnovelist’sstoryfollows a two-week countdown to the wedding Zoltán Böszörményi The Conscience of Trees: Selected Poems Trans. Paul Sohar Ragged Sky Press Veteran Hungarian poet and novelist Zoltán Böszörményi has graced the pages of WLT before—and for good reason. This volume perfectly encapsulates his sophisticated and lofty style of diction as well as his fluid ability to blend ideas, images, and feelings into a flowing river of artistry. The poems provide all the comfort and complexity of a nature walk, gently encouraging the reader to contemplation. James Bridle New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future Verso Technologist James Bridle takes aim at the twenty-first century’s obsession with computation as the solution to all problems, his central argument being that the data we collect has already outstripped our ability to draw meaningful conclusions from it. Touching on a wide variety of topics, including search algorithms , surveillance, climate change, and many more, Bridle makes a compelling case for pumping the brakes on technology to allow ethics to catch up. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 71 of Kerstin Ostheim, a journalist who investigates gruesome horse killings, and P. J. Banner, a photographer with a cocaine habit. After meeting on a dating app and seeing each other for six months, the middle -aged couple decide to get married. P. J. must learn to take responsibility and confront his denial and addiction in order to support Kerstin and Schuld, her transgender daughter from her first marriage, while Kerstin herself must navigate her family’s Nazi past and privileged position as a settler. Sprinkled with Swahili and German, and awash in poetic description of place, Odhiambo creates a sensual world where witch doctors offer proverbs with matterof -fact humor and mechanics find wisdom in Aristotle, only to be interrupted by tweets and text messages that join the flow of the narrative to bring the historical and the contemporary side by side. These juxtapositions form the warp and weft of the novel. Consider the relationship between Kerstin and P. J., which parallels that between Schuld and her boyfriend, Woloff, an Olympic medalist struggling with a knee...

Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History by Kadji Amin

Reviewed by: Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer Historyby Kadji Amin Andrew Ragni Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer HistoryDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, 255pp. ISBN: 9780822368892 T heM ay 2015 issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studiesquestioned queer theory's allegiance to antinormativity. Aptly titled "Queer Theory without Antinormativity," scholars in the journal wondered why antinormative figures or texts proved to be axiomatic for queer critique. The articles therein pursued a queer theory unburdened from this political or theoretical commitment to antinormativity, carving a space for scholarship that highlights and addresses the sticky web of complicities queer peoples share with the state, with the law, and yes, with normativity. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer Historymay be one of the earliest books in the field to take the critical intervention of the differencesjournal as its theoretical touchstone. Kadji Amin regards French writer Jean Genet as the paradigmatic "queerer-than-thou" historical figure animating critical thought and art today; however, by deploying an analytic Amin calls "deidealization," Genet's pederastic relationships, his racial fetishisms, and his earlier praise of France's carceral-pedagogical institutions expose the anti-egalitarian and decidedly not antinormative strains in Genet's writing and political activism. Rather than simply condemn Genet as untenable for [End Page 111]queer scholarship or even queer activism, Amin argues that the "unspeakable" aspects of the renowned pederast reveal a longstanding yet under-analyzed liberal-egalitarian tradition within the precincts of avowedly antinormative queer studies. Why is modern pederasty, in contradistinction to the work of David Halperin, which has focused on pederasty in ancient Greece, an all-but-ignored form of queer relationality within the field, despite its conceptual links to both criminality and deviant sexual behavior (two categories that otherwise enjoy widespread discussion in gender and sexuality studies)? In other words, what does the repression of pederasty in queer studies say about the field's difficulty in "envisioning alternatives to egalitarianism" (35)? Pederasty, Amin observes in concert with Halperin, describes a relation that eroticizes disparities in power, class, and/or age. Is it simply too disturbing of an attachment to study? And how do we account for the transmutation of the pederast into the pathologized figure of the pedophile sometime in the late twentieth century? Amin proposes a genealogical critique of queer studies' disavowed attachments to show how histories of gay liberation inform, in opaque ways, the casting of pederasty as "backward" and regressive in contradistinction to egalitarian or idealized forms of queer kinship. He calls this methodological practice "attachment genealogy," which builds upon genealogical critique to include affective orientations in the queer past that trouble the field's propulsions toward utopian thinking or utopian futurities. In this manner, Amin invokes the work of Heather Love to encounter historical objects that are not so readily redeemable into liberal notions of progressiveness or equality, Genet being chief among them. The structure of the book homologizes this argument, where each chapter's main themes—prison pederasty, racial fetishism, pederastic kinship, and queer terrorism—disappoint or even disturb our contemporary notions of queerness by locating complicity with bad objects as a particular quality of Genet's. By attending to the exclusion of pederastic relationships from gay liberation and the gay rights movement, Amin develops the analytic of "pederastic modernity" to theorize pederasty at the heart of European modernity. He does so by drawing on a number of Genet texts, noting how the youth penal colony of Mettray eroticized hierarchical differences between inmates in a pederastic fashion as a "training ground" for properly nationalist French masculinities: "European modernity is built on mass same-sex institutions—armies, prisons, and schools—that solicit and implant affective attachments to masculine hierarchies" (56). Pederasty, then, is no longer simply a pathologized form of homosexuality nor a diagnostic for degenerate behavior, for it comes to structure the subjectivization of citizens of empire. Therefore, Genet's texts could be said to expose the pederasty at the heart of the relationship between France and its incarcerated boys, its military, and the countries these soldiers occupy. [End Page 112] One of Amin's most convincing arguments troubles...

“It's a gap in awareness”: Exploring service provision for LGBTQ2S survivors of intimate partner violence in Ontario, Canada

ABSTRACTIntimate partner violence (IPV) is a prevalent issue in all relationship configurations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S) relationships. While the experiences of LGBTQ2S IPV survivors are understood, there are issues, needs, and challenges associated with service provision for them. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample (N = 10) of professionals (e.g., counselors, shelter managers, program directors) affiliated with organizations that provide services for IPV survivors in Ontario, Canada. Participants answered questions pertaining to the inclusion of LGBTQ2S IPV survivors into their existing services, and what service provision should look like. Data was analyzed using a thematic analysis to uncover themes that reflected participants' responses. The data was organized into recommendations for service provision at three different levels: direct service provision, organizational transformation, and underlying principles and values. Findings reveal suggestions for service providers to consider modifying their current organizations, to adequately include LGBTQ2S IPV survivors.

“We Can Write the Scripts Ourselves”: Queer Challenges to Heteronormative Courtship Practices

Courtship conventions are premised on widespread and deeply held cultural beliefs that men and women need and want different things from their romantic relationships. Yet queer relationships challenge the notion of distinct gendered behaviors in romantic relationships, and queer people often explicitly seek to undermine conventional relationship practices. Using interview data from 40 LGBTQ-identified respondents, I examine how queer people negotiate culturally dominant gendered dating and courtship practices. My findings show that, rather than replicate heterosexual norms, respondents actively reject them, seeking new and more egalitarian ways of building romantic relationships. Significantly, the narratives drawn on to justify egalitarian dating practices are similar to those used in their committed relationships. Respondents emphasized egalitarian, flexible, and non-gendered care work in committed relationships, indicating that how people date may potentially set the stage for the dynamics in their relationships. The importance placed on these alternative norms in queer communities, however, contradicts respondents’ assertions that they can create relationships free from cultural constraints, demonstrating how emerging norms can breed their own pressures for conformity.

Simone Chess. <i>Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations</i>. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp xi, 196.

This review considers Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature: Gender, Performance, and Queer Relations.