Queer Research Research Articles

“It's Like Mixing Paint”: Songwriting Gender Diversity and Alternative Gender Cultures with Young People as an ‘After-queer’ Methodology

This paper conceptualises songwriting as an ‘after-queer’ approach for exploring notions of gender and sexuality with young people. The article draws on songs created by seven groups of young people in music-based workshops which took place in schools with participants aged between 14–17. During these workshops, songwriting was used to explore the participants' imaginings of what gender might look like in their "perfect world". 'After-queer' scholarship is introduced and referred to throughout the paper as it relates to queer theory and research with young people, particularly focusing on discourses of risk and vulnerability that emerge across these fields. The paper highlights the value of creative and arts-based methodologies in queer research, through which expansion and questions of possibility, alternative, and identity can be raised and responded to. 'After queer' is offered as a useful lens for critical analysis, particularly in light of complex questions related to the promotion of "diversity" that emerged through the findings.

Mourning leather: Queer histories, vegan futures

This article brings memory studies and queer theory into conversation with animal studies through an examination of the process of mourning involved in giving up the use of animal products. Focusing on the use of leather in some queer subcultures, and combining autoethnographic reflection with other forms of testimony, the article argues that giving up leather involves a dual process of mourning: for the lives of the animals whose skins are used in those practices and for the intrahuman attachments and forms of care, pleasure and memory facilitated through those practices. Inspired by recent queer research on leather as a material and ‘mnemonic technology’, the article contributes to research on the use of animal products in the transmission of transgenerational human memory, going beyond food and the heteronormative framework of the family. It also adds new dimensions to the growing literature on veganism by asking readers to take seriously the ambivalence involved in giving up animal products where their use is saturated with memories of human community.

Towards a New Landscape of Queer Research on the Rural?

Towards a New Landscape of Queer Research on the Rural?

Gendering the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Even though a gender perspective, in reference to various aspects of museums and their exhibits, permeates the reflection on museums, gender is not explicitly taken up as a category of knowledge within the self-reflective narratives about the core exhibition or the conceptualization of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewish, which opened in Warsaw, Poland in 2014. Building upon the research gendering the memory of the Holocaust, especially with regard to historical exhibitions, and using a cultural studies framework to the study of representation, this article asks how femininities are framed by the representation of masculinities and how museum technologies work to produce gendered meanings. It concludes that most of the Holocaust gallery in POLIN problematically instrumentalizes gender relations to underpin a chronological historical narrative. In a dialogue with queer research on temporality, underscoring the coincidence of normative gender/sexuality and linear progressive narrative, it analyses this strategy as gender chronotechnology.

The State of LGBT and Queer Research in Higher Education Revisited: Current Academic Houses and Future Possibilities

We explored how scholars have examined LGBTQ identities and the epistemologies used during the past 10 years to reveal the current state of LGBT and queer research in higher education. After highlighting the recent sociohistorical context and the reason why it is important to revisit the state of LGBT and queer scholarship, we use ball culture and the house system as metaphors to discuss the current state of research. Namely, we identified how scholars have illuminated perspectives on perceptibility, climate, outcomes of academic and cocurricular engagement, and student success for LGBTQ individuals in higher education.

Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean by Lyndon K. Gill

Reviewed by: Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean by Lyndon K. Gill Gabby M.H. Yearwood Lyndon K. Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. 267 pp. Lyndon Gill’s Erotic Islands is an exploration of Black Queer life in Trinidad and Tobago detailing the impact of HIV/AIDS within a community of Black gay men and the social and political responses to the epidemic. Gill’s conceptual and epistemological work centers Black Queer and Black Feminist theories and anthropological methodologies to demonstrate the impact of race, sexuality, and politics on the social productions of carnival, calypso, and grassroots mobilizations. Gill accomplishes this by organizing the text around three main subjects: the life of Peter Minshall, a Trinidadian Carnival designer; calypso singer Calypso Rose; and Friends for Life (FFL), an HIV/AIDS intervention organization. These three sections are intermixed with “Interludes,” insights into Gill’s personal yet deeply theoretical challenges to anthropological conventions. This ethnography brings into relief anthropological preoccupations with ethnography; the role, impact, and power of researchers; and the ethical, intimate, and political involvement of anthropologists in the field. Gill, unabashedly and courageously, shows his limitations, strengths, and weaknesses not merely as a researcher but as a person in the field. Gill’s self-identification as a Black Queer man examining Black Queer life in Trinidad and Tobago allows for opportunities to discuss how theory and praxis intermix within ethnographic methodology. The opening preface, “A Port of Entry,” introduces the framework Gill plans to develop for his project. The Caribbean is depicted as the original Garden of Eden, establishing the desire for both space and bodies that historically motivated European engagement with the region. Situated [End Page 1301] alongside other scholarship of the region, Erotic Islands informs us of how these motivations continue into the present while also demonstrating how the Caribbean as a site of Western desire may be understood differently when centrally grounded within Black Queer/Feminist epistemology. Gill describes Trinidad and Tobago as a twin island nation with Arawak, African, French, Spanish, South Asian, and English heritage combining to shape the contemporary space and place. Gill foregrounds and weaves these elemental components throughout to demonstrate their importance to the reader. Gill introduces us to the queerness of Trinidad and Tobago through the folkloric symbol of the soucouyant. A reworking of the soucouyant, traditionally depicted as a witch who sheds her skin at night and feeds on the blood of her primarily male victims, demonstrates that the queerness of Trinidad and Tobago has always been there and serves as a legitimizing motif which frames his analysis. To decenter older readings of the soucouyant as dangerous and threatening, Gill connects the figure to the region through motifs of blood and spirituality, themes Gill uses later in the ethnography to discuss HIV/AIDS and local responses to the disease. The figure of the soucouyant allows for a blurring of the overly determined heterosexist research and evaluations of the region by early scholars. Rather than establishing the importance within queer research projects of the hurt done to queer subjectivities, the introduction, “A Queer Cartography of Desire,” instead focuses on the triumphs and successes made possible through Trinidadian Carnival, the music of Calypso, and HIV/AIDS intervention programs. With a heavy grounding in Black Feminist and Black Queer theories, the erotic is a central component to the entire work. The erotic serves to structure every facet of the ethnography from methodology and epistemological frameworks to anthropological analysis. Gill draws his usage of the erotic from Lorde, detailing that a negation of the sensual, physical, and emotional, limits the possibilities of the motivations for politics and love. Gill, as both person and researcher, becomes an integral component that draws the reader into an understanding of queer life in Trinidad and Tobago not possible without the erotic as the guiding force. This allows for a potential reworking, re-reading, and destabilizing of ethnography and sanctions Gill’s corporeal body as an interpretive tool and diagnostic instrument. Building from this groundwork we are directed, through Gill’s body, to the use of Kant’s aesthetic principle of sensory experience. These sensory...

Reflexivity and Queer Embodiment: Some Reflections on Sexualities Research in Ghana

The ‘reflexive turn’ transcended disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences. Feminist scholars in particular have taken up its core concerns, establishing a wide-ranging literature on reflexivity in feminist theory and practice. In this paper, I contribute to this scholarship by deconstructing the ‘story’ of my own research as a white, genderqueer, masculine-presenting researcher in Ghana. This deconstruction is based on thirteen months of field research exploring LGBT activism in the capital city of Accra. Using a series of ethnographic vignettes, I examine questions of queer subjectivity, embodiment and self/Other dynamics in the research encounter. Specifically, I interrogate what a reflexive concern for power relations means when researchers share moments of commonality and difference with research participants, here in relation to axes of gender, sexuality, race and class. Finally, I explore the challenge of theorising resistance in light of feminist postcolonial critiques of the politics of representation. I conclude that it is only by locating these tensions and dissonances in the foreground of our inquiries that reflexivity becomes meaningful as a way of rendering knowledge production more accountable and transparent, of practising feminist solidarity, and of excavating our own queer research journeys.

"Can I study you?" Cross-disciplinary conversations in queer Internet studies

We first met around a workshop table at the queer Internet studies (QIS2) in Philadelphia in February 2017. This conversation began when we realized that we all had some disciplinary knowledges, training and practice that can bear upon queer Internet studies, but simultaneously we felt unprepared for the methodological-ethical challenges posed by the Internet as a queer research environment. Michelle was trained in ethnography as an anthropologist and Jasmine and TL were trained in humanities perspectives — mostly through literature, performance studies and art history, though about five years ago they had begun to retrain in the fields of online archives, pedagogies and networks, which has led to a new collaborative research project on digital research ethics. We had all been trained in dyke/queer/feminist methods and critical theory, and continue to work in this area. And we all were experiencing some gut feelings about the need for better understandings of disciplinary practices — what we are doing, how do we apply what we know how to do, and why are we doing it — across disciplines as we enter the Internet as researchers, in a research situation. What follows is a conversation the three of us had over email and videoconference between July–October 2017, which revolved around the question of what ethnographic methods can bring to Internet research, and what might queer and feminist research ethics look like in the context of digital research environments.

Asking queer(er) questions: epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative inquirers

This collection of distinct scholarly essays deliberatively turns to queer experience and theorizing as a resource for constructing vibrant qualitative research designs. Queer theory offers a breadth of epistemological and methodological possibilities for qualitative projects that are too frequently overlooked for many reasons. These reasons include frequently strict association of queer theory with queer research topics and researchers, as well as a concurrent reluctance to interrogate the representational needs of heterosexist culture served by the metaphor of the ‘closet.’ Queer theory also compels inquiry that takes up the unique circumstances of queer subjects. Locating educational inquiry within globally complex socio-historical dynamics and a post-Obergefell/post-2016 election U.S. context, this article poses multiple trajectories through which various scholars explore queer(er) qualitative inquiry in educational studies. These perspectives invite researchers to rethink qualitative inquiry designs through engagement with the queer, inclusive of research topics not initially perceived to be queer.

‘More than boy, girl, male, female’: exploring young people’s views on gender diversity within and beyond school contexts

This paper explores the views of young people aged 12–14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015–2016. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found evidence of variable local gender cultures and gender non-conformity, we argue that the contemporary context, with its increasing global awareness of gender diversity, offers young people significant new ways of learning about and doing gender. Findings reveal that many young people have expanded vocabularies of gender identity/expression; critical reflexivity about their own positions; and principled commitments to gender equality, gender diversity and the rights of gender and sexual minorities. We also show how young people are negotiating wider cultures of gendered and sexual violence. Schools are providing some spaces and learning opportunities to support gender and sexual diversity. However, overall, it appears that young people’s immediate social cultural worlds are constructed in such a way that gender binary choices are frequently inevitable, from school uniforms and toilets to sports cultures and friendships. Our conclusion touches on the implications of these findings for how educational practitioners, external agencies and young people can address gender rights, equality and justice in schools and beyond.

M Archive. After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Reviewed by: M Archive. After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs Chandra Frank (bio) M Archive. After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018, 248 pp., $82.45 hardcover, $19.02 paper. How would future archives and archivists interrogate life beyond the present? What does Black feminism look like "after the end of the world"? For feminist and queer research and activism, the archive is a generative and yet complex site that continuously poses questions on racialized and gendered power structures. Black feminism and queer of color critique have challenged the conditions of existing archives and discussed the possible future of archival research for next generations. In this sense, the M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs opens up a set of questions on how archives are not only rewritten, but also reconstituted for a Black feminist speculative project. The archive emerges here in a new form that provides innovative methodological and theoretical insights on relationality. The arrangement of the book enables the positioning of the archive not as an end-goal, but rather as contemplation, an opening, and source of ancestral knowledge. The M Archive is written in the space between refusal and embrace. The book breathes a refusal to write known grammar and embraces an unmapped universe full of traces of the lives of new stories. The M Archive is the second iteration of a planned experimental triptych by Gumbs. The work engages with the groundbreaking Pedagogies of Crossing by M. Jacqui Alexander. Through offering a set of poetic artifacts, Gumbs uses a Black feminist speculative approach to the archive and unpacks the conditions of living "after the end of the world." Similar in format to Gumbs's earlier book Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, which was written in engagement with Hortense Spiller's work, the M Archive footnotes every poetic offering with a reference to Pedagogies of Crossing. The book offers a set of necessary and stimulating interventions that grapple with "late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis" (Duke University Press description, back cover). This is a generous work that challenges dominant views that assume that ancestral speculative work has no place in feminist theory. M Archive is situated "after and with the defunding of the humanities," and will no doubt provoke questions about scholarly practice [End Page 214] and its location in the continuous unfolding of the academic institution (xi). Academic conventions and knowledge production are broken down by prose, which offers readers a set of possible guidelines to undo the default in their own practice. M Archive opens with "A Note" by Gumbs on its overall intention: "this book centers Black life, Black metaphysics, and the theoretical imperative of attending to Black bodies in a way that it does not seek to prove that Black people are human" (xi). Conversing with scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, M Archive brings a compelling Black feminist perspective on the conditions and possibilities of the human. Drawing on future witnesses, indigenous knowledge systems, and the making of geography, multiple worlds emerge. Conceptualized as "speculative documentary work," M Archive is "written from and with the perspective of a researcher, a post-scientist sorting artifacts after the end of the world" (xi). Throughout the work, Gumbs models creative practices of citation and purposefully writes the book with Black writers, thinkers, and artists such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Alice Coltrane, and Rihanna in mind. The deliberate, layered politics of citation recalls Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life, in which she argues, "Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow" (2017, 15). M Archive includes the "Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements" homage to Kitchen Table Press, referencing a broad range of text, sound, and cinematic work to guide the reader through the poetics of destruction discussed in the text. The book speaks to forms of self-imposed destruction from heavy reliance on the digital world to the remnants of racial capitalist and colonial production. Orientation and movement are...

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (in IR) But were Afraid to Ask: The ‘Queer Turn’ in International Relations

Queer International Relations’ momentum in the past four years has made it inconceivable for disciplinary IR to make it ‘appear as if there is no Queer International Theory’. The ‘queer turn’ has given rise to vibrant research programmes across IR subfields. Queer research is not only not a frivolous distraction from the ‘hard’ issues of IR, but queer analytics crack open for investigation fundamental dimensions of international politics that have hitherto been missed, misunderstood or trivialised by mainstream and critical approaches to IR. As queer research is making significant inroads into IR theorising, a fault line has emerged in IR scholarship on sexuality and queerness. Reflecting the tensions between Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Studies and Queer Theory in the academy more broadly, the IR literature on (homo)sexuality largely coalesces into two distinct approaches: LGBT and Queer approaches. The article will lay out the basic tenets of Queer Theory and discuss how it diverges from LGBT Studies. The article then turns to the books under review and focuses on the ways in which they take up the most prominent issue in contemporary debates in Queer Theory: the increasing inclusion of LGBT people into international human rights regimes and liberal states and markets. The article finishes with a brief reflection on citation practices, queer methodologies and the ethics of queer research.

Towards transnational feminist queer methodologies

This article introduces the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research as seeking to conceptualise the transnational as a methodology composed of a series of flows that can augment feminist and queer research. Transnational feminist queer methodologies can contest long-standing configurations of power between researcher and researched, subject and object, academics and activists across places, typically those which are embedded in the hierarchies of the Global North/Global South. Beginning with charting our roots in, and routes through, the diverse arenas of transnational, feminist, participatory and queer methodologies, the article uses a transcribed and edited conversation between members of the Liveable Lives research team in Kolkata and Brighton, to start an exploration of transnational feminist queer methodologies. Understanding the difficult, yet constructive moments of collaborative work and dialogue, we argue for engagements with the multiplicities of ‘many-many’ lives that recognise local specificities, and the complexities of lives within transnational research, avoiding creating a currency of comparison between places. We seek to work toward methodologies that take seriously the politics of place, namely by creating research that answers the same question in different places, using methods that are created in context and may not be ‘comparable’. Using a dialogue across the boundaries of activism/academia, as well as across geographical locations, the article contends that there are potentials, as well as challenges, in thinking ourselves through transnational research praxis. This seeks complexities and spatial nuances within as well as between places.

Imagining Utopia, Sustaining Community. Autoethnographic Research and Queer Affective Pleasure


 
 
 For queers, the affects of pleasure and risk are intrinsically interrelated, and the practice of imagining utopia signifies the importance of community as a place where we come together to sustain and nurture ourselves. This essay explores the affective pleasure of queer worldmaking through community building in Finland from my perspective as a non-Finnish queer researcher. Taking pleasure in the freedom to experiment is at the very heart of being together, resisting heteronormativity, and visualizing alternative and utopian ways of worldmaking. While such acts are not necessarily unique to Finland, my experience as a queer feminist researcher and participant in Finnish queer communities was unique to me. Thus, I use autoethnography to discuss my insider/outsider experience of conducting research in Finland, as a queer feminist from the US my work adds to a growing body of autoethnographic scholarship that raises questions about cross-cultural perception and belonging, and offers new possibilities for queer methodologies.
 
 

Impact in Sexualities and Queer Research: Reflections and Questions for Geography and the Social Sciences

This paper discusses the so-called ‘impact agenda’ in UK universities specifically in relation to research on sexualities and/or queer themes. The paper reviews some of the wider controversies about the nature and purpose of the impact agenda (e.g. the risks to academic freedom; the potential implications for how scholars interact with research end-users; the problems with evaluating ‘impact’). It then raises questions regarding the visibility of sexualities and/or queer research within the impact agenda especially given the oft-perceived marginality of research on these themes in some disciplines and the historical and contemporary challenges faced by researchers working on sexualities and queer themes. The paper compiles and discusses data on the presence of sexualities and queer themes within so-called Impact Case Studies submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. It concludes with some reflections on the challenges the REF experiences when evaluating ‘public engagement’, something which is perhaps particularly unfortunate for a number of scholars working on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issue, given that one of the greatest collective contributions of scholarship in this area has been to raise awareness and shift public/student perceptions, even if this is challenging to measure.

Bringing our communities to the research table: the liberatory potential of collaborative methodological practices alongside LGBTQ participants

Research on and about queer people and topics in higher education continues to evolve, expand, and push boundaries on identity, policy, and programming, increasingly informed by our narratives and experiences. Thus far, this work has done little to dismantle the imposed binary of researcher and subject(s), relegating queer research and practice as something that is done ‘on,’ ‘to,’ or ‘for’ queer people, rather than ‘with’ them. Collaborative ethnographic methodologies and communities of practice (CoP) provide alternative modes of scholarship and practice that build queer people’s agency through active involvement in research and social change processes. Situated in two of our own examples, our purpose is to explore big questions and raise even more. This article calls for a further queering of LGBTQ research in higher education by utilizing collaborative methodologies such as CoP and collaborative ethnography to improve the strategies, practices, and knowledge of campus queer communities and imagining new democratic and liberatory realities together.

Queerscape

Auto/ethnography is not an apolitical endeavor, and as a queer researcher, I never lose sight of the sensibilities that influence my work. Leading with an explicit queer positionality and relying upon critical reflexivity, this essay focuses on my two-year fieldwork in rural, conservative Old Shawneetown, Illinois. I begin by navigating the natural landscape, illustrating how Shawneetown's flood-ravaged landscape implicates (my) queer identity—as both a lens for reading queer sexuality and as a metaphor for queer loss. Then, I shift to the human landscape—my interactions with the town's residents—where I feel the necessity to stifle my queer persona in favor of a performance that passes as heterosexual. Both landscape contexts position geography as a catalyst for the autobiographical, complicating issues of ethnographic dialogue, ethics, and risk—a queerscape—as divergent selves and subjectivities challenge one another in a charged, site-specific space of heteronormativity.

Not writing, and giving ‘zero-f**ks’ about it: queer(y)ing doctoral ‘failure’

ABSTRACTThis article proposes that a queer reading of failure might offer opportunities to re-think the affective-political practice of doctoral writing. It examines data from one case in Aotearoa New Zealand to illustrate how a doctoral student negotiates ‘failure’ in relation to their writing practice and identity. While higher education researchers have tended to interpret failure as something to avoid, or learn from in the pursuit of normative success, queer research offers us new pathways into analysis. In this article, I argue that we can recognize ‘writing failures’ as possible modes of being and becoming doctoral. Despite being frequently associated with affective practices of guilt, shame, and disappointment, failure might also open onto alternative feelings such as relief, joy, and satisfaction. Ultimately, the article contends that queer concepts might assist higher education researchers to interrogate normative framings of failure, and to glimpse alternative possibilities for understanding ‘success’.

Past matters: Queer contestations of colonial masculinity in Leslie de Noronha’s The Dew Drop Inn and Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens

This article addresses the colonial encounter, which often appears as the primal scene in the field of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial studies, with specific reference to South Asia. Through a thorough reading of two texts, Leslie de Noronha’s novel The Dew Drop Inn (1994) and Shyam Selvadurai’s second novel Cinnamon Gardens (1999), it provides a critical framework of queer/postcolonial analysis within which to comprehend the novels’ contestations of predominant literary tropes of the Raj. In examining colonial relations between men and same-sex interracial desire through a reorientation of contemporary queer research it thus works against the master narrative of European imperialism, which evacuates South Asian subjectivity even while attempting to portray it. To read queer self-definition(s) from a postcolonial perspective provides a significant nuance to the frame of interracial desire in the colonial era. The article contends that both novels reference, challenge and contradict colonial forerunners, in the form of novels by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Paul Scott. By considering such postcolonial narratives as a counter-response to literature of the Raj, it attempts to recover the queer South Asian subject as an agential formation rather than an object of colonial desire.

Queer pedagogy and the limits of thought: teaching sexualities at university

What are the limits of queer pedagogy's thought [Britzman, D. (1995). Is there a queer pedagogy or stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), 151–165]? This question is considered in relation to how queer pedagogy unfolds in a first-year university course entitled Learning Sexualities. Examples of how queer pedagogy might operate in university courses on sexuality within the discipline of education are non-existent. This discussion subsequently illuminates one example, not as a template to follow, but as a means of glimpsing something which is characteristically elusive and unrecognisable. Here, the paper joins a conversation about queer research, initiated by Talburt and Rasmussen [(2010). ‘After queer’ tendencies in queer research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(1), 1–14] about ‘after-queer’ tendencies, extending it to teaching in higher education. This is an examination concerned with interrogating queer theory's limits. It attempts a queering of queer pedagogy itself. Not only in terms of what is possible for it to achieve in heteronormative [Warner, M. (1993). Fear of a queer planet: Queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] institutions like universities, but also, in relation to deciphering the edges of how queer pedagogy comes to know itself. The author's experiences of teaching the Learning Sexualities course are employed as a way of illuminating some of these boundaries. One of these is identified as student ‘discomfort', a feeling that is antithetical to an institutional setting which demands and rewards student ‘satisfaction’ and ‘happiness’ in courses. This work is undertaken in the spirit of Kumashiro's [(2002). Troubling education: Queer activism and antioppressive pedagogy. New York: RoutledgeFalmer] project of ‘rethinking practices’ and ‘looking for new insights’ in our teaching in higher education.