Queer Resistance Research Articles

It's Not a Wedding, It's a Gayla: Queer Resistance and Normative Recuperation

The possibilities of performance to move audience/participants into challenging, resistant, and self-reflexive spaces is wrought with complications, notably, the complex ways dominant discourses quickly recuperate acts of resistance. This essay documents and theorizes our weekend-long Gayla celebration: a political performance project of love, community, protest, and activism that enacted a series of performative rituals reconfiguring notions of family, kinship, and patriarchy. Initially conceived as a ritualized celebration of our relations, both with each other and with our multiple families, we later made the decision to craft this self-reflective essay to examine and theorize the socio-political stakes, potentials, and shortcomings of the Gayla as a form of queer performance protest. We theorize queer utopian performance through the concepts of wander and futurity, examining moments of queer potentiality, queer imaginary, and discursive rupture, while also exploring how the performance event was audienced, negotiated, and recuperated through dominant discursive frames.

Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Deepa Mehta's Earth

Deepa Mehta's Fire gained much attention, both in India and internationally, as the first film to document a queer relationship between two South Asian women. What has been underexplored in Mehta's feminist trilogy – Fire, Earth, and Water – is how each film is set upon representing one particular form of violence against women within South Asia. Fire deals with the suppression of female desire, Earth with the violence against women during the Partition and Water with the treatment of widows in Hinduism. Mehta is so firm in documenting these oppressions individually that she is ultimately unable to capture the complexities of what she seeks to represent. This is best illustrated when comparing her second film Earth to its original narrative form: Baspsi Sidhwa's semi-autobiographical account of her childhood in Lahore during the Partition, Cracking India. Given that Mehta's trilogy documents different forms of women's subjugation, it is no surprise that Sidhwa's novel and the Partition would be an ideal fit for her feminist explorations. However, Mehta does not fully represent women and men's bodies in their different forms of agency the way that Sidhwa's novel does. In this essay I explore how Mehta's film represents the multiple violences against women and men as they are figured in the novel, but ignores the queer identifications and desires that saturate Cracking India. While Mehta's Earth stresses the violent reality of women's bodies as national metonyms, Sidhwa's Cracking India is able to represent both the violent repercussions on women's bodies during the Partition and simultaneously the queer bonds and bodies that emerged during India and Pakistan's creation. Sidhwa's Cracking India asks us recognize formations other than the national, through creating a queer liminal space. I argue that Mehta's traditional feminist perspective of representing women's subjugation obscures her ability to represent Sidhwa's novel beyond the heterosexual matrix of nationalist violence. As a result Mehta misses the radical sites of queer and feminist resistance that Sidhwa's narrative offers.

Horror, Homosexuality, and Homiciphilia in McKellen's Richard III and Jarman's Edward II

In Richard Loncraine's film version of Richard III (1995), Ian McKellen as Richard experiences "homiciphilia": erotic arousal from the thought of having caused the deaths of his victims. The film also hints at Richard's homosexual attraction to his henchman Tyrell and contains images that evoke the gay bathhouses associated with early outbreaks of AIDS. This negative treatment of deviant sexuality seems startling in a film based on a screenplay by, and starring, the openly gay actor Ian McKellen. By combining these dual markers of Richard's/McKellen's transgressive sexuality, the film leaves itself vulnerable to a reading, characteristic of the backlash against homosexuality in the late 1980s and 1990's, whereby gay men are demonized for deriving sexual pleasure from passing along AIDS to their partners, and through them, to the rest of society. In its treatment of homosexuality, McKellen's movie resembles the classic Hollywood horror films of the 1930s, which portray "the monster" as a stand-in for "the homosexual." As in such films, McKellen gratifies his heterosexual audience by killing off his homosexual protagonist and allowing a "normal" straight couple to regain control of England. McKellen's accommodationist political stance is thrown into relief when one compares Richard III to Derek Jarman's Edward II (1991). Jarman's radical position, which concedes nothing to the straight establishment, celebrates his protagonist's queer sexuality and impels him to rewrite the ending of Marlowe's play to dramatize the victory of queer resistance over heterosexual oppression.

Antonio's Claim: Triangulated Desire and Queer Kinship in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

Dyadic relations are not the norm in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Even desires and marriages are mediated by third parties that are necessary components of erotic and affective ties. While criticism tends to read Antonio as the excluded cast-off of Portia and Bassanio's marriage, he actually becomes a necessary element in the marriage's perpetuity, proffering his soul to ensure that the marriage and its offspring are legitimated. Antonio serves as a replacement for the state, which queer theorists argue has played an unacknowledged role as the third party in any marriage, conferring recognition and entitlements insofar as the marital couple reproduces the state. The state's interests are masked by the marital couple's naturalization as an elementary structure of kinship. As an acknowledged and desired third party in a marital love triangle, Antonio allegorically represents a queer resistance to the affective and erotic exclusions of the state-sanctioned, reproductive couple.

“This is Not an Empty-Headed Man in a Dress”: Literacy Misused, Reread and Rewritten in Soulopoliz

This essay explores relationships between southern black queer experience, grassroots activism, and the literacies of southern culture through a case study of “Ella Mosley,” a 56-year-old black transgender woman activist living in the South. Out of the misuses of literacy—the ways oppressive agents appropriate literacy to the detriment of an individual or community—manifests a mandate and an occasion for social action, identity formation, and affirmation. The rhetorical strategies employed in Mosley's activism are linked to her literacies of southern culture and its impact on her sense of self, both of which she draws on in her resistance to anti-transgender rhetorics and policies effecting transgenders in her city, “Soulapoliz,” and throughout the United States. The essay also depicts the usefulness of literacy as a lens on everyday sites of black queer resistance and self-making.

Rhetorical secrets: mapping gay identity and queer resistance in contemporary America

Davin Allen Grindstaff, through a series of close textual analyses examining public discourse, uncovers the modes of persuasion surrounding the construction of gay male sexual identity. In Part One, Grindstaff establishes his notion of the rhetorical secret central to constructions of gay male identity: the practice of sexual identity as a secret, its promise of a coherent sexual self, and the perpetuation of secrecy as a product and strategy of heteronormative discourse. Grindstaff continues in Part Two to examine major issues related to contemporary conceptions of gay male identity: overturning sodomy laws; public debates over same-sex marriages; medical and social responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the power of hyper-masculine body images and homoeroticism to creative communities; and, finally, what Grindstaff considers to be the most mysterious and significant practice of all: coming out of the closet. By investigating the public discourse--texts and images that circulate, produce knowledge, and become means of persuasion--surrounding the constructions of sexual identity, Grindstaff challenges heteronormative concepts of sexuality itself, thus creating new maps of social power and new paths of resistance.

“Extraordinary Female Affection”: The Ladies of Llangollen and the Endurance of Queer Community

This essay explores romantic responses to Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, known as the Ladies of Llangollen, arguing that Anna Seward and Anne Lister celebrated the Ladies’ relationship in order to melancholically enact the same-sex ties they were themselves unable to maintain. Hailed as both pioneering lesbians and chaste romantic friends, Butler and Ponsonby may appear unlikely candidates for queer recuperation. Their place within romantic literary history is equally contentious, their status as a female couple challenging notions of singular and masculine romantic subjectivity, and their creative production diverging from canonical textual forms. This essay nonetheless claims Butler and Ponsonby as queer romantics, arguing that the indeterminacy of their bond constitutes a commensurately queer resistance to definition. Their romanticism is similarly disclosed by that of their romantic acolytes, who lauded the Ladies’ home as an ideal of lasting affective community. Drawing on Judith Butler’s account of gender melancholia, this essay claims that Seward and Lister identified Butler and Ponsonby as embodying the hopes of queer community foreclosed in their own lives. Accordingly, they protected and promulgated the Ladies’ relationship in order to melancholically enact the same-sex attachments they were unable to establish enduringly or mourn publicly. In celebrating a model of flourishing female desire, Seward and Lister thus melancholically preserved their own lost love-objects, and affirmed the future instantiation of enduring queer communities.

The Gendered Unapologetic: Queer Resistance in Women’s Sport

Based on an ethnographic study of women’s rugby in the U.S. in the early 1990s, this article suggests that women’s participation in sport represents a type of resistance that can be understood as “queer” resistance, albeit a gendered one. The article argues that queer theories and politics of resistance offer a lens by which to explain how women who played rugby in the early 1990s subscribed not to a “female apologetic,” but rather an unapologetic. The results show the unapologetic to be comprised of transgressing gender, destabilizing the heterosexual/homosexual binary, and “in your face” confrontations of stigma—all characteristics of queer resistance. Furthermore, the results illustrate that each aspect of unapologetic queer resistance in sport is gendered. The article concludes that both the female apologetic and the gendered unapologetic are types of resistance observable in sport and suggests that further research needs to examine the extent to which gendered queer resistances are new and the degree to which they are specific to the institution of sport.