Queer Sensibility Research Articles

The Importance of Being Bitchy

This essay argues that bitchiness is an art form, a style of misanthropy and satiric dissonance that breaks with pious norms of mundane accuracy and “niceness.” Like the more commonly discussed category of camp, bitchiness is an off-color queer sensibility born of social marginalization, reveling in upsetting good taste for laughs. Traversing literary studies and popular culture, this essay tells the story of bitchy luminaries in three historical scenes: the tart wit of nineteenth-century satirists Jane Austen, George Gordon Byron, and Oscar Wilde; classic Hollywood divas and their homosexual contemporaries such as Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams; and the drag culture increasingly visible since the 1980s.

Fractured and fragmented selves: Queer approaches to designing virtual experiences1,2

This article presents an overview of three queer virtual reality projects, Virtual Drag (2016), Domestika (2017) and Untitled (2020). These are considered alongside other examples and design experiments by the authors that also take a critical, queer approach to representing bodily forms in virtual environments. This consideration includes looking at how bodies are represented in the environment that the participant explores, as well as the embodied experience of the participant visiting the environment either via a head-mounted display or via desktop. Through the discussion of queerly performed embodiment offered by these precedents, we propose a queer sensibility of disembodied presentness for virtual reality that embraces a position of immersion and presentness in multiple physical and virtual realities at once, as a theoretical and aesthetic grounding principle. Queering of presentness is a key concept that emerges through these works, in part due to the multiplicity of perspectives that VR affords. In Virtual Drag (2016) by Alison Bennett, Megan Beckwith and Mark Payne, we see the use of photogrammetry and glitch aesthetics to bring ideas of queer performativity and drag ‘realness’ to the fore when imaging bodies with permeable, porous boundaries in virtual reality. In Domestika (2017) by Jacolby Satterwhite, the virtual environment is populated with multiple avatars that repeat recordings of the artist’s dance performances; in this multiplicity of repeated traces, a viewer is unable to settle on a fixed representation of the artist’s self. This effect is amplified by the participant’s non-corporeal presence, demonstrating the creative potential of queer disorientation in virtual environments. In Untitled (2020) by Tarik Ahlip and Tactical Space Lab, we are immersed in a cinematic environment, filled with simulated light. There, we encounter the artist’s body, disembodied and forcing the viewer into the role of virtual voyeur and onlooker to actions out of time.

Camp Cinema and the Queer Experience

Camp is a queer sensibility which has recently begun to enter the mainstream. By viewing a case study of several key camp films of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is possible to chronicle its radicalism, and its gradual co-optation by the straight gaze. Camp, while at times reductive, has served to mirror and affirm the vibrancy of the queer experience, making an understanding of its roots essential.

The Texture of ‘Lives Lived with Law:’ Methods for Queering International Law

ABSTRACT Queer theory’s obligations to critique and problematise the mechanisms of power and discourse, especially law, remain important for revealing, unsettling and destabilising established sexual and gender norms. However, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, the emphasis on paranoid or critical practices in queer theorising must be counterbalanced by recognising the queer methods of repair evident in the way LGBTQIA+ people engage with systems of oppression in empowering and transformative ways. 1 , 2 In this paper, I draw on the methodological tools that Sedgwick provides to examine LGBTQIA+ engagements with international law in terms of their creative, generative and sustaining capacities. Focusing on the experiences of two Australian LGBTQIA+ activists, Rodney Croome and Dianne Otto and the objects they brought to the interviews I did with them, I highlight the queer sensibilities, or queer reparative practices, operating in and through their commitments to law. In doing so, I expand the registers through which to conceptualise queer theory in relation to law and instantiate the queer jurisprudential work occurring in international law.

Finding communitas: Encounter, unfolding, and creative writing

Anthropologist and poet Edith Turner (2012) sets out a narration of communitas to demonstrate its endless variations through fieldwork, how it appears often unexpectedly, and how it is a felt sense; “a collective satori” or sudden enlightenment. She calls communitas “togetherness itself”. This paper outlines the discovery and experience of communitas as it applies to creative writing in several different creative writing and research settings: 1) the genesis and makings of an interdisciplinary creative practice research group within a university setting 2) a durational creative exploration of writing and walking (not-walking), and 3) a performative “un-panel” exploring nonfiction as queer encounter. It borrows the concept of communitas as a loanword from the field of anthropology and ritual studies (Victor Turner, 1969; Edith Turner, 2012) and identifies generative characteristics of communitas for creative writing purposes. It investigates the development of the idea of togetherness itself through a feminist and queer sensibility in relation to Hélène Cixous’s non-acquisitional space and jouissance, and the communitastica of joy. This paper offers a way of thinking about the gift of communitas, including the elements needed to allow it to happen within creative writing, hand in hand with a sense of joy, jouissance and possibility.

Des Moines Gay Men’s Chorus, Queer Spaces, Collectives Styles, and Activist Dress, 1984 to the Present

During the 1970s, people in the United States founded gay and lesbian choruses for political activism, coming out, and celebration. We examined the history of one of these choruses, the Des Moines Gay Men’s Chorus (DMGMC). We asked, how do their bodies in motion and styling-fashioning-dressing produce, distribute, and negotiate queer representations? How do they appear across space and time? How can these style-fashion-dress acts open multiple interpretations and dialectical subtleties? To answer these questions, we analyzed the original DMGMC slogan T-shirt, the digital archive of historical LGBT T-shirts, performance videos and imagery, song lyrics, news articles, and oral histories. The chorus members negotiated queer sensibilities, choral traditions, activism, and community building through their T-shirts and performance costumes in complex ways. They negotiated queer representations by creating temporary queer spaces during the AIDS crisis and highlighting how community and visibility have been significant in gay history. However, the chorus often prioritized an appropriate kind of gay man via dress, which they reinforced through racial-power dynamics, complex-gender associations related to tuxedos, and cabaret performance outfits that included nun’s habits. The chorus’ various collective styles esthetically represent how gay men’s choruses navigate entanglements of tradition, gayness, and music while reclaiming oppressive symbology.

Performing androgyny: cross-dressing actresses, fandom, and queer sensibility in Hong Kong Cantonese opera

ABSTRACT While cross-dressing performance in Chinese opera has been extensively studied in various disciplines, the existing scholarship has a stronger emphasis on male actors playing female roles in Peking opera. This ethnography sheds light on women’s cross-dressing in Cantonese opera (yueju) in contemporary Hong Kong. Women playing the leading male role (the wenwusheng) is a century-old performance practice. Female wenwusheng being pursued by female fans is a noteworthy and yet understudied phenomenon. Based on my 2012–2016 ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on the performative aspect of female wenwusheng’s androgynous embodiments onstage and off. I examine fandom within this mostly homosocial space by studying the interplay between female wenwusheng’s public, onstage performances and their informal, offstage engagement with fans. I suggest that, by manipulating the gender ambiguity and ambivalence that extends from their onstage to offstage personas, female wenwusheng provoke homoerotic emotional intimacy that ties them and their fans together. Neither passing as men onstage nor appropriating male actors’ masculinity is the female wenwusheng’s goal. Their performance and offstage mingling provide an affective emerging space that accommodates the fluidities of gendered identities and sexualities. Female wenwusheng’s embodied androgyny also enriches Cantonese opera, as a seemingly heterosexist traditional art form, with queer sensibility.

Beyond Brideshead: The Male Homoerotics of 1930s Oxford

AbstractLooking beyond the notorious “Brideshead” aesthetes and homoeroticism of 1920s Oxford, this article explores the queer sensibilities of the university's male undergraduates and their associates through the 1930s. Steadily through the decade, Oxford's unique brand of queer aestheticism and same-sex love affairs became embroiled with wider debates about the hegemony of socialism and communism and the supposed degeneracy of standards at Oxford. At the same time, the assimilation of medicalized concepts of perversion and homosexuality increasingly made Oxford's aesthetes and same-sex love affairs objects of critical scrutiny, effeminophobia, and homophobia. For many of the university's queer male undergraduates, the Oxford University Dramatic Society provided a safe haven and a platform for queer expression both in Oxford and beyond. A group of images by the Russian émigré photographer Cyril Arapoff provides further insights into the male homoerotics of 1930s Oxford. Situated within the context of Arapoff's life in the city between 1933 and 1939, his extraordinary photographs of nude and seminude young men offer glimpses into the queer lives and loves at Oxford in a period when such experiences were rarely articulated in written form. The images include the spaces the young men inhabited and their interconnections to London's vibrantly queer dance and theater scene. Such insights help establish more firmly interwar Oxford as an important hub of queer modernism, with national and international import for the course of modern queer history.

Reflexive Poetry

These four poems are excerpts from a multifaceted project entitled Queerly Faithful: A Queer-Poet Community Autoethnography on Identity and Belonging in Faith Communities. This project attempts to bolster and critique contemporary studies of queer and faith identities as they manifest in the lives of queer people of faith by approaching the subject with a queer sensibility (Holman Jones & Adams 2010: 204). One facet of this approach involved my use of poetry as a personal reflexive medium on the research process itself. The poems invite the reader into my experience as I wrestle with articulating methodology, theory framing, data presentation, and the questions and challenges of producing a fixed document to present the findings of a queer project that resists fixedness. By blurring the lines between poetry/narrative/storytelling and social science writing, I invite the readers “to become coparticipants, engaging the storyline morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually” (Ellis & Bochner 2000: 745). The poems, which are scattered throughout the research paper, nuance the traditional academic language and prose analysis in the paper and serve to challenge conceptions of ‘proper’ social science writing and position the writing itself as a method of inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo & Sameshima 2009; Richardson & St. Pierre 2005; Richardson 1993). The poems in isolation, as presented here, invite the reader to consider the strengths and challenges of social science research and articulate my struggle to honour the sacred stories of my participants through fixed language. The poems play with the questions: what does it mean to be a social justice researcher and how might our work, methodologically as well as topically, critique and undermine oppressive epistemologies that elevate and prioritize certain voices over others?

Octólogos curvos para una creación audiovisual feminista

<p>Para pensar en diferentes formas de sentir, crear y representar desde las artes, debemos desestructurar la mirada patriarcal y hegemónica, así como sus estructuras de creación, donde las jerarquías y el individualismo están por encima de lo colectivo. Este estudio presenta una metodología de creación basada en la sensibilidad femenina, feminista y queer, con el objetivo de generar nuevas formas de creación que nos enseñen a relacionarnos mejor, respetarnos y vernos desde la multiplicidad de individualidades y subjetividades. Esta metodología cualitativa y cuantitativa, ha sido creada en base al análisis audiovisual de obras de video presentadas en el festival Internacional de videoarte Fem Tour Truck. El producto obtenido del análisis generó dos octólogos o mapas de tácticas, los cuales se presentan para ser discutidos, probados y evaluados. Estos octólogos se generan a partir de bases feministas donde el principio de reunión, comunidad y cuidado son esenciales para pensar y crear. Si sólo nos enseñaron a mirar desde perspectivas masculinas, bajo estéticas de deseo y subordinación o bajo estructuras de dominación, resulta difícil pensar que nuestras formas de crear no repliquen dichas estructuras. El análisis del constructo audiovisual ha dado una respuesta colonial y patriarcal que debe de ser modificada para una buena educación de la mirada y de las prácticas audiovisuales. La posibilidad de esta modificación trae consigo las bases para las tácticas de creación que darán lugar a una dinámica colectiva, sin roles, abierta y a la deriva. No hablamos de protocolos, sino de mapas con posibles tácticas para la creación, una experiencia rizomática y plural de creación en oposición con la lineal y determinada, una experiencia que se origina en la idea del octólogo, lo curvo, lo infinito, lo continuo.</p>

Ontology of the Fake: Marielle Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Can You Ever Forgive Me? adapts Lee Israel's 2008 memoir of the same name to offer a biographical portrait that challenges conventional ideas of ‘psychological ‘insight and development. In their place the film offers a celebration of the aesthetic labour of creating and being a fake. Lee Israel's success as a biographer sees her absent herself in favour of the voice of her subjects but this means she is perversely well-placed to begin their impersonation when financial hardship strikes. Melissa McCarthy's galvanising performance as Lee translates the comic gestures of heist and buddy movie into a more subtle meditation on the performative nature of identity, its fakery as well as its attachment to craft and profession. The film is similarly interested in crafting mises-en-scene of detailed period style, evoking the cinematic scene itself as the product of a style of fakery aligned with queer style and sensibility.

Delphinium’s portrait of queer history

Delphinium: A Childhood Portrait of Derek Jarman (2009) portrays filmmaker Matthew Mishory’s interpretation of the childhood of Derek Jarman described in interviews and autobiographical writing such as At Your Own Risk. The portrait of Jarman honours his memory with a Super 8 inscription that repeats the queer sensibility of Jarman’s cinematic and painterly work. Mishory’s film positions Jarman as his filmmaking predecessor; even more so, it positions Jarman as a sort of queer ancestor. Delphinium’s sense of ancestry demands a reappraisal of Jarman’s work that foregrounds its creation of queer lineage. This article does just that, looking at Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991) as both searches for queer origins and formations of queer futures. Through their explorations of queer continuity, Jarman’s films inscribe the process by which one learns to become queer and navigate a world that is so often hostile to queer existence. Their preservation of individual figures of the past provides a queer family history and a tool for education, a means for queers to understand their origins, as well as how to make sense of their own place in the world

Evoking the Female ‘Asexual’: Narrating the Silenced Self

ABSTRACTIn the twenty-first century, asexuality is defined as a ‘lack’ of sexual attraction. This definition is problematic as it erodes individual idiosyncrasies, assumes that everybody is sexual and that sexuality is immutable. At this juncture, a study of female (a)sexualities is long overdue. Until recently, Myra T. Johnson’s chapter on asexual and autoerotic women was perhaps the only piece written on this subject. She highlighted the dangers of reducing asexual-identified women to symbols of spiritual devotion or political consciousness at the absence of examining their lived realities, a concern that still resonates. In this piece of performative writing, which speaks to Nguyen’s ‘me-search,’ I seek to invoke the lost voice of the female asexual by weaving queer and feminist theories of sexuality with my self-narrative, which explores my journey from asexuality to autoeroticism. Drawing on Ahmed’s ‘queer phenomenology,’ which reconceptualises sexual orientation as the lived body’s relationship with time and space, I posit asexuality as a re-oriented queer sensibility. Traversing key scenes from my trajectory, I seek to convey silences, ambivalences, transitions and becomings, thus highlighting the elusiveness of identity categories. Ultimately, I wish to address Johnson’s vision by narrating the lived realities of female (a)sexualities, beyond representations.

The contest of queerbaiting: Negotiating authenticity in fan–creator interactions

Abstract Queerbaiting emerged as a named phenomenon through fan communities challenging the purportedly intentional exploitation of their queer sensibilities and desires. Analysing how this dynamic is staged through fan–creator interactions is paramount to understanding queerbaiting. I suggest that ownership over and claim of a single, authentic textual meaning and story is at the heart of the contest of queerbaiting. I employ fans and creators of the television shows Supernatural and Teen Wolf as case studies and analyse their interactions in online videos of fan conventions. I argue that the authenticity and commitment to a supposedly singular meaning is negotiated in these interactions through the humorous sexualization of the actors and characters. My central argument is that fan–creator contestations demonstrate that accusations of queerbaiting ultimately rely on notions of authorial intention and control.

Theorizing multi-partner relationships and sexualities – Recent work on non-monogamy and polyamory

This review article attests to the maturation of research into consensual non-monogamy and polyamory. It provides an in-depth review of a selection of recent publications that push boundaries and pair interdisciplinary inquiry with queer sensibility and theoretical sophistication in the three areas of theorizing emotions, theorizing intimacies and sexualities and theorizing discourses and the public sphere. This work foregrounds the persistence of moral normativity and judgemental attitudes regarding consensual non-monogamy. It underscores the power dimension around non/monogamy and reveals the complexity of contradictory dynamics of discrimination and privileging around non/monogamous life choices. It shows how non-monogamous people deconstruct feeling rules and demonstrates the nodal function of gender and race/ethnicity in the discursive framings of different forms of non-monogamy.

Introduction: Anthropology’s Queer Sensibilities

This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologize queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologizing queer theory in research on same-sex desire in Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan, and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection.

Queer sensibilities: notes on method

ABSTRACTThis note characterizes queer methods developed in the humanities in ways that may be useful in social science and law. Since it is antithetical to queer theory’s resistance to fixity to concretize queer methods into a metatheory, this note characterizes these methods as queer sensibilities. Queer sensibilities are useful for analyzing queer bodies in public spaces – physical spaces and democratic spaces – especially in research programs concerned with sexual citizenship. This note connects queer sensibilities to sculptures of Charles Ray. His work serves as both a metaphor for and substantive example of methods that replicate heteronormativity by erasing pubic queerness. Queer sensibilities leverage insights for how law and culture construct norms of sexual citizenship. At the heart of this note is a queer perspective on the extent to which men’s naked and queer bodies enter the dialogic of sexual citizenship, when heteronormativity censors such bodies and silences sexual expression.

‘I'm Crushing Your Binaries!’ Drag in Monty Python and Kids in the Hall

ABSTRACTMonty Python (1969–1974) and Kids in the Hall (1988–1994) are two male comedy sketch show troupes well known for performing as women. Through analysis of the performance styles present in Monty Python and Kids in the Hall sketches, we can observe a shift from a camp to a queer sensibility. Esther Newton's Mother Camp (1972) and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) were released, respectively, during the broadcast of each show and provide a critical framework through which the subversiveness of a given act of drag can be evaluated. Female impersonation in Monty Python's Flying Circus is signified by handbags, permed hair and voices that alternate between shrill and husky. Gender transformation is achieved through the foregrounding of token signifiers that hyperbolically represent femininity, but do not attempt to approximate it. By contrast, the more nuanced female impersonation in Kids in the Hall reconfigures the gender of the performers to achieve a queering effect. Using Newton and Butler to define and illustrate the difference between these two modes of performance, the subversive/conservative value of both (as enacted in the shows) will be evaluated.

Bruno Latour and Ecology Politics: Poetics of Failure and Denial in IR

Failure and denial are seductive concepts, and they were explicitly theorised at the Millennium conference in October, 2015. Though used to evoke an array of images to understand the condition of International Relations (IR) as a discipline and in relation to other social sciences, the concepts were not previously deemed pivotal for theorising world events. This article critically assesses how failure and denial are used by IR’s scholarly community as signifiers, and what it is that they signify. To this end, it considers Bruno Latour’s keynote address at the 2015 Millennium conference, along with some of Latour’s shorter works. Drawing on STS (science and technology studies), postcolonial and queer sensibilities, it concludes with a discussion of the significance of theatre in IR scholarship, and examines the broader social and political implications of how we think and understand failure and denial in the era of the Anthropocene.

Hopeless Cases: Queer Chronicities and Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha”

ABSTRACTFor this contribution to the special issue on “Mapping Queer Bioethics,” the author offers a reflection on the nature of the literary, written word as the ethically fraught site of queer bioethics. By invoking the historical tendencies and tropes of the clinical case history alongside a seminal text by Gertrude Stein, the author at once asks if we should liberate a queer bioethics from biomedical discourse via mainstream narrative; or if we should see this strategy as unavoidably housed in narrative forms of storytelling because it echoes the tropes and stakes of the clinical, pathologized case history as regards queer sensibilities.