Queer Sexuality Research Articles

“Dream Boy” and “Hotmale”

Abstract Gender and sexuality have gradually become the focus of more semiotic landscape research, however, studies relating specifically to sex tourism spaces are limited and with those in the Thai context even more so. Therefore, this paper examines the discursive construction of Phatphong 2, one of the famous destinations for sex tourism in Bangkok among male homosexuals, as queer space. Drawing on code preference and inscription (Scollon and Scollon 2003) and visual social semiotics (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996), we analyze the linguistic and semiotic resources in sexed signs. Findings reveal that Englishization, particularly the terms “boy” and “Bangkok” in shop signs, creates a glocalized and international queer identity for Phatphong 2. The salience of the lean male muscular body and marginalization of transwomen in promotional signs unveil the hegemonic masculinity in queer sex tourism spaces. The study concludes that sexed signs in sex tourism spaces are semiotic aggregates of global queer culture.

Shitsex: recontaminating queer sex and theory

ABSTRACT This essay responds and extends the discourse found in Corey and Nakayama’s “Sextext” and Gunn’s “ShitText.” Examining the process of anal douching, which washes away fecal matter from the anus before penetration, commonly found in queer sex practices, I argue that queers do not want shit in their sex; douching serves to “clean up,” sterilize, and legitimate queer sex in cis-heteronormative culture. Through the method of critical erotic/a, I argue that douching is a process of decontamination reflected in larger disciplinary conversations about queer theory; we “clean up,” sterilize, and legitimate queer theory to the cis-heteronormative academy.

Happiness

The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness but disindividuation. Bersani’s reading of Freud and his identification of sexuality at odds with the happiness of liberal society also provides a nascent account of neoliberalism’s capture of queer sex.

Maggie

This brief article considers Leo Bersani’s descriptions of Maggie Verver, a character in Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl, in relation to some of Bersani’s famous arguments about sexuality. Observing that Bersani’s presentation of Maggie in “The Jamesian Lie” and elsewhere makes her an apt figure not just for sexuality but also for Bersani’s later notion of queer sex as a negation of the social, the article considers both how an ampler consideration of this character might reflect back on Bersani’s use of her to instantiate his claims about desire, and how his account of Maggie might speak to readers torn between competing accounts of queer negativity.

Queer, Christian and Afrikaans: The libidinal, sexuality and religion in Kanarie and Skeef

Religion is often viewed as incompatible with queer sexualities and genders. In the Afrikaans-speaking communities of South Africa, Calvinist doctrine and dogma have been used to marginalise and ostracise those sexual and gender identities that stray from the heteronormative scripts sanctioned by cultural and religious practices. In this article, I examine how the libidinal is central to the way in which queer and faith communities interact in Afrikaans-speaking communities in two films: Kanarie and Skeef. The two films represent different filmic genres with Kanarie a fictional feature film and Skeef being a documentary. The two films, despite their different genres, broach the difficulty of being queer and religious. At the same time, the films show that it is possible to rethink religions/faith communities. Such rethinking creates accommodative spaces within faith communities in a way in which queerness is not viewed as a deviance or an abomination. I read these Afrikaans-language films against the conceptualisation of the libidinal offered by Keguro Macharia together with the ideas of queer agency proposed by Adriaan van Klinken. This queer agency marks not just a transgression of heteronormative Christian norms but also engenders expansive ways of understanding human sexuality and gender identities.

Slow beauty: Refocusing Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid through a slow cinema lens

Oliver Hermanus’s Skoonheid is often read as a representation of South African queer realities and political progressiveness both during and since the dissolution of apartheid. Consequently, Hermanus’s contribution to the aesthetic of slowness in Skoonheid has gone largely unnoticed in the broader context of slow cinema. In this article, I examine how Hermanus, through the slow cinema conventions, urges the viewer to contemplate issues of crucial importance to human behaviour, thereby putting Skoonheid’s meditative qualities on display. Drawing on Ira Jaffe’s concept of expressive minimalism, Emre Çağlayan’s poetics of slow cinema, and Thomas Elsaesser’s observations on the virtues and demands of slow cinema, I analyse the narrative and aesthetic strategies deployed in Skoonheid within the purview of slow cinema and beyond a representation of queer sexuality. This analysis reveals that Skoonheid represents a mode of narrative-formal expressiveness distinct from, yet in dialogue with, slow cinema in its emphasis on contemplation. Principally, Hermanus finds a way to testify to some of the most urgent concerns in contemporary society through the film’s contemplative approach, which draws the viewer’s attention to the mystery and ambiguity of human experience. Skoonheid’s contemplative approach is informed by the film’s processes and experiences of alienation, incommunicability, and existentialism.

Sex, Politics, Religion: Teaching Challenging Medievalisms with Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)

This essay explores how the films Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968), both starring Peter O’Toole as Henry II, can start conversations about medieval sexuality, politics, and religion in the undergraduate classroom. All three of these topics are frequently imagined by students as monolithic in the medieval period; sex and sexuality, for example, can be reduced to heterosexual practices joylessly regulated by church law. Insofar as students have a conception of medieval political systems, these are usually imagined as both strictly hierarchical and inescapably oppressive. Medieval religion — usually Christianity — is also often imagined as an instrument of oppression and control. All these negative assumptions can be productively interrogated using these films. This essay explores how the films — colorful, tightly scripted, and featuring arguably some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated actors — are useful teaching tools, both in an undergraduate course on the Middle Ages in cinema, and in a general medieval survey course. Becket, with its characteristically Anouilhian theme of realism vs. idealism, is a good starting point for discussing the complexities of medieval law, church politics and the church’s social functions with students. The films also help to start useful conversations on the visibility and invisibility of medieval women in film. Finally, both films depict queer sexualities in ways that are at odds with much popular medievalism. Whether in The Lion in Winter’s multiple transgressive sexual relationships, or in the visually explicit erotic tension between Burton’s portrayal of Becket and O’Toole’s Henry II, this essay examines how these films challenge students’ preconceptions and create opportunities for analyzing relevant primary sources. As such, this essay discusses both pedagogical strategies and assignment options related to the two films. I argue that both films can encourage analysis of the Angevin Empire and its afterlives in popular culture, and that this analysis is broadly relevant to popular medievalisms.Banner image: The Lion in Winter (1968), Haworth Productions. Image taken from Filmdetail (www.filmdetail.com).

This is Improper and Irreligious

This article examines the negotiation of queer sexuality in Arab-Muslim societies of North Africa. Through close analysis and reading of the film Imarat Yácubyan by Marwan Hamed (Egypt) and the novel Une Mélancolie Arabe by Abdellah Taïa (Morocco), this article examines how media makes it possible to understand how Muslims in North Africa negotiate their sexuality, religion, and practice against backgrounds in which queerness exists in silence and marginality. The selected film and novel demonstrate that Islam is, in fact, a sensuous and queer religion. Designating Islam as queer gestures towards the possibility of imagining non-normative sexualities exiting within and being compatible with the religion. In their different iterations of the intersection of queerness and the practice of Islam, Imarat Yácubyan and Une Mélancolie Arabe open new spaces for understanding Islam and, specifically, what it means to be queer, Arab, and Muslim within the sociocultural context of North African countries.

Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd: The Avant-Garde, Spectator-Ship and Psychoanalysis by Lara Cox (review)

Reviewed by: Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd: The Avant-Garde, Spectator-Ship and Psychoanalysis by Lara Cox Arka Chattopadhyay AFTERLIFE OF THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD: THE AVANT-GARDE, SPECTATOR-SHIP AND PSYCHOANALYSIS. By Lara Cox. Dramaturgies Vol. 37. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 216. The avant-garde introduces a break in the history of established aesthetic traditions, but its interruption becomes a norm and gets subsumed within the same traditions with the passage of time. Does [End Page 110] this mean, the radical edge of the avant-garde is momentary? Can we think of its afterlife beyond temporal exhaustion? This is the central question that Lara Cox’s Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd addresses with European absurdist theatre as corpus and psychoanalytically inflected arguments on identity categories like gender, race, and ethnicity as methodology. The intention is to think through the lasting and renewable political impact of the absurdist avant-garde, and, to its credit, it doesn’t let go of the specificity of theatre as practice. Cox blends psychoanalytic theory with questions of spectatorship that lie at the core of the conceptualization of theatre as performance. Cox chooses to begin from a historical vantage with what is usually considered the first absurdist play: Eugene Ionesco’s The Bold Soprano (1950). Her reading revolves around a perverse idea of spectatorship that tilts the work from tragedy to farce, converting anxiety into pleasure through the pervert’s fetishistic logic of ‘disavowal.’ In Cox’s readings, here and elsewhere throughout the monograph, the existentialist universal of the human condition gets challenged by particulars like queer sexuality in this case. She shows how Ionesco parodies masculine and feminine stereotypes and critiques the heterosexual institution of marriage. Taking into account the production history of the play (including queer stagings and amateur high-school performances) enhances the point of evolving parody in performance. From gender, we come to nation and ethnicity in the chapter on Arthur Adamov’s critically neglected play Off Limits (1969) that engages with the politics of the Vietnam War. Cox argues that the play critiques the American military intervention by introducing a psychotic spectatorship (unlike perverse spectatorship, as studied in Ionesco) of anger and resistance through the logic of ‘foreclosure.’ Though the post 9/11 contextualization of the play as a satire of patriotism remains speculative for lack of current-day productions, Cox manages to offer a convincing reading of how the play can have continuing political significance in the 21st century. The third chapter undertakes an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s 1972 play Not I as a disruption of gender exceptionalism with a focus on race, while it continues with the thread on psychosis. In this context, gender exceptionalism refers to a discourse that women in the non-Islamic West are more liberated than the Muslim women in the non-Western countries. The reading anchors itself on the implied racial and religious alterity of the djellaba-clad Auditor vis-à-vis Mouth. Cox argues for a female Auditor to balance the representation and suggests that the play trashes gender exceptionalism as it evacuates the ideology in the Real via the extreme tempo that turns Mouth’s speech into blah-blah for the audience. There is a psychotic repudiation of language that consolidates the ideology of exceptionalism. But, she complains about the absence of the Auditor in recent productions and how the white performer playing Mouth risks cultural appropriation. The critical thread on subverting gendered racism becomes more radical in the interpretation of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1958), read against the backdrop of the Algerian war of independence and French de-colonization. The spectatorial mode here is that of “supplementary enjoyment” halfway between pain and pleasure as the audience watches a theatrical portrayal of “black community’s emancipation from white hegemony” (Cox 123) and a deconstruction of white female victimhood. There is both fear and enthrallment in watching the play, as she shows by attending to the 2014 performance in Paris that evoked a strange bafflement. The idea of incomprehension plays into the supplementary enjoyment that doesn’t signify anything. The argumentative slant is towards the a-signifying Real. The high point of the chapter...

Queer Childhood Sexuality in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros

Queer Childhood Sexuality in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros Celine Parreñas Shimizu (bio) Global circulations of cinema produce intimate attachments to subjects located elsewhere, whose different lives across the distance come into proximity. The English title of the Philippine indie film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005), The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, is quite beautiful yet imprecise in its translation of the original Tagalog in the worldwide release. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros literally converts to "the blossoming young womanhood of Maximo Oliveros." The original Tagalog title is gendered: the word dalaga means young woman and the conjugation of pagdadalaga indicates becoming. To translate growing womanhood as blossoming in the sense of flowering goes beyond developing as an adult woman in the community. Flowering can also be read as a vaginal reference in the sense of burgeoning labia.1 The film is thus so much richer than its English title suggests in its representation of the adolescent child's sexual development and how it is situated in a larger constellation of gendered identities, a complexity that I will parse for this film that circulates widely in Filipinx and queer diasporas today. [End Page 170] Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros concerns a young genderqueer Filipinx youth named Maximo, or Maxie (Nathan Lopez), who may be an effeminate boy, a boyish girl, or someone in-between. At twelve years old, the adolescent may express themself in an aggressive effeminacy that troubles the spectator's categories, but in their neighborhood slums of Manila, no one is confused or discomforted by their defiance of gender boundaries. There are other children like Maxie, so their gender expression is normalized as one available option among many. That is, they are not alone as genderqueer in this film, so they do not represent a singular anomaly or embody an individual perception of perversity. While Maxie's gender obscurity makes them vulnerable to harassment outside the home, especially after dark, their family is composed of a kind and doting father named Paco and two protective older brothers, the quietly intense Boy (Neil Ryan Sese) and the lighthearted and flirtatious Bogs (Ping Medina). All are locally known criminals—petty thieves working in the underground economy—selling stolen cell phones or running the numbers. The Oliveros clan, in their cisgendered macho countenance, loves and protects Maxie, who has taken on the feminine role of cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the household since the death of their matriarch. But when Maxie develops an interest in the rookie policeman Victor Perez (J. R. Valentin), who eventually seeks to arrest their family after a local murder, their affection and care for this man of the law threatens to fragment the family. This film is extraordinary for the way it privileges the child's perspective, including the full-blown vulnerability in their desire for another, but it is not a coming out narrative. Maxie's queer sexuality remains ambiguous. Because Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is not a film about coming out, Maxie's sexuality is not the primary social category of experience in their development. Indeed, Maxie's sexuality is situated within a larger set of formative feelings and experiences, specifically mourning, grief, and poverty. Maxie seems to be heading in the direction of criminality. Their future aspiration to sell pirated DVDs is unlawful. The film does not present this path as something to which they are intrinsically prone but as the most viable, as it is exemplified and encouraged by the adults in their life. Maxie's limited choice is contextualized by the family's extreme lack of resources as poor people in the Global South. While Maxie's pursuit of a different life may be seen as a sexual one, due to the primacy of sex in defining queer identities, this film presents different kinds of queer desire that, while not denying erotic attachment, provide a broader map. In looking at the film through the lens of object relations theory—a branch of psychoanalysis focused on relations with others and their representative inanimate objects—we can see how the child's feelings exceed sexual instincts and include romance, loyalty, and grief. This allows us to examine the interpersonal relationship...

The possible forms of professionalism: credibility and the performance of queer sexualities among barristers in England and Wales

AbstractThis article constitutes the first account of sexual minority barristers’ experience of and relation to professionalism at the Bar. Drawing on survey and interview data, it presents the Bar as a site of heteronormativity, where masculinist heterosexuality is pervasively assumed and publicly valorized. The ‘credible’ barrister – authoritative, respected, competent – is constructed as heterosexual. In this context, sexual minority barristers risk a loss of credibility in coming out or being out in the workplace. Our data presents mechanisms by which these individuals manage the public expression of their sexuality. Some – in contrast to heterosexual colleagues – deny entirely the professional relevance of their sexuality. Others adopt assimilationist strategies, curating a ‘credible’ public persona: out, but otherwise conforming to heteronormative expectations and values. While the data includes exceptions that give cause for hope, many sexual minority barristers experience professionalism as pressure to render their sexuality effectively invisible, at significant cost personally and professionally.

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Queer Sex and the Crisis of Capital

Queer Sexualities and the Reconstruction of Alternative Modes of Being in Kenyan Society in the Film Rafiki

The government of Kenya, through the Kenya Film Classification Board (KFCB), has sustained a war against screening and promoting locally and internationally produced films featuring queer social imaginaries in the country. In 2014 and 2018, KFCB banned two locally produced films, The Stories of Our Lives and Rafiki, largely because these films were seen as valorising queer sexualities. The ban triggered animated debates regarding the triad of artistic freedom, censorship and the country’s moral compass. Consequently, persons leading queer lives are compelled to operate within various liminal spaces as a way of subverting hostility from the public. Focusing on Rafiki, this article explores how the filmmaker reconstructs alternative modes of being in society by portraying practices through which queer individuals claim and inhabit social spaces in Kenya. By representing the livability of queer lifestyles, the filmmaker not only confronts conventional moralities but also spurs debate on the future of queer individuals in Kenyan society.

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

Beyond a Lush Life: Representation and Performativity at America's [Only] Queer Jazz Festival

LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements by Karen Kampwirth

Reviewed by: LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements by Karen Kampwirth Jesse Edward Tenenbaum Karen Kampwirth LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements. Tucson, Arizona, USA: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 360 pp. Photographs, references, index. $50 hardcover (IBSN 978-0-8165-4279-6); $50 eBook (ISBN 978-0-8165-4525-4). Nicaragua is not notable for being especially repressive nor particularly accepting in terms of gay rights, but it is notable that there is an absence, an ambivalence, and a lack of specific policies, especially when compared to other parts of Latin America. This is to say that Nicaragua has a consistent lack of specific laws and policies regarding homosexuality or trans individuals (the anti-sodomy law of 1992 to 2008 notwithstanding). As political scientist Karen Kampwirth posits in LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements, perhaps the knowledge that a number of gay and lesbian Sandinistas were fairly influential in the movement prevented the early adoption of anti-gay laws, as happened in Cuba and Nicaragua (p. 54). Donald Casco is an interesting figure to focus on: a 9amboyant and openly gay man who had a popular TV show during the Sandinista revolution. Casco is reminiscent of Walter Mercado in the sense that he was very spiritual and intellectual, and his show focused largely on horoscopes and psychic topics. Unlike Walter Mercado, however, Casco was openly homosexual, which is impressive in the context of Nicaragua of the 1980s. His show ran through the 1980s, during the revolution, so one had to have a television in their home to see it, and many of the people who remember him were women who worked at home, or were too young or too old to fight at the time. Regardless, Casco made an impression because many children who suspected they were gay, lesbian, or transgender looked up to him as a cultural icon. He was from a relatively well-off family, which likely contributed to his being able to safely be open about his sexuality. Casco's experience can be linked to contemporary realities in Nicaragua relating to the influence of class on LGBTQ experiences. Nicaraguans who have higher educational attainment and [End Page 223] higher incomes have the possibility to be more open about their "nonnormative" sexuality (p. 117) or gender identity without as much risk of negative consequences in their social and family circles, compared to Nicaraguans from working class backgrounds. Another key idea that Kampwirth discusses in this work is the phenomenon of a so-called queer culture that originated in the Global North and has been exported to the Global South. She discusses how this is ironic, given the historical reality of the West slowing the expansion of queer cultures in "exotic" places that may have previously been more accepting of homosexuality and non-binary gender identities. In other words, first the Western/Christian/capitalistic societies stifled queer sexualities and identities in places they colonized, and now the opposite seems true, where Global North countries are perceived to be imposing more progressive ideas about sexuality and gender in Global South countries that have very conservative norms. The irony is rather mind-boggling. Kampwirth sheds light on the importance of keeping a culturally specific lens in mind when examining LGBTQ politics and experiences in Nicaragua from our Global North perspective. For example, the importance of coming out as a political strategy to gain more widespread social acceptance has been relatively successful in the Global North, but it has also developed in a very different political and economic reality from that in Nicaragua. This is especially the case considering the United States's highly individualistic culture and the economic ability of many U.S. citizens to move away from their families as young adults and experience queer lifestyles in greater privacy. By comparison, many Nicaraguans cannot afford to live on their own, and consequently live with their families for most of their lives, which does not as readily lend itself to the privacy or space to explore alternative sexualities, identities, and lifestyles. It is notable that in Nicaragua as well as in the Global North, universities provide safe places where young...

Dispatches from Utopia: Black Queer Nightlife in Shakedown

Abstract Many critics have discussed the ways in which Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman employs an exploration and interrogation of history as a means of creating and reshaping the present and future, a utopian extraction (which is ultimately an invention) of a symbolic Black lesbian figure who has been obscured and ignored throughout history. In this vein, this essay examines a work that similarly uncovers Black queer utopias of the past and actualizes queer potential for existence in the present: the 2018 documentary Shakedown, directed by Leilah Weinraub, which depicts a series of Black lesbian strip events in early-2000s Los Angeles. Drawing from a theoretical background that expands the political implications for queer sexuality, community, and performance, including queer of color critique, performance theory, queer utopia, and queer temporality, I present the ways in which joyful and utopic possibilities for Black lesbian being and belonging are opened in the strip clubs depicted by the film. Putting Foucault's model of heterotopias, or actualized utopic spaces existing across cultures, in conversation with these theories, I develop the concept of the “homotopia,” a queer utopian countersite that is both historically relational and temporally detached, existing affectively for queer viewers in multiple times and spaces. I argue that the film therefore not only represents an archival project of capturing and preserving a homotopic nightlife, but, further, carries it across space and time to shape an affective, digital utopia for the viewer. In this way, the documentary's depiction of these events constructs a homotopic space of its own, stimulating the spectator to engage in imagining alternative queer futures.

Queerness, Sex Work, and Refugee Status in Nairobi: A conversation with Queer Sex Workers Initiative for Refugees

In this interview, the author speaks with Queer Sex Workers Initiative for Refugees: a Nairobi-based grassroots service-provision and advocacy group formed by queer refugees in Kenya who are engaged in sex work. The interview explores the question of how queer identity experiences interact with the policing of borders, labour issues, and refugee status. It teases out the ramifications of the compounding factors of migration and criminalisation of sex work and gender diversity, across borders, to show how these produce discrimination, loss of livelihood, and vulnerability to violence.

Double closet, heteronormativity, and a gay academic living with HIV in China

ABSTRACT This article explores how a gay academic living with HIV negotiated heteronormativity in a Chinese university. It presents the participant’s professional life in a double closet, where he adopted various strategies to cautiously conceal both his gay identity and HIV-positive status. Such experience is used to unpack the operation of heteronormativity on campus and extend the conceptual edges of how heteronormativity is conventionally deployed. This article argues that heteronormativity in Chinese higher education prohibits and censors not only queer sexuality but non-normative ways of life such as living with HIV. It is also shown that despite staying in a double closet, the participant could exercise agency to challenge heteronormativity.

Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by Elizabeth M. Ginway

Reviewed by: Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction by Elizabeth M. Ginway Kathryn Houston Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead: The Body in Mexican and Brazilian Speculative Fiction. By Elizabeth M. Ginway, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020, p. 247, $34.95. In Cyborgs, Sexuality, and the Undead, M. Elizabeth Ginway reads speculative fiction from Mexico and Brazil in relation to relevant sociohistorical, political, and economic contexts of these two highly industrialized Latin American countries. In a reading of a host of notable speculative texts, the analysis spans over a century, from the late 1800s up to the present day. Ginway breathes new life into the theme of the body in literature by attending to the treatment of speculative bodies (cyborgs, zombies, vampires, etc.) in non-realist modes such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The introduction sets out to distinguish between Anglo and Hispanic speculative fiction and outlines how the body signifies in Mexican and Brazilian letters. First, she describes how gender and sexuality will be analyzed throughout the monograph, positioning that nontraditional sexualities stand as a "state between or beyond the genders" (2). She then reads the fictional body as metaphor for the nation-state in political and industrial flux, with zombies and vampires "embody[ing] the paradox of a present haunted by an embodied past" (2). The book opens with a chapter on "Gendered Cyborgs", which introduces Bolívar Echeverría's "baroque ethos"—a concept that acts as a theoretical tenet throughout the monograph—to explain how speculative fictions resist capitalism while still being a product of it. Ginway identifies different corporeal and mechanical representations of the female body and female cyborg, exploring the Latin American posthuman and "new ways of imagining the body politic" (69). Chapter Two, "The Baroque Ethos, Antropofagia, and Queer Sexualities," then broaches a century's worth of speculative fiction, analyzing noncanonical texts from both Mexico and Brazil. She engages with Echeverría's theory of codigofagia—survival strategies from the colonial period that "reformulated social and cultural hierarchies" (71)—which builds upon a reworking of the concept of antropofagia—the repurposing of "culture and tools of the colonizer in order to produce original art and expression" (13). Through these two concepts, Ginway argues that baroque and non-linear representations of queer bodies in works of speculative fiction re-imagine forms of gender that "craft new tales of nation and community" (106), thus resisting traditional divisions of gender, race, and sexuality. Shifting from machine and queer bodies to the undead, Chapter Three analyzes zombies as the "embodiment of fear and trauma," in imagined apocalyptic scenarios of the 21st century which "presage economic, political, or social chaos" (107). She returns to the "baroque ethos" to explain the virality of capitalism and how it infects both dominant and subaltern classes, applying Roberto Esposito's theories of immunity and the body [End Page 364] politic. In Chapter Four, Ginway contextualizes the history of vampire narratives, the genres of the gothic and the monstrous, and the figure of the vampire in the literature of Mexico and Brazil. She describes the defensive or immunological response towards foreign invaders in vampire literature, accounts for the challenges towards a patriarchal order, and identifies a new vampire figure who re-configures communities to "reverse colonization and resistance" (154). A point of contention may arise from the way in which queer bodies are positioned on par with "cyborgs" and "zombified and vampire bodies" (167). The latter mythical bodies are powerful metaphors for temporal and social periods of change, yet locating the queer body next to those of monsters and machines might be misunderstood as a conflation of these real and metaphorical bodies. Perhaps analogously, the topic of sexuality as it relates to gender studies is well developed, but the inclusion of more queer theory would have complemented Ginway's thorough and insightful readings of the body in Mexican and Brazilian speculative fiction. Finally, despite the care with which theoretical terms are explained, the text does not provide a clear definition of speculative fiction. Although Ginway initially defines speculative fiction as a more general category than science fiction, which "includes fantasy and horror" (1), any further...