Queer Studies Research Articles

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Doing Knowledge through Knowing Women

Dezorientacje: Antologia polskiej literatury queer [Disorientations: An anthology of Polish queer literature

<i>Dezorientacje: Antologia polskiej literatury queer</i> [Disorientations: An anthology of Polish queer literature

Politics and Poetics

Politics and Poetics

:Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

:<i>Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England</i>

Designing “‘Queer’ Across Cultures:” Disrupting the Consumption of Diversity

This article charts the underlying logic and structure of a course titled “‘Queer’ Across Cultures,” created to provide a transnational focus for the groundbreaking minor in Multicultural Queer Studies, spearheaded by Eric Rofes. Concerned that students would too easily revert to a practice of consuming diversity, I have attempted to weave together readings which complicate a colonial gaze by challenging hegemonic constructions of essential difference. My primary strategy in crafting this course has been to focus on the term “across” in the title. In other words to foreground and theorize the transnational within the production of both similarities and differences in sexual and gender practices, categories, and meanings. Through examining the gendered and sexual dynamics of colonialism, nationalist movements, and contemporary economic and cultural globalization, I seek to engage with the history of relations within and across nations that shape contemporary meanings of sex, sexuality and gender.

Queering gender in Indonesian Instagram

Abstract The popularity of Mimi Peri as a queer micro-celebrity on Instagram shows a paradox in the Indonesian digital society, widely known for being very heteronormative towards gender and sexual identities. Despite the controversy over their queer performance and identity, Mimi Peri’s positive image as a “kind-hearted” and funny micro-celebrity managed to attract the attention of 1.9 million followers on Instagram. By using a virtual ethnographic paradigm within the framework of queer studies, this research examines how queer performativity in the @mimi.peri Instagram account during the periode between 2017 and 2018 presented and related to the Camp strategy. Switching their virtual identity, playing a role as a “female fairy”, parodying, and representing it as a comic figure have been identified as Mimi Peri’s practice and strategy to effectively gain the attention and acceptance of their followers. While there are established assumptions of queer subjects as fun and funny, we also argue that the strategy to commodify their comical performance can be seen as a form of negotiation to the predominant gender norms on Instagram.

On Digital Models: Responding to Viral Metaphors in Pandemic Times

COVID-19 has been a crisis represented and interpreted through models. Models are metaphors that illustrate one phenomenon in and through another that is better understood or seemingly more transparent. In this article, we consider digitally driven COVID-19 models that draw on the certainty of data from smartphones and social networks to make predictions about a poorly understood virus. Network data normally used to model information spread drive models of an actually existing biological virus. A return to HIV network models of the 1980s helps map the social implications of this latest turn to modeling. These earlier models were used to hone stigmatizing viral metaphors about behavior, risk, and exposure, in the shadow of an emerging digital culture. Thinking across COVID-19 and HIV modeling demonstrates how models can support personal responsibilization, be used to blame “bad” actors, and justify the creep of new surveillance practices under the rubric of “Data for Good” programs. Drawing on critical HIV and queer studies, we argue that the people and behaviors that are opaque to viral models and their methods of capture present potential avenues for speaking back to digital virality’s terms. We highlight these exceptions, which show how certain lives make trouble for models and their sensibilities, telling of queer forms of life, desire, and contact that evade modeling altogether.

Enduring Emotions. Fat Time and Weight Loss in the Finnish Body Positive Podcasts Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft

ABSTRACT The article analyses two Finnish body positive podcasts, Jenny and the Fat Myth Busters and The Soft, zooming in on their way of discussing weight loss. Drawing on queer studies’ understanding of queer time, the article discusses fat time as a nonlinear temporality, which, as a product of fat-marginalizing culture, is hurtful yet characterized by a potential to resist. The article utilizes Sara Ahmed, Rebecca Coleman, and Sienne Ngai’s formulations of emotions and temporality. It utilizes the method of a situated close reading where the author’s experience with weight loss works as an important resource for analysis. The article argues that fat time is characterized by “ugly feelings that stay.” The endurance of feelings expands existing understandings of fatness by arguing that fat could be discussed as an affective presence beside it being viewed as a material reality. Even as the body changes, emotions such as anxiety and pessimism endure, making both the present and future fat.

Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacies

ABSTRACT Across the Global North and South, there have been exciting engagements with the concept of the archive in recent decades. These debates are of both scholarly and political significance, especially when it comes to contemporary struggles for minority rights, belonging, and recognition. The overlapping fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies have made major contributions to rethinking the archive - to raise new and important questions about gendered and sexualised intimacies, affect, memory, historical formations, activism and contemporary cultural practice. Contributing to this growing body of work, the present Special Issue: Intimate Archives: Interventions on Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy presents cutting-edge scholarship in African studies - working from various disciplinary standpoints - to occupy, engage and play with the archive as a politically urgent and intellectually productive theme. In this introduction, we underscore how the contributions to the volume mobilise the ‘archive' as more than an institution or a place; it works as an underlying metaphor and a call for thorough contextualisation and a radical re-imagination of the historical experiences - the intimate historicity – of gendered and sexualised lives amidst societal and political change, from colonialism to liberation, from criminalisation of sexual ‘deviance’ to ongoing struggles for visibility and rights not only in Africa but in the broader Global South.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation

Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation

Brownness Is Here, Queerness Is Not Yet (T)Here

Brownness Is Here, Queerness Is Not Yet (T)Here

Sissies, Loafers, and the Feebleminded

Focusing on rural white communities in the early twentieth century, this article examines how disability, queerness, and economic estrangement were intertwined in American eugenic assessments of the “unfit.” In doing so, it attends to the knotty relations of power by which such communities were simultaneously adjudged deviant and bestowed with the privileges of whiteness. Eugenic family studies supported claims to white superiority by regulating and preventing reproduction among “unfit” rural white communities who might reveal the sham of white supremacy. Yet eugenicists were also concerned about same-sex sexuality and other nonproductive sexualities among the unfit, despite their focus on the “science of better breeding.” This article first analyzes how eugenicists defined a desire for work as the counterpoint to perverse sexual desire. Next, it examines how state institutions used a legal “conduct test” to classify a person as incapable self-support — and therefore feebleminded — on the basis of same-sex sexual relationships, refusal to marry, interdependence, or failure to meet gendered labor norms. Throughout, the article details how eugenic family studies mapped disability, nonproductivity, and nonheteronormativity onto rural landscapes. It concludes by contending that rural queer studies can leverage these landscapes of marginality to think with the racialized city rather than against it.

To Exclude or Not to Exclude? The Question of Nationality as a Category in Queer Studies

This paper will try to look at some of the problems of categorisation through the prism of my own reservations and concerns when researching the novel Babyji (2005) by Abha Dawesar. The paper will examine whether categories and classifications are capable of including all the exclusions that they purport to remedy. In particular, this paper will examine the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and the category of the nationality ‘Indian’, as well as the simultaneous problems that arise from using the category of nationality in conjunction with queerness. Moreover, it does not implicitly entail that the more categories sprout in the world, the more inclusive the world will be toward queer individuals. The paper will therefore interrogate if there is a way out at all from this conundrum of labelling and binding oneself to these categories. This interrogation is done by challenging the idea that it is easier to think of Dawesar’s novel from a monolithic perspective of nationality, while the novel’s other facets are conveniently allowed to fade by critics and researchers. To think of Babyji as more than just a nationalistic novel, the paper applies Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “foreclosure” (“The Intervention Interview” 125). Spivak, borrowing the term from Lacanian psychoanalysis, differentiates foreclosure from exclusion and conceptualises the former “to mean the interested denial of something”. By using this term, the paper thus explores other interpretations of Babyji, concluding that thinking beyond categories (despite them being a necessary evil) is quite possible.

Revisiting gender theory in fan fiction: Bringing nonbinary genders into the world

While these facts are generally ignored, nonbinary gender is a theme in fan spaces, and Judith Butler's theory of gender creation mostly excludes the possibility of any genders outside of the binary. When brought together, classic queer studies and fan studies texts offer explanations for both and indicate that nonbinary genders are at the core of fan fiction. Fan fiction communities, although often transphobic, practice bringing into the world genders outside of the binary gender system. Judith Butler's gender theory and classic fan studies research inform one another; when they are brought together, it is clear that fandom is a ground for the creation of genders, which in turn are embodied outside of fandom and are objects of attraction that exist outside of binary-gendered attraction models.

Remembering James A. Parr (1936–2022)

Remembering James A. Parr (1936–2022) Barbara Simerka (bio) In my first doctoral class with Jim, he didn’t bring a prepared syllabus. Instead he consulted with the seven of eight of us gathered in the seminar room: which comedias had we read recently or often, which did we want to brush up on, what topics did we want to explore when looking at lesser-known authors and plays? The resulting syllabus required us to prepare two plays and two critical essays each week, but no one complained because of this collaborative approach to designing the syllabus. In particular, we enjoyed that the carefully chosen texts and essays often contradicted each other, and provided a springboard for intense debates. The next semester, in the Don Quixote seminar, he assigned his own recently published masterwork, Anatomy of Subversive Discourse—but also essays that offered vastly different perspectives of Cervantine narrative structure. Four years later, Jim and I had lunch in order to discuss the turn towards ideological study that my dissertation had taken. Even though he was not a fan of cultural studies, he listened carefully as I provided the examples of close reading to back up my ideas. Then, even though Jim was gravely concerned that materialist frameworks would be harmful to the Humanities as an intellectual enterprise, he supported me completely with the other doubters on my dissertation committee. I observed similar examples of support for new approaches in Jim’s work with his other graduate students—my USC siblings. There are no “School of Parr” scholars precisely because he encouraged us to blaze our own trails, in fields as diverse as feminist, cognitive, and queer studies. This sense of openness marked my relationship with Jim over the following three decades and is also the hallmark of his contributions to the fields of comedia [End Page 9] and Quixote studies. Dating all the way back to 1974, his Hispania essay on the state of Golden Age studies encouraged comedia scholars to move beyond close reading and incorporate interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. Under his leadership as editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes solidified its position as a top tier journal that publishes forward-thinking essays; not seeking to claim the cutting edge, but publishing a steady stream of thoughtful studies that advanced our knowledge as the discipline evolved. Jim’s upbringing resembles that of our current students. He was a first-generation college student from a modest midwestern background, the local boy who succeeded. He served in the military after his high school graduation, then earned his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. In an astonishing leap, he was named full professor and head of the department of Murray State University by the age of twenty-seven. Even a cursory glance at the daunting record of achievements on his curriculum vitae reveals the depth and breadth of his scholarly endeavors. Jim published five books and more than sixty articles in highly respected journals, many in the era of typewriters and hard- bound copies of the MLA Bibliography. He was honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Foundation. The University of Alabama named him “Eminent Scholar” in 1994. He also served in countless professional organizations, including a term as president for the Cervantes Society of America. James Parr played an important role in the evolution of our discipline, one that should not be overlooked or forgotten, but celebrated. His ability to look beyond his personal perspective to support innovative and high-quality scholarship is a model for current and future scholars. [End Page 10] Barbara Simerka Queens College CUNY barbara.simerka@qc.cuny.edu Barbara Simerka Barbara Simerka is Professor of Spanish at Queens College/CUNY. She is author of Knowing Subjects (2013 Purdue UP) and Discourses of Empire (2003 Penn State UP) and has published numerous essays on early modern feminism, Don Quixote and postmodern film, and dramas de privanza. She is currently engaged in research on sociological studies of status as an identity category, and on pedagogical studies of addressing representations of violence and trauma in the classroom. Copyright © 2022 Cervantes Society of America

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life

Tommy Pico's Fugitive Forms and the Poetics of Queer Indigenous Life Will Clark (bio) When TOMMY PICO, a queer poet from the Viejas Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in Southern California, won the 2018 Whiting Award for poetry, the selection committee praised the "inventiveness" of his "contemporary epics." Framing PICO'S book-length poems through a Western genre, the judges describe PICO'S work as a "forceful … interrogation of myth and cultural expectations and self" that is novel for connecting sexual exploration to histories of Indigenous dispossession.1 In celebrating PICO through the veil of a Western genre system, however, the committee obscures the Indigenous genealogies and queer Indigenous poetry that inform PICO'S composition. Yet, the very coloniality of the Whiting Award committee's evaluation unwittingly illustrates a crucial analytic for the way Indigenous writers exist athwart colonial spaces. [End Page 523] That is through what Indigenous critic GERALD VIZENOR calls a "fugitive pose": an Indigenous strategy for hiding in plain sight to combat either outright erasure or the tokenization of Indigenous life in U.S. culture, politics, and history.2 As VIZENOR explains, U.S. narratives have long obscured the "real" experience of Native life behind a "cultural pageantry" that obfuscates the present-day lived experience of Native peoples.3 In this environment, as MARK RIFKIN elaborates, longstanding presumptions of extinction have relegated Native peoples into a "static" past, maintaining the dispossession of Native peoples from land, political power, and cultural visibility.4 In the face of ongoing dispossession, the fugitive pose fosters Native cultural practices that are purposefully "elusive" to the settler imaginary.5 Moreover, as VIZENOR argues, this latent agency is critical for an Indigenous practice of "survivance" that combines survival and resistance to renounce "dominance, tragedy, and victimry."6 PICO'S work deploys such a pose: it enacts a survivance that remains fugitive to the gatekeepers of mainstream poetry who value novelty to the Western tradition more than Indigenous genealogies. The modes of resistance afforded by the fugitive pose for queer Indigenous people, however, remain obscure. Examining his recent book-length poems, Nature Poem (2016) and Junk (2017), I show that Pico presents a sustained argument insisting that fugitivity and Indigenous queerness are deeply interconnected phenomena. In this, Pico answers a call by scholars of queer Indigenous history Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Lauria Morgensen, who suggest that queer Indigenous subjects experience a dual fugitivity that needs further articulation in both queer studies and Indigenous scholarship. On the one hand, although the "diversity [of queer Indigenous knowledge] has been cited as an inspiration for GLBTQ identities," queer critique tends to ignore the "dissent lines that activists, artists, and scholars have already built," leaving Indigenous experience an asterisk.7 At the same time, Driskill and their [End Page 524] coauthors attest to an unmet need for Indigenous scholarship to uncover how the diversity of queer Indigenous sexualities offers distinct, if understudied, knowledge by which to decolonize scholarship and public life alike.8 Because of the ongoing obfuscation of queer indigeneity, contemporary Driftpile Cree Nation poet and scholar Billy-Ray Belcourt calls for a more declarative presence than that offered by a fugitive pose. As Belcourt explains, queer and trans Indigenous peoples face the most "acute and world-shattering" violence and require active demands for knowledge that "queers and indigenizes freedom" itself.9 Not only is attention to queer Indigenous experience necessary for the decolonization of Native life, but what Belcourt describes as the "non-sovereignty of the sexual" offers a method to construct a world for queer Indigenous people that moves beyond cultural and political forms that propagate Western domination.10 This undertheorized conjunction of queer and Indigenous fugitivity is what Pico's poetics embody, creating an evasive space to envision the present and future of queer Indigenous life. But Pico's poetry does more than merely testify to queer Indigenous conditions—it broadcasts that experience into the public sphere through a form attuned to the contradictions of literary history and twenty-first-century media, with a goal of reshaping the horizons of modern poetics through the image of queer indigeneity. As such, Pico's approach to contemporary queer indigenousness...

VOLUME 52 (2022)

VOLUME 52 (2022)

A Queer Way of Counting: Bibliography and Computational Approaches to the Queer Novel

The relationship of queer studies to literary text mining has been vexed by the latter's formative interest in large scales, clear categories and general trends, all at odds with queer investment in particulars, details, and persons and objects who resist normative patterns and labels. The history of queer bibliography, especially as embodied by early work such as Jeanette Foster's Sex Variant Women in Literature (1956) and Roger Austen's Playing the Game: the Homosexual Novel in America (1977), however, presents a compelling model for a kind of queer enumeration which is community-oriented rather than externally imposed, centered first and foremost on the task of guiding readers to new queer texts, and which is affectively invested in the task of counting itself: a kind of literary engagement that shows the queer potential of the question "how many?" Using a small corpus of queer novels derived from modern lists of book recommendations—a contemporary form of queer bibliography—I show that, while many kinds of textual queerness elude currently existing computational methods, these methods are nonetheless capable of identifying a variety of queer textual traces, both in queer fiction identified as such, and in presumptively straight novels. While future work in this area will ultimately require more sophisticated methods, these already extant tools offer scholars of queer literature an intriguing focus on surface-level features such as explicit terms of sexual identity—and the work of bibliographers such as Foster and Austen offers the theoretical foundations that new methods must be based upon.

Stretching and Strategizing: Refashioning Queer Studies from the Outside In

Stretching and Strategizing: Refashioning Queer Studies from the Outside In