Queer Subjects Research Articles

Provincial Drag in the Philippine Tropics: Towards a Decolonial Queer Tropical Aesthetics

Drag, in its neoliberal permutation, has become the most consumed queer art form everywhere in the world. The popularity of drag is often attributed to the bourgeoning empire of the Drag Race franchise. While the cultural phenomenon that is Drag Race has constructed a platform for drag to thrive in the mainstream scene, it has also created a limited and hegemonic understanding of drag as simply glamour and superstardom. This essay problematizes what has become “homonormative drag” and outlines the need to turn to pluriversal drag aesthetic praxes. It is argued that deploying a decolonial queer tropical lens, following Rolando Vazquez’s decolonial aesthesis and Samantha Nöel’s tropical aesthetics, opens our understanding of drag to situated local experiences in the tropics. This essay, unpacks the aesthetics of what I call “provincial drag,” found in the digital content produced by queer subjects in the Philippine provinces, to illustrate and re-locate the critical function of drag not simply for gender subversion, but also to laugh at neoliberal and colonial projects.

Queer Data

ABSTRACTData is both a worldmaking and a dismantling force. This panel brings together four approaches to queer data studies. The first talk focuses on genealogies of queer data studies, providing its intellectual history and foundations. The second talk examines a historically significant moment of queer data activism during the height of the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. The third talk examines current queer metadata interventions for libraries and archives. Finally, guided by queer approaches to computational data, the fourth talk focuses on forms of identification for Indigenous queer subjects in archives.

Jak nawiedzają lesbijki. Homo-spektralność, tożsamość i trauma w niezależnych podcastach Midnight Radio (2018) i Weaver (2021)

The article presents the spectralisation of lesbian desire, i.e., the discursive production of the social invisibility of lesbians, through its presentation in two podcasts: Midnight Radio (2018) by Bobbie Parker and Weaver (2021) written and performed by Newton Sweeney. The issue of spectralisation combines uncanny studies with queer theory, developing the concept of the queer subject as a phantom emerging in heteronormative culture through the social repression of queerness (the process known as homo-spectrality). In this context, the podcast format is particularly interesting as a derivative of radio, a medium historically predisposed to telling ghost stories (or conveying the voice of a ghost). The analyzed titles illustrate the social mechanism of spectralisation and offer a significant reinterpretation, as they base the production of the spectre not on the psychological mechanism of repression but on the desire for preservation, maintenance, and love.

Nature and Shadows in the Caribbean: Queer Subjectivity and Identity in Helen Klonaris’s “Ghost Children” and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Nature and Shadows in the Caribbean: Queer Subjectivity and Identity in Helen Klonaris’s “Ghost Children” and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

“Jack and Johnny went up the hill”: Emergent homonationalism and the construction of a palatable queer subject in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema

ABSTRACT This article interrogates an archetype it terms the “palatable queer subject” in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema. It advances that the production of this subject reflects and reifies India’s emergent homonationalism in the wake of the 2018 decriminalization of homosexual relations. The palatable queer upholds nationalism while enabling India to present itself on the global stage as a progressive nation state. In the Indian context, decriminalization granted this particular subject access to a newly sedimented norm of queerness predicated on the exclusion of more marginalized queer communities. This article strives to excavate this archetype in Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Be particularly careful of marriage). It extends Jasbir Puar’s framework of homonationalism in new geographic and conceptual directions, arguing that the palatable queer subject in Bollywood cinema reveals that certain queer people – namely, cisgender upper-caste, upper-class men – have been folded into the nation state, at the expense of more vulnerable queer people.

Queerying the Queensland senior English prescribed text list

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the prescribed text list for senior school English (including English as an Additional Language or Dialect, EAL/D) in Queensland, Australia. Queer understandings about the normalization of cisgender and heterosexuality provide a framework to analyze prescribed texts for adolescent learners. Hetero‐cisgender norms are perpetuated through overrepresentation in endorsed texts. Representations of queer subjectivities or themes in the most highly promoted texts, those appearing on the examination list, are infrequent and minor. Reflexive justice thinking acknowledges the critique of merely identifying “who is missing” in the literature and extends the discussion to consider the complexities of the social, cultural, and political contexts that influence who gets to decide.

Revival of the bhadra man in Rituparno Ghosh’s Unishe April and Dahan

Rituparno Ghosh’s cinematization of Unishe April (1994) and Dahan (1997) is a systemic triad interrogative feminist narrative of a case of sexual and non-sexual violence, the gendered spatial politics of Calcutta and the performativity of Bengali masculinity. The present study delves into the nuanced portrayal of the bhadralok masculinities in the cinematic texts of Rituparno Ghosh’s Unishe April (1994) and Dahan (1997). This research paper aims to articulate the relationship of Bengali bhadralok masculinity and the scattered hegemonies of socio-cultural structures of domination and patriarchal systems operating on multiple levels in the Bengali context. The bhadralok politics of the yesteryears was built on a collusion with the colonial system and espoused a broad spectrum of ideologies, including nationalism, liberalism, and humanism. Scholarly writings on Rituparno Ghosh have documented gender politics with an implicit focus on the feminine and queer subjectivity. The arguments of the present paper depart from the idea that masculinity is a genderless and a reified construct. Through a specific focus on masculinity and the masculine ideology’s nexus with gender social structuring, the present paper questions the invisibilization of masculine power, privilege, and performance. The bhadralok masculinity, though seemingly progressive and egalitarian, the embodiment preserves the patriarchal status quo of unequal gender relationships. Through an interrogation of the intersections of the changing bhadralok masculinities and its complex nexus with the changing social and cultural institutions across time and space, the study asserts that the cultured and sophisticated bhadralok gendered order is a failed political reconfiguration of masculinity.

Speaking Bitterly, Desirably and Queerly: The Jinxing Show as Queer Chinese TV

ABSTRACT This article examines one of the most sensational (and controversial) Chinese talk shows of the post-2010 years, The Jinxing Show (TJS; 2015–2017), known for its host, Jin Xing, China’s first transgender woman celebrity. I explore how the transculturally situated aesthetics, talk themes and presentation styles of TJS contributed to Jin’s on-screen presence as a form of ‘uneventful queer’ (McCarthy 2001) TV culture in a supposedly LGBTQ-censoring China. My televisual-discourse analyses of TJS reveal a ‘post-trans’, cosmopolitan-neoliberal rhetoric through which Jin promoted ‘proper’ Chinese womanhood and ‘desirable’ Chinese cultural citizenship in her unique ‘bitter-speaking’ style on the show. Meanwhile, I demonstrate that TJS crystalised certain queer-promising transcultural flows and encounters which were often endorsed by (or in fact dovetailed with) the government’s nationalistic-patriotic self-imaginary in an age of globalisation. Diverging from the scholarly criticism of Jin’s public persona as epitomic of Chinese-specific neoliberal tenets, this study emphasises the dual ‘post-trans’ and queer subjectivities generated through TJS and sheds light on the ‘Chinese-specific’ queer presences, desires, lives and possibilities that have been paradoxically enlarged and publicised through Jin’s on-TV advocacy for the state’s ideological-political projects.

Reaffirming the Queer Traumatized Self through Home: An Analysis of the Potential of Traumascapes in John Elizabeth Stintzi’s <em>Vanishing Monuments</em> (2021).
  

This article examines John Elizabeth Stintzi’s novel Vanishing Monuments (2021) applying the views of trauma, queer theory, and the potential discussions around the notion of place. The main issue in Vanishing Monuments is how returning home implies grappling with a non-linear account of haunted memories related to identity and trauma. Drawing on Maria Tumarkin’s concept of traumascapes and connecting it to Cvetkovich’s notion of “queer trauma,” this article aims at disclosing the potentialities that physical spaces can have for the traumatized queer subject. Firstly, this paper’s analysis will draw a connection between trauma and place to examine the function that the protagonist’s house has in the enactment of their trauma. Secondly, I will explore how the main character’s trauma is embodied in the narrative through a link between the concept of traumascapes and Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of queer trauma. This article concludes by evaluating the role that traumascapes might have for the queer subject to productively respond to trauma outside pathological boundaries.

Mediating queer masculinities through alternative music from Palestine

ABSTRACT Queer feminist media studies habitually overlooks how popular communications mediate same-sex sexualities beyond the global northwest. Thinking with this gap, this paper problematises mediated queerness in the Arab world. I use the case study of “alternative” music in Israeli-dominated Palestine to theorise how far (or not) Palestinian vernacular modalities constitute a politics of sexuality above and below—although not necessarily in opposition to—the master-narratives of LGBTQ+ recognition, visibility, and the individual closet that often overshadow global commodity platforms. Drawing on my twenty-eight-month ethnography on “alternative” music in Palestine, I explore how queer-identifying Palestinian musicians use music, drag, and performance videos to self-fashion gender and sexual identities, in the context of dominant, media-friendly visions of queerness on digital networks. Through close reading of Bashar Murad’s 2021 song and video, “maskhara” (mockery), and via interviews and ethnographic data, I argue that music constitutes a shifting politics of sexual (in)visibility in Palestine. Musicians move between visible and invisible queer subject positions, depending on audience, locality, and framing. Expanding the field’s focus on Anglo-American sexual representations, then, the contribution theorises mediated queer cultural worldmaking in contexts of settler-colonisation and militarised occupation.

Queer and Ethnicity in Minsk, 1952: Belarusian Reading of Kaspars Irbe’s Diary

This article proposes an intersectional approach to studying non-Russian queer experiences in the Soviet empire. While earlier applications of intersectionality focused on race, gender, and class, other regional perspectives may highlight ethnicity, citizenship, and language. The text approaches non-Russian queer subjects in the USSR as a heterogeneous multiplicity via a contextualised reading of a diary fragment written by the Latvian Kaspars Irbe in Minsk in 1952. It highlights the prominence of communication between queers and people from the “centre” but also notes the hindrance of immediate contact between ethnicised subalterns due to Soviet social engineering. Tracing contingencies of Belarusian history, the article reveals how national identity and queer emancipation projects can evolve together.

Queer lives during conflict in Northern Ireland: deconstructing the “two communities” model

ABSTRACT This article poses the question of how incorporating the “subjugated knowledge” of queer histories of the Troubles in Northern Ireland affects understandings of the conflict in international relations and security studies. It argues that while the centrality of the “two communities” model drives all other issues to the political margins and perpetuates division, adopting a queer approach can deconstruct the identities of those communities and suggest ways to move beyond that model. It uses Jack Halberstam’s queer methodology as a “scavenger methodology” to draw on existing published interviews, as well as plays and films representing queer experiences during the Troubles, and a queer theoretical approach that seeks to both foreground queer experiences and challenge normative and binary understandings of identity in this context. Focusing on queer lives during the conflict reveals that constructing the identities of the two communities depends on excluding the queer subject, that queer people’s security during the conflict was shaped by their queer identity, and that queerness can and has been mobilized to deconstruct received narratives and the apparently essential identities of the two communities, demonstrating some possibilities for dismantling the unionist/nationalist dichotomy.

Bridging the Vantage Point of Distance: Reynaldo Rivera and the Visual Legacies of Queer Spectacle across Time and Space

Gender impersonators and trans gender-nonconforming people have long been a source of fascination within the visual arts. Nevertheless, illustrators and photographers alike have perpetually instrumentalized the image of the queer subject as a visual shorthand for criminality, freakishness, and deception. Beginning with the broadside illustrations of José Guadalupe Posada, this article examines how visual representations of Latinx queerness and gender nonconformity shifted across the Americas and throughout the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth century. Ultimately, I contend that Reynaldo Rivera’s photography of late-twentieth-century ballroom culture provides a substantial departure from these speculatory conventions by visually legitimizing the lived authenticity of the queer Latinx people who populate his work.

Queer Experience in Turkey

This study explores the possibility of critical agency of queer subjects in Turkey in terms of challenging and subverting normative structural constraints. These constraints are attested through expansive use of the concept of habitus including class, gender, family, ethnicity and religion. Our field study in which in-depth interviews have been conducted detected two types of habitus in the life experiences of queer subjects: critical and conservative. While the former enables critical agency, the latter undermines this possibility. On this ground, it is argued that exhibiting critical habitus appears to be the precondition of performing critical agency. We conclude that having multiple minority identities, education, and involvement in organizations develop a critical habitus enhancing critical queer agency.

Queering the Postcolonial Auto/biography: Doubleness and Unspeakability in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother

Examining representations of queer subjectivities as minor subjectivities, this essay compares J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother to investigate the emergence of queer postcolonial auto/biography in the late 1990s. The two texts use a similar hybridized form (a blurring of autobiography and third-person biography) to represent marginalized queer subjectivities in the postcolonial contexts of South Africa and Antigua, respectively. In doing so, they redefine the notion of the minor as an anti-colonial poetics and a non-normative lived experience. Both narratives, published in the same year (1997) and composed in the midst of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and after the end of Apartheid, engage with related themes of doubleness, secrecy, and unspeakability to reveal the double consciousness of queer figures silenced and rendered minor as a result of internalized shame through the taboo on non-heteronormative desires. This essay analyses the intersections between postcolonial and queer dimensions of minor subjectivities in order to understand how the minor position of the queer subject in postcolonial societies is pluralized through strikingly similar literary strategies. Coetzee and Kincaid offer new possibilities for world literature through the publication of queer postcolonial auto/biographies which celebrate, facilitate, and complicate the plurality of minor identities and narrative viewpoints – especially the minor subjectivities and poetics surrounding queer postcolonial lives.

Intersections and the becomings of disabled and queer subjectivities in Margarita with a Straw

This article aims to explore the affective capacities of the non-lesbian and lesbian, non-disabled and disabled, moving and fleeting bodies of Laila Kapoor, who suffers from cerebral palsy, in the 2014 Hindi film Margarita with a Straw. The study examines the ontology of Laila’s disabled and sexualized body that is entangled in an assemblage of relations of other human (characters Dhruv, Nima, Jared and Khanum) and non-human (architectural space, wheelchair, laptop, voice aggregator and music) bodies in the film. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, this article examines the affective flows, desire and becomings of disabled and queer bodies within Margarita with a Straw. It demonstrates how the discursive, material, post-human subjectivity of disabled and queer bodies in the film manifests the potential to destabilize the notion of what a body is by continuously negating the social disavowal of bodies through new emergent potentials, capacities and assemblages.

Queer African literary communities: The anthology as political genre

The inaugural Gerald Kraak anthology titled Pride and Prejudice (The Gerald Kraak Anthology: African Perspectives on Gender, Social Justice and Sexuality) (2017) is a collection of poetry, fiction, journalism, photography, and scholarly writing that focuses on queer and other marginalised identities in Africa. The individual contributions place the queer cultural outsider at the centre of the text. The power of the anthology’s collective voice challenges normative subjectivity and its practices of exclusion by showcasing the subjects’ joy and suffering, and, through the collectivisation of individual experience, new possibilities arise for a recentred queer subjectivity that challenges imposed normative boundaries. The process of writing is a relatively private activity to explore and express identity and sexuality. In contrast to the privacy of writing is the act of sharing this writing with an audience that witnesses these private and often hidden identities and sexualities. This article focuses on how this anthologised collection of marginalised cultural ‘others’ shifts the borders of what is considered deviant by reading the entries through Judith Butler’s concepts of ‘legibility’, where the outsider is placed at the narrative centre.Contribution: This article contributes to studies on marginality, queer African literature, genre and anthologies.

Where the personal is political

The Queer Asylum Stories project collected interviews with people who had successfully gained asylum based on their sexuality. The focus of this article is on life stories leading up to and triggering the decision to seek asylum, and the processes of formation of the interviewees’ queer subjectivity. The discussion draws on the three related constructs of interpellation, ideological becoming and habitus, and considers the role of queer activism, understood as a dimension of queer habitus as theorised in the foundational work of Didier Eribon. Finding that the term ‘activism’ is widely used but infrequently defined, the article suggests that activism in general, and queer activism in particular, need to be defined explicitly and explored in order to gain a deeper understanding of what is involved. It provides a working definition of queer activism to guide this process.

Dezorientacje pamięci. "Pulverkopf" Edwarda Pasewicza

This paper aims to interpret selected themes from Edward Pasewicz’s novel "Pulverkopf". The relations of body, memory and language, as well as the motifs of spatio-temporal disturbances that result in identity crises are the subject of reflection. These crises stem from the main character’s exposure to secret and traumatizing messages concerning his family’s past and the history of the town where he grew up. The author of this article reconstructs the multi-layered plot of "Pulverkopf" and discusses the different types of disorientation that the protagonist faces. Using methodological tools drawn from psychoanalysis and queer studies (including Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation as presented in her book "Queer Phenomenology"), the author contends that in Pasewicz’s novel contact with spectres of the (other’s) past leads to the constitution of a queer subject.

Queer Affects in the Wandering Films of Antonio Hens

This article proposes an analysis of queer affects as they manifest in the films Clandestinos (2007) and La partida (2013), directed by the Spanish filmmaker Antonio Hens. Our exploration situates these films within a complex transnational framework, a context that not only shapes Hens’s authorial poetics, driven by the imperatives of production within his own film company but also exerts a profound influence on the subjectivity of the queer adolescent characters, a distinctive recurring compositional element throughout Hens’s oeuvre. Both films abound with thematic elements revolving around nomadic subjective experiences, encompassing themes of displacement, deterritorialization, spatial disjunctions, national estrangement, and an enduring yearning for alternative geographical contexts. Hens’s cinematic techniques amplify a pronounced sense of wandering nomadism and queer itinerancy. Within the scope of this article, we embark on an exploration of nuanced representations of queer subjects and their intimate or romantic relationships in various geographic settings. This analysis employs critical paradigms linked to the concepts of homonationalism, queer migration, and emotional intelligibility. Hens’s ‘wandering films’ adroitly utilize male characters who traverse intricate geographic landscapes. These are youthful and sexually fluid figures navigating a complex web of intimate and public urban spaces consistently tethered to notions of national identity. Consequently, these films identify the convergence of corporeal experiences and geographic environments as the locus where ineffable queer affective experiences manifest.