Queer Subjects Research Articles

We Have Always Been Here: Pelau MasQUEERade Disturbing Toronto Pride History

This article addresses the uneasy tensions and overlaps between race, sexuality, and citizenship, by focusing on the moments when queer diasporic people of colour slip “in” and “out” of Pride Toronto—the organization that hosts the annual Toronto lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Pride Parade. Drawing on Pride Toronto’s thirtieth anniversary promotional material, released in 2010, and the organization’s 2002 five-year strategic direction plan, the author applies a queer feminist diaspora reading practice to problematize how the documents, taken together, presents Pride’s queer history in Canada, which continues to be narrated by the organization in ways that de-racialize queer subjects and invoke white gays and lesbians as central to its story. Pelau MasQUEERade, a Caribbean queer diasporic group that participates in the Pride Parade, reveals how the histories of queer diasporic people of colour are strategically appropriated and belatedly visible only in sporadic moments in the documents. Pelau MasQUEERade’s presence works to disturb normative accounts of Pride, while simultaneously opening the door to overlapping histories of queer diasporic people in the event. The group reworks Pride Toronto’s de-racialized narrative of sexuality by gesturing to the ways in which race, sexuality, and notions of citizenship operate in multiple and contradictory ways.

Contagious heartaches: relational selfhood and queer care in Amman, Jordan

This article studies the relationship between care, family connectivity and queer selfhood in a Muslim-majority context. Based on fieldwork in Amman, Jordan, the article explores how queer people find themselves in demanding circumstances figuring out how to care for—and be responsible to—their family members, whilst caring for themselves at the same time. Drawing partly on Suad Joseph’s patriarchal connectivity and Lotte Meinert and Lone Gron’s contagious kinship connections, I argue that if we are to understand queer selfhood in Jordanian and other Arab, Muslim-majority contexts in more nuance, we need to look at the relations and emotions at stake in care. Through selected ethnographic cases—in particular one that deals with heartaches—we take a closer look at how queer selfhood is constituted in response to, and up against care and control dynamics in the family. This exposes the interrelated and emotionally contagious qualities of kinship, sexuality and gender. It moves us beyond an understanding of queer subjectivities at the margins of a Muslim community, and towards an understanding of what care and queer selfhood in Muslim and Arab contexts also involves becoming through the hands and hearts of others.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

<i>Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self</i>. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

Research Scholar, English Department, North-Eastern Hill University,

While COVID-19 has unleashed waves of reverse-migration from the cities back to the hometowns due to economic and physical uncertainties that accompanied the pandemic, queer people from the North-Eastern Region of India choose to stay in the cities. Defying the reverse-migration trend, they choose the freedom that the city gives them over the prejudice of their hometown toward their sexuality. This paper will theorize how pandemic affects and at the same time affirms queer sexualities This paper will re-interpret metronormativity in the context of North-East queer people and will co-opt Judith Halberstam’s theory while at the same time reworking it to fit the local context of queer North-East. Unlike Halberstam’s theory that the metro offers a continuum of free existence to the queer people, this paper will examine certain queer narratives both online and through interviews in order to understand how the city offers not a “freer” existence ( in the sense that freedom is given and implied upon) but rather a relatively anonymous existence which allows them to live freely in anonymity but never silent. It will problematize the concept of home and space and how queer subjectivities are (un)formed depending upon certain variables that the home offers which eventually affects queer existence. This existence will then juxtapose with Kosofsky’s “gesture of silence” of the home and the closet and in doing so, it will attempt to understand North East queer’s preference for the danger of COVID 19 and the “insecurities” of the city over the “security” of home.

“A New Species”

Abstract Taking as its starting point Michel Foucault's use of the biological species metaphor in his claim that, in nineteenth-century Europe, “the homosexual was now a new species,” this article considers the sudden explosion of homoerotic activities and cultural representations in Greater China beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The article focuses in particular on four literary works dating from around 1994 that examine queer individuals in relation modern institutional structures associated with disciplines of biology/science, reportage/media, medicine/activism, and policing/psychiatry. At the same time, however, through attention to the role played by these institutional structures in shaping new queer subjectivities, each of these four works emphasizes the subject's ability to intervene in the discursive formations within which those same subjectivities are positioned and thereby to narrativize the subject's own identity.

Queering Emotion in South Asia

Abstract A paucity of scholarship on emotions in South Asia through a queer lens prevails, as the field is relatively new, and thus, majorly normative. Discussions around emotions, particularly guilt, remain heteronormative. The act of queering emotion not only challenges the dominant gendered affective discourse, but also proposes an alternative framework to understand and elucidate emotions pertinent to queer lives in South Asia. The study analysed ethnographic accounts of 32 gay men from the Eastern Indian state of Odisha. The objectives of this study are threefold. One, it examines the validity of the hypothesis that guilt among gay men is not just an internal orientation, but can be induced by people’s complicitous actions. Two, it uncovers how guilt based on “reciprocity” is roused among gay men in a social system (Lebra, 1971). Society urges gay men to repay their parents, siblings, and caretakers by fulfilling their heteronormative expectations. Three, it foregrounds how gay men respond when apprised of their indebtedness to individuals. The study examines emotions in South Asia through a queer lens by investigating the complex manner in which the queer subjects negotiate with their affectual spaces, viz. social institutions of family and other alternative kinship structures.

When Queer Meets Teacher: A Narrative Inquiry of the Lived Experience of a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language

Queer teachers, as a result of inherent heterosexuality, have been historically living in a society of victimization and marginalization. Despite advances in LGBT rights and policies, research on queer teachers remains contextually undertheorized. Thus, this paper, based on life history interview, presents a narrative study of a non-local English teacher working in Thai higher education. Premised on the post-structuralist perspectives, this article aims to explore the construction of queer self as a professional language teacher through how sexuality is negotiated in the process of interacting with diverse subjects. The findings illustrate the fluidity of queer subjectivity within different discourses, where corresponding strategies are self-imposed to negotiate the boundaries between queer and professional selves. While queer individuals are affected by the dominant discourse of heteronormativity, queer visibility within institutional cultures comes down to a subjective piece. We conclude that queer teachers are professional subjects since the discourse of queer as professional is (re)constructed and normalised at the workplace.

Relational Subjectivity: Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Novel Außer Sich

Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s debut novel, published in 2017, covers the experience of antisemitism, migration, queerness and political struggle during a 100-year time span. Its structure is anything but straightforward and features homo- as well as heterodiegetic narrators. Structurally, the novel can be related to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, with its analysis of the logic of Kafka’s writings. Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic ethics and on the posthuman supplements the framework given by Deleuze and Guattari. Drawing on these writings, my analysis foregrounds the concept of the relational subject as developed in the novel as well as the link between its narrative structure and the exploration of time and anxiety. Taking into consideration its opening James Baldwin citation, I relate these issues to the novel’s of multidirectional memory of oppression. Tweetable abstract: This article explores how Sasha Marianna Salzmann connects queer subjectivity, multidirectional memory, time and narrative structure.

Slow waters: Marco Berger’s Taekwondo and the queer erotics of boredom

In the opening moments of the short British film Baby (WIZ, 2000), the close-up image of a hand brushing slowly against a bare chest triggers the film’s interrogation of the erotic potential in screening touch. Accentuated by a shallow focus on the individual body hairs and bumps of the protagonist’s skin, this suggestively haptic introduction at once emphasizes the centrality of vision in the filming of the sensual yet denies its epistemological mastery through the textural quality of its image. The film’s slow narrative structure, composed entirely of a series of erotically charged flashbacks during an act of masturbation, is matched by a lack of dialogue and by long, static takes of the naked and semi-naked bodies in and around a public swimming pool. During these flashbacks, the protagonist – played by a twenty-year-old Ben Whishaw – negotiates the homosocial hurdles of gender-specific changing rooms and communal showers. As he does so, his constant proximity to water, which envelops bodies and distorts the senses, provides a now familiar backdrop for the exploration of a developing sexuality and its concomitant potency for queerness. Moreover, as the suggestive smirk from a confident, muscular diver implies when his gaze meets that of Whishaw, the cinematic spaces of Baby are conceived as sites not only where the queer subject is able to find pleasure in looking, but where the eroticism of being looked at can often prove to be similarly as pleasurable. When both narrative and protagonist climax in the film’s closing moments – after a flashback of Whishaw removing his swimming shorts in a crowded public shower – vision, sexuality and sensation collide through a scene that both formally embraces the spectatorial gaze and queers its relationship with the on-screen image.

Queering the Ghosts of Typicality: The Disruptive Potential of Fabian Ludueña’s Philosophy

AbstractAccording to the philosopher Fabián Ludueña, before biopolitics, Rome and Greece put in motion the zoopolitics of an Anthropotechnical machine. The practice of expositio is the foundational zoopolitical human gesture. It consisted of leaving new-born children exposed at street markets to be sold as slaves, or in nature, left to survive (or die). The spectres of those body-minds still haunt our onto-epistemologies: by creatively fabulating with Ludueña’s work, I suggest looking back to the broken chains of the production of able bodies instead of perpetuating the reproductive futurity. Ludueña’s work investigates how and why the figure of the spectre gradually disappeared from the discursive milieu, and why it needs to be brought back into the spotlight. Its potential resides in its existence between binary categories like God and human, man and animal, male and female. It queers, defying epistemological boundaries, what it means to be dead or alive. Melanie Yergeau employs the term “neuroqueer” to talk about the non-neurotypical and queer subjectivities that are a continuum of indiscernibility and are violently dislodged into binary categories. In the conclusion, I argue for operationalising the concept of the spectre to help to short-circuit the able-neurotypical and heteronormative futurism, looking back to the ghosts of the exposed children.

Queer Fiesta

The Andean patron-saint fiesta is an iconic folkloric celebration often considered as a religious syncretic and hybrid expression of popular culture that brings together Spanish and Indigenous influences. Within fiestas, danzas (dance-dramas) represent both embodied devotional offers that include gendered costuming and dancing and representations of folklore as an ideology sustained by the idea of a heterosexual nation. In this article, I address queerness as a set of epistemologies and a privileged terrain to perform and contest the hybridity of fiestas producing a performance practice I term ‘queer hybridity.’ To do so, I focus on the work by Bolivian drag collective La Familia Galán as performers in La Paz’s La Fiesta del Gran Poder as Waphuri Galán, a danza character they created in 2001. I analyse queerness in tandem with hybridity and ask what it means for a queer subject to perform in a hybrid space like the patron-saint fiesta, while navigating folkloric narratives that position gender and sexual non-normativity as a danger to tradition. I read the clashes between queerness and normativity in fiesta as meaning-making encounters that do not attain to hybridity as a post-colonial identity but instead materialize the queer remaking of a hybrid performance form. I propose different new hybrid categories that are created as a result within the fiesta logics of ritual cross-dressing, devotion, temporality and cultural heritage, but also beyond fiesta time and space. Ultimately, I argue that the construction of the character of the Waphuri Galán by La Familia Galán and the effect it has had in Bolivian folklore and LGBT politics underscore the importance of queer epistemologies as contributing and sustaining ways of knowing in fiesta hybridity and its change over time.

“Something a bit more personal”: Digital storytelling and intimacy among queer Black women

Coming-out stories are important cultural texts wherein individuals articulate and interpret experiences of identifying as sexual minorities. Yet, much of the extant literature on coming-out stories examines narratives by white, middle-class gay men and lesbians. Critical inquiry into coming-out stories told by privileged queer subjects points to the formulaic and normative characteristics of their narratives, where sexual difference is downplayed or challenged. The goal of this article, then, is to ask whether and how coming-out narratives told by queer Black women conform to or depart from the “coming-out formula story.” Using an intersectional approach to narrative analysis, this article investigates the performative and discursive strategies that 50 women use in telling their coming-out stories on YouTube. Findings show that queer Black women’s use of intimate candor—the performative and discursive strategy of publicly revealing interior, often sexually explicit, aspects of the self—is a means through which women center desire and queerness; articulate a vision of queer Black womanhood; and complicate the coming-out formula.

Dazzle camouflage as queer counter conduct

Developed as an anti-surveillance strategy during World War I, dazzle camouflage used sharply contrasting colors to disguise ships in the British navy from enemy observation. Unlike traditional camouflage that was meant to keep one’s forces or weaponry hidden, dazzle camouflage used hypervisibility to deflect attention, making it impossible to detect a ship’s movements. In this article, I develop the concept of dazzle camouflage as a form of queer counter-conduct, arguing that queer subjectivity offers a generative vantage point for theorizing resistance to the hegemonic gaze. I draw on three forms of queer protest against everyday surveillance: Chelsea Manning’s response to trolling on Twitter, drag queen practices of reading, and a pair of art projects from visual artist Zach Blas. Taken together, these practices allow me to characterize dazzle camouflage as leveraging aesthetic playfulness and boundary work. Conceptually, my goal is to bring together surveillance studies and queer theory as frameworks for building a more robust account of dazzle camouflage, and moreover, an account that can be instructive for queer activism in a context of everyday digital surveillance.

Sutura2.0

AbstractWolof ethics ofsutura“discretion” have historically conflated perceived communicative excess with bodily contagion and associated both with queer subjects. For health non-governmental organizations (NGOs), online dating among gay Senegalese men presents two risks tosutura: contagious sex and contagious discourse. A Senegalese eHealth NGO hires gay men to send HIV/AIDS prevention messages through Facebook and online dating websites in order to contain HIV and, invokingsutura, contain queer communication and bodies. This NGO projects a heteronormative metapragmatic model of health communication, casting information as instrument of containment, and a unitary, de-eroticized digital self as informational messenger. In what I call queer biocommunicability, eHealth activists create erotically seductive digital personae incongruous with offline characteristics. Construed as communicative-bodily excess, digital seductions actually facilitate information exchange. NGOs instrumentalize queer biocommunicability to bolster a care framework that marginalizes queer subjects. This paper traces historical underpinnings and ethical-political implications of heteronormative biocommunicability’s dependence on queer transgression.

Fashioning Fabulation: Dress, Gesture and the Queer Aesthetics of Mumbai Pride

India’s ongoing legal movement to decriminalise ‘gay sex’ has been witness to the simultaneous sanitisation of queer spaces. From Pride parades declaring ‘no nanga naach, no flamboyance’ to quotidian policing of excessive dress and gestures, there is a growing emphasis on respectability that stages queerness in the private rather than the public domain. The good homosexual subject is increasingly at odds with public gestures, performances and dresses that might seem too excessive, too flamboyant, perhaps too queer. But what might it mean to sit with the bawdy gestures enacted by kothi, hijra and MSM persons in Prides, in offices, in public spaces and in daily life? This essay makes a case for theorising the fabulousness of gender and sexual minorities in India, pushing homosexuality beyond the registers of legality and epidemiology. By examining the political implications of excessive and risky aesthetic practices, it argues that what is at stake is not only a centring of aesthetics in larger considerations of queer politics, but also the larger work of fabulation: the reinvention of what meanings queer subjectivity can take on in public spaces in India.

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

Queer slacktivism as silent activism? The contested politics of queer subjectivities on GhanaWeb

This article examines the news, information, and entertainment website called GhanaWeb to ascertain how Ghanaians anonymously engaged in debates and conversations on homosexuality in Ghana and the diaspora between 2006 and 2012. Ghana’s 1992 Republican constitution criminalizes homosexuality in Section 104 of the Criminal Code, setting the terrain for non-heterosexual bodies and practices to be regarded as illegitimate. This is the terrain that informs the reactions to opinion pieces on homosexuality on GhanaWeb. Hence, the article contends that conversations and debates on homosexuality on GhanaWeb among Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians who are for or against LGBTI human rights constitute “queer slacktivism.” Arguably, this “online activism” is activism. Turning to Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia, which describes the coexistence of a variety of languages, and to a lesser extent, Stephanie Camp’s (2007) extension of Edward Said’s (1978) concept of “rival geography,” the article unpacks how GhanaWeb functions as a cyber geography in which the official language that Ghana is heterosexual at once competes with and is subverted by anti-homophobic rhetoric.

Radical Queer Epistemic Network: Kurdish Diaspora, Futurity, and Sexual Politics

This article examines the ways in which London's queer Kurdish activists imagine Kurdistan(s) and their relation to politics surrounding Kurdish and queer struggles in the United Kingdom. In doing so, the article draws attention to a “radical queer epistemic network” that establishes a transnational link among/across different borders of queer communities in the United Kingdom, such as race and class; “homeland” and “hostland”; present and future. Although there are works focusing on the Kurdish diaspora in Europe and the United Kingdom, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to queer voices and epistemologies. How do Kurdish queer subjects negotiate ethnic, gender and sexual identities whilst imagining and (re)constructing the homeland, hostland, and politics? How do queer Kurds assert their existence and make alliances in the United Kingdom’s political sphere? Can these experiences subvert the orientalist gaze directed towards queer Middle Easterners while critiquing the existing oppressive structures that affect them? This article sheds light not only on the experiences of a segment of the queer Middle East diaspora community in London but also on the mobilisation of the diasporic sexual impulsions within the political sphere through an auto-ethnographic account from London Pride 2017, contributing to the deconstruction of a presumed monolithic group, namely the Kurdish diaspora.

Queer-on-queer Violence: Homopopulism & African LGBTQ Mobility

ABSTRACTIn November 2018 the governor of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, launched an anti-gay crackdown, threatening the arrest of individuals suspected of being homosexual. Of the 54 countries in Africa, 34 currently have laws that criminalise homosexuality, three of which include the death penalty (Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria). Like many marginalised communities, LGBTQ individuals cross borders for the sake of political and economic security. This article explores the structural constraints associated with African queer mobility within the context of global geopolitical shifts and the subsequent rise of anti-immigration populist-nationalist sentiments in Europe and North America. The article draws on the theoretical lenses of Queer IR in order to understand how and to what extent European queer subjects are implicated in enforcing restrictions on African queer mobility. It makes specific reference to the rise of populist-nationalism and the resistance from and/or collusion by queer subjects. As such, it argues that the emergence of Homopopulism has resulted in increasing queer-on-queer violence through LGBTQ support of anti-immigrant and security (populist-nationalist) regimes.

Dissonance and Multiplicity in Queer Oral History Narratives

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which queer oral history illuminates the problem of historicity of the queer historical subject. I argue that a problem of historicity exists when the speaking subject (the narrator) is not required to have the lived experience of a queer past to qualify as a queer subject. I posit that there are two truly unique aspects of queer oral history – a dissonance among subject, actor, and experience and the presence of multiple subjects in the oral history narrative. I employ the oral history interviews I conducted with LGBTQ Floridians to demonstrate these dissonances. I offer a method of reading for multiplicity instead of queer universality when interpreting and analyzing queer narratives. This challenge to traditional historical methodology requires scholars and researchers to ask new questions about identity, memory, authenticity, and experience.