This article examines Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2022) through the frameworks of gender studies and queer theory, analysing how it challenges dominant gender and sexuality narratives in South Asia. Focusing on Biba, a trans woman and erotic dancer, and Haider, a cisgender man grappling with societal expectations, the film destabilizes Pakistan’s heteronormative and patriarchal norms. It employs Gayatri Gopinath’s (2005, Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures , Duke University Press) ‘hijrotic’ concept to highlight trans desire as central to South Asian public culture, not marginal. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (1990, Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity , Routledge) gender performativity and R. W. Connell’s and J. W. Messerschmidt’s (2005, Gender & Society , 19 (6), 829–859) hegemonic masculinity, it explores Haider’s evolving gender identity. Despite Pakistan’s legal recognition of transgender individuals, Joyland exposes the gap between formal rights and lived oppression, showing how trans and female bodies are controlled through domestic labour and public morality. The film serves as a critical lens for understanding the complex interplay of gender, sexuality and class in contemporary South Asia.

Inspired by feminist queering and affect theories to disrupt research norms, we drew on our felt experiences to explore the affective atmosphere of language teacher education. In this experimental work, we harnessed affect and queer theories to contest the gendered, classed, and heteronormative atmosphere of language teacher education using a form of post-qualitative inquiry that we named “dialogic queering”. Given our marginalized backgrounds (queer; academic of colour; working-class female academic), dialogic queering creates spaces to explore difficult but genuine thoughts and feelings while challenging norms entrenched in language teacher education. Underpinned by critical empathy, dialogic queering allowed us to decenter prescriptive methodologies to explore the entanglements of gender diversity, inclusion, and queer theory. This queering embodiment demonstrates how norm-resistant approaches can empower language educators and researchers to disrupt the cis-heteronormative and neoliberal ways of thinking, learning, researching, and writing. We hope that our work can convey to readers the potentiality and power of dialogic queering as a form of post-qualitative inquiry to engender insights about language teacher education and research that surprise, resonate, and transform.

This article examines Androman: De sang et de charbon (2012), directed by Az El Arab Alaoui, as a critical intervention in Moroccan cinematic representations of gender, patriarchy, and national belonging. Set in a geographically and politically marginalized Amazigh village in the High Atlas Mountains, the film narrates the story of a young girl forced to live as a boy in order to survive within a rigid patriarchal system. Drawing on postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies, and spatial analysis, this study argues that Androman exposes the fragility of hegemonic masculinity and articulates alternative ethical forms of masculinity from the margins of the nation-state. Through close textual and visual analysis, the article positions the film as a postnational cinematic text that critiques domination while imagining new possibilities of gendered and national belonging within contemporary Moroccan cinema.

ABSTRACT This article first offers a psychoanalytic reading of homosexuality as formalized in Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays and in Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud in his first Seminar. In contradistinction to a more commonplace and more limited and limiting reading of homosexuality as an identity category understood primarily (if not exclusively) in identitarian and communitarian terms, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as this article illustrates, conceptualizes homosexuality in mental (or psychic) terms. More specifically, instead of bespeaking the homogenizing and universalizing language of the group (i.e. “the homosexuals”), the more productive, and crucially ethical, rhetoric of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis bespeaks the particular and even singular speech of every homosexual subject. Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalytically oriented thinking on homosexuality will be distinguished from two early representative examples, namely, from Michel Foucault’s parochial historicist perspective and from Guy Hocquenghem’s theorization on homosexual desire. Further, we will present and elaborate a psychoanalytic perspective on homosexuality vis-à-vis perversity—albeit not as an aberration from a social norm or moral conduct, but according to its underlying unconscious mechanism of disavowal. Lastly, this article articulates and advances an ethics of homosexuality and, more inclusively, queerness by reading several representative examples of contemporary queer and psychoanalytic theory.

This article addresses the lack of critical considerations of mothering in the field of queer studies. The anti-social turn in queer theory advocates a turn away from procreation and frames the mother as the transmitter of a heteronormative legacy. In this way, queer theory naturalizes the association between the assigned female at birth body, womanhood, motherhood, and heterosexuality and precludes considerations of queer and feminist mothering. Autobiographical writing by queer mothers challenges this depiction of motherhood as inherently normative. In her poetry collection Crime Against Nature, the late Minnie Bruce Pratt describes losing custody of her children under a North Carolina sodomy law after coming out as a lesbian in 1975. Pratt’s insistence on claiming her queer sexuality despite severe social sanctions refuses the characterization of the mother as heteronormative. I place Pratt in conversation with two later memoirs of queer motherhood, Cherríe Moraga’s Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts to consider Pratt’s legacy to queer discourse. I read these narratives of queer feminist maternal subjectivities through the lens of the “sodomitical mother” to challenge the framing of the maternal body as always white, heterosexual, cisgender, sexually modest, and in service to the hegemonic social order. These accounts of queer feminist maternal subjectivities challenge current right-wing attacks on 2SLGBTQ+ rights that seek to “protect” children from access to education on race, gender, and sexuality in the name of a presumably white, heterosexual, and cisgender parent.

Zooming in on a postsocialist piece of queer autofiction, namely the 2022 novel Dezrădăcinare (Uprootedness) penned by the Moldovan-Romanian female author Sașa Zare, this article analyzes the role of self-writing as reparative practice operating on textual and extratextual levels. Instead of engaging directly with queer theory and performing a close reading of Zare’s work, we opted for “queering” the various contexts that labeled the book: historical, political, literary. This operation bridges between different theoretical articulations of reparative writing and reading, and facilitates the discussion of gendered and queer experiences in a more comprehensive framework, by connecting personal identity and sexuality with the post-Cold War social and cultural transformations in Central Eastern Europe, while re-localizing queer reparative practices in the East. We argue that queer identity complicates the narrator’s/author’s troubling geocultural positioning, one pendulating between Moldova and Romania, while simultaneously empowering her to undertake a reparative and self-affirmative process through writing. We conclude that coming out through literature has an interventionist function by opening new ways for marginalized groups to express themselves in the dominant culture.

This special issue explores a new strategy for addressing an old problem in queer theory and queer Asian studies: how to effectively challenge Western hegemony and provincialize Euro-American experiences of gender and sexuality. Specifically, we are interested not only in how a critical regional and transnational queer studies can generate new knowledge and insight about non-normative genders and sexualities in Asia and Asian diasporas, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how the growing field of queer Asian studies may be uniquely positioned to broaden, challenge, decolonize, expand, and generate new theoretical frameworks and understandings of queerness, both in Asia and beyond. Working from locations as diverse as China, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam, the contributors to this special issue examine how the various communities with whom we work are creating, imagining, questioning, resisting, and witnessing what it means to be queer in Asia, including how the very paradigm of queerness itself can often obscure some Asian experiences of gender, sexuality, and (anti)normativity. By seeking to move the field of queer Asian studies from “queer studies in Asia ” to “queer theory from Asia ,” we hope to offer another possible path toward the centering of queer Asias within queer studies and theory.

Gender remains a significant yet often subtle dimension of literacy in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Picturebooks and digital texts may introduce young children to patterned cues about how gender is seen, valued, and enacted, sometimes reinforcing binary expectations even when such messages are not explicit. This paper considers how children may encounter and interpret gender through schemas, scripts, and multimodal features embedded in the texts they read and the literacy practices they participate in. Drawing on insights from picturebook scholarship, cognitive studies, queer theory, and childhood studies, the discussion explores how gender may be shaped through repeated visual, verbal, and affective cues that children learn to recognise and respond to. At the same time, a growing body of inclusive and counter-normative texts may offer opportunities for children to expand or adjust their existing understandings of gender, although such shifts are often partial and dependent on context, mediation, and broader cultural messages. By approaching literacy as an embodied, relational, and multimodal experience, this paper aims to open a reflective space for considering how early literacy practices may support more diverse and expansive possibilities for gender in ECEC settings.

Southern Queeroscopic Interactionism (SQIT) constitutes an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework that critically interrogates the intersections of identity, spatiality, and systems of power as they materialize in the lived realities of Black queer people in the U.S. South. Synthesizing insights from Black Queer Theory, Queer of Color Critique, Two Souths Theory, Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Symbolic Interactionism, SQIT reconceptualizes the South not as a monolithic region but as a layered landscape of intersecting geographies, cultural productions, and racialized gendered economies of meaning. This paper theorizes SQIT as a queeroscopic methodology that challenges hegemonic constructions of Southern identity, foregrounds epistemic insurgency, and illuminates how Black queer Southerners produce knowledge, resist domination, and construct selfhood across stratified and often hostile terrains. By examining symbolic repertoires, spatial negotiations, and interpretive practices of marginalized subjects, SQIT offers a transformative reconfiguration of how sociocultural theory understands the South, identity, and queerness.

ABSTRACT The Marathi short film U for Usha (2019) portrays the journey of an illiterate, single mother navigating her identity and desires within a deeply traditional rural society in Maharashtra. This study analyses how the film encodes rural queer intimacy through silence, gesture, and everyday spaces, and how audiences from varied socio-cultural backgrounds decode these meanings. Using an interpretative qualitative design, the research combines close reading of the film, a semi-structured interview with director Rohan Kanawade, and a focus-group discussion. Grounded in feminist film theory, queer ruralism, intersectionality, and Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the analysis reveals that Kanawade’s rural background shapes the film’s narrative and aesthetic choices, while audience interpretations differ based on caste, gender, educational background, region, and media exposure. The study argues that U for Usha challenges urban-centric queer narratives in Indian cinema and highlights the importance of rural, intersectional experiences in understanding queer representation and spectatorship.

This article argues that the designing and dressing of fashion dolls are forms of queer aesthetic labor that engage in gender plasticity, enabling new aesthetic possibilities for envisioning gendered bodies in contemporary fashion. Through exploration of the interactions between the doll, maker, and dresser, I contend that such labor creates speculative futures which challenge binary gender narratives. By integrating reflective artistic practice, queer theory, and fashion studies, I comprehend the designing, dressing, and restyling of dolls as practices of queer worldmaking, whereby the plasticity and artifice of the bodily surface are central to the envisioning of gender as a fantasy beyond our social construct. Here, gender is framed not as an embodied experience but as an aesthetic negotiation, as exemplified by the fashion doll. By examining the connections between dolls and drag performance, the article demonstrates that both nonhuman and human bodies are shaped through intersecting economies of desire and creativity, which are in turn sustained by aesthetic work. Ultimately, this investigation broadens our understanding of visual queer aesthetic practice in fashion beyond corporeal self-fashioning, and it positions fashion dolls as repositories of queer sensibilities and speculative canvases for imagining gender in fashion and visual culture.

Youth identity formation is a complex and dynamic process shaped by social, cultural, and personal factors, with gender expression playing a central role. In recent years, subcultures such as punk, goth, hip-hop, and cosplay have become significant spaces where adolescents experiment with gender identities beyond mainstream norms. This study explores how subcultural participation influences adolescents’ gender expressions and identity construction. Drawing upon queer theory and sociological perspectives, it synthesizes existing literature and case studies, including research on hip-hop in Brazil and punk in North America, to examine how subcultures both resist and reproduce dominant gender norms. The discussion also considers the role of digital media in expanding subcultural communities and facilitating global networks of identity formation. Findings suggest that subcultures create opportunities for gender-nonconforming youth to resist traditional expectations and develop alternative forms of self-expression, while also reproducing challenges such as patriarchal hierarchies and social marginalization. These insights highlight the dual role of subcultures as both liberating and constraining forces in shaping adolescent gender identities.

María Elena Walsh left an indelible mark on the subjectivities of children born in the 1960s. We grew up listening to her songs repeatedly thanks to vinyl records. The songs emerging from these records, sung in the clear and measured voice of their author—with a cadence that reflects the early stages of her career as a singer of Argentine and Latin American folk music—lead us on a journey through fabulous and nonsensical worlds, ruled by alternative logics, opening up new possibilities for what it means to know and to wield power. This analysis focuses on two albums—Canciones para mí (1963) and El País de Nomeacuerdo (1967)—which include some of her most unforgettable songs, reading them through queer theory (Sara Ahmed, J. Halberstam, Kathryn Bond Stockton) in order to trace new trajectories within her work.

“Great poets are bisexual; male and female at once.” In “Tennyson and Musset,” published in The Fortnightly Review in 1881, Algernon Charles Swinburne makes a case for bisexuality as a valuable starting point for poetic knowledge. How did Swinburne’s conviction that “great poets must be bisexual” inform the spaces he created and inhabited in his work, his poetic affect and the directions of his lines of inquiry? This essay brings “Hermaphroditus” into dialogue with the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and bisexual epistemology of Clare Hemmings in order to examine how Swinburne figures bisexuality, what the term might have meant to him as an orientation, and consequently what it could mean to us as his readers. It also considers the way in which scholarly attempts to bring Swinburne back in line with queer theory often ironically function as “straightening devices” in the sense that they return his bisexually-oriented texts to hegemonic monosexuality.

Too often, researchers focus on individual behavior to explain health disparities characterizing queer and trans communities. This article uses ecosocial and queer theories to highlight the mechanisms and causal pathways contributing to poor health outcomes, focusing on the concepts of embodiment, whereby individuals physiologically and psychologically incorporate their environment, and erasure, whereby healthcare professionals, computer information systems, and national surveys render them invisible. Authors enumerate the specific pathways in the categories of cisnormativity and heteronormativity, institutional discrimination and structural violence, interpersonal violence and rejection, and internalized oppression, giving special attention to the ways in which the healthcare system contributes to health inequity for queer and trans people. The article concludes with a description of the implications of this approach to understanding queer and trans health inequity for those in the fields of social work and public health, including educators, researchers, funders, and clinicians, and calling for radically reimagining how we understand ourselves in relation to one another.

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the performance artwork It Doesn’t Look Like Anything to Me (Fischer, 2022) through the lens of queer intimacy. I argue that the work exemplifies a recent movement in performance art—the “dance exhibition”—which operates in the grey zone between choreography and conceptual practice. This genre’s exploratory and boundary-blurring aesthetics resonate metaphorically with queer intimacy in the performance, offering a context for experimenting with affect beyond binary positions. Using a personal and affective reading method rooted in queer affect theory, the analysis centers on three recurring scenes: “the gaze,” “the embrace,” and “movement.” Across these scenes, the performers enact gestures that oscillate between binary positions, generating affective states marked by ambivalence and flux—such as vulnerability and hardness, and femininity and masculinity. I suggest that these oscillations produce new understandings of queer intimate affects operating within a “grey zone,” as the performance momentarily exceeds stable affective and identity categories through rapid repetition and transformation. Building on queer theory’s view that gender identity consists of gestural repetitions open to modification through performance, I conclude that the work’s continual movement between, and beyond, binary expressions can be read as an experiment in cultivating less binary forms of queer intimacy.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! offers a profound exploration of trauma, queer identity, and cultural displacement through the experiences of Cyrus Shams, a queer Iranian-American poet navigating grief, addiction, and the search for meaning. This research examines how Akbar employs poetic prose, fragmented narrative, and symbolic motifs to convey the psychological and social dimensions of trauma and identity formation. By applying trauma theory, queer theory, and intersectionality, the study analyzes Cyrus’s struggles with parental loss, cultural expectations, and marginalization, highlighting the ways these experiences intersect to shape selfhood and resilience. The textual analysis demonstrates that Martyr! transcends conventional trauma narratives and queer storytelling by presenting nuanced, multifaceted characters and emphasizing the interplay of personal, cultural, and historical forces. Ultimately, the research illustrates how Akbar’s novel contributes to contemporary literary discourse, providing insight into the complexities of grief, identity, and the search for meaning in marginalized lives.

ABSTRACT Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+) leadership has often been overlooked, meaning that leadership is narrowly understood and recognised. By obtaining unique access to an LGBTQ+ leadership development programme in UK higher education (HE) and conducting an in-depth multi-layered study, this (post-)qualitative research reframes leadership and leadership development. The study involved observations of programme sessions and repeated interviews with programme attendees. Using reflexive thematic analysis and thinking with queer theory, three interwoven themes were identified: (1) the distinctiveness and potential of LGBTQ+ leadership; (2) the portrayal, solidarity and collaboration of community; and (3) the possibility, precarity and rupture of queer space. By reframing leadership in these ways, this research helps to make LGBTQ+ leaders’ leadership intelligible and makes leadership more pertinent to LGBTQ+ staff. Significantly, it offers an alternative conceptualisation of leadership emphasising relationalities and communities in specific contexts, one which appears to be relevant to the challenging landscape of UK HE. This research may also inspire future LGBTQ+ leadership development programmes to attract, retain and progress diverse talent.

This paper examines the ways that fat and queer individuals have their identities caught in the unenviable space between oversimplification and underrepresentation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with fat queer individuals, this paper examines fat queer phenomenologies of identity primarily through Sara Ahmed’s (2006) Queer Phenomenology. Through Ahmed’s positing of an orientation toward queer, this article demonstrates how fat queer individuals attempt to orient themselves and their identities in response to these rigid understandings of what fatness and/or queerness can be. In exploring how fat queer people found themselves represented, certain stereotypes emerged that were neither entirely affirming nor entirely rejected representations of fatness and queerness. The limitation of these representations was often not the representations themselves, but instead the assumption that fat queer identity fell within the narrow bounds the representations depicted. To draw, then, on an orientation toward queer, this paper analyses fat and queer identity as it holds onto stereotypes and subcultures as sites of reference while it orients itself away from rigid norms to produce a more expansive and nuanced idea of fat queer identity.

In this article, queer is framed as a concept, as an interest in knowledge, i.e. as a commitment to emancipation, and as the (emerging) identities of the characters in the books we analyse. We present queer theory through the problematization of the concept of gender and discuss queer pedagogy, which critically examines social orders in education by dismantling them. We present a reading of two picturebooks, Koira nimeltään Kissa (“A Dog Called Cat” by Tomi Kontio & Elina Warsta, 2015) and Ensilumi (“The First Snow” by Mila Teräs & Hannamari Ruohonen, 2022) as an example of how corrective queer literacy (Sedgwick, 2003) can be used to raise awareness of differences by challenging gender as a fixed and normative category. We also argue that queer literacy enables identifying and considering differences as intersectional. We suggest queer literacy as a means of promoting a more equal future, but also highlight the queer utopia, which, following Muñoz (2009), is about giving space and possibility for the future to be different. Finally, as in teacher education there is a need to identify different layers of meaning, queer pedagogy in which knowledge is produced by unpacking inequalities, such as adult/child, teacher/student, could be utilised more.