Queer Voices Research Articles

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community

When I take out the picture of my mother

when I take out the picture of my mother LM Brimmer (bio) [ See PDF for formatting of the poem. ] with her mother and my sister I remember howexile is a legal amendment that can also be felt. i was omitted. ellipses an ekphrasis of my inherited custom frame. in a mirror I remain concealed. old film too afraidto be revealed. here every pixel is flesh-elision the wrinkles i have, She has, too. my/Her mother's chin… & now I'm yellowing on Kodak, refused a flash-marked birth. undeveloped, afloat in my mind, unused exposures expire before i've been made. the new sacrament. where gloves & jackets squint back at the lens from the house front. unseasonable hurriedly aimed, handled thing discover me blindfolded. kept. weapons fire in-between faces & out of frame. it's me, hardwood softened by proximity to the sea. am i her memory? One yearning to be adapted. O, teach me how to return from the tide where every picture is a tightly closed eye! the next thing i know the nurse has tied my arms & i'm alone in an awful naked room, island of punishment, birth hovers the rupture along my windswept coast. my clouded elegy. had escaped that palace, the tunnel, & had skipped the boat – [End Page 167] yowl for my restoration with the skill of a marineanimal— sea my opaque corneal current. look, eye have become the zookeeper & the zoo. [End Page 168] LM Brimmer LM Brimmer is an artist & educator living on Dakota land in Minneapolis. Co-editor of the anthology Queer Voices: Poetry, Prose and Pride (MHS Press, 2019), their writing has appeared in The Alliance of Adoption Studies and Culture Journal, La Raza Comíca, Impossible Archetype, Gasher Journal, and Quarterly West. In 2021, their work made semi-finalist for Newfound Journal's Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was long listed for Frontier Poetry's Award for New Poets. They attend the MFA program at Randolph College as a Blackburn Fellow. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

The Handmaiden

The Handmaiden

‘What’s important is being in the room’: Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood and the politics of queer history

In his 2020 Netflix miniseries Hollywood, producer Ryan Murphy presents us with an almost utopian version of Hollywood, an alternate history that centres queer and Black voices over the realities of the repressive queerphobic and racist nature of the 1940s US society. It tells the story of an ultimately Oscar-winning film project surrounding the story of the real-life suicide of silent movie actress Peg Entwistle, put together by marginalized creators. In many ways, the miniseries commits to the screen a classic narrative of the American dream, of the marginalized overcoming adversity and ‘making it big’. It frames Hollywood as aspirational, both as an actual physical place but also as fantastical space, using strategies borrowed from theme parks and other immersive spaces. It is unusual in centring Black, queer and Black queer voices in this story, and by extension in history – in time and space(s) where they are usually erased. It makes use of nostalgia in manifold ways to do so, showcasing it as a tool that presents both opportunities and dangers when applied to marginalized communities. As such, it emerges as a liberal fairy tale espousing the virtues of individual action over collective activism against systemic injustices, and champions a politics of visibility rooted in whiteness. This article interrogates the potentiality of popular culture, and this text of historical television specifically, for reinscribing queer people into US public memory. To do so, it discusses the Disneyfication of Hollywood in the series and how it shapes our perception of the past, ideas of marginalized nostalgia(s) for queer and BiPoC (and queer BiPoC), and the role celebrity/star figures play for constructing history on-screen.

Queer Advice to Christian Philosophers

Philosophy of religion is dominated by Christianity and by Christians. This, in conjunction with the historically anti-LGBTQIA bent of Christian thinking, has resulted in the exclusion of less dominant and often marginalized perspectives, including queer ones. This essay charts a normative direction for Christian philosophers and for philosophy of religion, a subfield they dominate. First, given some of the unique ways Christian philosophy and philosophers have unjustly harmed queers, Christian philosophers as a group have a responsibility to communities their group has oppressed to prioritize the interests of the oppressed. Second, Christian philosophers must prioritize queer voices by creating or furthering academic space (e.g., at conferences, in journals and books, and in academic posts) for those who publicly and professionally identify as queer. Third, Christian philosophers must mitigate their criticisms of queers and queerness where such criticisms would undermine their efforts toward compensatory/reparative justice.

Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey through the AIDS Crisis

Plague Years: A Doctor's Journey through the AIDS Crisis

Re-thinking of Queer Voices in the New South Africa: Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me

Re-thinking of Queer Voices in the New South Africa: Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me

‘It’s easy to mistrust police when they keep on killing us’: A queer exploration of police violence and LGBTQ+ Victimization

ABSTRACT Almost 50 years after the Stonewall riots, queer liberation and police resistance are still inextricably intertwined. International hate crime statistics around the globe show increasingly high rates of LGBTQ+ victimization and criminalization by law enforcement. This qualitative research aims at evaluating whether queer theories of visibility and performativity could serve as useful tools to investigate the problematic dynamics between police and young queer individuals. For this purpose, online interviews were carried out with a sample of 20 young queer individuals from different European countries. Findings revealed that performing non-heteronormative bodies and behaviours is associated with being perceived as risky, dangerous and deviant. The correlation between queerness and deviance leads to a number of detrimental consequences, including police over-policing and criminalizing young LGBTQ+ individuals in public spaces, queer people underreporting hate crime incidents for fear of secondary victimization, and overall scepticism and mistrust towards the criminal justice system. Thus, this research not only affirms the importance of including queer voices in criminological research, but it also reveals the insidious nature of police violence against the LGBTQ+ community, which has long been neglected in queer studies.

Queer expectations: An empirical critique of rural LGBT+ narratives

Much of the body of literature on LGBT+ populations within the United States place urban areas and so-called gayborhoods as goals and eventualities, paralleling early US studies on immigration. Using a multistage, mixed-methods approach, consisting of secondary analysis of the Pew 2013 Study of LGBT Persons ( N = 1197) and in-depth interviews (35 gay men, 2 trans-identifying individuals, 1 heterosexual woman, and 2 lesbians), we found that rural LGBT+ residents engaged in both short-term and long-term travel to mitigate feelings of being spatially segregated from the loci of gay social life—what Ghaziani (2019a) refers to as cultural archipelagos. However, rural residents also used their geographical location to resist dominant narratives about LGBT+ life. Some of our respondents felt that living in rural areas better situated them to be activists and advocates for LGBT+ rights, while others simply did not feel they could be comfortable within more urban contexts. These findings suggest that rural LGBT+ residents may have delinked their sexual selves with their cultural and political selves, thus illustrating the plurality of rural queer voices that exists. As we also argue, while residence category should be considered as influencing one’s experience, care must be used to avoid overly deterministic accounts. Finally, this article extends earlier work by Brekhus (2003), Mattson (2015), and Ghaziani (2019a) by presenting the meaningfulness of travel to and from queer cultural strongholds.

Contributors

Contributors

Editorial Preface

Editorial Preface

Queer Camera: Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Prater Violet

ABSTRACT This essay locates Christopher Isherwood’s radical energy in the use of emergent visual technologies to curate a space for queer desire in his works Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Prater Violet (1945). Isherwood subverts the heteronormative cinematic discourses by pausing them and preparing Instantaneous Photographs out of small moments that engage in a play of stillness and movement. The pauses enable the narratives to constantly draw attention toward themselves as well as the namesake narrators who voice their queer desire in those moments. This presents to us the unique esthetics of Isherwood wherein the visual does not only serve the novelistic in being a narrative strategy but becomes an epistemological mode through which the visual constructs queer subjectivity, in a world witnessing the rise of fascist forces. In short, the “queer camera,” seizing the grand narrative of history, forges queer time and queer voice, and, thereby, an alternative history that acknowledges queer presence.

Identidad y disidencia sexual en el rap feminista queer: un análisis narratológico de “Lisístrata”, de Gata Cattana

El presente artículo es un análisis microdiscursivo de la canción “Lisístrata” de la rapera española Gata Cattana (1991-2017). Se emplea una metodología procedente de los Estudios Críticos del Discurso, la teoría de la interseccionalidad y la narratología feminista y queer de S. Lanser. Se tienen en cuenta las dimensiones macro y microdiscursivas, así como el análisis de la voz comunal, autorial y queer. Por una parte, se busca desentrañar las implicaciones sociales que esta enunciación disidente trae aparejada en la construcción identitaria de la propia autora y el público al que interpela. Por otra, se pretende describir y analizar el aporte de Gata Cattana para resignificar el rap español.

Queering communication studies: a Journal of Applied Communication Research forum

ABSTRACT Genders and sexualities continue to remain underexplored in the field of communication studies and the academy in general. This essay examines possibilities for incorporating queer perspectives into communication studies. At the invitation of the Journal of Applied Communication Research editor, 9 communication scholars who use queer theory or queer perspectives in their own work responded to a series of questions addressing how queer theory and perspectives can be used in the discipline, both by those who are new to queer theorizing and those who are looking to expand their knowledge and practices. The answers to these questions provide an understanding of what queer theory is and its relationship with LGBT studies; allow practical considerations for incorporating queer perspectives into communication scholarship in multiple methodological areas; offer considerations for welcoming queer voices in the classroom, the communication discipline, and the larger academy; and indicate several scholarly resources for those who want to learn more about queer theory and LGBT studies.

Activism and the Economy of Victimhood: A Close Look into NGO-ization in Arabic-Speaking Countries

Over the past ten years, countries in the Arabic-speaking region have witnessed a significant increase in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) branding themselves as LGBT-focused. Predominantly male-led, these organizations brought with their emergence a discourse around gender and sexuality that utilizes identity politics and narratives of victimhood. Consequently, NGOs became able to simultaneously secure funding, to claim struggles around gender, sexuality and bodily integrity as their own, and to appropriate local community and individual victories. The feminist thought became appropriated to legitimize neoliberal organizing. This essay provides a critique of identity politics used by NGOs, claiming representation of diverse queer voices, while reproducing narratives of victimhood. Drawing on a contextualized analysis of trends of the NGOization of activism in the region, this essay offers theoretical and empirical contributions around the complex geographies, continuities, and ruptures within the so-called civil society, state systems, and international funders. The essay questions what is “civil” about a society of functionaries that alienate oppressed populations deemed “unfit” to a foreign imaginary of victimhood. We here aim to expose the role the NGO-ization of activism plays in relation to maintaining the status quo around gender and sexuality, and erasing feminist histories. The essay exposes how victories claimed by NGOs are in fact the work and effort of those whose organizing is located outside the institutions. The essay suggests that LGBT-focused NGOs are often complicit with oppressive state systems and structures, promoting homonationalist narratives. We propose that much activism within NGOs is creating an economy of victimhood that is ultimately dependent on funding provided by states in the Global North. In this essay, we argue that Arundhati Roy's writing around the NGO-ization of resistance is also applicable to the context of the region, as it has material implications on queer intersectional feminist organizing and voices.

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.

LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia ed. by Jeff Mann & Julia Watts

Reviewed by: LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia ed. by Jeff Mann & Julia Watts Melissa Helton (bio) Jeff Mann & Julia Watts, eds. LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. Morgantown, W. Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 288 pages. Softcover. $29.99. Jeff Mann & Julia Watts, eds. LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia. Morgantown, W. Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 288 pages. Softcover. $29.99. If asked to describe yourself, what words would you choose? Most of our identities do not conflict with each other. Poet and environmentalist are pretty compatible. Mother and educator don't seem too antagonistic. What about queer and Appalachian? Trans and rural? LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia, edited by Jeff Mann and Julia Watts, crosses into spaces where "queer" and "Appalachian" can be contentious or complementary, showing how queer lives play out in those spaces in all their beautiful and challenging intricacies. The introduction to the collection states the goal is to show that "queer" and "Appalachian" don't have to be mutually exclusive. The collection achieves that goal, but not without some noticeable missteps. The collection is full of well-established names: Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Aaron Smith, Ann Pancake, and others, including the editors themselves. These writers are powerhouses in their craft and have proven themselves fearless in their LGBTQ writings and their commitment to the region. The pieces take readers into spaces they may or may not recognize. In "Saving," a short story by Carter Sickels, the main character visits Mamaw in the nursing home where she suffers dementia and hasn't seen her trans grandson since [End Page 133] before his transition. The narrator of one of Savannah Sipple's poems shops at Walmart with Jesus. "Handling Dynamite," a short story by Watts, centers on a deep mine and a coal company town. Many pieces address the common struggle of do-I-stay-or-do-I-go that has fueled the Appalachian diaspora for generations, particularly for queer Appalachians. This, predictably, is often followed by the frequent desire—or requirement—to return "home." While it is clear the editors made it a priority to gather diverse queer voices, the book would have benefitted from more examples of intersectionality in the LGBTQ+ community. The collection lacks an in-depth excavation of when queerness intersects with disability, Black identity (despite doris diosa davenport's poem "Black Lesbian Appalachian Identity," which is celebrated in the editors' note), parenthood, age, or violence. Bisexuality and pansexuality are absent in any meaningful way, which is often all-too-common in queer and straight spaces alike, making the anthology miss an opportunity to be inclusive of members of the LGBTQ+ community who identify as having a plural sexuality. Likewise, while there is work that features transgender characters, they are all trans men, and the collection is lacking a discussion of trans women, nonbinary folks, and those who identify as asexual or intersex. That being said, I am stunned by this collection. So much of queer literature takes place elsewhere or in some amorphous non-place, and the pieces in this book weave together queer and Appalachian identities in ways in which it is tough to tell where one ends and the other begins. I dare say that may be the point. In Jonathan Corcoran's "The Rope Swing," queer desire unravels at the riverbank, a safe place where "an unthinkable touch of the hand, [is] rendered acceptable by the privacy of the forest." Nickole Brown's [End Page 134] poem "To My Grandmother's Ghost, Flying with Me on a Plane" addresses the common conflict between queerness and religion when it asks what her grandmother Fanny thinks of the speaker's life. Additionally, the book offers a gem in its "Selected Bibliography of Same-Sex Desire in Appalachian Literature." It brings to our attention books and writers outside the collection by Davis Grubb, J.T. LeRoy, Lee Smith, and Karen Salyer McElmurray, among others. The bibliography is divided by genre and can be a helpful springboard for personal or scholarly reading lists, as well as a way to find representation in the broader literature missing from the selections in this collection. LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia...

Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice”: Indexical Disjuncture in the Talk of LGBT Members of the Progressive Muslim Community

This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, voice, ideological disjuncture, and resistance. Through analysis of individual and group conversations alongside ethnographic observations, I argue that LGBT Muslims and allies strategically index queerness and Muslimness as a challenge to marginalizing discourses and to create ‘safe’ spaces that also benefit other Muslims on the margins. Narratives of both LGBT Muslim marginalization and its strategic disruption as well as nonconformist group interactions are used to illustrate how the queering of Muslim discourse creates “indexical disjuncture” to make space for both LGBT Muslims and other nonconformist Muslims. I conclude by considering how providing evidence of language’s role in the process of ‘queering’ contributes to ongoing conversations in queer theory.

The emergence of black queer characters in three post-apartheid novels

Before the end of apartheid, queer lives were almost entirely unrepresented in public literary works in South Africa. Only after the fall of institutionalised apartheid could literature begin to look back at the role of queer people in the history of South Africa, and begin to acknowledge that queer people are a part of the fabric of South African society. A number of celebrated authors emerged who were exploring queer themes; however, most of these authors and the stories they told were from a white perspective, and black queer voices were still largely absent in literature, especially novels. This paper explores the limited number of black queer literary representations following the influential work of K. Sello Duiker. I explore the social dynamics that might have influenced the fact that so few examples of black queer characters currently exist in South African literature. Through an analysis of novels by Fred Khumalo, Zukiswa Wanner, and Chwayita Ngamlana, I show how black, queer characters in post-apartheid novels confront ideas of culture, race, and sexuality as they wrestle with their identities and with questions of belonging and visibility.

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018

Utopian Acts 2018 Conference Report: Birkbeck, University of London, September 1, 2018