Queer Of Color Research Articles

Queering critical race pedagogy: reflections of disrupting erasure while centering intersectionality

This article argues that intersectional pedagogies are one way to capture the experiences of Queers of Color, specifically in higher education classrooms. Using critical pedagogies and critical race theory in education, the author makes the case for the need to intentionally center race and sexuality within pedagogical approaches and curriculum, what they call “Queer Critical Race Pedagogy.” Using autoethnography, the author reflects on three pedagogical practices that center race and sexuality and finds that employing a QCRP is critical because the representation of Queers of Color in the classroom, course materials, and as historical actors are significant to disrupt erasure and silence in curriculum. The author concludes that QCRP can lead students of diverse backgrounds to commit to social change.

Unresolved feelings: notes on pleasure and pain from an accidental educator

This essay – written autobiographically as a confession – charts uncomfortably and reflexively salient experiences and emotions of a queer educator of color. It unveils and analyzes unresolved feelings as messy examples in his journey as an urban school teacher, as a graduate student, and eventually as a university academic and administrator. In particular, it foregrounds the pleasure-pain dynamic that will be addressed, although often intertwined, separately for fuller exposition and examination. Drawing interpretive and methodological insights from women of color feminism, the essay enacts a theorizing from the personal to work against facile understanding of the cultural politics of identity and emotion. Rather, it marks a queer of color critique that is grounded in feminist theorizing as a framework and language for a more livable and humane world.

A Decolonial Feminist Epistemology of the Bed: A Compendium Incomplete of Sick and Disabled Queer Brown Femme Bodies of Knowledge

This compendium takes up a series of concepts as a means to think them newly from the contemporary time and place of "the bed," where the bed is a temporal and geographical (non)location central to sick and disabled queer (SDQ) bodies and life. Excerpted from a larger project-in-progress, this article, in part, proceeds from Lugones's 1987 essay "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception." It strives toward articulating a decolonial feminist epistemology that is informed by queer of color, sick and disabled phenomenology and material life. We are compelled by what we might name as the work of queering and the work of sickening: methods for cultivating non-normative relationships to our bodies, our desire, our health, and to each other. In the spirit of Lugones's notion of playfulness, we consider queer play as a methodology of ever-unfolding liveliness that also takes seriously and honors the gravity of queer chronic illness life. This, we propose, affirms a politics and poetics of illness that is antithetical to coloniality's hold on the body as only of value while productive and profiting for itself and for another. A growing archive of SDQ thought and cultural material, this compendium is not necessarily intended to be read in a linear fashion. That is part of its SDQ disruption of heteropatriarchal, racist, and ableist grammars; a central component of SDQ temporalities; and an emphatic reminder that despite and because of the ways we are bound to and by illness, we make possible diverse forms of life otherwise.

Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and the Symptom: A Lacanian Reading

ABSTRACTIn Clinical Encounters in Sexuality Giffney and Watson have made an intricate tie between (at least) two divergent fields. This essay considers the sexual impasse between queer theory, including queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis, mapped out in the collection, in terms of the Lacanian sinthome. In Le Sinthome Lacan describes the sinthome as a jouissant fault point that enables something in/of the failed sexual relationship to work out. In this review, I touch upon political, theoretical, and disciplinary fault lines so carefully navigated, crafted, and animated in this exemplary collection.

Editors’ Introduction

> “Through this book, I imagine the possibility that later generations of media feminists might not have to do this work again: putting a stop, for a while at least, to this particular feminist ‘re’-cycle.” > > —Alexandra Juhasz, Women of Vision , 20011 > “Theories and concepts help order history, but critically informed production practice, an orientation of learning, thinking, and doing might move us out of these painful historical reveries.” > > —Angela J. Aguayo, Documentary Resistance , 20192 alexandra juhasz: In October 2017 I received …

Queer California: Untold Stories

In 1978 in San Francisco, Gilbert Baker designed the prototype for what would decades later become a ubiquitous symbol for gay pride: the rainbow flag. The original design featured eight colors, each respectively symbolizing sex, life, healing, sunlight, nature, magic/art, serenity, and spirit. Queer California: Untold Stories installed a prototype of this flag as one of the first works visitors encountered in the exhibition. As the wall text explained, “In 1979, Baker sought to mass produce the design and found that flag makers did not carry pink as a standard color. He let pink go for a chance at commercial success. He also abandoned turquoise to retain the flag’s symmetry.” Curator Christina Linden presented the flag as a cautionary tale as much as a cause for celebration, installing it in a section titled “What Gets Left Out” and proximate to wall text defining the process of assimilation. Numerous pride flags have been developed to represent different identities and subcultures—from bisexual and nonbinary to bears and leather—whereas composite flags have sought to expand the visible spectrum of queerness, such as the Progress Pride Flag, which presents black and brown stripes representing queers of color and the white and pastel pink and blue stripes of the trans flag as intersecting with the standard rainbow flag.1 In this exhibition, the curator juxtaposed Gilbert’s original vision with artist Amanda Curreri’s Misfits 1979 (Sex and Art) , a 2013 flag composed of hot pink and turquoise panels that reclaim sex and art (apparently minus the magic) as core to queer culture and expression. Both logics—of inclusion for previously underrepresented queer experiences and of reclaiming sex and art—effectively describe the exhibition’s agenda of presenting “untold stories.” Importantly, Linden’s show also refused a binary between art and historical documentation [Image 1].2 IMAGE 1. Misfits 1979 (Sex and …

Finding sequins in the rubble: The journeys of two Latina migrant lesbians in Los Angeles

Mainstream research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender Los Angeles (LA) has ignored Latinx queer communities until recently, and lesbian Latinas, particularly those who are migrants and/or refugees, have been especially marginalized. Building on scholarship and creative work by Chicana, Latina, women of color feminist, queer of color, and queer migration activists and scholars, this essay contributes to research on Mexican, Central American, and Latina lesbians in LA. In her research on sexually non-conforming Latinas, Katie L. Acosta argues that to better understand Latinas’ sexualities in all their complexities, future scholarly work should address the pleasures and desires of Latina lesbians, as well as the quality and stability of the relationships they nurture in the borderlands. Building on queer migration research and using what Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque Ramírez call “queer oral history,” this article focuses on two everyday lesbians in LA whose stories add depth to our understandings of LA queer history and to the lives of queer migrants in the city. The narratives of Luna and Dulce, migrant lesbians from Mexico and Guatemala, respectively, provide a context for better understanding diverse experiences of migrant Latina lesbians in LA. Situating their lives within ongoing research on lesbian Latinas, this essay focuses on three themes—migration, leisure spaces, and family—to explore how these inform the women’s everyday choices and shape their practices of freedom. Their stories and perspectives have been instrumental in enabling me to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that I call “finding sequins in the rubble,” through which we can recognize and understand how queer Latinx communities engage in processes of queer-world making and radical possibility through everyday acts of resilience and self-care in the midst of familial, institutional, and state violence.

Muslim–queer encounters in Rio de Janeiro: Making sense of relational positionalities

For recently arrived West African migrants in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro, the virtual and street encounters with travesti sex workers and queer beach goers provoked questions of relative power and status as experienced from a social margin of local Brazilian society. Based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2014, I address the question of how my Muslim interlocutors’ encounter with queers facilitate a particular and partial reading of Brazilian social relations, their legal mediation and their individual and social valuations. Moving between queer, postcolonial, queer of color and Muslim queer scholarship, I situate the local encounters of Muslim West Africans and queer subjects to differentiate and transcend the global framework of homonationalism and queer necropolitics. Situational positionalities result from the interplay of multiple geographical and social locations that, in their contradictions and interdependencies, are characteristic of contemporary urban configurations.

Anti-LGBT violence and the ambivalent (colonial) discourses of Ghanaian Pentecostalist-Charismatic church leaders

This study examines the discourses used by Ghanaian Pentecostalist Charismatic Church leaders (GPCCs) to describe same sex sexual relations and anti-LGBT violence. This research was informed by the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of postcolonial theory, queer of color critique and critical intercultural communication. Consistent with the critical perspective, Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis was utilized to analyze the ideological tensions framing the discussions of same-sex relations in Ghana. Findings show that the prior relationship between Christianity and colonialism have made GPCCs an influential colonial institution currently masquerading as an innately "African" institution protecting the interest of all Africans. The author concludes that social justice programs and initiatives in Ghana and other African countries with similar sociopolitical contexts should create spaces for counter narratives that center the voices of queer Ghanaians/Africans.

The Suicide of Leelah Alcorn: Whiteness in the Cultural Wake of Dying Queers

Abstract In this article, I examine public discourse in the wake of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. I argue that Alcorn’s politicized suicide beckoned a national tragedy whereas the slew of queer and transgender people of color murdered did not because of the repeated deployments of a whiteness-derived innocence. Performances of hegemonic grief evinced Alcorn’s posthumous rhetorical agency in ways that caused responsible adults to take action against the violence of conversion therapy on U.S. queer youth. In this article, I analyze how the rhetorics and performances of white grief functioned as an exigence for a queer of color critique that used the wake of Alcorn to unhinge logics of white supremacy and white grievability. As queers of color labored in Alcorn’s wake to grieve their own dead in more public ways, they demonstrated how queers of color shoulder the burden of evincing their own trauma more so than their white counterparts. The cultural wake of Alcorn suggests that hegemonic grief functions as a modality of white supremacy while determining whose life is worthy of remembrance and a place in the queer imaginary.

Introduction to Critical Forum: The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism

Introduction to Critical Forum:The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism Tyler Bradway The following critical forum, "The Sonic Politics of Black Experimentalism," takes as its point of departure Carter Mathes's Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights, published in 2015 by the University of Minnesota Press. Mathes's groundbreaking work demonstrates the exciting conceptual and political affordances of black experimental literature for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His book does not simply bring together the fields of black studies, sound studies, and literary studies—it profoundly reimagines their points of convergence. Focused primarily on African American experimental literature and music, Imagine the Sound argues that the sonic dimensions of black experimentalism open out onto histories of black radicalism that have been repressed, forgotten, or marginalized by predominant narratives about the Black Arts Movement and black postmodernism. Mathes advocates for close listening as a method to recover the inchoate potentialities and resistant auralities of postwar African American experimental literature. Through their sonic experimentations, these texts afford more capacious and radical notions about black freedom and sociality than those sanctioned within the post-Civil Rights Era. [End Page 257] Among its many contributions, Imagine the Sound makes a strong case for understanding sound as an experimental dimension of the aesthetic that outstrips restrictive boundaries of genre and other "simplified categories of interpretation" (18). Indeed, Mathes draws inspiration from Zora Neale Hurston's foundational identification of "an improvisational impulse within the sound that exceeds flattened constructions of race and culture." Hurston anticipates and makes possible Imagine the Sound's attunement to a "fusion of sonority, temporality, and narration that has political implications in signaling different orientations toward black historical consciousness" (17). Mathes discovers this fusion within an expansive archive of writers and musicians, including John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Henry Dumas, Larry Neal, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Gloria Naylor. Listening for the sounds that reverberate out through their experimentations with form, Imagine the Sound beckons readers into new phenomenological and historical relations with the Civil Rights Era and its aftermath. In this regard, Mathes's title is an invitation to think and feel—to imagine, in the fullest sense of the verb—literary sound in all of its corporeal density and political vitality. Our contributors take up this invitation by recontextualizing Imagine the Sound within different fields of scholarship and cultural debate. As outlined in the introduction to this issue, each contributor was encouraged to reflect on how the experimental methods and archives of Imagine the Sound might be brought to bear on other areas of inquiry. As is clear from their responses, Mathes opens new horizons for thinking about the sonic politics of black experimentalism in many fields, including hip hop studies, time studies, new phenomenologies of reading, black feminism, queer of color critique, and black radical mysticism, among others. The conversation that unfolds within this forum testifies to multiple kinds of inquiry that experimental aesthetics engender. Far from seeing experimentalism as a step back from the social, each of these essays insists on its imbrication with the lived and historical experiences of people of color. Indeed, they draw inspiration from Mathes's understanding of experimentation as a means to break open the racist epistemologies that enclose black culture. Following Toni Cade Bambara, Mathes teaches us to understand "critical thought as phenomenological and experiential" (149). Collectively, the contributors take up this integration of affect and critique, and they stress that the politics of black experimentalism cannot be understood without an attunement to [End Page 258] its affective dimensions. In Mathes's words, the affective liveliness of black experimentalism engenders "radical openings onto new and evolving paradigms of African American aesthetic form and critical thought" (200). The following essays pursue such radical openings through their own experiments with form and thought. [End Page 259] Copyright © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University

More than violence: UndocuQueers’ narratives of disidentification and world-making in Seattle, Washington, USA

In this article, I re-present the lives of undocumented people away from violence to argue that undocumented queer Latinx migrants, or UndocuQueers, engage in disidentification processes to transform spaces for themselves in the present and imagine more inclusive futures. Disidentification is a practice whereby people, specifically those who are outsiders from mainstream culture, identify with a norm and repurpose it for a different end and interest, performing a new world for themselves. UndocuQueers employ disidentification to traverse spatial configurations of marginalization and exclusion. Centering a narrative focus on UndocuQueers, this article argues that UndocuQueers disidentify with multiple ideas, such as those of the good citizen and good immigrant, to navigate and create spaces to connect with others in Seattle. This article juxtaposes geographic literature alongside queer of color theorizing to first reframe UndocuQueer as an identity process and as a cartography of social practices. I then describe how UndocuQueers’ disidentificatory practices enable them to repurpose norms in a club, an airport, and an agricultural field. UndocuQueers use this geography of disidentification to center relationality and kinship in their visions of a more just future within the realms of education, art, and social justice. I conclude that the vulnerability that UndocuQueers experience does not prevent them from being agents in the production of social, political, and spatial practices. Rather, they are constantly engaged in a project of world-making that is nuanced, open, and relational.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Violent Intersectionalities and Experiences of Marked Arabness in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home

This article proposes an alternative analytical model to examine the shifting devaluation of racialized, classed, and gendered lives in Randa Jarrar's A Map of Home. As the novel depicts powerful instances of nonnormative practices, it lends itself to new analytical approaches for understanding the relationship between power, normativity, and value in Arab American fiction. The intellectual and political frameworks that inform this reading of the novel draw on Arab and Arab American feminisms, women of color feminisms, and queer of color critique. This emphasis marks a shift from existing criticism in proposing to interpret the characters' experiences, not as struggles of identity and belonging but as tense processes of gendered and classed racialization, self-representation, and political determination. In doing so, the discussion moves toward a critique of coercive practices that render Arab and Arab American lives in the United States vulnerable to threats of violence/exploitation in the context of neoliberalism.

Into the Morass: Chesnutt, Antinormativity, and the Queer Politics of Early Jim Crow Literature

AbstractIn this essay I discuss how Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars—through the tropology of spatialization, illustrations of expansive human intimacy, and indictments of the triangulation of antinormatively gendered and sexed bodies as political capital—intervened in sexual respectability politics in the African American uplift culture of the post-Reconstruction era. In doing so I argue that Chesnutt consecrated the “noble strivings” of sexually antinormative African Americans while simultaneously illustrating the way overdetermined sexual identity politics, especially those in the naturalist literary tradition, diminished black life. With Chesnutt as my starting point, I recommend a return to early Jim Crow novels—particularly those written between the years 1900 and 1905—to suggest their progenitorial role regarding recent turns in queer theory and queer of color critique. In doing so I take steps toward a literary genealogy of queer US sex politics that runs from Plessy v. Ferguson and early Jim Crow, into modernism, and down through women of color feminism of the late 1980s before its formal or academic consecration in contemporary US queer theory. I do this to emphasize an important but still-developing ethic in contemporary queer literary studies: the need to center the study of queer representation and politics on more than homosexuality and especially on blackness.

When Queer Theory Meets Tongzhi in “China”

Book Review| August 01 2018 When Queer Theory Meets Tongzhi in “China” Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism, and Media Cultures. Edited by Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. and Schroeder, William F., with Bao, Hongwei. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2015. xiii + 274 pp. Alvin K. Wong Alvin K. Wong Alvin K. Wong is a faculty member in comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google TSQ (2018) 5 (3): 507–513. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-6901356 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Alvin K. Wong; When Queer Theory Meets Tongzhi in “China”. TSQ 1 August 2018; 5 (3): 507–513. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-6901356 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Search Advanced Search In recent years, with globalization becoming a key research agenda across the humanities and social sciences, there have been two concurrent developments within the fields of queer studies and Asian studies. On the one hand, proponents of the model of “global queering” like Dennis Altman view globalization of the US models of gay identity as producing what he terms “ordinary gayness” (1996). On the other hand, many queer theorists critique the Eurocentrism of Altman's position, and their works signal a transnational turn through the models of queer diaspora, queer of color critiques, and critiques of queer liberalism and homonationalism.1 Overall, the transnational turn in queer theory charts alternative modes of belonging by queers who do not center the assimilationist models of US nationalism or the hegemony of Euro-American empires. However, it is fair to say that the critique of... Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Heroism and Comics Form: Feminist and Queer Speculations

Desiring Blackness: A Queer Orientation to Marvel’sBlack Panther, 1998–2016

AbstractThe socially symbolic figure of the superhero comes into close contact with vernacular intellectual critiques of race and modernity through the much-anticipated film adaptation of Marvel’s Black Panther comics. This article analyzes the implications for queer approaches to black popular cultural production of the knowledge practices that inspire Black Panther’s depiction of an African utopia. The intertexts involved include histories, travel writings, and other comics. Focusing on the divergent treatments by authors Christopher Priest (1998–2003) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (2016) of the title character’s black female comrades-in-arms, this reading interrogates how race consciousness and colonial legacies inform the discourses of desire operating within the text. The term desiring blackness describes an orientation to reading that defers to African Americanist and black diasporic considerations to ground the task of interpretation in conditions that elicit compromise among disparate lines of theoretical inquiry: queer phenomenology, decolonial epistemology, Afrofuturism, and queer of color critique.

Queers Read What Now?

This essay reconsiders the common trope of gay and lesbian reading from the vantage of racial difference as an entry point into thinking the possibility of comparative queer of color literary history. While testaments to reading as crucial to gay and lesbian identity formation abound, such reflections and the literary canons they produce do not account for racialized readers or literary traditions. This neglect becomes evident when examining women and queer of color anthologies as well as scenes of reading in three texts published from the advent of explicitly LGBTQ2 of color literature to the present: Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), Craig Womack’s (Muscogee-Creek and Cherokee) novel Drowning in Fire (2001), and Janet Mock’s memoir Redefining Realness (2014). Although these narratives imagine and claim other cultural histories and frames of reference that render queer and trans of color existence and eroticism possible, intelligible, and valuable, they remain within the logic of reading as textual mirroring and self-identification, which precludes comparative modes of reading and occludes the definitional challenges posed by queer of color critique. Returning to Lorde and renovated theories of comparative racialization, I close by gesturing toward the subjective vulnerabilities and (dis)identifications as well as the institutional changes necessary for comparative queer of color literary histories to flourish.

“What do gay Asian men want?”: Desiring otherwise in the work of Richard Fung

A vast literature on queer of color critique, and increasingly on queer of color geographies, has shed greater light on how queer people of color negotiate racialized sexual economies. This paper considers how cultural geography, informed by psychoanalysis and queer of color critique, might contribute additional sophistication and critical insight to conversations about sexual racism – by not only decrying sexual racism, but by shedding light on racialized people's complex forms of psychical agency, as well as political agency, in relation to it. It turns to the work of gay Trinidadian-Canadian artist and scholar Richard Fung, whose films and essays both proffer underrepresented images of racialized queer sexual subjectivities and grapple with the ways in which queer people of color can themselves become enlisted in racial-sexual hierarchies. Providing geographical and historical context for Toronto's stratified racial and sexual politics as they play out in ordinary life, I point to moments in which Fung's films both decry such inequality and meditate on alternatives that detour from dramas of mis/recognition by whiteness.