White Heteronormativity Research Articles

They don’t owe you their story: conceptualizing racialized queer care through protective spaces

Guided by a love politic and centrifugal intersectionality we demonstrate how whiteness, homonormative whiteness, and white heteronormativity alienates racialized queer students in both 2SLGBTQ + and racialized counterspaces within the university. The tensions experienced by racialized queer students, do not stem from the existence of these spaces, rather they are rooted within institutional notions of diversity. It is through this examination that we present our conceptualization of protective space. Protective space builds from the reconceptualization of safe spaces as defined by the Roestone Collective. Protective spaces are rooted in a love politic and involves moving forward from guilt to meaningful action embedded in accountability to create love-centered solutions. These principles can be used in both individual action and collective organizing. The conceptualization mainly builds on the experiences of sexually diverse identities; therefore, we encourage researchers and practitioners to expand and build upon this work.

Staging Intersectionality

This essay follows the making of a queer of colour aesthetic space in the form of a music video entitled Brother, within a largely homogenous white University. The video places white heteronormativity on the periphery whilst intersectional brown bodies take the centre. It inverts racist and fetishistic tropes in music video culture and reverses the white male gaze. The making of the video created a small brown island in a sea of white as a vision of a future brown space protected from the ubiquitous, ambivalently festishizing white gaze; a gaze that projects its own narrative onto bodies of colour. It puts forward a thesis of racial agency, whereby the performance of “race” is scripted by the person of colour and not provoked by the construct of whiteness.

Blak, Bi+ and Borderlands: An Autoethnography on Multiplicities of Indigenous Queer Identities Using Borderland Theory

Indigenous queer people often experience a conflict in identity, feeling torn between long-standing cultures and new LGBTIQA+ spaces; however, conflicts are being reframed by new generations of Indigenous queer academics who consider decolonising ideas about white heteronormativity. The following autoethnography of my own Indigenous queer journey (muru) uses narrative analysis to explore the challenges of living between worlds as well as the difficulties in gaining acceptance from multiple cultures. This story, like many others, highlights the power of narrative as it reflects the nuanced experiences of Indigenous queer people with identity multiplicity via the application of borderland theory. The narrative analysis forefronts the wide impact of internalised phobias (homophobia, biphobia, and racism) and its impact on performative self-expression of sexual identity, self-sabotage, institutionalized racism and shadeism, and community acceptance, particularly for bi+ sexual identities. This article will explore existing literature which illustrates how navigating the multiplicity of identities may result in poorer social and emotional wellbeing, particularly for Indigenous queer youth. The article concludes with final comments and suggests future directions in mixed method research with Indigenous queer Australians to better understand and improve their social and emotional wellbeing.

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel

"James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) as a Transgressive White-Life Novel. In the wake of the Second World War, American literature saw the rise of a type of novel that is little known today: the white-life novel. This type of novel is written by black writers but describes white characters acting in a mostly white milieu. While at the time African-American critics praised this new way of writing as a sign of maturity, many have since criticized it for being regressive by pandering to white tastes. This paper sets out to analyze the most famous of these novels, namely James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). It is my contention that Giovanni’s Room connects blackness and queerness through the use of visual metaphors in the novel, disrupting thus the post-war consensus on ideals of white masculinity. The novel, while seemingly abandoning black protagonists, enacts a subtle critique of white heteronormativity akin to Baldwin’s own positioning within American thought of the post-war era. Keywords: blackness, James Baldwin, post-war fiction, queer, white-life novel "

Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada

Reviewed by: Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada Katherine Dugan Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 296 pp. $32.00. When Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada stepped into the basement of the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she stepped into a world where Catholic masculinity is constructed and sustained. As she argues in Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotion in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this world is "how religious men come to understand themselves and be recognized as men" (2). This Catholic manhood entails tattoos that articulate religious commitments and the work of the annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dance of the Giglio. Framing her intervention, Maldonado-Estrada points out that the nuances of Catholic men's lives are understudied: "[i]t is odd to say it, but laymen are largely invisible in histories of Catholic devotional life. Or they are foils, by contrast heightening the piety of women" (10). This book enters a long conversation about Catholic devotionalism, which has historically centered women's experiences. Turning to men's devotional lives, this book charts the nature of man-making devotional labor. The structure of this book moves swiftly through arguments about the locations of religious practice, the role of labor in prayer, the place of money in festivals, questions about public performance of masculinities, and analysis of gentrification and the shifting nature of [End Page 81] urban religion. Among the many contributions this text makes to Catholic studies, three are especially poignant. First, in this book, devotionalism takes place in a relatively unexplored set of registers: bodies, joking, work, men's relationships and male homosocial spaces. Maldonado-Estrada posits that the men's tattoos are "devotional objects" that mediate relationship between themselves and the divine (48). Likewise, the aesthetics of this devotionalism are such that the men embody a "devotion that allows men to transgress, to play with vibrant aesthetics . . . and white heteronormativity" (54). This expands where scholars locate devotionalism: from women's spaces to men's; from inside churches to outside; and from subdued to vibrant aesthetics. Second, Maldonado-Estrada's attention to nuances of her ethnographic method is a model. While she notes that a woman in men's spaces should not have to talk or think so much about her gendered positionality (17), the way she does unfold the layers of her own positionality offers a thoughtful contribution to questions about method. She refuses to shy away from the way her female body, her Puerto Rican identity, her ability to paint, and her willingness to joke with the men in these pages built her method. During her years of fieldwork, Maldonado-Estrada spent countless hours building ethnographic relationships with the men who constitute the "lifeblood" (210) of this festival. This is how she "made real friendships that exceed the language of methodology" and "became a woman researcher who belonged in the masculine spaces of the feast" (104). The craft and style of her self-reflective negotiations enrich the work. Third, Lifeblood of the Parish is also a portrait of the shifting landscape of urban Catholicism in the early twenty-first century. This is about gentrification, changing parish demographics, and an urban Catholicism that is tied to Italian practices. When Maldonado-Estrada turns her descriptive eye to what she calls "public masculinity" (143) on display in the feast, she argues that the "muscle" of the Dance of the Giglio facilitates a normative heterosexuality through homosocial spaces (163). That space asserts a particular interpretation of Italian American identity onto the streets of Williamsburg—even among the changing demographics of the neighborhood (209). The focus on laymen's lives addresses a significant lacuna in Catholic studies. Maldonado-Estrada's decision to focus on masculinities is an important intervention: we all know women are around the edges of these men's devotional lives, but that is where they remain for the men in this book. This is a book and a story about men's lives, marked as men—the accompanying women fall outside the frame...

Vivência Negra: Black Lesbians Affective Experiences in Brazilian Gynecology

ABSTRACTIn Salvador-Bahia, many Black lesbians are deeply concerned about how gynecologists dismiss or demean their sexuality, which often leads to prolonged lapses in gynecological care. Black lesbians who identify as virgins in particular are confronted with challenges that reveal entrenched normativity within the gynecological clinic. In this article, I examine Black lesbian virginity as a site of vivência Negra (Black woman’s existence or lived experience) during the gynecological encounter. In response to such encounters, Black lesbians assess their inhumane treatment by way of anti-racist knowledge production. The resulting anti-racist evaluations serve to identify and decenter white heteronormativity in gynecology.

The maintenance of white heteronormativity in porn films that use Australia as an exotic location

ABSTRACTExotic locations are used in pornography to generate distance between the audience and the explicit content. The ‘pornoexotic’ maintains white heteronormativity through presenting the exotic as a zone of anomie, where taboo desires can be satisfied. This article examines Australia as a unique pornoexotic location through four pornographic feature films. The Australian pornoexotic functions to geographically and symbolically distance the viewer while simultaneously presenting bodies and desires that do not deviate from white, heteroporn standards. It achieves this through a focus on the landscape, through the character arc of a coerced outsider and through the symbolic investment in but absence of Aboriginal people. The invisibility of Aboriginal people in porn can be contextualized through the ongoing neocolonial measures restricting Aboriginal people’s access to pornography. This article examines one of the most recent neocolonial measures regulating Aboriginal sexuality – the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which banned pornography in a number of Aboriginal communities.

Domesticating the Aliens Within: Sentimental Benevolence in Late-Nineteenth-Century California Magazines

This essay analyzes the workings of romantic love and its legal institution, marriage, as signs of universal humanity in fictional representation of Chinese immigrant women in two important California magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Overland Monthly and the Land of Sunshine , including short stories written by Asian American/Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton. Reading these fictional narratives in the contexts of the period's prevailing trope of "yellow slavery," antimiscegenation legislation that codified white heteronormativity, and the magazines' expansionist rhetoric, I argue that these narratives constitute a "culture of benevolence"-sentimental emancipatory discourse shaped by U.S. women's reform movements-which has been integral to the racial projects of the U.S. nation and empire. By tracing the tension between the trope of "yellow slavery" and marriage, I situate my analysis within the broader shared ideological structure and connected histories that racialized African Americans and Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century all the while foregrounding how heteronormative narratives about Chinese immigrant labor produced the period's shifting boundaries between the domestic and the foreign. I argue that while sentimental narratives attempt to address injustices by "humanizing" the Chinese, that is, by imagining their inclusion in universal humanity through heteronormative love and marriage, the very terms of heteronormativity paradoxically rationalize the logic of exclusionary laws, obscure imperial historic power relations, and undermine the eligibility of the Chinese for citizenship, socially, culturally, and politically. These narratives thus expose the limits of emancipatory discourses that posit heteronormative love and marriage as the passages to full membership within U.S. capitalist and imperial relations.

Texts of our Institutional Lives: From Transaction to Transformation: (En)Countering White Heteronormativity in “Safe Spaces”

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

"What a Difference a Gay Makes": Queering the Magic Negro

The "Magic Negro" is a term coined in the 1950s describing Hollywood's portrayal of black men as characters who, although disabled, have supernatural powers that allow them to save lost or broken white men. Here, I compare this "gospel" with that of the Fab 5 (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), who transform disheveled, uncultured straight men into "chick magnets." This comparison concludes that racial and sexual minorities are acceptable in American popular television and film as long as the salvation and redemption motif of the American myth prevails and white heteronormativity remains unchallenged and privileged.

The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and SexualityLynda NeadLynda Nead Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 15, Number 2Winter, 1990 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494586 Views: 167Total views on this site Citations: 20Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1990 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Shari M. Huhndorf Scenes from the Fringe: Gendered Violence and the Geographies of Indigenous Feminism, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no.33 (Mar 2021): 561–587.https://doi.org/10.1086/712045GREGORY DA SILVA BALTHAZAR, FABIANA DE AMORIM MARCELLO Corpo, gênero e imagem: desafios e possibilidades aos estudos feministas em educação, Revista Brasileira de Educação 23, no.00 (Sep 2018).https://doi.org/10.1590/s1413-24782018230047Jamie Jelinski Without Restriction? Inuit Tattooing and the Dr. Wyn Rhys-Jones Photograph Collection at the NWT Archives, Visual Anthropology 30, no.44 (Jul 2017): 344–367.https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2017.1340065Tim Gregory The maintenance of white heteronormativity in porn films that use Australia as an exotic location, Porn Studies 4, no.11 (Jan 2017): 88–104.https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1262276 Introduction, (Jan 2014): 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-001 Archives of Pain, (Jan 2014): 27–58.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-002 Speaking Sex/Speaking Race, (Jan 2014): 59–82.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-003 Race-Pleasures, (Jan 2014): 83–106.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-004 Laughing Matters, (Jan 2014): 107–127.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-005 On Refusal, (Jan 2014): 128–145.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-006 Conclusion, (Jan 2014): 146–151.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-007 Notes, (Jan 2014): 153–179.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-008 Bibliography, (Jan 2014): 181–211.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822377030-009Marina Wallace The Fluidity of Acceptability: Seduced by Art and Pornography and the Kinsey Institute Collection, (Jan 2013): 274–286.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367938_15Klara Arnberg Under the Counter, Under the Radar? The Business and Regulation of the Pornographic Press in Sweden 1950–1971, Enterprise & Society 13, no.22 (Feb 2015): 350–377.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1467222700011228Klara Arnberg Under the Counter, Under the Radar? The Business and Regulation of the Pornographic Press in Sweden 1950–1971, Enterprise and Society 13, no.22 (Feb 2015): 350–377.https://doi.org/10.1093/es/khr080Lucy Blaney Incomplete Resistance, Feminist Media Studies 11, no.44 (Dec 2011): 433–449.https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2011.555962Stephen Brooke War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s, The Journal of British Studies 45, no.0101 (Dec 2012): 118–138.https://doi.org/10.1086/497058 References, (Jan 2000): 379–462.https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012487460-2/50013-1Melanie G. Wiber Undulating women and erect men: Visual imagery of gender and progress in illustrations of human evolution, Visual Anthropology 7, no.11 (Jan 1994): 1–20.https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.1994.9966633

One ‘Body/Nation’: Pathology and Cultural Citizenship in Australia

Particular bodies within the Australian nation can be seen to threaten to disrupt and destabilise dominant notions of cultural citizenship. Understood through intricate intersections of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, ‘Australianness’–and its correlation to the geographical nation–is constantly monitored. Crucial here is the manner in which boundaries of whiteness, and ‘true Australianess’, are reconstituted, fuelling avoidance of the ambiguities of national belonging and ensuring the enduring pathologisation of the ‘un’Australian. In particular, discursive associations between HIV/AIDS and the ‘foreign’ as perceived contaminates to the nation operate to reinforce these understandings. Here, the threat of disease both informs, and is fuelled by, connotations to ‘the foreign’, often conflating the two in very literal ways. Discourses of pathology correlate here with visceral connotations of pollution and darkness. As such, HIV/AIDS has become a crucial site whereby cultural fears of the ‘non-normal’ coalesce; a meeting point for all manner of perceived threats to the ‘white heteronormativity’ of a healthy Australia. The relationship between Australian citizens–rendered knowable and safe through normalising hegemonies–and the nation becomes one of identification through these signifying practices of fetishised affiliation. The body is implicated in all aspects of these complicated matrices of identity markings, revealing the fluid and often contradictory manner in which the nation’s cultural borders are articulated, assumed and performed, on, and through, the body. Indeed, as the taxonomies of national identity are reiterated and reaffirmed through discourses of the everyday, the boundaries rendering distinct those deemed truly ‘Australian’, by virtue of cultural appropriateness, become increasingly important in the desire to maintain the ‘essential’ nature of national belonging.