Queer Theory

Peter Bailey coined the term "parasexuality" to refer to a specific mode of Victorian sexuality and to address the repressed/vulgar dichotomy of scholarship around Victorian sexuality. I take the same basic concept and bring it into a contemporary context, in which it has use both as a mode of sexuality and as a way of conceptualising power relations and structures.

Published as part of an exhibition at ARTSPACE NZ, September 2014

This article considers whether ‘straight’ identified researchers can produce anti-normative knowledge. This question derives from debates around what (if any) contribution ‘straight’ researchers can make to queer theory/research. While recognizing that political and ethi- cal decisions are integral to this discussion, I focus on the epistemological implications of straight researchers’ participation in queer theory/research. This discussion grapples with a wider issue within identity politics around the participation of researchers who are regarded as representing the ‘norm’. I trouble the relationship between identity and know- ledge by arguing that sexual identity does not determine the production of anti-normative knowledge. Insights from queer theory are employed to interrogate the power of hetero- normativity in generating ‘normative’ knowledge, and elucidating whether these practices are invested in particular sexual identities.

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people’s use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for young people, this paper recasts the debate’s ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and a relational materialist notion of ‘more-than- human’ are drawn on. By recognising sexuality-as-assemblage, it is possible to see more-than-human elements (such as mobile phones) as implicated in the becoming of sexuality at school. This conceptualisation implies new texture and dimensionality to the wider project of (re)producing sexual meanings and identities at school. It also necessitates acknowledging an ontologically different understanding of the human- non-human divide, that decentres young people and/or phones as to ‘to blame’ for ‘negative’ practices like sexting. Instead, agency manifests via the intra-activity that occurs when mobile phones and young people are in-relation.

Resumo: O presente artigo apresenta uma leitura analítico-interpretativa do conto “Aqueles dois”, de Caio Fernando Abreu, centrando-se na articulação de elementos que constroem, na narrativa, uma (possível) homossexualidade dos protagonistas, bem como na repressão heteronormativa que estigmatiza tais personagens.

Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of the short story “Aqueles dois”, by Caio Fernando Abreu. The articulation of elements that might suggest the homosexuality of the main characters is stressed in this analysis, as well as the heteronormativity that stigmatizes them.

Louisa May Alcott’s work is among the best known and most loved in American literature, especially Little Women and its spirited and unconventional Jo March, a fiction-writing tomboy representing Alcott herself.  Almost as well known nowadays is Alcott’s sensational fiction, such as “Behind a Mask,” which has been widely anthologized since being first published to widespread surprise and delight in the 1970s. While feminists have written much about the ambivalent gender politics in Little Women as well as the racy potboilers, and recently queer critics have begun to claim Jo as one of their own, this essay explores what feminism and queer theory reveal together and can say to each other along the way as they are brought to bear on Alcott’s lesser known work, including notably the two novels that do not fall in either category of sentimental nor sensational fiction, Moods and Work. The essay demonstrates that both approaches bring slightly different issues and details into focus and can benefit from a combined reading.

This volume is about the education of gender and sexualities, which is to say it explores how gender and sexuality identities and differences get constructed through the process of education and «schooling». Wittingly or not, educational institutions and educators play an important role in «normalizing» gender and sexuality differences by disciplining, regulating, and producing differences in ways that are «intelligible» within the dominant or hegemonic culture. To make gender and sexuality identities and differences intelligible through education is to understand them through the logic of separable binary oppositions (man-woman, straight-gay), and to valorize and privilege one normalized identity within each binary (man, straight) and simultaneously stigmatize and marginalize the «other» identity (woman, gay). Educational institutions have been set up to normalize the construction of gender and sexual identities in these ways, and this is both the overt and the «hidden» curriculum of schooling. At the same time, the «postmodern» times in which we live are characterized by a proliferating of differences so that the binary oppositional borders that have been maintained and policed through schooling, and that are central to maintaining highly inequitable power relations and rigid gender roles, are being challenged, resisted, and in other ways profoundly destabilized by young people today.

Cameron C. McKee (Northwestern University) and Shane Duncan (San Francisco State University) engage with various gay comics series by the Chicago-based Étienne (Domingo Stephen Orejudos) to argue that the tongue-in-cheek humor of camp was (and remains) a central strategy for the construction of queer identity against the oppression of heteronormativity.

This presentation articulates a genealogy of the transgender child by returning to the endocrinological and eugenic definition of sex and invention of gender in the twentieth century medical sciences. I resituate the history of endocrinology and its interest in the growing child’s body as part of a broader medical and political strategy of positive eugenics that saw in hormones and the endocrine system the promise of an unlimited enhancement of human stock or species.  Children’s bodies, to this discourse living examples of recapitulative theories of human evolution, served as crucial sites for a set of utopian and socialist eugenic aspirations in interwar Europe whose techniques were inherited by the founding American doctors of transgender medicine in the mid twentieth century.  While most contemporary doctors and scholars date the emergence of the transgender child to the 1990s or even more recently, this genealogy emphasizes what that periodization overlooks and offers a surprising history that details how children were treated in the United States as ‘transsexual’ beginning in the 1960s.

A queer theory inspired perspective is valuable not only for broadening the scope of archaeological interpretation and our understanding of past lived experiences, but also for informing an archaeological pedagogy which expands the diversity of authoritative viewpoints in the discipline. Field schools, as one of the most central aspects of archaeological training, have the potential to either reaffirm heteronormative structures which obscure non-conforming persons and viewpoints or to promote inclusive practices that can benefit the field by expanding the range of experiences, perspectives, and voices in the archaeological discussion. This paper will discuss specific ways in which an explicitly queer-informed field school acts to create a safe space where inclusion is based on analytic archaeological potential rather than correct conformation to perceived social norms.

This hybrid essay/narrative attempts to give an account of the survival of a “queer” subject, specifically a trans child living in Lima, Peru, in the 1950s and 1960s. My theoretical claims may be simple, but the survival of this trans child was anything but simple. The essay argues that in the survival of this child, friendship played a vital role.

Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Rather than focusing on race and nation as main categories of analysis, Ponce uses a queer diasporic reading to consider the multiple audiences for Filipino literature. In doing so, he explores alternatives to the nation as the basis for an imagined community, and focuses instead on sexual politics and the transpacific tactics of reading.

Diese Veranstaltung versucht einige historische und aktuelle
Kunstpraxen vorzustellen, die gegen jegliches nur (un)denkbare
Aktionsfeld in Lateinamerika vorgehen um heteronormative
Subjektivitäten zu verändern. Ausgehend von einer offenen Kartografie und der Arbeit der brasilianischen Performance Gruppe Solange Tô Aberta diskutieren der Künstler Pedro Costa, die Künstlerin und Aktivistin Marissa Lôbo sowie die Forscherin Fernanda Nogueira die Möglichkeiten eines aktuellen künstlerischen Genderaktivismus. Roberta Lima, Künstlerin, hat ihre Promotion in Philosophie an der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien im Jahr 2013 abgeschlossen.