QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Book Review of Queer Nightlife. Edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramόn Rivera-Servera

2021-08-27T12:20:09-04:00

Ann Arbor, US: University of Michigan Press. 2021; 1 + 297 pp., $95.00 hardcover; $39.95 paper.

Review of Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900

2022-01-17T01:48:56-05:00

Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900. By Jessica Hinchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; xviii + 322 pp., $32.99 paper, $26.00 e-book.

New Queer Horror Film and Television. Edited by Darren Elliott-Smith and John Edgar Browning. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2021, 256 pp., $45.00 paper, $45.00 e-book.

2021-11-28T21:08:47-05:00

Review of Gay Men and Feminist Women in the Fight for Equality: “What Did You Do During the Second Wave, Daddy?” By D. Travers Scott.

2021-07-05T20:16:37-04:00

Review of:

Gay Men and Feminist Women in the Fight for Equality: “What Did You Do During the Second Wave, Daddy?” By D. Travers Scott.

Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonisms and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. by Eric A. Stanley (review)

2021-12-20T18:47:42-05:00

Networks of Queer Care

2021-09-16T16:49:32-04:00

Review of

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha. Vancouver, Canada: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. $15.63 paper, $10.49 Kindle, $25.99 audio CD.

Forget Burial: HIV Kinship, Disability, and Queer/Trans Narratives of Care. By Marty Fink. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021; pp. xvii + 202. $29.95 paper, $78.00 hardcover, $28.45 Kindle.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). By Dean Spade. London, New York: Verso, 2020. $13.49 paper, $9.99 Kindle.

Trans Care. By Hil Malatino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. $10.00 paper, $3.79 Kindle.

Book Review: Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures

2021-11-28T18:24:05-05:00

Hip Hop's Early Introduction: Queer Readings of Black Male 'Rape' in Popular Culture

2022-11-07T09:53:50-05:00

This essay examines popular media claims that hip hop artist Lil Wayne and Chris Brown were raped. I emphasize the word claims because their experiences became contested sites over whether black men could be considered legitimate subjects of rape. Considering how Lil Wayne's narrative of his early childhood sexual experience rendered him as an impossible subject of rape and how Brown's narrative interpellated him as a raped subject, I demonstrate how historical discourses of racial liberalism overdetermine black men's sexual stories. Countering racialized and sexualized narratives of deviance and injury that circumscribe hip hop masculinites, I advance a queer mode of reading that emphasizes the radical potential of illegibility.

Mx. Ph.D. Student

2022-08-02T16:53:22-04:00

With hir dying breath, communist thinker Leslie Feinberg purportedly uttered, "Hasten the Revolution!" (Pratt 2014). As hir dying words insist, hir life was characterized by political struggle. The notion of hastening this revolution announces the twin imperatives of Feinberg's thought: the conjoined projects of identity formation coaltion building. For Feinberg, the concrete possibility of revolutionary change demanded the forging of alliances among those who do not share a common identity but, rather, those who share a common goal of emancipation. Any robust understanding of Feinberg's queer communism must be necessarily be thought of as intersectional because, like intersectionality, both indentity transformation and coalition building accomodate difference rather than impose obligatory forms of political subjectivity. Ultimately, I propose that Feinberg might be best thought of as a theorist of biopolitics whose theories about intersectionality and alliance building are a strategy to mobilize against the forces of neoliberal capitalism and biopower.

“There’s Power in that Y”

2022-01-13T14:21:18-05:00

Portmanteau identities, such as Gaymer (gay-gamer), can shed light on the important social work that identity labels do for those who choose to adopt them. In this article, I analyze how “Gaymer” is not just a convenient portmanteau, but an identity used to manage stigma and advance inclusivity for people inhabiting identities often viewed as mutually exclusive. I demonstrate this with data gathered through actual world ethnographic research with Gaymers at a monthly meetup in Houston, Texas and virtual world ethnographic research with two Facebook Groups. I found that Gaymers are often excluded from both the gaming community and the mainstream gay community, however, rather than try to minimize contradictions in their identity, they seek to create contradictions by gaming in gay bars, performing in drag shows as video game characters, and advocating for more inclusivity at gaming conventions, among other tactics. My results show a critical need to move beyond an examination of multiple stigmas existing towards a study of how they interact. I build upon Russian linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s concepts of privative and equipollent markedness to show how the interaction between “gay” and “gamer” has resulted in “Gaymer” being created and performed as what I call an equipollent identity. Recognizing the existence of equipollent identities, like Gaymer, invites many important avenues of study of the positive and productive ways in which stigmatized individuals manage stigma and build community, which are not limited only to scholars of gaming or queerness.

Becoming Max, Athena, and Kristin: Transnormative Nationalism Territorializing Transtextually with the Post-Post-Gender-Cyborg Woman in Dark Angel and Battlestar Galactica

2021-03-18T11:44:35-04:00

Several scholars have theorized the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics by examining nonfictional texts from 2007 to the present. In contrast, this article analyzes interactions among nationalism, transgender politics, and fictional texts, showing that the reterritorialization of cis- as transnormative nationalism began transtextually as early as 2000. The argument contributes a more comprehensive explanation of not only the relation between homonationalism and transgender politics but also the reterritorialization of normative nationalist assemblages. The supporting evidence is a US science fiction television figure that the article names the post-post-gender cyborg woman. This figure is incarnated in Max, a transgenic woman in Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2002), and Sharon, a female humanoid Cylon (or robot) in Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi Channel, 2004–2009). The analysis considers the characters’ production, texts, and reception. That data is interpreted through a theoretical frame that introduces the term transnormative nationalism to foreground an assemblage that intertwines the characters’ discipline into a transnormative subject position with the texts’ American exceptionalism. Concurrently, the concept of transtextuality facilitates theorization of how the texts interact with “real-world” politics.

Making a Reality: Inclusive Wedding Vendors and Extramarket Morality

2022-09-18T13:09:09-04:00

This article analyzes a series of interviews with queer-positive wedding apparel and style providers. Vendors’ descriptions of their relationships with clients reveal a prioritization of embodied intersubjectivity. We explore vendors’ construction of themselves as providing respite, in the wedding apparel production process, from clients’ repertoire of experiences of exclusion in a hetero- and cisnormative fashion industry. The intercorporeal ethics at work in the relationship between vendors and clients suggests the persistence of what Wendy Brown has called ‘extramarket morality’ inside the wedding attire marketplace.

It Gets Better, But

2022-08-02T16:43:41-04:00

A thematic analysis of interviews with lesbian, gay, and transgender US athletes who were out while playing varsity collegiate sports is examined for LGBTQ and athletic identifications. Viewing being out as an ongoing process, we draw upon theoretical perspectives of common in-group identity model and superordinate identity, adding the concept of entanglement, to describe relations between identifications. Participants described athletic identifications as superordinate to and predating LGBTQ identifications. Before coming out, they anticipated conflict. Being out, they experienced more implicit than explicit homonegativity. Identifications were described as entangled in supportive ways but conditioned upon prioritizing athletic identifications as superordinate.

Thinking Trans/Sex

2021-07-09T13:00:40-04:00

My gender identity is trans- fag bottom boy. I characterize my trans- masculinity as a technologically enabled creation that gives embodied form to the fantasies that structure my desire. I cannot think my gender without recourse to my sexuality. In fact, I conceive of my transness as wholly motivated by the sexual. According to most academic work in Transgender Studies and many political and community discourses, however, I am mistaken at best, and at worst, I am an impossibility. Gender and sexuality are commonly maintained as separate phenomena that emerge from distinct ontological and epistemological foundations. In this paper, I trace the historical emergence of the contemporary conceptual frame that holds that gender and sexuality are separate aspects of being. I then argue that the separation of gender and sexuality is not a necessary or sufficient condition for transness. Finally, I discuss the consequences of not considering even the possibility that some trans- people cannot separate their felt sense of gender and sexuality.

Looking for Pauli, Pauli Murray's Trans Poetics

2021-09-09T13:54:53-04:00

Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century black writer, priest, and legal thinker who has been, for the last two decades or so, the subject of a recovery project. As a result, Murray is now regarded as a crucial player in the history of civil rights litigation; in U.S. feminist organizing and theology; and in black feminist critique in relation to all of the above. Further, the recovery of Murray’s contributions has coincided with the narration of Murray as someone who was (or might have been, in another time) trans. Following the lead of Issac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), and focusing on Murray’s life and work as a poet, this meditative essay considers Pauli Murray as an enduring figure in and for a black trans literary past.

Pandemic Conversation

2023-05-05T14:56:44-04:00