QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

The Last of Us: Im/Possibilities of Queer Love at the End of the World

2024-01-30T16:27:50-05:00

Queering Dystopia

2024-01-16T16:18:25-05:00

This critical essay braids an ethnographic account of playing through the video game The Last of Us, Part II’s relative utopic enclaves, reflections on the material dynamics organizing the game’s development process, and a narrative performance of player character Ellie’s navigation of the game world. Centering the game’s representation of a commune located in Jackson, Wyoming—the site of the game’s first few hours—the essay grapples with the complexity inherent to media that may aim to inspire queer and anarcho-socialist worldmaking while constructed within the constraints of digital media production’s particular strain of hypercapitalism. Ultimately, I seek to help animate the key role of anticapitalism in the project of queer worldmaking.

Utopia, Apocalypse, and Queer Effacement on The Last of Us

2024-01-21T13:28:26-05:00

The Last of Us invites viewers to contemplate the prospects of a future radically rewritten by disaster. The series offers spectators the opportunity to ponder what life would have been like during the last two decades had the course of history gone in a markedly different direction. This includes many of the legislative and cultural accomplishments of LGBTQ political movements, which no longer exist in the program’s universe. The series maintains a tradition of engaging the tropes of utopia and apocalypse, which have long structured LGBTQ movement rhetoric. The transformative space occupied by these characters, which mirror Foucault’s understanding of heterotopias, is both suspiciously sentimental but also aspirationally satisfying.

The Im(possibility) of Disability at the End of the World in The Last of Us

2024-01-16T13:32:40-05:00

This essay offers a crip reading of the critically acclaimed show, The Last of Us, to argue that the show through its representation of the characters of Bill and Frank posits that there is no future for disability at the end of the world.

Strawberry Fields and Malls of Wonder: Micro-Utopic Moments and Threats to Normativity in The Last of Us

2024-01-17T16:43:56-05:00

This essay analyzes two key episodes in the 2023 HBO series The Last of Us that center queer romance. We approach queerness as a project of hopeful futurity while considering the quotidian moments of micro-utopia within queer relationships as illustrated by characters. Ultimately, we argue that the representation of queer micro-utopias in The Last of Us is significant to a larger queer worldmaking project, as they provide potential models for ways that we too might navigate our material reality, which seemingly teeters on the edge of dystopia more and more every minute. We argue that the representations of queer worldmaking via micro-utopic moments in these two episodes are significant, especially with the inclusion of an interracial lesbian couple. Ultimately, we identify limitations of these micro-utopias through particular attention to both racial-gender dynamics and age, which affect the characters’ experiences of romance, partnership, and futurity.

“For Once We Could Win": Potentiality and the Wild Utopia of The Last of Us

2024-01-22T20:56:45-05:00

This article examines the queer utopian meanings disseminated in the first season of HBO’s The Last of Us. As a piece of speculative fiction, the Last of Us offers audiences alternatives to master-narratives that demarcate what is and what will be along false dichotomies and rigid epistemologies. Speculative narratives, when focused on/created by subaltern agents have the ability to go where the hegemonic can’t/won’t – boundless and indeterminate spaces of what could be. This analysis mostly focuses on Ellie’s wild, punk, and utopian performance(s) because her status as a queer orphaned child opens a significant space for audiences to speculate the real-world parallels of this fiction. Because relationships are of significant importance to this narrative, the actions and embodiments of various settings, plot lines, and other characters are also evaluated in relation to intersections subalternity. Predominantly following José Esteban Muñoz’s conceptualizations of punkness and queer utopia, I advance that through performances of punk and wild embodiments/modalities of being, the Last of Us television series depicts a wild utopia within a dystopia that queers potentiality and futurity.

Can Riley Abel Save Us? Rethinking Queer Potentiality in “The Last of Us”

2024-01-20T03:35:04-05:00

I discuss queer potentiality throughout this body of work, noting that media centering underrepresented bodies in ways that critique and disrupt forms of oppression carry potential possibilities for change. I examine the television series The Last of Us to think through the Strong Black Woman stereotype and queer potentiality. Queer Potentiality is “the lens through which we envision the world beyond what we already know” (Muñoz 2009). I argue that The Last of Us series forecloses the opportunity to re-imagine the world outside of the landscape of white supremacist structures of oppression, effectively quashing queer imagination and curtailing expansive possibilities of the future. This is despite ample potentiality for evoking an imagination toward queer futures that recognizes plural realities through the character Riley Abel. The result of such foreclosure is queer invisibility, death, and reinforced homonormativity.

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics by V. Jo Hsu

2023-02-26T22:26:54-05:00

Jotería Communication Studies

2023-04-26T15:25:11-04:00

The Vulgarity of Caste

2023-03-25T16:00:14-04:00

Shailaja Paik’s “The Vulgarity of caste” tells a story of India’s caste system and its intricate grip on the nation’s cultural and national character. Before we delve deeper into the book, it is necessary to understand the basics of the caste system. Caste is to India what race is to the United States – it organizes and permeates all walks of life.

We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production

2023-02-17T00:45:11-05:00

Squeezing a Juicy Archive of Sticky Objects with Hélène Cixous’s Écriture Matérialiste

2023-05-03T10:54:03-04:00

Hélène Cixous’s ethico-poetic inflections of writing with the body (écriture féminine or women’s writing) have received disciplinary attention in rhetorical studies as political disruptors of androcentric economies of hermetic rhetorical canons. However, her powerful works remain under-explored as imaginative forms of queer word/worldmaking praxis through a transversal pivot to posthumanist rhetorics which challenge anthropocentric, representational accounts of rhetorical agency and distribute rhetorical action to diverse accounts of more-than-human materiality. Hence, I draw on Cixous’s essay “Vivre l’orange/To live the orange” to re-trace her era-defining, feminist rhetoric of writing with the body as a queer, juicy, de-essentialized archive of sticky objects and posthuman subjects inter-weaving a posthumanist rhetoric of writing with matter (materialist writing or écriture matérialiste). I emphasize that Cixous’s attention to the vibrant call of quotidian objects is her sensing, her witnessing of matter as her critical-creative-vibrant peer, her more-than-human, sticky kin. Ultimately, without an amplified rhetorical sensing of object histories which I consider Cixous’s gesture of queer responsiveness, intensified intervention in the ongoing injustices of the world is not ethically possible in Cixousian praxis.

Occasional Belonging

2022-04-08T12:49:05-04:00

This article tells the story of two major scenes of queer East and Southeast Asian nightlife in post-Trump New York City. The first of these is the gaysian scene, housed on the weekends at a Hell’s Kitchen gay club. The second is the slaysian scene, exemplified by a recurring, Brooklyn-based party for queer-identified Asians cleverly titled, Bubble_T. Each is an outpost of queer Asian worldmaking, and by close reading the social expectations and aesthetic sensibilities of both scenes, this essay uses ethnographic methods to reveal the disciplinary protocols that shape the city’s queer Asian nightlife. The article also, in its final section, proposes conditional hospitality as a strategy through which the disciplinary protocols of each of these scenes might be repurposed to transform “queer Asian American” from a merely identitarian formation into a political one. What is it that draws someone to this world of queer Asian nightlife and not that one? And how can whatever that draw is be redeployed for political purposes? The article engages with the work of Lauren Berlant, Erving Goffman, and a range of thinkers in queer Asian American studies in order to advance answers to these questions.

Beyond Reproduction

2022-12-01T13:32:03-05:00

Over the last twenty years, in the wake of Bagemihl’s observation, some progress has been made in the way ethological science engages and interprets sexual behaviors among nonhuman animals. However, when observed in more detail, even among those ethologists keen to recognize the complex behaviors of the animals they observe, there is still a notable degree of heteronormativity at play. Today, the issue lies not so much in denying the ubiquity of non-normative sexual activities and the pleasure they bring to nonhuman animals, but in the fact that the interpretation and the language used by some ethologists in scientific publications indicate that they are locked into a Neo-Darwinian evolutionary paradigm which drives them to systematically consider reproduction to be the single ultimate causation for animal traits and behaviors. Taking a Neo-Aristotelian approach to animal behavior, added to a queer perspective on nonhuman sexual activity, this article will suggest that approaching nonhuman sexual activity without looking for ways to explain it in the context of reproduction could allow ethologists to move away from these heteronormative tropes more easily and open up new ways of accounting for sexual activity in their research design and public communication.