QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking

Decolonize Drag, a Book Review

DeVante Love — 2025-09-17

Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource by and for Transgender Communities

Peyton Bonine — 2025-09-17

Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling by Jaya Keaney (review)

Drew Trinidad — 2025-09-17

Review of Feast by Ina Carino

Kaitlin Hoelzer — 2025-09-17

Book review of Feast by Ina Carino, a queer Filipinx American poet.

Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality by Ela Przybylo (review)

Nicholas Colecio — 2025-09-17

A Practice of Proliferation: Anjali Arondekar’s Abundance and Archival Engagement as Timepass

Namrata Verghese — 2025-09-17

Brown and Down

Josue David Cisneros — 2025-09-17

This essay analyzes several memoirs written by undocumented migrant activist artists to understand how they narrate and context racialized, queer, and undocumented peoples' alienation. I explore the social and affective condition of being "alien," as narrated in these works, and strategies through which that marginalization is negotiated, survived, and resisted. The dialectical notion of "browness" or "alienness" drawn from the work of José Muñoz, Sara Ahmed, and scholars of undocu-queer rhetoric is central to this analysis. These works move from the negation of browness caused by the fragmenting violence of white, heteronormative citizenship, to the negation of the negation, where browness rhetorically problematizes both the conditions that cause queer migrants' alienation and the predominant means of achieving disalienation through white hetero-/homonormativity. I trace the ways that these memoirs react to the stultifying normativity of liberal immigration politics through specific rhetorical and aesthetic strategies that exceed demands for visibility, recognition, and presence. Instead, they dwell in experiences of estrangement, celebrate queer forms of intimacy and community, and explore ways to convert "alien affects" into forms of solidarity, survival, and resistance. Through this analysis of queer and undocumented migrant memoirs, the essay contributes to our understanding of immigration politics, resistance, and coalitions rhetorics of "browness."

#DragIsAProtest

Ian Rafael Ramirez — 2025-09-17

As the Philippines faced one of the strictest and the most militarised COVID-19 lockdowns in the world, digital drag performances and online live shows provided a space for drag artists to entertain their audience and earn income through tips. For Filipino non-binary drag artist Mrs Tan, the digital space also served as an opportunity to perform their politics. In this article, I explore how online drag became a site for performing calls to action through a critique of “online limos” (literally online begging) – an anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment used to degrade live online drag shows. The two performances produced by Mrs Tan, Tandemonium and Dancing On My Own, were a response to such events. They particularly re-produce “online limos” to emphasise the demands of drag artists in times of crisis. In this article, I examine how these digital drag performances enact what I call digital queer performativity or the online practices of queer artists that appear to be re-productions but rather aim to mess with and dismantle oppressive power structures. I argue that both performances are imbued with queer political potentialities that make visible the demands and worldmaking project of the queer community in a time of interlaced crises: to enact care for one another, re-imagine what a “new normal” should look like, and to pay attention and address their struggles.

“Like No One I Ever Saw Before”

Mary Maxfield — 2025-09-17

This piece examines the concept of a “ring of keys moment,” a personal encounter with a queer person that creates in the subject a felt sense of queer identity as possible. It traces the “ring of keys” concept across a range of media, including the 2015 musical Fun Home, which introduced the term; the 2006 Alison Bechdel memoir that musical adapts; and contemporary LGBTQ conversations of the “ring of keys” experience, such as those on the 2017-2020 podcast Nancy. Through close readings of these texts, the article challenges popular portrayals of “ring of keys moments” as pre-existing events, arguing instead that the discourse creates the moments it appears to describe. Ultimately, “Like No One I Ever Saw Before” considers “ring of keys” as an imaginative theory of queer subject formation, in which the self and the recognition of another are inextricable, co-constitutive processes. It further suggests that “ring of keys” offers a model of queer temporality that can be used to reimagine queer life in the past, present, and future as co-constitutive.