Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Romancing The University: Bipoc Scholars In Romance Novels In The 1980s And Now, Jayashree Kamble

Publications and Research

English-language mass-market romance novels written by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) writers and starring BIPOC protagonists are a small but important group. This article is a comparative analysis of how recent representations of diversity in this sub-set of the genre, specifically the character of the Black academic and the language of racial justice, compare with the first group of BIPOC novels that were published in 1984 (Sandra Kitt’s Adam and Eva and All Good Things as well as Barbara Stephens’s A Toast to Love). In Adrianna Herrera’s American Love Story (2019), Katrina Jackson’s Office Hours (2020), and …

Queer Horror, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

This chapter examines the queer Gothicism of American horror to consider the ways in which marginalized genders and sexualities have been either condemned or covertly endorsed through horror’s textual and visual mediums. In mainstream cis-heteronormative society, queer genders and sexualities have been an abjectified, “horrific” presence, and these mainstream investments represented via horror, as a mode of expression devoted to irruptions of the body, means that the presence of queerness is often registered as an a priori spoliation of bodily norms. Like the term “queer” itself, audiences have often reappropriated the Gothic figures that appear in horror, and some queer …

Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (Preface And Introduction), Paisley Currah

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rhetoric Of The Invisible (Or, How Bisexual People Demand To Be Seen), Olivia Wood

Publications and Research

While the term in its modern usage existed earlier, the word “bisexual” consolidated its meaning as a sexual identity during the 1970s. In the following decades, the term became the source of much consternation in the gay and lesbian communities, in part due to the pressures of political lesbianism and the stigmas of the AIDS epidemic. The first bisexual-specific organizations in the US and the UK formed in the early 1990s, yet bi people continue to struggle for visibility, representation, and acceptance, even within the LGBTQ+ community. For these reasons and others, bisexuality identity presents complicated rhetorical situations for people …

Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

This piece looks at queer characters in the Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016). The film takes place during the heyday of the Hollywood film studio set in 1951 and draws on many films during that time period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Queer Gothic Literature And Culture, Laura Westengard

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Relationships Between Dress And Gender Identity: Lgbtqia+, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki, Kim K. P. Johnson, Rafi Sahanoor, Arsha Attique

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Full-Factorial Randomized Controlled Trial Of Adjunct Couples Hiv Testing And Counseling Components Addressing Drug Use And Communication Skills Among Sexual Minority Male Couples, Tyrel J. Starks, Kory D. Kyre, Christine B. Cowles, Juan Castiblanco, Catherine Washington, Jayelin N. Parker, Erin M. Kahle, Rob Stephenson

Publications and Research

Background: The past decade has seen increasing attention directed to the development of HIV prevention interventions for male couples, driven by epidemiological data indicating that main or primary – rather than causal – partnerships account for a substantial number of HIV infections in this population. Couples HIV testing and counseling (CHTC) has emerged as a standard of care in the US. This protocol describes a study that aims to evaluate the efficacy of two adjunct components to CHTC – communication training (CT) videos and a substance use module (SUM) – to reduce drug use and sexual HIV transmission risk …

Vhs Archives, Committed Media Praxis, And ‘Queer Cinema', Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Committed media praxis is a doing as much as it is a knowing. Queerness is a manner of being as much as it is a politics, theory, or set of modish objects. This chapter about topics that are also processes—queer, media praxis, cinema—performs these across two acts: “Part 1: A Hesitant or Maybe Just Slightly Defiant Preamble,” is a creative unfolding, in the body of the text and as much so in its footnotes, of the author’s “queer feminist media praxis”: “Part 2: VHS Archives” is a demonstration of VHS Archives, a multi-sited, many-yeared project in experimental pedagogy, web-based archival …

Sexuality And Borders In Right Wing Times: A Conversation, Alyosxa Tudor, Miriam Ticktin

Publications and Research

We respond to prompts about the relationships between race, migration, and sexuality, as these intersecting differences have been forced into the same frame by the violent practices of right-wing regimes, and brought into relief by Covid19. Even as we have long known that sexual politics are a way to govern bodies, and to distribute uneven states of vulnerability, we are seeing new incarnations of government. What we aim to point out is how people who are seen as “different” are being attacked, maimed, dispossessed and murdered. But perhaps more importantly, we insist on the specific nature of right-wing times because …

Va Ser Homosexual, Chopin?, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

A hores d’ara, el més sorprenent de tot és que l’homosexualitat de Chopin sigui notícia. Però no hi ha dubte que ho és, i molt. El darrer rebombori l’ha aflamat un documental radiofònic suís de dues hores de durada del pianista i escriptor Moritz Weber en el qual compila i escenifica fragments de cartes homoeròtiques del compositor polonès. (Vegeu, al final d’aquest escrit, algunes referències a la web).

Overture: Love—Love Is A Pink Cake, Or, Queering Chopin In Times Of Homophobia, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Abstract:

An introduction to the three essays included in this section. The article highlights the right to know whether Chopin was gay and contextualizes this inquiry in a very long and pervasive historiographical tradition, essentially two-hundred years long, dedicated to examine Chopin sexual orientation, on the one hand, and on the other the more recent tradition of queering western classical music composers. The main point is not to demonstrate categorically that Chopin was “gay” (a relative, modern identity marker in any case) but rather to highlight the discourses that have presented him as unequivocally heterosexual.

Resumen:

Una introducción a los …

When Are You Going To Catch Up With Me? Shu Lea Cheang With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

“Digital nomad” Shu Lea Cheang and friend and critic Alexandra Juhasz consider the reasons for and implications of the censorship of Cheang’s 2017 film FLUIDØ, particularly as it connects to their shared concerns in AIDS activism, feminism, pornography, and queer media. They consider changing norms, politics, and film practices in relation to technology and the body. They debate how we might know, and what we might need, from feminist-queer pornography given feminist-queer engagements with our bodies and ever more common cyborgian existences. Their informal chat opens a window onto the interconnections and adaptations that live between friends, sex, technology, …

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Twelve Dispatches From The Futures Of Aids, Alexandra Juhasz, Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler

Publications and Research

A Dialogue between Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, and Jessica Whitbread, with Images by Quito Ziegler and an Introduction by Alexandra Juhasz

Setting The Terms Of Our Own Visibility A Conversation Between Sam Feder And Alexandra Juhasz On Trans Activist Media In The United States, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In the summer of 2016, I sat down at my computer and Skyped with my friend and fellow queer media activist Sam Feder about their film, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. What follows is a highly edited transcript of our conversation, paying particular attention to Sam’s core research findings about trans representational history and how their findings might align with their processes and goals as a trans activist media maker committed to telling this complex story.

Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced.

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

Relationships Between Dress And Gender In A Context Of Cultural Change, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki, Kim K. P. Johnson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in …

The Words And Worlds Of Carolee Schneemann And Barbara Hammer With Two Thoughts By Agnes Varda, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Complied past interviews as a memorial

Where Were The Lesbians In The Stonewall Riots? The Women’S House Of Detention & Lesbian Resistance, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Where were the lesbians in the Stonewall Riots? They were jailed in the House of Detention for Women in Greenwich Village, New York City, two blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Lesbians in the Women's House of Detention shouted from the windows to the rioters in the streets below, fueling the momentum of the Stonewall uprising. The women's prison was a site of lesbian confinement and resistance that inspired the 1969 uprising in Greenwich Village.

Polly Thistlethwaite is Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives 1986 – 1997.

Tracing Trans Bodies In Neobaroque Literature, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

This document briefly explores the ways in which trans people have been written through Baroque aesthetics in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various unjust forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. The differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho are analyzed, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being trans in an exclusionary society.

Seropositivo: Queer Solidarity & Survival In Severo Sarduy’S Fiction, Huber Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

With the onset of the HIV epidemic, to prevent transmission, the Cuban government aggressively tested its sexually active population, sending infected people to live in quarantined sanitariums. It is in these establishments, in which an HIV-ridden Sarduy sets his last novel, entitled Pájaros de la playa (1993). Even as the reader witnesses the degradation and disintegration of sickened bodies, which the Nation rejected and discarded, Sarduy provides gender and sexual dissidents with a vision of themselves that does not compromise their queerness when confronting institutions of power. Instead, through subversion, appropriation and solidarity, he enacts a creative exploration of existence …

Poor Queer Studies: Class, Race, And The Field, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This study asks, What are the material conditions under which queer studies is done in the academy? It finds a longstanding association of queer studies with the well-resourced, selective colleges and flagship campuses that are the drivers of class and race stratification in higher education in the U.S. That is, the field of queer studies, as a recognizable academic formation, has been structured by the material and intellectual resources of precisely those institutions that most steadfastly refuse to adequately serve poor and minority students, including poor and minority queer students. In response, “poor queer studies” calls for a critical reorientation …

Something Old, Something New: Historicizing Same-Sex Marriage Within Ongoing Struggles Over African Marriage In South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This article examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian- and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, the author argues that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in …

In-Terracial Conversation, Cheryl Dunye, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Introduction: For Better Or For Worse? Relational Landscapes In The Time Of Same-Sex Marriage, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

As same-sex marriage has become a legal reality in a rapidly growing list of countries, the time has come to assess what this means for families and relationships on the ground. Many scholars have already begun to examine how marriage is helping some same-sex couples, but in this introduction I call for a broader and more critical research agenda. In particular, I argue that same-sex marriage crystallizes a key tension surrounding families and relationships in many contemporary societies. On the one hand, strict family norms are relaxing in many places, allowing more people to form more diverse types of caring …

Queer Solidarities: New Activisms Erupting At The Intersection Of Structural Precarity And Radical Misrecognition, Michelle Fine, María Elena Torre, David M. Frost, Allison L. Cabana

Publications and Research

This article investigates the relationship between exposure to structural injustice, experiences of social discrimination, psychological well being, physical health, and engagement in activist solidarities for a large, racially diverse and inclusive sample of 5,860 LGBTQ/Gender Expansive youth in the United States. Through a participatory action research design and a national survey created by an intergenerational research collective, the “What’s Your Issue?” survey data are used to explore the relationships between injustice, discrimination and activism; to develop an analysis of how race and gender affect young people’s vulnerabilities to State violence (in housing, schools and by the police), and their trajectories …