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Full-Text Articles in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Nietzsche And Emancipatory Politics: Queer Theory As Anti-Morality, C. Heike Schotten Dec 2018

Nietzsche And Emancipatory Politics: Queer Theory As Anti-Morality, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

This article offers an emancipatory appropriation of Nietzsche’s work, making the case that the founding of the field of queer theory exemplifies and proffers a liberatory Nietzschean praxis of anti-morality. This argument requires reading Nietzsche’s work from the perspective of the oppressed and (re-)reading queer theory as part of the project of critical theory.


Transfiguring Desire: Divining The Origin Of Species, Sonny Nordmarken, Samuel Ace Aug 2017

Transfiguring Desire: Divining The Origin Of Species, Sonny Nordmarken, Samuel Ace

Sonny Nordmarken


In this piece, we combine autoethnographic and poetic methods/genres to examine intimate and social experiences we have had as two transmasculine queers with complex sexual and gender histories in an intergenerational relationship. If queerness/transness is a “species,” our title, playing on Darwin, promises an answer to oft-asked problematic questions of queer/trans origins. Refusing to address this question, we instead turn Darwin on himself and examine intimate moments in our lives to show how we have experienced the constant formation and personal evolution of desire and identity. Tracing memories reaching back 28 years for one of us and 58 years for …


Laramie 2.0: Journey Of A Queer Professor, Eric D. Teman J.D., Ph.D. Mar 2016

Laramie 2.0: Journey Of A Queer Professor, Eric D. Teman J.D., Ph.D.

Eric D Teman, J.D., Ph.D.

Through autoethnographic poetry, I take the reader on a journey through my experience of moving to Laramie, Wyoming, to become faculty at the University of Wyoming. As a gay male who is still haunted by the 1998 brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, I engage in storytelling: relaying my personal experiences of living in modern-day Laramie, showing the reader my fears, obstacles, and revelations through prose.


Homonationalism: From Critique To Diagnosis, Or, We Are All Homonational Now, C. Heike Schotten Jan 2016

Homonationalism: From Critique To Diagnosis, Or, We Are All Homonational Now, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of politics, into, in its current guise, a diagnostic of international political relations. Although this transition offers
insight into the international scene, I argue that homonationalism also loses its distinctiveness as a political formation in its own right as well as its critical capacity in the process. In particular, I argue that homonationalism becomes incapable of critically evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses …


Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology, Margot Weiss Dec 2015

Always After: Desiring Queerness, Desiring Anthropology, Margot Weiss

Margot Weiss

Queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—and instead signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity. But for all this, queer has never quite moved beyond identity. And queer has not quite been the site of resistance we had hoped, as the story of queer studies’ academic institutionalization might portend. Still, I am not writing a eulogy for queer. Instead, in this Retrospectives essay, I resist finding—if only to lose—a new proper object of queer anthropology and suggest, rather, that it is the frustration of …


Hands On My Hips: Politics Of A Subversive Fish, Eric D. Teman J.D., Ph.D. Nov 2015

Hands On My Hips: Politics Of A Subversive Fish, Eric D. Teman J.D., Ph.D.

Eric D Teman, J.D., Ph.D.

These interpretive autoethnographic tales are about my life experiences, growing up in rural Ohio as a queer male. I relive several of the innumerable unfortunate encounters with bullies who have haunted me over the years, partly as a therapeutic means to cope with the lasting effects of those torturous years and partly to potentially reach and touch the lives of others similarly affected. I use performative texts as a powerful means of portraying and articulating my message and persuasively voicing the emotion experienced. I also reflect on the queer predicament and how it has shaped my life.


Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority And Accountability Beyond Homonationalism, C. Heike Schotten, Haneen Maikey Oct 2012

Queers Resisting Zionism: On Authority And Accountability Beyond Homonationalism, C. Heike Schotten, Haneen Maikey

C. Heike Schotten

A critical response to Jasbir Puar and Maya Mikdashi's "Pinkwatching and Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and Its Discontents"


Broom Closet Or Fish Bowl? An Ethnographic Exploration Of A University Queer Center And Oneself, Eric D. Teman Ph.D., Maria K. Lahman Ph.D. Feb 2012

Broom Closet Or Fish Bowl? An Ethnographic Exploration Of A University Queer Center And Oneself, Eric D. Teman Ph.D., Maria K. Lahman Ph.D.

Eric D Teman, J.D., Ph.D.

The authors detail an educational ethnography of a university queer cultural center’s role on campus and in the surrounding community. The data include participant observation, in-depth interviews, and artifacts. The authors review lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, ally, and questioning (LGBTAQ) issues in higher education, heterosexual attitudes, and queer theory. The findings of barriers to the Center’s mission plus the suicide of a Center student prompted the authors to explore research poetry as a means to express the inexpressible. Furthermore, they illustrate tensions between contemporary queer and gay theories through the telling of a straight tale (traditional research report) and a …


The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss Dec 2010

The Epistemology Of Ethnography: Method In Queer Anthropology, Margot D. Weiss

Margot Weiss

This essay explores methodological dilemmas in queer anthropology by reviewing three recent queer ethnographies: Mary Gray's Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America; Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic; and Gloria Wekker's The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora. The essay aims to illuminate the epistemology of queer studies more broadly by focusing on a key paradox of ethnographic method: the binary of theory and data that is simultaneously made and unmade in ethnographic research and writing. In a newly transnational queer studies, ethnography …


Gay Shame And Bdsm Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, And Sexual Politics, Margot D. Weiss Dec 2007

Gay Shame And Bdsm Pride: Neoliberalism, Privacy, And Sexual Politics, Margot D. Weiss

Margot Weiss

This essay contrasts two contemporary activist groups: Gay Shame San Francisco, which seeks to disrupt homonormative lesbian and gay activism by challenging policing and gentrification; and the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, which disseminates a public image of BDSM, leather, and kinky practitioners as suburban minivan drivers who “look and dress like your neighbors.” Margot Weiss argues that neoliberalism’s relegation of sexuality into the realm of the private renders even kinky sexual practices like BDSM normative—kink-normative, if not homonormative—by detaching potentially disruptive sexual practices from any form of radical or progressive—public—politics.


Gender Matters: Making The Case For Trans Inclusion, Nancy J. Knauer Jan 2007

Gender Matters: Making The Case For Trans Inclusion, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

The transgender communities are producing an important and nuanced critique of our gender system. For community members, the project is self-constitutive and, therefore, has an immediacy that also marks the efforts of other marginalized groups who have attempted to make sense of the world through description, interrogation, and, ultimately, a program for transformation. The transgender project also has universalizing elements because, existing within the gender system, each one of us embodies a particular gender articulation. It is through this articulation that we define ourselves in relation to the gender we were assigned at birth, the gender we choose, the gender …


Science, Identity, And The Construction Of The Gay Political Narrative, Nancy J. Knauer Jan 2003

Science, Identity, And The Construction Of The Gay Political Narrative, Nancy J. Knauer

Nancy J. Knauer

This Article contends that the current debate over gay civil rights is, at base, a dispute over the nature of same-sex desire. Pro-gay forces advocate an ethnic or identity model of homosexuality based on the conviction that sexual orientation is an immutable, unchosen, and benign characteristic. The assertion that, in essence, gays are "born that way," has produced a gay political narrative that rests on claims of shared identity (i.e., homosexuals are a blameless minority) and arguments of equivalence (i.e., as a blameless minority, homosexuals deserve equal treatment and protection against discrimination). The pro-family counter-narrative is based on a behavioral …