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Full-Text Articles in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Swerf Necropolitics: Three Sites Of Feminist Mistranslation And The Politics Of Feminist Exclusion, Aaron Hammes Jan 2023

Swerf Necropolitics: Three Sites Of Feminist Mistranslation And The Politics Of Feminist Exclusion, Aaron Hammes

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The acronym SWERF, or Sex Work(er) Exclusive Radical Feminism, and its attendant ideologies brings up a number of questions and potential schisms for the enterprise of feminist thought more broadly. This inquiry examines what it means for feminism to exclude, what the excluders believe is gained by protecting certain boundaries around which identities and practices are included, and the ideological foundations and consequences of this thinking. SWERF logics are understood as mistranslations of the radical potentialities of feminism, clustered around three sites: exclusion (against bodily autonomy) , equivocation (between sex work and labor trafficking), and misrepresentation (of the sex worker …


Gender Unfreedom: Gender Diverse Perspectives From Digital India, Sara Bardhan Jan 2022

Gender Unfreedom: Gender Diverse Perspectives From Digital India, Sara Bardhan

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Digital Age: Giving Sex Work A New Meaning, Allison Garvey Jan 2022

The Digital Age: Giving Sex Work A New Meaning, Allison Garvey

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Life Of A Lesbian Feminist Activist And Professor. Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life By Sheila Jeffreys, R. Amy Elman Feb 2021

The Life Of A Lesbian Feminist Activist And Professor. Trigger Warning: My Lesbian Feminist Life By Sheila Jeffreys, R. Amy Elman

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.


History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter Jan 2021

History, Activism, Erasure: Archival Paradox As Institutional Practice, Sarah H. Salter

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This essay connects the reparative assemblages of queer archiving practice to growing conversations in university studies. Tracing the fraught legal history of Penn State University’s first “Homophile” association in the 1970s, this essay theorizes how university records—and the processes of recording they index—participate in the creation of institutional identity and help establish institutional relations with their communities. Ultimately, it suggests that archivists and librarians act as mediators, unintentionally or purposefully, of the relations between vulnerable communities and the structures of power in which they are embedded.


Erotic Fever In The Arquives: Imagining A Queer Porn Paradise In Cait Mckinney And Hazel Meyer’S Exhibition Tape Condition: Degraded, Genevieve Flavelle Jan 2021

Erotic Fever In The Arquives: Imagining A Queer Porn Paradise In Cait Mckinney And Hazel Meyer’S Exhibition Tape Condition: Degraded, Genevieve Flavelle

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Focusing on Cait McKinney and Hazel Meyer’s site-specific exhibition Tape Condition: degraded (2016) at the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives, this paper explores reparative and desire-driven approaches for working with partial and missing histories within archives. Focusing specifically on artists working as archivists, I consider how the limitations of evidence-based histories can be addressed through creative practice. The essay unfolds in two parts. The first examines a selection of objects from the exhibition to draw out the historical context of The ArQuives, grounding my analysis of the conditions that have created and perpetuated specific archival gaps; in this case, pornography made …


Archives Of “Sexual Deviance”: Recovering The Queer Prisoner, Vic Overdorf Jan 2021

Archives Of “Sexual Deviance”: Recovering The Queer Prisoner, Vic Overdorf

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Queer federal prisoners are a population often inaccessible to queer memory due to the strong institutional barriers that separate these individuals from life outside of prison walls. This paper asks: how can we employ feminist methodologies in the recovery of queer voices from federal prison archives? By documenting perceived deviance and perversions, carceral institutions in the 1930s-1950s built a case to justify their use of discursive and physical violence against queer bodies. This paper argues that carceral archives serve as norming mechanisms, creating barriers between normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual. To counter this norming, Ann Laura Stoler (2002) provides …


Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy Jan 2021

Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The archive of Irish writer Kate O’Brien is a notable example of how queerness haunts the mainstream of feminist literary spaces. The 2019 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) exhibition Kate O’Brien: Arrow to the Heart, which set out to restore this censored novelist’s place in the archive of twentieth-century Irish writing, provides a case study of these dynamics. Queer and feminist perspectives on the archive, with a focus on affect, hauntings and Sara Ahmed’s “queer use,” illuminate the conflicting epistemologies regulating the O’Brien archive. Reading this exhibition as an Irish queer, affective experience collides with entrenched structures of power …


An Offering On The Altar Of Queer History: Amalia Mesa-Bains And Sor Juana’S Library, Maria P. Chaves Daza Jan 2021

An Offering On The Altar Of Queer History: Amalia Mesa-Bains And Sor Juana’S Library, Maria P. Chaves Daza

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

This paper argues that home altars are archives. I consider the history of altars within Chicana community practices; political, and feminist critique of both patriarchal nationalism; and the role of the altar in challenging the public and private divide defined by nationalist discourses of the US and Aztlan. Furthermore, I use Amalia Mesa-Bains’s altar installation The Library of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz to consider how altars are spaces of feminist queer memory-making and resistance against colonial logics.


I Hate The Archives: A Queer Lesbian Meditation, Helis Sikk Jan 2021

I Hate The Archives: A Queer Lesbian Meditation, Helis Sikk

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Questioning the neutrality of archives is nothing new as feminist scholars have been doing it since the 1970s. More recently, queer theorists have pushed the subjectivity of the archive even further by emphasizing the importance of desire and pleasure as its central tenants. The archive in these discussions is sometimes a metaphor for a variety of experiences and at other times a brick-and-mortar physical space. Yet, there has been a lack of focus on the relationships between these two approaches. Similarly, there has not been enough discussion on how to challenge the exclusivity of the archive in our everyday praxis …


Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler Jan 2021

Andrea Revised: Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist As Revolutionary By Martin Duberman, Phyllis Chesler

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.


Towards A Trans Feminist Disability Studies, Niamh Timmons Jan 2020

Towards A Trans Feminist Disability Studies, Niamh Timmons

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

In this article, I investigate the ways in which Transfeminism and Trans Women can be more integrated and entangled within feminist disability studies and Disability Justice, and vice versa. This would make the field a seemingly rich arena for considering the linkages between Trans Women, Transfeminism, dis/ability, and feminism. Yet, the primary texts of the feminist disability studies consistently leave out Trans Women in their analyses. Specific inclusion and highlighting the experiences of Trans Women, especially Trans Women who are disabled, is often missing from disability rights and disability justice projects. This is especially alarming given the way Trans folks, …


Virtual Avatars: Trans Experiences Of Ideal Selves Through Gaming, Kai Baldwin Mar 2019

Virtual Avatars: Trans Experiences Of Ideal Selves Through Gaming, Kai Baldwin

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This article aims to explore the experiences transgender gamers have with avatars. Building on a foundation of identity construction theories from both media studies and queer studies, this study theorizes that these gamers will use their virtual world avatars to experiment with gender performance and ideal selves. These theories of identity construction are explored and examined through digital ethnography, by using the participant observation method, in which trans gamers are interviewed about their experiences with avatar creation and use. Based on the evidence gathered from those interviews, this study concludes that trans gamers in general tend to create avatars who …