Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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.