While family forms are ever more diverse, there are few critical analyses of the ways in which LGBTQ families have been represented in fiction. This article explores recent Italian novels by Cristiana Alicata, Melania Mazzucco and Chiara Francini that depict lesbian and gay parents and their children. In all these novels at least one gay or lesbian parent dies. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on mourning and melancholia, I problematize the persistent spectre of grief and loss attached to gay and (...) lesbian parenting. However, reflections by Heather Love also prompt me to explore what Love calls a “politics of damage”, or an attempt to see past the looming threat of inevitable homosexual doom towards the queer, subversive elements of these narratives, which question normative conceptions of the family and open up space to reflect on ‘alternative’ parental models. (shrink)

The most resounding expression of the truly unprecedented mobilizations of migrants throughout the United States in 2006 was a mass proclamation of collective defiance: ¡Aquí Estamos, y No Nos Vamos! [Here we are, and we're not leaving!]. This same slogan was commonly accompanied by a still more forcefully incorrigible rejoinder: ¡Y Si Nos Sacan, Nos Regresamos! [... and if they throw us out, we'll come right back!]. It is quite striking and, as this essay contends, not merely provocative but genuinely (...) productive to note the affinity between the crucial articulation of this radically open-ended politics of migrant presence with the similarly abject and profoundly destabilizing politics of queer presence. In a manner remarkably analogous to the slogan, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!", the dynamic enunciation of these phrases in the context of the mass mobilizations of migrants asserted an irreducible spirit of irreverence and disaffection for state power. Both gestures unreservedly and unapologetically assert not only their irreversible presence, furthermore, but also uphold the intractable challenge of their own intrinsic incorrigibility. (shrink)

_The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research_ represents the editors’ intention to disrupt cycles of thinking about the place of queer theory in educational research. The book aims to encourage dialogue about the objects and subjects of queer research, the forms of politics incited by the use of queer theory in education, and the methodological approaches used by scholars when queering. The contributions to this book come from those who find queer (...) theory problematic, as well as from those who continue to see a productive place for queer research in education, however that may be defined. The editors have collected contributions that attend to the boundaries that are placed around queer research in education by researchers themselves, and by peers, ethics committees, funding bodies and university and government bureaucracies. Considering how key researchers in gender and education identify with, or deliberately distance themselves from, queer theory, this collection grapples with the contemporary cultural politics of doing queer theoretical work in different education spaces and places. In short, it seeks to disrupt what people think they already know about the ‘place’ of queer theory in education. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. _. (shrink)

It's commonly understood within the academy that the terms "man," "woman," and "other" are socially constructed, and that their meanings are maintained by the current political order. But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge - which is rooted in Marxism - with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In the Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, though (...) seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience."-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

On November 4, 2008 California voters passed Proposition 8, and accordingly same-sex marriage was banned under the state constitution. Proposition 8 is now being considered by the Supreme Court. The proposition has sparked national debate about the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens’ sexuality and corresponding rights; calling into question the practice of allocating rights and privileges on the basis of sexuality and family form. Proponents of the proposition, who can be classified as predominantly socially conservative, want (...) to maintain the status and privileges of marriage for heterosexuals; arguing that allowing same-sex marriage threatens the legitimacy, sanctity and strength of traditional heterosexual marriage . This article examines the extent to which three Californian pro-same-sex marriage organizations (Equality California, Join the Impact, and the Courage Campaign) have challenged and/or appropriated social conservative and neoliberal discourses in their effort to gain access to the rights and privileges that are currently administered through marriage. (shrink)

This essay theorizes the fashion photographic image as a privileged site for queer sensory experience. It takes the stance that the aesthetic engagement with the fashion image occurs through sensation, and more precisely, through a haptic and periperformative experience that activates desires, meanings, and fantasies. Through the circulation of feelings sparked via the sensorial experiencing of the photo, queer subjects can sense belongings and form affiliations that bind them in an egalitarian community of sense exceeding sexual and social (...) differences. A queer theory of fashion photography does not posit that the photographic image may foster propositional knowledge in the viewers, but rather that it moves them to engage corporeally with the image and triggers their imagination to configure new affective modes of being in the world. (shrink)

This paper outlines the main tenets of poststructuralism and considers how they are applied by practitioners of queer theory. Drawing on both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, queer theory explores the ways in which homosexual subjectivity is at once produced and excluded within culture, both inside and outside its borders. This approach is contrasted with more sociological studies of sexuality (labeling theory, social constructionism). Whereas queer theory investigates the relations between heterosexuality and homosexuality, sociologists tend to examine (...) homosexual identities and communities, paradoxically ignoring the social construction of heterosexuality. Poststructuralism can inform a sociological approach to sexuality by emphasizing the generative character of all sexual identities. A sociological study of sexuality which is informed by poststructuralism would examine the exclusions implicit in a heterosexual/homosexual opposition. In this process, bisexual and transgender identities can become viable cultural possibilities, and a broad-based political coalition established. Whereas mainstream sociology focuses on the ways in which homosexuals are outside social norms, and whereas queer theory exploits the ways in which this outside is already inside, this perspective suggests that a critical sexual politics seeks to move beyond an inside/outside model. (shrink)

The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be ‘out’ to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means uncontested political goals. This paper analyzes different school initiatives by and/or for queer students and asks how political these initiatives (...) are from the perspective of Jacques Rancière's conception of politics. In particular, it employs Rancière's work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) to analyze conditions of visibility and sayability and the political risks and benefits that gaining visibility and sayability carries for queer students and teachers. The paper brings Rancière's distinction between identification and subjectification into conversation with Judith Butler's work on the governing of intelligibility by social norms, and the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’. Finally, Rancière's work on the role of allies in political interventions that shift the distribution of the sensible provides a fresh reading of Gay‐Straight Alliances in schools and the work of queer allies more generally. (shrink)

Why do states who are committed to the principle of civilian immunity and the protection of non-combatants end up killing and injuring large numbers of civilians during their military operations? Bugsplat explains this paradox through an in-depth examination of five conflicts fought by Western powers since 1989.

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on (...) the political and material effects of pro-sexuality. (shrink)

This article reads some familiar examples of contemporary visual arts, such as Cindy Sherman, Mona Hatoum, Robert Gober, John Miller, Eva Hesse, Orlan and Robert Mapplethorpe, by engaging with diff...

This article examines the connections between a theory of redemption as indebtedness and the wider political/economic realities of indebtedness. In order to illustrate the argument the author demonstrates why it is necessary to even question the roots of theories since they too carry a wider agenda. The author contrasts a debt economy with an economy of love.

This article provides an analysis of the transnational spatial politics of activism around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer politics in Poland. The authors discuss three key themes that emerged from their empirical research on activism associated with the equality marches in Krakow, Poznan and Warsaw. These are concerned with age and the intergenerational politics of solidarity; the connection between migration and activism, and the use of city-twinning links. The authors argue that research on the spatial (...) politics of activism and social movements can enhance existing understandings of the sustainability of activist struggles for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer politics in Poland. (shrink)

This article works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, especially queer theory, to examine critically the controversial, and often socially controlling, role of biomedical knowledge and interventions in the realm of human sexuality. It will attempt to situate scientific/medical discourses on sexuality historically, socially, and culturally in order to expose the ways in which “proper” sexual health in medical research and clinical practice has been conflated with prevailing social norms at particular historical junctures in the 20th and 21st centuries. How might (...) the relationship between clinical and cultural spheres be better engaged in biomedical knowledge and clinical practice in understanding sexual health, given the impact of homophobic and transphobic assumptions in the diagnostic histories of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood, a new diagnostic category introduced into the DSM following the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-III? The article will argue further that biomedical knowledge is always already mediated through culture by analyzing normative racial, gender, class, and sexual ideologies that regulated early understandings of the epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the West and in the postcolonial world while informing global health policy on HIV/AIDS. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical education for both LGBTQI patients and medical professionals, for understanding gender and sexual rights as human rights, and for thinking about new kinds of interventions, contestations, and struggles to resist continued homophobic and transphobic assumptions in biomedical practice today and their ongoing effects in the everyday world. (shrink)

Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of (...) the subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

In his extensive private manuscripts, Jeremy Bentham used same-sex male intimacy as a philosophical test-case for the full political and social enfranchisement of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists. Bentham argued that oppression in law, philosophy, religion, and literature were all based on aesthetic hierarchies that refused to acknowledge differences of taste in sensory pleasure, including sexual pleasure. In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham's sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the (...) foundation for egalitarian liberty. Shanafelt challenges the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, instead showing Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of discriminatory violence. (shrink)

COVID-19 has precipitated an increase in political homophobia in Turkey. This article focuses on the interlocking processes of LGBTQ marginalization and exclusion in Turkey with the purpose of uncovering how political homophobia is enforced, experienced, and navigated by LGBTQ people in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of two critical conceptual tools, pink line and queer strategies, I first propose a multi-layered conceptualization of political homophobia that is drawn through anti-LGBTQ boundary regimes that shape the everyday lives (...) of LGBTQ people and sexualized bordering processes that filter and block digital LGBTQ representation and visibility in Turkey’s digital publics. I then analyze the everyday strategic uses of digital platfroms by LGBTQ activists and community organizers in Turkey. Invested in this complexity, this article draws from the ethnographic data of 20 interviews with LGBTQ people whose lives have crossed paths in several digital LGBTQ groups during the pandemic. Henceforth I argue that these digital LGBTQ groups have facilitated ways of connectivity among LGBTQ people in Turkey which limit exposure to the COVID-19 virus while partially freeing them from the restrictive limits of the nation-state and its political homophobia. (shrink)

In 1984, Lea Campos-Boralevi published a seminal study on _ Bentham and the Oppressed _, which focused on women, sexual non-conformists, the poor, the colonized, the enslaved and animals. There did not seem to be any need for further studies on the subject. Carrie D. Shanafelt proves us wrong. The combination of the publication of new volumes of the _ Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham _, especially _ Not Paul, but Jesus. ___ ___ vol. __ III. Doctrine _ (2013) and (...) _ Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writings on Sexual Morality _ (2014), as well as the emergence of Queer studies from the 1980s onwards has provided fertile grounds for a reexamination of Bentham’s stance towards the oppressed. Carrie D. Shanafelt writes a compelling essay on Bentham’s concern for equal and depenalized access to pleasure for those she calls the disenfranchised, that is women, the poor, the colonized and the enslaved, as well as sex and gender minorities. The shift from Campos-Boralevi’s ‘oppressed’ to Carrie D. Shanafelt’s ‘disen... (shrink)

The last five years have witnessed the birth of a vibrant new group of young scholars who are writing about queer law, politics, and policy--topics which are no longer treated as of interest only to lesbians and gay men, but which now garner the attention of political theorists of all stripes. Playing With Fire --the first scholarly collection on queer politics by US political theorists--opens the intersection of lesbian and gay studies and political theory to a (...) wide audience. It covers a wide range of issues, including: the theory of queer identities; the contrasts among ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; the debate between liberals and communitarians; the right to privacy; and the meaning of equal citizenship. Contributors: Gordon Babst, Lisa Bower, Cynthia Burack, Judith Butler, Paisley Currah, Morris Kaplan, Gary Lehring, Shane Phelan, Anne Marie Smith, Angelia Wilson, and Stacey Young. (shrink)

Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity are fraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains of women's `ordinary' lives during the era of the women's liberation movement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of the early women's liberationists — their attempts to bring the personal into view as the dense, affect laden, site of social (...) reproduction — can offer us a countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the `private' domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US national public sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment — the time of women's liberation — in this one, the essay stages a comparative reading between two novels, Doris Lessing's A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and June Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter (1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, both have as their subject the dense and complex relations between political action, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction, and reading the two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both `the political' and `the personal' were contested terms, their meanings challenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in some cases, transformed. (shrink)

It would be an almost comical understatement to say that, throughout my graduate study in philosophy and subsequent years of teaching and writing, I found myself engaging with the works of Jeremy Bentham somewhat infrequently. Beyond flavorful anecdotes about mummified heads and jabs about stilted nonsense in my undergraduate Intro to Ethics courses—as we segued into extended discussion of John Stuart Mill, of course—Bentham’s direct and recognized role in my philosophical activities has been pretty much nonexistent. With all that said: (...) as a sexual- and gender- nonconforming aesthetician and LGBTQIA+ educator and wellness professional living in what is now a post-Roe United States, I found Carrie D. Shanafelt’s Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (2021) to be rich, captivating, and at times, even genuinely comforting. -/- Shanafelt’s short book is equal parts history of philosophy, philosophical history, biography, and queer manifesto, written in an accessible manner that successfully balances scholarship with readability. I could easily see Uncommon Sense engendering rich discussion in graduate seminars as well as undergraduate courses of various sorts—though I can just as easily see portions of the book’s content generating various rumbles of controversy, at least at some of the institutions I’ve taught at before. (See, for example, Chapter Four, titled ‘Bentham’s Queer Christ.’) Any anticipatory worries of short-sighted reactionary takes aside, the book would absolutely serve well as the central focus on an entire course, supplemented by a range of literature and scholarly material from philosophical aesthetics, queer studies, political theory, and more. Honestly, I would love to teach that class. (shrink)

Contested Borders broadens understandings of dissident sexualities in Africa through focusing specifically on the Maghreb. It examines new representations of same-sex desire emerging in new francophone life writing, memoir, and literature from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

This paper elaborates a theory of ‘unbecoming’ to explore how a queering of the subject might transform oppressive social conditions. In this analysis of the subject’s deconstructive relation to the law I take up the interpellation scenario forwarded by Louis Althusser and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to argue that being ‘unbecoming’ potentially not only alters subjectivity, it also alters the very law that hails the subject into being. First, I deconstruct both subject and law in their relation to each (...) other as performatives, for it is at this threshold of undecidability that the possibilities for political transformation emerge. Second, I demonstrate the creative and transformative political force of queer performativity to show that our agency as political beings lies not merely in affirmative representations of identity. Political agency also emerges in the creative force of a becoming that is also an unbecoming, where in and through our abjection from the social order we critique and transform it. (shrink)

Deliberations and discussions on inter-caste relationships in South Asia so far have been fixed within the confines of heterosexuality. Not only are heterosexual inter-caste relationships the default imagination of an inter-caste love, but also notions of heteronormativity dominate discussions of inter-caste love, relationship and, importantly, inter-caste marriages. In asking ‘queer’ questions about caste, this article analyses what an inter-caste dynamic means for social movements which rally around notions of love and desire or choose to reject them. This article recentres (...) desire and intimacy into caste to imagine queer (im)possibilities of dalit love. In doing so, the article asks: where is the dalit lover? Building upon conversations and interviews with five dalit-queer scholars, intellectuals and activists, as well as provocations offered by them, this article complicates ‘inter-caste love’ itself as a site of power and politics, of social categorisation as well as of critical theorisation. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyze the construction of ethics in sexuality research in which qualitative methods are employed in the field of social sciences. Analyses are based on a bibliographic review of current discussions on research methods of queer theory and on the authors' own experiences of past research on sexuality. The article offers a theoretical perspective on the ways ethnography and in‐depth interviews become methods that can rely on a consensual method and create a politics of intimacy (...) between the researchers and research participants. The politics of intimacy may contribute to the production of a politically engaged knowledge while escaping from the moral matrix that usually governs the relationship between researchers and research participants. It is argued here that the researcher's sexed and gendered body matters for fieldwork; that the consensual method among participants may be employed in sexuality research as a fruitful tool; and that the relationships created among researchers and participants can pose a challenge to predetermined ethical guidelines in research. As a result, discussions problematize the existence of a politics of intimacy in sexuality research that is characterized by ethical relations among research participants. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of world heritage (WH) through a cosmopolitan lens. It proposes that cosmopolitanism provides fertile ground for the study of WH, in particular if combined with sensitivity to distinct indigenous ethical and political claims. Underpinning my article is the question of whether the politics of WH, despite its peaceful and universalist intensions, obscures local disputes and subaltern voices. The empirical emphasis is placed on the WH site of Laponia in the North of Sweden – a (...) location of Sami indigenous communities and commercial mining interests. I provide a narrative analysis of the inconsistencies between the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative defined by support for human and indigenous rights globally and the protection ambition of WH and its generally favourable attitude towards mining, despite its potentially damaging effects on the WH site of Laponia and the cultural heritage and land rights of Sami people living there. My study also provides an analysis of Sami narratives on Laponia – storylines that are rarely included in the Swedish ‘good state’ narrative. The study seeks to contribute to scholarly understandings of indigenous peoples’ ability to lay claims to the cosmopolitan protection logic that prevails in WH. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article argues that, while the configuration of the lesbian body and of subjectivity in Sarah Waters’s first three novels—Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith —is carried out in the discursive and performative terms of postmodernist feminism, her latest novels evince a move towards a queer phenomenological position characterised by a growing interest in the material and socioeconomic conditions of the body and subjectivity. Initiated in The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, and culminating in The Paying Guests, (...) this phenomenological turn is observable in that these novels are centrally concerned with material issues of class and situated in periods of collective post-war trauma and political unrest that open up the possibility for cultural change and social transformation, thus suggesting a move towards a transmodernist position. The article offers a queer reading of The Paying Guests, based on Sarah Ahmed’s notions of “encounter” and “orientation” as a way to substantiate this assertion. (shrink)

Plant-based milk alternatives–or mylks–have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards ‘plant-based’ food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the ‘better’ alternative. By navigating this affective landscape, brands attempt to make mylk as simultaneously palatable (...) and disruptive to the status quo. We examine the politics of mylks through the concept of palatable disruption, where people are encouraged to care about the environment, health, and animal welfare enough to adopt mylks but to ultimately remain consumers of a commodity food. By encouraging consumers to reach for “plant-based” as a way to cope with environmental catastrophe and a life out of balance, mylks promote a neoliberal ethic: they individualize systemic problems and further entrench market mechanisms as solutions, thereby reinforcing the political economy of industrial agriculture. In conclusion, we reflect on the limits of the current plant-based trend for transitioning to more just and sustainable food production and consumption. (shrink)

Many legal arguments pertaining to equal rights for gay and lesbian families have relied upon empirical research on the `healthy' childraising environment of these families. While neither disputing recent legal gains nor diminishing their importance, this article looks at some of the conceptual categories that drive this research. The limitations of such research, as salutary as it is, are typically understood in terms of their obvious political context. Such research avoids highlighting any differences between gay/lesbian families and traditional families because (...) an emphasis on such differences feeds cultural stereotypes that are damaging to non-traditional families. This article takes a different tack, looking at how the concepts that frame research are based in binaries and fantasies about families and sex that we argue are too limiting. It assumes that the elision of sexuality within such studies is symptomatic of a broader repression of a variety of meanings of family. In response, the article brings in queer theory and psychoanalysis to broaden our approach to understanding new forms of family and kinship initiated by gay and lesbian families. The article addresses single household lesbian families that are most frequently the object of empirical research. (shrink)

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions (...) of interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:298 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy AlterNotes on the Politics of Women’s Studies Graduate Certificates Jennifer Nash’s “Feminist Credentials: Notes on the Politics of Women ’s Studies Graduate Certificates,” published in this same issue of Feminist Studies, provokes a crucial, if difficult, conversation about graduate certificates in women’s studies.1 Nash asks us to question the value of graduate certificates (...) in two registers: first, if the certificate is valuable to those doing PhDs in the disciplines—as professional certification in feminist theory and interdisciplinarity—is women’s studies reproducing its own discounting by continuing to privilege disciplinary formations? And, second, in the highly constrained job market for academic jobs in women’s studies, do those with graduate certificates in women’s studies and PhDs in the disciplines compete with women’s studies PhDs, thereby undercutting the latter’s distinction and chances of getting academic jobs in the very field in which they have been trained? Nash makes it clear that she is not suggesting the graduate certificate be eliminated, nor that only women’s studies PhDs be hired for women’s studies jobs, but rather that this predicament is an effect of the corporatization of the university. To elaborate on the nuance in Nash’s argument and not reproduce the logic of supply and demand that the neoliberal university is producing, I’d like to raise other aporias in the relationship between graduate certificates and PhD education and point to alternate possibilities. 1. In keeping with Nash’s essay, I am using the term “women’s studies” throughout this alternote as well. Priti Ramamurthy 299 The fiscal realities in favor of the graduate certificate in women’s studies highlighted by Nash are all too real. An additional reality is that graduate certificate students subtend women’s studies PhD programs in vital ways. In terms of course offerings, graduate students in certificate programs take a mix of core and elective classes. Given the very small size of most incoming women’s studies PhD student cohorts, without graduate certificate students in women’s studies, departments would be hard pressed to justify offering core and elective courses. For women’s studies faculty, the opportunity to teach not just core but elective courses that draw on their areas or sub-fields of expertise is enabled by graduate certificate students taking their courses. For women’s studies PhD students, this provides a larger range of elective courses to choose from. Many graduate certificate students shape their doctoral projects deeply with the knowledges they get from the certificate courses. Beyond the courses they are required to take, graduate certificate students often continue to work with women’s studies faculty and invite them to serve on their PhD committees. On the one hand, we may posit, as Nash does, that women’s studies faculty thereby service students in other disciplines, but on the other hand, the feminist knowledge produced in the process is exciting and valuable for not just their disciplines but for women’s studies. Departments such as history, geography, and anthropology may have a large cohort of feminist scholars, but graduate certificate students still seek out feminist scholars in women’s studies for their sub-discipline or area studies, and for methodological and/ or theoretical expertise. Unfortunately, many disciplinary and interdisciplinary departments still lack feminist scholars, and in these departments graduate certificate students make important feminist interventions through their doctoral research. To take a recent example, Karin Eriksson, a doctoral student in Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington, was transformed by her GWSS graduate certificate coursework in women of color, indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonial feminisms, queer studies, and feminist epistemologies. She is questioning why her department does not offer a single course on settler colonialism and Sámi ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies. Her doctoral work, in close collaboration with Sámi indigenous and feminist activists and communities in Sweden, will address questions of settler colonialism. Not only does Scandinavian studies get transformed in the process, but so does women’s studies, especially our own doctoral program and 300 Priti Ramamurthy the students in it who had not engaged with the unique feminist issues raised... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 81-101 [Access article in PDF] Sex without Sex, Queering the Market, the Collapse of the Political, the Death of Difference, and AIDS: Hailing Judith Butler Brett Levinson It is interesting to note that in Judith Butler's study of the social construction of sex, Gender Trouble (as well as in the sequel, Bodies That Matter), one finds barely a trace of sex. Or to put matters more (...) bluntly: in Butler's study of gender critiques that avoid or dismiss the matters of hetero- and homosexuality, in her examination of the relationship of gayness and lesbianism to feminism, and in her exposition of a politics of queerness--as to fucking, not a word. This omission is not tangential to Gender Trouble. It determines Butler's entire undertaking. 1. The (In)difference of Performance By illustrating that sex, like gender, is a social construction, Butler strives to tear not sex but both sex and gender from biological essentialism. For as Butler insists, as soon as we imagine sex (woman/man) as naturally given, and gender (feminine/masculine) as a product of social forces, we fall into the very gender essentialism that we seemingly called into question. This is because the sex/gender binary makes sex the ground of gender: a woman may be masculine or feminine, and she may subvert the social norms that demand that women act in a certain manner. But throughout all of these gender reversals, she remains a woman. Her behavior, therefore, is either far from her sex (if she is subversive) or close to it (if she conforms). But in either case, it is measured in terms of that sex, which stands as the essence or foundation of the conduct. Hence, within such a discourse, gender stereotypes do not actually emerge as social (thereby deconstructible) constructs since the substructure (sex) of their edifice is given prior to production.This thesis, which ultimately reveals that the sex/gender split reproduces the woman/man binary--the foundation of sexism--opens the way for one of Butler's most renowned interventions: her theory of performativity. Butlerian performance traces the intersection of Derrida's concept of mimesis and Foucault's understanding of power. Derrida argues that if a mark (in writing) or a sound (in speech) is to form part of a language, it must be iterable. Language hinges on social conventions, and social conventions on repetition, ritual. Repetition, therefore, does not follow (from) a pregiven [End Page 81] [Begin Page 83] sign but is a condition of its possibility: a sign must be repeatable before it is a sign. 1Derrida often translates these ideas into an analysis of "the citation," a fact Butler fully exploits. An articulation, Derrida argues, must be a priori citable (again, iterable) if it is to function as an articulation, as a "speech act." This means that deviance, miscitation, recontextualization, and the possible transformation or loss of an enunciation--any or all of which could occur via a citation--belong essentially to that enunciation. The repetitions that yield rituals, habits, and then norms are the same iterations that undermine those norms. But this is true not only for speech. It holds as well for the law: the citing, execution, reading, writing, and acknowledgment of the law, hence the possibility of the law's shift and even disappearance, pertain to the law's groundwork.Gender Trouble posits patriarchy and compulsive heterosexuality as two such citable laws. And as laws, they are powerful but not inevitable. Indeed, because the law of normalcy harbors its own deviance as a condition of its public emergence or deployment, this normalcy opens the way for its own transgression. One is indeed subject to the law of the norm. But this subjection cannot not grant the very alternative agency/subjectivity it strives to suppress.Hence for Butler, queer types such as the "femme" or the "butch," as they perhaps flaunt (through dress, bodily image, or public demonstration) the constructed character of their own sexual identities, recite and dis-cover the constructed, artificial... (shrink)

Drawing from our interdisciplinary qualitative study of LGBTI conservative Christians and their allies, we name an especially toxic form of shame—what we call sacramental shame—that affects the lives of LGBTI and other conservative Christians. Sacramental shame results from conservative Christianity's allegiance to the doctrine of gender complementarity, which elevates heteronormativity to the level of the sacred and renders those who violate it as not persons, but monsters. In dispensing shame as a sacrament, nonaffirming Christians require constant displays of shame as (...) proof that LGBTI church members love God and belong in the community. Part of what makes this shame so harmful is that parents and pastors often dispense it with sincere expressions of care and affection, compounding the sense that one's capacity to give and receive love is damaged. We foreground LGBTI Christian movements to overcome sacramental shame by cultivating nonhubristic pride, and conclude by discussing briefly their new understandings of love and justice that could have far‐reaching benefits. (shrink)

¡PRESENTE! investigates the many answers to a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be present? Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor answers that question by offering an expansive explication of presence as both ethical command and performative knowledge production. Taking the histories of state violence, colonialism, and imperialism as her starting point, Taylor situates being ¡Presente! as an embodied and performed practice of standing alongside those harmed by historical and ongoing violence. Noting that Present/e is simultaneously single and plural (...) in English and Spanish, and drawing on Jean Luc Nancy's formulation of being singular plural, Taylor asks how presence is imbricated in questions of subject formation and collectivity. She begins with reframing the racialization of Latin Americans as a coming into presence through colonial conquest-a presence not as subjects but as subjugated objects-and asks what was made absent through this racialized process. For Taylor, the epistemicide of Indigenous, Native, and African ways of knowing stands at the center of this process of presence and absence. To counter this ongoing epistemicide, Taylor situates ¡Presente! as a performative and decolonial mode of knowledge production that decenters European Enlightenment traditions and seriously takes up Native, Indigenous, and African ways of knowledge and temporality. Grounded in performance studies, this book links knowledge to action as a doing practice, or what Taylor calls a "peripatetic strategy" that emphasis movement in learning. This book offers an expansive theory of ¡Presente! in various locations and situations: the original colonial conquest of Columbus and the Spanish; the May 1968 student protests; a study in Zapatistan autonomy; the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa; queer histories of Mexico; and the former torture centers of the Pinochet dictatorship. Throughout these varied locations, Taylor weaves a methodology, theory, and practice of ¡Presente!. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of performance studies, Latin American studies, American studies, critical ethnic studies, colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, and queer theory. (shrink)

The paper aims at revealing the key legal and political factors that determined the organization and holding of the referendum on unconditional and urgent withdrawal of the former USSR army from the territory of the Republic of Lithuania and restitution of damage to Lithuania. It is established that the main factor was that the Supreme Council-Reconstituent Seimas of the Lithuanian Republic adopted provisions on the status of the occupation army and was constant in seeking to ensure the sovereignty of (...) the state of Lithuania throughout its territory. The position of the nations, parliaments and governments of the Republics of Estonia and Latvia was yet another circumstance that the organizers of the referendum relied upon. Their position was aimed at ensuring that as a result of negotiations, the foreign military forces return to dislocation places in its own territory. Retrospective view on the phenomena and facts of the state’s internal and foreign politics in 1991-1992 makes it impossible not to notice that negotiations with the USSR and later, with the Russian Federation, took place in a complicated political arena. While Lithuania was seeking dynamism in negotiations, the other party was finding various excuses to impede dynamic actions and thus to delay positive agreements. Taking due regard to the situation, it was believed that a decision adopted by the Nation would speed up the negotiations on foreign state’s armed forces. (shrink)

The relation between gender and aesthetics is central to any formulation of feminist aesthetics, and yet the meanings of these terms are continually contested and revised. Both gender and aesthetics carry diverse, interdisciplinary significations, which are shaped by complex histories of disagreements. When the term “aesthetic” was first introduced in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, it did not refer to artistic production but rather to the mode of knowledge gained through the senses. Aesthetics today can have (...) at least three different meanings: (1) a general theory of artistic practices; (2) a theory of reception, focused upon how we appreciate or judge natural beauty and artworks; and (3) a theory of sensibility shaping our experience, practice, and knowledge. In this last sense aesthetics does not have to refer to art at all, but is rather concerned with the role of different senses, such as touch, sight, taste, smell, or with different affects: pleasure, pain, or disgust (Korsmeyer 2012). One could make an argument that the affective turn in feminist and queer theory today is also implicitly informed by this third historical meaning of aesthetics, even if theorists themselves do not engage aesthetics directly (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2011). Gender is also a contested category in feminist philosophy and theory (Chanter 2007); in general it refers to social and political determinations and regulations of biological sex and sexual practices, but there is no consensus on the relationship of gender to power, the body, sexuality, or sensibility. Following feminist theories of intersectionality, introduced by black feminists (Crenshaw 1991), I assume in this chapter that the category of gender is relational, political, and historical; that is, that its significance and its relation to embodiment are shaped by desire and power relations, which also determine the meaning of class, race, labor, environment, and other political phenomena. (shrink)