Critically examining the experiences of queer people of color in culturally-based sororities and fraternities.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Duran ◽  
Crystal Eufemia Garcia ◽  
Hannah Lee Reyes
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Culturally Based

Poststructuralism and Its Discontents

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ardoin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Real World ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Central Values ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Fiction Writers

Deconstruction and poststructuralism have profoundly shaped popular and academic thought, while also drawing both popular and academic resistance, and doing so (strangely) consistently over decades. In particular, deconstruction and poststructuralism (and their synecdoche—the capital-T “Theory”) are viewed as sources of existential peril to English studies, where their impact has been indelibly tied to a canon expansion that takes seriously—and particularly—the contributions of women, people of color, queer people, and others. Detractors often reduce poststructuralism to its -ism—making of it a stagnant force of destabilizing chaos or a hopelessly unproductive and apolitical form of theoretical play. Dogmatic enthusiasts often become similarly reductive. Thinkers like Barbara Johnson and fiction writers like Percival Everett exemplify and advocate for a brand of deconstructive self-critique in which we: avoid allowing our enthusiasm or opinions to harden into any -ism (even when the enthusiasm is for, say, undecidability); embrace (in fact, seek) opportunities of confrontation with ignorance in our own thought; and recognize the potential value of upheaval in our real-world practices. Such self-critique is far from an existential peril to central values of English studies; it is, in fact, something not unlike the “critical thinking” valued and marketed by the Humanities.

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Branded Beautiful

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Lia T. Bascomb
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Queer People ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

Remixing Transfeminist Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-555
Author(s):  
Rox Samer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Geographical Range ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Gender Variance ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Media Narratives

Abstract There are likely many ways to remix transfeminist futures. As a scholar-vidder, I focus on vidding as one form this work might take. Vidding is an especially affective form of remix art that renders literal the Foucauldian imperative “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” In disturbing what was previously considered immobile, fragmenting what was thought unified, and not hiding the cuts with which it does so, vidding produces affective surplus. It is not only that a vid disassembles source media, but that its reassembly produces more than a new text; it also, often unpredictably and inexplicably, generates entirely new affects. Taken up as a transfeminist creative critical praxis, vidding could challenge the transphobic and cissexist common sense on which our reality relies, including its teleological histories that cast trans as “new,” ignoring the contributions of trans people to feminist and queer movements and the historical and geographical range of gender variance; liberal discourses that approach trans as yet another matter of civil rights, neglecting how visibility renders trans people more susceptible to violence and surveillance; and media narratives which tell the same fetishizing, isolating, and tragic stories of trans lives time and again. Through my analysis of three of my own transfeminist vids, I introduce the digital humanities methodology “remixing transfeminist futures” and propose we remix our transphobic, transmisogynistic, cissexist reality so as to make perceptible a future when trans people, queer people, people of color, and all women and femmes are free.

scholarly journals Information Communication Technologies as Tools to Cope with Stigma: An Exploration of Coping in College-Aged Queer People of Color

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice H. Fadrigon ◽  
Courtney E. Smith ◽  
Chantelle A Roulston ◽  
Juan F. Maestre
Keyword(s):  
Communication Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Information Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Discrimination And Oppression ◽  
Societal Stigma

Within the United States, Queer People of Color (QPoC) experience high levels of societal discrimination and oppression as a result of having both a stigmatized racial identity and a stigmatized sexual orientation/gender identity. Despite this, QPoC have been the focus of very few studies, and little is known about how to effectively support this marginalized group. Research shows that QPoC utilize Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) to cope with societal stigma, however few studies have addressed exactly what ICTs QPoC are using and how they are using them. This qualitative study explores common themes in the experiences of stigma for QPoC, what ICTs QPoC are using to cope with this stigma, and how they are using these ICTs. The authors conducted 12 semi-structured interviews followed by a thematic analysis. The main ICTs that participants discussed using include: Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Tinder, Grindr, GroupMe, Tumblr, Reddit, Netflix, YouTube, Video Games, and Texting. These tools were primarily used for distracting and escaping from stigma, communicating and connecting with others, seeking QPoC media, exploring one’s identity, seeking a community, and finding emotional support. Participants reported that these ICTs are effective coping mechanisms, however stigma permeates these online spaces as well, making it difficult for QPoC to feel safe from the stigma they face offline. To address this, the authors put forth several suggestions.

Interlude

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-104
Author(s):  
William Cheng
Keyword(s):  
People Of Color ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Queer People

The Interlude observes how various marginalized members (disabled people, queer people, people of color) of the American Musicological Society (AMS) entered the musicological field out of love for its scholarly and collegial possibilities, but how this love has not always been repaid—at times leading to the (usually quiet) departure of these members.

Feeling Fear, Feeling Queer: The Peril and Potential of Queer Terror

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (7) ◽  
pp. 561-568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Harris ◽  
Stacy Holman Jones
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Bisexual And Transgender ◽  
Viral Media

This essay considers what we are calling queer terror, an affective condition not limited to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) or other minoritarian subjects, and its relationship to fear, hate, and factionalism (or isolationism). That is, queer terror is both terror against queer subjects and a queering of terror culture itself. We ask whether, through the act and its viral media representations, queer terror creates minoritarian public sphere that can be shared by queer people of color (QPOC) and allies alike. This affectively queer allyship begins with a racially and queerly attentive politics and seeks community both in response to and as a refusal of the kinds of terror that made Orlando possible.

scholarly journals Mark Bingham

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
J. B. Mayo, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Small Group ◽  
September 11 ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Queer Communities ◽  
Post September 11 ◽  
High Level

In this article, the author recounts some of the events that occurred on September 11, 2001, when four doomed airlines crashed after being hijacked by 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists, resulting in the deaths of 2,977 people in New York, New York, at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and on an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It is at this latter location, where United Flight 93 crashed killing everyone onboard, including 31-year-old Mark Bingham, an openly gay businessman and member of a small group of people who, it is believed, wrested control from the hijackers and brought the plane down.  In the years post-September 11, Bingham has become known as a modern-day hero by the various queer communities, while also garnering a high level of notoriety among many mainstream people as well. The author maintains, however, that Bingham’s hero status simultaneously contributes to the dismissal and erasure of countless other queer people, primarily Black, Brown, and transgender, who have also performed heroic acts throughout modern U.S. history. Without diminishing the actions Bingham and the others took on board United Flight 93, the author questions why this particular gay man is remembered, while countless other queer/trans people of color remain largely unknown.

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