Stepping back from queer theory: Language, fieldwork and the everyday in sexuality studies in France

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 408-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis M. Provencher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
French Cultural Studies

In a 2012 special issue of French Cultural Studies, Didier Eribon urges French studies scholars to step back from critical theory, and in particular queer theory as it has emerged in cultural and literary studies. He is also particularly critical of a version of queer theory conjugated with psychoanalysis. For Eribon, cultural studies scholars and those working in sexuality studies should move away from the ‘master narrative’ of the family and (re)turn to the cultural, the social, the field and empirical evidence. Over the last 15 years, I have conducted fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with self-identified same-sex desiring men in France. Their life stories can be read at times through the Anglo-American lens of a gay-identified, Western coming-out narrative with a telos of ‘progress’ that involves moving from the closet to being ‘out’. At the same time, however, a queer linguistic approach can help us to read against the grain of several norms and hence provide us with a broader understanding of their lived experiences. In this essay, I present empirical language data from my interview with ‘Tahar’ one of my self-identified same-sex desiring Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French interlocutors to illustrate how his speech acts are situated at the crossroads of multiple discourses, temporalities, identities and traditions. As we shall see, Tahar’s story involves being ‘beur’, ‘being homosexual’ and ‘being fat’. This subject speaks back against the empire, against heteronormativity, and against corporeal norms. While a postcolonial critique based on a ‘postcolonial identity’ (looking at ethnicity or religion, for example) or a linguistic analysis based on ‘gay identity’ could be helpful here, my point is that a queer linguistic analysis – one that takes a position counter to the normative broadly defined by considering simultaneously multiple subaltern subject positions – could provide a better approach for those of us working in an interdisciplinary French cultural studies context.

scholarly journals Introduction: Anthropology’s Queer Sensibilities

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 843-852
Author(s):  
Paul Boyce ◽  
Elisabeth L Engebretsen ◽  
Silvia Posocco
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Uk

This special issue addresses vital epistemological, methodological, ethical and political issues at the intersections of queer theory and anthropology as they speak to the study of sexual and gender diversity in the contemporary world. The special issue centres on explorations of anthropology’s queer sensibilities, that is, experimental thinking in ethnographically informed investigations of gender and sexual difference, and related connections, disjunctures and tensions in their situated and abstract dimensions. The articles consider the possibilities and challenges of anthropology’s queer sensibilities that anthropologize queer theory whilst queering anthropology in ethnographically informed analyses. Contributors focus on anthropologizing queer theory in research on same-sex desire in Congo; LGBT migrant and asylum experience in the UK and France; same-sex intimacies within opposite gender oriented sexualities in Kenya and Ghana; secret and ambiguous intimacies and sensibilities beyond an identifiable ‘queer subject’ of rights and recognition in India; migrant imaginings of home in Indonesian lesbian relationships in Hong Kong; and cross-generational perspectives on ‘coming out’ in Taiwan, and their implications for theories of kinship and relatedness. An extensive interview with Esther Newton, the prominent figure in gay and lesbian and queer anthropology concludes the collection.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

2016 ◽  
pp. 286-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Stockton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Same Sex Couples

This essay offers a presentist reading of Romeo and Juliet in light of the political move to secure marriage rights for same-sex couples in the United States. At the same time, it critiques the recent anti-social, queer theoretical tendency to disassociate queerness from both gay identity and critical efforts to historicize desire. Identifying the Second City Network’s character of Sassy Gay Friend as the combined figure of the Nurse and Mercurtio, this essay argues for the viability of a gay, feminist, and queer life that stands against the rush to secure marriage rites, as well as against the death-drive that anti-social queer theory celebrates as queer.

Cut, Snap

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-136
Author(s):  
Dominic Pecoraro
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Sexual Minority ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Communication Theory ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
Queer Identity

Inspired by critical interpersonal communication scholarship and queer autoethnography, this piece depicts interpersonal interactions mute or challenge queer identity. I explore the nexus of interpersonal communication theory, identity work, and queer theory to contextualize coming out and coming into sexual minority status. This piece explores narratives in which the legitimacy of queerness is unaccepted, unassured, and undermined.

Homosexuality in K. Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams: Demythologising the Imaginings and Universalising the Reality

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Black African ◽  
Sex Preference ◽  
National Allegory ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Sex Orientation ◽  
The Right

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.

The Rainbow after the Storm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Marriage Equality ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Gay Couples ◽  
Gays And Lesbians ◽  
The U.S

The Rainbow after the Storm tells the story of the rapid liberalization of attitudes toward gay rights that made same-sex marriage the law of the U.S. sooner than almost anyone thought was possible. The book explains how and why public opinion toward gay rights liberalized so much, while most other public attitudes have remained relatively stable. The book explores the roles of a variety of actors in this drama. Social science research helped to shift elite opinion in ways that reduced the persecution of gays and lesbians. Gays and lesbians by the hundreds of thousands responded to a less repressive environment by coming out of the closet. Straight people started to know the gay and lesbian people in their lives, and their view of gay rights shifted accordingly. Same-sex couples embarked on years-long legal struggles to try to force states to recognize their marriages. In courtrooms across the U.S. social scientists behind a new consensus about the normalcy of gay couples and the health of their children won victories over fringe scholars promoting discredited antigay views. In a few short years marriage equality, which had once seemed totally unrealistic, became realistic. And then almost as soon as it was realistic, marriage equality became a reality.

Culture and the popular: Introduction to essays in memory of Brian Rigby

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 293-299
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
French Cultural Studies

This article introduces the special number of French Cultural Studies commemorating the role of Brian Rigby as the journal’s first Managing Editor. It situates his contribution in the emergence of cultural history and French cultural studies during the rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s in France, the UK, the US and other countries. It suggests that these new areas of study saw cultural activities in a broader social context and opened the way to a wider understanding of culture, in which popular culture played an increasingly important part. It argues that the study of popular culture can illuminate some of the most mundane experiences of everyday life, and some of the most challenging. It can also help to understand the rapidly changing cultural environment in which our daily lives are now conducted.

Introduction Religion in France: Belief, identity and laïcité

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Special Number ◽  
French Cultural Studies ◽  
The Relationship

This is the introduction to a special number of French Cultural Studies devoted to religion in France, focusing on the issues of belief, identity and laïcité. The articles deal with social and cultural issues of secularity and identity, and also reach into philosophical argument and literary representation. They explore the relationship between France and Islam, issues of Jewish and Catholic heritage, the philosophical issues of belief and non-belief, and the historical roots of French secularism and the search for ways of living together.

THE NEW OTHER VICTORIANS: THE SUCCESS (AND FAILURE) OF QUEER THEORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH STUDIES

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Kaye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
History Of

Much of the critical writingon Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault's theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault'sThe History of Sexuality(1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus'sThe Other Victorians(1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault's telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus's examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus's reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world thatThe History of Sexualityhad so forcefully undermined.

scholarly journals Anusocratie? Freemasonry, sexual transgression and illicit enrichment in postcolonial Africa

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (5) ◽  
pp. 831-851
Author(s):  
Peter Geschiere ◽  
Rogers Orock
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Sexual Transgression ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
Anal Penetration ◽  
Sex Practices

AbstractCameroonians recently invented a new word to characterize the state of their country: anusocratie (the rule of the anus). This became central in the moral panic from 2000 onwards over a supposed proliferation of homosexuality. Anusocratie links such same-sex practices to illicit enrichment by the national elites and their involvement with secret associations of Western provenance, such as Freemasonry, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. This article tries to unravel this conceptual knot of homosexuality, the occult (Freemasonry) and illicit enrichment: first, by historicizing it. Of interest in the Cameroonian case is the fact that a similar link is mentioned in one of the first ethnographies, Günther Tessmann's Die Pangwe. Freemasonry is clearly a colonial imposition on the country, but the link between same-sex practices and enrichment has a longer history. Second, a comparison with similar ideas elsewhere on the continent can also open up wider perspectives. The link with illicit enrichment does not figure in classical conceptions of ‘homosexuality’ as developed in Europe, yet it strongly emerges from examples from all over Africa. Both Achille Mbembe and Joseph Tonda show that this image of the anus – anal penetration – articulates popular concerns about staggering inequalities. Yet, this aspect is ignored in debates about growing ‘homophobia’ in Africa. A confrontation with classical texts from Western queer theory (Bersani, Mieli) can help us discover other layers in African discourses, notably an emphasis on sexual diversity as an answer to homophobia. It can also serve to relativize the linking of sexual practices to sexual identities, which is still seen as self-evident in much queer theory of Western provenance.

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