Hypervisibility in Australian punk scenes: Queer experiences of spatial logics of gender and sexuality

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Sharp

In this article, I draw on the knowledge and lived experience of queer people – some of whom also identify as trans, gender diverse and/or non-binary – who actively participate in Australian punk scenes. Using socio-geographical research of intersectionality, critical race theory and spatiality I find queer experiences of and in punk highlight a complication to claims of female and queer invisibility, one that takes into account spacial formations. Attending to queer, trans and gender-diverse people’s experiences, hypervisibility presents a conceptual entanglement where genders, bodies and sexualities attract attention from a dominant, patriarchal group, rather than being rendered invisible by it. This hypervisibility appears steeped in unintelligibility where being visible but unknowable presents a range of issues such as standing out not only in physical punk spaces such as gigs, but on digital platforms and in everyday life. As such, this article builds on a feminist thesis of invisibility politics by aiming to elasticize knowledges of gender, resistance and subcultural participation among marginalized groups.

Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.


Author(s):  
Page Valentine Regan ◽  
Elizabeth J. Meyer

The concepts of queer theory and heteronormativity have been taken up in educational research due to the influence of disciplines including gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Queer theory seeks to disrupt dominant and normalizing binaries that structure our understandings of gender and sexuality. Heteronormativity describes the belief that heterosexuality is and should be the preferred system of sexuality and informs the related male or female, binary understanding of gender identity and expression. Taken together, queer theory and heteronormativity offer frames to interrogate and challenge systems of sex and gender in educational institutions and research to better support and understand the experiences of LGBTQ youth. They also inform the development of queer pedagogy that includes classroom and instructional practices designed to expand and affirm gender and sexual diversity in schools.


Hypatia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-735
Author(s):  
Jana Cattien

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Helen Marsh

In this thesis I draw on deconstruction theory and queer theory to analyze the current representation of sex, gender, and sexuality in Canadian television. Through this research I found that although Canadian television is portraying an increasing number of queer genders and sexualities, misinformation and stereotypes continue to perpetuate a one-dimensional characterization of people. This research pertains directly to my creative thesis: a pilot episode of a TV series which fraternal twins, Jed and Theodora, grow up with the ability to switch into one another's body. I dive directly into the correlation between sex and gender and the lived experience of being in a body that does not necessarily represent gender. The will both create a new gendered "construction" as well as question the need for gender identifications.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-342
Author(s):  
Angeline Stephens ◽  
Floretta Boonzaier

Current conceptualisations of citizenship in South Africa are embedded in the egalitarian discourse of the Constitution, lauded for its recognition of historically marginalised groups, including sexually and gender diverse people. Within the paradox of progressive legal advancements and the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, we use a decolonial feminist lens to critically engage with the notion of citizenship for black lesbian women in contemporary South Africa. We adopt a social-psychological perspective of citizenship as an active practice, embedded within the dynamic intersections of historical, structural and discursive patterns of power-knowledge relations in everyday life. We draw from five focus group discussions that were part of a study that explored the intersections of identity, power and violence in the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa. Focusing on the enactments of citizenship in public spaces, we contend that black lesbian women’s lived experiences of citizenship point to the enduring manifestations of the coloniality of power, in which the centrality of race underpins the intersections of class, gender and sexuality. We conclude by arguing that current conceptualisations of full citizenship in contemporary South Africa require a reframing that recognises the coloniality of power and the heterogeneity of marginalised and invisibilised subjectivities.


Symposium ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-114
Author(s):  
Nicolas Marion ◽  
Gábor Tverdota ◽  

Cet article introduit l’hypothèse de l’oppression nécropolitique des sans-abris. Nous partons d’une analyse métaphorologique de propos tenus par les sans-abris sur leurs conditions d’existence, souvent décrites comme impliquant l’expérience vécue paradoxale d’une indifférenciation tendancielle entre la vie et la mort. Nous essayons de conceptualiser le contenu de ces descriptions en faisant appel au concept de nécropolitique développé par Norman Ajari dans le contexte des études critiques de la race. La nécropolitique sera comprise ici comme un idéal-type de gouvernance de la vie ne se réduisant ni à la biopolitique (soin de la vie de certaines populations), ni à la thanatopolitique (l’extermination de populations jugées indésirables), mais visant plutôt à brouiller les frontières qui séparent la mort de la vie. La nécropolitique est ce qui rend la vie quotidienne des sans-abris proprement invivable, aboutissant à cette vie vécue sous forme-de-mort dont font état les témoignages de certaines personnes sans-abri.This article introduces the hypothesis of the necropolitical oppression of the homeless. We begin with a metaphorological analysis of the discourses held by certain homeless persons regarding their conditions of existence, often described as involving the paradoxical experience of a tendential undifferentiation of life and death. We then build on the concept of necropolitics elaborated by Norman Ajari in the context of critical race theory. Necropolitics will be understood here as an ideal-type of the governance of life reducible neither to biopolitics (caring for the life of certain populations) nor to thanatopolitics (extermination of undesirable populations). Instead, the rationality of necropolitics as a form of oppression consists in constantly blurring the frontiers of life and death. In the case of the homeless, necropolitics is rendering their everyday life literally unlivable, an experience reflected in the analyzed testimonies of homeless persons.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document