What’s Queer? Queer Theory Versus Queer Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Heike Schotten
Keyword(s):  

This article provides an outline of the project of queer theory and the ways that this project has (and has not) engaged with the question of Palestine. Ultimately, the author argues that queer theory and Palestinian liberation share, albeit perhaps unwittingly, a defining resistance to elimination and an enduring commitment to unsettlement. As such, queer politics is and can surely become decolonial praxis, just as decolonization has a clear affinity with dissident queer resistance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-331
Author(s):  
Tripp Rebrovick

This article explores the concept of political and legal regimes of touching by analyzing Walt Whitman’s poems that envision a new political order founded on comradeship – a distinct kind of friendship characterized by physical intimacy. Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, I argue, demonstrate that touching is a political act. This study resists treating Whitman anachronistically as a “homosexual” and argues that comradeship as he understands it represents a model of queerness that can challenge the recent anti-social turn in queer theory.


Author(s):  
Stephen Amico

This article explores the potentials and perils of reading queerness in relation to cultural products, performances, and places outside the site of the theory’s genesis. Beginning with an examination of audiovisual and discursive transgressions in the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian band Kamon!!!, putatively “stylistic” elements are shown as intimately related to a political sociocultural realm. This move to the political, and to queer politics, necessitates an interrogation of the politics of queerness, and the risks of intellectual colonialism that perpetuates cultural hierarchies and stereotypes (the “backward,” pragmatic East versus the fluid, utopian West). Approaching queer theory through the lens of performativity—a textual assimilation which “queers” the other—the dynamics of musical notation and transcription are engaged in order to highlight the possible asymmetries engendered via transcultural queering, suggesting that only through mutually transformative dialog can queerness fulfill its liberatory potential.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-398
Author(s):  
Grace Lavery

Abstract This essay contemplates an enduring form of reasoning it titles “egg theory”: the type of reasoning that trans people use, prior to transition, to prove transition's impossibility or fruitlessness. It follows this reasoning in a critical and ironic framing in the work of the novelist and critic Sybil Lamb and then, in a less ironic mode, through some essays of Eve Sedgwick and, more broadly, the tranche of queer theory that her work continues to inspire. Egg theory's hostility to the logic of transition inheres in queer theory's own insistence on universality and virtuality as key aspects of queer politics. The essay concludes by considering, through Freud's “Schreber Case” and Dalí's “Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” alternatives to egg theory for approaching the condition of the egg before it hatches, the trans person before transition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leila Farsakh ◽  
Rhoda Kanaaneh ◽  
Sherene Seikaly

In this introduction to “Queering Palestine,” the curators of this special issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies explore what queer theory and activism can teach us about the Palestinian condition, and vice versa. They contextualize the arguments made by the contributors for the relevance of queer politics to the question of Palestine, which encompass queer theory and dissent, sexuality politics and the nation-state, and queerness as decolonial practice.


2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 37-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Brooks

This article is an attempt to bring sound studies discourses into dialogue with queer theory, to “queer” the field of sound studies, and to open up queer theory to the textual canon of sonic art. Concerned with notions of failure, this article deals with glitch and examines the result when error, malfunction and failure are amplified within systems. The author argues that the glitch, a key conceit of experimental music, is a productive framework for theorizing minoritarian politics and alternative modes of knowledge production.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0961463X2110081
Author(s):  
Rachel E Friedensen ◽  
Ezekiel Kimball ◽  
Annemarie Vaccaro ◽  
Ryan A Miller ◽  
Rachael Forester

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science’s interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants’ current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Kristien Justaert

In this article, I confront Marcella Althaus-Reid’s thinking with the recent ‘negative turn’ in queer theory, as observed by Judith Halberstam. What remains when the belief in our world as such, and in the future of it, has to be totally rejected, as some queer theorists like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, for example, claim? Or, in theological terms: what could the categories of redemption, salvation and liberation still mean if one wishes to think God within history, but at the same time rejects this history? I investigate these questions by focusing on two central concepts of Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology, incarnation and redemption. First, brought into dialogue with negative queer politics, I argue that Althaus-Reid helps us to develop an understanding of radical incarnation in the flesh on the ‘underside’ of society. Second, I look at Althaus-Reid’s critique of the traditional Christian understanding of redemption and her alternative of a notion of redemption that is connected to love, solidarity and reciprocity, instead of to a one-way act of grace by a transcendent God. I conclude that a ‘negative queer theology’, when developed in line with Althaus-Reid’s insights, necessarily maintains an affirmative undercurrent, a belief in an unknown life.


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