Cementing of an Empire

In this photo essay on the Regias del Drag competition in Monterrey, Mexico, photographer Laura Alvarez meditates on the experiences, identities, and things that comprise northern Mexico’s queer communities.

“That's What Google Is For”

Through in-depth interviews, this chapter examines the ways 25 LGB young adults (18-35 years old) used digital technologies as they do emotion work to preserve relationships with heterosexual parents. Findings demonstrate that, with the aid of technology (especially texting, Skyping, social media, YouTube, television, and various informational websites), LGB young adults engaged in personal and interpersonal forms of “preventive” and “palliative” emotion work. The former's aim was to prevent noxious feelings and the latter to preserve familial relationships despite emotional pain. These forms of emotion work allowed LGBs to maintain relationships with their parents, but by privileging the emotional wellbeing of heterosexual parents above those of LGBs. The authors conclude by suggesting that digital technology can be a dual-edged sword. Access to these technologies may allow LGBs to connect with queer communities and to obtain information about queerness, yet utilizing these technologies as a way to preserve familial relationships was an adaptation to--rather than disruption of--heterosexism and homophobia.

Disruptions, Decolonial Desire and Diaspora: A Provocation toward a Pacific Queer Worldmaking Scholarly Practice in Aotearoa–New Zealand

Pacific queer scholarship is underrepresented within Pacific research communities in Aotearoa–New Zealand. What does exist is either hypervisible or centres on narratives of oppression, both of which are archetypes that can deny the complexity of Pacific queer communities. As two queer Samoan scholars raised in the Aotearoa–New Zealand diasporic setting, we offer a provocation that tests the opportunities (and limits) queer theoretics provide for Pacific research. Through a combination of poetry, vignettes, and theory (queer and straight), as well as reflections, we intentionally and generatively transgress heteronormative, exclusionary and static boundaries that still exists within Pacific research in New Zealand.

Getting Freaky with Missy

This article analyzes the music of Black female rapper Missy Elliott in order to consider performative challenges to the politics of visibility and visuality of Black queerness in hip hop. While mainstream media lauds the recent increase in and representation of out Black LGBTQ rappers, scholars such as C. Riley Snorton caution such praise for the unique ways visibility and surveillance are entangled formations that render Black queer communities vulnerable to violence. This article draws on Elliott’s songs “Get Ur Freak on” and “Pussycat” to present alternative ways of navigating the violence of visibility for Black queers and queerness. It argues that Elliott musically inhabits, expresses, and produces queerness through a set of cultural practices that this article calls the “musical aesthetics of impropriety.” The musical aesthetics of impropriety are performative expressions that are developed and deployed at the level of the sound recording, and that exploit the gaps and fissures of what qualifies as proper sexual subjects (e.g., LGBT) and how we come to perceive them as such (i.e., “evidence“) in order to produce alternative sexual and sonic formations. It is, thus, through the musical aesthetics of impropriety that we might imagine and articulate racialized queerness in hip hop differently.

Mark Bingham

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.

Examining the State of Health Research on Pacific Rainbow Communities in New Zealand; Literatrure Review

Introduction: Pacific Rainbow/Queer Communities (PRCs) in New Zealand (NZ) have had scant attention paid to the specificities of their health and wellbeing needs in research. Recently, the Health Research Council of NZ funded its first Pacific-specific PRC project (The Manalagi Project) executed through the University of Auckland’s Centre for Pacific Studies. This paper reports a literature review conducted to ascertain the current state of health research on PRCs, Rainbow/Queer and Pacific communities’ health in NZ. Methods: A scoping review was conducted where relevant public health database search engines were accessed, which included PubMed and Medline to explore both national and international health research pertaining to PRCs, Pacific communities and Rainbow/Queer communities. Additional Google searches were undertaken to identify more ‘grey’ material such as reports, websites, other relevant government sources, as well as non-profit organisation and educational resources not visible via scientific databases. Findings/Outcome: The review identified published journal articles (n=20), books (n=1), reports (n=25) and theses (n=3) as well as other documents relevant to the study, such as websites and news articles pertaining to PRCs in NZ and abroad. It reveals a severe paucity of health research focused on PRCs domestically and internationally. Although more research is being conducted into the space of Pacific communities, as well as Rainbow/Queer communities, research that is PRC-focused is urgent and critical at this time. Conclusion: Both Pacific and Rainbow/Queer communities in NZ are socially marginalised, thus experience a raft of health challenges represented by a racist and cisnormative heterosexist health system. This literature review reveals a lack of understanding around the nuances that exist when these experiences intersect and coalesce in the body and experience of PRC members. It has identified a significant gap in Pacific health research that exists in NZ and abroad that urge us to frame future research to also be intersectionally-informed to capture the unique needs and context of PRCs.

Resignifications: Linguistic Resistance and Queer Expressions of Latinidad

The resignification of language practices among LGBTQIA+ communities has seen the reclamation of terms like queer, dyke, and faggot enter mainstream discourse. Marginalized communities who view the reclamation of language as a form of empowerment also have a long history of resignifying certain forms of pejorative language to revalorize meanings along ethnic and racial lines. This chapter provides an overview of contributions from queer theory, queer studies, and queer linguistics that center the reclamation of historically pejorative terms used for queer communities, but situates these queer resignifications within the context of linguistic reclamations enacted around ethnic and racial affiliations. The chapter specifically focuses on the reclamation of the Spanish terms joto/a/x and jotería by Latinx communities in the United States—terms that have historically been used to denigrate men performing traits associated with femininity—to illustrate how linguistic reclamation provides an avenue for resistance by creating and maintaining new worlds of possibility.

Sexuality politics on the football field: queering the field in Turkey

Focusing on queer-identified amateur football teams, this article investigates the potentials of the mobilities and alliances of gender non-conforming footballing people to disrupt the seemingly effortless structure of the football field. While football is arguably one of the sports with the strongest discriminatory attitudes toward gender non-conforming people, it has also become a site of resistance for queers in Turkey as of 2015. How political opposition groups relate to the football field, which is mostly considered as a male-dominant and heterosexualized space where social norms are reproduced, are classified into three groups in my research: resistance through, against, and for football. I give particular attention to the category “resistance for football” as a distinctive way for gender non-conforming people to inhabit the field. I discuss how the link between sexual and spatial orientations shapes the domain of what a body can do, both in terms of normativity and capacity, and I explore what these teams offer in order to exceed spatial and sexual boundaries. Lastly, I present recent queer interventions in the value system of the game through which I reflect upon the concept of “queer commons” and the processes of bonding, belonging, and border-making in queer communities.

‘Where the state freaks out’: Gentrification, Queerspaces and activism in postwar Beirut

In this article I illuminate the production and erasure of Queerspaces in Beirut as part of postwar gentrification. A dual Beirut has emerged within assemblages of sectarian power, sexual citizenship and political economy. Commercial Queerspaces tacitly incorporated into the neoliberal and sectarian state exist while the ‘Queer unwanted’– spaces and people deemed transgressive to the moral order – are violently erased by state and non-state actors. These dual spaces expose the limits on life for Queer communities. To analyse these dynamics, I turn to the testimonies of LGBTQ activists in Beirut in relation to the possibilities offered by Queerspace. While activists note the exclusions – class, gender and sexuality – of commercial Queerspace that restrain political agency, they have powerfully asserted radical intersectional politics into recent revolutionary anti-sectarian waves of protest. This politics is marked by articulating Queerness as a project of connecting marginality for all excluded groups in Lebanon’s postwar order and by a queering of sectarian/neoliberal space that has hitherto cleansed undesirable LGBTQ bodies. This article draws on extensive fieldwork in Beirut (2011 to 2020), thus permitting longitudinal research of LGBTQ activism.