In and/or/plus Out: Queering the Closet

By enacting a reflexive return to our initial encounters with the ambiguous and multivalenced potential offered by queerness, I locate and piece together the traces of an always already lost/forcibly disappeared network that is constantly unfolding nonetheless. Taken together, these individual/ized encounters form structures of queer knowing, moving, and feeling that counter this individualization, which I argue is an integral part of the repertoire of techniques designed to foreclose the potential of a queer collective. It is with this in mind that I posit what I call authoritarian heterosexuality as a particular and particularly potent political regime, one that is entangled in colonial legacies and local sedimentations that inform the contemporary Egyptian state’s attitudes towards queers specifically, and towards its citizenry more broadly. And by using this affective material as my entry point into an analysis of what queer might really mean here, I am able to reveal the traces of this violating constitution. Put differently, by engaging in a structural analysis of diverse articulations and experiences of queerness, I am simultaneously engaging in an analysis of the ways in which authoritarian regimes, in their efforts to eradicate queerness, end up producing it along lines that are perhaps illegible when read with the optic of traditional queer theory. To this end, I will be foregrounding my analysis in “the closet” as both a material artifact and disciplinary technology of this heterosexist regime that works to impress a damaging sense of individualism in subjects, as well as a site of potential for queers to collectivize, once the inconsistencies and similarities between such designations as “in” and “out,” “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective” are parsed out.

Governing Juridical Sex: Gender Recognition and the Biopolitics of Trans Sterilization in Finland

In many countries, compulsory sterilization is still a precondition for amending juridical sex. Drawing on feminist and queer debates on the entanglement of recognition with governmentalization, this article moves beyond a human rights frame to examine how struggles for legal gender recognition are bound up with the production and discipline of trans subjectivities, bodies, and relationships. It argues that rights and recognition may not only reinscribe regulation, but also they are a means of rendering trans subjects governable. By theorizing gender identity as a biopolitical discourse that produces trans subjects, the article genealogically examines the problematization of “gender identity” in Finnish welfare population governance practices leading up to the 2003 Finnish gender recognition law. The analysis demonstrates how the discourse of “equality” was key for producing a clearly defined trans population that could be identified, assessed, and, hence, governed. While the sterilization requirement was justified as a replacement for former castration laws which had been used by male-to-female transsexuals to access genital surgery, it also acted as a disciplinary technology to neutralize the alleged threats to normative forms of kinship that could be produced through gender recognition. Finally, the article considers points of resistance and avenues for further research.

Tension Metastable Fluid Nuclear Particle Detector: Qualification and Comparisons

Fluids in states of tension metastability offer unique capabilities for detection of nuclear emissions from fission and other nuclear phenomena. This includes the ability to completely avoid photonic interference when detecting neutrons in addition to being able to detect neutrons over eight orders of magnitude with spectroscopic capabilities, and the ability to provide directionality information, all from the same instrument; altogether, representing an unsurpassed capability for next-generation application of multi-disciplinary technology for diverse fields of application. In this paper we present the underlying principles of detection using tension (negative, i.e., sub-zero) pressure fluid states at room temperature and present results of qualification of performance in terms of intrinsic efficiency of detection of neutrons from fission and fusion sources. It is found that, unlike present day systems where intrinsic efficiencies are limited to about 20% for fast neutrons, the tension metastabile fluid detector (TMFD) systems offer intrinsic efficiencies of over 90% with the ability to readily scale-up in size for vastly improved effective detection.