Mediations of Security, Race, and Violence in the Pulse Nightclub Shooting

This article examines news and political mediations of security, race, and violence in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in an attempt to isolate how dominant institutions reaffirm and preserve the North American state's monopoly on violence and cultural preservation through the calculated balance of security in relation to tolerance of diversity. The event was predominantly mediated through security discourses of the “war on terror,” and this martial framing enabled the production of homonationalist rhetoric (drawing on Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages) that aimed to include previously excluded queer Latino/a populations within the American body politic. Focusing on news media reporting and political as well as activist responses to the shooting during the months of June–August 2016, the article shows how this process of homonationalist inclusion was not smooth. Memorialization and advocacy for the Pulse victims by dominant institutions is striated by colliding phobias (Islamo-, xeno-, and homo-) that interrupt a clear mode of nationalist address or point of identification in mediations of the shooting. Drawing on a knowledge base attentive to queer-of-color and Indigenous concerns, the article demonstrates how biopolitical and necropolitical value is extracted from communities exposed to intersecting violences with differential dividends distributed to queer Latino/a and Afro-Latino/a communities.

A Critique of “Mascquerade”

This article begins by identifying the demand for “masc” in gay male digital cultures as a repressive phenomenon. Drawing on a key queer alt-right text by Jack Donovan in which “masc” is explicitly theorized, it shows that its disciplinary logic is distinct from homonormativity. The homo/hetero binary is explicitly rejected, and the perverse structure is weaponized as a repressive mechanism suited to a postnormative environment. Under these conditions, critiques of normativity and homonationalism are unable to provide an effective counter because the subjects they address have stopped caring. The article describes perverse homogenization processes as “homotribalism,” arguing that they provide an erotic basis for ethnonationalism. It then provides a detailed reading of Call Me by Your Name (2017), claiming that its striking contemporary relevance during the first year of the Trump administration followed from working through the question of homotribal desire within liberalism.

Impure Hopes

The experiment in China that produced the world's first babies with “edited” DNA comes out of an international research program aimed at producing an HIV cure. An atmosphere of secrecy surrounded this experiment at the edge of the law. Volunteers who signed up for the experiment were HIV-positive tonzghi—gay and bisexual “comrades” already living with closely guarded secrets and conflicted desires. Impure hopes—a mix of heterosexual dreams about reproductive futurity and biotech speculation about an HIV cure—drove the research forward. Volunteers were caught between dreamworlds, harboring hopes that were not entirely their own. The story of these patients is tangled up with CRISPR, a fast and cheap tool for manipulating DNA that contains tantalizing promises of medical breakthroughs for innovators and investors. Speculation in the innovation economy produced an earlier gene-editing experiment in the United States that brought HIV-positive veterans of ACT UP together with biotechnology entrepreneurs. After achieving promising results, a fickle market pushed gene-editing enterprises away from HIV cure research. Building on earlier work about impure science, this article makes an argument against purity to consider the contours of hope in ethically compromised times. Hope demands ongoing articulation work. As powerful political and economic forces threaten to steal queer hopes or simply capitalize on them, it is important to make our own ethical, political, and discursive cuts—to selectively renew some articulations while breaking other connections.

Black Church Rumor

In 1992, Jet published “James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims,” which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also “[given] him the AIDS virus.” This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes “Black church rumor” as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on “down low” sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

Darwin's Orchids

Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference organized around masculinity and femininity—an approach Myra Hird has called the “ontology of heterosexuality.” But these interpretations are incorrect. Schaefer argues that far from being an advocate for the ontology of heterosexuality, Darwin provides tools to demolish it. Turning to his research on barnacles and orchids and his speculation on the sources of organic variation, this essay highlights the irreducible importance of diversity and change for Darwin's framework. The ongoing ferment of variation that is the guideline of all life on earth extends not only to the morphology of sex organs but to desire itself. Darwin shows that the ontology of heterosexuality is an arbitrary snapshot, a single moment in the fluid trajectory of life, rather than a law that can be arbitrarily cast over the whole arc. In this, Darwin supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first axiom for queer theory: “People are different from each other.” The essay concludes by connecting a Darwinian approach to sex with José Esteban Muñoz's call for a queer ecstasy that anticipates the futurity of desire.