The Freak Show’s ‘Missing Links’: Krao Farini and the Pleasures of Archiving Prehistory

This article offers a new perspective on Victorian freakery and prehistory by reading the career of Krao Farini, the ‘Missing Link’, through lenses of queer theory and archival studies. Born in Laos with hypertrichosis, a condition that produces an abundance of body hair, Krao transformed into living proof of the ‘Missing Link’ upon migrating to London in the 1880s. I contextualize Krao’s exhibition by situating her show within contemporaneous visual, textual, and performed examples of the ‘Missing Link’. Reading Krao alongside these other ‘Missing Links’ illuminates inconsistencies in their representations of gender and sexuality that nullify firm distinctions between ‘pre’ and ‘history’. I argue that the freak show’s ‘Missing Link’ materializes rhetorical and epistemological connections between Victorian prehistory and contemporary queer historiography to provide a valuable framework for accessing queer archives otherwise buried in the historical record. Though the correlations between prehistory and queer history are not necessarily explicit, locating their similarities reveals how persistent notions of Victorian time inform contemporary queer scholarship. Presaging recent queer archival interventions, Krao’s remaining archive demonstrates how prehistory breeds alternative models of evidence that disorder the archive’s relation to time: evidence of the ‘Missing Link’ unravels the language of stability, family, and presence on which archives typically rest. Resisting the implicitly heteronormative logic of the archival document, prehistory makes possible new ways of narrating Victorian histories of freakery, imperialism, and gender and sexuality.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

Researching ‘gay Cape Town’ finding value-added queerness

An initiative to market Cape Town as a premier gay and lesbian tourist destination has steadily gathered steam over the last decade. I set out to study this phenomenon thereby adding to conversations about the normalization and globalization of queerness. Rather than straightforwardly presenting my findings, however, this paper considers queer theorizing as an inductive process by detailing the answers I did not find in the field and the questions I did. Based on my close readings of queer theory, I went looking for resistance and therefore queerness in the normalized space of ‘gay Cape Town’. I was disappointed. But I did not instead find outright capitulation. Rather, in this process of queer's commodification, I found anxieties, cracks and fissures beneath a veneer of assured mainstreaming. I found an undetermined process that did not represent either ‘un-African-ness’ or ‘global queer homogeneity’ or ‘African-ness’ and ‘local queer heterogeneity’. I found not an un-queering through commodification, but a queer commodity struggling to gain a foothold in a nation in which the terrain for gay and lesbian politics has drastically changed in such a way that the market cannot be ignored. To grapple with these findings, I argue for a more ambivalent approach to queer theorizing.     

In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall,Una Troubridge and their Dogs

How does attention to dogs open up understanding of the queer, and more specifically, the Sapphic, past? This article examines the forgotten enmeshments of lesbian and pedigree dog subcultures in 1920s England. It takes as its case study one of the best-known couples of Sapphic modernity, Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, and their dachshunds, Wotan and Thorgils. Bringing into dialogue scholarship on queer, trans and animal history, it traces the historical footprint of the dogs and considers how what this article calls the ‘canine archive of sex’ – a wide range of documents including show catalogues, newspaper reports, fiction and scientific writing – adds to understanding of the complexities of modern Sapphic history. Sapphic here is used to denote relationships between people assigned female at birth, some of whom may have transed gender norms and expectations. The article argues that the records of Hall's and Troubridge's involvement in the world of dog breeding expand understanding both of Sapphic modernity specifically and the intersections between histories of sexuality and gender and animal history more broadly. They reveal how gender norms, class privilege and racialised practices converged in modern pedigree culture, shaping canine–human relationships as well as the queer subcultures that formed around them.     

Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK

While traditional perspectives on transgender from some strands of feminism and within medical/psychoanalytical discourse have argued that transgender people conform to and reproduce gender stereotypes, queer theory has celebrated transgender as a site that highlights the social and cultural construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ and, moreover, as a symbol of transgressive gender possibility. Both of these readings ignore the complexities of lived trans experiences and identifications. By evaluating a queer reading of trans through recent empirical research into transgender identities, I suggest that while trans identifications certainly queer binary models of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, such transgressions are materially, culturally, socially and spatially contingent. The article draws on empirical research to explore the ways in which access to queer subjectivities is constrained by, and negotiated alongside, the locales of the workplace and community spaces.     

EPIDEMICS AND CONTAINMENT: Cuba and the HIV/AIDS epidemic

The Cuban response to a new and little understood disease, HIV/AIDS, was swift. A ban on imported blood was followed by mass testing of HIV antibodies, beginning with Cubans who had travelled abroad. In 1986, a sanatorium – ‘Los Cocos’ – was opened to treat Cuban soldiers who had returned with AIDS from Angola. Soon after, Cubans who had never left the country began testing HIV positive, most of whom were gay and bisexual. ‘Los Cocos’ was neither a hospital nor a prison. The campus was large, and duplex apartments and sports areas were built. The director, Dr Jorge Perez Avila, an infectious disease expert, stepped in as the Dr Fauci of Cuba. His goal was to continue his research on AIDS while simultaneously ensuring that the sanatorium formed a safe refuge for patients while awaiting antivirus medicines. Through his work, Dr Perez managed to transform the sanatorium into a place where sex and sexual differences were accepted, and where a gay community could emerge to produce theatre, arts and sex education for Cuba's public schools. In 1994, the sanatorium became a voluntary institution and many of the patients opted to remain.     

Worlding Sexualities under Apartheid: From Gay Liberation to a Queer Afropolitanism

This essay examines gay journalism as gay liberation literature to model a cultural history of sexuality informed by comparative urban and queer studies. My argument is that gay liberation literature under apartheid lags behind important shifts in sexual activism; and my aim is to extend the valences of postcolonial queer studies towards a historical examination of North-South interactions in theorizing sexual rights activism. The primary archive used is Link/Skakel, the official newsletter of the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), which soon became a mainstream gay newspaper called Exit. I first describe debates around the term Afropolitanism to describe how the development of a gay and lesbian subculture in Johannesburg was influenced by models of gay consumerism and activism in the North. Next, I examine the controversial legal reforms initiated by GASA without challenging racial discrimination and segregation, reflecting a consumption based identity politics. The direction of comparison from North-South and the exclusivist racial and gendered assumptions were challenged by a ‘queer Afropolitanism’ connecting racial and sexual liberation, articulated first by lesbians in GASA and later, the Gays and Lesbians of Witwatersrand (GLOW). In conclusion, I indicate how the transformation of the Johannesburg based gay liberation movement reflecting sexual, racial, and geographical diversity is not reflected in its associated publications, which degenerate into tabloid style journalism.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.     

Straight Pins,Gauze, and Linotypes: The Cuban Post-Soviet Artists’ Book

Matanzas’s Ediciones Vigía and Holguin’s Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro construct an arc from the revolutionary 1960s and its investment in collective and communal goods, to the increasingly privatized 1990s and 2000s through their materials and procedures, as well as through their engagement with the figure of the archive. I contend that the books printed by Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro are both artists’ books – that is, books that are art unto themselves – and books as ‘archives’. Here, I understand the ‘book’ as ‘archive’ in a similar fashion as art historian Hal Foster interprets ‘archival art’: that is, art, in this case book art, that ‘draws on informal archives but produces them as well’ in an effort ‘to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’. The hand-made books of Ediciones Vigía and Ediciones Cuadernos Papiro project a new figure of the reader and occupy social spaces that are radically different from their predecessors. Where Cuban institutional archives have left incomplete territories of the Revolutionary-era and pre-Revolutionary book, the 1990s and 2000s ‘archival book’ incarnated in Ediciones Vigía and Cuadernos Papiro has come to occupy these voids in a compensatory fashion as an ‘archival’ product.     

The politics of rebirth in Colm Tóibín's ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’

This paper explores the compatibility of Catholic and homosexual identities. Because the language of Catholicism is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination, I aim to show that not only does it provide a vocabulary for oppression but also for change. For the contemporary Irish novelist, the latter means conferring new meaning onto formerly oppressive language. In ‘Three Friends’ and ‘A Long Winter’, two short stories from Tóibín's Mothers and Sons (2007), the protagonists undergo a ‘baptism’ that signals their emergence into a new world, one tolerant of homosexual desire. Fergus, in the ocean, and Miquel, in the bathtub, experience moments at once erotic and cleansing. I outline their participation in the traditional world – the time before their bathing rites – in contradistinction to a re-imagined, modern, ‘queer’ world. I argue that Tóibín appropriates a Catholic, and therefore heteronormative, rite in a way that includes homosexuals. Thus, he reworks an oppressive framework in order to allow for the formerly excluded to participate and celebrate their non-heteronormativity, or queerness.     

Intimate mobilities: emotional embodiment and queer migration

This paper offers theoretically-informed empirical insights into queer migration in the contemporary West. Understanding the rationales, patterns and outcomes of migration is important for scholars researching the life experiences of gay men, lesbians and other non-heterosexuals. This paper advances knowledge of queer migration by interpreting interview data from thirty-seven gay and lesbian Australians. The analysis is prompted by a qualitative and narrative turn in migration studies, and the urgings of new mobility studies to account for the embodied and emotional dimensions of migration. Interrogating gay and lesbian Australians' migration narratives over the life course, I scrutinise the emotionally embodied nature of queer migration. I focus on the body as a vector of displacement, and explore how emotions, desires and intimate attachments shape queer mobilities. Respondents particularly emphasised the roles of ‘comfort’ and ‘love’ in relocation decisions. I found that these feelings interleaved with three patterns of emotionally embodied queer migration in the data—coming out, gravitational and relationship migrations. The embodied affects of comfort played a key role in coming out and gravitational migrations, while the exigencies of love underpinned relationship migration.     

Sex work and exclusion in the tourist districts of Salvador,Brazil

Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, in the Northeastern region of Brazil, is composed of racialized, gendered, and sexualized spaces in which certain people are welcome, while others are marginalized and excluded. Praça da Sé, in the Centro Histórico, is a major site of both the local commercial sex industry and the tourist industry in Salvador. With their public visibility in sites heavily frequented by tourists, sex workers in Salvador reveal how sexuality is public, politically contested, economically charged, and, most significantly, racialized. If, as Tom Boellstorff argues, ‘globalization resignifies the meaning of place rather than making place irrelevant’ (2007, 23), how does one then study racialized sexualities in the context of the globalized tourism industry? How do class, space, and race influence practices of sex work and sex tourism in Salvador? This article offers a critical analysis of racialized sexualities in the study of the sexual economies of tourism in Salvador. I conceptualize Salvador as a ‘site of desire’ (Manderson and Jolly 1997) where issues of socioeconomic inequality, racism, and sexism coexist alongside celebratory affirmations of Afro-Brazilian cultural production in Salvador. This article explores how the touristic cityscape of Salvador is divided into carefully demarcated zones where class and race are crucial factors in determining who ‘belongs’ and who is ‘out of place.’     

The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line

This paper critically queers gentrification through an ecological analysis of the redevelopment of New York City's High Line. Taking the abandoned-queer-ecology-turned-homonormative park as a novel form of gay and green gentrification, I argue that the ‘success’ of the project must be critiqued in relational ecological terms. Intervening into the literature of gentrification, I begin to account for the material and symbolic aspects of ecological gentrification with the help of innovations in plant geography and queer ecology. To ground my analysis, I look to the process of ‘succession’, focusing, in particular, on one of the most established and successful plants growing on the abandoned High Line, Ailanthus altissima or the Tree of Heaven. Drawing on empirical insights, this account of the High Line's redevelopment tracks relations between queers and plants. Through layers of sexuality, ecology, and geography, the matter of displacement becomes central to a consideration of ethico-political possibilities for a queer ecological critique of urban space. In conclusion, I argue for an ethics and politics of responsibility to and for abandoned spaces that calls us to pay closer attention to the queer, the ecological, and their ongoing entanglement.     

Queering the Field? The complexities of sexuality within a lesbian-identified football team in England

Lesbian-identified sports teams provide a challenge to the heterosexing, and heterogendering, of sport and sport space. An ‘out’ lesbian football (soccer) team can be understood as offering resistance to compulsory heterosexuality. It is this disruption of normative sexuality that can be described as queer and contributes to the queering of sport space. Given evidence of obdurate heteronormativity in most sporting arenas, such a team could be described as a queer community. However, a critical engagement with lesbian subversion is necessary before claiming lesbian ‘subjects’ as queer ‘subjects’. In this vein, the discussions that follow reflect an engagement with marginalised sex–gender–sexuality identities within a specific lesbian sport community in London, England. Relatively little is known about the social relations that exist within lesbian sporting communities. Through an engagement with femme-inine players and transsexual players this article aims to highlight the diversity of sex–gender–sexuality experiences. Moreover, it demonstrates the tensions and complexities within a particular footballing sub-culture, which can be described as both queer and anti-queer. In this way it contributes to developments in the feminist–queer theorising of the spatiality of sexuality. The research is drawn from a larger ethnographic study of the team, which includes analysis of archival materials and club documents, semi-structured interviews and participant observation.     

‘Lady Austin’s Camp Boys’: Constituting the Queer Subject in 1930s London

In December 1932, police raided a private ballroom in Holland Park Avenue. They found almost sixty men dancing, many in female clothing and make–up. An ongoing encounter between the police and working–class queer social worlds drew the ballroom into a public domain within which masculine sexualities were contested, produced and consumed. The ensuing trial gripped metropolitan opinion, becoming the most notorious and widely reported ‘pansy case’ of the 1930s. This paper explores the complex nexus of spaces and practices that cohered in the case as a site at which the queer subject was definitionally produced. During the trial both legal authorities and newspapers and the defendants sought to produce a stable contradistinction between queer and normal, though the meanings they invested in that difference diverged radically. Yet focusing upon the intersecting sites through which this queer subject was constituted – the city, the body and the police/policed interface – suggests the unsettling ambiguities undermining the stability of that difference. Throughout the case, the difference between queer and normal often seemed anything but self–evident, and the arrested men appeared an electric threat to the metropolitan cultural landscape.     

White noise: sound,materiality and the crowd in contemporary heritage practice

Sounds of our Shores was a joint venture between the National Trust and the British Library that employed a crowdsourcing methodology to create a permanent archive of British coastal sounds. In this paper I pursue a critical analysis of that project in order to problematise the recent emergence of practices aimed at capturing and preserving everyday sounds as ‘sonic heritage’. More broadly, I use the case study to think through two trends in contemporary heritage practice. These are, first, a turn towards crowdsourcing as a means of democratising representation, and, second, a current trend towards the accumulation and preservation of an ever-broader range and mass of materials as heritage. The framework for my analysis is provided by a dual reading of the term ‘white noise’. Thus, for my purposes, ‘white noise’ describes both an acoustic phenomenon (the product of every possible frequency sounding simultaneously; a sonic expression of perfect equality and perfect chaos), and a particular mode of racialised sound production and audition, modulated and constrained by whiteness. White noise displaces and silences its Others. The white ‘listening ear’, to borrow Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman's terminology, is either deaf to, or appalled by, the sounds those Others make.     

God,not Caesar: Revisiting National Socialism as ‘political religion’

This article argues that use of the concept of ‘political religion’ to describe the radicalized political movements of the twentieth century has again gained currency in recent years as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the global upsurge of religiously inspired violence and that research with respect to religion proper – what religion is, its role in public life, its evolving reception by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – can advance the discussion. The article subsequently offers the author's own research as evidence of the concept's applicability to the case of National Socialism. Analysis focuses, specifically, on a movement in nineteenth century Germany to develop a secular system of ethics, a project that eventually led, ironically and tragically, to the emergence of a new faith in a absolutized ‘collective will’ as the transcendent source of all moral values. The National Socialist movement subsequently co-opted this article of faith, the article argues, by transforming Hitler into a holy medium for the salvific dictates of what became, by the early 1930s, an unimpeachable ‘Volkswille.’