Best for society? Transnational opposition to sexual and gender equalities in Canada and Great Britain

While much has been written about the limitations of new legislative equalities, there is a silence in geographies of sexualities regarding the backlash to these changes and the reiteration of particular heteronormativity. In working across Great Britain and Canada, we argue that these resistances are trans-scalar, operating transnationally as well as evoking nation, classroom, home and body. Arguments at the local level are embedded in and draw on the broader ‘natural family’ arguments circulating at local/regional, national and transnational levels. Drawing on the literature on transnationalism that understands these processes as (re)forming values and practices, this article explores the discourses that reiterate the naturalness and centrality of particular forms of heterosexuality as key for a healthy society and the protection of children. The latter works on three levels. First, the child cannot be ‘naturally’ produced outside of heterosexual sexual relations. Second, the raising of these children appropriately and healthily redefines ‘family’ within heteronormative structures. Third, comments that might be termed ‘homophobic’ are reframed as merely free speech as a way to counter LGBT recognition. We finish the article by arguing for explorations of heterosexuality within transnational networks to resistances to LGBT equalities.     

Identity construction and ‘coincidental’ entrepreneurship among gay Filipino guesthouse owners in Amsterdam

This article centralizes gay Filipino entrepreneurs in the guesthouse industry in the city of Amsterdam, drawing on the narratives and trajectories of five of them. The article highlights the common threads of experiences of these immigrant entrepreneurs, as these provide interesting insights into the processes of their identity (re)construction and social embedding in the Netherlands and the role of their entrepreneurial involvement in these processes. In addition, the article describes how they relate to their home country, the wider Filipino community in the Netherlands, and the wider Dutch gay community. It will be shown that these experiences and relations sit uneasily with established positions in debates on home and belonging within transnational migration studies and queer studies, notably the idea that moving to western countries of destination cannot be treated as equivalent to moving to ‘queer cultural homelands.’ In addition, the article shows that immigrant entrepreneurship does not revolve around ethnicity per se in the sense that entrepreneurial practices cannot be understood separately from other identity forming structures such as sexuality and class.     

This is where we live: queering poor urban spaces in literature of black gay men

This article critiques the exclusion of working-class and impoverished gays and lesbians of color by drawing on popular and academic theories of the development of gay and queer urban spaces. Through an analysis of black gay men's literature of the 1980s and 1990s, it explores the factors that tie black gay men to and ostracize them from their home neighborhoods. It is argued that black gay writers use textual strategies to question their invisibility in their communities of origin and in white gay neighborhoods, show their positions and roles in the home and neighborhood, and queer these spaces.     

Can't I be seen? Can't I be heard? Black women queering politics in Newark

What does it mean for a black female to negotiate urban space? How is her body read, her politics enacted, and her agency understood and interpreted? How do black women use their bodies and identities to challenge structural intersectionality in US cities? To answer these questions, I explore how black women embraced a set of oppositional spatial practices to resist the intersectional effects of misogyny, homo/transphobia, racism, and poverty in Newark, New Jersey. I reconstruct the creation of the Newark Pride Alliance, a local lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer coalition that mobilized in 2003 and 2004, after the death of Sakia Gunn. Exploring migrations between ‘black women,’ ‘black queer’ and ‘black feminist,’ I examine how black women respatialized social capital and enacted resistance. Through semi-structured interviews and frame analysis, I explore how black women forged new relationships between queer youth and black vernacular institutions, and created political spaces in which honest engagement of issues of gender violence, poverty, and power could take place.     

Chinese Queer Images on Screen: A Case Study of Cui Zi’en’s Films

The image of Chinese LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) is largely absent from the big screen under the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship control. Taking advantage of the now cheaply available digital-video (DV) technology, queer activist and filmmaker Cui Zi’en has produced more than 10 LGBT-themed films since 2002, which shows the momentum of Chinese independent DV filmmaking. Although circulated mainly underground in China and at international film festivals, Cui’s films seek to promote the visibility of Chinese LGBT by representing queer diversity in this community. As the only filmmaker consistently dealing with LGBT themes and experimenting with new film techniques in China, Cui employs unconventional film aesthetics, featuring extreme long takes, unstable camerawork and minimal narrative, to challenge the oppression of Chinese LGBT by heteronormative conventions, as embodied by state power and a patriarchal social order. Furthermore, facilitated by DV technology, Cui adapts Western New Queer Cinema to the Chinese context, which brings a new dimension to Chinese cinema. In China’s restrictive political environment, Cui, like many other independent filmmakers, uses moving images to challenge official interpretations of social realities in contemporary China.     

The End of Queer (as we knew it): Globalization and the making of a gay-friendly South Africa

In J. K. Gibson-Graham's The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), the authors (Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) provocatively deploy queer theory to further their project of telling non-capitalist stories of globalization. In short, they reject the narrative that globalization is always and only penetrative in the hope that global capital will ‘lose its erection’ and ‘other openings’ in the body of capitalism can be considered. I adopt their strategy of looking at stories of globalization. But, while they are concerned with the homophobia of economic theorizing, I consider the gay-friendly discourse of post-apartheid South Africa. Recent expressions of official tolerance by various nation-states around the globe have been dismissed as the mere appropriation of difference by hegemonic forces. Against such interpretations, I look at the ways in which the inclusion of ‘sexual orientation’ in post-apartheid South Africa's constitutional Equality Clause can instead be read as a queer globalization. Based on this reading, I problematize the presumption that queer globalizations take place beyond the realm of the hegemonic and point to the need for queer theorists to think through the political ramifications of homosexuality's repositioning as saviour rather than scapegoat of certain nation-states.     

Brazilian Horrors Past and Present: José Mojica Marins and Politics As Reproductive Futurism

Director José Mojica Marins is both the mastermind and actor behind Zé do Caixão, an icon within Brazilian popular culture and an international cult sensation. Marins encountered numerous conflicts with Brazil’s military dictatorship, and after producing the first two films of an intended trilogy, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the third film, Embodiment of Evil, was not made until 2008. Throughout this trilogy, Zé do Caixão kidnaps, tortures, and murders scores of victims, effectively mimicking the human rights abuses that occurred under the dictatorship. He advocates liberation from the oppression of traditional morality while reinscribing its rhetorical raison d’être: purpose through procreation. The popular appeal of these films, their political intentionality, and their production during and after the dictatorship allow for an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Marins in his attempt to both shock audiences and instill in them a counterhegemonic consciousness. Despite the radical agenda at work in Marins’s films, I will argue that this trilogy is conservative in its rhetorical framework, serving as an example of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, wherein political legitimacy is contingent upon procreation.     

Queering the transnational turn: regionalism and queer Asias

In recent years, queer studies has increasingly interrogated the racial and colonial unconscious embedded in the earlier studies of non-normative genders and sexualities through the critical frameworks of queer of color critique and queer diaspora studies. This article aims to ‘queer the transnational turn’ by considering what critical edge ‘regionalism’ might bring to the investigation of queer modernities in Asia from both contemporary and historical vantage points. The introductory section of the article provides a broad overview of the ‘transnational turn’ in queer studies, what we diagnose as the ‘area unconscious’ of queer studies in its exclusive critique of Western colonial modernity, and the related binary of cultural particularism versus Eurocentric universalism. Alternatively, we argue that the concept of regionalism can be productively mobilized in order to study the various scales of queer sexualities that traffic within and circulate across Southeast Asia, Australia, imperial China, and contemporary Sinophone cultures (Sinitic-language communities on the margins of or outside mainland China). Through a paired reading of Johann S. Lee’s Singaporean queer novel, Peculiar Chris (1992), and Su Chao-Bin and John Woo’s Sinophone martial art film, the Reign of Assassins (2010), our inquiry accounts for how the spatial–temporal telos of global queering get materially translated across multiple regional hubs of sexual differences. Queer regionalism in Singapore, China, and the Sinophone worlds encompasses relational dynamics, power differentials, and subnational and supranational linkages. Finally, queering regionalism can open up new analytical frameworks for the study of sexualities and corporealities across transcolonial relations and wider temporal and spatial connections.     

Critical queer regionality and LGBTQ politics in Europe

This article examines what a critical focus on the region can contribute to the study of LGBTQ politics in Europe. It is argued that a regional lens can challenge methodological nationalism in existing studies of European LGBTQ politics. It can also contribute towards a broader examination of the politics of scale in relation to the Europeanisation of LGBTQ politics. The article discusses alternative theoretical approaches to the region and examines the queer affinities of these approaches in turn. The argument proceeds to consider the political effects of these alternative theoretical framings of the region in contemporary LGBTQ politics in Europe. It is suggested that a regional critical lens can foreground sub-national and transnational regional political formations, which otherwise may be overlooked in an uncritical focus on the national scale of LGBTQ politics. A regional perspective can also help unsettle Anglo-American framings of sexual politics.     

Madonna and Child of Soweto: Black Life Beyond Apartheid and Democracy

ABSTRACT

South African artist Laurence Vincent Scully’s 1973 painting, Madonna and Child of Soweto, offers an analytical tool for understanding the capacity of public religion to advance black life. The author argues that this image censures apartheid violence against black persons and reimagines a just sociality by displaying sacred, black motherhood and infancy in the figures Mary and Jesus. Their temporality and corporeality, when analyzed with a queer womanist method, gestate sacred public religion that exceeds both the apartheid governance of the past and also the secular, post-apartheid democracy of today.