Genocide and Global Queer Politics

This article presents a critical analysis of the relationship between the concept of genocide and global queer politics, offering an original mapping and examination of the discourse of genocide in this respect. Starting from the beginnings of genocide discourse with Lemkin and the United Nations Genocide Convention, existing literature is analysed to reveal circumscribed usage in relation to non-heterosexual lives. The methodology combines analysis of genocide discourse with case studies. The article maps and analyses the historically shifting form of genocide discourse, including through attention to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and demonstrates how the patriarchal and heteronormative origins of this discourse continue to have effects that exclude queer people. This analysis is developed, in particular, in relation to the absence of sexuality, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity as group categories in the Genocide Convention. Interwoven with this analysis of discourse, case study analysis is used in relation to Nazi Germany, Uganda and the Gambia to establish genocidal processes focused on homosexuality in each. The scope of claims for anti-homosexual acts of genocide is thus extended in Nazi Germany and Uganda, and such a claim is initiated in the Gambia, while appreciating the complex relation of “homosexuality” to African sexual identities. It is also argued that new definitions of groups from the Rwanda tribunal represent openings for some kinds of queer politics. The concluding section then draws on the discourse analyses of Foucault and postcolonial studies to initiate discussion of the potential discursive effects of invoking genocide in relation to homosexuality or queer politics, in particular contexts. It is argued that a greater consciousness of genocide in queer analysis and politics would be desirable, even while the existing terms of genocide discourse must be contested.     

Fragile subjectivities: constructing queer safe spaces

This paper uses framing theory to challenge previous understandings of queer safe space, their construction, and fundamental logics. Safe space is usually apprehended as a protected and inclusive place, where one can express one’s identity freely and comfortably. Focusing on the Jerusalem Open House, a community center for LGBT individuals in Jerusalem, I investigate the spatial politics of safe space. Introducing the contested space of Jerusalem, I analyze five framings of safe space, outlining diverse and oppositional components producing this negotiable construct. The argument is twofold: First, I aim to explicate five different frames for the creation of safe space. The frames are: fortification of the queer space, preserving participants’ anonymity, creating an inclusive space, creating a space of separation for distinct identity groups, and controlling unpredictable influences on the participants in the space. Second, by unraveling the basic reasoning for each frame and its related affects I show how all five frames are anchored in liberal logics and reflect specific ways in which we comprehend how queer subjectivities produce/are produced through safe space and its discourse.     

Queering Communia: the politics of positionality when doing research on squatting in Rome

The politics of positionality in relation to sexuality and desire has remained unquestioned when investigating autonomous and alternative spaces, these studies mainly focused on political positionality through the adoption of militant and action-based methodologies. The article tries to fill this void by discussing issues of positionality related to sexuality and desire when doing research on squatting. The main aim is to discuss how entering the field in social movements research through an action-based approach can lead the researcher to involve every aspect of their life, including sexuality and desire. By discussing the case of my PhD research project focused on the re-emergence of squatting initiatives in Rome, the article is aimed at showing how my sexuality, notably my previous engagement in queer politics, has represented an important issue when negotiating with my research partners. When discussing the strategies and activities I adopted, the article plays with the tensions between being queered by the fieldwork and queering it, showing the possibilities of contamination as well as the limits of the politics of positionality.     

Reorienting the nation: spatio-corporeal imaginaries and Turkey’s father of modern obstetrics,Dr Besim Ömer

In this study, I use a queer theoretical framework to critically assess narratives of reproductive reorientation in the early Turkish republic. I focus on the writings of one of the central medical professionals associated with the Kemalist regime, Dr Besim Ömer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s approach to orientation, I undertake a queer reading of Dr Besim Ömer’s writings on reproductive bodies and the spaces that they inhabit. Spatial dimensions of reproductive misalignment and reorientation are especially evident in Dr Besim Ömer’s work between 1923 and 1938. Rural and urban women are written as out-of-line with respect to the presumed national family line of Turkishness, one that extended Turkish bodies from the heroically fertile past and into a successfully (re)productive future. This assessment is predicated upon a spatio-corporeal imaginary: the naturally fecund Turkish woman, a body whose otherwise reproductively inclined tendencies had become misaligned in both the stagnating rural and industrializing urban spaces of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic. I draw upon Ahmed in order to highlight the slantwise character of desires for properly oriented reproductive bodies and spaces that were in-line with the nationalistic family line of Turkishness; desires that were predicated upon a placeless idealization and an embodied utopia. Spatio-corporeal imaginaries such as these have limited the scope and dimension of what constitutes, as Ahmed describes, ‘a life worth living.’     

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.     

The Question of Authorship of the Coplas Attributed to Lucas Fernandez

In late eighteenth-century Spanish discourse, moralists and satirists attempted to redress what they deemed a grave social issue: the loss of a masculine, virtuous visibility in men, especially in young, well-heeled males. In moralist essays, the petimetre became the quintessential trope for the idle, effeminate, aristocratic Spanish man. He was created as a literary figure to stand in marked contrast to the manly hombre de bien, who represented martial valor and heteronormative privacy. Juan Antonio Mercadal, author of El Duende especulativo sobre la vida civil (1761), delved into the issue with, among other writings, his "Discurso IX." In this essay, he describes a type of man whom he refers to as "hermaphrodita." Like the petimetre, this is a queer male figure who transgresses the dimorphous gendered system. By using the term hermaphrodite, Mercadal conjures up images of an intersex person who retained a monstrous, almost mythical reputation during the eighteenth century. In effect, the satirist is employing a coded word to invent a new reality: an intergendered male who challenges what it means to be a man or a woman. The unintended result of Mercadal's essay is the creation of a new identity that brings together ser and aparecer, or reality and illusion. By creating the figure of the hermaphrodita, Mercadal engendered the very reality he wished to combat.     

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.     

Ceramics,clothing and other bodies: affective geographies of homoerotic cruising encounters

This paper provides a new approach to the geographies of cruising and public homosex. For some time, social scientists have contended that, in those semi-public spaces where men meet each other for sex, actions speak louder than words and men's competency in using the space is more important that the (sexual) identities they claim in other aspects of their lives. This paper extends that argument in a new direction through an engagement with recent theorizations of affective geographies and more-than-representational approaches to spatial practices. Through a series of short vignettes of cruising encounters on city streets, in public toilets and in urban green spaces, this paper examines how public homosex is enacted and performed in relation to both human and non-human bodies, objects and the environment in which it takes place. The encounters described in the paper draw attention to the complex choreography of gestures through which cruising is performed and sexual engagement is negotiated ethically. I contend that the site-specific, performative nature of these sexual encounters suggests a more contingent sexuality arising from the interaction of bodies in specific environments and exceeding the boundaries of reified sexual identities.     

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.     

Gay-riatrics: spatial politics and activism of gay seniors in Tel-Aviv’s gay community centre

This paper discusses aspects of spatial politics and activism at the municipal Gay Community Centre in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one marginal group within the LGBT community that is active in the centre – gay seniors. Drawing on theories of queer geography, queer gerontology and geographies of activism and social movements, the qualitative research reported here uses in-depth interviews and participant observations to demonstrate how these men construct the space for their activity both inside and outside the centre. On the one hand, this spatial politics shifts along a delicate axis between proximity to the municipality and community hegemony, looking ‘inside’ the community on the one hand. On the other, it subverts and challenges the existing communal order, looking ‘outside’ to the surrounding society. However, these two directions are not necessarily binary; rather, as the paper shows, they stand in a dialectic that holds them in tension. This tension is evident in the ways in which the group operates from within the core of the hegemony, creating a complex non-dichotomous reality that enables politics that acts within – and despite – the mainstream.