QUEER CULTURE

Stonewall Inn, Sociology of Sexualities, Queer Culture

The word ‘queer’ was a derogatory term for many years but has now been appropriated by a radical section (the ‘in your face’ section) of the gay and lesbian community to identify gay and lesbian culture or studies.

Gay and lesbian studies or rather queer culture studies, is becoming as legitimate in the academic community as are women's studies or black studies.

Cultural studies is interested in examining gay and lesbian 'Queer' culture as depicted in the writings, films, or art work of the community and in analyzing the public identity of this cultural community.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: HETEROAFFECTIONAL BONDING IN QUEER CULTURE. 
Winston Wilde, MA, DHS 
Qualitative research into queer lovestyles has revealed patterns; one of these being heteroaffectional. Through the narratives of historical case studies, reasons emerge as to why opposite gendered queer people "pair-bond." In the chaotic ecology of queerdom and in the infinite possibilities of love, this is not meant to be a definitive declaration, rather an exploration of uncharted territory. - sssswr.org/abstract00.htm  

'Coming home': Queer migrations and multiple evocations of home 
Anne-Marie Fortier, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK 
This article proposes an examination of recent interventions in queer studies that project queer culture and politics within a diasporic framework. Drawing on written narratives of what may be termed 'queer migrations', I seek to map the intersections of queer memories and diasporic spaces as they are uttered in terms of 'home'. By following the movement of queer subjects between homes, I examine how 'home', migration and belonging relate to each other in multiple ways. First, I discuss narratives of queer migration as homecoming, where 'home' is a destination rather than an origin. I explore the connection between exile, displacement and migration-as-homecoming found in some discussions on queer diaspora. How do the 'homes' people move towards relate to those that are 'left behind'? How does the movement toward some 'homes' operate through the fixing of others? Second, I consider the movement back home, how home is reimagined or reconstituted through memories that challenge the assumed idea of home-as-familiarity. Drawing on autobiographical renditions of queer migrations and remembrances of home, I discuss Elspeth Probyn's argument about movement, desire and childhood as 'suspended beginnings'. If one can never return 'home', as Probyn argues, what are the effects of coming home again and again on definitions of home? Third, I wonder how memories of home can relocate queerness within the home without reinstating home as originary moment. Is it possible to conceive of being 'at home' in a way that already encounters/engenders queerness, but without deploying an originary narrative of 'home'? Running through this discussion is a reflection about identity narratives that seek to reconfigure spaces of belonging shaped through both movement and attachment. Can we consider differential movements of subjects as not simply about thinking about home as mobile – not simply about the undoing of home as stasis – but as the re-forming of the very bounded spatiality of homes? - ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/4/4/405

What's that Smell? - Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives 
Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego, USA, jhalberstam@ucsd.edu 
This article is drawn from a book-length study of the explosion of queer urban subcultures in the last decade. My larger purpose is to examine how many queer communities experience and spend time in ways that are very different from their heterosexual counterparts. Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction, and queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community. In my work on subcultures, I explore the stretched out adolescences of queer culture-makers and posit an `epistemology of youth' that disrupts conventional accounts of subculture, youth culture, adulthood, race, class and maturity. This article charts new developments in the theories of subcultures and youth cultures and argues that we should look now at the forms of stylistic resistance embedded in queer subcultural worlds. - ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/3/313

The Transgendered and Transgressive Student 
Rhetoric and Identity in Trans-Queer Ethnography 
Abstract: This instructor/student co-produced webtext examines the challenges and benefits of creating a trans-queer ethnography in the context of the computer-mediated writing classroom, in academia, and in the cultural terrain of contemporary America. By juxtaposing personal reflections, course materials, theoretical reflection on gendered identity, and research on gender in the electronic composition classroom, this web text unravels and reconstitutes perspectives on the value of creating transgressive transgendered texts in the computer-mediated writing classroom. 
What difficulties does a student encounter when constructing a text that transgresses academic notions of ethno-methodology traditionally held by many social science instructors? 
What difficulties does a student encounter when constructing a text that transgresses binary notions of gender typically held by classmates in a computer-mediated writing classroom? 
In what ways does a student have to navigate social pressures of family, peers, faculty, and administrators in order to produce a self-reflective, self-exploratory text about transgendered identity that will be posted on the web? 
In the Winter of 2002, the authors participated in a pilot course called Advanced Writing: Ethnography. This web text unravels the experiences of Marshall Kitchens, the instructor who directed the course and mediated student interactions with each other and with the institution (such as through the Human Investigation Committee), and Lindsey Larkin, at the time a senior in sociology who chose to investigate drag king culture from an auto-ethnographic perspective in a project titled "Performing Gender: Drag King Culture in Metro Detroit." Larkin explains her purpose in constructing a trans-queer ethnography: "It was about self- exploration. I definitely didn't write it to persuade anyone, except myself. And, that is a point I want to focus on . . . the way I choose to separate myself from the 'lens of straight culture' and at the time, in order to find power and identity in queer culture I felt like it had to come through me. I think that's why it often times felt so scandalous...transgressing... because I hadn't allowed myself, or been given the opportunity in the academic realm to explore these issues on my own terms." 
Larkin's observation engages the questions raised by Suzanne De Castell and Mary Bryson (1998): "What might the ethnographic field colonized by queer subjects, the ethnographic text written from its margins, look like?" Their claim is that the goal of queer ethnographies is to "reveal the wires and pulleys and supports of the everyday context within which 'the normal' is invented and stage-managed, rendering its strange artifices and carefully wrought illusions evident, naming the ways in which social and cultural life are selectively re-presented to members as stable, reliable, necessary."1 While to some degree this revelation is directed toward the reader of the ethnography, we argue that the most significant revelation is to the student investigator herself about her own understanding of gendered identity. Rather than choosing a classical Aristotelian rhetorical construction that might more effectively move classmates, faculty members, and others to a more sympathetic understanding of transgendered identity, Larkin chose an impressionistic, self-reflective rhetorical style that assisted her in understanding, accepting, and celebrating her own views of transgendered identity. 2
This web text, like the student project itself, employs entertaining and playful methods to examine a difficult/painful issue. In an email exchange with Kitchens, Larkin explains, "I see drag now more as a way to criticize relations of power in a patriarchal and heterosexist society. During the same time I was working on the ethnography I organized the clothesline project (a visual display of tee-shirts made by and for survivors/victims of sexual violence) and wrote a column for the Oakland Post disclosing one of my own stories of abuse (I was raped/assaulted, targeted as an out lesbian) and for the first time I thought about how I actively rejected and limited my queer identity for many years. For me, engaging in this project was very much about regaining power and voice that I didn’t think was mine as a queer woman." Gender explorations such as drag king shows are seen as semi-temporary, and therefore feel "safer." 
As Larkin explains, any one can dress up, and then leave, although it's hard to watch a drag show and then remain exactly the same person as you were before. In the same way, this web text will shift identities, trying on different personas, exploring different perspectives, and leaving the reader with an unsettled sense of identity and a greater understanding of the relationship between student research and self- constructed identity. - bgsu.edu/cconline/kitchenslarkin/abstract.html

The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London 
Matt Houlbrook and Chris Waters 
This essay explores the ‘underground’ queer culture of London, as mapped assiduously by the pseudonymous author, Rodney Garland, in his 1953 novel, The Heart in Exile. The novel charts the progress of its narrator, Dr Anthony Page, a psychiatrist, as he investigates a former lover's mysterious death. His investigation draws him into the ‘strange half-world of the homosexual’, as a 1961 paperback edition of the novel announces; it is a world which Page maps in detail. The novel was reissued in 1995 with a preface by novelist and playwright Neil Bartlett, who claimed that Garland offers contemporary readers ‘a perfect crash course in the prehistory of British gay culture’, a ‘systematic exploration of our twilight world’. This essay takes issue with that claim and suggests that we need to view Garland's London as radically unfamiliar territory – a queer world, but not a gay world as we now understand the term. It suggests that the task of recuperation – of finding ‘our’ hidden history – is an inadequate paradigm within which to read Garland's text. It defamiliarizes the London of 1953, mapping the ways in which the queer subject was then constituted, and demonstrates how The Heart in Exile is central to the project of destabilizing those categories of identity taken for granted today. - hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/62/1/142

Queer is Here? Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Histories and Public Culture - Robert Mills 
This article documents the emergence, in recent years, of a prominent discourse on queer history in the public sphere. Focusing especially on LGBT History Month, an events programme launched in February 2005 that sets out to ‘mark and celebrate the lives and achievements of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered people', as well as reviewing an exhibition at the Museum of London called ‘Queer is Here’, which opened in February 2006, I consider the potential exclusions generated in these contexts by a rhetoric of outness and repression. Stressing the significant role that transgender identification has played historically, as well as the shaping effects of race and place on experiences of sexual and gender dissidence in urban environments, I argue that models of ‘sexual orientation’ leave certain dimensions of queer experience and desire untold. Drawing on recent efforts to theorize the relationship between publics and queer counterpublics, I conclude that the translation of queer history into the language of public culture ideally entails a contestation of the very norms of presentation and consumption in which museums and other popular history narratives are currently embedded. - hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/62/1/253