Queer culture is LGBT subculture. The word ‘queer’ was a derogatory term for many years but has now been appropriated by a radical section of the gay and lesbian community to identify gay and lesbian culture or studies. Gay and lesbian studies or Queer culture studies has become 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. Stonewall Riots at the Stonewall Inn marked the beginning of resistance against intolerance towards people oriented differently. Homophobia is an uncontrollable fear of homosexuals and Xenophobia is fear of strangers.
The Construction of
Queer Culture in India. Ana Garcia-Arroyo.
These words from Ana Garcia-Arroyo's book The
Construction of Queer Culture in India: Pioneers and Landmarks are prescient and
may well prove prophetic, at least in a limited way, in the Indian context.
Though no revolt or revolution may be in the offing in the near future. India as
a culture seems poised for a significant change in attitudes to same-sex love
and relationships. - Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.
Issue 16, March 2008.
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.
'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.
What's that Smell? - Queer
Temporalities and Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego, USA.
This article is drawn from a book-length study of the explosion of queer urban subcultures
in the last decade. Queer
uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family,
heterosexuality and reproduction, and queer subculture develops as alternatives to
kinship structure 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.
This article argues that we should look now at the forms of stylistic resistance embedded in queer
subcultural worlds.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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 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.