Homonormativity

With the rise of mainstream drag cultures achieving international recognition through transnational circulations mediated by artistic platforms, such as RuPaul’s Drag Race, discourses of drag authenticity have also emerged. Such representations are produced through homo/nationalist logics of sexual citizenship, normality, and ‘modernity’ to regulate and manage definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drag performance. The politics of drag thus come to cultivate insular grammars of legitimate drag performance practice through the proliferation of a queer politics built on homogeneity and sameness and furthermore, one that often seeks to bifurcate queerness and sexuality from race, class, and transness, among other vectors of systemic oppression that push mainstream queerness outside of its contained optic of white, middle-class, gay men. Access, success, and livability in such ‘queer’ spaces for marginalized artists is then predicated on a conformity to a homonormative performance politic. While contradictory to, what is supposed to be, the transgressive potential of queerness, queer artists who engage in feminist, revolutionary, insurgent, and radical politics often become rendered always-already elsewhere to the geographies of mainstream queerness for wtheir disruptive and threatening potential. In this article, I am in conversation with multiple Toronto QTBIPoC drag performers who are situated within these positions of peripheral subjecthood as they work through archives of resistance and decoloniality to trouble and unsettle homonormative exclusions and work to queer ‘queer space.’ These artists include Babia Majora, Sydney Quest, Rhinestone Chickadee, Halal Bae, Amian Black, and Mallika. These transformative strategies of queer re-making function through geneaologies of what I call the “insurgent drag subject” where radical queer of colour performance practice challenge the homonormative as a site of universal queer knowing and being.

Im Rekurs auf Kimberlé Crenshaws Konzept einer "political intersectionality" und Erkenntnissen aus den post-/dekolonialen Queer Studies diskutiert dieser Beitrag die komplexen Verstrickungen von Rassismus und Hetero-/Homonormativität. Ausgehend von dem ‚Phänomen' Alice Weidel und einer nur scheinbaren Widersprüchlichkeit zwischen Rassismus/rechter Politik und LGBTIQ*-Kämpfen wird gezeigt, in welcher Weise durch eine zunehmende Auslagerung von LGBTIQ*-Feindlichkeit auf (vermeintlich)  fremde Körper, andere (Welt-)Regionen und Kulturen sowie in ein temporales Früher, rassistische Deutungsmuster und Grenzziehungen im Rahmen aktueller LGBTIQ*-Politiken (re-)produziert werden.

Gavin Brown (University of Leicester, UK) is one of today's most eminent scholars of political geography and sexualities. In this intellectual-biographical interview, he describes his academic path, as well as discusses some of his major contributions to the fields of geographies of sexualities and gender and protest movements and activism. This interview by Gilly Hartal introduces some of his major conceptual and theoretical contributions in the fields of sexualities and gender, geopolitics, the spatiality of protest camps and, in particular, the spatial practice of solidarity. Knowledge, as feminist theory has taught us, is always grounded in personal-political contexts and subjectivities. This conversation with Gavin Brown offers an intimate perspective into Brown's academic experience, which interestingly also reflects the growth and materialization of the field of geographies of sexualities into a sub-discipline. The interview also addresses the current state of critical geographical work and calls for support of and solidarity with scholars and departments under threat.

Recent theorizations of trans embodiment have brought attention to the ways neoliberalism limits the productivity of non-normatively gendered bodies. This paper deals with the discursive framing of embodiment and sexual desirability among trans men and other transmasculine persons negotiating internet-mediated homoerotic spaces. Micro-level analysis of discourse structure and macro-level analysis of socio-political context together show how trans men navigate homonormative sexual economies by linguistically recuperating their bodies’ sexually productivity. Instead of undermining claims of embodied masculinity and homoerotic value, potential sites of exclusion—i.e. trans genitals—become sites of flexible accumulation that enhance, rather than detract from, their bearers’ desirability.

Heteronormativity is a hegemonic system of norms, discourses, and practices that constructs heterosexuality as natural and superior to all other expressions of sexuality. Queer theorist Michael Warner (1991) coined the term heteronormativity to illuminate the privileging of heterosexuality in social relations, which relegates sexual minorities to a marginal status position. Heteronormativity legitimates homophobia -the irrational fear of gay and lesbian people -and heterosexism -the discrimination of sexual minorities within social relations and structures. Heteronormative standards and discourses that legitimate the discrimination of sexual minorities can be found in most social institutions, including religion, the family, education, the media, the law, and the state. For example, the media often underrepresents lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and/or presents them stereotypically. In the educational realm, LGBTQ people are often completely erased from sexual health and other pedagogical materials. Sexually marginalized individuals are often denied domestic partner benefits or access to marriage, and they face a host of other discriminatory practices because their relationships are valued less than a heterosexual relationship.

The notion of gender was debated in France long before the 2013 law on marriage equality. In 2004, a mayor in the south of France celebrated the first gay marriage. One year later, a court denied two trans women the right to marry because they did not behave as husband and wife. The introduction locates public debates on gender in France, and shows that they have heavily weighed on the 2013 law, which maintains discriminations against LGBT people with regard to parenthood, trans rights, and nationality. From this standpoint, France has experienced no clear "before-and-after" watershed. French conservatives indeed see themselves as majority victims of a system devised to benefit minorities. They credit the idea that LGBT rights are the product of a "theory" to legitimize their own doctrine. References to the United States become all the more potent since they accredit the idea of a foreign plot.

This chapter argues that the images of Ellen and Portia’s same-sex wedding, refigure lesbian identity within the ‘postfeminist culture [that] both assumes and creates a female subject who desires marriage’. At the same time, their high-profile celebrity wedding helped to mainstream the same-sex marriage equality campaign through their mutual celebrity brand. Paradoxically, then, their celebrity lesbian marriage is both a political act against heteronormativity and a neo-conservative image of homonormativity and postfeminist female identity. If, as Dana Heller has shown, the ‘celesbian’ (defined as a celebrity who is ‘known or alleged’ to be a lesbian) is a ‘disruptive laborer within the affective economies that organize the intimate celebrity logic of capitalism’, then the ‘celesbian couple’ is the ultimate labor force of neoliberal capitalism in their ability to ‘make queer feeling (or feeling queer) appropriate through performances that allow them to draw together that which has been kept apart—the homo and the hetero, the celebrity system and queer politics—within the norms of global capitalism’.

What is queer theory? And can we even define it? And what are the political stakes of this field of study for gender and sexuality studies, specifically, and for society, more broadly? In this course, we will tackle these questions through engaging with certain core texts and some key debates within queer theory. First, we will examine how queer theory emerged out of feminist and gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and queer activism and how queer theory differentiates and positions itself alongside these other fields of studies. We will, then, turn to queer of color critique -which emerged out of women of color feminism and an intersectional analysis -to analyze the importance of studying sexuality and queerness through their intersections with race, gender, class, and other social categories. We will also look at other interventions into queer theory such as discussions around HIV and relationality, transnationalism and the diaspora, space, bodies, disability studies, and transgender studies. A main goal of this course is to be able to utilize queer theory to analyze social inequalities and to see queer theory's potential in challenging and resisting dominant modes of knowledge production and cultural practices.

Using the Netherlands as a case study, this article explores how increased social acceptance of and legal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people impact their lives. The author draws on in-depth interviews with nine LGBT people to argue that the danger of acceptance is invisibility for those who assimilate and marginalization for those who do not conform to assimilationist discourses, such as transgender individuals and other gender nonconformers. Utilizing Butler’s theories of normalization and Goffman’s theories of stigmatization, the findings also show that assimilating into homonormativity can generate feelings of shame and fear. The author concludes that new approaches in dismantling heteronormativity and seeking equality are needed in order to achieve genuine acceptance for LGBT people.

British comedian Stephen Fry published an open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee comparing the Russian Federation’s recent homophobic laws to Nazi Germany and calling for a ban on the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. This essay suggests homonationalist Russophobia allows Western queer citizens, who often are denied full equal rights in their own countries, to enact both national and transnational belongings in the vilification of Russian policy. This paper suggests Russia’s 20th and 21st de- and re-criminalisations of homosexualities can be viewed as protection against a foreign threat within its own project of nation-building and focuses on media that (re)produce homonationalist, Western imaginative geographies that celebrate the multiculturalism, diversity, and sexual liberalism of gay-friendly North America and Western Europe whilst (re)configuring Russia as backwards and homophobic, and whose gays and lesbians need Western-style liberation.

This chapter highlights the role of the concept of normativity in language and sexuality studies. It is argued that normativity has played a central role in this field, even if as a largely undertheorized concept. The theoretical discussion of normativity is advanced by conceptualizing norms as discursive formations and by distinguishing prescriptive from descriptive norms as well as normative mechanisms on the social micro-level from those on the social macro-level. Central patterns that are involved in the discursive construction of various sexual normativity types are outlined, namely heteronormativity (i.e., the notion that a particular version of

Après l’adoption du mariage pour tous, les mouvements réactionnaires ont orchestré une vaste campagne contre la théorie du genre, dangereuse propagande venue tout droit des campus américains !
Bruno Perreau démontre que cette campagne s’attaque en réalité à la théorie queer, elle-même largement inspirée de textes français. Il propose, à partir de ce paradoxe, une enquête sur les liens entre identité, communauté et nation, aux antipodes du républicanisme ambiant.
L’ouvrage présente les nombreuses facettes de la réponse à la théorie queer en France, de la Manif pour tous au militantisme gay, lesbien et trans, en passant par les séminaires de recherche, l’émergence de nouveaux médias, les politiques de traduction, le rôle des partis politiques ainsi que les débats autour du nationalisme et de l’intersectionnalité.

This article tracks Jasbir Puar’s term “homonationalism” as its meaning has transformed in her scholarly work as well that of Maya Mikdashi. I argue that homonationalism has evolved from its original formulation as, in part, a critique of politics, into, in its current guise, a diagnostic of international political relations. Although this transition offers insight into the international scene, I argue that homonationalism also loses its distinctiveness as a political formation in its own right as well as its critical capacity in the process. In particular, I argue that homonationalism becomes incapable of critically
evaluating activist strategies, practices and discourses of political resistance.

The 2010 Israeli Supreme Court judgment in the matter of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, Jerusalem’s LGBT community center, was a turning point in both its recognition of equality for the gay community and its adoption of the discourse that sets LGBT rights as signifying Israel as a liberal democracy and as distinguishing it from other states. This article explores LGBT rights politics in Israel and beyond, taking a critical look at the terms “homonormativity” and “homonationalism.”

Homonormativity has been described as neoliberal sexual politics that does not challenge the dominant heteronormative institutions and is anchored in domesticity and consumption. Homonationalism has been described as nationalist homonormativity, in whose framework “domesticated” homosexuals serve as ammunition for nationalism. The discussion of homonationalism highlights a process whereby the homosexual, rather than being viewed as a threat to the state and its security, has been transformed into someone who is perceived as integrated in the state and who distinguishes it from other states through its tolerance towards him.

Homonormativity and homonationalism are preconditions for “pinkwashing”: the use of LGBT rights for propaganda purposes. The article will argue for the need for non-reductive conceptions of the connection between homonationalism, homonormativity, and pinkwashing, as well as point to the contradictions between domesticity and consumption that exist within the notion of homonormativity.

The slaying of two gay youths in a 2009 shooting attack at the Barnoar gay youth center in Tel Aviv was a turning point in LGBT rights politics in Israel. The reactions to this incident marked the rise of the new homonationalism alongside the intensification of criticism of this phenomenon, leading to divisive rifts amongst activists. This article examines the “deal” that was woven in the shadow of the Barnoar attack between the gay community establishment and the nationalist establishment and the ensuing crisis in queer politics. In response to the ascent of homonormativity and homonationalism, there was a strengthening of identity politics amongst the groups that are excluded from them, while the queer politics that challenged essentialist notions of identity fell into crisis. The queer idea was at times turned into simply one more identity (“Q”) in the alphabet soup of identities, at the expense of its critical potential and effectiveness.

This paper investigates the theory of heteronormativity. It examines the extent to which heteronormativity affects LGBT peoples' lives in the UK, by synthesising and critically evaluating the research in this area. It considers the classical theory of heteronormativity, analyses the criticisms of the theory, and considers the impact of issues such as the Civil Partnership Act 2004 and homonormativity. It concludes that heteronormativity remains a valid and useful concept in the 21st Century, and highlights areas that require further research.

This paper reflects upon the adoption of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) rights discourse and imagery in police public relations and problematises the construction of police as protectors and defenders of gay liberties and homonormative life. Building from a foundational conceptualisation of policing as a racial capitalist project, it analyses the phenomenon of police rainbow branding practiced in nominally public spaces, such as Pride parades, and online through news media and social networking sites. Drawing on critiques of queer liberalism and complicities with state violence, the paper explores the contours of carceral homonationalism, arguing that 'officially anti-homophobic' police image work attempts to obscure the role of the carceral state in (re)producing sexual and gender oppression. However, this image work has also given rise to new forms of political action. Counter-movements against police and 'carceral pride' are actively reworking the distributions of space and visibility within LGBTI movements.

Gay community has become widely known and certainly plays a very important role since there are many web series that depict homonormativity. Hence, this paper tends to show some perspectives that embrace homonormativity and the impact of it towards Thai’s culture by using Fractured Identity perspective and Gender Identity theory.

In the last fifteen years, great strides have been made in advancing the rights of queer people. In the same period that these victories have been secured by queer movements, we've seen the rise of crony capitalism, violent consequences of the war on terror, the hyper-juridification of politics, the financialization of social movements, and the medicalization of non-heteronormative identities and practices. But how do we critically read the celebratory global proliferation of queer rights in these neoliberal times?

Pregnancy is considered a feminine experience in mainstream Canadian culture. Babies identified as female at birth are expected to grow up to become feminine heterosexual mothers. This research considers the desires, choices, and experiences of individuals who were identified as female at birth, but who do not identify as feminine heterosexual women; this dissertation focuses on the reproductive desires, choices, and experiences of butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer individuals in British Columbia. Three methods and two distinct populations formed this research. Participant observation was conducted in 21 cities across southern BC. Questionnaires were completed by 28 health care professionals (HCPs), and by 46 butch lesbian, transmen, and genderqueer (BTQ) individuals. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 10 HCPs, 8 BTQ individuals who had experienced at least one successful pregnancy, and 4 BTQ individuals who had either experienced or been diagnosed with a condition linked to infertility. What I found, is that for many BTQ individuals, reproduction associated with the female body (ie: pregnancy and breastfeeding) is not exclusively considered a feminine desire or experience. In fact, what I discovered is that BTQ individuals who experience pregnancy and breastfeeding explicitly challenge the cultural fetish associating femininity with reproduction (including pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering, and fertility). Thus, I highlight not only the typically ignored desire and achievement of pregnancy of BTQ individuals, but also how BTQ individuals have experienced breastfeeding, how some BTQ parents raise queerlings, and how some BTQ individuals have negotiated diagnoses and experiences of infertility. Overall, I highlight the unique and various expectations and experiences that butch lesbians, transmen, and genderqueer individuals have regarding their ‘female’ (and potential) biological reproduction. In the end, I hope that by presenting the diverse reproductive experiences, desires, and choices of BTQ individuals, that I can foster more of an understanding of these experiences, desires, choices, and individuals, and thus challenge the cultural fetish that links femininity with ‘female’-associated reproduction. Moreover, I offer recommendations for health care professionals in an effort to foster more understanding in BTQ health care, as well as help to facilitate more queer competent health care professionals.

El artículo reflexiona sobre diversos aspectos relacionados con la app geosocial de Grindr, vinculada a las tecnologías tradicionales de cruising homosexual. Para ello, utiliza una noción ampliada de "cruising" y propone algunas categorías de análisis diferencial: por un lado, la oposición entre cruising espacial (inmediato) y comunicacional (mediado), por otro la oposición entre un cruising analógico y otro digital. El texto no configura un ensayo unitario convencional, sino más bien un conjunto de notas estructuradas como bloques temáticos.

Titolo «Rimani maschio finché non ne arriva uno più maschio (e attivo) di te»: la costruzione delle maschilità omosessuali come pratica normativa tra normalizzazione e complicità. Cirus Rinaldi – Università degli studi di Palermo Abstract L'articolo intende ricostruire, alla luce dei più recenti posizionamenti critici sulle maschilità e attraverso il riferimento alla costellazione queer, i principali processi di costruzione e rappresentazione sociale delle maschilità omosessuali. Attraverso la messa in discussione del concetto statico di maschilità egemone, il lavoro propone di analizzare le rappresentazioni contemporanee delle maschilità omosessuali come forme ibride che si strutturano secondo modalità proprie del gruppo di maschi egemoni. Nello specifico, le rappresentazioni commerciali delle maschilità gay egemoniche possono consistere in una nuova forma di appropriazione da parte del tardo capitalismo ad uso del pubblico più vasto e la loro circolazione nella cultura dei consumi consolida e rafforza un immaginario specifico, proietta uno sguardo di classe e razzializzato sulle soggettività gay utilizzabile sia dal pubblico omosessuale che da quello eterosessuale. La domanda principale è se, in termini teorici ed epistemologici, sia sufficiente questo posizionamento estraniante per distanziarsi dalla riproduzione della maschilità egemone o se si tratti, invece, di comprendere le strategie di neutralizzazione e le vari istanze culturali giustificatorie del medesimo processo che continua a costituirci anche se sotto forma di maschi altri.

This doctoral project is an investigation of the imaginaries of sexual citizenship in post-Maidan Ukraine. I used a queer feminist discourse analysis method to examine how LGBT+ communities seek to position themselves in relation to hegemonic discourses of state and nationhood. Collecting data from focus group discussions and online forums, I identified the Euromaidan (2013-2014) as a pivotal moment wherein sexual citizenship was intensified as a dynamic process of claims-making and negotiation between LGBT+ communities and the state. Analysing how LGBT+ communities imagine and make sense of sexual citizenship, I demonstrated how the dominant discourse of sexual citizenship – homopatriotism, as I call it – emerged as a specific form of homonormativity at the complex intersection of the post-Maidan nationalist mobilisation, war in the eastern part of Ukraine, global human rights discourse, post-socialism, neoliberalism and axes of colonial power.

According to Suzanne Danuta Walters, increased visibility of gay characters does not mean the removal of stereotypes and positive representation in popular media, nor does increased visibility of a minority automatically challenge the status quo. In terms of comic book characters, how do gay characters perform gender and either perpetuate or disprove existing stereotypes about straight men and women, and gay men and women? This article will discuss how Wiccan and Hulkling from Young Avengers enact homonormativity as a way to gain social acceptance and re-inscribe stereotypical gender roles where Hulkling functions as the masculine partner and Wiccan as his feminized counterpart. When homonormativity, the perpetuation of heteronormativity by gay characters, is performed, gay characters become socially acceptable. Yet, even heteronormative gay characters are still othered, which Wiccan and Hulkling both exemplify when they are isolated from each other.

This article analyzes the current dichotomy in American political and popular culture between pro-gay biological determinism, which is used to argue for LGBTQ rights, and anti-gay social constructionist ideas. This pro-gay biological determinism results in a politics of exclusion that renders queer identities falling outside a biological, lifelong model invisible. Building on Lisa Duggan’s notion of homonormativity, the author describes this discursive production as biological homonormativity, illustrated through
an analysis of three key sites: an exchange between lesbian music icon Melissa Etheridge and Governor Bill Richardson during an LGBT political forum; the legal proceedings of Perry v. Schwarzenegger ; and the gay cult film But I’m a Cheerleader!

Through its ironic critique of monogamy as a monstrous force, the horror film It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) advances, by way of negative example, a queer ethics of open, responsible sexuality—albeit an ethics constrained by the film’s setting in a present-day, neoliberal Detroit increasingly stripped of public services. By examining the film’s ambivalent nostalgia for both a generic and urban past, this essay argues that It Follows’s queer aesthetic achieves its emotional tenor through imaging Detroit’s decrepit (sub)urban spaces as haunted by polyvalent sexualities and socioeconomic inequalities.

The homosexual male has long been represented as other, whether as the medicalised or sexually deviant other, however, neoliberalism aims to recuperate the figure of the homosexual into the normative social order, no longer ‘other’, now eager consumer and productive member of society. This thesis investigates how the tension between homonormativity and queerness is represented in William S. Burroughs’ novel Queer, in order to elucidate how homosexual characters are constructed in literature produced under neoliberalism. Queer theory will be applied to a close analysis of the text in order to explore how homosexual subjectivity is constructed through representation. Texts are products of specific cultural moments, and as such it is important to understand the ways in which neoliberalism, which is the dominant logic of the current time, has influenced representations of homosexuality in the novel Queer. This thesis will look at Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics in order to explain the production of homosexual bodies and subjectivities, which in turn will account for how the split between homonormativity, the depoliticised homosexual body which desires to assimilate with the social order, and queerness comes to be. It is argued that, despite Burroughs’ reputation for being a subversive writer, Queer contains homonormative representations of homosexual people who desire acceptance into the hegemonic social order. In reading Queer as a site of stress in subjective becoming, this research provides a theoretical base for analysing other queer texts and their representations.

This article explores the ways in which coupledom is promoted through contemporary family policy in the UK. It does this in the context of dominant political discourses suggesting that broken relationships are a major political problem and the cause of almost all that is wrong with British society today. The paper performs an analysis of recent family policies, revealing narratives claiming that stable coupled relationships are the foundation of a strong nation. The reverse of this narrative, therefore, is that to not be in—or even worse, to not even aspire to be in—a coupled relationship is not just a personal failure, but a failure for the nation as a whole. The article therefore argues that the UK government encourages a particular type of intimate relationship, despite an increasing recognition of ’diverse’ family forms. Build- ing upon Rich’s notion of compulsory heterosexuality, the article concludes that what we are witnessing in current British society is not compulsory heterosexuality, but compulsory coupledom.

This dissertation examines the process of parental acceptance for gay men in India and the US. In academic literature and public discourse, this acceptance is often seen as a linear, albeit often gradual, process. However, interviews with gay men conducted for this study show that this acceptance waxes and wanes in patterned ways. It is found that gay men often experience *contextual* parental acceptance. Acceptance becomes weaker or stronger at different points and stages in the life course and in different interactional settings. Parental acceptance becomes stronger or diminished in these contexts depending on how gay men’s parents respond to the forces of heteronormativity and homonormativity, and whether American gay men align with the racial normativity while experiencing their sexuality, in these time and spatial contexts. Finally, this study incorporates the experiences of gay men from India to show that the understanding of parental acceptance through the lenses of homonormativity is more exclusive to the US. Parental acceptance in India can be better understood through how queerness, in addition to homonormativity, shapes gay men’s perceptions of parental acceptance.

Trotz des Booms um das New Queer Cinema der 1990er Jahre wird lesbische Repräsentation im Kino weiterhin marginalisiert. 1 Eine ganz banale Antwort auf die Frage danach, warum das so sei, ist und bleibt: Sexismus. Es ist ein Trugschluss zu glauben, dass das queere Kino davon nicht betroffen wäre. Queerer Aktivismus, queere Kunst und Theorie und feministische Ansätze stehen in einem konfliktreichen Spannungsverhältnis zueinander. Nicht ohne Grund nennt B. Ruby Rich das New Queer Cinema der 1990er Jahre zunächst eine (white) boys' own story (Rich 2004: 7), die die Perspektiven von Frauen und People of Color vernachlässige. Auch im sogenannten New Wave Queer Cinema der letzten Jahre dominieren schwule Sujets. Dieses Label wird bisher maßgeblich mit dem Schaffen von Regisseuren wie Travis Mathews und Ira Sachs in Verbindung gebracht. Das heißt nicht, dass diese Filme nicht sehenswertes queeres Kino sind und sie so pauschalisierend unter einem Label verhandelt werden sollten. 2 Aber kaum eine andere Kunstform ist noch immer von einem solchen Geschlechterungleichgewicht geprägt wie der finanziell anspruchsvolle narrative Spielfilm. Während sich inzwischen eine ganze Reihe LGBT-Repräsentationen vornehmlich im Mainstream-TV finden, scheint es vor allem für lesbische Regisseurinnen deutlich schwieriger zu sein, ihre Projekte umzusetzen und lesbische Geschichten im narrativen Spielfilm zu erzählen -gerade wenn es um nicht-Weiße Lesben geht. Eine nennenswerte Ausnahme bildet hier der Spielfilm PARIAH der Regisseurin Dee

Global anarchist movements and queer politics are integrating in mutually informing ways. The characteristics of this synthesis include liberatory theories and practices of embodied genders and sexualities in private and public, direct actions to visibilize and extend queer publics, and queer intersections with capitalism, the environment, race, disability, public space, private property and citizenship, among others. This article
will critically analyze three cases of anti-consumerist vomiting, including an erotic performance, a punk zine, and a Pink Panthers direct action, to investigate the politics of queer anarchist autonomous publics that extend the anti-homophobic and ant-iheteronormative politics of queer counterpublics toward challenging homonormativity through intersectional anti-oppression and liberatory value-practices.

This paper seeks to highlight the often overlooked interconnectivity of the cultural sphere and the economic sphere, particularly focusing on same-sex reproductive law and neoliberalism. Using The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, specifically highlighting its implications for same-sex couples, this examination demonstrates the way that policy and legislation frequently echo normative ways of being, encouraging the “good”, productive neoliberal citizen and/or family. This article is informed by Foucault’s notions of governmentality and biopower, problematising this limiting legislation, arguing that it is grounded on an internalised ideal of the traditional family, discouraging more transgressive or creative family formations. Specifically, I challenge the way that this legislation privileges marriage, the two parent model and bolsters the binary constructions of heterosexual/homosexual and male/female. Consequently, despite being celebrated as a victory for same-sex couples, The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 reaffirms the hierarchy of non-heterosexual identities, allowing only those who follow the hetero/homonormative ideal to legitimately access reproductive services.

In this paper, I seek to contextualize the fight for the (already accomplished) legal recognition of same-sex marriage in Portugal within the wider frame of LGBT activism in this country (Cascais, 2006), and in the interplay of several differently positioned activists. Within this frame, I will analyze how the theoretical work of Miguel Vale de Almeida (2008), in seeking to legitimize the fight for monogamous same-sex marriage, seems to have engaged in identitary Othering and misrepresentation vis-à-vis polyamory. Such misrepresentation is contingent to the non-empirical confounding of polyamory and polygamy, along with the essentializing of gendered dynamics in intimate relationships, and the erasure of lesbian and gay ethical non-monogamous relationships. Thus, by deploying similar straw-men fallacies as those used by conservatives to fight against LGBT rights, polyamory is (apparently) successfully critiqued and shown to have to subsume or silence itself to an alleged strategic essentialism required for passing legislation in favor of same-sex marriage.

This paper concludes with a reflection of the (political) dangers of petitioning for silence of Othered identities, and how such petitions are based on the same identitary violence and disciplining that LGBT movements have been trying to fight for decades, and that draws on homonationalism, homonormativity and heterosexual privileges to affirm itself.

Ideology is an integral component in the reproduction of power. Integral to this central tenet of statecraft is the regulation of identity and proscribed methods of social engagement—positive portrayals of “good citizenry” and delegitimized representations of those challenging hegemony. Through an Althusserian and linguistic analysis, positioning the X-Men movie franchise as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), one can examine the lives of mutants portrayed in the text as indicative of preferred methods of statelegitimized sociopolitical interaction. This metaphorical and textual analysis is used to discuss the lived realities of queer persons resisting hegemony, and is located in the bodies and performances of those who resist assimilation and homonormativity and who challenge reformist LGBT organizations seeking rights for non-heterosexuals through further entanglement with the state. I explore the world of mutants and queers with the following question in mind: How can one utilize a queerly theoretical analytical lens while maintaining a discernable distance from reformism, homonormativity, and assimilationist reductionism? Both the fictional world of the X-Men and the lived queer reality reflect the state’s efforts to dictate the borders of citizenry, the expression of grievance, and the performance of deviance, difference and stigma. Whereas the mutant narrative reflects statist ideals of a neoliberal, “politically correct” politics of integration, this agenda conceals an insidious denial of queer identity through the coerced conformity of “deviant” bodies. This discourse will be discussed through a variety of locales, including the performativity of gender and sexuality, the narrative of racial deviance, and the discussion of “passing.”

Homonormativity has been theorised as an expression of the sexual politics of neoliberalism.  Undoubtedly, in at least the countries of the Global North, sexual politics has changed significantly during the era of neoliberalism.  However, too frequently, homonormativity (like neoliberalism) is presented in both academic and activist debates as being an all-encompassing, external entity that exerts a powerful, structuring influence over most aspects of human life.  This paper challenges this representation of homonormativity, suggesting that it is in part a result of the specific geography of knowledge production about homonormativity that is most frequently the product of life in major metropolitan urban areas.  Written from this vantage point, theorisations of homonormativity have become distanced from the lived experience of the majority of sexual minority people. Building on earlier work in Geography that theorises the diverse economic practices that exist within and alongside neoliberal capitalist relations, this short paper argues for a renewed focus on the diverse social and economic relations that produce ordinary homosexualities in ordinary cities (and rural areas).  Such an approach does not deny the (re)production of homonormative subjectivities, but neither does it start from the a priori assumption of their hegemonic position in contemporary lesbian and gay lives.

For some readers it might be something new, to find a work about “gay spaces” in the frame of the geographical discipline. Others might not even know what issues are researchable in this specialized field or why there is a need for researching. Hopefully this essay can give answers to many of the questions that might arise while being confronted for the first time with that topic.
While in this chapter the research methods are unfolded and the topic is integrated in the discipline of geography, the following chapters are filled with more specific content. Chapter 2 defines and discusses terms such as “gay” and “queer” and concepts like “heter-onormativity” or that of “sexualized spaces”. The last concept is leading over to chapter 3, the main chapter, wherein gay spaces are explored from different perspectives – such as the urban/rural difference or the Nordic view – and also critically questioned. The conclusion in chapter 4 is not done in the usual way, but adopts political-geographical concepts of territo-ry and territoriality. The way in which this essay was done is finally reflected in the last chap-ter (5), which also includes acknowledgements and is then followed by the references.

Please see the published version of this draft: Schubert K. (2019) The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP. In: Gerhards H., Braun K. (eds) Biopolitiken – Regierungen des Lebens heute. Politologische Aufklärung – konstruktivistische Perspektiven. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25769-9_5
PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma.

Within the gay male community there exists a specific performance of masculinity that holds dominance, or cultural currency, over other portrayals. This paper will seek to explore what hegemonic gay masculinity is, possibilities about why it has risen to prominence and what the dominant presence of this masculinity means in Canada and the United States at the pivotal contemporary moment one month after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide. I will position this hegemonic gay masculinity alongside the growing use of the term homonormativity and work to prove that the LGBTQ community at large should be more critical of the gay men who perform their masculinity 'right', than those who perform hegemonic gay masculinity 'wrong'.