Archive - Topic - Gender and Sexualities

Affect is not an expression of transsexuality but is, rather, the definitive condition of it. --Lucas Cassidy Crawford, “Transgender Without Organs?” Transsexuality offers a dramatic instance of the temporal instability of the flesh. It sets embodiment in motion. --Susan Stryker, “Transsexuality: The Postmodern Body and/as Technology.” [1] No body seems...

I think I hear at least every other day: “You’re not normal!” You only like women because you’re in prison!” –Karen Batton, personal correspondence [1] Prisons in the United States regulate the ways in which people in them can build a home and construct intimate, sexual, and family lives. These...

[1] On 27 March 1995 Nigel Hawthorne did not win a Best Actor Oscar for his role as George III in Nicolas Hynter’s The Madness of King George (1994). In an interview with the American magazine The Advocate a week earlier, he had discussed his openness about his homosexuality and...

Setting the terms: after the Fire [1] While it would be problematic to fix a monolithic moment of change from invisibility to visibility in the context of queer citizenship in India, it could be argued that the events following the screening of Fire (1997) performed an important epistemic shift in...

[1] Although no critic has noted this, it still appears trite and painfully embarrassing to proclaim: “There are no lesbians in Chinese societies.” After all, it is almost a cliché to argue that sexuality is a construct. Thirty years ago, Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality examined how power...

[1] I spent several years of my life looking, waiting for the right time to die. In my early twenties, I fantasized about being martyred, killed for a purpose, a cause, something that would make my death bearable for the others, those who cared. I felt no risk in drugs,...

[1] The prominence of the ‘ghostly’ in Affinity, Sarah Waters’s 1991 neo-Victorian gothic fiction of female same sex desire, might be read as a fantastic fictional evocation of a recurring trope in lesbian feminist literary history and historiography: the historical ‘invisibility’ of lesbian identity. However, I wish to explore the...

[1] The cultural articulation of sexuality to political violence has enjoyed no shortage of scholarly analysis in recent years. Drawing upon libidinal models familiar to readers of renowned German Freudo-Marxists Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Klaus Theweleit, several monographs published since the mid-to-late 1990s forward compelling arguments about the relationship...

My inspiration for the script came from watching the religious right videotape The Gay Agenda. There’s a scene where they show drag queens going through a town, and the narrator is warning viewers that these people will take over your town, and I thought, ‘Well, that would be fun.’ –...

“Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture.” —Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Bravo website blurb [1]The recent popularity of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the...