10:00 am – 11:30 am: Queering the University
IN(QUEER)Y AND THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY
W. King Mott, PhD. Associate Professor of Political Science and Women and Gender Studies, Seton Hall University
The political and personal details that are necessary for the queer to survive and thrive are unique in a Catholic higher education context. Perhaps there is not a more genuinely queer environment as the history of priests, nuns and religious reveals a refuge for LGBTQ individuals. The paradox is the contorted closet that exists where refuge and condemnation co-exist. This academic terrain has tested the limits of academic freedom when it comes to queer theory as an academic field. There are casualties along the way and there are considerable victories. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this investigation is that vibrant queer theory does operate in orthodox Catholic institutions. The purpose of this investigation is to reveal the history of queer theory at a Catholic university. Emphasis is placed on the impact of this peculiar narrative upon faculty, administration and students. Included in the investigation are interviews of activists at all levels along with the Catholic opposition. The narrative exposes a trajectory of increasing liberation and cooperation perhaps paralleling the dilemma faced within the corporate Roman Catholic Church. Queer theory has undergone a unique birthing in Catholic higher education. It is an important story.
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QUEER METHODOLOGY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE
H. Howell Williams, MA student, New School for Social Research, Political Science
In Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam employs what she calls a “queer methodology” to paint a complex and variegated picture of sexuality and its historical constructedness. She describes it as a “scavenger methodology,” in that it borrows from a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, deep textual reading, and archival research, as well as critical film and cultural studies. This paper unpacks the notion queer methodology, examines what specifically is involved in performing such a logic of inquiry, and highlights the risks and benefits of employing this approach. I argue that a queer methodology provides for a recounting of narratives and livelihoods that are obscured by the promotion of some methodologies as representing “good” social science. Political and social categories of identity are too varied and complex to be fully accounted for by exclusively using traditional approaches like interviewing or regression analysis. For this reason social scientists interested in studying queer issues must expand their proverbial “toolkit” outside of traditional social science methods to include the humanities and cultural studies, as well as more traditional positivistic and interpretivistic methods. By intentionally subverting disciplinary boundedness, a queer methodology maintains methodological rigor while doing away with the hierarchies through which disciplines organize particular methods.
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ECUADORIAN COLLECTIVE
María-Amelia Viteri, Visiting Assistant Professor, Departamento de Antropologia, Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. Associate Researcher and Professor, FLACSO/Ecuador
How are scholars using queer theory? As a Cultural Anthropologist, I address this question transnationally through the examination of the Ecuadorian-based Collective “Desbordes de Gener@” that emerged three years ago from a class on gender, sexuality and citizenship I teach at FLACSO1 (Quito) during the summers. The Collective is formed by mostly Ecuadorian graduate students, activists, academics and artists strategically united by political and activist performances that questions the borders of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ while ‘queering’ the academe. I am particularly interested in mapping the production of knowledge through and around the Collective’s art-action performances as it confronts traditional meanings around what is considered to be “man” and/or “woman”. The Collective is re-drawing the classroom and the city’s geography calling into question space, positionality, entitlement, inequality, belonging. One of the questions that emerges from this critical analysis is what are the limits of a ‘transnational queer inquiry’?
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11:30-1:00 pm: Queer Activism [Theory and Practice]
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THE CONCEPT OF QUEER AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE-USE: CAN LEGAL DISCOURSES BE QUEERED?
Julia Honkasalo, PhD Student New School for Social Research, Political Science / Center of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change, University of Helsinki, Finland
This paper explores the use of the concept “queer” in political and legal contexts. Political activism has long benefitted from the openness and ambiguity of the concept “queer”. Theorists such as Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam and Michael Warner among others have pointed out, that “queer” functions as an emancipatory concept because it has no fixed referent. Thus, “queer” and “queering” have been broadly used when resisting hetero-normative and patriarchal dichotomies such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual and normal/pathological by disclosing the underlying power structures and motivations that produce these distinctions in the first place. “Queer” has also been used as an umbrella term to describe all kinds of varieties of sexualities and identity positions. However, recent civil rights debates - most notably the marriage equality debate - pose new challenges to queer activism. This is because legal debates in courtrooms are still dominated by the use of fixed referents such as male/female, gay/lesbian, mother/father, husband/wife and citizen/immigrant. This has led some activists to prefer to talk about “rainbow rights” and “LGBTQ” rights instead of simply “gay rights”. In this paper I ask whether the use of fixed terminology is something inherent to legal discourses or can also legal discourses be queered?
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GIVING A QUEER ACCOUNT OF THE SELF AND CULTURE
Andy Silveira (Research Scholar), Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad – India
This paper examines how a queer account of the self – one that is neither objective nor can be located in the ahistorical subjective - leads to visibility in anti-identitarian terms that question the parameters of exclusionary discourses that constitute the “body” in specific frames of thought. The paper begins with a discussion of inter-subjective processes through which the self and the other come into being not in the essential terms of being but in the differential terms of becoming. In any narrative of the self, certain determinants of selfhood are foregrounded. A queer selfhood challenges these determinants thus disallowing the possibility of being straight-jacketed into a definition. I then use Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to examine the amendment of the infamous Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (a penal provision for criminalizing sex other than heterosexual penile-vaginal) brought about by queer activism. The paper examines queerness in how it constructs the self (autoanalysis) and cultural politics (by studying the queer activist case that led to the Delhi High Court judgement). The paper accounts for a self that does not see the self as a static entity but a fluid continuum in the process of not just coming to terms with identity (self) but also otherness (politics), showing that contingency and not fixed identity can also be a solid base for both self and politics.
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LGBT RIGHTS IN MEXICO: THE MARRIAGE MOVEMENT IN A MACHO LAND
Genaro Lozano, Ph.D student, The NSSR
Mexico has experienced a revolution in LGBT rights in the past 10 years. Despite a deeply conservative president and a setting where Catholicism, sexism, macho-ism, and traditional gender roles are deeply rooted, Mexican LGBT activists have been able to advance some of their goals both at the federal and at the local level. In this paper, I explore two different trajectories for advancing civil unions for same sex couples in Mexico City and in the Northern state of Coahuila. Both localities approved a legal recognition of same sex couples in their local congresses in 2006.
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3:00 pm - 4:30 pm: Queer Cultures
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PAJUBÁ AND THE UNIVERSALIZATION OF THE FEMININE IN QUEER SUBJECTIVITY
Álvaro Luís Lima, Student of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design
Pajubá, a form of Portuguese slang initially used among Brazilian lower-class gay men of African and indigenous descent, has now been popularly adopted by different queer communities all over Brazil. Although its use can vary widely, I will focus on Pajubá speakers’ tendency to address any individual or group by the feminine pronoun regardless of the gender and sexual orientation that the addressee is culturally assigned, opposing to the general rule in Portuguese of masculinization of the subject. I will use Luce Irigaray’s notion of the feminine as a “sex which is not one” and Judith Butler’s commentary on Irigaray’s writings to interpret this linguistic phenomenon as a resistance to normative categorizations of gender. Considering that to Irigaray the feminine is an absence of the masculine rather than a gender on its own, I will argue that such a characteristic of the slang reflects a queer desire to subvert current identity constructions and to create new means of thinking about the subject in the Portuguese language. I will also draw a connection between Irigaray’s feminine absence and Rey Chow’s logic of femininity as supplementarity, suggesting that the appropriation of the marginality as supplement is core to the problematization of identity prominent in queer theory.
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CHINESE BEAUTY PAGEANTS: CAN THE HETERONORMATIVE ALSO BE QUEER?
Mignonette Chiu, Columbia University
My research investigating the proliferating global phenomenon of the ethnic Chinese beauty pageant has illustrated the “obvious”—the Chinese beauty pageant, like most mainstream pageants, does not reflect the heteronormative “nature” of a community, but rather, produces it (performatively and literally). In contrast to Western pageants, which are in decline, the Chinese pageant is a cultural practice that now circulates the globe through networks of g/local pageants. And while g/local Chinese communities are heavily invested economically, socially and politically in such heteronormative practices that produce modern Chinese as normatively heteronormative, the pageant contests disciplining normative Orientalizing forces that construct Chinese women’s sexuality as a specific kind of “heterosexual.” Queer theory is often expressed as a practice of challenging the heteronormative, which disqualifies Chinese/Asian female/femininity and/or ritualized heteronormative practices as “queer” or queering (resisting dominant norms of gender and sexuality). But if queer theory is understood as challenging and disrupting a specific form of “hegemonic heteronormativity” which exists within a range of heteronormativities, then can certain heteronormativities also be queer?
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BAREBACKING AND THE CULTURE OF PUBLIC SEX: ETHNOGRAPHY OF A NEW YORK CITY SEX PARTY
Étienne Meunier, PhD candidate, Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey
The phenomenon of bareback sex in urban gay male communities (intentional condomless anal sex with risk of HIV transmission) has puzzled researchers and lay observers for at least a decade. Epidemiologists and psychologists see the practice as a public health problem that needs to be solved, while a few cultural critics have attempted to articulate its political potential (Crossley, Dean, Holmes, Tomso). With the arguments of queer scholars who have written on public sex in mind (Berlant, Bersani, Delaney, Warner), I try to see what kind of queer politics manifest themselves (or not) within the subculture of barebacking. My arguments are based in participant observation I have done in a series of bareback sex parties in New York City in the past year. I believe that the specific mode of embodiment and bodily interaction in sex parties, which queers traditional notions of the privacy of the body, and works toward building group intimacies, are key to understand the political meanings that some attach to gay public sex and barebacking.
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4:30 pm – 6:00 pm: KEYNOTE PANEL (scroll down for details)
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7 pm: Afterparty at Rockbar, 185 Christopher Street. Welcome everyone!
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