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This paper draws on ethnographic interviews with women-loving women (WLW) in Berbice, Guyana, South America, to interrogate the Creole linguistic term “deh” as a cultural heuristic device central to the visibility politics in this rural community. The linguistic concept of “deh” is a localized Creole (a dialect produced from the mixing of African, Indian, and Indigenous languages), which unsettles the Western image of the “closet” and the discourse of “coming out.” “Deh” is a double-entendre referring to a spatial location, like “over there,” and to a romantic or sexual relationship between two people. How might the linguistic concept of “deh” open up a discursive epistemological space where same-sex desires are not marginalized or relegated in rural spaces? How do women loving women (WLW) create the conditions for their existence in rural spaces? Analyzing nine interviews with WLW, this paper explores how Black and Brown women-loving women embody and express their same-sex desires through the Creole concept of “deh” and argues that “deh” exposes the colonial violence of language. Through “deh,” WLW offers a framework for rethinking self-making and repositioning their relationship to the broader society and the state. The colonial/modern system imposes and projects LGBTQ as a global framework for understanding human sexuality; as a transgressive linguistic and embodied sexual praxis, “deh” destabilizes the colonial knowledge of gender and sexual practices in Berbice. As such, this paper can be read as an act of decolonizing Western knowledge systems.

This paper will analyse the process of the creation of an original script and a short performance focused on the relationship between the Catholic figure of Francis of Assisi and the body, as framed by queer theory. Over the centuries and in various cultures, the Catholic institution has been a body of oppression, particularly to minorities. On the other hand, the institution has produced a significant number of figures who were resilient and who have defied the system, both internally and externally. Frequently, these figures are depicted in a tame manner, so that they are seen in a more conservative and orthodox light. Francis of Assisi is one of these figures. Particularly in and after the administration of the Order under Bonaventure, Franciscanism developed in a way that the image of the Poverello was manipulated and softened down. By returning to the pre-Bonaventure documents on the saint, and reflecting on them through queer theory, this project attempts to show the defiant traits of this saint, particularly in the way how he perceived and related with the body and physicality, including deformation. This presents a liberated approach to the body and queers the way how the body has been oppressed both by the Institution, which suppresses the body, as well as by society, that celebrates only select body forms. The second part of the paper ‘translates’ into practice the theoretical framework through a case-study of a theatrical project.

"As an intervention into a domesticated academic knowledge production and an increasingly normative queer theorizing, Queer Indiscipline, Decolonial Revolt asks for the proliferation of other modalities of thinking and writing. The context of such interrogation is the neoliberal restructuring of the university which comfortably accommodates criticality. Where criticality has lost its sting, this paper calls for a daring indiscipline opposing political, public, and scientific disciplining. This brings practices of doing knowledge and not the knowledges as such into attention. An intimacy between the queer and the undisciplined is established by referencing the resistance to assimilationist politics and practices as queer theory’s principal asset. Yet, undisciplined knowledges are not only geared towards challenging the bounds of the discipline(s), but also, and more broadly, towards decolonial futures. Queer Indiscipline, Decolonial Revolt explores various moments of concomitant unlearning and improvisation on and beyond the academic stage. The piece conducts three non-linear explorations. The first part analyzes the making of a hierarchical knowledge machine as part of capitalist modernity and revisits moments of queer and black queer theorizing that challenge the dividing lines between high/low, sensible/nonsensical, intellectual/corporeal, theory/practice, speech/chatter, etc. The second part discusses the masterful subject as the agent of knowledge. While the persistence and the pervasiveness of such master fantasy gets acknowledged, the verve of this paper is oriented towards the modality of queer dispossession. The final section gives way to the sabotage inherent in the unruly rhythm of life. Such sabotage is tested to counteract the frameworks, formats and concepts which articulate intellectuality on a more fundamental level. This advances the deconstruction of intellectuality to the terrifying and beautiful point where intellectuality is co-extensive with the social."

Building on the work of chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa and queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz this paper analyses and discusses the affective component of language for those whose first language has been overshadowed by a second language. I ask how language affects the self’s sense of identity/belonging, the possibility for communicating/accessing queerness, and what linguistic or poetic tools can be employed to empower the self. Following the tradition of feminist thought that assumes that the personal is political, I write from personal experiences. As a Colombian-born migrant in Sweden, I explore how the overshadowing of my mother tongue (Spanish) by Swedish (as the language with the perceived highest social and cultural value in Swedish society) has impacted on my self-image, sense of identity, self-worth and queerness. Gloria Anzaldúa inspires me to mix languages and push the boundaries of the academic text format. Confronting it with a poetic, violent and desbordado language, I challenge normative ideas of academic writing, but I also hope that others might find beauty in the decisive ambiguity and the mixing of languages. I engage with what Gloria Anzaldúa (2012, 1984) and Cherrie Moraga (1984) call theorizing from the flesh and turn to concepts such as linguistic terrorism, while also approaching José Esteban Muñoz’s brown feelings (2020). Furthermore, I build on Torres (2017) who argues that the emotional bonds bilinguals have to different languages intersect with their sense of identity and place, thus evoking various emotions and memories. From here, I conclude that having one’s first language be overshadowed by a second one creates ambiguity and confusion about the self’s identity. Feeling homeless in language translates into an uncertainty about one’s claim to any citizenship or cultural identity, thus leading to anxiety, sadness and sense of non-belonging. I contrast this with the concept of disidentification (Muñoz 1999), which opens practices of survival through entering queer temporality and embracing ambiguity. Accordingly, the confusion about a defined identity (going along with a particular language) can become useful for negotiating the self’s queerness. For Muñoz, neither opting for assimilation nor counteridentification, but disidentifying allows the self to (re)construct a sense of identity and belonging.

Art practices occupy a space of liminality within academia, being valid, appropriate to illustrate questions and discourses in social sciences and humanities, and not sufficient in mainstream academia to assert what art foregrounds as ‘knowledge’. So, what happens when art has something to claim through non-academic methods of inquiry? Even more complicated, what happens when art allows putting forward theoretical hypothesis involving the immateriality of affect? Departing from a practice-led research focusing on the endurance of white, cisgender, and heteropatriarchic impositions, as well as the ways these impositions materialise themselves on the body, this paper explores the possibilities of Fucking with grammar, a writing method developed throughout the writing of my PhD research. Linguistics has been stretched for centuries by QUILTBAG individuals — queer and questioning, unsure, intersex, lesbian, transgender and two-spirit, bisexual, asexual and aromantic, gay and genderqueer; swardspeak, lavender, and code-switching all entail ways of reshaping and creating language as response to socio-political necessities, camouflage, or simply to access a jargon that can be more faithful to practices and embodiments of the group creating it. However, there is a different kind of reclaiming emerging, when performance artist, actress, and activist Linn da Quebrada utters “I am a cisgender woman with one breast and a penis,” she is committing the kind of epistemic disobedience that undoes epistemology. Here, I focus on disobediences that bring western epistemologies to collapse. These challenges that contribute to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “the end of the world as we know it” (2014). To end what ‘we’ know requires a different ‘how’, it entails methodological deployments that help bringing into crisis academic hierarchies regarding [research] corroborability. Questioning after Audre Lorde: how does one make tangible the immeasurable and unpredictable without being averted and undercut by the tools still sustaining the master’s house? The approach I propose here is Fucking with grammar. Fucking with is associated with messing with someone; fuck you or fuck me is negatively perceived; in sex, ‘fuck you’ or ‘fuck me’ is one-sided — the act of fucking should be fucking with, because even when saying ‘I want to fuck you’ it is still necessary more than one person for this ‘fucking’ to actually happen. Similarly, in English, the correct preposition following the verb ‘to dream’ is ‘of’ or ‘about’, which makes absolutely no sense: because when one is dreaming, one is embedded in a withness that ‘of’ or ‘about’ cannot account for. This piece shares how I fuck with grammar within a practice-led PhD research: applying Portuguese and Turkish grammar structures to English, generating verbs or nouns out of adjectives and vice versa[s]. Fucking with grammar is a mode of surpassing some of language’s limitations when speaking of that which is immaterial; it is a semantic slap in the face calling for decolonisation of one’s immediacy of logic when assuming typos and linguistic ignorance within writings not following English normativities. I t is a method that contributes to a broader challenge to formats sustaining hierarchies around what is considered ‘academic’ research.

The paper brings forth and analyzes an example of the ways in which Hispanic Queer Theory colonizes trans* subjects and issues. It adopts Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008) as a particularly relevant case study, due to its significance in the development of subsequent Latin American queer scholarship and activism. An array of critical tools offered by the epistemologies of the South and Trans* studies enable the study of the particular status allotted to trans* people in the Preciadist project. By focusing particularly on Preciado’s use of the pair “bio” and “techno/trans” throughout the work, and the various subject positions assigned to these categories, the paper exposes the colonialist structure that shapes the work, and the resulting appropriation and erasure of trans* people, particularly transsexuals. It contextualizes these operations in a broader queer academic tradition in which Preciado’s work is inscribed, and concludes with a reading of the queer/trans* scholarly relationship as a North/South dynamic.

The paper offers an analysis of various public representations of Argentina’s recent past from the perspective of a Queer Philosophy of History. It contends that this approach offers valuable tools to look into how and why we shape our past like we do, what comes as the “mess” that historical narratives often try to “tidy up,” how they achieve this, and how all of this relates to our present interests. With this aim, the paper describes and analyzes different mechanisms that are put into play when producing representations of the liminal events that shook Argentina in the 1970s, focusing specifically on the ways in which those who were part of the resistance against State terrorism tend to be selected, presented and described. In its conclusions, it suggests reading these practices of public memory as cases of political anxiety, rethinking them through the potential offered by a queer perspective.

This paper explores Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology from a disability studies perspective. In addition to her emphasis on race and desire, I ask how we might use Ahmed’s queer, cultural phenomenology to ask about the sociomaterial basis of disablement, reflecting on the interactive emergence of these subjectivities more generally. In the first section of this paper, I examine¬¬ the three main chapters in Ahmed’s important book. I then ask what Ahmed might have asked, if she had explored disability therein. Next, I turn to some phenomenological disability studies, interrogating how subjectivity is put to work in the shared world, rather than universally accorded to all persons at all times. In the final section of this paper, I return to the basis of the phenomenological project itself, and ask what this revised version of subjectivity means for the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, with an eye to future work.

This paper examines the contested nature of New York’s public spaces in the 1980s and 1990s through the lens of Lefebvre’s notion of „the right to the city.” With particular attention to the loss of public sex culture to gentrification and neoliberal policies of urban growth, this paper points to the interplay of such factors as the AIDS epidemic, homophobia, and homelessness, which inhibit the achievement social justice for sexual minorities. When the New York authorities closed down spaces crucial for the articulation of urban counterpublics – such as bath houses, piers, and Times Square sexual establishments – they delegitimized queer forms of desire and displaced various urban subjects already marginalized by race, class, homelessness, and AIDS. While the past destruction is irreversible, more recent grassroots initiatives relying on the right to the city rhetoric have been able to mobilize fragmented urban counterpublics in a successful bid for certain contested spaces.

The paper concerns sexual orientation of transgender people and expert discourse strategies of normativisation of sexuality of the mentioned group of people. The paper is based on qualitative analysis of transgender people’s statements concerning their sexual orientation. Basing on the assumptions of social constructionism, author of the paper tries to demonstrate that the common manner of presenting sex, gender and sexuality referring to the binary categories of description and classification (man/woman, heterosexuality/homosexuality, cisgenderism/transgenderism, etc.) is a construct of discourse based on the essentialist concept of sex, gender and sexuality. In accordance to the concept of the tool of power-knowledge (Foucault), this discourse legitimizes a definite idea of social order and supports definite strategies of normativization.

This article discusses the main characteristics of the politics of masculinity visible within Polish queer movements. In this paper I examine the way in which gay activists define and negotiate their identity and describe queer collective actions in reference to their gender dimension. The first part of the paper presents a summary of contemporary approaches towards masculinity and towards a gender perspective on social movements. In the second part, which is based on semi-structured interviews with queer activists, I draw on various attitudes of the respondents towards a greater visibility of gay identities, the presence of sexuality in the movements’ discourses and an internal differentiation of non-heteronormative masculinities.

In this paper, I analyze selected art shows, that took place in Warsaw clubs (Le Madame and M25) in the early 2000s. I describe the performances of the art collective Suka Off and the play “Miss HIV” directed by Maciej Kowalewski, as well as the reception of these shows. Described actions boldly and innovatively addressed issues of human carnality and non-normative sexuality. In the article, I attempt to include these performances in a local queer history – while trying to analyze the story (which I produce) critically.

This paper tells the story of two women—a veterinarian and a folk healer—to foster political, environmental, and social conditions in which pastoralists based in the central Indian state of Maharashtra could thrive. For them, this practice of fostering necessarily meant tending to human and nonhuman animals together. The women I followed called this interspeciated practice, One Health. To be sure, they borrowed this term from more economically-dominant and politically-normative international development organizations. When wielded by these institutions, One Health has designated a model for preventing emerging zoonotic diseases, and the pandemics they often cause, through the surveillance of marginal livestock rearing communities, often in the Global South. My interlocutors’ projects intersected with One Health—and thus were available for funding from it—insofar as the central conceit of One Health was that human and nonhuman animals can share illness. Yet the politics and ethics of the two were very different. I make this case by ethnographically tracking different modalities of seeing that characterize One Health and its vernaculars. Sight, I argue, operates as a perceptual orientation that initiates a “becoming-with” the world for my interlocutors versus a tool to control it (Dave, 2012). How, I therefore ask, might different ways of apprehending the bonds of human and nonhuman beings reveal how we might yet learn to dwell differently on an exhausted planet?

Museari is an online museum dedicated to upholding human rights and sexual diversity through art, history, and education. Museari was born in 2015 and since then more than 70 exhibitions have been presented. This paper analyzes Museari's interest in teacher training, something that has been especially positive during the Covid-19 pandemic. The objective of the research is to reflect on the opportunity to use a virtual museum to address issues of art and education. For data collection, we used assessment instruments specific to the case study, such as diagnoses, discussions, focus groups, and participant observation. We highlight museum’s positive reception by the students, particularly the role it plays in overcoming stereotypes and conventional taboos to achieve inclusive environments.

Before coming out of the closet and publishing a series of successful gay novels, Patricia Nell Warren was known as Patricia Kilina, wife of a Ukrainian émigré writer George Tarnawsky. Her early poetry, written in Ukrainian, includes numerous references to non-traditional gender roles which she further explored in her anglophone novels. The Front Runner (1974) was published when Warren had already divorced her husband and came out of the closet. It was met with commercial success and became the first contemporary American bestseller about gay love. In this paper, I focus on the mixed reader-response of The Front Runner in the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the role of homophobia and misogyny in Patricia Nell Warren’s novel. I argue that The Front Runner provides readers with a thought-provoking literary representation of the changing social attitudes towards non-binary gender roles and non-heterosexuality right after Stonewall and before the AIDS epidemic.

Drawing on heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity, this paper seeks to unravel the issue of the underreporting of male rape to the police and to the third sector. Critically examining the issue of male sexual victimisation will provide a fuller understanding of it within the police and third sector context. Underpinned by gender theories and concepts and the framework of heteronormativity, I argue that male victims of rape are reticent to engage with the police and voluntary agency practitioners because of hostile, sexist and homophobic reactions, attitudes, and appraisal, particularly from other men in these agencies within England to police masculinities and sexualities. I draw on primary data of police officers and voluntary agency practitioners (n = 70) to illustrate the ways wherein gender and sexualities norms and beliefs affect and shape their understanding and view of men as victims of rape. The data suggests that, when male rape victims report their rape, they are susceptible to a ‘fag discourse’, whereby the police and voluntary agency practitioners are likely to perpetuate language to suggest that the victims are not ‘real’ men, intensifying their reluctance to report and to engage with the criminal justice system. Thus, the police and voluntary agency practitioners’, particularly male workers, masculinities are strengthened through emasculating male rape victims.

This paper explores the works of art by Marcelo Pombo, Fernanda Laguna and Omar Schiliro, artists working in the Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas in Buenos Aires during the 1990’s. Their plastic operations, materials, contents and visual references are related to childhood as a political way of interfering with heteronormativity and normative fictions that regulate the artistic canon. Through these ideas, we will think of the images from the aesthetic and political rearrangements that provide queer temporalities.

Facing a saturation of normative representations of gender and sexuality in the culture industry, the cinematographic discourse has managed, ever since the first decade of the XXI century in Argentina, to produce alternative images as regards genders, sexualities, erotic and affectionate bonds, family. This paper has the aim of setting the link between this phenomenon and the discussion on the emergence of the New Queer Cinema. For this purpose, a brief introduction is issued related to representations of intersex bodies thus presenting as corpus two films recently released in the country: XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007) y El último verano de la boyita (Julia Solomonoff, 2009).

This text is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference In/visible: The Sexual and Political Regimes of the Archive, in a panel titled “The Queer Location of Culture: Nationalism, History, Sexuality” (Skopje, National Gallery of Macedonia – Chifte Hamam, 25 February 2012).

Based on A. Revathi’s The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life-Story (2010) and Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger (2012), the paper explores the possible connections that arise between the two autobiographies while articulating the similar praxis of living beyond gender norms, though in very distinctive cultural contexts. The comparability of the texts provides grounds to construe “queer” and “disability” in the transsexual experiences as symptomatic but not solely based on the common negation of “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory able-bodiedness” as imposed social constructs. The process of “transgendering” (Ekins and King 34) as initiated by the sense of disability/queerness of being in the “wrong body” is also explored through the study of the narratives. Both Revathi and Bornstein are affected by an innate desire for a "feminine" form of existence as well as the social injunction of following the dictates of "normality" and "ableism" vis-à-vis the gender attributed at birth. The surgical and hormonal transformations do not lead to a psychosocial “rectification” and may culminate in a dysfunctional womanhood. Revathi’s unrequited love and failed marriage and Bornstein’s inability to "qualify" as a lesbian will be read as instances of how the inadequacy of social structures is misconstrued as a "gender-impairment" in the individual and instituted as "hijra" or "butch."

This paper is an attempt to overview life strategies of those people in Japan, whose experiences have fallen outside the scheme of heteronormative roles. The modes of resistance to hegemonic notions are analysed in their historical context, including the origins and popularity gaining, however the main point is to reveal the withdrawal of hegemony of numerous outdated social norms. The analysis of selected examples is done engaging with Japanese gender theories as well as western queer approach.

The processes of recontextualization and reappropriation are said to be the basic ways to neutralize the stigma that is imposed on the sexual minority groups. In light to such processes this article looks at the issue of changing connotations and meanings of the historically strongly conditioned symbol of the pink triangle. By the investigation of different contexts in which the symbol occurs today – commemorative, emancipatory, and connected with pop-culture – the authors undertake the reflection on the consequences related to the attempts to dis¬connect the pink triangle from the Holocaust symbolism. Additionally, through the usage of the theft metaphor, the authors pay attention to the fact that the limitations of property rights apply not only to material items, but also to symbolic values. On the basis the J. Butler’s performativity concept, A. Croom’s understanding of reappropriation and E. Goffman’s concept of social stigma, the paper analyzes the ways the pink triangle symbol is used in the framework of contemporary discourses created in the USA. The main question concerns the issue of property. To whom does the pink triangle belong? To the ex-prisoners for whom it is stigmatizing, or to LGBT groups, who wear it with pride, or maybe to the users of contemporary culture, who use it as a supplement to different kinds of gadgets?

This text is a revised version of a paper presented at the conference In/visible: The Sexual and Political Regimes of the Archive, in a panel titled “The Queer Location of Culture: Nationalism, History, Sexuality” (Skopje, National Gallery of Macedonia – Chifte Hamam, 25 February 2012).