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This essay recovers Judith Butler's theory of self-narration for queer theory and narratology. The essay shows how self-narration unlocks relational capacities not entirely stifled by disciplinary power. The essay spotlights the importance of renarratability, or the capacity for an event to be renarrated, to Butler's theory. Renarration engenders recursive inconsistencies rife with queer potential. Through renarration, one can compose a scene of redress that revises the violent and otherwise life-denying contours of narratability itself. As an example, the essay turns to Danez Smith's essay, "How HIV Ruined My Sex Life. Then I Met My Match" (2021), published at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Smith renarrates a scene of redress that transformed their affective and social relations to sex as a Black, queer, nonbinary person with HIV. Through self-narration, Smith revises the nar-ratability of Black queer bonds and demonstrates how self-narration can sustain and strengthen the capacities of queer relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides an introduction to the special issue of differences titled Unaccountably Queer, which commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Judith Butler's contribution to moral philosophy, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Through Butler's work, the introduction theorizes queer metarelationality as a vernacular ethical practice that is vital to queer life. Reframing queer theory's debates over the antisocial thesis, the essay argues that Giving an Account of Oneself offers valuable insight for contemporary debates over critique and postcritique, queer and trans kinship, and the relationship between ethics and politics. The essays in the special issue consider Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself in relation to a range of fields, specifically queer theory, Black studies, trans studies, disability studies, postcolonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, life writing, and narratology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer Aesthetics will be a new section for GLQ, and this essay explains its focus and rationale as it replaces the Moving Image Review. This essay outlines the need for queer aesthetics as an analytic as it relates to changes in liberal governance and media representation, subjectless critique, and academic discourse. In addition, it outlines a genealogy of queer aesthetics and form and questions the centrality of representation as a discourse for queer theory and studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction describes catastrophizing as a kind of storytelling, a way of gathering events into a narrative of continuity and discontinuity that, when skillfully deployed, is an expression of shifts in thought. Beginning with two short stories about the rise and fall of catastrophe theory, which enjoyed brief mainstream popularity in the 1970s, and the liquid blackness journal's own history of exploring catastrophe, this introduction suggests catastrophizing is a self-reflexive scholarly and creative practice. Disciplines tell catastrophic tales to indicate when and where modes of inquiry and their forms of expression start and stop. Black studies, for example, assumes it plays a considerable role at the beginning of the end of the world; as such, the scholarly contributions to ecocriticism, performance studies, computing, queer theory, and abolition studies that appear in this issue are all methodological experiments that begin at "the end." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins with the premise that Evelynn Hammonds's highly cited "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" provides a reading strategy that has largely been ignored by subsequent scholarship. This work theorizes science as a Black episteme and addresses space-time as a self-reading strategy and an exemplar for how scientific analogies can illuminate analyses in Black thought. It problematizes the uptake of physical ideas without taking care to understand those physical concepts in conversation with Black scientists. The author shows how Black queer thought can and should inform the creation of intellectual links between Black scientific thinkers and Black thought outside of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The span between 1973 and 1981 marks a number of significant changes in computer history, medical history, and queer and transgender (trans) history in the United States: the development of the earliest object-oriented graphical user interfaces used in the Xerox Alto computer prototype and its commercial successor the Xerox Star; the development and publication of the third revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (or DSM-III), used by physicians for medical diagnosis, which more than doubled its number of diagnostic categories from the DSM-II; and finally, the removal of "Sexual Orientation Disturbance (Homosexuality)" from the DSM and the addition of a new diagnosis, "Gender Identity Disorder" (now "Gender Dysphoria"), in the DSM-III. This article performs a horizontal cut across time to place medical history, queer and trans history, and computer history side by side, looking closely at how changes in the visualization and datafication of medical diagnosis developed alongside the ways computers were imagined into visual, screen-based technologies that recapitulate the same racialized and gendered logics of medical surveillance and thus of the state: that seeing something is the same as understanding its nature. We must think of software history as medical history, and computer history as queer and trans history. Intimately connecting these threads of trans history, trans of color critique, medical history, and computer history is the invisibility of mediation and the normalization of power that occurs as the result of it: the mediation of the visuality of the computer's graphical user interface; the mediation of medical diagnosis as the conversion of embodied experience into so-called medical fact; and the mediation of bureaucratic documentation that reduces human life into data points, digestible and computable en masse by institutions and by computers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an analysis of the 2014 video game Dragon Age: Inquisition, this essay brings two contemporary problematics into dialogue—the neoliberal gamification of society and the logic of queer liberalism—to suggest that they converge upon a common, long-standing animus: the figure of the massified Oriental. The massified Oriental haunts Asianness, and retains East and Southwest Asia as its primary cultural referents, but the deterritorialization of Orientalism as an epistemic apparatus locates Orientalism in the realm of affect rather than geography. Thus, this paper proposes a heuristic of "actional Orientalism," which draws attention to the procedural and discursive production of agency and the consequent narrative validation of that agency, contrasting agentic players against their objectified, thingified, and massified gameworlds. Whereas in Tara Fickle's "ludo-Orientalism," wherein racialization is premised upon the otherness of the type of risk-taking and play, actional Orientalism draws on whether the racialized figure is capable of agency at all, finding within the Oriental the complete absence of the bounded, liberal, choosing subject. Dragon Age: Inquisition deploys actional Orientalism on full display, offering liberal transgender representation contingent upon acceptance of an individualist affect, requiring the full abjection of massified, Orientalized, queer others to enable this representation to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reckons with the representation of queer sexualities and modes of reading in Jonathan Lynn's Clue (US, 1985). The film, originally a box office flop that has become a cult classic, deploys the character of Mr. Green to concentrate and dispel its queer energies. Although he declares near the start that he is "a homosexual," Green's sexuality is evacuated from the mystery narrative in a way that no other character's is. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and fan studies from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to Juno Jill Richards, the essay argues that Clue is structured by its anxious, phobic reaction to Green's sexuality; that it both depicts and provokes paranoid queer readings; and that the movie's future depends on the imaginative re‐creations and re‐queerings of the modern fan culture that has sprung up around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A Proximate Remove: Queering Intimacy and Loss in The Tale of Genji" by Reginald Jackson is a book that explores the queer aspects of the classic Japanese text, The Tale of Genji. The author argues that the tale queers traditional structures of thought, action, and feeling, and examines moments of vulnerability and loss experienced by various characters. The book is organized into an introduction and five chapters that delve into different aspects of the narrative, offering fresh insights and interpretations. While some details may be debated, the book provides a thought-provoking analysis that encourages readers to engage with the complexities of The Tale of Genji. [Extracted from the article]

Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Andil Gosine's invitation in Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) to consider the possibilities of animality, this essay sits with the two valences that are potentially inherent in his framing—first, that we reassess the generative possibilities of animality, and second, that we consider how in refusing the demarcating line between humanity and animality they potentially remake each other. Centering "animality" as an analytic, the author considers the kinds of relations that animality allows us to imagine with ourselves and each other. The essay frames Gosine's questions as ones that pursue the decolonial possibilities of animality and suggests that Nature's Wild offers us a blueprint for a Caribbean queer decolonial politic. Its primary inquiry resides in asking how animality adapts and signifies in potentially intersectional ways and whether this framing makes room for us to envision the ways "gender" also holds generative possibilities in relation to ideas of animality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jane Gallop's succinct yet forceful book, I Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus i , is a notable exception. As this review has highlighted, Gallop's work makes significant theoretical contributions to disability studies, aging studies, queer and feminist theory, and temporality studies. Grappling with the intersections of gender, sexuality, disability, and aging is a complex endeavor but it is one that Gallop embraces. [Extracted from the article]

Associated with disaster metaphors such as floods, avalanches, tsunamis, and icebergs, older people have come to take the symbolic form of the environmental impacts they are imagined causing. Yet even as older people are posited as the cause and imaginatively take the shape of the disaster, they are also registered as especially vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather. While the tendency toward blame and care are not logically incompatible, this tension has resulted in a cultural narrative that fuels a deep sense of unfairness across generations. This article reads the sterility dystopia—a subgenre of science fiction where a global inability to have children results in aging populations and societal collapse—as registering the anxiety that arises at the intersection of age and the environment. Taking The Children of Men as a case study, I suggest that P. D. James's novel expresses the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations—not of a world lacking children, as we might expect, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging. Pushing against the link between climate activism and generational futurity, I draw on queer theory to argue that intergenerational kinship in the present privileges the values of affiliation, contingency, and immediacy that can inspire a more sustainable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a Western post – Cold War era, the pharmaceutical industry, state, and capitalism have merged to regulate gender and sexual normativity. According to Paul Preciado in Testo Junkie, the illicit and self‐regulated use of hormones destabilizes gender and sexual binaries, a methodology that he calls "gender hacking." This article argues, however, that an expanded interpretation of Preciado's historical narrative and understanding of hacking could better account for how race mediates gender and sexual normativity. This piece offers a rereading of Preciado's analysis on the historical regulation of gender and sexuality by analyzing how race has been used to justify medical experimentation and management as a starting point for an intersectional perspective on hacking. Further, by building on José Muñoz's and micha cárdenas's readings of queer and racial futurity in relation to communalism and non‐Western kinship formations, this article contends that an expansion of "gender hacking" toward "queer hacking" can read the intersections of racial, gender, and sexual resistance as processes that create glitches in the sociopolitical code of racial capitalism. By examining hacking as a social, rather than biological or digital, phenomenon, queer hacking uses spatial relations, communalism, and visions of futurity to discuss how potential frameworks for kinships and identities that operate outside Western norms can be created. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on a passage where Leo Bersani addresses the intensity of his attachment to many of his first sentences—sentences that seemed to come all at once and to betray his own understanding of the topics they introduced—this essay considers that betrayal in relation to his view of homosexuality as betraying the seriousness of statements. By examining how the latter betrayal gets enacted in the betrayal his sentences perform, it identifies the tension in Bersani's work between an explicit resistance to the "de-gaying" he associates with queer theory and the "de-gaying" impulse of his own work, which made it central to queer theory itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Baudelaire and Freud (1977), Leo Bersani posits that psychoanalysis offers a way of understanding sexuality as characterized by the mobility of fantasy, rather than by the content of fetishes or sexual identities, and that this mobility offers the "potential for explosive displacements." This short meditation explores how mobility as a concept, understood in Bersani's sense, helps us think beyond some of the paradoxes, redundancies, and aporias in both psy science and queer theoretical models of sexuality. The essay closes by showing how Bersani returned to "mobility" in Homos (1995) and argues that, via this concept, he suggests ways that queer theory itself can avoid becoming a "new normativity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" is often described as an early entry into the strain of queer theory that offers queerness as tarrying in abjection, failure, and antisociality. This essay, however, is much more interested in thinking about the ways Bersani mobilizes connections to femininity in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" As Bersani moves from "women and gay men" to "average, law-abiding family" to "being a woman," femininity haunts, each of these individual nodes further illuminating an insight about femininity with and without women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors' introduction to this special issue of differences titled Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani describes the issue's focus on the speculative importance of aesthetics in Leo Bersani's scholarship, especially his attention to a "syntax of thought," or the structural innovations of thinking, reading, and perception explored throughout his critical writings. The introduction also emphasizes Bersani's ongoing attention to relationality through the aesthetic and how it contributed to his decades-long rethinking of sexuality, sociality, politics, and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conceives of a transpacific brownness in relation to other forms of brown to produce a storied manifest for brown theory. By activating "the brown transpacific" as an epistemological paradigm that navigates the disciplinary logics of colonial encounters, this article attempts to untangle a story of how some people in Asia went from resembling a wild and uncontainable threat to a form of brownness that became necessary for the reproduction of the Global North. As the last "color" term to be used by racial scientists, "brownness" has delineated racial hierarchies between blackness and whiteness that, to colonial powers, have emphasized the possible degradation of whiteness, or, to the colonized, have promised future induction into whiteness. The varied formations of transpacific brownness explored showcase the impossibility of its own capture—rather than reveal a bounded history, brownness arrives as a concept that cannot be grasped or produced into knowledge. This article thus shifts in its second half from its focus on the "brown transpacific" to a theoretical triptych that reflects on brownness as (1) a site for the ungovernable "brown mass," (2) peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and (3) the complex "shades" that reveal troubling histories and shameful intimacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1918 anti-Chinese riots, which saw scores of Chinese-owned stores destroyed by largely Afro-descended peasant community members, are popularly remembered as one of the worst acts of interracial violence in Jamaica's postemancipation history. However, by examining the coverage of the riots by the Gleaner , Jamaica's newspaper of record, the author embarks on a mapping project to help show the network of nonconforming and anticolonial collaborations within these communities that existed in tandem with interracial tensions. The aim is to show how recapturing these productive collaborations from the past can animate intersectional forms of activism in the present. Furthermore, the article explores how Patricia Powell, as a queer Caribbean writer, uses her novel The Pagoda to perform the same work as the map in creating a counterhistory that gives voice to the anticolonial, nation-building strategies of subaltern groups lost in the gaps of official colonial archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article creates a portrait of recent designations of nonbinary gender identities and sexual orientations in Quebec French. It addresses how purism and the condemnation of anglicisms played a part in this vocabulary. The most frequent neologisms in the French press in Quebec are LBGT* and queer. The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), Quebec's official language institution, first condemned queer because of Quebec's sensitive history with anglicisms and created allosexuel and altersexuel to replace it. However, these terms were found to be artificial and were not very successful, bringing the OQLF the change its initial normative judgment on queer, which is now accepted. More than the negative attitude toward anglicisms in Quebec, what played a major role in the circulation of those neologisms is the need for traditionally dominated groups to gain symbolic power by choosing their own labels, especially those used in a variety of languages worldwide, strengthening the sense of identity and belonging of historically marginalized groups and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can taxonomy—a scientific method critiqued for its utility within Western imperial projects of racial and species classification—be queered? This article mines the tensions between the hostility to taxonomy within critical theory and the taxonomical renaissance within contemporary queer, trans, and asexual vernacular systems of classification. Contemporary queer uses of taxonomy express a shared utopian vision of combinatorial queerness, in which sexual, gender, and relational liberation occur through a multiplying menu of increasingly fine-grained identity options. The article examines the untimely echoes between contemporary queer classification systems and German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld's 1910 taxonomy of "sexual intermediaries," which forwards a combinatorially lush kaleidoscope of sexual and gendered possibilities that outflanks even contemporary developments. The goal is to simultaneously challenge the notion that sexology is contrary to queer projects and to consider the consequences of acknowledging sexology as a living inheritance of contemporary queer and trans culture. The conclusion asks how Native and racialized queers might resist the universalizing logics of taxonomy from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organized around the complete works of John of the Cross, Juan Goytisolo's Las virtudes del pájaro solitario (1988) presents a radical characterization of mysticism aligned with the spontaneity and immediacy of poetic genius. Through an elaboration of the opposition between critique and creation or theory and practice, Goytisolo aligns his version of mysticism with heresy and negative theology. But how might a return to John of the Cross's writings wrest this "mystic" and "poet" from the confines of exceptionalism to rethink his exemplarity as grounded and cultivated in community? This article argues that reading John of the Cross's Cántico espiritual in the context of the Carmelite reform not only destabilizes Goytisolo's notion of radical mysticism but also makes imaginable a loving critique that offers the politics of queerness and religious difference an alternative to oppositionality per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking Lauran Berlant's "cruel optimism" as exemplary of recent attempts to integrate psychoanalysis and ideology critique, this essay focuses on the psychological paradigm underlying such an evocative phrase in order to demonstrate that even the most capacious interpretations of psychosocial experience are only ever as radical as their metapsychological foundations. As such, while Berlant's defense of people's bad attachments may seem compassionate compared to intellectuals who "shit" on dreams, a deeper analysis of cruel optimism's metapsychology reveals that this compassion is obtained through the inadvertent dismissal of psychosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging genre of autotheory has been tied to a longer lineage of feminist and queer writing. Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967) forms an important context for contemporary autotheoretical practices not only as an influence but also as a cautionary tale. Published in 1967, just one year before its author shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto was quickly overdetermined by readings that saw the shooting as a fulfillment of the manifesto's vision, rewriting the manifesto as a kind of autotheory in reverse. Tracing SCUM's afterlife in a range of cultural texts, including Riot grrrl zines and Andrea Long Chu's autotheoretical work Females (2019), reveals consistent anxieties about the relationship between the manifesto and the shooting. As a parallel cultural formation arising alongside autotheory, SCUM's afterlife shows how anxieties about interpretation drive the autotheoretical impulse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay has three goals: First, to illustrate the epistemological interventions of Black Brazilian queer artivists in theories of Black liberation through naming and defining their sexual-dissident-subjectivities and the affective modes they engender, such as the feeling of solidão (solitude). Second, to contribute to efforts to decolonize the academy in the Americas more broadly, by pointing to the emergent Black queer archives and repertoires that Black queer artivists are intentionally producing outside the Brazilian academy. And third, to highlight how, why, and where Black queer theory is being produced in Brazil, to avoid crediting privileged (in this case, white mestizo) actors within the Brazilian academy for the intellectual production of Black queer theorists who generally do not have access to the transnational academic sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study follows the oceanic routes of female migrant laborers as a way to reconsider the geographies of queer theory through the colonial port city. In so doing, the author highlights feminized forms of migrant labor, including sex work and care work, as a central facet of the history of sexuality beyond the nation-state. This history begins in the 1920s and 1930s, when the League of Nations sponsored a massive investigation into international sex trafficking, through surveillance of port cities across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. These investigations reveal the ways that female migrant laborers were constructed as nonnormative sexual subjects, both through their transient status as citizens and for performing reproductive labors outside the context of the white nuclear family. In this way, the league investigation offers an early case study for technologies attending to the biological specificity necessary to detain individuals at the border. This biometric archive lays the groundwork for a theorization of queer femininity, often ignored by historians of sexuality focused on the criminalization of sodomy. Through attention to an early biometric database, rather than criminal archives, what follows offers a geography of feminized labor and queer femininity based across a transoceanic network of port cities. A consideration of sex work in the midcentury novel, including Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and J. G. Farrell's Singapore Grip, more closely establishes the biometric and aesthetic categories used to construct female sexual deviance at the midcentury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article meditates on black unbelonging as the haunting impasse reached when attempting to wrest a phenomenological account of black life amid perpetual black death. It seeks to expose the calculated dislocation of black modes of being, embodiment, and sensation from hegemonic categories of experience that serve to capture, to surveil, and to leave Blacks in a state of "constitutive discomfort." Rather than merely signifying non‐ontology, alienation, or racialization, black unbelonging further allegorizes self‐possession and originary constitution as haunting the interpellative processes that maintain the Western subject of phenomenology in modernity. After reframing Merleau‐Pontian flesh not within a redemptive phenomenology but through a Spillersian invocation of the flesh‐of‐this‐world as the proper object of antiblack terror, the article demonstrates how the protagonists of Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits (1989) and Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016) stage black unbelonging through various Gothic conventions. Ultimately the article champions alternatives to phenomenology simpliciter that are ephemerally indexable by what it calls "black necromancy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representational slippage between queerness and entranceability in two queer modernist novels, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and John Rechy's City of Night. Highlighting the historical and conceptual overlap between early sexological work on inversion and early psychological work on trance, it argues that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, queer desire was in part understood as a function of compulsively misdirected and pathologically fixed attention. Embracing rather than refuting this model of queerness, writers such as Barnes and Rechy drew on the language and imagery of homoerotic entrancement to cultivate a mesmerizing—and distinctly queer—aesthetic, incorporating entrancement into their writing at the levels of both form and content. The article thus suggests that sexology provided writers such as Barnes and Rechy with an unexpected method for capturing and holding the attention of their readers, shaping queer modernist aesthetics in an oft-overlooked way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author elaborates the intersection of environmental theory and queer theory through a reading of the figure of the lesbian, which scholars, like Robyn Wiegman, Valerie Traub, and Lynne Huffer, have recently used to argue for a more nuanced reconsideration of gender in contemporary queer theory and queer studies. The author argues that the burgeoning field of queer ecopoetics can offer a productive response to recent calls to forge feminism alongside queer theory. The author takes the poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) as a case study for a queer, lesbian, feminist ecopoetic praxis. Through a reading of three poems, the author demonstrates that, for Rukeyser, questioning human ontological boundaries is inextricable from her exploration of queer human desire, and especially inextricable from her vision of queer futurity. Furthermore, this essay shows how queer ecopoetics offers a common ground for the beyond-human, kinship-building impulses of environmental thought and for queer theory's congruent impulses of erotic and world-building relationality (as best illustrated in José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia). The author contends that what most cogently binds ecopoetics to queer theory is a deep commitment to anti-anthropogenic ethical praxis, which parallels the ethics described by Lee Edelman as a radical challenge to the social itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on queer Indigenous life in the early twentieth century through an analysis of the archive of Nabor Feliz, an Indigenous sculptor who toured with major circuses. In the essay, the author employs queer critique and Indigenous theory to contend that the circus offered Feliz opportunities for Indigenous expressions of sexuality that might not have been otherwise afforded them in this period. The essay is based on an examination of the photographs, letters, and newspaper articles in the archive, which is housed at the Southwest Museum. To the author's knowledge, this is the first article-length piece on the complexities of queer Indigenous life in the first half of the twentieth century and the first study of Feliz's life and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Queer as in Abolition Now!" introduces the special issue "Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition." The issue brings together scholars, artists, and writers working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical activist movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition. Drawing on methodologies from the social sciences, humanities, and fine arts, contributors offer fresh vocabularies and analytical lenses to the ongoing work of constructing liberatory futures without prisons, police, or the tyranny of colonial gender systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison's 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison's story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a "lost opportunity" for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in gamedevelopment discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation--without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph's "straight version" of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the "present absence of queerness in video games.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating "Asian America" and "Asia" in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most "Asiatic" genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the "real" genres of race and neo-Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-raciallyidentifying North American designers--Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee-- and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed Park Geun-hye's impeachment. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, the article argues that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea. These normative idioms of temporality articulate the stakes of being out of place in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the queer theory and its unity with ecology and evolution theory. It notes queer theory's insight that gender is performative. It suggests that queerness is implied in the concept of green or the ecological thought that undermines Mesopotamian reality. The article also explores the origin of agrilogistics in Mesopotamia and its basis on increasing happiness or eliminating anxiety about where the next meal will come from.

The article focuses on narrative climax of a pornographic sequence while in gay male porn produced during the AIDS crisis and before the development and normalization of antiretroviral therapies for management and prophylaxis of HIV. It mentions social and political histories of queerness are inseparable from the histories of queer sex and queer porn. It also mentions ecocritical, and sexological theory can attest, is intimately related to the questions of labor.

The article offers information on a roundtable discussion for curating visual archives of sex. Topics discussed include complexities generated by the archives of sex/gender, identity, and difference; contemporary art in Bring Your Own Body (BYOB) illustrated a wide range of aesthetic, political, and social strategies for articulating the experiences of transgressing sex and gender and aspect of queer identity is also one that historically has been censored due to prejudice and discrimination.

Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference organized around masculinity and femininity—an approach Myra Hird has called the "ontology of heterosexuality." But these interpretations are incorrect. Schaefer argues that far from being an advocate for the ontology of heterosexuality, Darwin provides tools to demolish it. Turning to his research on barnacles and orchids and his speculation on the sources of organic variation, this essay highlights the irreducible importance of diversity and change for Darwin's framework. The ongoing ferment of variation that is the guideline of all life on earth extends not only to the morphology of sex organs but to desire itself. Darwin shows that the ontology of heterosexuality is an arbitrary snapshot, a single moment in the fluid trajectory of life, rather than a law that can be arbitrarily cast over the whole arc. In this, Darwin supports Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's first axiom for queer theory: "People are different from each other." The essay concludes by connecting a Darwinian approach to sex with José Esteban Muñoz's call for a queer ecstasy that anticipates the futurity of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]