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AbstractDrawing on in-depth interviews with 17 participants, this study explores the experiences of Chinese queer university students in managing their queer identity on campus. A range of strategies is outlined, including passing, covering, being implicitly out, and being explicitly out. This study also presents participants’ expectations regarding institutional support, as well as their ambivalence toward it. While participants expressed various expectations of university support, they simultaneously considered institutional support difficult or impossible due to the campus climate and broader political context. Informed by queer theory and the concept of heteronormativity, this paper engages in a queer critique of Chinese higher education, examining the manifestations of heteronormativity at both institutional and interpersonal levels. Situated within the context of Xi Jinping’s presidency, which has reinforced political control over higher education in China, this study examines the impact of intensified authoritarianism on the campus experiences of queer university students. In this challenging environment, the study highlights a unique facet of contemporary China, providing empirical insights into the power dynamics among queer individuals, educational institutions, and the party-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractNaming oneself, and claiming an identity and a community, depends largely upon how people define and represent themselves, and whether that self-definition and representation is accepted by, or legible to, others who inhabit different social positions based on age, gender, sexuality, and often generation. My aim is neither to rehabilitate the lesbian past or lesbian words for identity, nor to reject the increasingly broad use of the term queer. Rather, as a Generation X lesbian, I contend that lesbian culture, identity, and community continue to have much to offer for other categories of queerness that are similarly “untidy”, contested, or less well-understood by the mainstream. Approaching lesbian history, culture, and identity as dynamic and complex broadens possibilities for who might find connection and belonging in a lesbian past and a queer future. I explore an eclectic lesbian archive with an intergenerational Canadian focus that centers lesbian identity, community, and representation. My analysis supports my assertion that lesbian and queer inheritance flow multi-directionally, across and among people of varied generations and different social locations. I further posit that far from being anachronistic, lesbian, as a term for identity and culture, and as a political project, has ongoing productive potential, vitality, and agility that exceeds generational or linear understandings due to its fundamental grounding in self-definition. (Re)circulating lesbian and queer culture, therefore, functions as intergenerational wealth, community building, and cultural memory, bridging past pleasures, knowledge, and affective attachments with present and future possibilities for living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My comment addresses a theme in several of the papers in this collection that gestures to the limits of queer theory, as a body of scholarship developed mainly from within Euro-American feminist frameworks. I will ask if perhaps groundedness in place and historical specificity might suggest registers of 'queerness' that exceed the potentials of queer theory. Particularly considering precarity - a sense of embodied vulnerability to each other - this piece will examine the potentials of frameworks that are rooted in place-based ideas about reciprocity, kinship, and intimacy as integral to understanding queer precarities. Indeed, such a view might suggest that what is 'queer' is often framed through a normatively modern and often colonial rendering of binary gender, and sexuality as fixed in sexual identity. It will ask what an archive of queer precarity might look like, and what geographies it might suggest if we decentred queer theory. Simultaneously, the essay will ask how forms of reciprocity, indebtedness, kinship, and homemaking that exceed the limits of coloniality might open up registers for queerness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to discuss how young Latinx men living in Australia negotiate, embody, and complicate existing dominant and racialized masculinities. Queer and feminist theories are used to explore how Latinx men negotiate and embody masculinities, sexualities, and being 'other' in a White dominant cultural context. These tensions were explored through semi-structured in-depth interviews and a creative visual method known as sandboxing with twenty-one Latinx men. Sandboxing aims to elicit conversation and allows for the reflection and sharing of a visual and symbolic representation of participants' lives. The findings suggest masculinities are lived and embodied alongside negotiating racialization and sexualities. The fluidity of masculinities surfaces in participants' reflexive engagement with masculinities and the nuances in negotiating and simultaneously reproducing gender binary norms. Participants' careful negotiation in engaging with feminine culture led to developing the concept 'feminine threshold', a theoretical contribution offered in this article, in understanding how Latinx men negotiate masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Kurdish‐majority city of Amed (Diyarbakır), Turkey, the local sex work economy has become increasingly and intimately interwoven with institutions, discourses, and practices of securitization. In this context, queer and trans Kurds adopt, adapt, and use surveillance to negotiate the value of their work and life with one another, the broader community, and the state. These negotiations involve vocabularies, strategies, and affective attachments derived from the long‐standing militarized conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers' Party. Key to this dynamic is the notion of bedel, or the indebtedness and obligation that Kurds feel toward the struggle for Kurdish rights. Through affective debt, queer and trans Kurds police boundaries for their security and livelihoods through surveillance, defining those who can and cannot do sex work. In the process, they shift the meanings and functions of bedel as they endure, embody, and embrace violence and homophobia to gain acceptance of their identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this commentary, from our positionality as members of the LGBTQA Caucus executive committee, we consider the academic and embodied barriers that stand in the way of a more inclusive IR from the perspective of queer and trans scholars in the discipline. We offer our reflections from our positionalities as queer scholars applying queer theory in IR, including our work in the Caucus to support LGBTQ + scholars in the discipline as a means of confronting what continues to be a very narrowly accessible space – geographically, financially, socially and linguistically. Relatedly, we consider the embodied experience of not belonging to the discipline of IR; an experience that many LGBTQ + scholars will recognise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As with many popular texts promising templates for successful storytelling, The Writer's Journey claims that a singular story structure applies to all voices and circumstances, therefore funnelling every character journey into a 'universal neutral'. This article offers queer temporality as a lens through which to unravel the 12 steps of Vogler's hero's journey, informed by queer theory's critiques of the 8 steps of the heteronormative life journey. It joins other studies critiquing the paradigm from other standpoints, including Indigenous screen storytelling, gaming and interactive narratives, and for development of characters disenfranchised by gender and/or circumstance. Others note the model's increasing irrelevance as writers uncover its limitations for creative processes of story development. This article homes in on how studies of queer temporalities – rejecting 'dominant temporal logics' and 'chrononormativity', replacing 'straight time' with 'queer time', can further destabilise the hero's journey's dominance in story development by exploring the breadth of practices in creative writing and screen production beyond the universalising models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines the symbolic and aesthetic uses of the home in the British New Wave. Key works of scholarship on the cycle have tended to position the home as a site of stable return for the young protagonists, and as a privileged expression of the reproductive heterosexual maturities that the films are seen ultimately to endorse. This article argues that, far from such reliable bastions of normativity, these domestic spaces are depicted often as visually strange and ideologically unstable. There is, consequently, a distinctly domestic emergence of queer forms and figures to be found in the British New Wave, exceeding the critical attention to the queer in these films, which has hereto focused almost exclusively on the cycle's lone denoted homosexual character. The article focuses first on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in which I argue that signs of gender subversion, homosexuality and transness make the home a primary site of ideological tension for the aspiring patriarch. I then discuss the queer home-making of A Taste of Honey, in which imitation and subversion of 'traditional' domesticities present opportunities for resistance, critique and creativity. Ultimately, I argue that the queer lingers within these films as query, occasioning an un-making of the 'normative' family and an imaginative re-making of kinship that can be appropriated to a project of queer hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars and activists have been asking queer questions about transitional justice. Queer perspectives advocate for the recognition of anti-queer violence within transitional justice; the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ people in transitional justice processes; and the development of queer decolonial critiques of transitional justice. Informed by this research agenda, I develop a queer perspective to the global governance of transitional justice. I analyse documents from the UN, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the International Criminal Court. Representing mechanisms from across global transitional justice, I trace the (cis-heteronormative, colonial, carceral) violence of transitional justice and its institutionalization at the global level. I reflect on the queer tensions and (im)possibilities of global transitional justice, a site that is violent but holds transformative potential. The global governance of transitional justice must be queered to expand its social, political and conceptual remit, and to seek more radical, liberatory worlds within and beyond formal justice mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the convergence and intersection of posthumanism and the queering of hypermasculinity as represented in the superhero bodies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It examines how the super-bodies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically Ironman, Captain America, Hulk, and Vision, can be read in light of the intersection between posthumanism and queer theory. By drawing upon posthumanist theory and queer theory, it challenges normative notions regarding hypermasculinity by queering the corporeal forms of superheroes who have experienced technological (like Ironman and Vision) or biological (Captain America and Hulk) enhancement. These posthuman super-bodies stand at the juncture of the ongoing tension between historically evolving heterosexual norms and queer interpretations and can exist as a highly significant site for the representation of heightened masculinity in superhero movies. Thus, this study will attempt to show how posthumanism queers hypermasculine bodies, upending norms by rejecting uniformity and universal definitions. The bodies of these superheroes, which have originated from the human form, move beyond what makes them so and are characterized by constant movement, fluidity, and renewal, which is reminiscent of queer ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory essay, we lay some theoretical ground to the special issue on Queering Multilingualism. We outline what we mean by 'queering', and why it is necessary in relation to multilingualism. Ultimately, our argument is that a focus on gender and sexuality allows us to expand our understanding of the complexity of power relations in multilingual settings, encounters, and lived experiences. With the help of examples from the contributions to the special issue we not only illustrate how language classrooms and learners' interactions are constrained by cis-genderism and heteronormativity, but we also show how language teachers and learners can challenge gender and sexual normativities. Based on the narratives of multilingual speakers, we also argue for the importance of considering gender and sexuality in relation to other identity categories such as age, ethnicity, race, and social class. Theoretically, this requires bringing queer theoretical approaches into dialogue with intersectionality. We conclude with some reflections on the relationship between multilingualism and sexual desire, especially in contexts of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres multilingualism in relation to gender, sexuality, culture, and race, presenting the narrative of one participant, Samson, who self-identifies as a black, queer, man and refers to several linguistic varieties that he has some proficiency in. The narrative emerged from an interview conducted in which Samson discussed his language portrait, a multimodal biographical method. Thematic analysis was used as a starting point in interpreting how Samson discursively constructs language in relation to gender, racial, sexual, and cultural positions. To unpack Samson's constructions of self and others we bring decolonial feminist theoretical approaches in conversation with linguistic citizenship. We argue that Samson is trying to undo the normative conceptions of a range of identity categories and that he narrates several different discursive and social strategies to develop new subjectivities for himself and to create new relationalities. In his decolonial project of being, he tries to queer the norm and norm the queer. Samson's story provides us with the possibility of living and languaging outside of colonial structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusion is constantly referenced in educational institutions' mission and values statements. Despite their purpose of guiding the institution, these brief paragraphs usually create more questions than answers regarding the who, what, and how of inclusion work. This article applies a queered critical discourse studies lens to a manifest content analysis of the term "inclusion" in professional journals from the field of postsecondary developmental education. Queer pedagogies support critical examinations of power and deconstructing dominant discourses. Our analysis of 112 articles across eight journals uncovered how developmental education scholars' discussion of inclusion and the nature of inclusion work rarely operationally defined who should be included or who is/ought to be included in conversations about educational equity and inclusion. Further, the data included a strand of heteronormative ideologies that suggest an implicit assumption that being inclusive of queer students is only about discussing LGBT students, rather than acting inclusively of the queer population at large. In applying a queer theory lens, we interweave concrete recommendations into our presentation of the findings, challenging educational scholars, educators, and educational leaders to make inclusion language inclusive of all and create spaces that promote discursive as well as physical inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuals who identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (2SLGBTQ+) frequently encounter discrimination, stigma, harassment, and violence. Despite the prevailing influences of cis-heteronormative narratives, 2SLGBTQ+ individuals often encounter support, love, kindness, acceptance, and compassion in their everyday lives. The aim of the research was to explore how compassion can be a catalyst for societal change. Through three theoretical lenses: post-structuralism, queer theory, and Buddhism, we explored the beliefs, values, and experiences surrounding compassion for 2SLGBTQ+ individuals navigating a cis-heteronormative societal landscape. Eligibility criteria for participants included being 19 years or older, residing in Canada, self-identifying as 2SLGBTQ+, and possessing an interest in discussing compassion. Twenty individuals consented to participate in semi-structured interviews that were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participants were asked about their understanding of compassion, its significance in their lives, and their practices related to it. They were prompted to recall moments when they received compassion and instances when they expressed compassion toward others. Transcripts were analyzed using Foucauldian discourse analysis. Three major themes arose: (1) (un)learning compassion through chosen families and queer mentorship; (2) pursuing queer lines of flight through generative compassion; and (3) creating queer futures through acts of (self-) compassion. Cultural and social constructs often position compassion and pain as intertwined and fundamental facets to the human experience. We situate both compulsory and generative forms of compassion within an organizing metaphor of "boundless radiance," the dynamic movements of compassion toward an ever-widening field of becoming that cultivates the way of the open heart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a two‐part paper: in the first one, a personal story serves as a conceptual prism through which I address the issue of how a queer analyst can be a problem for analytical psychology; in the second, I present some readings and images—mostly from decolonial feminisms—that have been of interest to me lately in my path to queer Jungian psychology, that is, to de‐essentialize and de‐individualize its theory and practice. By borrowing (and altering) the title from Gloria Anzaldúa's (1991/2009a) essay "To(o) queer the writer", this paper explores some themes she has elaborated there on solidarity, theorization and ways of writing and reading from othered points of view. In dialogue with Donna Haraway's (2016) Staying with the Trouble and Ursula K. Le Guin's (1989/2000) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, together with the imagery of bags, weaving and string figures game, this paper aims to explore the potential of what I have called "woven onto‐epistemologies". By imagining and developing this new condition of knowledge, other stories and theories in analytical psychology may have an opportunity to be told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practices of online censorship around boys' love (danmei) in mainland China have exhibited continuous change, with varying media targets and nominal justifications. This article explores dynamic transformations in the strategies employed by authorities, media platforms, and danmei creators throughout different time periods. Based on the authors' archival research, the censorship of danmei can be classified into three distinct stages: the years 2004 to 2015, 2016 to 2020, and 2021 to the present. These periods are distinguished by the primary danmei media form that authorities most often target for censorship. We argue that China's digital censorship apparatus has given rise to an unrelenting and intensifying suppression of danmei content, which is further bolstered by the sustained promotion of a media discourse that fosters a culture of disdain for danmei, and hence, has limited spaces for the expansion of danmei fandom and its practitioners' creativity. Moreover, we suggest that there is a continuous and combative interplay between danmei culture and censorship, wherein creative practices become highly responsive to government regulations and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Analytical Psychology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

During Xi Jinping's presidency, the increasingly repressive political control over Chinese universities has had a significant impact on academic research. Yet, little is known about how Chinese academics navigate such a climate. Drawing on interviews with 11 gay academics in China, this article explores their motivations and strategies for conducting queer research. It is shown that participants submit to heteronormativity and the Party authorities by managing their sexual identity, keeping a low profile and practising self-censorship in their research. However, they can also expand the institutional space for queer research by strategically mobilising various forms of power and discourses and highlighting the legitimacy of their research. Through the queer theoretical lens, this article presents gay academics' agency in conducting queer research as involving simultaneous conformity and resistance in relation to heteronormativity and political control in Chinese academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes videos produced in 2020 by teachers who implemented the cultural curriculum of physical education as an alternative for promoting emergency remote teaching in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. After watching recordings shown on the Grupo de Pesquisas em Educação Física (Group of Physical Education Surveys (gpef-feusp) channel, the authors selected excerpts addressing gender relations and sexuality that constitute the thematization of bodily practices, subsequently comparing them with the arguments available in queer and decolonial queer studies literature. They propose reflecting on the possibility of the emergence of subversive bodies in the pandemic context, the visualization of dissident corporeal aesthetics in remote classes and possible experiences in Physical Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queering the Map (queeringthemap.com) is a novel digital platform: a storymap, an anonymous collaborative record, an archive of queer experiences. To contribute to the platform, visitors make their own mark by clicking on an empty space on the map. As to what visitors contribute, the platform's About section suggests, simply, 'If it counts for you, then it counts for Queering the Map'. In this article, we probe this guiding principle. What does count in this context? What matters in the queer archive? Drawing on interviews with 14 site users and an analysis of nearly 2000 stories pinned to Australia on the map, we consider what platform practices reveal about queer collective memory-making, to illuminate the how and why of a queer archive. We see that relatability matters because of the affective, affirming and community-building seeds it can generate; situation matters because it is through participatory practices that recognition, visibility and community place-making are enacted; and, the everyday matters as the archive's visitors collectively claim and gift their varied personal experiences. Through these themes we explore queer contributions or how site visitors are oriented towards giving something of themselves to the archive. We discuss how archival properties of the platform are key to (queer) participation, and to meaning-making – as distinct, as queer, as a valued record. Queering the Map, we argue, is significant in how space is made for queer representation, carving new contours for archival 'evidence' and community histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a preliminary socio-historical reflection on Queer Theory, exploring how this critical perspective challenges conventional notions of sex, gender, desire, identity, discourse, ideology, and power. Moreover, the article considers how Queer Theory offers insights into the study of theater as an art of the margins, in particular discursive dramatic counter-strategies. The study indicates that theater from the Augmented Age draws upon concepts derived from Queer Studies. Modern and contemporary Western plays engage with transgressive sexual topics in innovative ways, challenging traditional stereotypes about sexuality. The study also poses the question of whether theater is still oriented towards societal acceptance and concludes that it is undergoing a revolutionary transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"A man is supposed to dance manly", announces the first point of the flamenco 'decalogue' proclaimed in 1951 by one of the most important avant-garde flamenco dancers of the 20th century, Vincente Escudero. These words illustrate the relationship between flamenco and the traditional division of gender roles. Despite being considered the fruit of transcultural hybridisation, flamenco is characterised by a strong conservatism. In this context, flamenco dance is a field of struggle for kinetic identity in which two flamenco visions clash. The first is the traditional one, in which one of the determinants is the division into male and female dance, and the second is the queered one, in which the categories in question are blurred and transformed, ultimately leading to the inclusion of queered flamenco in the space of popular culture. The purpose of this text is to present the problem of redefining gender in contemporary flamenco dance and how its queering practices affect the aforementioned categories, opening up flamenco to the space of popular culture. The author focuses on the choreographer and dancer Manuel Liñan, as well as the pop culture project Queer Flamenco by Ruben Heras and Jero Férec. These artists continue to discuss the binary divisions within flamenco at the level of both gender and sexuality. In doing so, they perform acts of transgression by entering into a dialogue with the aesthetic and kinetic canons of masculinity and femininity that are strongly rooted in flamenco. Queer becomes for them not only a form of constructing their own kinetic identity, but also a sphere for creating inclusive spaces. At the same time, artists such as Heras and Férec incorporate flamenco into the context of popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an in-depth examination of Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits, contextualizing its narrative within the frameworks of Queer theory and African American cultural studies. Set against the backdrop of a rural North Carolina community, the novel focuses on the experiences of Horace Cross, a young African American grappling with his homosexuality amidst the constraints of a Christian Fundamentalist society. The analysis explores how the novel navigates themes of race, sexuality, and identity, particularly through Horace's quest for self-transformation. This study underscores the novel's intricate exploration of these themes, positing queer transformation as a pivotal element that provides insight into the complexities of identity and community within the African American context. Additionally, the article examines the novel's integration of popular culture references, revealing their role in bridging the discussions of racial and sexual identity. The aim is to shed light on Kenan's narrative as a significant contribution to the discourse on intersectionality in literature, highlighting its impact in the broader fields of Black and queer studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Gendernaut. Queering the Future" is a project influenced by queer theories, transfeminist activism and science fiction. It reflects on the potential of various strategies related to accessibility, distribution, socialization and playful reinterpretation of feminist and queer archives. The creation of archives, software programming, audiovisual production, performing performances or developing games all serve as artistic strategies aimed at invigorating archives. They share a clear intent to enhance accessibility to archives that document the memories of feminist and gender and sexuality dissident communities. Through transmedia and performative experiences, we envision the archive as a living, interactive space, devoid of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities linking past, present and future to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies a common process of mystification within academic knowledge production today: the treatment of subordinated groups as mere metaphors or rhetorical figures for academic theorizing. We witness it when academics ask what trans might teach us about transnationality, when we are invited to reflect on what might be queer about modern warfare, or when nation-states are described as subaltern. Trans, queer, and subaltern populations are routinely fetishized within scholarship on the "traditional" International Relations concerns of statecraft, migration, security, and so on. This tendency serves a mystifying function by disabling scholars from examining the social relations that shape and organize their lives and histories. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, to understand the origins and logics of this self-mystifying process, this paper returns, via Stuart Hall, to Karl Marx's methodological writings on abstraction. It contributes to the formalization of his methodology for contemporary IR scholarship by drawing a distinction between the fetishization of abstraction and the concretization of abstraction. Second, the paper explores how abstracted subject positions have been fetishized within three fields of international studies: trans studies, queer theory, and subaltern studies. Third, after elaborating a critique of this mystifying move, the paper outlines alternative approaches that instead seek to concretize the abstractions queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their specific historical and social determinations. These strategies of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned within scholarly knowledge production today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text explores what I call the 'anal body and politics', that is the potentiality and the political implications of the body when mapped and morphologically rearticulated from another standpoint than the hegemonic ones of the Phallic body, the frontal body, the heteronormative body, the reproductive body, the (liberal) individual body and so on. Instead, the anal body proposes something more vital to the body itself, without reinforcing a hetero-racialcapitalistic logic of reproduction, self-possessiveness, verticality, and property/propriety. The body that could be, and continues, as always already, being a multitudinous body of differences, transversally configured in provisional, yet unstable, unity; the body which brings the politics of co-existing and transindividuality. I develop my argument by reparative reading, from behind, of feminist theories of sexual difference, followed by a critical excavation of the politics of refusal specific to the anti-social thesis in queer theory, and 'rehabilitation' of the forgotten liberationist theory of Guy Hocquenghem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following text provides a glimpse into New York City's experimental drag scene and late-night culture in the early 1990s. It introduces the work of Blacklips Performance Cult, a group founded by ANOHNI, Johanna Constantine, and Psychotic Eve in 1992, and presents their gory, monster camp plays as a form of worldmaking in response to the cosmic grief of mass queer death in the wake of the epidemic that decimated the East Village arts community in the preceding decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note from the field is about a nexus of queer kink subcultures and consent-based intimacy work in theatre. I report, investigate and wrangle with the process of incorporating queer kink into a university production of Love and Information by Caryl Churchill I directed. What I have learned and hope to demonstrate throughout this paper, is that queer kink subcultures are paradigmatic communities built on consent, and we as performing arts practitioners can more visibly expand the margins of our cultural competency dialogues to not only include them but look to them as productive modes to investigate relationships of power, embodiment and performance.

In this paper, we queer the understanding of urban spaces to move forward a utopian project. 'Let this be a new town unfettered by the traditions of the past, a step into the future', proclaimed Nehru about Chandigarh. Designed by Le Corbusier and his team in the 1950s, Chandigarh was symbolically and materially meant to propel India into modernity. Although built with the ideals of socialism and secularism, Chandigarh is very much an elite city. This paper traces the Queer Pride parade initiated in the year 2013 to appreciate how non-normative groups challenge and subvert the planning of Chandigarh. Our attempt in this paper is to queer the utopian understanding of Chandigarh. We do this through a reading of pride walks as disruptive moments that assign new possibilities and meanings to public spaces. Technocratic solutions proposed as part of grand urban planning imaginations can never take us closer to utopia. Instead, we argue, it is through disruptions caused by events like pride parades that we slowly inch towards utopia. In making the above argument, this paper pushes the boundaries of both queer theory and urban utopian imaginations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the Responsibility to Protect has become increasingly intersectional with over two decades of research; however, there remains a blind spot on the persecution of queer people. This is surprising given that queer people have been persecuted in atrocity crimes as far back as the Holocaust. While the field of genocide studies has recently begun to engage with this area, we frame queer persecution more broadly around the four R2P crimes. In this article we set out the rationale and urgency for including a queer lens in the prevention of atrocity crimes. This is not only about a focus on queer people; we argue for a queer politics and ethics that ceaselessly interrogates all relations of power. We outline the scale of the gap in academic research, policy and state understandings of R2P. Since R2P is often framed as a foreign policy matter by western states, with the global South as the object of R2P, we include two case-studies on escalating persecution against LGBTI+ people in Europe: the United Kingdom and Hungary. We argue that the R2P research and policy communities should remove what we call the 'cishetronormative blindfold' and engage more broadly with intersectional approaches to atrocity prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the travestismo (crossdressing) of the Peruvian coast in the visual and performative work of Javier Vargas Sotomayor. From a queer and decolonial theoretical framework, I analyze how this artist explores the imaginaries of the coast to recover the indigenous sex/gender dissidence in a territory colonized by extractivist capitalism. I propose that the "Telúricas subterráneas" artistic series (2018) carries out processes of disidentification with cisheteronormativity to reveal the potential of queer utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soulful aging is a process of adding meaning to each part of the aging process. In order to navigate the wilderness of soulful aging, this essay seeks wisdom from ancient and contemporary sages, poets, philosophers, and analysts- weaving modern practices of mindful living and meaning creation with age old and sanctified notions of attaining wisdom. The author provides three axis of contemplation and paradigms to engage with while navigating soulful aging (1) Decolonizing Aging (2) Queering Aging and (3) Befriending aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article provides a critical review of research on geographies of sexuality and acknowledges how sexual identities are constructed through an intersection of multiple dimensions in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Although the region is experiencing a gradually changing landscape regarding the rights of queer people, ongoing discriminatory practices attached to heteronormativity suppress the expression of non-normative sexual identities. Upon exploration of queer theory and a review of literature on the challenges facing queer people, this article argues for reimagining an African society that embraces a multiplicity of sexualities. It also advocates for tackling hetero- and binary-defined norms by presenting counterarguments and scenarios that demonstrate the significance of deconstructive and non-binary approaches towards sexuality and space in sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer theory's obligations to critique and problematise the mechanisms of power and discourse, especially law, remain important for revealing, unsettling and destabilising established sexual and gender norms. However, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, the emphasis on paranoid or critical practices in queer theorising must be counterbalanced by recognising the queer methods of repair evident in the way LGBTQIA+ people engage with systems of oppression in empowering and transformative ways.1, 2 In this paper, I draw on the methodological tools that Sedgwick provides to examine LGBTQIA+ engagements with international law in terms of their creative, generative and sustaining capacities. Focusing on the experiences of two Australian LGBTQIA+ activists, Rodney Croome and Dianne Otto and the objects they brought to the interviews I did with them, I highlight the queer sensibilities, or queer reparative practices, operating in and through their commitments to law. In doing so, I expand the registers through which to conceptualise queer theory in relation to law and instantiate the queer jurisprudential work occurring in international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Citizen science, a field and practice that commonly involves 'non experts' engaging in scientific activities, is an avenue of science engagement that commonly results in increased scientific knowledge, literacy, and skills for the volunteers that participate. In recent years there have been increasing efforts to better understand the myriad outcomes for participants including how personal dimensions of these citizen science volunteers, such as their identities, background, cultures, and experiences, contribute to their relationships with citizen science as well as the broader field of STEM. While previous studies have acknowledged the lack of demographic diversity in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, education, and socioeconomic status, there remains little record of the sexual orientation and/or gender identity of citizen science volunteers. The aim of this study was to understand the personal dimensions of engaging LGBTQ+ volunteers in citizen science including the relationships between their queer and science identities. Based on the perspectives and experiences of 14 LGBTQ+ citizen science volunteers as shared in semi-structured interviews, this article suggests that citizen science practitioners have the potential to reduce barriers faced by queer citizen science volunteers by taking actions and enacting strategies that welcome, respect, involve, and retain LGBTQ+ participants. [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]

In this study, it is aimed to reveal the lack of associating social work and queer theory in Turkey and reflecting it to professional practices. In this framework, first, it is aimed to understand how the social work discipline has historically handled queer theory and how this approach has changed (or not) and how critical social work, radical social work and antioppression social work approaches look at the subject, then the queer theory's approach to the issue. It is envisaged to present a gender-neutral approach on how it can be applied in social work intervention processes. An approach independent of gender roles embodies the idea that the roles, facts, and situations assigned to women and men through the binary gender system are socially constructed, changed, and differentiated from society to society, from culture to culture, rather than biologically determined. Along with all these discussions, it is aimed to make a critical analysis of the transformations social work has undergone in the context of queer theory and to reveal the perspective of queer theory from this point of view, and to reveal the possibilities that social work can provide to social work by providing the queer perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that Brazilian hip hop has opened up and become transgressive in terms of commodification practices, spaces of performative occupation and racial and gendered identification. Such expansion has meant not only an ideological broadening of what counts as hip hop and Black but also where such expressions are recognized as legitimate. This article focuses on the work of Emicida, Linn da Quebrada, Rico Dalasam and Jup do Bairro. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are we to understand the politics of location in our "hyper-space-biased" time of digital existence? This article revisits the debate on media and spatiality through the lens of critical phenomenology and argues for the need to recognize multiple forms of embodiment in mediaspace. With support from a case study on queer digital media use in Russia, it takes the socially circumscribed subject as its strategic starting point for understanding digital media space. By doing so, it argues that often referred to as tropes of a "seamless medialife" are not only simplifying things, but can easily become normative. In digital existence, some bodies and mobilities are quite literally stopped, and we cannot conflate how flesh travels and occupies space with how we might occupy and travel in code. In order to develop my argument, I will put media phenomenology in dialogue with queer phenomenology, but also hint at how we may take our cue from the field of existential media studies to further this debate on vulnerabilities and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To queer urban planning and municipal governance requires explicit civic engagement with sexual and gender minority inclusions, representations and needs in urban plans and policies across departmental and committee silos. This collection questions the hetero-cis-normative assumptions of urban planning and examines the integration of LGBTQ+ issues in municipal governance at the interface of community activism, bureaucratic procedures, and political intervention. The editorial summarizes the contributions to this thematic issue within a tripartite thematic framework: 1) counter-hegemonic reactions to hetero-cis-normativities; 2) queering plans and policies; and 3) governance coalitions and LGBTQ+ activisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes Queering the Crip, Cripping the Queer (Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2022/2023) - the first international exhibition which centred on the intersections of queer and crip history, culture, and activism. Drawing on the theoretical framework of cultural disability studies, Ojrzyńska examines its key thematic areas, such as inclusion, aesthetic beauty, history, and resistance. Informed by the minoritarian ethics of representation, Queering the Crip" showed how a museum exhibition can serve as a site of inclusivity and a resource for inclusive practices, nurturing solidarity and a sense of connection across various categories of social exclusion, invisibility, and marginalization, with major focus on "quip" identities, to use the neologism put forward by Quiplash. It expanded the Schwules Museum's reach beyond those members of the queer community who fit in the bodily and mental "norm" as well as stimulating reflection on the place and role of disability in culture and society. In fact, the exhibition presented disability and queerness as identities and alternative ways of being in the world that can intersect and have a strong subversive political, ethical, and aesthetic potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the "danza de los mecos", a dance performed annually by young Nahua men during the carnaval in Tecomate, Veracruz, in honor of Tlacatecolotl/Tlahuelliloc, a deceitful and capricious demon-like figure otherwise known as "el Diablo". The performance features Indigenous men who dress as devils, wear masks, or dress as women. Drawing on fieldwork, I analyse the performance of the "danza de los mecos" as a critical site in which to examine the embodiment of indigeneity, the enactment of Nahua epistemologies, and the queer gestures that subvert colonial structures of power in contemporary Mexico. By focusing on dancing bodies, I attend to the intricate ways bodily acts transmit memory, knowledge, and imagination through ritual. I explore the role that embodied expressions of indigeneity play in the queering of colonial systems of power, while allowing Indigenous men to simultaneously assert and undermine their masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed by queer theory, this qualitative study sought to better understand the unique experiences of homophobia that occur amongst Latinx gender and sexually diverse youth (GSDY) in south Texas. Latinx GSDY in this borderland region, are less likely to be in schools that adopt affirming policies and are therefore more likely to experience homophobia. The study collected written journal responses from eight Latinx gender and sexually diverse alumni of borderland region schools that presently serve as community leaders and advocates. Findings suggest that homophobia is experienced as trauma and that participants employed positive trauma responses to confront their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this excerpt from a chapter originally published in McNeil et al (2017), five queer art educators interrogate the intersections of religion, education, the arts, and LGBTQ identities through an annual performance session called "Big Gay Church" (BGC). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julietta Singh uses an epistolary tradition to meditate on pressing challenges in the contemporary moment. She fixates on a resounding theme: how must we break from existing systems to truly center the most vulnerable in our institutions and epistemologies? In a long-form letter to her six-year-old daughter, Singh reflects on queer life and architecture, family trauma, radicalization, and collective mobilization.

Belgian designer Raf Simons is internationally known for his leadership in avant-garde menswear and his willingness to break with conventional perceptions of masculinity. Nevertheless, his intervention in this field has not been the subject of a thorough academic investigation to date. Focusing specifically on the revisioning of the male body and men's fashion in Simons's critical fashion practices, this article aims to offer an original reading of the designer's work. Drawing on queer theory, I will theorize the image of the interzone, which has been dear to the designer's modus operandi, as a queer trope that allows Simons to critically engage with masculinity, identity and body politics. By building a theoretical bridge between the fields of fashion studies and queer theory, the article seeks to expand the literature on Belgian fashion and the Antwerp fashion scene, providing a perspective on its relationship with masculinities, the body and queerness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I seek to queer belonging in a post-apartheid city space. I will do this by taking a queer orientation towards a particular public space—the Durban/eThekwini City Hall in South Africa, and a particular set of experiences I had there during the Zanele Muholi Homecoming exhibition in 2017–18. I will also seek to use these to unsettle the concept of belonging. This queering happens at two levels. First, how the relatively mainstream or institutional space of City Hall space was queered through the exhibition of a black queer artist at the Durban Art Gallery. Given that the City Hall was built to symbolise Britishness in the colonies, this occurrence, although momentary, is illuminating. Second, during my experiences at the exhibition there were several moments which stuck with me. I take one of these which took place with my mother and reflect on it to complicate our understandings of belonging. Ultimately, belonging operates in complex ways within post-apartheid cities demonstrated by one particular place and experience in Durban. For LGBTIQ+ people, belonging is many things. In this article, I demonstrate the possibilities of public art to claim belonging in a city not designed for queer black life, and some of the slippages and productivity of “not belonging” using the notion of reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]