Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued…
On Documenting Marginalized Communities: ln the process of making a film, 8 million questions run through my head: Who are we representing and who hasn’ t already been represented? What is the most egalitarian way to approach this project? What is a feminist, antiracist approach? Who am I to make this? What will l fill…
“I use my most recent film, Thick Relations, to argue that traditional narrative structures are by definition oppressive and controlling. Traditional narratives demand a straight progress through time, through life, through love, through sexuality and conflict and family—a straight progress that would have us believe in and desirous of state-sanctioned institutions and relations. Queer lives…
In Reclaiming Our Space, social worker, activist, and cultural commentator Feminista Jones explores how Black women are changing culture, society, and the landscape of feminism by building digital communities and using social media as powerful platforms. As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black…
LGBT/queer film festivals provide counter-public spaces for marginalised subjects to formulate community, negotiate identity and rally under political banners. At the same time, screening work by LGBT* filmmakers interpellates spectators into a common subject position and locates discursively ‘homeless’ subjects in space and time. The creation of queer, urban, community space is particularly vital in…
This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement,…
How do trans and genderqueer poets write the body onto and against the page?What expressions and forms—even if amorphous ones—does the body use and take in its poetic becomings? Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013), edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, is a collection that grapples with these questions…
Drawing on one year of fieldwork with LGBTQ youth, I explore the ways Tumblr, a microblogging and social networking site, has become a vibrant center of queer discourse and collectivity. I argue that for LGBTQ users, Tumblr simultaneously generates the specter of a “queer utopia”—a space where queer potential flourishes and more expansive ways to…
Indonesia has a long and rich tradition of homosexual and transgender cultures, and the past 40 years in particular has seen an increased visibility of sexual minorities in the country, which has been reflected through film and popular culture. This book examines how representations of gay, lesbian and transgender individuals and communities have developed in…
Although over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of gender studies, transgender has largely remained institutionalised as an ‘umbrella term’ that encapsulates all forms of gender understandings differing from what are thought to be gender norms. In both theoretical and medical literature, trans identity has been framed within a paradigm of awkwardness…