Queer Melancholia

GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, founded in 1993, offers an exemplary site for understanding the rise of queer theory, which, from the start, has struggled with the tension between institutionalization and radical resistance. By situating the emergence of this journal and queer theory in general within the AIDS crisis and the literary tradition of the elegy, this essay offers a reading of conventional academic practices as rituals of queer melancholia that comes to challenge the assumption of queer theory’s secularity.

Queer Musicology

Queer musicology is a field dedicated to the study of sexual and gender diversity as it relates to music. This may focus on people who identify with a specific minority group, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ). It may explore a sense of fluidity in the face of identity categories or binary thinking. It may seek to understand underlying cultural habits, regulatory systems, or gendered discourses that affect all people in a society. In other words, queer musicology raises a big tent, making room for multiple, even contradictory approaches (identitarian versus anti-identitarian, minoritarian versus universalist). Taking cues from feminist studies and following a critical turn in the 1980s toward the social, personal, and embodied dimensions of music, its original practitioners were motivated by a desire to remedy longstanding heteronormative practices in the discipline. Just as in the wider humanities, where gay and lesbian studies paved the way for queer theory and then transgender studies, there has been a continuous evolution of the field’s burning questions and representative voices. Important intellectual projects include historical reconstruction of suppressed life stories, the study of social groups, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and the theoretical exploration of music’s role in queer forms of knowledge.

Theory in the Interstices

Religious studies, queer studies, and transgender studies have long kept their distance from each other for reasons ranging from benign neglect and ignorance to active hostility. Yet scholars working in the interstices between these fields have spent decades developing gay and lesbian studies in religion and queer studies in religion. Strassfeld (2018) has argued for transing the study of religion, and transgender studies in religion is experiencing marked growth partly in response to his call. Nevertheless, although queer and transgender studies in religion are gaining increasing acceptance in religious studies, scholars outside of these subfields still generally consider them inessential to the field as a whole, and many continue either to ignore queer and trans topics and perspectives or to address them solely in the most limited of terms. Queer and trans studies, for their part, largely still ignore or actively dismiss religion, addressing the topic only in simplistic ways that would make any religionist cringe. How, then, are those of us who live in these interstitial spaces, cringing at the infelicities of all three fields, to demonstrate the richness of the intellectual soil in this space not just for ourselves but for the larger fields? This work argues for the critical necessity of developing theory from the interstices between religious studies, queer studies, and trans studies – a task already begun by such scholars as Janet Jakobsen, Ann Pellegrini, Jasbir Puar, Ashon Crawley, Max Strassfeld, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and Yannik Thiem – and suggests specific areas in which such theoretical work has particular potential to alter queer theory, trans and gender theory, and religious studies theory as a whole.

The Comics of Alison Bechdel

The Comics of Alison Bechdel is the first full-length volume dedicated to the comics art of Alison Bechdel, beginning with her early work on the long-running serial comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and including original scholarship on her acclaimed memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. The volume is organized into three sections. The first looks at Bechdel’s place in lesbian comics and considers her work in the context of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory. The second looks at kinship, affect, and trauma in Bechdel’s work, with a focus on interiority and the artist’s experiments with comics form. The third looks at place, space, and community, considering the significance of rural queer life, topography and mapping, and forms of LGBTQ community. Archival research and theories of the archive provide new insight into Bechdel’s art, including the composition of Fun Home and the development of the lesser-known Servants to the Cause, which appeared in The Advocate in the late 1980s. An introductory essay orients readers to Bechdel’s career—her childhood in Beech Creek, her involvement in LGBTQ activism and lesbian comix, her move inward towards life writing, and the mainstream cultural recognition prompted by the adaptation of Fun Home into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical—as well as to current trends in Bechdel scholarship.

Postcolonialism

The term ‘postcolonialism’ is sometimes spelled with a hyphen – post-colonial – and sometimes without. There is no strict general practice, but the hyphenated version is often used to refer to the condition of life after the end of colonialism while the non-hyphenated version denotes the theory that attempts to make sense of this condition. The term is regularly used to denote both colonialism and imperialism even though these refer to different historical realities. Like postmodernism and poststructuralism, postcolonialism designates a critical practice that is highly eclectic and difficult to define. It involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects at the levels of material culture and of representation. Postcolonialism often involves the discussion of experiences such as those of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place and analysis of the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe, such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics. Since conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper are as much the subject of postcolonialism as those coming after the historical end of colonialism, postcolonialism allows for a wide range of applications and a constant interplay between the sense of a historical transition, a cultural location and an epochal condition. Postcolonialism is seen to pertain as much to conditions of existence in former colonies as to conditions in diaspora. Both are frequently linked to the continuing power and authority of the West in the global political, economic and symbolic spheres and the ways in which resistance to, appropriation of and negotiation with the West’s order are prosecuted. However the term is construed, there is as much focus on the discourse and ideology of colonialism as on the material effects of colonial subjugation. Because it has its source in past and continuing oppression, postcolonialism furthermore has affinities with multicultural, feminist, and gay and lesbian studies.

Female Subversion through Sex Work: Transgressive Discourses

The main objective of this article is to provide a multi-faceted and spatially-sensitive reflection on sex work. Taking as a point of departure subversive feminist politics on the one hand and the much contingent notion of citizenship on the other, I intend to present various forms of prostitution as potentially positive and empowering modes of sexual and emotional auto-creation. Informed by the leading research of the subject, as well as inspired and educated by Australia-based Dr Elizabeth Smith from La Trobe University in Melbourne, who had researched and presented female sex workers as self-caring and subversive subjects who make own choices and derive satisfaction from their occupation, I wish to seek academic justice for all those women (and men or trans people, for that matter) in the sex industry who feel stigmatized by political pressure and ultra-feminist circles across Europe. Translating Dr Smith’s significant research into European (and Polish) social realities would be a valuable contribution to the local discussions on gender and sexuality, and axes they intersect with. More importantly, however, a framework of a conceptual interdisciplinary approach needs to be adopted—one in which a specific queer form of lesbian feminist reflection is combined with human geography, both of which have much to offer to various strands of sociological theory and practice. Therefore, as a queer lesbian scholar based in Poland, I would like to diverge a bit from my usual topic in order to pay an academic and activist tribute to the much neglected strand of sociology of sex work. However, my multi-faceted and interdisciplinary academic activity allows me to combine the matter in question with the field of lesbian studies. Both a female sex worker and a lesbian have been culturally positioned through the lens of what so-called femininity is, without a possibility to establish control over their own subjectivities. Hence, on the one hand the article is going to be an academic re-interpretation of sex work as such, but on the other, methodological possibilities of acknowledging and researching lesbian sex workers will be additionally considered with special attention to feminist epistemologies and praxis. While a sensitivity to a given locality is of utmost importance when dealing with gender and sexuality issues, I would like to suggest a somewhat overall approach to investigating both female empowerment through sex work and lesbian studies inclusive of sex workers. Importantly, the more common understandings of the sex industry need to be de-constructed in order for a diversity of transgressive discourses to emerge.