Drag resistance: Necropolitics, queer survival and a Balkan counterpublics

Taking the murder of Greek HIV+ and queer activist Zak Kostopoulos as its starting point – an exercise of necropolitical power in broad daylight – this article explores the work of drag queens in Greece and their aesthetic/political choices. It interprets their performances as tactics of survival and resistance and as creative responses to queer trauma. The role of queerfeminist spaces, cultural events and collectives also is examined as a response to the increasing right-wing turn in the country’s political scene – itself the result of the financial crisis of 2008. It imports José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentifications and counterpublics, Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics into the Greek/Balkan context and analyses the particular configurations and intersections of sexualities, genders, statehood, race, class and religion in Greece. It then examines disidentifications and counterpublics as empowering practices of community forming, offering glimpses of a queer Balkan counterpublics and the tools employed towards its making (humour, parody, reclaiming, disidentification, mourning and embodied pleasures).

Succès de Scandale: Homophobia, racism and abject marketing in fashion

Succès de Scandale, the manipulation of outcry over the deliberately shocking, has been used frequently to garner notoriety and fame in the past. Currently, fashion brands are notorious for dropping crypto-offensive items into their marketing and then backing off with a meagre apology when customers react with legitimate offence. Social media hashtags generate viral visibility, and the associated brand is amplified exponentially. Engaging in this dance between the edgy and the truly offensive becomes tactical for brands to appear ‘cool’, and to push back against notions of the ‘politically correct’. However, as consumers become increasingly inured to the abject, brands go to ever-greater lengths to generate publicity they hope will translate to higher sales. Shocking visual tropes become increasingly provocative to engage the online masses, moving into dangerously racially charged and homophobic territory at times. Offensive? Certainly. Of larger concern, though: are there deeper consequences to reckless dissemination of scandalous content?

A poetics of sensuality: Xenophobia and same-sex intimacy in cane/cain

This article offers a reading of the ways in which the short film, cane/cain (directed by Jordache Ellapen, adopts a poetics of sensuality to both unsettle and undergird its themes of South Asian migration, sexual intimacy and xenophobia in South Africa. While both homosexuality and xenophobia are not uncommon sites of public discourses in South Africa, cane/cain unearths the less visible faces of both by centring Brown bodies in corporeal collisions of sexual intimacy and of xenophobic violence to disrupt normative and binary categories of sex, race and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. Utilizing the symbolic currency of sugarcane as an aesthetic and narrative pivot, cane/cain constructs a tension between the cinematic pleasure elicited by its poetics of sensuality and its discomfiting themes of homosexual intimacy and xenophobic intolerance to insert the South Asian subject into the discourses of race, sexuality and nationality in South Africa.

Paranoid viewers and the ‘already knowing’ of YouTube’s coming out genre

While viewing LGBTQ+ coming out narratives within speech act theory is certainly nothing new, social media platforms (and YouTube, specifically) have created new opportunities for enacting these performances. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s method of paranoid reading, this article highlights the relationship between LGBTQ+ YouTubers, the coming out narratives they produce and their viewers’ engagement. After looking to YouTube as a platform frequently employed for sharing this genre of performative rhetoric, this article analyses individual video uploads alongside the viewer comments they have garnered to illustrate the paranoid phenomenon of ‘already knowing’ – i.e., viewers’ refusal to be surprised by acts of coming out. While this paranoid approach is complicated through reparative readings and a breakdown of the paranoid/reparative binary, recent offerings of coming out videos uploaded to YouTube also suggest diverging trajectories for the genre’s future.

Colourblind coverage: Mainstream media erasure of intersectionality in large-scale cases of anti-LGBTQ violence

Despite extensive critique calling for greater acknowledgement of intersectionality, the LGBTQ community in North America continues to foster a White, upper- and middle-class, gender-normative culture. Media discourse has perpetuated these narratives by downplaying the racism inherent in events centring homophobic violence against racialized LBGTQ people. Through a content analysis and discourse analysis of national and local news sources in the United States and Canada, this study explores the hesitation of journalists to explicitly acknowledge the intersectionality of race and LGBTQ identity in two North American instances of large-scale anti-LGBTQ violence targeting predominantly racialized members of the community. The Bruce McArthur case in Toronto, Ontario involved the serial murder of mostly racialized gay men, while the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida was a mass shooting that took place on Latinx night at an LGBTQ nightclub. In both cases, despite superficial acknowledgement of the victims’ demographics, journalists minimized the racial aspect of the violence in order to present more palatable politicized narratives.

Surrogacy and the Reproduction of Normative Family on TV, Lulu La Vey (2019)

Review of: Surrogacy and the Reproduction of Normative Family on TV, Lulu La Vey (2019) Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 258 pp., ISBN 978-3-030-17569-6, eBook, £35.99 ISBN 978-3-030-17569-6, h/bk, £64.99 ISBN 978-3-030-17572-6, p/bk, £44.99