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QED : A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking
Number of Followers: 2

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ISSN (Print) 2327-1574 - ISSN (Online) 2327-1590
Published by Michigan State University

[2 journals]

Insects, Threads, and Urinals: Polymorphous Desire Flows in Krzysztof
Jung's Work
- Abstract: When in March 2019 the Schwules Museum in Berlin exhibited a collection of queer and homoerotic 1970s and 1980s drawings by the queer Polish artist Krzysztof Jung, the show's title—Der männliche Akt (The Male Nude)—appeared surprisingly limiting and almost crude. Of course, attractive male bodies were a frequent preoccupation of Jung's work. However, it seems that to emphasize this particular aspect of his practice as a sole basis for curating a retrospective of his work is to dismiss it as purely aesthetic homoeroticism. To do so in an established Berlin museum of GLBTQ culture may also mean that the precarious positionality of a queer artists who worked in the context of communist Poland is flattened and simply ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
The Queer Intimacies of Roses in Louise Aston's "Wilde Rosen" (1846) and
"Die wilde Rose" (1850)
- Abstract: In Louise Aston's 1846 poem "Wilde Rosen" ("Wild Roses"), her speaker admires the roses that surround her and engages them with great kindness and intimacy. The speaker—"the stranger, the homeless"—even configures her own being and experiences in terms of these flowers, describing her youth as a petal-less and faded rose.1 In her 1850 poetic collection Freischärler Reminiscenzen (Volunteer Reminiscences), Aston's work with the image of wild roses continues. A similarly titled poem found there, "Die wilde Rose" ("The Wild Rose"), narrates the tale of a bold hunter who journeys to pluck a singular, captivating rose from a tall cliff. These two poems, along with the 1846 collection that also bears the title Wilde ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
A Dialogue on Therapeutic Peer-to-Peer Models for Trans and Nonbinary
Surgical Support
- Abstract: These things can exist in tandem: recognition of the injustices against us and also celebration of the fortitude it takes for each of us to live in this world.In his role as facilitator, Tobias comes fifteen minutes early to unstack the sticky, moderately padded beige seats and place them in a quintessential support-group circle.1 Erik shows up soon after, either early or right on time. Like most AFAB2 transgender, Two Spirit, and nonbinary3 people that filter into these sessions, we have both spent a lot of time waiting in chairs with this same, practical yet slightly inhospitable arrangement. The easily storable seats bring to mind all manner of halfway moments where our patience has been required. This is the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Queer Healing
- Abstract: We are our own healers. The moment we realize the power is within us, we start to attract collaborators that show us our inner strength, the power of self love, the light that not only shines our lives, but those who SEE US. Gone are the days for seeking Masters. If we listen and listen good, we'll discover we are our own Masters, our own Healers.A recent study by Icebreakers Uganda has shown that LGBTQIA+ youth are four times as likely to attempt suicide, have suicidal thoughts, and engage in self-harm, compared to youths who are straight.1 Uganda is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for LGBTQIA+ people. Although there are so many challenges facing queer people there more people coming to terms with ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
"The Fantasy of Queerness": A Conversation with Roger Q. Mason about
Lavender Men: An Emancipation Play and Making a Queer of Color Creative
Life in Theater and Performance
- Abstract: It was in Summer 2017, in the fabled rolling hills of Ripton, Vermont, on the campus of the iconic Bread Loaf School of English, a short walk from the farm of Nobel laureate American poet, Robert Frost, that I first met playwright, actor, and director, Roger Q. Mason. Mason, an alum of Bread Loaf, and self-described "Black, Filipinx, plus-sized, gender nonconforming, queer artist of color," had returned to the glorious campus that lays at the feet of the extraordinary Green Mountains, to edit the campus newsletter, "The Crumb," and to work as assis-tant director of that summer's production of Shakespeare's Othello. The production would feature actors from the Trinity Repertory Company of Providence, students in the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Introduction: How to Survive a Presidency
- Abstract: "150,000 DEAD—OFF WITH GEORGE'S HEAD."ACT UP and Queer Nation activists chanted those words outside the Astrodome at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. The protestors amassed to scold George H. W. Bush for his mishandling of the AIDS epidemic, which had left scores of LGBTQ people dead since it was first reported in 1981. By the time they arrived in the Lone Star State, queer activists had spent the last decade pushing for policies to expand access to healthcare, implement educational curriculum to stem infection rates, and bolster legal protections for people living with AIDS. While delegates to the convention cheered wildly for Pat Buchanan's "Culture War" speech and reluctantly absorbed Mary ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
How to Live with a Virus
- Abstract: As the news broke that a new coronavirus was beginning to spread in the United States, I received the following Instagram direct message: "What' No AIDS memes'"Lana Del AIDS, courtesy of Theodore Kerr.The message came from a friend who knew that over the last decade, I've been creating art that uses contemporary news and culture to push back against the relative silence around HIV. For example, a few years ago I made a postcard that read, "LANA DEL AIDS." My hope was that by inserting the idea of HIV into a pop icon, people would be reminded that AIDS is not just a part of our past but also part of our present. With this in mind, my friend reasonably figured that in the face of an emerging and mysterious virus that ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
LGBTQ+ Aging during COVID-19
- Abstract: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and same-gender-loving (LGBTQ+) older adults have unique needs based on experiences related to LGBTQ+ aging across the life course. LGBTQ+ older adults encompasses a large and heterogenous group that spans several generations and cohorts of life experiences: the Silent Generation, the Invisible Generation, the Pride Generation, and the AIDS Generation. The Invisible Generation includes LGBTQ+ older adults who came of age during the Great Depression.1 Many LGBTQ+ older adults of the Invisible Generation fought during World War II. They remained largely invisible during this time. The Silent Generation includes LGBTQ+ older adults who came of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Containment and Interdependence: Epidemic Logics in Asian American
Racialization
- Abstract: In 1899, when a few cases of bubonic plague appeared in Honolulu, the US military invaded Chinatown. Ten thousand residents—primarily Chinese and Japanese—were quarantined and barred from leaving as the Honolulu Board of Health fumigated all houses within 14 blocks. Though health officials already had evidence that the plague was carried by rats, they instead blamed "filthy" and "exceedingly unclean" Asian inhabitants.1 After more cases emerged, the Public Health Service relocated 4,500 Chinese residents to a quarantine camp and ordered a controlled burn of buildings where victims had died.2 The blaze was picked up by a strong wind and spread over 38 acres. It destroyed 4,000 homes while the district's rats fled ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
The Pandemic Clears Media Pollution and Queers the Ecosystem
- Abstract: The virus spreads. Cities shut down. But nature rejoices. Carbon emissions fall as fast as the price of gas. Pollution disperses, clearing the air. Supply chains shut down, prompting calls to diversify how we cultivate our food and land.The pandemic reshapes the US media environment, too. Media expands rapidly and organically. Like the virus, media spreads in close quarters, person-to-person, and deepening its hold with every moment of co-presence. Traffic on open-access platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok sharply increase within weeks as artists and entertainers broadcast live from home and, newly unemployed, spend hours crafting tightly scripted short videos to communicate joy, trauma ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Transgender Migrant Rights, Reproductive Justice, and the Mexico–US
Border in the Time of COVID-19
- Abstract: In the past few years, headlines have dominated United States and international news outlets about the reproductive, sexual, and gendered violence occurring at the Mexico–US border, in particular at the junction of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, and the violence that women, families, and LGBTQ individuals are subjected to during their migration experiences. As Chicana feminist reproductive justice scholars operating in the psychological and physical borderlands,1 we have interrogated the ways in which reproductive injustices—reproductive feminicidios, the incarceration of Brown and Black mothers, and the (in)voluntary sterilization of Latin American women—affect Latinx and Latin American women in devastating ways.2 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
The Homonormative Economic Frame and COVID-19 Relief Debates
- Abstract: The main drive toward participating in a group life, and the main shunning of such life, come essentially from one source: identification. In its positive form it is a manifestation of the need for acceptance . . . one wanders into the bar in the hope of finding the convivial spirit that comes from being with one's own.On June 13, 2020, the owners of The Stonewall Inn launched a fundraiser. Beset by months of closure and lost revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the historic bar faced permanent closure.2 After all, even historic landmarks in a capitalist society still have to pay bills, being an eponym for the modern trans and queer rights movement is not enough. This hardship though, much like Stonewall itself ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Impressions of a Quarantine: A Collage
- Abstract: "How is anyone to tell a story which he cannot understand himself'""The truth is rarely pure and never simple."Note to the reader: This text is comprised of impressions and quotes from my personal journals and commonplace books interlaced with later impressions and reflections. The text is organized thematically rather than chronologically, and my hope is that you will read it with an ear for meter and cadence, pausing at passages that invite a more contemplative gait and freely moving with passages that want to gallop. Thank you.Earnest cynicism. Cynical sincerity.Now sedulous. Invoking grim endurance.March 13. Denison is going to remote learning for three weeks as are virtually all higher education institutions ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Queer Relationalities in the Era of Social Distancing
- Abstract: At 12:01 a.m. on Tuesday, March 17, 2020, San Francisco became one of the first cities in the continental United States to "shelter in place" as a public health response to the growing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic.1 The local health order made it mandatory for city residents—except for "essential workers," such as medical personnel, grocery store workers, and emergency personnel, among others—to stay inside and away from others, officially inaugurating the "era of social distancing" in San Francisco.2 Along with personal hygiene practices (e.g., frequent handwashing, not touching one's face), this era is characterized by increasing physical distance to a minimum of six feet between individuals in public spaces ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Black Queerness and the Cruel Irony of the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Abstract: It is another Friday morning at 6 a.m. I reach down between my legs and feel my intense erection and realize why I woke up so abruptly. When I arise, as I typically do, I reach for my glasses to look at my phone. I wonder if I received any text messages last night after I fell asleep. Indeed, I did, from my best friend who is three hours behind me, "I love you too man." I immediately feel warmth literally run through my chest. During the early period of the pandemic, we promised each other that we would check in on each other and give reminders, either through text, phone, or video chat, of how much we value and love each other. Before the pandemic, while I was in Arizona, we would do this often, and these ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Finding Pleasure in the Pandemic: Or, Confronting COVID-19 Anxiety through
Queer Feminist Pleasure Politics
- Abstract: When I was invited to contribute "something about finding pleasure in the pandemic," I had just finished weeping on the floor for an hour. I had found myself on the floor several times during the COVID-19 stay-at-home order—my new therapist called it a "grounding technique." Through new iterations of anxiety, I stared out over construction noises that beep beep beep beeped all day, every day, from my "at-home-office"—a desk I dumpster-picked fifteen years ago that is now wedged between the window and the living room couch. I wasn't coping with the stay-at-home order well. And finding pleasure in the pandemic—while, again, witnessing violence against Black people, relearning our bodies through my partner's gender ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
How Can We (Have) Queer Sex in a Pandemic'
- Abstract: How can we queer sex in a pandemic' What can we learn from previous attempts to do so' How can we (re)imagine queer safer sex in this pandemic' How can we (re)create queer assemblages of sexual desire and pleasure, protection, and community' And how might these be linked to other forms of queer activism'In taking up these questions, I will relate two pioneering texts of the early AIDS epidemic—the 1983 manual "How to Have Sex in an Epidemic" by Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen (in consultation with Dr. Joseph Son-nabend)1 and the 1987 critical essay "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic" by Douglas Crimp2—to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, characterized by familiar uncertainty and a proliferation of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Queering Intimacy, Six Feet Apart
- Abstract: Social distancing has become the foundation of the United States and global public health efforts to halt the spread of COVID-19. In the United States, national, local, and state campaigns promoted social distancing as the lynchpin of safety—stay six feet away from each other in order to stay safe. Organizations employed various visualization techniques to make six feet easy to measure. The Centers for Disease Control measures six feet as two arms length1; the Red Cross asks people to imagine two large dogs standing head to tail2; and the State of Colorado3—always on brand—asks residents to visualize the length of skis. At the same time as we are asked to develop body memory for what six feet looks and, more ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Smart Crowdsourcing in COVID-19: Assisting Wuhan with Mobility in Lockdown
- Abstract: With widespread uncertainties and challenges in all fronts, emerging crises such as COVID-19 call for organized, participatory problem solving and deliberation to respond to such unprecedented challenges. Crowdsourcing can function as an effective strategy to tackle such problems with an agile, distributed, and collaborative approach. One case examined here is how drivers from Didi, a share ride company in China, collaborated with other stakeholder groups to enable the mobility of medical care workers (MCWs), patients, and vulnerable populations in Wuhan when all public transportation services were stopped during the city lockdown in late January 2020. Complicating the mobility problem was the high health risks ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Fugitive Life: The Queer Politics of the Prison State by Stephen Dillon
(review)
- Abstract: These are fertile times for "critical prison studies" with multiple texts in circulation, and particularly generative are those that offer fresh takes on histories of resistance, like Emily Thuma's archives of anti- carceral feminism in All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence and Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier's project on twentieth- century prisoner- led organizing, Rethinking the American Prison Movement.1 This expanding body of work offers powerful tools for those working to dismantle our nation's racialized investments in the prison industrial complex (PIC), and reminders of the strength and necessity of inside–outside organizing. Yet the joy of resurfacing legacies of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity by
Michael Lovelock (review)
- Abstract: Reality television's genesis as a commercial force took place at the turn of the century. In subsequent years, media and cultural studies scholars have produced a rich body of work concerning this cultural form. In recent years, RuPaul's Drag Race has significantly grown its audience and cultural reach, and Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has been revived and retooled for Netflix. These developments, among others, have positioned inquiry into the relationship between queerness and reality television as a fruitful endeavor. It is against this backdrop that Michael Lovelock's monograph, Reality TV and Queer Identities: Sexuality, Authenticity, Celebrity, has emerged.Lovelock, following David M. Halperin, takes ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla
Musser (review)
- Abstract: In his 2002 self-portrait, the queer Black artist Lyle Ashton Harris conjures Billie Holiday, enacting the singer's iconic seduction while dwelling in multiple dimensions of black femininity. The performative self-portrait is featured on the cover of Amber Jamilla Musser's most recent book, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, which begins with Harris to distill the relationship among selfhood, racialized femininity, and fleshiness. For Musser, flesh is the site where knowledge is formed and where radical modes of existence are made possible. Turning to the work of twentieth- and twenty-first century artists of color, Musser forms an "esoteric aesthetic archive" (15), deftly examining a wide array ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire by Cynthia Wu (review)
- Abstract: Cynthia Wu's Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire provides a daring and innovative genealogy of Asian American canonical literature through a queer analytic. Wu's book analyzes five texts: John Okada's No-No Boy, Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging. By analyzing the intraracial male intimacies in each of these texts, Wu argues that 1) these intimacies may offer a pathway to facilitate coalition building and bridging of Asian America's internal divides and 2) embracing intraracial same-sex desire can possibly recuperate Asian American tendencies towards assimilating to normative US desirability ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement by David K.
Johnson (review)
- Abstract: This is historian David K. Johnson's second book. His first, The Lavender Scare (2004), is well- cited and was made into an award- winning documentary in 2019. This book narrativizes what Johnson calls the physique era from 1951 to 1967 which is marked by the rise and fall of physique photography, magazines, and other related businesses. Johnson argues other scholars have wrongly interpreted physique culture as apolitical due to its focuses on sex and profit. Instead, Johnson explains profit- focused work helped build imagined and actual community as a cite of resistance and a group identity formed in opposition to censorship.The first three chapters examine the rise of physique era commerce. The introduction ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling (review)
- Abstract: Kara Keeling offers a robust analysis of Black sonic, visual, and aesthetic cultural productions, namely as they intersect with racial capitalism, imagination, technologies, and the interactions mediated through them. This offering is ideal for scholars of Afrofuturism, media and cinema studies, queer studies and Black studies. For its contributions to queer constructions of temporality and futurity, in particular in the context of Black media and existence, the text is valuable for queer of color theorists. Professors and students of media, cultural, and/or communication studies would also find the text useful as it provides analyses of various Black and queer media—transnational films, avantgarde music, and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of
Belonging in and Across Differences ed. by Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette
Calafell (review)
- Abstract: Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell's edited volume Queer Intercultural Communication: The Intersectional Politics of Belonging in and Across Differences (QIC) leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I like bitter. Bitter serves multitudes. In liquid form, it is the foundation for a potent cocktail. As a root, bitter soothes nausea and other ailments. In this way, to and for multiple audiences, QIC serves relief and pleasure, remedy and repair. Reading QIC, I touch those places in my own writing and reading in the field that call out for relief and pleasure, remedy and repair. The disciplinary contexts and histories Eguchi and Callafel trace through their narration of queer intercultural communication expose nerves ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00
Call Me by Your Name Dir. by Luca Guadagnino (review)
- Abstract: On January 22, 2017, Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Later the same year, it would receive the longest standing ovation in the history of the New York Film Festival.1 Thus, it is no surprise that the film has been acclaimed as a modern classic for the GLBTQ community. The content is familiar for many in the community: self-discovery, heartache, and an aspiration for acceptance. The film takes place at the intersection of fantasy and tragedy, as first love often does.Based on the novel by Andre Aciman, the film follows Elio Perlman, the son of two successful academics, as he spends the summer of 1983 in the rural Italian countryside. Oliver, a visiting ... Read More
  PubDate: 2021-05-03T00:00:00-05:00