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Whatever : A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies
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This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Online) 2611-657X
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Forbidden temporalities: the wayward aesthetics of Punchdrunk’s
"Sleep No More"
- Authors: Tom Fish
  Pages: 1 - 22
  Abstract: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is an immersive theatrical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hitchcock’s Rebecca that has been staged in New York since 2011 with over 2000 performances. Sprawled over a hundred rooms within three intricately designed warehouses, the event offers a visceral exploration of a labyrinthine space and the potential for anonymous—even erotic—one-on-one encounters with a performer in the dark. This paper offers a new angle on Punchdrunk’s immersive style by considering the embodiment of temporality in performance and its concurrent aesthetic politics. Borrowing from queer theory’s temporal turn, it details how the company manipulates time in the space to create a ‘wayward’ aesthetic, borrowing from the etymology meaning “turned away” and the First Folio’s name for the witches as “Weyward Sisters”. Ultimately, it looks to encourage further queer readings of time in popular theatrical performance while also broadening the notion of resistant reading strategies to consider queer embodiment and theatre’s haptic relationship to time.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.138
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Di Mana Bumi Dipijak, Di Situ Pelangi Dijunjung
- Authors: Ash Masing
  Pages: 23 - 42
  Abstract: This paper is concerned with understanding the complex tensions between national and queer identity in the context of migration, especially migration from the postcolony towards the imperial core; here, issues of modernity, progress, and futurity become contested when the possibility for a queer way of being is made available within the colonial metropole. Using approaches at the intersection of nationalism, queer theory, and postcolonialism, I specifically focus on queer Malaysians in London, and the ways migration towards a ‘liberating’ West has informed the articulation of their nationality and sexualities. After conducting five semi-structured interviews with LGBT+ identifying Malaysian migrants, I conclude that moving to London has configured these identities along spatial and temporal lines, where queerness is rendered a new kind of present and potential future, whilst Malaysian identity remains a spectre from a ‘repressive’ past. Given the underlying assemblages of homonationalism and Western hegemony that subsume queerness under the tent of Western values, progression, modernity, and futurity are made available through the internalisation of a Western queer politics and the formation of new (homo)national affiliations.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.162
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Lesbian lexicon: The construction of a repertoire of hate in Peruvian
cyberforums
- Authors: Carolina Mirian Lovón-Cueva, Marco Lovón-Cueva
  Pages: 43 - 70
  Abstract: The lesbophobic lexicon in Peru is created by the rejection of lesbian women because of their sexual orientation. The objectives of this paper are the following: to identify insulting lexical constructs against lesbians in Peruvian virtual forums and to interpret them as representations of symbolic violence and performative acts of hate speech. Methodologically, seven lexemes (“camionera”, “machito”, “chito”, “machorra”, “machona”, “marimacha”, “tortera”, “marimacha”) that are used in the interactions of forum members are selected. To study the semiotic signifiers and meanings, we start from the definitions proposed by academic dictionaries, particularly on Peruvianisms, and then contrast them with the social meanings situated in the discourses of the forum members; subsequently, we explain that the lexical voices generate and reproduce violence and hatred against the group of lesbian women. The article concludes that the lesbophobic repertoire perpetuates practices of symbolic violence and maintains aggressive discourses of rejection.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.156
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
S/M, Splatter, and Body Modifications in the early Clive Barker
- Authors: Giorgio Paolo Campi
  Pages: 73 - 96
  Abstract: This paper deals with three components of the aesthetic framework elaborated by author, artist, and filmmaker Clive Barker in his first works during the first half of the 1980s, with a particular focus on the fictional creatures known as Cenobites featured in the novella The Hellbound Heart (1986): the references to S/M visuals and culture, the taste for gore/splatter and the aspect related to (self)induced body modifications. In the first part, these three elements will be discussed, and their origins tracked down in Barker’s biographical background and artistic career. In the final part I will try to contextualize this composite aesthetics in its historical setting to show how its elements combined to outline a coherent worldview, different and subversive with respect to the one imposed by the then hegemonic and heteronormative narrative, and how they became one of the main grounds for political criticism and contestation in the ultraconservative United Kingdom during the Thatcher era.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.157
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
William Seabrook and Man Ray
- Authors: Sergio Cortesini
  Pages: 97 - 126
  Abstract: Around 1929‑1930 writer William Seabrook commissioned from Man Ray three sets of photographs. One set showed Seabrook himself mimicking S/M interactions with Lee Miller; another group was tableaux vivants visualizing Seabrook’s fetishistic fantasies; the third set consisted of portraits of Seabrook’s partner (Marjorie Worthington) wearing a collar especially designed by Man Ray. These series, along with other related works (such as Seabrook’s photographs of a female partner sheathed in a black leather mask, published in surrealist journals Documents and VVV), offer a seemingly abusive iconography of female subjection for the sake of male gratification. However, delving into the intellectual environment that aggregated Man Ray, Seabrook, and the surrealists of Documents, this article seeks to read the pictorial corpus as visualizations of interpersonal interactions that approximate the protocol of today’s BDSM. The body of work is indeed imbued with motifs of primitivism, orientalism, and négrophilie that were rampant in vanguard elites around 1930. Seabrook’s fetishistic objects and practices were not alien to racial bias, and gendered unbalance of power. Yet, while these experiments seem to debase the female partners into objects of erotic mechanics, most of them were consensual and performative and bear witness to personal search for modernist transcendence and spiritual epiphany.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.167
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Ballgags, ropes, and spatulas
- Authors: Jan 'Jay' Szpilka
  Pages: 127 - 161
  Abstract: This article is aimed at investigating the way toys are used within BDSM practices. “Toys”, as a term, encompasses a wide variety of objects such as gags, cuffs, or whips which form the material bedrock for BDSM sexualities. At the same time, the presence of so many objects within sexual practices is a cause of anxiety, evident even in specialist scholarship on kink. Drawing on examples from my fieldwork among Polish BDSM practitioners, I will be attempting to provide a different perspective on the role of toys in kink, one that does not replicate the anxieties about fetishism and commodification, while at the same time attending to the queer use of everyday objects that is so common within the world of BDSM.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.168
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Performing gender, race and nation. The queer turn in contemporary Latin
American literature (1990‑2021)
- Authors: Gabriele Bizzarri
  Pages: 165 - 174
  Abstract: The constant and significant presence of queer motifs in Latin American literature of the last thirty years should not be glossed over. Of course, the recruiting of yet another imported label, trafficked from the geographical, economic and academic “North” into a third-world context should not be taken for granted; and it will also be important to vigilate over the modes and circumstances of a theoretical landing which will have to negotiate its ambiguous conquests with the specificities of a peripheral context. However, it is just as important to signal that the theory’s antinormative and destabilizing potential seems to find the “natural” context in which to unfold in a continent which, from a number of viewpoints, in the overlapping of its manifold wildcards, emerges into the history of Modernity without being able to fully dwell in any of its categories. In Latin America queer becomes the emblematic catalyst of the locally active difference in all possible inflections, the ideal trigger of the apocryphal versions of the apparently already written story of the plausible relationships between bodies and territories, versions which pour forth not only from the incongruencies of gender and sexuality, but also from the ethnic, sociopolitical, and epistemic discontinuity which is written in characters of blood in the mind-blowing chronicle of these lands. So that it comes to work as a powerful mechanism of contemporary interpellation of the old and deceitful story of “Latin American identity”.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.192
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Styles of the Flesh: an Anthropological Mutation
- Authors: Daniel Link
  Pages: 175 - 182
  Abstract: The short essay proposes a proto-queer reading of the work of playwright Raul Dalmonte (aka COPI), based on the author’s extensive research work on this champion of the Argentinian avant-garde. Here, the characters of COPI’s “theater of the world”, the puppets and mirages of his great baroque deception, are signaled as the standard-bearers of a new anthropology of the pose.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.193
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
What happens when transvestite ‘make world’' On Camila Sosa
Villada’s Las malas
- Authors: Gabriel Giorgi
  Pages: 183 - 188
  Abstract: The text, delivered orally at the first presentation of Camila Sosa Villada’s 2019 novel, works as a timely and evocative long review, focusing on the author’s profound reconfiguration of the canonic representations of the transvestite universe within the Latin American context. The focus, here, falls on language, the mischievous language of the protagonists that, intertwining transphobic testimony and baroque imagination, fictionally reconfigures the limits of the real.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.195
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
“The world of desire is not as bright as it is believed.” Abjection,
body and transvestite agency in Las malas by Camila Sosa Villada
- Authors: Richard Leonardo-Loayza
  Pages: 189 - 208
  Abstract: This article examines Las malas (2019), by Camila Sosa Villada. It is intended to show that in this text a complaint is made against the social conditions to which transvestites are subjected, which are considered abject bodies and, therefore, susceptible to being violated, disappeared or discarded. Likewise, we want to verify that this novel presents the transvestite as a being with agency, whose presence not only questions the foundations of the heteropatriarchal system, but also reconfigures some of the sacred institutions of said system, such as motherhood or family.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.180
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
The representation of queer practices and the re-signifying of family
notions in two recent Argentinian novels: “I Am Whoever You Want to Call
Me” and “The Evil Ones”.
- Authors: Henri Billard
  Pages: 209 - 222
  Abstract: The purpose of the current work is to study one aspect of the representation of persons with dissenting gender, which has become more visible and less cartoonish in Latin American literary production since the year 1994. We are referring to the presence of trans characters (i.e., transvestite, transsexual and transgender) that begin to acquire new identities with the help of a context comprised by people without blood ties with the main character.
  To illustrate this, we will discuss two recent Argentinian novels, Soy lo que quieras llamarme (“I Am Whoever You Want to Call me”) by Gabriel Dalla Torre (Neuquén, 1977), published in 2012 by El Ateneo in Buenos Aires ( Letra Sur International Award for Novel), and Las malas (“The Evil Ones”) by Camila Sosa Villada (La Falda, Córdoba, 1982) published by Tusquets in 2019 (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award in 2020).
  PubDate: 2022-08-06
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.176
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Disrupting the wound, managing the suffering
- Authors: Tania Pléitez Vela
  Pages: 223 - 254
  Abstract: For much of the twentieth century, the field of gender dissidence remained invisible in Salvadoran literary criticism. The opening up of this field of study began at the beginning of this century. However, there is still little critical and theoretical space dedicated specifically to the lesbian discursive self-construction reflected in Salvadoran literature. Starting with the death of the composer, violinist and poet Ingrid Bolaños, the author of the article exposes the oppressive mechanisms of the ‘heteronation’ (Curiel) in El Salvador, so as to approach the poetry of Silvia Matus (1950), Kenny Rodríguez (1969) and Marielos Olivo (1977). Thus, the poem is understood as a scenario in which the wound is managed in social and political terms, becoming a transmitter of creative, individual and collective resistance.
  PubDate: 2022-07-28
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.178
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Murder as a destination' Transgender identities in narratives of the
Salvadoran postwar 1992‑2021
- Authors: Amaral Arévalo
  Pages: 255 - 302
  Abstract: In 1992, the Salvadoran postwar period began. Along this period, the social movement started various demands, and in the literature, we have seen an emergence of subjectivities that contradicted heterosexuality. The present text proposes to analyze the trans identities represented in narratives of the Salvadoran postwar period between 1992 and 2021. Trans identities encompass a series of narrative representations that share an expression and gender identity dissidents from the binary norm of hegemonic heterosexuality. In conclusion, it is highlighted that death as the destiny of trans people reflects the transphobia processes that exist and persist in Salvadoran society; postwar Salvadoran narratives reproduce this transphobic and murderous social imaginary. The trans identities represented correspond only to trans women; transmen are invisible in these narratives. The challenge and the next frontier to overcome in the narrative field is for trans people to be the architects of their histories, placing their subjectivities, desires, identities, problems, aspirations, etc.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.160
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
“Estoy muy feliz de verte alive”
- Authors: Ignacio Pastén
  Pages: 303 - 326
  Abstract: In the following article I seek to investigate a hitherto forgotten but emerging aspect of Latin American critical and cultural studies, namely, the migration and diaspora of transgender youth and transvestites from the Southern Cone to the United States for artistic, creative and humanitarian purposes. I say forgotten inasmuch as the sensitivities experienced by the trans prefix were, in the beginning, discarded from the queer or sexual dissidence theories; and I point to it as emerging insofar as the new critical perspectives promoted by emerging researchers have set their sights on such bodies and subjects as true epistemes of contemporary cultural endeavor. The thesis states that transgender sensitivities are fundamental to understand the relationship between the national post-dictatorial period and the cultural productions of the 1990s. The works that artists and writers such as Germán Bobe, Iván Monalisa Ojeda and Francisco Copello carried out during those years allowed us to understand an entire Chilean and Latin American scene of young creators who fought dictatorships and canons with their bodies always accompanied by the sign of sexual dissidence
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.159
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)
Transgenderism and social dissent in Marcial Gala’s Llámenme
Casandra
- Authors: Patricia Valladares-Ruiz
  Pages: 327 - 342
  Abstract: This article examines the literary representation of dissident sexual and gender subjectivities in revolutionary Cuba in Marcial Gala’s novel Llámenme Casandra (2019). Grounded in queer, gender, and cultural studies, it analyzes how gender fluidity challenges the state apparatus of social control that punishes any infringement of the “new man” model. It also reflects on the stigmatization of gender transgressions and its impact on the articulation of transgender subjectivities devoid of agency.
  PubDate: 2022-08-05
  DOI: 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v5i1.181
  Issue No: Vol. 5 (2022)