Queer Objects: A Symposium With Robyn Wiegman and Annamarie Jagose

From the Australian National University, announcement of a forthcoming Symposium:

Queer Objects: A Symposium with Robyn Wiegman and Annamarie Jagose

‘The rejection of essentialism,’ David Halperin writes in How to be Gay (2012), ‘did not prevent the original founders of queer theory from asking “What do Queers want?”’. In her Object Lessons (2012), Robyn Wiegman explores the political and institutional effects of scholarly attachments to objects of knowledge. Queer theory is, for Wiegman, one of several ‘identity knowledges’ that share a commitment to social justice and that can teach us lessons about what and how we want.

More than two decades after queer theory’s emergence, presenters at this symposium are invited to engage with queer as an objectand with the object lessons of queer theory.
• Camp objects and aesthetics
• Screens and closets
• Queer knowledge: secrets and revelations
• Queer archives and ephemera
• Queer bodies and voices
• Antinormativity
• Queer as death drive / form of life.

For further information and to register your attendance please contact symposium convenor Monique Rooney:

Email: Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au

Transgender Identity and Popular Culture: Images From Film

Sharon Cowan, University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published 'We Walk Among You': Trans Identity Politics Goes to the Movies as Edinburgh School of Law Research Paper No. 2013/39. Here is the abstract.

Recent legal and social acknowledgement of (some) trans citizenship claims demonstrates the continuing evolution of trans politics and identity, and the relationship between socio-political identities and popular culture. This article examines current debates over trans citizenship and identity, and argues that certain kinds of identity and citizenship claims have cultural currency in contemporary representations of sex/gender. In order to address these issues, this article highlights key disputes and tensions in contemporary debates about transgender identity, citizenship and claims to legal rights, by examining the ways in which sex/gender identity is portrayed in three films -- Cabaret, Transamerica and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Each film demonstrates various ways of interpreting and reworking the constraints of heteronormative binary notions of sex/gender, and these struggles over meaning are also reflected in the ways in which different articulations of trans identity and citizenship claims have been legally and culturally recognized. The article explores the ways in which particular accounts of trans identity are given primacy within law, and how film can help us to reflect upon questions about which sexed/gendered people get to count as legal citizens. The paper concludes by reminding us that despite discourses of recognition, it is important to remember the exclusionary as well as inclusionary tendencies of law.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Dr. Seuss, Human Rights, and Self-Knowledge

Peter Nicolas, University of Washington School of Law, is publishing The Sneetches as an Allegory for the Gay Rights Struggle: Three Prisms in the New York Law School Law Review, volume 58 (2014). Here is the abstract.

Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s story The Sneetches, with its two classes of persons — the Star-Belly Sneetches and the Plain-Belly Sneetches — has been invoked by different minority groups over the years as an allegory for discriminatory treatment by the majority against that group, with a particular focus on anti-Semitism and discrimination against African-Americans. In this essay, I seek to invoke the themes found in the story as an allegory for the modern struggle for gay rights in the United States viewed through three different prisms.
The first, and most obvious, is the battle between the heterosexual majority and the gay minority represented by the Star-Belly and Plain-Belly Sneetches, respectively. The former seek to distinguish themselves from the latter through laws regarding marriage, parenting, and service in the military, as well as access to certain other markers of social acceptance, including the ability to donate blood and membership in private organizations such as the Boy Scouts.
However, The Sneetches serves as an excellent allegory for two mis-en-abîmes in the struggle for gay rights in the United States. One of these stories-within-the- story is a struggle between two different minority groups — gays and African-Americans — with some in the latter group rejecting efforts by the former to draw analogies to their own civil rights struggle. The second is a struggle between two different sub-groups of gays and lesbians — assimilationists and non-conformists — with the latter critical of what it views as insecurity on the part of the former in seeking mere formal equality by erasing valuable differences that set gays and lesbians apart from heterosexuals. Indeed, in this second struggle, some non-conformists have come out against the rights of gays and lesbians to marry or serve in the military.
In this essay, I demonstrate that in these struggles, each of these groups — African-Americans, assimilationist gays, and non-conformist gays — simultaneously internalize the discriminatory impulses of the Star-Belly Sneetches and the insecurities of the Plain-Belly Sneetches. Relying on the insights of Social Dominance Theory, I conclude that The Sneetches is not merely a story about a struggle between two different classes of people within society, but also about a struggle within each of us as individuals.

Download the full text of the article from SSRN at the link. 

As the Court Considers Prop 8 and DOMA

From the Washington Post, a survey of gays and lesbians in pop culture.