Charles on Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary American Culture

ICYMI: Casey Charles, Critical Queer Studies: Law, Film, and Fiction in Contemporary American Culture (Routledge, 2012). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Critical Queer Studies examines contemporary films and documentaries that dramatize the intersection of law and queer life, analyzing the effects of legal doctrines-jury selection, unwanted sexual advance, negligence, hate crimes, and gay marriage-on the production and reception of queer film and fiction. Exploring the interaction of these discourses by discussing internationally-known American films, the book demonstrates how the law maintains its hold over the queer subject through promoting certain ideological fictions and conversely how film and literature draw upon the material realities of queer legal status to dramatize conflicts between law and the marginalized subject. Critical Queer Studies synthesizes queer studies, law and literature, and film studies, engaging these fields to show how the struggle for gay and lesbian rights has influenced the production of film and fiction.

Professor Charles is a former attorney who now teaches English at the University of Montana.

Superheroes, Comics, and Queer Theory

Ramzi Fawaz is publishing The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (New York University Press, 2016). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

In 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as “new mutants,” social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and “freaks” soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America’s most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies – including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants –alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

Katie Kilkenny discusses the book here for Pacific Standard.

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