Using videorecorded data from canvassing interviews between activists and voters in Los Angeles, this thesis examines the ideologies of sexuality that emerge in conversation through the interactive construction of argumentative reasoning and socio-semiotic processes of ideological representation. Analysis focuses on the discursive connections canvassers and voters draw between attitudes toward LGBT politics and beliefs about what causes a person to be gay or bisexual. In contrast to ideologies circulated by the mass media, the data demonstrate broad variation in how voters' stances on politics and morality are tied to their own presentations of self and whether they believe homosexuality is something people choose, are influenced toward, or are born with. Nonetheless, canvassers misrecognize this variation and generate restrictive ideological representations through processes of iconization, erasure, and dichotomic replication. In order to better promote LGBT political causes, I call on activists to rethink their persuasive strategies in light of these findings.
The paper deals with the situation of sexual minorities in Bangladesh. Bangladesh, although historically a relatively tolerant and open-minded Muslim majority country, remains conservative on sexual matters. Therefore, large sections of Bangladesh's society seem to reject each sexual orientation which is perceived as "non-traditional" and portrays heterosexuality as the only accepted cultural norm. In consequence, homosexuality is becoming criminalized to such an extent that not only cultural values and societal norms but also national laws are in serious conflict with internationally accepted human, gender, and sexual rights.
This paper explores an anomaly in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights policy, laws allowing transsexual individuals to amend their birth certificates. Unlike most other LGBT rights policies, these statutes are often found in Southern and other conservative states. In fact, these laws are found in half of the Southern states. The array of states with these laws does not conform to the traditional pattern of morality politics laws that is commonly associated with LGBT rights. Using a Cox non-proportional hazards model, we find that the adoption of these laws was influenced by vertical diffusion of the Centers for Disease Control's model vital records recommendations. States with more professionalized bureaucracies, like Virginia and Georgia, were more likely to implement these recommended best practices. However, as transgender rights became more closely associated with the gay rights advocacy movement, this issue likely resembles morality policy. The result being that liberal and conservative elites respond to these policies in predictable manners. Notably, the political opportunity structure in Southern states has not allowed the passage of this type of statute since the incorporation of transgender rights into the LGBT social movement during the mid-1990s.
Karma Chavez's forthcoming book, Queer Migration Politics, suggests that neither the inclusionary politics of the mainstream US LGBT rights movement nor the utopian turn in some queer theory sufficiently capture the possibilities for queer politics in this moment. Drawing on the rhetoric of activists working at the various intersections and convergences of queer and immigration rights and justice, Chávez advocates that coalition is a productive alternative to both inclusionary and utopian approaches, even as coalitional approaches sometimes draw upon them both. In this talk, Chavez sketches the main arguments in the book and discusses some of the key case studies from activist rhetoric in the contemporary United States. A podcast of the lecture can also be found on the Decolonizing Sexualitie Network website at http://www.decolonizingsexualities.org/karma-chavez-lecture/.
In 2010, Portugal became the eighth country worldwide to approve same-sex civil marriage. Such legal change is a recent addition to the achievements that have put Portugal at the forefront of sexual citizenship rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Europe. This article investigates the political path of LGBT rights in this Southern European, majority Catholic, and post-dictatorship country, exploring the role of the Portuguese LGBT movement in contributing to change. This research highlights how the state is willing to compensate – via legal recognition – queer sexual encounters to the extent that they willingly embrace the dominant values of respectability and normalcy. In this respect, the approval of same-sex marriage offers the opportunity to discuss issues of agency, citizenship, recognition, and normativity. The paper begins by contextualizing sexual citizenship in democratic Portugal, providing an analytical account of the LGBT movement. In the second section, I suggest that a 'politics of containment' has characterized much of recent public discussion about sexual and reproductive rights, and I provide some examples. In the last section, I discuss the political and cultural implications of same-sex marriage law, with a particular focus on issues of normalization and homonationalism – that is how the state can actively contribute to the creation of the acceptable 'normal gay' with the compliance of LGBT activism.
Porn is so safe; everything is inscribed in a master plan. Like a drug designed to consume entertainment and to be back to work in time, pornography allows you to be at ease in the corner of your world. Through masturbatory micro-rituals, it reaffirms all Western societies values. Back when Pluto was a planet, pushed by the advent of digital technology, a lightning ripped through the grey sky of this boredom valley. In the historical period between the nineties and the two-thousands, pushed by the possibilities of digital communication, a new body front emerged as theoretical and activist battleground, deconstructing the dogmatic anti-sexwork positions of historical feminism and LGBT-identities. "Porn Studies" came out as an open, multidisciplinary field, mixing Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cinema History and Performance Art. One of the main goals stands in the use of pornography as text, in which to read and to deconstruct identity boundaries where either heteronormative or LGBT-gentrifying politics produce a flat market space. The application of D.I.Y.-ethics to "Porn Studies" moved the thought to a political and activist level through the practices of self- representation and cultural individualization.
Through an archive of court cases, prison interviews, morgue reports, film, and video, I argue that the promise of liberal democracy and the larger projects of humanism are built through the slaughter of other types of (non)sociality. Specifically, I attend to the murders of trans and queer people of color, histories of racialized violence, prisons, HIV/AIDS, and the animal industrial complex to knot together spaces of friction where non-mimetic histories might tell us something about one another. In other words, my project is not about substituting abject bodies, but shows how mechanisms of destruction are used and reused in the multiple projects of epistemic violence. To this end, I am interested in the ontological limits for those named as objects, under relentless force. Utilizing theories of the postcolonial, work in Black studies, feminist science studies, political and bioeconomies, and psychoanalysis, I argue that queer life is necessarily produced as the underside of gender normative, able bodied, white heterosexuality. Queer Remains is about the material remains of trans and queer people, the flesh and bones of those that once were, and also indexes the ways past violations haunt the present. The introduction, "The Afterlives of Social Death" opens with a reading of a closed circuit TV scene of Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman who was brutally beaten by Mississippi police while in custody in 2009. Here I situate my work, and its interventions, in various genealogies of Black, Queer, and Trans studies. The first chapter, "Queer Crypts: Overkill and Ontological Capture," thinks through an archive I assembled of murdered trans and queer people. I work through the gruesome horror of these murders to try to piece together a reading of violence that resists the "bad apple" model that popular LGBT politics argues. The true terror is not only in the pageantry of the murders, but the reality that they are not "outlaw practices," rather they constitute the norm of dominant culture. My second chapter, "Necrocapital: AIDS/Affective Accumulation/Viral Labor," argues that even within the biopolitical state, the reproduction of death is also a space of capitalist accumulation. The violence I highlight is the reality that the HIV cell lines are the alienated cell labor of a person living with HIV, and this labor produces drugs that the same laborer might not be able to afford. My third chapter, "Forced Life: Animality, Trans Captivity and Abolitionist Time," is an extended meditation on forms of "living" that might signify a space of (non)being more unthinkable than death. This chapter's materiality is the dual histories of the prison industrial complex and factory animal farming. Here I am interested in resituating abolition as a way of dislodging the work of humanism as the barometer of liberation. My conclusion, "Death Drops," offers a reading of a 14-year old gay youth's suicide letter, written before he hanged himself in 2010. While such acts are read to be pathological, Seth Walsh suggests in his note that he hopes by taking his own life, he will make those who bullied him "hurt like [he] hurts." Here I position the devastating act of queer suicide as a form of revolutionary violence and not only a "cry for help," but also a demand for action.
