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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
192009
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| Summary/Abstract |
‘I feel like a monster’, typed Chelsea Manning, referring partly to her gender identity but mostly to her job in the US military. Morally conflicted by what she saw and read while serving in Iraq, extremely isolated from her unit and experiencing emotional distress in relation to her gender identity, Manning would act on these stressors by leaking hundreds of documents to Wikileaks, and coming out as a (trans) woman. While she was quick to be classified as either a hero or a traitor, her case evades such dichotomisation and calls for more sophisticated readings. While a lot has been written on Manning in queer and transgender studies, surprisingly little has been published on this case in International Relations, not even in the quickly growing field of Queer IR. Yet Manning’s case helps highlight many of its core concerns in relation to issues of power, security, and sovereignty. In fact, what is often lost when reading the Manning case are the queer and trans logics of protection that were disrupted by Manning’s disclosures and that made such disruption possible. These dominant logics rely upon a culture of secrecy that must be preserved for performances of national security to hold true.
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| 2 |
ID:
191704
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This essay reads the aunties on the peripheries of Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frear’s film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), as minor figures, enacting a methodological turn to the seemingly insignificant in analyses of South Asian culture and sexuality. I ask why the aunties’ desire feels so impossible, especially in a film centred on a Pakistani protagonist’s queer utopia. Both ubiquitous and precluded from a complexity of desire, representations of the Pakistani aunty suffer from a deficit of imagination. Aunties tend to be shown as middle-aged women who surveil and police their kin and have a neutered or absent sexuality, as the film’s paradigmatic figuration of the aunty exemplifies. This article argues that such creative constraint derives from the construction of female sexuality as deviance in South Asia, and then tries to look beyond these constraints. While asking what a more capacious imagining of the aunty and her desires might make possible, I offer parameters for reading sexuality in Pakistan and its diasporas by foregrounding deprivation of pleasure and choice.
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| 3 |
ID:
186850
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| Summary/Abstract |
Departing from the prevailing, individualist perspective of freedom, emphasizing individuals’ independence and the maximization of self-interest via unconstrained decision-making, this article applies the concepts of practised freedom and relational autonomy to explore the lived experience of Chinese rural-to-urban migrant gay men. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in the ‘urban villages’ (城中村) of South China, we examine the ways in which rural migrant gay men achieve a sense of freedom, which is dependent on rural-to-urban migration, informal manufacturing jobs, and other queer peers, thus demonstrating a certain level of relational autonomy. Our article clearly shows how these men have come to identify as homeless guabi (挂逼, local slang for those who suffer a tragic and mysterious fate) and spend their days wandering, with no interest in stable work or long-term monogamous relationships. Our research offers a first-hand anthropological account of young adults from the rural working classes who prefer to ‘lie flat’ (躺平) – they refuse to strive for upward social mobility because they believe that upward social mobility is unattainable and a factory job too taxing.
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| 4 |
ID:
125731
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
When we and several authors of the articles included here originally debated the idea of this special issue, our aim was to respond to what we perceived as a standstill that locks Middle Eastern queer studies into a premodern Eastern versus modern Western-oriented division. While the East is studied as a repository of tradition with an identifiable sexual and amorous nomenclature, the West is often presented as a fixed hegemonic structure distinct from the East, regardless of the long traditions of cultural exchange and the specific forms of translation and dialogue that take shape when the identities and models of desire associated with the West travel or are performed outside it or at its periphery. This division has generated a set of binaries pertaining to the applicability of terms (gay, lesbian, homosexual) and theoretical frameworks (queer theory) to Middle Eastern literary and cultural contexts. It is our belief that critical engagements with queer Arab and Iranian sexualities in literature and culture ought to situate current discussions in queer theory within debates and concerns arising from specific Middle Eastern social and political realities.
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