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- Volume 2, Issue 3, 2017
Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2017
Volume 2, Issue 3, 2017
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Pegging and the heterosexualization of anal sex: An analysis of Savage Love advice
By Jade AguilarAbstractThis article analyses the Savage Love advice columns that discuss the act of ‘pegging’, a term that US sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his readers coined in 2001 to describe a woman anally penetrating a man with a strap-on dildo. Since the term was coined, the act (and the term) has gained popularity in the United States, appearing regularly in the mass media. Using a queer theoretical approach, this article shows that while straight-identified peggers benefit from the gains that gays/lesbians/queers have made in expanding norms in sexual culture, they simultaneously engage in a form of ideological work to expand the definition of ‘straightness’ in order to maintain their straight identity and the accompanying social privileges.
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A queer aesthetic: Representations of gender and sexuality in Sadie Lee’s Tomboys and Crossdressers
More LessAbstractThis article examines a series of paintings created by the artist Sadie Lee. Although these paintings are over twenty years old, their subject matter has salience to continuing debates about the nature of the relationship (if any) between gender and sexuality, and the role of clothing and physical appearance in self-representation, recognition and subjectivity. In focusing on queer women who do not easily fit within the homonormative cultural logics of mainstream lesbian culture, Lee directly challenges and enlarges contemporary understandings of current and historical queer subjectivities and sexualities. Drawing on recent scholarship regarding queer utopian looking practices and emotion, this article seeks to contribute towards ongoing debates about lesbian representation within popular culture by exploring the queer aesthetic of Lee’s paintings. What is ultimately argued is that Lee’s paintings generate an affective experience that offers us with a critical opportunity to disrupt the ‘straight time’ of the mainstream visual canon.
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Violent bodies and victim narratives: On the cinematic activism of Gregg Araki’s The Living End
By Robert MillsAbstractThis article examines how director Gregg Araki uses violence as a means of political contestation in his queer ‘road movie’ The Living End (1992). Closely analysing the formal and aesthetic construction of the film’s various violent moments by considering them alongside both specific activist practices and works of theory, this discussion outlines the material effects, and subsequently the significance of Araki’s abrasive, often confrontational style. Throughout, this article argues that The Living End’s use of violence operates on a much more complex level than a lot of critical discussions recognize, moving its focus away from the currently dominant practice of attributing significance to ‘homo pomo’ (homosexual postmodern) stylistics and instead considering the contextually specific political realities that prompted such representational excess.
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Male intimacy in Marco Berger’s Plan B and Hawaii
By Andrew KornAbstractArgentinian director Marco Berger has made representing love between men, rather than their sex and individual sexual identities, his cinema’s objective. Critics and scholars have noted his original refocusing of bonds between men, which is consonant with contemporary queer Latin/o American film and theory. To elucidate Berger’s relationality, this article outlines the formal and thematic elements in his short film El reloj (The Watch) (2008) and examines their expansion in his features Plan B (2009) and Hawaii (2013). Uniting Berger’s idea of ‘love’ with Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘friendship’, I argue that the features visualize the formation of a unique male intimacy in which men can explore each other’s physicality, share affectionate gestures, express sensitivity, play together, take care of each other and have sex. Their bonds lessen heteronormative aggression and dominance and transform sexuality, as they no longer derive pleasure solely from the sexual act but rather from the range of sensations, emotions and experiences of their multifaceted intimacy.
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Abjectly melodramatic: The monstrous body and the queer politics of Tamam mıyız? (Are We OK?)
By Baran GermenAbstractThis article seeks the queer politics of melodrama in the very abjectness of the form with a reading of Çağan Irmak’s 2013 popular motion picture Tamam mıyız? (Are We OK?). Telling the story of an unlikely friendship between two men, the film thematizes abjection as a social phenomenon with its abject bodies: Temmuz, a bohemian gay sculptor, and İhsan, a suicidal young man with tetra-amelia syndrome. Are We OK? capitalizes on melodrama’s affective potency to render its characters sympathetic through a narrative of victimhood shared by both men. This article demonstrates that the film nonetheless struggles to register these abject bodies in a socially intelligible relationship within the confines of the norm. In a performative act evocative of abjection, the film pushes Temmuz and İhsan to the end of melodrama, where their bodily unison forms an embodied queer subjectivity. The improbability of this body situated in an anti-oedipal temporal impasse between a post-melodramatic future and a pre-abject past exposes the ineptness of the categories of relationality that govern the domain of the social.
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Failure reconnaissance: The virtual problem of the It Gets Better Project
More LessAbstractThe It Gets Better Project, founded by Dan Savage and Terry Miller and launched in response to a spate of queer teen suicides, purports to offer messages of hope and encouragement to youth struggling with issues related to their sexual identities. Although many critics have already noted the problematic nature of It Gets Better’s platform and messaging, this article critiques the project with a twofold approach in order to highlight alternate and more useful approaches to messaging queer teens. First, works by theorists including Lee Edelman and Michael Warner offer insight into the project’s dangerous propensity for encouraging assimilation and normalization within the larger social apparatuses that fostered a need for the project in the first place. Second, this analysis builds on Judith Halberstam’s work on the legacy of queer failure, in addition to emphasizing Kate Bornstein’s pragmatism, to propose methods of messaging that are materially helpful and instructional to the queer teen, the queer community and potentially the culture as a whole.
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Book Reviews
Authors: Jordan Forrest Miller, Rachel Walerstein and Sasha CocarlaAbstractOut Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on Yo uTube, Tobias Raun (2016) New York: Routledge, 228 pp., ISBN: 9781472466761, h/bk, $149.95
Queer: A Graphic History, Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele (2016) London: Icon Books, 175 pp., ISBN: 9781785780714, h/bk, US $17.95; ISBN: 9781785780714, p/bk, UK £11.99
The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Yo uth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship, Andrew Scahill (2015) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 193 pp., ISBN: 9781137488503, h/bk, $95.00
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Classic Media Review
More LessAbstractImperfectly, recorded and produced by Ani Difranco (1992) Buffalo, NY: Righteous Babe Records
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