Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture - Current Issue

This article explores the construction of gender identities and sexual orientations displayed in the 2018 anime series Darling in the Franxx by focusing on the series’ emphasis of its characters’ bodies. Karen Barad’s account of Agential Realism functions as a critical framework. The theory offers an understanding of matter as a dynamic process that provides a tool to think about bodies beyond the binary framework of female and male. The anime exhibits notions of gender fluidity, homosexuality and transsexuality. This analysis, therefore, aims to disclose how the sexed body is employed in the series’ conceptualization of gender identities and sexual orientation deviating from heteronormativity. Simultaneously, it discusses how Darling in the Franxx bears the risk of reaffirming the binary structure, as Barad’s theory does not necessarily follow an opening of binary structures.

Amidst heightened mainstreaming, are there factors that dampen camp enjoyment or engagement for fairly receptive, more or less camp-versed audiences? Even viewers responsive to camp subculture can be susceptible to a tendentious, contrary impulse: prescriptive sobriety regarding heteronormative totems, rituals and topics that a prevailing model of medicalized subjectivity enjoins one to take seriously by default. Building on established queer interventions in camp studies, this article proposes the term ‘therapeutic reflex’ for this normative, mockery-reluctant influence – distinct from heteronormativity but frequently collaborating with it. In wilfully camp fashion, this article looks at five mid-century American films – Now, Voyager (1942), Strangers on a Train (1951), The Bad Seed (1956), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Psycho (1960) – as specimens of camp resignification’s knack for exposing lingering therapeutic bias, its paradigm of subcultural conservancy and its affordance of normative scrutiny and counternormative dissidence.

This article aims to explore the affective capacities of the non-lesbian and lesbian, non-disabled and disabled, moving and fleeting bodies of Laila Kapoor, who suffers from cerebral palsy, in the 2014 Hindi film Margarita with a Straw. The study examines the ontology of Laila’s disabled and sexualized body that is entangled in an assemblage of relations of other human (characters Dhruv, Nima, Jared and Khanum) and non-human (architectural space, wheelchair, laptop, voice aggregator and music) bodies in the film. Drawing on the concept of assemblage, this article examines the affective flows, desire and becomings of disabled and queer bodies within Margarita with a Straw. It demonstrates how the discursive, material, post-human subjectivity of disabled and queer bodies in the film manifests the potential to destabilize the notion of what a body is by continuously negating the social disavowal of bodies through new emergent potentials, capacities and assemblages.

Review of: Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, John Waters (2022)

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-37418-572-5, h/bk, $26.00

ISBN 978-1-25086-723-0, p/bk, $18.00

Review of: Male Femininities, Dana Berkowitz, Elroi J. Windsor and C. Winter Han (eds) (2023)

New York: New York University Press, 408 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47983-961-2, h/bk, $99.00

ISBN 978-1-47980-878-6, p/bk, $35.00