The ' argument from queerness', made famous by J. L. Mackie, remains one of the most influential arguments in metaethics. However, many philosophers focus on just one or two of its strands, while others assume a particular but by no means universal reading of it. This essay attempts to disentangle and evaluate all strands of the argument. Surprisingly, when this is done, not much is left as a distinct argument from queerness. Much of the argument collapses into other (...) types of argument, and what is left, though intuitively appealing, is not viable as philosophical argument. (shrink)

In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or “ Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non- factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to (...) state facts.1 Define semantic realism to be the view that ascriptions of meaning are apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, and are, at least in some instances, true. Semantic realism, thus defined, is a form of cognitivism about semantic judgement, according to which judgements ascribing meaning express beliefs, states apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues against semantic realism, and in favour of a form of semantic non-cognitivism. However, another form of opposition to semantic realism accepts that semantic judgements express beliefs but asserts that those beliefs are systematically and uniformly false.2 This cognitivist form of opposition to semantic realism is similar to the error-theoretic form of opposition to moral realism mooted by J.L. Mackie in the first chapter of his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. In this paper I will investigate whether there is a plausible analogue of Mackie’s “argument from queerness” that can be used to make a case for an error-theory of semantic judgement. In §2 I set out what I take to be Mackie’s argument from queerness against moral realism. In §3 I argue that there is no straightforward and plausible analogue of that argument that would justify an error theory about ascriptions of meaning. In §4 and §5 I defend the argument of §3 against an objection developed in a recent paper by Daniel Whiting. (shrink)

The argument from queerness is one of the most important arguments for moral error theory. Moral error theory holds that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed or, more precisely, that all moral judgements are false. The argument from queerness, in the version I am concerned with, claims that moral discourse is centrally committed to the thesis that moral facts entail categorical reasons, understood as irreducibly normative favouring relations, and that if this thesis were true, moral facts would be queer. (...) In this paper, I argue that axiology does not fall prey to the argument from queerness. Axiology is the part of moral discourse that examines which things are good, which things are bad, and what makes good things good and bad things bad. I argue that axiology survives the argument from queerness for three reasons. First, many axiological judgements are not committed to the thesis in question. Second, some judgements about moral value are committed to the thesis but do not belong to axiology. Third, some axiological judgements are committed to the thesis but can simply be removed from axiological discourse. (shrink)

This essay explores what it means to “queer” ethics. Writing from a perspective that is both personal and philosophical, I argue that we cannot queer ethics simply by expanding the range of topics studied by analytic philosophers to include things like kink, misgendering, and going stealth. Queering projects in analytic ethics require queer sensibility, ways of doing philosophy that deviate from analytic philosophy’s dominant norms. The main contribution of this essay is to articulate this sensibility in methodological terms and highlight (...) its potential to transform analytic ethics. (shrink)

This paper describes the stakes of ongoing conversations in areas of queer theory and black studies on the epistemological, ethical, and political role of unintelligibility. In line with longstanding philosophical questions about the value of aporia as gap or absence in our understanding, thinkers like Lee Edelman and Frank Wilderson III have articulated how black and queer people have regularly fallen into spaces of unintelligibility as they have run against given formations of the social world. These thinkers have theorized what (...) this unintelligibility – what they will call this queerness or blackness – is other than an impetus for integration. The paper describes the dichotomy between two key positions in this conversation, resistance and refusal, suggesting these positions offer challenges better addressed through a conception of estrangement. (shrink)

Introduction : low theory -- Animating revolt and revolting animation -- Dude, where's my phallus? forgetting, losing, looping -- The queer art of failure -- Shadow feminisms : queer negativity and radical passivity -- "The killer in me is the killer in you" : homosexuality and fascism -- Animating failure: ending, fleeing, surviving.

In his recent book Error Theory: History, Critique, Defence, Jonas Olson attempts to revive the argument from queerness originally made famous by J.L. Mackie. In this paper, we do three things. First, we eliminate four untenable formulations of the argument. Second, we argue that the most plausible formulation is one that depends crucially upon considerations of parsimony. Finally, we evaluate this formulation of the argument. We conclude that it is unproblematic for proponents of moral non-naturalism—the target of the argument (...) from queerness. (shrink)

I met Kyla at a small conference on a rainy weekend in February 2018. I wandered into the workshop shortly after it had started, and the room was filled with Black women designing vision boards. Kyla didn't stop what she was doing as she replied to the question the presenter posed to the room. Her hands continued moving, cutting glossy paper or pasting shiny gems onto her board: “When I tell people that my organization raises money to take girls abroad, (...) so many of them say, ‘Well why wouldn't you raise money for them to buy clothes or eat. They need food and education before they need to travel.’ But I always say, ‘But what about Black joy?’”. (shrink)

This article explores some of the challenges and benefits of doing a dissertation with participants from a population to which I belong and on a topic some consider controversial, that of gay and lesbian educators. I describe the homophobia I experienced and how that homophobia affected my choice of topic, the research process, and my job prospects. Each step of this research journey presented me with a variety of delicate decisions. I discuss my thought processes in resolving these dilemmas and (...) some of the practical solutions I used to address a variety of difficulties. Although written specifically about doing research with gay and lesbian teachers, many of the lessons I learned throughout this process can be applied to a range of research situations. For example, many researchers share cultural backgrounds with their participants. This presents both the opportunity to establish rapport with participants quickly but also the danger of the researcher reading his or her own experiences into the data. I describe some of the ways I addressed this issue as well as others commonly faced by those doing dissertations. I conclude that doing a dissertation on a topic I feel passionately about sustained me throughout the dissertation process. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with (...) death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

"Annamarie Jagose knows that queer theory did not spring full-blown from the head of any contemporary theorist. It is the outcome of many different influences and sources, including the homophile movement, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism. In pointing to the history of queer theory-a history that all too often is ignored or elided-Jagose performs a valuable service." -Henry Abelove, co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader The political and academic appropriation of the term queer over the last several years (...) has marked a shift in the study of sexuality from a focus on supposedly essential categories as gay and lesbian to more fluid or queer notions of sexual identity. Yet queer is a category still in the process of formation. In Queer Theory , Annamarie Jagose provides a clear and concise explanation of queer theory, tracing it as part of an intriguing history of same-sex love over the last century. Blending insights from prominent theorists such as Judith Butler and David Halperin, Jagose argues that queer theory's challenge is to create new ways of thinking, not only about fixed sexual identities such as heterosexual and homosexual, but also about other supposedly essential notions such as sexuality and gender and even man and woman. (shrink)

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. (...) This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world. (shrink)

Is queer social science possible? Early queer theorists disparaged empiricism as a normalizing, modernist discourse. Nonetheless, LGBTQI+ social scientists have applied queer concepts in empirical projects. Rather than seek a queer method, we ask, Is there an empirical perspective that (ontologically) envisions social relations more queerly—attending to discursive and materialist productions of reality? Dorothy Smith’s work foregrounds people’s activities of engaging texts and satisfies Black queer studies’ and new materialisms’ critiques of early queer theory. Underutilized and often misread, especially its (...) ethnomethodological sensibilities and its vision of actors as relational, practical actors, her work shows how my race is not mine, it is ours; your sexual orientation is not yours, it is ours; their gender is not theirs, it is ours. Smith offers an ontology without essence, grand theory, or normativity, facilitating a range of queer, interpretive projects—from the intersectional to the transnational to the embodied. (shrink)

Introduction: find your way -- Orientations toward objects -- Sexual orientation -- The orient and other others -- Conclusion: disorientation and queer objects.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Identifying (with) the Queerness of Melville’s PierreNeill Matheson (bio)James Creech. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.James Creech’s Closet Writing/Gay Reading is a remarkable book in several ways. First, it offers a significantly new interpretation of Melville’s enigmatic novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), which has increasingly been viewed as marking a crucial turning point in Melville’s career, gaining the status (...) of a major if equivocal work of nineteenth-century American fiction. Creech’s reading of Pierre adds much to previous work on homosexuality in Melville’s writings, making an important contribution to the history of Melville criticism. Supported by a shrewd, detailed analysis of the novel, and some surprising extratextual evidence, he argues compellingly that Pierre is preoccupied with the closeting of gay identity and with the tenuous possibilities for homosexual self-expression in a repressively heterosexual culture. Nevertheless, as its subtitle suggests, Pierre is a work that advertises its own ambiguity with a high degree of ironic self-awareness. Creech’s claims about it, made with a certain bravado, though accompanied by many hesitations and caveats, seem at times to diminish the complexity with which the novel itself explores the problem of identity.In addition to its interest as a reading of Pierre, Closet Writing/Gay Reading also represents a provocative statement within the wider context of critical and theoretical work on homosexuality, staking out a position that resists both the problematizing of identity performed by queer theory and the historicizing aims of much recent gay studies work. Creech elaborates the notion of “identificatory” or “camp reading” with great self-consciousness about its place in the critical landscape, so that it is as much a reaction to various theoretical positions as a stance in its own right. It is the combination of this critical hyperawareness, as if continually looking over one’s shoulder, and a kind of willed innocence with respect to interpretive problems that is most extraordinary, and it is worth exploring further.If one of the book’s aims is to add to a theory of the closet, it is also concerned with describing a poststructuralist theory that is in complicity with the suppression or emptying-out of homosexual meaning. Creech’s argument that deconstruction in particular has been blind to homosexual content contains in its margins a personal narrative of his own emergence from a theory closet. One of the strategies of Creech’s reading is to make his coming-out story converge with the one that he attributes to Pierre: his unambiguous claim for Pierre’s gay identity is simultaneously an avowal of a critical approach no longer in conflict with his own sexual identity. He alludes to his early and lingering attraction to deconstruction, the subsequent discovery that its influence, inhibiting unequivocal identity claims, prevented him from affirming his sexuality, and his tentative, incomplete, but increasingly assured rejection of that influence. Creech [End Page 30] asserts more than once that an analysis of Pierre’s impossible mourning would be valuable, but the story of his own critical history begins to sound like an account of the identifications, losses, and self-reproaches typical of melancholia. In this light Closet Writing/Gay Reading is interesting not because it is itself representative of recent gay criticism, but because it is a highly original, idiosyncratic, and suggestive response to a representative set of critical pressures surrounding the problem of identity.The central methodological claim of Closet Writing/Gay Reading is that identification is the form of reader response necessary to bring closeted homosexual meaning to light. Creech argues that the task of gay literary criticism is to counter the reductiveness of traditional, straight criticism by “putting homosexuality back in its rightful place, reimagining the text from which it has been censored, within which it has only been allowed an encrypted and ciphered status, or out of which it has been abstracted” [29]. Gay literary criticism faces the interpretive problem of recovering homosexual meaning that may have become nearly invisible through the combined effects of the restrictive cultural imperatives under which the author was writing and the reductiveness of later criticism... (shrink)

In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu demonstrates how queer Marxist critics in China use queer theory as a non-liberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation, and in doing so, he revises current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be.

Self-tracking-technologies can serve as a prominent example of how digital technologies put to test established practices, institutions, and structures of medicine and healthcare. While proponents emphasize the potentials, e.g., for individualized healthcare and new research data, opponents stress the risk that these technologies will reinforce gender-related inequalities. -/- While this has been made clear from—often intersectional—feminist perspectives since the introduction of such technologies, we aim to provide a queer-feminist perspective on self-tracking applications in healthcare by analyzing three concrete cases. In (...) this way, we want to show why such a perspective is helpful in assessing self-tracking technologies and how such a perspective might contribute to a queering of healthcare. -/- After a short introduction to self-tracking in healthcare and the corresponding risks of reproducing gender-related inequalities, we introduce queer bioethics as a methodology to examine structural discrimination and marginalization in bioethical research. We apply this framework in the analysis of three exemplary self-tracking applications from the areas of nutrition/fitness, reproductive health, and mental health. In the subsequent discussion of these results against the backdrop of already existing queer-sensitive technologies, we identify an equal access, a subversive design, an inclusive database, and a diversity-sensitive and discriminatory-critical definition of purposes as well as individualized usage possibilities as first possible starting points for a queering of self-tracking applications. Finally, we draw conclusions, how such a critical perspective on self-tracking applications might also contribute to a queering of the healthcare system at a structural level. (shrink)

This book aims to productively engage the pioneering work of Queer theorists and point toe way towards a new sociological Queer studies.

The most resounding expression of the truly unprecedented mobilizations of migrants throughout the United States in 2006 was a mass proclamation of collective defiance: ¡Aquí Estamos, y No Nos Vamos! [Here we are, and we're not leaving!]. This same slogan was commonly accompanied by a still more forcefully incorrigible rejoinder: ¡Y Si Nos Sacan, Nos Regresamos! [... and if they throw us out, we'll come right back!]. It is quite striking and, as this essay contends, not merely provocative but genuinely (...) productive to note the affinity between the crucial articulation of this radically open-ended politics of migrant presence with the similarly abject and profoundly destabilizing politics of queer presence. In a manner remarkably analogous to the slogan, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!", the dynamic enunciation of these phrases in the context of the mass mobilizations of migrants asserted an irreducible spirit of irreverence and disaffection for state power. Both gestures unreservedly and unapologetically assert not only their irreversible presence, furthermore, but also uphold the intractable challenge of their own intrinsic incorrigibility. (shrink)

Queering Paradigms IVa: Insurgências queer ao Sul do equador, junto com o volume Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms (Lewis et al. 2014), divulga de forma multilíngue pesquisas apresentadas no 4° Congresso Internacional Queering Paradigms (QP4), sediado no Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Ambos os volumes compartilham o objetivo de analisar o status quo e os desafios para o futuro dos Estudos Queer a partir de uma perspectiva inter/multidisciplinar, concentrando-se sobre as relações entre os eixos Sul-Norte. (...) O presente livro oferece capítulos escritos em português e espanhol, línguas subalternas na academia global, visando a privilegiar vozes e conhecimentos do Sul. Os trabalhos reunidos neste volume insurgem contra a colonização epistemológica dos corpos que habitam o Sul global e apontam para os problemas que surgem quando a(s) Teoria(s) Queer do Norte são aplicadas sem adaptação a outros contextos. Além de violências epistemológicas, a falta de atenção ao que acontece ao sul do equador pode levar a uma paralização do debate queer. O convite que esses capítulos fazem é um desafio a olhar para onde não se costuma olhar e ouvir as vozes que não se costuma ouvir, de forma a devolver ao queer seu potencial de contestação. Queering Paradigms IVa: Insurgências queer ao Sul do equador, junto con el tomo Queering Paradigms IV: South-North Dialogues on Queer Epistemologies, Embodiments and Activisms (Lewis et al. 2014), difunde de forma multilingüe algunas de las investigaciones presentadas en el 4o Congreso Internacional Queering Paradigms (QP4), en Río de Janeiro, Brasil. Ambos tomos comparten el objetivo de analizar el estado actual y los desafíos para el futuro de los Estudios Queer desde una perspectiva inter/multidisciplinaria, concentrándose sobre las relaciones entre el eje Sur-Norte. El presente libro ofrece capítulos escritos en portugués y español, lenguas subalternas en la academia global, con la pretensión de privilegiar voces y conocimientos del Sur. Los trabajos reunidos en este tomo se insurgen contra la colonización epistemológica de los cuerpos que habitan el Sur global y apuntan a los problemas que surgen cuando la(s) Teoría(s) Queer del Norte son aplicadas sin adaptación a otros contextos. Además de las violencias epistemológicas, la falta de atención a lo que acontece al sur del Ecuador puede llevar a una paralización del debate queer. La propuesta de estos capítulos es un desafío a mirar para dónde no se suele mirar y a escuchar las voces que no se suelen escuchar, para devolverle al queer su potencial de contestación. (shrink)

Queer Impact and Practices brings together chapters arising from the third annual Queering Paradigms conference. Queer Theory is still evolving and extending the range of its enquiry. It maps out new territories via radical contestations of the categories of gender and sexuality. This approach de-centers assumptions of heteronormativity, but at the same time critiques a new homonormativity. This book incorporates the work of queer theorists and queer activists who are seeking new boundaries to cross as well as new disciplines and (...) social relations to queer. The sections of this book interrogate the impact of Queer Theory in studies of culture, nationalism, ethnography, linguistics, psychology, intimacy and activism. Chapters address contemporary theorizing about gay citizenship and 'homonationalism' as well as a critique of gay visibility. Other topics include the symbolics of queer subversion and transgression in performers who transgress gender and sexuality codes. Queer activists extend their analysis into the world of punk, Buddhist religious teaching and Native Studies. This book demonstrates that Queer Theory, as well as being a disposition, is now deployed by many researchers as a legitimate framework of analysis that questions many of the categories, constructs and relationships we encounter in twenty-first century society." -- Publisher's information. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between feminist studies of motherhood and queer theory, Mothering Queerly, Queering Motherhood articulates a provocative philosophy of queer kinship that need not be rooted in lesbian or gay sexual identities. Working from an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates feminist philosophy and queer, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, Shelley M. Park offers a powerful critique of an ideology she terms monomaternalism. Despite widespread cultural insistence that every child should have one—and only one—“real” mother, many contemporary family constellations do not (...) fit this mandate. Park highlights the negative consequences of this ideology and demonstrates how families created through open adoption, same-sex parenting, divorce, and plural marriage can be sites of resistance. Drawing from personal experiences as both an adoptive and a biological mother and juxtaposing these autobiographical reflections with critical readings of cultural texts representing multi-mother families, Park advocates a new understanding of postmodern families as potentially queer coalitional assemblages held together by a mixture of affection and critical reflection premised on difference. (shrink)

Ideal for courses in philosophy and gender, sexuality, race and disability studies, Queering Philosophy provides a critical introduction to and engagement with current conversations and emerging themes at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy. This accessible and important book advances a queer feminist critique.

The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be ‘out’ to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means uncontested political goals. This paper analyzes different school initiatives by and/or for queer students and asks how political these initiatives are from the perspective of (...) Jacques Rancière's conception of politics. In particular, it employs Rancière's work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) to analyze conditions of visibility and sayability and the political risks and benefits that gaining visibility and sayability carries for queer students and teachers. The paper brings Rancière's distinction between identification and subjectification into conversation with Judith Butler's work on the governing of intelligibility by social norms, and the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’. Finally, Rancière's work on the role of allies in political interventions that shift the distribution of the sensible provides a fresh reading of Gay‐Straight Alliances in schools and the work of queer allies more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article takes Judith Butler’s epistemological problem of “framing” alongside Dana S. Belu’s notion of “reproductive enframing” to analyze whose bodies lie outside the borders of who is considered the appropriate reproductive citizen. Are all bodies subject to reproductive enframing under a totalizing technological ideology that Martin Heidegger refers to as Gestell? Or, does Belu’s notion of “partial enframing” allow a space to queer, or upset, our current understanding of such ideology? By queering the way that we currently view (...) assisted reproductive technology, can we widen the frame or cross its borders? In this article, I am primarily concerned with the necessity to queer French reproductive policy, though the questions I raise can be extended to any critiques of ART. (shrink)

“Doing Gender,” Candance West and Don Zimmerman’s famous 1987 article, has become a folk concept—a trope or commonsense resource within the sociology of gender. Yet at the same time, most gender scholars overlook its ethnomethodological premise, visible in both poststructuralist misunderstandings of its argument outside the discipline of sociology and what I term a realist misunderstanding of it in the study of structures and identities within the discipline. Reading West and Zimmerman queerly while clarifying ethnomethodology’s ontology, I refocus attention for (...) critical scholarship on ethnomethodology’s analytic sensibilities for research on gender, race, and sexuality, among other embodiments. Specifically, ethnomethodology reframes a vision of actors as relational, practical actors; repositions gender as accountable, jointly produced social relations, not individual identity; and foregrounds resistance in addition to conformity. Hence, my gender (race/class/sexuality) is not mine; it is ours. Ethnomethodology’s ontological shift in temporality to reality-in-production enables interpretive-materialism: a queer, anti-racist, intersectional sociology that is future-facing and in motion. (shrink)

This book investigates the argument from queerness against moral realism, famously put forward by J. L. Mackie in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). The book can be divided into two parts. The first part, roughly comprising chapters 1 and 2, gives a critical overview of Mackie’s metaethics. In chapter 1 it is suggested that the argument from queerness is the only argument that poses a serious threat to moral realism. A partial defense of this idea is offered (...) in chapter 2 via a discussion of Mackie’s argument from relativity, which is concluded to fail for reasons that generalize to other influential arguments against moral realism. Chapter 2 also explores Mackie’s moral semantics at length. The key notion of authoritative prescriptivity is analyzed, and a new interpretation of Mackie’s error theory is defended. In the second part, consisting roughly of chapters 3 and 4, the argument from queerness is taken apart and put back together, resulting in several different versions. Chapter 3 discusses three different supervenience-related arguments, all of which are found to be unpersuasive. Chapter 4 develops two different versions of the core argument from queerness, focusing on authoritative prescriptivity. A total of thirteen objections are discussed and rejected. It is concluded that the two arguments do indeed refute the targeted versions of moral realism. Finally, in chapter 5 the entire discussion is briefly summarized. (shrink)

The timeline of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch that Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer say began in the late 18th century with the invention of the steam engine – seems like a brief and inconsequential blip, against the time scales embodied by the microbial communities. Wolbachia bacteria predate Anthropos by some 150 million years, and will likely outlast us. Wolbachia bacteria are worthy of their own geological epoch because they offer a fresh vantage point on one of the most (...) pressing ethical questions of our time: ‘How should we love in a time of extinction?’ Narratives about the Wolbachiacene have the potential to disrupt the overwhelming stories of tragedy orbiting around Anthropos, with disquieting and generative accounts of interspecies romance. Wolbachia often perform queer tricks inside their invertebrate hosts. In some host species these bacteria induce parthenogenesis – completely eliminating males from the population. Wolbachia can also transform genetic males into reproductively viable females. (shrink)

There is increasing resistance to gendering in contemporary society, seen in gender-neutral childrearing and pronouns, expansion of legal sex categories and intersex rights, and queer and genderqueer movements. This timely book considers the utopian question of whether, and how, gender could be eradicated and how we might understand identity and relationships without it. It considers the implications of arguments from 'new materialism' about the malleability of biological sex, and of queer theory and gender deconstruction, for social change and political practice. (...) The original theoretical and practical argument is for an androgynous, reciprocal ethic or way of being in the world that transcends both sex/gender and some of the debates plaguing gender studies. It takes inspiration from real-world queer and post-gender practices, for example by being written using gender-neutral pronouns, and also considers the reality of implementing such an ethic in a highly gendered world, especially in cross-cultural contexts. (shrink)

This paper discusses a number of critical ethical problems that arise in interactions between queer patients and health care professionals attending them. Using real-world examples, we discuss the very practical problems queer patients often face in the clinic. Health care professionals face conflicts in societies that criminalise same sex relationships. We also analyse the question of what ought to be done to confront health care professionals who propagate falsehoods about homosexuality in the public domain. These health care professionals are more (...) often than not motivated by strong religious convictions that conflict with mainstream medical opinion on homosexuality. We argue that they ought to be held accountable for their conduct by their professional statutory bodies, given that they abuse their professional standing to propagate sectarian views not representative of their profession. Lastly, we propose that medical schools have special responsibilities in training future health care professionals that will enable them to respond professionally to queer patients seeking health care. (shrink)

Work in the field of feminist logic is still rather scarce and the field itself remains a contested area of study, but still, it is developing. One approach concentrates on analyzing logical systems with respect to structural features that may perpetuate sexism and oppression or, on the other hand, features that may be helpful for resisting and opposing these social phenomena. Upon this assumption, I want to investigate possible applications of queer feminist views on (philosophy of) logic with respect to (...) a very specific group, namely contradictory logics, i.e., logical systems containing contradictions in their set of theorems. I want to show that, on the one hand, the formal set-up of contradictory logics makes them well-suited from the perspectives of feminist logic and, on the other hand, that queer feminist theories provide a relevant, and so far undeveloped, conceptual motivation for contradictory logics. Thus, bringing together contradictory logics and queer feminist theories may prove fruitful both as a ‘real-life’ motivation for these peripheral logical systems and as a formal basis for a philosophical field that is still characterized by a distrust of formalism. (shrink)

Contemporary humanoid sex robots have been rightfully criticized for their heteronormative and misogynistic design. In this article, we aim to explore the diverse possibilities of queering sex robots. While previous research on queering sex robots has predominantly suggested making humanoid sex robots more diverse by offering more options in terms of the designed gender, age, skin color, body shape, etc. of the robot, our aim is to think the question of queering sex robots beyond diversifying humanoid design options alone. To (...) do this, we present two theories in tandem — Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism — to approach this possibility. Our paper, therefore, accomplishes two things: first, we provide philosophical and ethical foundations for queering sex robots based on Queer Lacanian Psychoanalysis and New Materialism. Second, we derive implications from these insights on how sex robots can be queered beyond multiplying humanoid design options. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of queer theory, along with examples of how we and others have applied queer theory in social psychology research. Throughout the chapter, we highlight the differences between queer theory, queer research methodologies, queer studies, and ‘queer’ as an identity category. The chapter first presents a focused review of social-psychological literature that has used the term ‘queer’, before considering research examples that illustrate the differences outlined above.

Through a careful reading of Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism alongside Volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality, I argue that scholarship on both neoliberalism and queer theory should heed Foucault’s framing of both neoliberalism and sexuality as central to biopolitics. I thus offer two correctives to these fields of scholarship: for scholarship on neoliberalism, I locate a way to address the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism in a manner that Marxist analyses fail to provide; for scholarship in queer (...) theory, I warn that the longstanding embrace of non-conformity as a mode of resistance to normalization is suspiciously neoliberal. I conclude with the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of jouissance as a non-fungible limit to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism that, if historicized and especially racialized, might offer a meaningful response to the increasing ethical collapse wrought by the neoliberalization of our lives. (shrink)

_Queer Theory and Social Change_ argues that there is a crisis within Queer theory over whether or not its theories can actually deliver change. Max Kirsch presents a challenging alternative to the current fascination with post-modern analyses of identity, culture, and difference. It emphasizes the need for a discussion of the importance of communities and the role of globalization on queer movements.

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of (...) dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socio-economic, political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

‘Why Queer Diaspora?’ intervenes at the intersection of queer theory and diaspora studies to ask how the conditions of geographical mobility produce new experiences and understandings of sexuality and gender identity. More particularly, this essay argues against a prevalent critical slippage between queer and diaspora, through which the queer is read as a mobile category that, like diaspora, disrupts the stability of fixed identity categories and thus represents a liberatory position within the material and geographical displacements of globalization. Instead, I (...) posit that the work of ‘queering’ diaspora must be to examine the new articulations of normative and queer as they emerge in the transformations of the late twentieth century. To this end, the essay looks to two contemporary documentaries, Remote Sensing (Ursula Biemann, 2001) and Mariposas en el Andamio/butterflies on the Scaffold (Margaret Gilpin and Luis Felipe Bernaza, 1996), as models of alternative articulations of the queer and the diasporic. Ultimately, I argue, it is a focus on the labour through which the seemingly natural categories of gender and sexuality are produced, that a queer diasporic criticism might offer. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on sexuality has focused primarily on sexual orientation. Yet, there’s another normatively significant phenomenon in the neighborhood: sexual identity. Here, I develop a cultural theory of queer and straight sexual identity. In particular, I argue that sexual identity is a matter of inclusion/exclusion in relation to queer and straight cultures, which are differentiated in terms of characteristic practices involving kinship and political resistance.

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I (...) explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty. (shrink)

In this critical personal narrative Harris explores some of the gaps between conceptions of feminist thought and feminist practice. Harris focuses on an analysis of race, class, and desire divisions within feminist sexual politics. She suggests a queer black feminist theory and practice that calls into question naturalized identities and communities, and therefore what feminism and feminist practices might entail.

A sociologist examines contemporary engagements of queer bodies and identities with fertility biomedicine. Drawing on social science, media culture, and the author’s own empirical research, three questions frame the analysis: 1. In what ways have queers on the gendered margins moved into the center and become implicated or central users of biomedicine’s fertility offerings? 2. In what ways is Fertility Inc. transformed by its own incorporation of various gendered and queered bodies and identities? And 3. What are the biosocial and (...) bioethical implications of expanded queer engagements and possibilities with Fertility Inc.? The author argues that “patient” activism through web 2.0 coupled with a largely unregulated free-market of assisted reproduction has included various queer identities as “parents-in-waiting.” Such inclusions raise a set of ethical tensions regarding how to be accountable to the many people implicated in this supply and demand industry. (shrink)

This book is composed of research presented at the fourth international Queering Paradigms Conference (QP4), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It intends to contribute to building a queer postcolonial critique of the current politics of queer activism and of queer knowledge production and circulation.

This article provides a theoretical argument for a queer failure pedagogy enacted in required diversity courses. Queer failure, as originally theorized by Halberstam (2011), rejects the traditional notion of success and failure rooted in capitalist, heteropatriarchal hierarchies. Queer- and critical disability-informed educators have taken this concept and theorized what this approach can open up for educators in the classroom. This article is particularly interested in understanding failure in the required diversity course, as failure is a constant presence when having discussions (...) on diversity, equity, and inclusion in today's political climate. This article offers examples of the author's experience engaging with queer failure and discomfort and explores how we can reframe this crisis for ourselves and our students. (shrink)