Author: CB

In Jan Zita Grover’s article on lesbian photography, she speaks about “the burden of scarcity” in relation to lesbian sexual imagery. To explain what this means, one must first understand the context in which it is being discussed. In our patriarchal society, lesbians are consistently either represented as deviant bodies or not represented in society. The lesbian body is almost seen as a deviant object in the stereotypes of the current patriarchal society. Grover mentions that there are typical issues when things are in short supply, including problems with hoarding and placing too much “value and power to whatever commodity has become or is designated as scarce” (p.187). In turn, Grover seems to be suggesting that there are high expectations for the limited number of images that represent lesbian desires. These scarce images cannot properly symbolize all lesbian bodies, but rather a select few that only have a portion of the population’s characteristics and do not take into account different subcultures. As an example, she compares movies, which depict white heterosexual women in a particularly negative light that would cause shame if they were the only models available. However, this is not the case and there are many representations of heterosexual white women in movies that they can pick from.

-CB

Grover, J. Z. (1991). Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs. Stolen Glances. (pp. 184-190). Ontario, Canada: Pandora Press.

How did Boystown neighborhood residents reproduce racism through digital practices? 

In Chicago, the Boystown community is considered a thriving gay entertainment district and residential neighborhood, but the residents remain largely white and middle class due to the use of social media, which reinforces segregation. However, people of color still experience segregation and hostility because they are blamed for almost all crimes (Blair, 2016, p. 290). This community formed and practiced “race-based” systems of social control. While there appeared to be good intentions of eliminating violence from Boystown, the blame put on gay black youth serves to group and stereotype the gay black youth community into one category, which creates a racialized environment. Digital practices, such as “Take Back Boystown” and “Lakeview 9-1-1,” were created for discussion of violent crimes in the neighborhood. Through these Facebook pages, they allowed the community to negatively portray black lives. Therefore, through these avenues, racism was legitimized and black gay youth became the “unwanted population” (Blair, 2016, p. 298). This issue expands outside of the Boystown community into a variety of things including a poor education system, corrupt politics, and a collapsed economy.

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Blair, Z. (2016). Gay Neighborhoods, Social Media, and the (Re)production of Racism: Boystown. No Tea, No Shade. (pp. 287-303). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

In Dean Spade’s essay, he identifies several shortcomings of current anti-discrimination and hate crime law reforms. There is hope that these laws will benefit people within marginalized groups, but there are many limitations to current law reforms. Errors of anti-discrimination laws include the false notions of equality or fairness with the new law reforms because oppression and discrimination of numerous identities (Spade, 2015, p.43). Spade claims that “the perpetrator perspective” obscures the historical framework of systemic prejudice against people of color. For example, these anti-discrimination law reforms theoretically end racism, but in reality enhance color-blindness. Additionally, Spade (2015) claims that hate crime law reforms oversimplify hate crimes and discount transphobia in prison systems. For example, Spade asserts that the prison system targets people these hate crime law reforms are supposed to protect and reinforces transphobia even though it claims to be more inclusive (Spade, 2015, p. 47).

Spade, D. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law. London, England: Duke University Press.

The antisocial thesis in queer theory seems to be the idea that LGTBQ+ persons are inherently incompatible with society’s heteronormative designs. The premise of the antisocial thesis stems from most scholars specializing in queer theory like Lee Edelman and Leo Bersani see queer as “standing outside” social models. Edelman belittles any suggestions of a cohesive, gender fluid society (Rodriguez, 2011). Another premise that I hope for, instead, is Jose Esteben Munoz’s ideas of a future where society can let go of categorizations and collapsing social differences to overcome needs for the antisocial thesis (Rodriquez, 2011). Lastly, the article, The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, also offers interesting evidence of antisocial thesis when they talk about the emphasis of procreation and importance of reproduction in society (Caserio et al., 2006). Supposedly, Edelman claims there is a connection with homosexuality and fears of mortality (Caserio et al., 2006).

Politically incorrect erotic desires are seen as acts of sexual deviance that do not fit in with societal beliefs of sexuality (Rodriguez, 2011). These politically incorrect desires enforce the antisocial thesis because there is a wide range of sexual desires that do not fit into society’s norms. Rodriguez seems to focus on fantasy because reality has so many social constructs that has a way of “returning us to forms of sociality that have constructed us as perverse racialized sexual subjects” (Rodriguez, 2011).

 

References

Caserio, R. L., Edelman, L., Halberstam, J., Muniz, J. E., & Dean, T. (2011). The antisocial thesis in queer theory. Modern Language Association, 121(3), 819-828.

Rodriguez, J. M. (2011). Queer sociality and other sexual fantasies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17(2-3), 331-348.

This visual object exemplifies what Gayle Rubin terms “moral panic” because sexual offenders created a huge sex panic in which the media, policy makers, and activists all got involved (WITN.com, 2017). Sexual offenders are a group of people that pose a threat to societal values—one group being pedophiles. As depicted in this photograph, media coverage frames the problems of sexual predators in terms of morality and usually depicts well-known cases as outrageous.

Society catalogues both pedophiles and asexual people as abnormal on the basis of their sexual practices. Asexual people lack sexual desires and are then categorized as abnormal while pedophiles are committing sexual wrongdoings, which society detests.

References

Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex

Supreme court strike law banning sex offenders on social media. (2017). WITN.Com, pp. 1-2.

“To Live in the Borderlands” by Gloria Anzaldua discusses issues in the borderlands between America and Mexico in order to bring up conflicts between identities and facets of a person within an individual. The poem is written in two different languages—Spanish and English—which show that duality has clearly influenced the author’s life.

In order to fully understand the poem, one must understand both the English and Spanish words. I know how to understand the transitions between the two languages because I took an undergraduate course in Spanish. Using both languages may be the author’s way of showing the mingling of two cultures.

In the last stanza of the poem, Anzaldua writes, “To survive the Borderlands/you must live sin fronteras/be a crossroads” (Anzaldua, 3). “Sin fronteras” means to live without borders.  I understand this last stanza to mean that people in the borderlands must conform and assimilate into both cultures. She describes people of the borderlands to have no sense of belonging because they are torn between two cultures, and have a new culture that has formed in the borderlands.

-CB

References

Anzaldua, G. “To Live in the Borderlands.” Borderlands-La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books, 1987, pp. 194-195.  http://www.revistascisan.unam.mx/Voices/pdfs /7422.pdf

Queer rights movements have made a lot of progress in society and politics to create equal rights; however, racial issues have been ignored. In her essay “The Whiter the Bread,” Alison Reed writes, “…fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms. Whiteness, then, goes unacknowledged and unexamined, while uncritically reproducing multiculturalist logics that mainstream visibility can smooth over ongoing injustices, precisely by exploiting the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed, 57).​ Breaking down this quote, one can surmise that Reed claims that by using colorblind politics, we have ignored that white supremacy exists apart from white queer theory. The “embodiment in post-racial terms” is how race is embodied in a society that considers its “race problem” over.  She asserts that, “according to colorblind liberals, the ‘race problem’ was put to rest after civil rights legislation” in the 1960s (Reed, 51). This theoretical idea that the United States is rid of racial discrimination and prejudice is false, yet satisfies many citizens and ends opportunities for justice by negating the presence of white supremacy or racism. In reality, white people portray themselves as the “heroes of civil rights” and continue to create the growing problem of systemic racism (Reed, 51). Furthermore, Reed states that often in queer theory scholarly works, there is a trend to leave out racism in conversations about race, which perpetuates colorblindness and white supremacy (Reed, 56).

The second section of the quote: “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” means that black bodies in queer movements are used to create the illusion of a cohesive queer movement. In this way, white queer people will not be seen as having a privilege because of their race and their status as an injured person will not be negated. White queers then “align themselves with a racialized ‘otherness’” (Reed, 50). Their successes draw on being victimized or in an “injured state” and the movement continues to be stronger because of the supposed alliance with people of color and queer people.

-CB

Reference: Alison Reed “”The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”

My definition of queer theory: A feminist, academic area of study that is concerned with the cultural view of non-normative sexual orientations and non-binary genders. Queerness has been linked predominately with gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons but may include any sexual identity.

The thoughts and ideas that Queer Theory would be helpful to medical humanities students thinking about going into the healthcare system. LGTBQA persons face many challenges in finding culturally informed health services and getting the best care. In the past, healthcare did not understand queerness and it interfered with providing great medical practice; if the students in my medical humanities understand queer perspectives, they would be better clinicians for it.

 

Cathy Cohen writes about marriage and heterosexuality as viewed from white supremacists perspectives (Cohen, 454). She uses the example of historical marriage laws that prohibit the marriage between slaves, more specifically persons of color. Cohen writes about A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. piece, In The Matter of Color-Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period, and writes, “he reminds us that the essential core of the American legal tradition was the preservation of the white race” (Cohen, 453). In colonial times, people of color were not allowed to participate in the sanctity of marriage because it threatened the white race. These views carried on throughout history and interracial marriages are still stigmatized today.

Cohen’s discussion of this relationship is relevant to her plea for “difficult work of coalition politics” because the prohibition of marriage for people of color can provide more information for integration of races (Cohen, 482). Cohen claims “if we pay attention to both historical and current examples of heterosexual relationships which have been prohibited, stigmatized, and generally repressed we may begin to identify those spaces of shared or similar oppression and resistance that provide a basis for radical coalition work” (482). Coalition politics is challenging work because it attempts to bring together many different marginalized populations to achieve one common goal and each unique group must understand their privileges.

References

Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”

-CB

Amber Hollibaugh claims that “gay liberation was the most passionately personal movement” that she belongs to. According to her, the gay rights and liberation movement made her face a lot of hostility and ridicule because of its rebellious nature. The paragraphs on page 264 and 265 of “My Dangerous Desires” speak about a gendered world where our beliefs and systems are incongruent with a world of only binary genders. She is claiming that our society has socially constructed the two genders: men and women. Due to the nation developing this type of heterosexual society, the gay rights and liberation movements caused a dramatic confrontation of what was perceived to be “the norm”. Hollobaugh’s main point seems to be that differing from the norm is so unheard of and therefore has become a large political issue. However, she believes that the gay liberation and rights movement has become “a movement for gay nuclear family rights and for serial monogamy.” Instead, she wishes for a movement that does not assimilate with a heterosexual society but rather can coexist and be something altogether new. In fact, she uses the phrase “we are just like them” distastefully and claims that the movement is trying to normalize queer people.
Riki Wilchins writes, “White American culture tends to be one of the few that splits sexual orientation from gender.” (27) However, person’s sexual orientation and their gender often force them to face similar societal or political issues and therefore join social networks or alliances. Both being oppressed minorities, it is easy to come together and form a more “powerful movement of political recognition.” In my own experiences, these alliances are recognizable in the form of “Gay Pride” parades in which the queer community comes together in order to stand up for their beliefs and challenge society’s heterosexual views.
-CB