Beyond 90°: the angularities of black/queer/women/lean

This essay argues for detailed attention to the materiality of black queer women’s spatial coordinates, the literal points of contact with the surfaces we traverse, as sites where categories of race, gender, and sexuality are disciplined and negotiated. It does so through a brief history of how Man’s 90° relationship to the ground, a verticality and perpendicularity that valorizes a physical comportment that is also the structuring condition for one’s political capacities, is produced by enforcing black and indigenous subjects to the ground, invariably defining the categories of Otherness as 0° and 180°. Through a reading of Rashaad Newsome’s performance Shade Compositions, the author argues a reading of the angles that exceed 0°/90°/180° may provide paths for reorienting the possibilities of black queer presence in the field of the political. If 90° signals a delimited political field, then, one governed by notions of rational civility that are always exclusive of black and black queer bodies, might the angularities surrounding, say, 120° reveal sites of productive incivility that are inextricable from the lives, experiences, and certainly bodies of black queer women themselves?     

Unveiling the Forbidden: Same-sex Love as a Motif in Lydia Wahlström’s Writing

This article investigates how the historian and writer Lydia Wahlström (1869–1954) wrote about same-sex passions in a time when homosexuality was forbidden by law and tabooed in literature. There were of course also, during the first decades of the 1900s, many people who lived in same-sex relationships, some of them openly enough that this can still be discerned in the historical material. Lydia Wahlström was among them. She was active in the suffragist movement and one of its most prolific leaders, speakers, and writers. Wahlström was awarded a doctorate in history in 1898 and then became the director of studies at the Åhlinska School for girls in Stockholm. Alongside this, she wrote numerous articles and non-fiction books on a wide range of subjects as well as three romans-à-clef. In these novels, she wrote about the love that dared not speak its name, but she had to draw a veil over the forbidden motif in order to write about it. The interesting thing is that Wahlström did not mask the controversial motif more than that the observant contemporary reader could understand the underlying meaning in the novels and that it becomes even clearer to those who read her autobiography that was published many years later. This article deals with writing about same-sex love in a profoundly homophobic time.     

Mythical enjambment in The Hungry Woman: nation,desire, and Cherríe Moraga’s utopic turn

In her play The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2001), Cherríe Moraga makes use of a technique I call “mythical enjambment”: the insertion of a myth, story, or cultural context into another where it “doesn’t belong,” a willful act of making the unexpected out of the expected. Moraga utilizes mythical enjambment to illuminate how mythologies become entrenched and perpetuate harmful ideologies. Interrupting the traditional aesthetics of Western theater by drawing attention to the ways queer women of color are erased from the narrative, Moraga also challenges the absence of queer women of color from the Chicano movement by embedding her play within some of the most dearly held myths of Chicana/o culture. Ultimately, the use of mythical enjambment gestures toward the utopic and revolutionary potential of theater. The Hungry Woman shatters myths on multiple, intersectional levels: from the critical gaze of interpretive authority to the myths that cohere Chicana/o identity along masculinist and heterosexist lines.     

A Letter Sent,Waiting to be Received: Queer Correspondence,Feminism and Black British Art

Abstract

This article examines what the published letter does as a form that is both intimate and public, and how it is particularly resonant when dealing with the silences and absences around queer and feminist artist of colour histories. Connections are made between three letters published in feminist and queer journals and books, written for readers who may include the writers’ loved ones, friends, contemporaries, and future readers. These three letters are contained within the following publications: Surviving Art School (2016) by the group Collective Creativity, a QTIPOC artist group who made the publication as part of a wider project examining the history of Black British Art (members are: Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabur, Rudy Lowe and Raju Rage); a special issue of FAN (Feminist Arts News) edited by Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter in 1988, the precursor to the more well-known collection Passion, edited by Sulter in 1990; ending with Himid's recent reflections on her curation in the 1980s through a series of ‘Letters to Susan’ published in the 2011 catalogue for the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain. Through close examination of these examples, this article explores the particularities of the letter form, asking if it allows feminist and queer artists of colour to present their experiences in a manner that encourages all their readers to take part in the conversation, whilst prioritizing calls for other people of colour to respond. The article proposes that the published letter form keeps feminist histories alive and creates a counterpublic that speaks to and for a community that is imagined as both geographically and temporally diffuse.     

Techniques of black male re/dress: corporeal drag and kinesthetic politics in the rebirth of Waacking/Punkin’

The improvisation-based dance Waacking/Punking developed in gay underground disco clubs of 1970s Los Angeles and circulated transnationally via television's landmark black music/dance show Soul Train. With almost all male progenitors passing during the early AIDS crisis, the culture was reborn in the 2000s to the transnational hip-hop/street dance arena, now a competition style dominated by nonblack cisgender females. While seeming to promote hetero-normative gender performance, learning the dance practice potentially queers movement norms through corporeal drag – techniques for trying on and refashioning movement that transform kinesthetic consciousness. At the same time, the obscure structural positioning of the black male figure associated with Waacking/Punking's historical context complicates and disorients gendered notions of power and racialized sexuality in its rebirth. This trans-methodological study centers experiences of black practitioners, drawing from first-person stories of pioneer and new generation dancers, as well as native ethnography and archival research. In subtle ways, Waacking practices redress black masculinity and question performing social inclusion under terms of a white patriarchal order – terms that suture blackness-to-pathology-to-violence. The erotic practice of Waacking/Punking may be understood as an embodied re-negotiation of hegemonic demands on gender and sexuality, made possible through its transmission of a black kinesthetic politics.     

Getting a `Get' – the Limits of Law's Authority? N. v. N. (Jurisdiction: Pre-Nuptial Agreement) [1999] 2 F.L.R. 745

This note examines the decision of the Family Division of the High Court in N. v. N. (Jurisdiction: Pre-Nuptial Agreement) in which, in the context of Jewish divorce proceedings, the Court found that it had no jurisdiction to order a husband, by specific performance of a marriage agreement, to go through the procedure to obtain a ‘get’ (a hand-written bill of divorcement) allowing his wife to remarry. First, discussion of the case is contextualised broadly within the debate on the (de)merits of employing legal means in order to redress social wrongs. Secondly, adopting a theoretical perspective upon the difficulties involved in using law to achieve social change, the note goes on to examine more specifically why women from minority cultures may choose to go to the law of the dominant culture in order to obtain relief. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Queering the ‘straight’ line: men’s talk on paying for sex

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with eight men who identified as clients of women sex workers, but who also spoke about paying to secretly explore their sexual desires for trans women and men. I draw on queer theory to approach the question of how, and to what extent, men’s paid sexual encounters functioned as sites where they could resist the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality and navigate more fluid sexual identities. Highlighting the complex nature and meanings of paying for sex, I argue that the secrecy of the paid sexual encounter provided a space for ‘breaking out’ of the confines of heterosexuality whilst simultaneously being the very thing that allowed men to stay ‘in line’ with what was expected of them within the heteronormative realities of their everyday lives.     

The presence of absence: Beyond the “great goddess” in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series

Ann Liv Young's The Bagwell in Me, which premiered at The Kitchen in NYC, 2008, continues this experimental dance-theater artist's characteristically brutal, anatomizing exposure of the performers’ bodies through both sexual and violent narratives. This analysis examines how Young's construction of a certain type of subject on the stage challenges the subjectivities of her audience members, provoking moments of potential eruption. By setting up the possibility of abjection through the ambivalent dynamic of attraction and repulsion, and bombarding the audience with tropes that engender a push toward Georges Bataille's concept of “radical formlessness,” I argue, Ann Liv Young's performance places notions of the stable subject – composed of a “whole” body that is coherently organized and intelligibly coded in terms of sex, gender, sexuality and race – into question. Not only will this analysis explore how viewing oral sex as choreography speaks to Bataille's discussion of radical formlessness through decontextualization and the maddening effects of staring at the sun, but it will also interrogate how the same strategy of radical formlessness could have entirely different performative effects regarding the threat of bodily coherence and taxonomy within the narrative of historical racial violence.