One of the arguments that queer color of critique makes is that queer theory and queer studies and their applications in communication studies are not intersectional. This criticism also includes the dominance of White voices, perspectives, and methodologies. Hence, some scholars argue that although queer theory and queer studies promise inclusion, they are not inclusive enough. Following this criticism, in this essay I claim that in addition to the dominance of White perspectives and the hegemony of English, queer studies in the communication discipline is U.S.-centric. Therefore, I argue that to fully understand queer experiences, as communication scholars we must take intersectional and transnational perspectives to make sense of queer lives. In this article, the author offers transnational queer slippages and translations as a perspective to examine diasporic and transnational queer experiences. Here, I argue that diasporic and transnational individuals often live in multiple cultures and different nation-states and speak more than one language. Hence, they constantly maneuver between cultures and nation-states and often translate from one experience to another. Sometimes, due to linguistic limitations, such as the lack of a word to mirror their experience, they fail to translate. Moreover, diasporic and transnational queer individuals often experience different layers of cultural maneuvering because they also have to negotiate their queerness. They translate their experiences from mainstream culture to queer culture, from the mainstream queer culture to their individualized diasporic and queer experiences. Thus, they often experience constant translations. When they fail to translate, they begin to experience slippages. I refer to these slippages as queer slippages because they do not only translate between nation-states, cultures, and languages, but they also translate between mainstream queer culture and diasporic or transnational queer experiences. These slippages can be liberatory because they offer possibilities, but they can also be very challenging for those who are stuck in those slippages.
91-100 of 797 Results
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Transnational Queer Translations
Ahmet Atay
Article
Spanish Queer Cinema
Santiago Fouz Hernández
LGBTQ+ lives in Spain have experienced drastic changes since the days of the Franco dictatorship. Then, laws were made to prosecute and incarcerate queers. Now, Spain enjoys one of the most comprehensive legal frameworks to protect LGBTQ+ rights. Spanish cinema, in part, reflects this evolution. Heavy censorship made representation of LGBTQ+ characters almost impossible during Franco, although in the early years crusade films created homosocial scenarios which could be read against the grain. In late Francoism and in the early years of the transition visibility was very rare and would typically involve damaging stereotypes of gay men in degrading comedies or oversexed lesbian vamps in exploitative horror films. After the abolition of censorship in 1978, filmmakers including Ventura Pons, Pedro Almodóvar or Eloy De la Iglesia made considerable headway in normalizing the presence of queer lives and stories on the Spanish screen. Growing (but vulnerable) levels of social acceptance and visibility in the last three decades or so have made LGBTQ+ characters and stories increasingly more visible. The 1990s saw the proliferation of films set in the then emerging “gay villages” in major urban centers, especially Madrid’s Chueca. In the 2000s, legal advances such as same-sex marriage or the right to adopt led to more romantic comedies and some melodramas dealing with these issues (weddings, families, and so on). More recently there is a greater diversification of spaces, characters, and stories, including immigration and trans issues. New generations of queer creators have found considerable domestic and international success in streaming services, with representation becoming much more explicit and noticeably more complex and diverse.
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Crip Theory
Jeffrey Bennett
Over the past two decades, crip theory has evolved into a vibrant field of study for generating new forms of knowledge that scrutinize ableist assumptions of the social world and that strive to incorporate diffuse bodily experiences into otherwise restrictive cultural structures. In doing so, thinkers indebted to crip theory have developed original categories of epistemological consideration, often referred to as “cripistemologies.” As a mode of critique, crip is situated as both a methodology and a sensibility; it is both a tool and an attitude. Three discernable qualities of crip theory as it relates to Communication Studies have tended to emerge in the literature: normative understandings of the body, the contingent materialization of crip practices, and the political character of crip. These touchstones provide a useful orientation for capturing the scope of crip theory in Communication Studies, including in the areas of media representation, public culture, and performance studies.
Article
Multiculturalism, Ethnicity, and Prisons: Russia, Georgia, and Estonia
Costanza Curro, Judith Pallot, and Olga Zeveleva
Ethnic difference and ethnic identity constructions are examined in prison settings. While a vast academic literature examines prisons as sites of ethnic and racial identity constructions in the United States and Europe, studies of Soviet and post-Soviet prisons have not been included in this scholarly dialogue. Thus, ethnic identity negotiations in prisons in the former Soviet Union are examined. Soviet legacies in policies and practices toward ethnic and religious difference in prison services and the contrasting trajectories away from the Soviet penal model in different jurisdictions after 1991 are considered. Examination of Russia focuses on Muslim prisoners and official and popular responses to moral panic about “prison jihad.” Subsequent analysis turns to elements of Soviet legacies in two other post-Soviet countries: Georgia and Estonia. New trends and reforms unique to each case (including the architectural and spatial organization of incarceration) are identified, the role of prison subcultures is discussed, and analysis is provided as to how these prison systems reflect or refract overall trends of ethnic discrimination and marginalization in each country.
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Queer African Studies
Godfried Asante
The main goals of the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of queer African studies (QAS) are to (a) resist the continual (post)colonial perpetuation of “African culture” as a homogenous entity devoid of diverse nonnormative genders and sexualities, (b) seek to decenter universal Western epistemological framing of queerness, and (c) reveal the intersectional ways that queer African subjectivities are experienced. Drawing primarily from African/Africanist scholarship and queer theory/studies, QAS seeks to create more fluidities between a network of activists and university-based professors to produce contextually relevant and grounded studies that center African experiences in conversations on gender and sexuality. In particular, scholarship in QAS places Africans’ lived experiences as the starting point to theorize queerness. As an interdisciplinary field of study with scholars from history, anthropology, political science, sociology, legal studies, and African studies, QAS has emerged as an essential theoretical intervention in African studies, queer of color critique, and postcolonial studies. In this way, it opens up spaces to interrogate the theoretical and material concerns of queer theory and African studies beyond its westernized origins and focus. For same-gender-loving, queer, nonbinary, and trans Africans, for whom queer theory’s historical beginnings seem to have written them out of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex+ Euro American history, their emergent contributions to the now institutionally anchored discipline of queer theory, and queer studies in communication, provide a necessary corrective and decolonial endeavor to decentralize the Euro American lens in which queerness tends to be theorized and explored. In this regard, while “queering” Africa is a necessary project for some scholars, “Africanizing” queer studies equally provide the epistemological shifts needed to dislodge the West as the source and referent for queer theorizing. The field of communication studies is diverse in its formations and production of knowledge. However, the different subfields all cohere around the commitment to theorizing the symbolic and material systems of communication that enable individuals to make sense of their lives and their positionalities in both local and transnational contexts. QAS can invariably contribute to the various subfields of communication studies by providing an alternative epistemological framework for analyzing language and meaning, especially as they pertain to gender and sexuality.
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Queer Music Practices in the Digital Realm
Ben De Smet
The relevance of music in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexually nonnormative (LGBTQ+) lives and identities has been extensively established and researched. Studies have focused on queer performances, fandom, night life, and other aspects of music to examine the intimate, social, and political relations between music and LGBTQ+ identities. In a time where music culture is produced, distributed, and consumed increasingly in digital spaces, relations between music and LGBTQ+ identities are meaningfully informed by these spaces. As this is a relatively recent development and offline music practices remain profoundly meaningful and relevant, the amount of research on queer digital music practices remains modest. However, a rich body of literature in the fields of popular music studies, queer studies, and new media studies provides an array of inspiring angles and perspectives to shed light on these matters, and this literature can be situated and critically linked.
For over half a century, popular music studies have directed their attention to the relations between the social and the musical. Under the impulse of feminist studies, gender identities soon became a prominent focus within popular music studies, and, driven by LGBTQ+ studies, (non-normative) sexual identities soon followed. As popular music studies developed a rich theoretical basis, and feminist and queer studies evolved over the years into more intersectional and queer directions, popular music studies focusing on gender and/or sexuality gradually stepped away from their initial somewhat rigid, binary perspectives in favor of more open, dynamic, and queer perspectives.
Following a similar path, early new media studies struggled to avoid simplistic, naïve, or gloomy deterministic analyses of the Internet and new media. As the field evolved, alongside the technologies that form its focus, a more nuanced, mutual, and agency-based approach emerged. Here, too, scholars have introduced queer perspectives and have applied them to research a range of LGBTQ+-related digital phenomena.
Today, popular music, sexual identities, and new media have become meaningful aspects of social life, and much more remains to be explored, in particular on the intersection of these fields. A diverse array of queer fan practices, music video practices, and music streaming practices are waiting to be examined. The theory and the tools are there.
Article
Stress and Coping in Sexual and Gender Minority Relationships
Steven Samrock, Kai Kline, and Ashley K. Randall
LGBTQ+ is an inclusive term used to encompass sexual and gender minority individuals in aspects of their diversity related to sexual and gender expression. Specifically, LGBTQ+ refers to individuals who may identify as lesbian (L), gay (G), bisexual (B), transgender (T), queer (Q), or other sexual and/or gender identities (+). Given that many individuals live in heteronormative and cisnormative societies, the LGBTQ+ community experiences unique stressors specific to their traditionally marginalized identity/identities; such experiences are defined as experiences of minority stress. Aspects of minority stress, including stigma, prejudice, and discrimination, generate stressful social environments for LGBTQ+ individuals and these experiences are often negatively associated with individual and relationship well-being. For example, if an individual experiences harassment for their sexual and/or gender identity, they may experience feelings of distress and be more reserved with public displays of affection with their partner. As such, one romantic partner’s experience of minority stress can impact both they and their partner’s experiences.
Relationship maintenance behaviors, such as communicating and coping with the stress together with one’s partner (dyadic coping), have been identified that may help mitigate minority stress’ deleterious effects. Dyadic coping is a process that conceptualizes how partners cope with stress in the context of their relationship, identifying how partners communicate their stress and the respective coping behaviors. Finally, there has been an insurgence of relationship education programs designed to help LGBTQ+ couples identify and cope with experiences of minority stress. For example, the Couples Coping Enhancement Training–Sexual Minority Stress incorporates the unique experiences of sexual minority couples to help couples improve (minority) stress management; enhance their ability to cope as a couple; sensitize both partners to ideas of mutual fairness, equity, and respect; improve communication; and improve (emotional) problem-solving skills.
Article
Transnational and Queer Diasporic Sexualities
Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui
Research on transnational and queer diasporic sexualities is still in its infancy but continues to evolve rapidly as understandings of sexuality and queer identity become further complicated. The nuanced and contextual intersections of queer identity as paired with cultural specificity amplify and redefine queerness across space. Pushing back against long-standing notions of what queer looks like in the West, transnational and diasporic queer sexual identities transcend normative definitions of what sexualities can look like outside of rigid binary thinking. Considering three core themes—Western hegemony, transnational and queer diasporic families, and blurring the First/Third World binary—offers the ability to highlight lived experiences to better understand the complexities of the past, present, and future of transnational and queer diasporic sexualities.
Article
Diffusion of Innovations from the West and Their Influences on Medical Education in Japan
Mariko Morishita and Miho Iwakuma
In the 19th century, Western medicine spread widely worldwide and ultimately diffused into Japan. It had a significant impact on previous Japanese medical practice and education; it is, effectively, the foundation of contemporary Japanese medicine. Although Western medicine seems universal, its elements and origins as it has spread to other countries show localized differences, depending on the context and time period. Cultural fusion theory proposes that the culture of a host and influence of a newcomer conflict, merge, or transform each other. It could shed light on how Japanese medicine and medical education have been influenced by and coevolved with Western medicine and culture. Cultural fusion is not assimilation or adaptation; it has numerous churning points where the traditional and the modern, the insider (indigenous) and the outsider (immigrant), mix and compete. In Japan, medicine has a long history, encountering medical practices from neighboring countries, such as China and Korea in ancient times, and Western countries in the Modern period. The most drastic changes happened in the 19th century with strong influence from Germany before World War II and in the 20th century from the impact of the United States after World War II. Recently, the pressure of globalization could be added as one influence. Since cultural fusion is ubiquitous in Japanese medical fields, examples showing how the host and newcomers interact and merge can be found among many aspects of Japanese medicine and medical education, such as curricula, languages, systems, learning styles, assessment methods, and educational materials. In addition, cultural fusion is not limited to influence from the West but extends to and from neighboring Asian countries. Examining cases and previous studies on cultural fusion in Japanese medicine and medical education could reveal how the typical notion that Japan pursued Westernization of its medicine and medical education concealed the traditions and the growth of the local education system. The people involved in medicine in the past and the present have struggled to integrate the new system with their previous ideals to improve their methods, which could be further researched.
Article
Divorce and Relational Termination
Madeleine Redlick Holland and Pamela J. Lannutti
Given that the legalization of same-sex marriage at the federal level is a relatively new phenomenon, it is not surprising that research related to divorce and dissolution of LGBTQ+ relationships is in the early stages of its development. Research has begun identifying unique factors that may place LGBTQ+ relationships at increased risk of dissolution, including minority stress, lack of resources, and nontraditional relational arrangements. Additionally, nuances in the experience of dissolution that LGBTQ+ people may face have begun receiving scholarly attention, such as a lack of general awareness of LGBTQ+ divorce. This research has further revealed that the relationships that ex-partners may develop after romantic relationship dissolution carry different expectations, norms, and forms than those associated with non-LGBTQ+ relationships. There is still much room for growth and exploration in this area. Specifically, future researchers might consider integrating perspectives that move away from minority stress theory or qualitative research methods.
