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.
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Transnational and Queer Diasporic Sexualities
Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui
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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.
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Gay Pornography
Joseph Brennan
Commercial, moving-image, hardcore, all-male pornography (otherwise known as “gay pornography”) emerged in the United States in the 1970s when, for the first time, many of the cultural inhibitions and legal restrictions on explicit gay sexual content were swept away with the current of a sexual revolution—prompted in large part by the 1969 Stonewall riots. In 2022, its study constitutes a thriving subfield of porn studies.
This qualitative review starts with the contributions of foundational essayists (Richard Dyer and Thomas Waugh) in a 1985 edition of Jump Cut, followed by discussion of the contributions of three special issues on the subject (in 2004, 2015 and 2017) in the Journal of Homosexuality, Psychology & Sexuality, and Porn Studies—through which a case is made for the instrumental role of these specials in the subfield’s exponential growth, commencing circa 2015. “Bareback” (the on-screen abandonment of the condom) and “gay-for-pay” (a gay-sex-strictly-for-remuneration fantasy and career construction/identity) are marked out for separate consideration as two profoundly dominant (and uniquely gay-aligned) conditions to which much of the subfield’s (relatively) recent flourishing can be attributed. The final section organizes extant literature according to key bulges and thrusts across text, industry, and audience concerns, with John Mercer, Jeffrey Escoffier, and Todd G. Morrison, respectively, nominated as the key architects of the critical, 21st-century groundwork on which the subfield owes much of its contemporary vibrancy.
This is a dynamic survey, acknowledging the author’s own disciplinary stake (cultural studies) via qualitative, strategic selection of some eminent and emerging themes from across the literature. Crucially, allowance for future updates is built into its structure and method; key themes can be added as new priorities emerge, expanded, or shifted, with the ebb and flow of the subfield’s agenda items (should thrusts come to bulge or bulges lose impetus).
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Homonationalism’s Viral Travels
Hana Masri
First defined by Jasbir Puar in 2007, homonationalism refers to the collusion between LGBTQ subjects or rights discourses and nationalism. This definition contrasts with previous transnational queer and feminist analyses. Homonationalism instead describes a form of national homonormativity and sexual exceptionalism in which some LGBTQ subjects are complicit with, rather than excluded from, nationalism and imperialism. This recognition and incorporation into the nation is predicated on the nation’s production and disposal of populations of racial and sexual others, particularly through Orientalist constructions of undesirable Muslim and Arab sexualities and genders. The literature on homonationalism thus explains how certain queer and trans subjectivities are mobilized in service of modernity’s racial, capitalist, imperial, and colonial projects, such as the U.S. “War on Terror.”
In addition to this original definition, the framework of homonationalism has been expanded to refer to the way LGBTQ rights have become a barometer by which to evaluate nations’ and populations’ right to sovereignty at the global political scale. This includes, for example, discourses that use notions of sexually progressive multiculturalism to justify foreign intervention.
Scholars and activists alike have applied the framework of homonationalism widely, to the degree that the homonationalism has been referred to as a viral concept. Much of this uptake focuses on “pinkwashing,” a manifestation of homonationalism that refers to a nation-state’s promotion of its “gay-friendly” record in order to obscure other types of political violence, including colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. At the same time, homonationalism’s extensive uptake has led to a proliferation of perspectives that complicate, challenge, and expand the concept’s usage; though the conditions it names emerge across contexts, its instantiations vary based on historical and geopolitical context. These differences in application inform critiques of the concept, which tend to focus on the overextension and universalization of the concept at the expense of its clarity, context specificity, and utility for activism seeking to contest homonationalist policies and practices.
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LGBTQ Youth Cultures and Social Media
Olu Jenzen
Research has established that access to the Internet and social media is vital for many lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer + (LGBTQ+) young people. LGBTQ+ social media youth cultures form across platforms and are shaped by a range of media affordances and vernaculars. LGBTQ+ youth use social media for self-expression, connecting with other LGBTQ+ young people, entertainment, activism, and collecting and curating information. Through a digital cultural studies approach, the essay discusses themes of LGBTQ+ youth identity work, communities and networked publics, and youth voice to explore how digital and social media imaginaries and practices produce new forms of socialites. It situates LGBTQ+ youth social media practices in relation to the affective economy and algorithmic exclusion of platforms, as well as in relation to neoliberal paradigms of gender and sexuality and homotolerance.
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Molecular Images, Leaky Masculinities: Pain, Photography, and Queer Desire
Katrin Köppert
The pharmacopornographic turn in photography began in the 1950s, with a molecularization of photography that enabled moments of queer critique at a time when neither queer theory nor practices of hormonal gender hacking were common. Molecules in the subversive function of imitation and drag can be seen, in particular, in Albrecht Becker’s photography. Becker’s photography is conceived as minor photography based on Gilles Deleuze and Felíx Guattari’s concept of minor literature. The queer-political dimension of vernacular media practices plays an essential role here.
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Queer/ing Archives
Morgan DiCesare and Charles E. Morris III
Communication scholars have taken up queer archives and their artifacts, often in a Western context, in relation to a range of presumptions that had previously structured (straight) archival engagement. Queer archives and memories have been buried and erased by homophobic histories. Nonetheless, revisitations of these histories seek to differentially unearth queer materials, challenge the terms of erasure, and revise modern conceptions of sexuality that tie it to identity, community, organization, and activism. Queer scholars and activists have rewritten archival standards that had previously functioned to exclude queer life, and they have challenged the terms of “queer” in relation to both past and present. Queer/ing archives thus addresses practices, places, objects, theories, people, and methods that have been articulated to queer pasts in the interest of its influences on queer presents and futures.
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Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory
Wendy Gay Pearson
Speculative fiction, like queer, can be an umbrella term; it can cover any writing in which reality is not mimetically represented. In other words, speculative fiction is a fuzzy set whose boundaries are permeable, capacious, and capable of definition and redefinition by readers and writers alike. The set includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, the Gothic, and most or all magic realist writing. Because of its focus on spaces and times that have not (yet) happened, may never happen, and may, indeed, be impossible, speculative fiction as a supergeneric category leaves open a great deal of room for queerness in all its forms. Queer theory illuminates depictions of sexuality, gender, and their intersectionalities as they are represented in speculative fictions of all kinds. In doing so, it traces several specific queer theoretical interventions, including: questions of queer representation; histories in which queer representation has been suppressed; queer dismantling of all types of normativity; queer theorizing about intimacy, kinship, reproduction, and family; questions of posthumanism and the queering of embodiment and/through technology; and issues of queer time versus the power of chrononormativity to reinforce assumptions about linear time and “normal” life. Speculative fiction is a powerful medium for both queer readers and queer writers because it empowers narratives, characters, and/or settings that disrupt the many ways in which dominant assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality are produced by, and in turn reinforce, colonial aspirations and expectations. Some speculative fiction may be dystopian, but some speculative fiction may also read the past reparatively in order to imagine more hopeful worlds.
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Arts-Based Queer Communication Studies
Sandra L. Faulkner and Madison A. Pollino
The blending of queer communication studies and arts-based research (ABR) offers a unique way to engage in this exploration and critique dominant structures and institutions that influence social lives. ABR offers scholars a means to understand in more imaginative ways by allowing for personal, emotional, experiential, and embodied expressions of knowledge that value alternative, participatory, and indigenous ways of knowing. ABR approaches to queer communication studies allow individuals to combine queer concepts, content, and methodologies with subjective lived and embodied experiences. ABR offers several avenues to disrupt and transform the taken-for-granted heteronormative foundations of research. ABR alongside queer communication studies encourages individuals to challenge their perceptions of gender and sexuality as well as the conventions that shape these perceptions. ABR, unlike other research methodologies, creates a space where individuals can explore and confront difficult topics in a more digestible and nontraditional manner. Through creative practices such as autoethnography, poetic inquiry, performance, and film, individuals can resist and critique the status quo while simultaneously providing an alternative perspective that recognizes the highly personal and fluid nature of one’s identities and relationships.
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Methodological and Statistical Considerations in Studying Sexual Minority and Gender Diverse Relationships
Gabriel A. León and Ashley K. Randall
Increasing the representation of diverse voices in relationship science requires statistical methodologies that are inclusive of individuals in relationships who identify as a sexual minority (i.e., lesbian, gay, or bisexual) or gender diverse (i.e., transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, etc.) individuals. Research questions related to the initiation, development, and maintenance of romantic relationships for these individuals should be explored using quantitative methods that are sensitive to diversity and individual differences within a population. Analytical tools relevant to the study of interdependent, yet indistinguishable dyads, including references to extended technical guides for those wishing to conduct this work are presented.
