Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)

Families are (one of) the first and most influential socializing agents of our lives. Among the innumerable messages family members convey to each other, a select few are regarded as “memorable.” Memorable messages are “distinct communication units considered influential over the course of a person’s life.” Those messages that are most memorable are typically brief, direct, oral messages delivered by a higher-status, older, and likable individual to the recipient during their teen or young adult years. Although memorable messages were initially regarded as having positive implications for the receiver’s life, newer research has provided space for the negative implications and perceptions of these messages. Nonverbal communication elements and relational contexts and qualities are influential to the receptivity of memorable messages. Although memorable messages often originate from a family member, the sources of memorable messages can also be friends/peers, teachers, coworkers, or, in some cases, the media. Research on memorable messages has been largely concentrated in health and interpersonal/family communication contexts; organizational and instructional contexts have also been explored. Memorable message research in families has focused much on health topics (i.e., mental health, sexual health, body image and weight), socialization (i.e., around school, work, race, other topics), and coping with hardship. In these studies, memorable messages have largely been investigated through mixed-method survey-based research, but also through purely quantitative (i.e., survey-based) and qualitative (i.e., interview) methods as well. This research has been largely atheoretical but has been grounded in control theory and, more recently, the theory of memorable messages and communicated narrative sense-making theory. Future research and practical applications of family memorable message research include informing health campaigns and family life education programming.

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.

Michael Warner is the Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, and his career has followed an interesting trajectory, beginning with the study of print and its importance to the emerging American nation and extending into queer theory and contemporary politics. There is an important line of thought that connects three of Michael Warner’s books: The Letters of the Republic (1990), Publics and Counterpublics (2002), and The Trouble with Normal (1999). In The Letters of the Republic, Warner begins to outline the way in which publics emerge and are discursively produced. In Publics and Counterpublics, he more thoroughly engages both the production of normative publics and the resistant communities of counterpublics, the latter of which he often illustrates with examples drawn from queer communities. Finally, in The Trouble with Normal, Warner challenges the efforts of gay and lesbian rights advocates to accommodate and assimilate to heteronormative standards in an effort to join the public constituted by the dominant heterosexual society. As he notes, these efforts effectively undermine the transformative qualities that queerness can bring to a society in refiguring the way sex and relationships are regarded. In effect, The Trouble with Normal seems to be a queer, counterpublic polemic, one that mirrors (in purpose, if not in content) the emerging revolutionary discourse in 18th-century America. In addition, Warner provides some valuable perspectives on the development of public discourse in American, and makes several observations that pre-date, yet bring into sharp relief, some of the issues and concerns that have been raised about social media.

Minority stress for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) and African American communities has been well documented over the past 30 years. Generally speaking, being a member of a stigmatized community can lead to alienation from social structures, norms, and institutions, all of which can have negative implications for mental health, well-being, and relationships. When speaking about minority stress and its impact on LGBTQ+ relationships, the research is mixed. Although there are findings that show LGBTQ+ individuals face greater discrimination and more negative health impacts than heterosexual couples, other research notes the positive coping mechanisms that highlight the resilient nature of these couples. For African Americans and other racial minorities, the disparities are greater, with research showing that racial identity is linked to an increase in overall external stressors. However, over the last few years, discrimination toward sexual and racial minorities has reached a critical tipping point. Both within the United States and worldwide, social movements are drawing attention to the historical inequalities experienced by minority groups, and demanding change. Considering minority stress research, methods, and analyses are built on the connection between an individual and their social situations, the construct is due for an evolution, one that is representative of what our world looks like today. Although conceptualizations thus far have been productive in understanding the stressors of the LGBTQ+ and African American communities, there is a need to incorporate critical concepts of intersectionality and expand understanding of what it means to be a member of a minority group.

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.

In 2009, one of the most powerful executives in the world, Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, asserted that his firm was “doing God’s work.” This comment was made in the wake of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a crisis that Goldman Sachs and other U.S. and European investment banks played important roles in creating. The comment’s audacity did not escape notice, raising eyebrows even in the mainstream news media given its historical situatedness at the tail end of the crisis. Although Blankfein’s comment was coded negatively in the cultural consciousness, it was also represented as iconic of the culture of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe,” as referred to in the popular vernacular. Blankfein’s comment is deployed to illustrate the conceptual models and methodologies of those fields of study known as critical and cultural organizational communication research. These closely coupled but distinct fields of study will be delimited with special attention to their objects of investigation and methodological deployments using this example. Cultural and critical organizational communication represent closely coupled fields of study defined primarily by their phenomena or objects of study—organizational communications. Scholarship maps and analyzes communications to understand how organizations are constituted through communications that decide organizational policies, programs, practices, and values. Typically, organizational communications include all formal and informal signifying systems produced by members of the particular organization under investigation. Cultural approaches to organizational communication emphasize how these communications produce meaning and experience, while critical approaches address the systemic and historically sedimented power relations that are inscribed and reproduced through organizational communication signifying systems. Organizational communication scholarship from a cultural approach would ordinarily seek to represent the organizational culture primarily using ethnographic methods aimed at disclosing an organization’s employee articulations, rituals, performances, and other circulations of symbol systems in the course of workaday life. However, the challenges to accessing Goldman Sach’s hallow grounds might defeat even the most intrepid ethnographer. Lacking direct access to the day-to-day practices and experiences of investment bankers, challenges of access to work-a-day spaces have encouraged researchers to adopt rhetorical and/or discourse analytical methods to understand the culture as represented in available cultural texts, such as internal communications, press announcements, available corporate policies, shareholder reports, and so on. Ethnographies of communication and rhetorical/discourse analysis together represent the primary nonfunctionalist methodologies commonly used to study how organizational meanings are produced, disseminated, and transformed. Across disciplines, organizational cultural analysis, particularly when pursued ethnographically, is typically rooted in an interpretive tradition known as verstehen, which understands meaning as agentively produced through a temporally emergent fusion of subjective horizons. Culture is therefore regarded as emergent and is believed to be actively constructed by its interlocutors, who are afforded great agency within the tradition of verstehen. The emergent aspects of culture are fertile and seed subcultures that produce novel cultural performances as members delineate symbolic boundaries. Power is regarded by this tradition as largely visible to the everyday interpretive gaze, although admittedly fixed in institutions by rules, roles, and norms. The relatively visible character of institutional power hierarchies is believed to beget open conflict when disagreement exists over the legitimacy of power relations. Power is believed to circulate visibly and is thus subject to re-negotiation. This emergent and negotiated social ontology encourages researchers to adopt a pluralist view of power and a more relativistic approach to evaluating the social implications of specific organizational cultures. However, the Blankfein example raises complex moral questions about organizational cultures. Does everyone at Goldman Sachs really think they are doing God’s work? If they do, what does that actually mean, and is it a good thing for society given the firm’s demonstrable appetite for risk? More deeply, what are the conditions of possibility for the CEO of one of the world’s most powerful organizations saying that his firm is pursuing God’s work? Critical organizational communication adopts the methods of verstehen, in addition to methods from other critical traditions, but interjects ethical interrogation of systemic inequities in access to power and resources that are found across many social institutions and are deeply embedded historically. For example, a critical scholar might interrogate whether Goldman Sach’s cultural exceptionalism is found across the financial sector’s elite organizations and then seek to explore the roots of this exceptionalism in historical event and power trajectories. The critical scholar might address the systemic effects of a risk-seeking culture that is rooted in the collective belief it is doing God’s work. Critical organizational communication research seeks to understand how organizational communications naturalize or reify particular organizational interests, elevating them above the interests of other stakeholders who are consequently denied equitable opportunities for agency. Cultural and critical organizational communication studies have prioritized various discourse-based methodologies over the last 20 or so years. The challenges with ethnographic access may have helped drive this shift, which has been decried by those who see discourse analysis as too disconnected from the daily performances and meaning-makings of organizational members. However, the primary challenge facing these fields of study is the one long recognized as the “container metaphor” (Smith & Turner, 1995). The study of organizational communication too often represents its field of study as a self-contained syntagm—a closed signifying system—that too narrowly delimits boundaries of investigation to communications produced in and by particular organizational members with less examination of the material and symbolic embeddedness of those organizational communications within a wider social milieu of networked systems and historically embedded social structures. In essence, organizational communication has struggled to embed its observations of discrete communications/practices within more encompassing and/or networked social systems and structures.

The parent–child relationship is one of the most influential, important, and meaningful relationships in an individual’s life. The communication between parents and children fuels their bond and functions to socialize children (i.e., gender, career and work, relationship values and skills, and health behaviors), provide social support, show affection, make sense of their life experiences, engage in conflict, manage private information, and create a family communication environment. How parents and children manage these functions changes over time as their relationship adapts over the developmental periods of their lives. Mothers and fathers may also respond differently to the changing needs of their children, given the unique relational cultures that typically exist in mother–child versus father–child relationships. Although research on parent–child communication is vast and thorough, the constant changes faced by families in the 21st century—including more diverse family structures—provides ample avenues for future research on this complex relationship. Parent–child communication in diverse families (e.g., divorced/stepfamilies, adoptive, multiracial, LGBTQ, and military families) must account for the complexity of identities and experiences in these families. Further, changes in society such as advances in technology, the aging population, and differing parenting practices are also transforming the parent–child relationship. Because this relationship is a vital social resource for both parents and children throughout their lives, researchers will undoubtedly continue to seek to understand the complexities of this important family dyad.

Over recent decades, a growing body of research has consistently emphasized the importance of parental support of one’s queer (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, etc.) identity to their mental health and overall well-being. Parent–queer child relationships have increasingly drawn scholarly attention, with particular interest in children’s coming out (i.e., disclosing their queer identity) to their parents. Scholars have also focused on understanding parents’ experiences. Although researchers emphasize the importance of parents’ responses to their children coming out, as well as the importance of how people communicate and make sense of queer identities, the nature of parent–child communication beyond the initial coming out event is also central to the personal and relational well-being of parents and their queer children.

Being voluntarily childless (i.e., “childfree”) is a growing trend in the United States and around the world. Although most childfree people know early in life that they do not wish to become parents, the decision to forgo having children is an ongoing process that requires childfree people to construct a life that deviates from the normative family life cycle. Increasing rates of voluntary childlessness is a trend spurred by a variety of shifting social, economic, and environmental factors. Yet despite the increasing normalcy of voluntary childlessness, childfree people (and especially childfree women) face social sanctions for deciding not to become parents, being broadly perceived more negatively than childless people (who do not have children but want them) and parents. Such sanctions include social confrontations in which others (e.g., family members) question or contest the legitimacy of their childfree identity. Media coverage of voluntary childlessness forwards the notion that motherhood and femininity are inseparable and that voluntary childlessness is an issue that primarily concerns and affects women. Furthermore, childfree people face discrimination in health care contexts when seeking voluntary sterilization and in workplace contexts when “family-friendly” policies create unequal distributions of labor for those without children. Members of the childfree community use the Internet to share resources and seek support to navigate challenging interactions with outsiders. Beyond this, although some studies have begun to interrogate the roles of geographic location, race, and sexual orientation in shaping the experience of voluntary childlessness, at present, a largely White, wealthy, able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative, and Western view of this topic is still perpetuated in the literature.

The decolonization of nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the late 20th century made possible the arrival of postcolonial academics who engaged in a critical and thoroughgoing analysis of the ways in which colonial histories have affected and continue to influence not only our understanding of phenomena, such as culture, but have influenced the very frames and processes of the creation and dissemination of knowledge about phenomena such as culture. While this work was initiated by postcolonial scholars of literature, postcolonial theory and frameworks have been adopted by several allied fields, including the communication field. Since the 1990s, communication scholars have been using postcolonial frameworks to deconstruct the colonial and neocolonial representations and tropes present in news and popular culture discourses. They have also brought communication theory to bear upon key concepts within postcolonial study, such as hybridity and diaspora. In the mid-1990s communication scholars joined the larger debate on the continued relevance of the postcolonial framework, and as with postcolonial scholars in other fields, they have continued to insist that the interruptive and political impetus of postcolonial theory provides an important entry point for the study of a world still shot through with colonial and neocolonial power relations. Although there is still a lot of scope to make the postcolonial approach more central to the communication field and its subfields, communication scholars have continued to use postcolonial theory to shed important insight on several vital communication issues. Feminist scholars of communication have been at the forefront of the effort to increase awareness and use of postcolonial frameworks for the study of communication.

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.

Earlier generations of Western scholars often regarded nonheterosexual desires, identities, and intimacies in Chinese-speaking contexts as marginalized, stigmatized, and silenced, if not completely invisible, in mainstream mediascapes and pop cultural spaces. However, in contemporary Chinese and Sinophone contexts, queer practices, images, and narratives voiced, either explicitly or implicitly, by media producers, performers, and consumers or fans who do not necessarily self-identify as LGBTQ are common and even proliferating. These manifestations of queer Chinese media and pop culture are diverse and widespread in both online and offline spaces. In the new millennium, with the rise of queer Asian, queer Chinese, and queer Sinophone studies, scholars have strived to move away from Euro-American-centric and Japanese-centric queer media studies and theories when examining queer Chinese-language media and cultural productions. In particular, a growing body of scholarship (in fields such as literary studies, cinema and television studies, and fan studies) has explored intersecting ways of reconceptualizing “queerness” and “Chineseness” to examine gender, sexual, and sociocultural minority cultures in Chinese-language public and pop cultural spaces. Some of the literature has usefully traced the history of the concepts “homosexuality” and “tongzhi” (comrade) in modern and contemporary China, as well as the transcultural transmission and mutations of the meanings of the English term “queer” (ku’er) in Chinese media studies. Differentiating these concepts helps clarify the theorization of and scholarly debates surrounding queer Chinese media and pop culture in the 21st century. A number of scholars have also troubled the meaning and the essentialized identity of “Chineseness” through a queer lens while decolonizing and de-Westernizing queer Chinese media and pop cultural studies. In addition, post-2010 scholarship has paid major attention to Chinese media censorship and regulations (with a close focus on the context of mainland China/the People’s Republic of China/PRC) concerning homosexual and queer content production, circulation, and consumption and how these have been circumvented in both traditional and online media spaces.

Queer comics have been a staple of LGBTQIA+ culture, from independent and underground comics beginning in the late 1960s to web comics in the current digital age. Comics are a uniquely queer art form, as comics scholar Hillary Chute has argued, consistently marginalized in the art world. Queer comics have also principally been produced by and for queer audiences, with mainstream recognition not being their primary goal. This marginalization has, in some sense, been a benefit, as these comics have not been captive to the pressures of capitalist aesthetics. This makes queer comics a rich historical archive for understanding queer life and queer communities. Collections of queer comics from the late 1960s and onward have recently been published, making large archives of work widely available. The Queer Zine Archive Project online also houses a large volume of underground and self-published material. There are some affordances inherent to the medium of comics which make it a distinctly powerful medium for queer self-expression and representation. In comics, the passage of time is represented through the space of the page, which makes complex expressions of queer temporality possible. The form is also quite intimate, particularly hand-drawn comics, which retain their original form rather than being translated into type. The reader plays a significant role in the construction of meaning in comics, as what happens between panels in the “gutter” (and is thus not pictured) is as much a part of the story as what is pictured within the panels. In addition to the value of reading queer stories in comic form, incorporating making comics and other creative practices into pedagogy is a powerful way to engage in queer worldmaking.

The emerging subfield of queer communication pedagogy (QCP) marks an educative praxis that centers the liberation of queer and trans subjects and, specifically, those who are most violently impacted by racist cisheterosexism in the form of carceral logics and policing. Intersectional articulations of sex, gender, and sexual difference are disciplined and literally policed both in and out of the communication classroom. Course design, for instance, provides a disciplinary means for justifying the violent repression of sex, gender, and sexual difference in the classroom through activities that insist on a compulsory framing of gender in binary terms. Or, policing can emerge in the racist cisheterosexist pedagogue’s gaze that communicatively constitutes “incivility” out of racialized sex, gender, and sexual difference; this is evidenced in the violent policing of queer and trans students of color beginning with the school-to-prison pipeline and on into higher education settings where educators are empowered to call on campus police forces to remedy what they perceive as “unruly”—queer—students. QCP reflects histories comprising both critical communication pedagogy (CCP) and queer pedagogy. CCP, itself informed by critical pedagogy, is committed to liberatory educative ends driven by praxiological means derived of lived experience in historical context. That is, critical pedagogy takes as a point of departure lived experience as a means of resisting intersectional oppression and, in turn, enacting progressive social change. CCP strives toward these liberatory goals through communicative means, specifically dialogic encounters between/with/as students-and/as-teachers. Conversely, queer pedagogy refers to a destabilization of pedagogical presumption implicating the racist cisheteronormative foundation informing carceral-centered knowledge production and educative engagement. In turn, queer pedagogy labors toward the abolition of carcerality including the prison industrial complex and police state. Taken together, QCP marks an activist-oriented educative praxis that labors toward liberation of queer and trans subjects through the abolition of racist cisheterosexist carcerality.

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.

Queer healthcare communication spans different literature and topic areas. The medicalization of queer bodies has historically and continues to influence how queer individuals interact and communicate within healthcare settings. Further, heterosexism is rampant within medical institutions that perpetuate the idea that all patients are heterosexual. Because of the influence of heterosexism, medical schools are designed to ignore queer bodies. If queer bodies are acknowledged, they are positioned as something exotic and not presented as a typical patient. Heterosexism is further communicated in patient and provider interactions by providers assuming their patients’ heterosexual identity and assuming all queer patients are promiscuous. In turn, queer patients may make decisions about their healthcare based on providers’ heterosexist attitudes. Providers who practice medicine have also demonstrated their limited knowledge about queer patients and how to care for them. The literature on discrimination of queer patients focuses more on how providers have used both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication. In looking at queer discrimination, queer invisibility demonstrates more covert functions of healthcare communication. Due to the invisibility of queer patients, disclosure becomes a site of interest for researchers. While some queer patients try to seek out queer-friendly providers, researchers have given recommendations on how healthcare providers can improve their queer competency. Finally, some notable topics within queer healthcare communication include queer pregnancy, HIV, and why transgender identity should be a separate topic as transgender people have their own healthcare needs.

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.

Scholarship engaging queer theory in tandem with the study of colonialism and empire has expanded in recent years. This interdisciplinary area of research draws from queer of color theorizing and women of color feminists who made these links during queer theory’s emergence and development in social movements and within the field of women’s and gender studies. Together, queer of color, (post)colonial, transnational feminist, and Indigenous scholars and activists have highlighted the centrality of gender and sexuality to colonial, settler colonial, and imperial processes. Among the alignments of queer and (post)colonial inquiry are their emphases on social transformation through critique and resistant praxis. In the communication discipline, scholarship queering the study of colonialism and empire has emerged in critical/cultural studies, intercultural communication, rhetoric, media studies, and performance studies. Two broad thematics defining this scholarship are (a) decolonizing queerness by identifying how queer theory, LGBTQ activism, and queer globalizations have reinforced Whiteness and empire; and (b) queering decolonization by identifying how heteropatriarchal, binary, and normative systems of sex, sexuality, and gender contribute to colonial processes of past and present.

Queer(ing) popular music culture is a diverse field. It focuses, on the one hand, on the adjective “queer” and describes and analyzes what makes certain music queer. On the other hand, there is a strong emphasis on the verb “to queer,” on the doing, on how music culture can be made queer. Queer music is directed against not only norms concerning gender and sexuality, but also other intersectionalities correlating to the body and desire, such as disability, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and so forth. Early on, queer music culture stood for “homosexual” musicians, performances, taste, or audiences, but has now opened up toward other identities and queering practices showing the construction of identities in an interplay of dominant power mechanisms (e.g., racialization). To queer music culture is to step outside of binary normative assumptions and dichotomous thinking and to introduce more subtle in-betweens in music, which are directed against the hegemonic power structures at place in music culture and the society in general, and aim to dissolve them. Queer musical performances and how to queer music culture depend strongly on the cultural and historical context the music is placed in. Two key concepts for the analyses are the performance and performativity (repetition of performances) of gender and sexuality and other intersectional identities. Both concepts are crucial because they form the foundation of queer theory. In terms of music culture, this means that it is not only about how a musician performs their gender during a show, but also that this gendered performance needs to be repeated over time and in society. For example, members of the same audience could emulate the gendered performance of the musician in their own social life. Gender is performed and performative, as are other kinds of identities such as sexuality and other intersectionalities (race, class, age, dis/ability). Analyzing how a gender/sexuality/class/race performance is done and how it is repeated in everyday life (performativity) helps to find queer acts and gestures. In music culture this means to look at not only musical performances or at the appearance and behavior of the audience during the performance and in their daily lives, but also in doing music culture differently—hence “queering” music culture—and not corresponding to the heteronormative production and consumption scheme. This kind of “queering,” for example, happened in the Riot Grrrl movement when they produced their own labels and escaped the male-dominated studio productions. Other examples are their self-produced zines to spread queer-feminist knowledge or their DIY archives (see History of Queer(ing) Popular Music Culture), and the queering of the production/consumption scheme is also seen in the ballroom culture as explained in the following section. Further musical periods and genres will be examined critically for their queerness: blues and jazz in the early 20th century, glam rock in the 1960s and 1970s, Black hip-hop from the 1990s until now, and contemporary trans music.

The history, principles, and contributions of the reproductive justice (RJ) framework to queer family formation is the nexus that connects the coalitional potential between RJ and queer justice. How the three pillars of RJ intersect with the systemic marginalization of LGBTQ people—especially poor queer people of color—helps clarify how the RJ framework can elaborate the intersectional understandings of queer reproductive politics and kin.