scholarly journals Annihilating love and heterosexuality without women: Romance, generic difference, and queer politics in Supernatural fan fiction

Author(s):  
Monica Flegel ◽  
Jenny Roth

This essay examines the differing generic tropes and sexual politics evident in Supernatural slash and in J2 fan fic. We argue that while some stories within Supernatural fan fiction provide happy endings to the characters that are denied them in the show's canon, dark!fic instead focuses on the intensity and exclusivity of Sam and Dean's love, thus illuminating dangers at the heart of the one-true-love trope. We also argue that RPS written within the Supernatural fan community demonstrates greater adherence to conventional romance tropes and normative sexualities, and thus reveals important ideological constructs of heteronormativity.

Author(s):  
Cornel Grey ◽  
Nikoli A. Attai

This chapter takes up questions of sexual citizenship by examining the desire for and impact of LGBT rights discourses in the Anglophone Caribbean. The chapter works through the difficulties and aspirations of queer politics in the Caribbean to articulate a vision of citizenship and/or freedom that is not overdetermined by white Anglocentric models. Popular measurements of homophobia tell a partial story of queer life and sexual politics in the Caribbean, and this chapter attempts to fill that gap by pointing to the ways that queer people engage, challenge, redefine, and dissociate from laws and policies that mark their sexuality as antagonistic to nationhood. The chapter draws on Rinaldo Walcott’s mobilization of homopoetics to contextualize the political and cultural tensions between LGBT rights organizations in the Global North and organizers in the Caribbean. It offers blacklighting as a way to name the processes by which organizations and governments in the Global North doubly impose LGBT rights frameworks and forward antiblack narratives about Caribbean citizens. In closing, the chapter asks for a return to the question of LGBT rights and its deployment in the Caribbean and proposes a means of engagement that holds blackness alongside sexuality in matters of rights and citizenship.


Author(s):  
Volker Woltersdorff

This essay analyses apocalyptic rhetoric in recent queer theoretical writings on negativity and temporality, in particular the invocation of an end, and its use for political radicality. The suspension of progressive time in favour of alternative temporalities, such as reversion, circularity or endless presence, has for long been a strategy of subcultural performance, coming out narratives, AIDS activism, and other queer politics. Such strategies stage a rupture within the linearity of time and the symbolic order of discourse. The author illustrates the potentials and pitfalls of this rhetoric gesture by elaborating its inherent dialectics between the disruption and the emergence of temporality. The dialectics consist precisely in that by radically negating historicity, apocalyptical rhetorics make history. Invoking the end of future thus empowers the one who is speaking, as it installs an immediate urgency for action and interpellates queer subjects. Yet, the assumed radicality often hides the privileged condition of its formation. By universalising the particularity of this perspective, it runs the risk of turning radical negativity into radical affirmation. In conclusion, the author claims that it is the loss of futurity rather than, as some antisocial approaches argue, the active destruction or negation of futurity that ought to be regarded as queer momentum. For when the experience of a queer loss results in a work of mourning, it aims at reappropriating the future and articulating it in unforeseen and queer ways.


Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leelan Farhan

Evren Savcı’s Queer in Translation presents an alternative, both in methodology and analysis, to the Orientalist analytical frameworks typical of Western scholars studying queer politics in Middle Eastern regions. Specifically, Savcı analyzes the rise of Turkey’s Adalet ve Kalınma Partisi (AKP; in English, the Justice and Development Party) to show how the AKP’s increased securitization and oppression of marginalized communities—including, but not limited to, Turkey’s LGBTQ community—is the result of the marriage of Islam and neoliberalism. Savci produces compelling case studies that reveal how Turkey’s weaponization of religion, morality, and capitalism serve to secure the nation against dissenting citizens. From the discourse surrounding the complicated murder of a gay Kurdish man, to unlikely solidarities between religious hijabi women and LGBTQ activists, and the public commons that became Gezi Park, Savci’s critical translation methods reveal how the language to construct and resist securitization in Turkey are far more nuanced than simple attribution to solely Islamist extremism or Western neoliberal influence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-50
Author(s):  
Tomáš Hejduk

Abstract The study compares Theognis’ and Socrates’ concept of love: there is an ambivalence of love present in both authors in the form of a connection between the pleasing and the unpleasing, that is, on the one hand, devotion to the educatory harshness of the lover, on the other to his skill and cunning. To what extent is the ambivalence in Socrates and Theognis similar or dissimilar? The answer discloses a comparison of ideas about the functioning, the aims, and the meaning of love in the wider context of understanding the life and world of the two authors: such a context exposes the duplicity in Theognis, and the love of negation of unambiguous teaching about the proper life without painful testing. In Socrates, it is exposed to irony, to eternal ignorance and to openness to another and to god’s world. Next, we contrast Theognis’ limiting of another’s duplicity (devotion and cunning) to a level between a loving and friendly relationship with Socrates’ expansion of the loving struggle into every sphere of life, above all into the relationship of the lover to himself and those close to him. We explain this contrast as a decision between trust in reason and trust in love as the fundamental forces conferring meaning on human life. We show, however, that with Socrates it is not blind love but rather love embracing reason and overlapping divine challenges, while with Theognis it is not pure reason that is involved, but rather reason directed by the socio-political situation.


1996 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debbie Epstein ◽  
Deborah Lynn Steinberg

The Oprah Winfrey Show provides an interesting set of contradictions. On the one hand, it appears to challenge common-sense assumptions about relationships, specifically heterosexual relationships (for example, by consistently raising issues of sexual violence within a heterosexual context). Yet, at the same time, Oprah's presentation often works to reinforce precisely the norms she seeks to challenge. Through a close analysis of a selection of programme clips from one particular programme among many about relationships, sexuality and families, this article will consider the ways in which the Oprah Winfrey Show both problematizes and yet normalizes the boundaries of heterosexuality. Here we shall discuss both the resolute exposure and exploration of what could be termed the casualities of normative (and compulsory) heterosexuality and, paradoxically, its recuperation as a ‘rational’ ideal. In exploring the ways in which this recuperation takes place, we shall begin with a brief consideration of two of the key discourses which shape the show: the discourse of therapy and that of kinship. Our analysis of the sexual politics of the Oprah Winfrey Show in these terms will focus on the programme, ‘How to Make Love Last’ (18 January 1993). Like so many other programmes, ‘How to Make Love Last’ intends to highlight and deal with problems within heterosexual relationships as distressing but solvable (through the medium of therapeutic self-help). At another level, however, the programme also (unwittingly) reveals a different order of problems which, ironically, can only be reinforced by the mode of rescue proposed and staged.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawna Manchakowsky

Cass, Kiera. The One. New York: Harper Teen/Harper Collins Publisher, 2014. Print.Book Three in The Selection seriesThe One is the third instalment of Kiera Cass’ Selection series.  The first book, The Selection, begins with thirty-five girls who are chosen across the country to vie for the prince’s heart to become the next queen of Illéa.  For most girls, this would be a dream come true.  For America Singer, one of the selected, she could not care less.  She does not want to leave her family or her childhood sweetheart behind.  Soon swept into a world so different from her own, she begins to see not everything is perfect at the castle or as simple as it seems.The Elite, book two, picks up right after one of the eliminations and begins with the final six girls (the elite).  There is more turmoil as America battles with her feelings for her childhood sweetheart, Aspen, who is a guard at the palace, and Maxon, the prince, who has more aspects to him than she originally thought.  Tension rises when the rebels attack the castle and the girls are under siege.  While America struggles with her feelings, she decides that she does, in fact, want to be there and will now try for Maxon’s heart, if she still has a chance.The One, book three, begins with the castle under attack.  We have learned secrets about the king at the end of book two and are beginning to understand the rebels’ motives. Competition is also fierce as it is now down to the top four girls and each girl is desperately trying to win Maxon’s heart.  America feels strongly for the prince, but how can she know if she loves him when he still has three other girls that he is dating?  Does he love her or one of the other girls more?  Can she really turn away from Aspen, her first true love? Full of action, suspense and heartache, you will want to know how this book ends. The story is a mix between The Hunger Games, The Bachelor and Cinderella. This series is sure to thrill teenage audiences looking for adventure and romance.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewed by: Shawna ManchakowskyShawna Manchakowsky recently completed her MLIS at the University of Alberta.  When she is not working at Rutherford Library as a Public Service Assistant, she can be found with her husband parenting her two young girls; avoiding any kind of cooking; and reading for her two book clubs. In between book club titles, she tries to read as much teen fiction as she can get away with. 


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Mariel Austin

According to Mattel, Monster High dolls topped $500 million in annual sales in 2014, quickly gaining on Barbie, whose $1.3 billion in annual revenue plummeted for the fourth quarter in a row. Monster High's recent ad campaign claims, "We are monsters. We are proud." Race, ethnicity, and disability are coded into the dolls as selling points. The allure of Monster High is, in part, that political identity and the celebration of difference become consumable. The female body, the racialized body, and the disabled body have long been coded as monstrous. Monster High reclaims this label, queering it. Using Jack Halberstam's work on children's culture and Richard Berger's and Rosalind Hanmer's work on fandom, this article explores the queer potential of Monster High. Fans rewrite the Mattel narrative through fan fiction, repainting the dolls, and embodying them through virtual avatars, makeup, and costume play. These fan practices both queer the dolls' identity politics and create communities of interest that act as safe spaces for expressing queer identity and generating fan activism. These fan practices have also influenced Mattel's branding of the dolls, specifically with the recent inclusion of activism campaigns such as WeStopHate and The Kind Campaign into the Monster High Webisodes and Web site. By exploring the queer politics of Monster High fandom, this paper explains how that queering generates social change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-470
Author(s):  
Mario Pecheny ◽  
Luca Zaidan ◽  
Mirna Lucaccini

Focusing on the case of Argentina, this text discusses two issues. The first refers to the tension between progress in feminist and LGBTIQ+ politics, on the one hand, and erotic-affective practices, that is, ‘actually existing eroticism,’ on the other hand. This tension is analyzed on two levels: first, through the construction of identities, theoretical perspectives, and political strategies in the sex-gender arena from a stance of victimization; and second, through examining new ‘normativities’ that resulted from the achievements by feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements in transforming their demands into laws and policies. The second issue calls attention to a particular form of political action: public shaming and what the authors refer to here as ‘lynching,’ which describes extreme methods of a sexual politics of victimization in a context of neoliberal governance.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahuvia Kahane

The historicity of canon is considered with an emphasis on contemporary fan fiction and early Greek oral epic traditions. The essay explores the idea of canon by highlighting historical variance, exposing wider conceptual isomorphisms, and formulating a revised notion of canonicity. Based on an analysis of canon in early Greece, the discussion moves away from the idea of canon as a set of valued works and toward canon as a practice of containment in response to inherent states of surplus. This view of canon is applied to the practice of fan fiction, reestablishing the idea of canonicity in fluid production environments within a revised, historically specific understanding in early oral traditions on the one hand and in digital cultures and fan fiction on the other. Several examples of early epigraphic Greek texts embedded in oral environments are analyzed and assessed in terms of their implications for an understanding of fan fiction and its modern contexts.


Sociology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy L. Stone ◽  
Sarah Davis

The study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) social movements mostly emerges out of the sociological study of social movements, although historians have written a number of texts focusing on the history of the movement. The LGBT movement has transformed dramatically throughout time; contemporary queer politics would be incomprehensible to homophile activists mobilizing after World War II. At any given moment, the movement has diversity within it in terms of participants, agendas, tactics, and collective identities; in the early 1970s, within the one social movement there were lesbian feminists and gay liberationists organizing more radical politics, homophile activists taking more moderate approaches to visibility, and the beginnings of the modern liberal gay rights movements. Scholars tend to focus on the mobilizations, tactics, ideologies, and collective identities of the movements. This bibliography provides an overview of the LGBT movements, sections on major phases of the movement, and sections that provide guidance on law and culture in the movement. The major phases of the movement include the early gay and lesbian homophile organizing, gay liberationist politics, lesbian feminism, AIDS activism, and the modern LGBT movement.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document