WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910101
Marquis Bey
{"title":"NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary","authors":"Marquis Bey","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910101","url":null,"abstract":"NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary Marquis Bey (bio) The aim here is not to give an incessantly clear definition of nonbinariness, such that we would then have an “accurate” or “correct” definition. Indeed, this impulse—to clarify pristinely, to excavate etymological roots in order for a term to be illuminated once and for all, obviating misuse—is one I have long had, and I feel its tugs now. But that will not save nonbinariness from misuse or misunderstanding. There is in fact something in nonbinariness that refuses this impulse, it seems—something that has long asserted that even if this or that meant X (or shall we say “Q” or whatever other non-X/Y letter so as not to imply gender- and sex-laden allusions) in its supposed origins, in its etymological DNA, as it were, it does not mean that it must be that now, true-bluely. Because what is nonbinariness if not to say, to demand, that yeah, maybe I was Q when I was young, and even when I started to get older, but I am not that now. And do not have to be. And do not wish to be. Like Beans Velocci, who I have met briefly, on a brisk evening in Philadelphia (my hometown) in a heated restaurant tent enjoying food and company and intellectuality, I was made trans. Not, as with Velocci, by Foucault—although he is a supplemental culprit, just not the primary actor—but by other things. In my case, by suggestions and experiences and drives and, too, cartoons. I speak to this in my book Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, where I detail across multiple essays the ways that Dragonball Z or The Powerpuff Girls were sites of imaginative inhabitation, where what was extant in my world did not have to be all of the possibilities for myself; the ways this movement of a hand or rejection of a space or unfitness within a community were sites of exquisite rebellion and testament to how we could move differently, think differently, en- and ungender differently in proximity to unsanctioned imaginaries. I came to my nonbinariness [End Page 313] by way of a double refusal: I was refused entry into this or that space, this or that modality, expected as it was and predicated on criteria far less attractive to me than most; but, too, I refused those spaces in tiny, muted ways. They did not want me, at least as I wished to be and become, and I did not want them—there was, in short, “a throwing up of hands and an embrace of the refusal that was the term nonbinary” (Velocci 2022, 476). I love this refusal, a term I have returned to over and over, to the point of exhaustion now, it feels to me, but a term that continues to emerge for its utility, its depth, its feeling of Yes, that’s it. Because it is in that refusal, or whatever one wishes to call it—I hope it is clear that I am not too hung up on the words one uses, as long as they allow you, us, to do and be and reach for the thing we are working toward—that something is going on. That is, very often it seems that much of the scholarship or th","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910089
Maya von Ziegesar
{"title":"Writing about Mentorship, and Mentorship through Writing","authors":"Maya von Ziegesar","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910089","url":null,"abstract":"Writing about Mentorship, and Mentorship through Writing Maya von Ziegesar (bio) Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman (eds.)’s Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023 My copy of Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology is thin and pink, floppy almost, with title matter written in modern, lowercase letters. Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, both English professors and themselves a mentor-mentee pair, introduce the book humbly and autobiographically, musing on COVID, the ’80s proto-girlboss film Working Girl, and their own experiences with mentorship and feminist community. For these and other reasons, including an intrusive, gen-Z cynicism about second-wave feminism that try as I might I can’t always suppress, I picked up Feminists Reclaim Mentorship expecting reminiscences about boys’-club academia, open-secret sexual harassers, older women hardened by their own ascents to power, commitments to reimagining old and broken systems, communities of peer mentors, and reiterations of the importance of reciprocity and listening. I was not expecting such a thoughtful, ambivalent, and sharp book; not expecting to be forced to put it down in order to think deeply about the mentors I’ve had, the almost-mentors I wish I’d had, my mother mentors and peer mentors; not expecting to end up less sure than ever about the right way forward or even the meaning of the word. In short, I underestimated this book. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship has teeth. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship is broken into three parts, following a familiar arc. First, mentorship as we have received it: hierarchical and implicitly patriarchal. The authors in this section reflect on the powerful people they used to aspire to be, or their own successes and failings once they had transitioned from mentee to mentor. They ask when mentorship ends, whether mentorship can transcend its inherent asymmetry, how to listen to your mentees and become a better mentor. The middle section is a crisis point for the meaning of mentorship. The authors here talk about mentor ghosts and [End Page 268] mentor imaginaries, a radical break from traditional mentorship, a refuge for those of us never meant to find our home in hierarchical patriarchy. Finally, in the last section, mentorship is reimagined and reconfigured. Mentor-ship becomes a fluid, reciprocal relationship between feminist peers and colleagues, something nonexclusionary and new. In this section, mentor-ship is reformed by some authors and rejected by others. When I finished reading, I was left with a longing for a final turn of the narrative that would never come. The pernicious and deeply ingrained problems of our social world are articulately described and diagnosed, while solutions are offered, tentatively, as experiments in half-imagined, living alternatives. The aching of the first section—recollections of being a graduate student in search of a mentor who would never manifest—continued througho","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910076
Raagini Bora
{"title":"Desi Genderqueerness: The Mystery and History of Gender Diversity in India","authors":"Raagini Bora","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910076","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The goal of this article is to conceptualize a decolonial understanding of an Indian genderqueerness, trying to contest the false temporal binaries of coloniality and postcoloniality. Tracing India’s complex and rich queer and genderqueer history preceding British colonization, I dissect the impact of colonization on postcolonial transphobia and understandings of trans. Through a historical literature review and media content analysis of the controversial film The Pink Mirror (2003), I apply a decolonial lens to reimagine locally produced narratives of queerness and genderqueerness through local genderqueer communities, such as Hijras and Kothis.","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910091
Audacia Ray
{"title":"Trans Visibility Cloak","authors":"Audacia Ray","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910091","url":null,"abstract":"Trans Visibility Cloak Audacia Ray (bio) One Sunday afternoon, as Aiden walked through the vestibule of their Brooklyn apartment building, they saw a long cape hanging on a coat hook near the mailboxes. They thought this odd. Often there were packages dropped off here on the floor, but they’d never seen a tenant use the coat hooks. It was a remnant of a bygone era when this brownstone was inhabited by one family instead of split into three apartments. Aiden had been a goth girl in high school, wore a homemade cape then, a thing that shrouded their ever-changing body in mystery. It made the hated curves of their body invisible but made them a target of merciless teasing. In the New Jersey suburbs of the 1990s, it got Aiden the nickname Dracula. Secretly, they were kind of into being called Dracula, because it meant that the girl name they’d been given by their parents wasn’t being formed over and over again in the mouths of sneering teens. They felt a pang of nostalgia and kindness toward their teen goth self as they looked at this cape. What the hell, Aiden thought, and they lifted the cape up and, with a practiced flourish, swung it around their shoulders. They had been heading out to go buy some snacks anyway, might as well do it wearing a cape and play into someone else’s story, I was out getting coffee and I saw someone casually walking around in a cape! When they got to the bodega, one of the men who was often sitting outside on a broken milk crate was on his way into the store. “Sup, bro?” the guy asked, holding steady eye contact with Aiden as he held the door open for them. Aiden tried not to look startled. This guy usually looked offended by Aiden’s existence, like Aiden’s asymmetrical haircut and gender [End Page 276] nonconformity meant they were a threat to his cis-hetero existence. In the cape, they were no longer a threat, but—what?—a comrade in arms? Aiden gathered their snacks and continued a slow saunter around the neighborhood. They began to get in the groove of getting head nods and uncomplicated greetings from men. What was this sorcery? Men being nice to them? They stopped briefly in front of a chaotic window display in a hardware store, which depicted a backyard BBQ with plastic flames fluttering in the breeze of a small electric fan, and lawn chairs with red, white, and blue NY football helmets emblazoned on them. “Go Giants!” a passing man said to them cheerfully. They continued their walk, thoughtfully crunching away on Funyuns. Their feet took them toward their favorite neighborhood plant shop, where there were always tiny succulents in adorable little ceramic pots with faces painted on them. Very hard to resist. They swept into the store, feeling the whoosh of the cape around their ankles. A twenty-something femme with a lip piercing and an undercut with the long part dyed cactus-green gave them a nod of queer acknowledgment. How could it be that on this one walk, they had been treated with kindness by cis men and also ","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910087
Natalie Erazo
{"title":"The Creative Resistance of Trans of Color Culture, Technology, and Movements","authors":"Natalie Erazo","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910087","url":null,"abstract":"The Creative Resistance of Trans of Color Culture, Technology, and Movements Natalie Erazo (bio) Jian Neo Chen’s Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019 Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Jian Neo Chen’s book debut, engages transdisciplinary critique through the examples of trans, gender nonconforming, and disabled artists and activists of color working across film, performance, literature, and digital media, among other cultural practices. Chen locates radical aesthetics and activism that challenge dominant paradigms ordering the world according to racial and colonial binary sex/gender systems (4). Taking as its departure point the 2014 Time magazine cover featuring actress Laverne Cox announcing the “transgender tipping point,” the book critiques the ways in which racialized trans identity has become minoritized in our neoliberal multiculturalist climate and absorbed within the capitalist free market system, yielding merely symbolic rather than tangible structural change. Instead, the book locates trans of color identity outside the confines of nation-states, and it centers communities that continue to emerge and resist singular definition. Chen builds on the legacies of foundational trans of color community-builders Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and activist scholars such as Christopher Lee and Emi Koyama, whose contributions were often eclipsed by the predominantly white leadership of the first wave of transgender organizations in the 1990s. Using trans in accordance with the likes of Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore, Chen highlights the adaptive, relational, and liberatory possibilities of opening up trans to other meanings and to inclusiveness of gender nonconforming and variant identities and expressions (5). This challenges the pathologized perceptions of transgender identity and embodiment held by white settler-colonial binary and medical systems as well as conventional Western [End Page 260] notions of family and kinship. Focusing on Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx artists and activists, Chen draws connections between embodied experiences of “racial gender displacement and subjugation” and the interrelated legacies of U.S. imperialism, colonization, and captivity, both within and beyond national borders (4). Nodding to Michel Foucault’s “biopolitical genealogies of state and social power,” Chen offers crucial considerations about state policies and carceral infrastructures that create power imbalances within society, ascribing “affective hierarchies of social value including the criminal and civil, sick and productive, perverse and moral, foreign and native” and justifying systemic policing along these lines (16). The first chapter, “Cultures,” explores performance, the body, and sensation and the ways in which Asian bodies have been constructed by the West. Trans migrant Korean","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735777","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910081
Leslie Feinberg
{"title":"Dear Theresa, from Stone Butch Blues","authors":"Leslie Feinberg","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910081","url":null,"abstract":"Dear Theresa, from Stone Butch Blues Leslie Feinberg Dear Theresa: I’m lying on my bed tonight missing you, my eyes all swollen, hot tears running down my face. There’s a fierce summer lightning storm raging outside. Tonight I walked down streets looking for you in every woman’s face, as I have each night of this lonely exile. I’m afraid I’ll never see your laughing, teasing eyes again. I had coffee in Greenwich Village earlier with a woman. A mutual friend fixed us up, sure we’d have a lot in common since we’re both “into politics.” Well, we sat in a coffee shop and she talked about Democratic politics and seminars and photography and problems with her co-op and how she’s so opposed to rent control. Small wonder—Daddy is a real estate developer. I was looking at her while she was talking, thinking to myself that I’m a stranger in this woman’s eyes. She’s looking at me but she doesn’t see me. Then she finally said how she hates this society for what it’s done to “women like me” who hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men. I felt myself getting flushed and my face twitched a little and I started telling her, all cool and calm, about how women like me existed since the dawn of time, before there was oppression, and how those societies respected them, and she got her very interested expression on—and besides it was time to leave. So we walked by a corner where these cops were laying into a homeless man and I stopped and mouthed off to the cops and they started coming at me with their clubs raised and she tugged my belt to pull me back. I just looked at her, and suddenly I felt things well up in me I thought I had buried. I stood there remembering you like I didn’t see cops about to hit me, like I was falling back into another world, a place I wanted to go again. [End Page 220] And suddenly my heart hurt so bad and I realized how long it’s been since my heart felt—anything. I need to go home to you tonight, Theresa. I can’t. So I’m writing you this letter. I remember years ago, the day I started working at the cannery in Buffalo and you had already been there a few months, and how your eyes caught mine and played with me before you set me free. I was supposed to be following the foreman to fill out some forms but I was so busy wondering what color your hair was under that white paper net and how it would look and feel in my fingers, down loose and free. And I remember how you laughed gently when the foreman came back and said, “You comin’ or not?” All of us he-shes were mad as hell when we heard you got fired because you wouldn’t let the superintendent touch your breasts. I still unloaded on the docks for another couple of days, but I was kind of mopey. It just wasn’t the same after your light went out. I couldn’t believe it the night I went to the club on the West Side. There you were, leaning up against the bar, your jeans too tight for words and your hair, your hair all loose and free. And I remember that look in your eyes again","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"93 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910066
Lena Mattheis
{"title":"Nonbinary Pronouns in Literary History: Queer(ing) Pronouns in the Works of Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish","authors":"Lena Mattheis","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910066","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article seeks to explore how nonbinary, ambiguous, and gender-neutral pronouns are used for gender nonconforming characters in seventeenth-century British literature. Focusing on a particularly interesting time for gender nonconformity in British literature, the article traces queer pronoun use in three poems by Aphra Behn and in the prose narrative Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656) by Margaret Cavendish. While the history and grammaticality of singular they and other gender-neutral pronouns has been explored in several linguistic studies, the aesthetic dimension and historicity of gender-neutral language in literature is still frequently questioned. An examination of what is only a small sample of literary texts that consciously play with unstable pronouns, ambiguously gendered characters, and gender nonconforming language emphasizes the artistic and creative dimension of nonbinary and gender-neutral pronouns. The fact that we find ambivalent pronouns and gender nonconforming characters at the core of many plays, poems, and novels in literary history also shows that readers have been able to comprehend and empathize with queerly gendered characters and pronouns for centuries.","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WSQPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2023.a910070
Denis E. Boyacı, Aslıhan Öğün Boyacıoğlu
{"title":"Tracing “Gender Critical” Ideology in Turkey: A Study of the Feminist Movement on Sex/Gender in Relation to Trans and Queer Inclusivity","authors":"Denis E. Boyacı, Aslıhan Öğün Boyacıoğlu","doi":"10.1353/wsq.2023.a910070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.2023.a910070","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Drawing from queer theory and transfeminism, this article discusses whether queer- and trans-inclusive feminism is a possibility within the contemporary feminist movement in Turkey by analyzing its approach to the concept of sex/gender. In this context, in-depth interviews were conducted with activists who took part in the feminist movement and the LGBTQIA+ movement in Izmir, Turkey. These interviews reveal that the feminist movement bases its understanding on the sex and gender distinction and heteropatriarchy’s gender binarism, questions the identities of trans subjects, and establishes power domains in terms of being white and cishet. The present study has concluded that the feminist movement does not build sufficiently on transfeminism and queer theory, and reinforces a cisnormative sex/gender approach.","PeriodicalId":37092,"journal":{"name":"WSQ","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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