The Clinic and the Tearoom

Although the clinical and the sexual are commonly treated as antithetical realms of experience, queer commentary teaches that the clinic is a positively sexual space and that clinical intimacy is a creative form of sexual intimacy. Contrary to writers such as Engelhardt, the clinic is a space where queer publics are forged, and the barriers between moral friends and moral strangers potentially dissolve, but only to the extent that one is disposed to allow oneself to enjoy experiences of identification that confound the ideals of human dignity typically invoked in writings about sexual ethics on the one hand and clinical medical ethics on the other hand.     

“I’m Not Gonna Run Around and Put a Condom on Every Dick I See”: Tensions in Safer Sex Activism Among Queer Communities in Montréal,Quebec

In looking at the HIV/AIDS crisis as it relates to queer communities, two historical trajectories can be drawn: on the one hand, severe state inaction and neglect, which was countered by patient activism, community self-care, and auto-education movements. On the other, a call for sexual responsibilisation that, through institutionalization via AIDS Service Organizations, merged with a broader tradition of heterosexist medico-legal state surveillance and normalization; this has been countered by intentionally adopting ‘unsafe’ sex practices. As such, many queer communities experience ambivalence in how to organise, advocate, and resist oppression around issues of sexual health. This article employs that ambivalence to think about how political resistance operates. Using fieldwork conducted in Montréal, Quebec, I illustrate that for many queers, especially those involved in the field of sexual health, the course they navigate between queer political identity and safer sex messaging and materials is a tense and nuanced one. Rather than seeing this ambivalence as a sign of political failure or incoherency, however, we may see these contradictions as a form of iterative openness that Judith Butler suggests is evidence of—indeed, necessary for—emancipatory political potential. Ambivalence ensures and enables a persistent categorical antagonism, so that the boundaries of what constitutes ‘queer sexual resistance’ remain unfixed.     

Queer Muslim love: a time for ijtihad

ABSTRACT

Across the globe, Muslim communities have developed, and are continuing to develop, a theology of compassion, non-judgmental attitudes, and support toward queer Muslims. This discourse uses ijtihadic analysis to support acceptance of queer Muslim love, because religion is a strong and deep social construct that acts as a moral compass where Muslim queers learn to feel “unacceptable”, “bad”, and “worthless” and under the mercy of the horrified gaze of mainstream, heteropatriarchy, which uses religious arguments to contest the rights enshrined in the South African constitution. It provides a case study as a pedagogical reflection to share intentions, process, and outcomes of sexual diversity workshops to support queer Muslim love to broadly raise critical consciousness about alternative sexual orientations and identities.     

The Difference Sameness Makes: Objectification,Sex Work,and Queerness

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice.     

Is it Really Just About Being More Like a Fag? Confronting the Gay Male Model Mantra

Although the debate between feminism and queer is by now a fairly old and some might argue, trite and overwrought one, in this paper I direct my attention to a specific feminist assessment of queer that I find to be especially unhelpful and pernicious: the automatic linkage of queer with the exaltation of a gay male subjectivity. This article is informed by my own ethnographic research on lesbian/queer public sexual cultures; specifically, two Canadian lesbian/queer bathhouses, where public sex and sexual exploration are encouraged. I argue that this contention, that lesbians who espouse queer are aping (gay) male sexuality and subjectivity—due to the privileging of non-normative sexual practices found within the gay male community—does two things: (re)essentializes genders and sexualities, and, more importantly, robs non-gay male subjects (e.g., women, lesbians, butches, trans identified individuals) of their own agency. In sum, I believe that this linkage to a supposed gay male imitation, and concomitantly, viewing lesbian/queer sexual cultures, behaviors, configurations, and signifying sexual economies as mere derivatives of gay male culture, reinforces lesbian/queer invisibility and (re)centers the heterosexual matrix. For the sake of lesbian/queer subjects’ own viability, lesbian/queer sexualities must thus be pulled out of this discursive trap.     

Queer Patients and the Health Care Professional—Regulatory Arrangements Matter

This paper discusses a number of critical ethical problems that arise in interactions between queer patients and health care professionals attending them. Using real-world examples, we discuss the very practical problems queer patients often face in the clinic. Health care professionals face conflicts in societies that criminalise same sex relationships. We also analyse the question of what ought to be done to confront health care professionals who propagate falsehoods about homosexuality in the public domain. These health care professionals are more often than not motivated by strong religious convictions that conflict with mainstream medical opinion on homosexuality. We argue that they ought to be held accountable for their conduct by their professional statutory bodies, given that they abuse their professional standing to propagate sectarian views not representative of their profession. Lastly, we propose that medical schools have special responsibilities in training future health care professionals that will enable them to respond professionally to queer patients seeking health care.     

The Waiting Room: Ontological Homelessness, Sexual Synecdoche, and Queer Becoming

An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay considers the waiting room an apt metaphor for lives shaped by medical understandings of queer corporealities. Drawing upon the work of Gayle Salamon, Malatino develops the concept of sexual synecdoche as a useful analytic tool for considering the operations of medical pathologization in the realm of non-normative gender. She concludes with a discussion of queer becoming as an alternative ontology of gendered being that offers a resistant, coalitional way beyond contemporary, problematic institutionalized understandings of intersex subjectivities.     

Vital Wheels: Disability,Relationality, and the Queer Animacy of Vibrant Things

This article probes the philosophical and political significance of the relationships between wheelchair activists and their wheelchairs. Analyzing disability memoirs and the work of a professional wheelchair dancer, I argue that wheelers frequently experience complex relationality and queer kinships with their wheels. By bringing the artistry of disabled writers and dancers into conversation with the notions of human–material relations in the work of Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, and Mel Chen, I show how alternative animacies shape wheelers’ conceptions of interdependence and movement. The sensuous pleasure they take in their wheels queers conventional conceptions of how humans should relate to things. New materialist philosophy has increasingly drawn attention to the porous boundaries between the human and material world. But where posthumanist philosophers have largely aimed to dethrone the sovereignty of the human, disability activists use alternative animacies to raise up a devalued and discounted portion of humanity: to emphasize the agency and capacity of those whose lives are often cast as pitiable and powerless, to express a queer feminist disability culture and politics, and to claim the transgressive vitality and vibrant artistry of life with disability.     

Que(e)rying the Clinic before AIDS: Practicing Self-help and Transversality in the 1970s

In this paper, I offer a treatment of “the clinic” in which the clinic—as concept and space—is que(e)ried, that is, both questioned and made queer. I present two historical case studies that queer clinical thought and practices in the period before AIDS and before the full-blown arrival of queer theory on the western theoretical landscape. These two cases—the practice of self-help developed in the women’s health movement in the United States and the practice of tranversality developed out of and beyond the Institutional Psychiatry movement in France—challenge the practice of medicine in the prehistory of both AIDS and queer theory, yet, they are not generally seen as precursors, or related in any way, to AIDS activism. In a sense, then, I also want to question and make queer the history of AIDS as we conventionally know it today by extending that history backwards and outwards to earlier queer critical and clinical practices like self-help and transversality.     

“What do gay Asian men want?”: Desiring otherwise in the work of Richard Fung

A vast literature on queer of color critique, and increasingly on queer of color geographies, has shed greater light on how queer people of color negotiate racialized sexual economies. This paper considers how cultural geography, informed by psychoanalysis and queer of color critique, might contribute additional sophistication and critical insight to conversations about sexual racism – by not only decrying sexual racism, but by shedding light on racialized people's complex forms of psychical agency, as well as political agency, in relation to it. It turns to the work of gay Trinidadian-Canadian artist and scholar Richard Fung, whose films and essays both proffer underrepresented images of racialized queer sexual subjectivities and grapple with the ways in which queer people of color can themselves become enlisted in racial-sexual hierarchies. Providing geographical and historical context for Toronto's stratified racial and sexual politics as they play out in ordinary life, I point to moments in which Fung's films both decry such inequality and meditate on alternatives that detour from dramas of mis/recognition by whiteness.     

Lived Body vs Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity

Toril Moi has argued that recent deconstructive challenges to the concept of gender and to the viability of the sex/gender distinction have brought feminist and queer theory to a place of increasing theoretical abstraction. She suggests that we should abandon the category of gender once and for all, because it is founded on a nature–culture distinction and it tends incorrigibly to essentialize women's lives. Moi argues that feminist and queer theories should replace the concept of gender with a concept of the lived body derived from existential phenomenology. In this essay I take up and develop this suggestion, and argue that there are several advantages that a category of the lived body has over a category of gender for feminist and queer theories: (1) no nature–culture distinction is necessary but the body can be described as historically and socially specific; (2) it is not necessary to break out a gendered and "raced" part of identity with this category; (3) differences of sexual desire can be described without recourse to an "inner core" of identity or "sexual orientation." I go on to argue, however, that it is important to retain a concept of gender for a theoretical purpose beyond that which Moi and those she criticizes conceive. In recent years feminist and queer theories have tended to conceive their theorizing as restricted to identity and subjectivity. How large scale social structures differentially position people in relations of privilege and disadvantage has been ignored, relatively. This essay argues then that theorizing structural processes and inequalities is crucial, and that a concept of gender is important for such theorizing. I propose three aspects of gendered social structure that are irreducible to one another: (1) a sexual division of labor (2) normative heterosexuality, and (3) hierarchies of power. In each case I illustrate the social theoretical work these categorizations of gendered structure can and should do.     

Wish You Were Queer: Exploring the Potential of Queer Play Parties to Arouse Social Change

Abstract

This article explores how the practice of BDSM sex parties within the queer community can inspire social structure alternatives conducive to sustainability. Drawing from the notion that the dominant social order of neoliberal hetero-patriarchy undermines our ability to address sustainability challenges as a collective, I demonstrate how the same culture disproportionately alienates the queer community. Taking from the theory of subaltern counterpublics, I highlight how social structures created at BDSM queer sex parties challenge dominant cultures and create spaces of inclusivity and radical participation, specifically through communication. These are key criteria called for in commons management, relevant for sustainable futures.     

Clever love: Dislocated intimacies among youth

In this paper, we consider the sexual and affective life of youth in order to explore the social space of emotions as understood from youth's friendship relations. Our broad aim is to develop a cultural understanding of how youth negotiate a framework and a set of practices for establishing and experiencing their sexual and affective life. We focus on the context of Hong Kong, where there is a prevailing conservative sexual culture on one hand, and an open, hyperactive ecology of consumption of sexual imageries on the other. We ask, firstly, how youth negotiate a space of relatively unregulated nature outside of the disciplinary apparatus, so as to deal with matters of sex and romantic interest, but also paradoxically face their own acquiescence to a visible degree of sexual restraint many of them believe to be proper to their pre-marital sexual period of life. We argue that the discourses and practices of sex and love within youth culture in such contexts as Hong Kong tend to flourish within, and “dislocate” into, the codes of friendship embedded in a socially-oriented consumption environment. We started out researching youth sex, but find ourselves drawn toward a theorization of “friendship” and its many meanings and structures as forms of intimacy among young people.     

Child Sexual Abuse within Educational Settings: A Qualitative Study on Female Teachers Who Sexually Abuse Their Students

ABSTRACT

Despite growing interest, research on female sex offenders has been limited. Previous research on female sex offenders has focused on understanding behaviors, patterns, and motivations of female sex offenders overall, but only a handful of studies have specifically focused on teachers who are convicted of sexually abusing underaged students. For the present study, we examined the nature of child sexual abuse among a sample of female teachers, focusing specifically on the onset, situational context, and conclusion of these sexual abuses. We examined interviews conducted with 35 female sex offenders who used their position as a teacher to engage in a sexual abuse of underage students from 1995 to 2016 in a southern state. Based on the narratives of both victims and offenders, our findings indicated several categories of female teacher offenders including predatory, sexual friendship, and emotionally dependent. We hope the findings of the current study will help inform educational policy in efforts to prevent the occurrence of these abuses in the future.     

Leaving to Love: Filipina Caregivers and The Queer Kinship of Transnational Childcare

This article considers the affective and psychosocial dimensions of transnational childcare. It offers a transdisciplinary engagement with the subjectivity of Filipina caregivers, suggesting that the ways in which their love and care are split across borders and nations “queers” conceptions of family, childhood, and maternal obligation. Specifically, queer theories of kinship and diaspora are employed to offer an affective reading of Canada’s Caregiver Program. D. W. Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough” mother is also engaged in an effort to complicate narratives of maternal obligation, neglect, and love.     

Queering the Fertility Clinic

A sociologist examines contemporary engagements of queer bodies and identities with fertility biomedicine. Drawing on social science, media culture, and the author’s own empirical research, three questions frame the analysis: 1. In what ways have queers on the gendered margins moved into the center and become implicated or central users of biomedicine’s fertility offerings? 2. In what ways is Fertility Inc. transformed by its own incorporation of various gendered and queered bodies and identities? And 3. What are the biosocial and bioethical implications of expanded queer engagements and possibilities with Fertility Inc.? The author argues that “patient” activism through web 2.0 coupled with a largely unregulated free-market of assisted reproduction has included various queer identities as “parents-in-waiting.” Such inclusions raise a set of ethical tensions regarding how to be accountable to the many people implicated in this supply and demand industry.     

Corrupting Conversations with the Marquis de Sade: On Education,Gender, and Sexuality

In this essay, the author joins a conversation started by Martin (Reclaiming the conversation: the ideal of the educated woman. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1985) regarding gender and education seeking to extend the conversation to address sexuality. To do so, the author brings a reading of the Marquis de Sade to challenge the emphasis on reproduction in education as it relates to gendered and sexual norms. The author, following Martin’s approach in Reclaiming the Conversation, reads one particular text of Sade’s—Philosophy in the Bedroom—to argue for queer possibilities that Sade brings to the conversation around gender and sexuality within twenty-first century education. The Marquis de Sade may viscerally seem an inappropriate choice to return to and use to join the conversation, but his novelic imagination incites complications in the conversation. Following in the footsteps of Martin’s re-reading of historic philosophical texts the author offers not only another layer of thinking about “female education,” but also opens up space for engaging gender and sexuality in the history and philosophy of education. As issues around gender and sexed bodies become ever more present and contested in educational discourses, does Sade continue the conversation in ways that corrupt the reproductive aims of education?     

Religious/secular discourses and practices of good sex

This article focuses on the triangulation of sexuality, religion and secularity in Dutch society by analysing two contemporary case studies. We focus on sexual experiences and practices rather than sexual identities to further understand the constructions of what constitutes ‘good’ sex. The empirical research is situated in the Netherlands, where the binary of religion and sexual regulation versus secularity and sexual freedom has been dominant in both public and political discourse for a long time. Exploring sexual practices and narratives as central to the constitution of both religious and secular selves, we noted these to be fluctuating, inconsistent and subject to discourses. Our first case study discusses sexual experiences of non-heterosexual Protestant women, whereas the second explores the frequently considered ‘neutral’ notions of secularity in sexual education. Applying insights from both religious studies and queer studies, we bring the empirical study of sexuality together with the theoretical debates about the conceptualisation of the secular and the religious in contemporary Western Europe. This comparative approach to sexuality not only undermines the culturally presumed exclusive opposition of the secular and the religious but it also provides new empirical contributions for understanding the interactions between sexual practices and sexual discourses.     

Proleptic Sexual Love: God's Promiscuity Reflected in Christian Polyamory

Abstract

Goss acknowledges the value of pair-bonded relationships to the Christian community but wants to explore the ethical and theological space for envisioning Christians whose erotic lives fall outside monogamous relationships. He takes seriously Elizabeth Stuart's suggestion that the restoration of an eschatological paradigm for rethinking queer sexual relationships. Goss claims that Christ becomes the paradigm for multi-partnered relationships in spiritual encounters within religious communities and perhaps a means for rethinking non-monogamous relationships.