Journal of Lesbian Studies最新文献

This article explores the interweaving of successes and failures at trans-inclusive women's festivals. I analyze conflicts that occurred at the Mystical Womxn's Magic Festival and the Ohio Lesbian Festival. In the process, I demonstrate that working across racial and gender divides in these spaces is possible but only if we understand that solidarity is processual and relational but also, quite simply, hard work. This labor requires acknowledging that failures are an integral part of the praxis of forging alliances. By failures, I am primarily referring to moments of insensitivity, casual macroaggressions, lack of deep listening, and other common occurrences of harm. Ultimately, I argue that solidarity is a journey not an end point and that a crucial aspect of the journey is grappling with collective and personal failures along the way.

In 2011, Jair Bolsonaro initiated a fight against the federal program proposal School without Homophobia (2009), which aimed to educate children, school staff, and parents on the respect to sexual diversity and prevention of violence against LGBTQIA + students. Bolsonaro's Gay Kit unleashed an anti-gender campaign in Brazil. The fight against "gender ideology" that follows Jair Bolsonaro initial campaign indicates a turn in the articulation and the discourse of conservative and right-wing actors. This anti-gender campaign brough together groups that historically have been divided along class, race and gender lines, such as radical Catholic, middle- and upper-class white conservative Brazilians, and Neo-Pentecostals. In this paper, I analyze the power of the anti-gender campaign unleashed since the 2010s to find a common enemy, a common language and a common interest among conservative sectors of Brazilian society. I argue that gender works as the main symbolic glue that helps right-wing actors to forge a common identity in opposition to a new common Other, namely leftists. The main factor bridging them together is the preservation of the masculinist national identity that denies any form of structural inequality and critical thinking.

Drawing on queer of color critique, this paper uses mixed methods including participant observation, interviews, visual and textual analysis, and photovoice to interrogate sex workers' queer creative practices. Building upon the larger oeuvre of sex working artists, contemporary sex working artists in Los Angeles utilizes queer creativity to thwart hegemonic readings of sex work. Performances at two activist fundraisers drew on the themes and esthetics of sex work to counter mainstream narratives about sex work and workers, and to interrupt their objectification. The cover and graphics of a sex worker zine push back against dominant narratives about sex workers and the power structures that suppress sex worker self-representation. Photovoice methodology allowed sex workers to counteract objectification by telling their own stories. In their creative products, sex workers show how "queer" is a praxis of sex and gender disruption, rather than a simple identity category signaling non-heterosexuality, challenging homonormativity in addition to heteronormativity.

By elucidating the average everydayness of prostitution, this essay shows-contrary to contemporary conceptions of sex work as either horror or utopia-that whoring is boring. Boredom is a stubborn aspect of modern Western existence. Yet in its philosophical portrayals, it is only described based on masculine parameters, and modeled on male figures such as the flaneur. As his feminine equivalent, the flaneuse shows that boredom is a pervasive yet under-explored feature of feminine life. Like the flaneur, the flaneuse turns to writing to process her impressions of the boring public sphere, but unlike him, the flaneuse is a literal streetwalker. On her strolls in the polis, her gaze never merely grazes the metropolitan landscape and its inhabitants, but solicits. As a queer femme or lesbian, she responds to the male gaze (only) when she is looking for work. Boredom is intrinsically linked to life under capitalism, but boredom may also be conceived as an important attitude for combatting its demands for ever-increasing productivity. Epitomized by the flaneur, the flaneuse, the scribe, and the whore, the meditations that make up this essay formulate a passive resistance against the capitalist logic of work. Through the political medium and passive modality of writing, they draw on the bored and impotent aspects of subjectivity in order to rethink political resistance through passive existence.