Theorizing Queer Useful Concepts from Butler and Sedgwick

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Theorizing QueerUseful Concepts from Butler and
Sedgwick

• Kevin Moss
• Middlebury College

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Miss Coco Peru
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Sedgwicks tropes of gender same-sex desire

• gender transitivity or liminality
• gender separatism
• Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

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Sedgwicks gender transitivity

• inversion
• anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa
• a woman's soul trapped in a man's body
• androgyny or gender liminality
• Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
  (Berkeley U. Cal. Pr., 1990), 87.

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Sedgwicks gender transitivity

• androgyny or gender liminality

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Sedgwicks gender transitivity

• androgyny or gender liminality

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Sedgwicks gender separatism

• gay men as hypermasculine
• clones, leather daddies

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Vjeran Miladinovic, Terezin sin (Beograd Vjeran
Miladinovic, 2001)

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• Rade loved men like I did, by a certain logic of
  ours we were sisters. We loved(voleli, m) each
  other just like sisters, complained(jadale, f) to
  one another and talked(pricale, f) about the
  soldiers we liked.

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• So it would be more interesting, more beautiful
  for them and for us, we began to speak among
  ourselves in the feminine gender.
• If men desire us as men, we wanted to try and see
  how they would react to us when we put on makeup
  and dressed like women.

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Uroš Filipovic, Staklenac (Beograd Kontrabunt,
2002)

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Uroš Filipovic, Staklenac

• Anti-gender-transitivity
• In principle I hate all that camp transvestism
  and feminized behavior. Men disguised as women
  repulse me sexually and disgust me.

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Uroš Filipovic, Staklenac

• For me a man has to look both inside and outside
  like a real man.
• Homosexuality is in some pure ideal form the
  mutual attraction felt by two masculine men,
  rather than two feminized men or transvestites.

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Eve Sedgwick another incoherence in modern
constructions of homosexuality

• Homosexuality as the property of a distinct
  minority population
• minoritizing view
• vs.
• Homosexuality as a sexual desire that potentially
  marks everyone, including ostensibly heterosexual
  subjects
• universalizing view

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Survey among Serbian students whom would you NOT
want to have as a roommate?

• 70 Albanian
• 67 homosexual
• 63 Roma
• (Whom would you want to have 75 Macedonian or
  Slovene)

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Iran No homosexuality, but trans is
OKDocumentary Be Like Others

• Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but
  the country allows sex change operations and
  hundreds of men have elected for surgery to
  change their lives.

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Reaction of Novomedia Association to showing
Brokeback Mountain on Ukrainian TV

• We must point out that showing homosexual
  relations forms a distorted model of behavior,
  which is particularly dangerous for children,
  adolescents, and youth whose psyche and life
  values are still in formation.
• http//news.invictory.org/issue16718.html

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Reaction to a California law banning
discrimination in school materials

• SB777 bans anything in public schools that could
  be interpreted as negative toward homosexuality,
  bisexuality and other alternative lifestyle
  choices.
• Parents want the assurance that when their
  children go to school they will learn the
  fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic
  -- not social indoctrination regarding
  alternative sexual lifestyles. Now that SB777 is
  law, schools will in fact become indoctrination
  centers for sexual experimentation. Meredith
  Turney, Capital Resource Institute

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Frank Kameny

• Inspired by the slogan "Black is Beautiful" Frank
  Kameny (1925- ) coined the phrase "Gay is Good"
  in 1968 . Though mild by today's standards, at
  the time it was a radical statement challenging
  the commonly held belief that homosexuality was a
  "sickness and a sin".

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Gay Rights / Special Rights

• THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA IS A THREAT TO YOU...YOUR
  FAMILY... YOUR COUNTRY! Homosexuality is
  targeting our youth. The gay/lesbian agenda wants
  your child's mind and body! Homosexuals
  "procreate" by preying on the vulnerability of
  the young! Shocking as it may seem, homosexuals
  are being granted legal access to public
  classrooms where they recruit and propagandize
  the innocent.
• http//www.christianreality.com/videos/vs-vid113.h
  tm