Friday Event Program

Memorial Union, MU II, University of California, Davis

All events free and open to the public

8:30 AM – 8:45 AM

Registration, coffee, bagels

8:45 AM – 9:00 AM

Opening Remarks

  • By Symposium Co-Chairs Abigail Boggs (Cultural Studies, UC Davis) and Cynthia Degnan (English, UC Davis)

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM

Panel 1: AFFECT, DISPLACEMENT, AND BELONGING

10:15 AM – 11:15 AM

Featured Speaker: Debanuj DasGupta

  • “Desiring Legality: Centering Struggles of Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual and Transgender Immigrants Within the LGBT Movement and its Potentials to Disrupt ‘Homonormative’ Tropes of Legal Equality”

11:30 AM – 12:15 PM

Panel 2: MOBILE ECONOMIES OF DESIRE

12:15 PM – 1:30 PM

Lunch (on your own)

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Panel 3: PRODUCING TERROR, TRACKING BODIES

2:45 PM – 4:00 PM

Keynote address by Professor Siobhan Somerville

  • “Civil Rites: Naturalization, Imperialism, and the Production of U.S. Citizenship”

4:15 PM – 5:15 PM

Panel 4: CIRCULATING RIGHTS, FIXING CITIZENSHIP

5:15 – 5:30 PM

Closing Remarks by Symposium Co-Chairs

Freda Fair

Exile, Affect, Belonging, and Queer of Color Masculinities in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt

Drawing on affect, critical race, queer, and feminist studies, this paper argues for an alternative interpretation of the affective laborer as exemplified by the protagonist Bình in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt. David Staples and other labor scholars describe affective labor as occurring in the present late capitalist moment of flexible accumulation. I argue that Truong’s novel carves out a space for the affective laborer during the modernist moment of the early 19th century as well as offers a counter-argument to labor studies discourses that continue to perpetuate the idea that colonized labor is always and only lifeless oppressed labor. As an affective laborer, Bình demonstrates resistance by choosing to love his work as a chef so much so that he displaces his affect into his labor, thus literally inserting himself into the meals he produces (his emotions and bodily fluids) rather than investing himself affectively in relations with his employers or serving with courtesy (as would a telephone marketer or stewardess). Bình refuses to turn his affect into a commodity to be capitalized on as he also refuses to allow it to be extracted by his employers, those who most directly control his means to life. Further, as a live-in affective laborer, Bình is unable to be fully expressive of his queer desire in the home of his employers. Thus, he negotiates a different relationship to privacy making queer liberalism’s articulation of capitalist modernity as the precondition for public expressive queer desire inadequate in its inability to account for Bình’s experience. This discussion of Truong provides a place from which to investigate what a creative, variant, and more expansive liberatory politics might look like for colonized or oppressed subjects who do not aggressively refuse voluntary servitude or physically resist the ways in which they are oppressed.

Amanda Lee A. Solomon

The Queer Songs and Transnationalism of Jose Garcia Villa

Recently, Jose Garcia Villa has been re-discovered by Filipino American writers and scholars and re-presented as the father of Filipino American poetry and Asian American modernism. Villa though occupies a contested terrain in American literature as his work could not technically be classified as belonging to the American nation (since the U.S. had made clear its intentions to cut ties with the islands) or to the Philippine nation (since it was yet to be officially born). However, this paper argues that rather than attempt to recoup Villa as some pioneering father in Asian American literature, it investigates how Villa and his queer (post)colonial poetics elucidate the colonial and epistemological violence that makes Filipino American literature possible. As Luis Francia points out in the 2008 Penguin Edition of Villa’s Doveglion, Villa’s poetic speaker’s complex, combative, fraternal, and even homoerotic relationship to God “could be reasonably interpreted as the idea of America.” I argue that it is Villa’s transnational and exilic condition that makes such critical homoeroticism possible. These queer moments in Villa’s poetry undermine the stability of any category – Filipino/American, masculine/feminine, civilized/savage – that were deployed to justify U.S. colonialism. Villa’s poetic speaker’s struggle for self-definition characterizes the Filipino artist of this period left to define his existence not by recourse to citizenship but to a greater scheme of identification seemingly beyond God and humanity, male and female.

Christopher J. Pérez

Sitting on His Bed: Ethnographic Intimacy and Spatial (Dis)Comfort

This paper identifies the bedroom space, and more specifically, the bed, and its spatial practices, as a site where new knowledges, narratives, and identities emerge. Building off of Juana María Rodríguez’ theoretical framework from her book Queer Latinidad,1 this paper re-imagines the practice of knowledge production through intersecting relations between bodies in spaces to conceptualize how geographic discourses are transformed into meaningful spaces for asylee subjectivity and identity. In the context of feminist and queer politics, Sara Ahmed details the roles of emotions and “affective economies” in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender asylee processes in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion2 with particular attention to “queer feelings” of comfort and discomfort in different spaces, also contributing to this analysis.
Based on a three-year ethnographic study with a gay political asylee from Venezuela living in Washington, D.C., this paper explicates a key moment on the participant’s bed during an interview that illuminates “queer feelings” of comfort and discomfort that speaks to epistemological questions of asylee subjectivity, ethnographic methods, and intersections of bodies, spaces, and systems of meaning brought together through ethnographic practices. This paper explores the different and intersecting spaces of an asylee and an ethnographer drawing connections to how “queer feelings” operate in multiple discursive spaces and communities. In particular, this paper makes connections between the public space of a courtroom and the private space of the bedroom detailing how “activismo” [activism] emerges in intricate and subversive ways through silence, speaking, and embodiment. Stitching together pieces of interviews that took place in different spaces with José, the participant of this project, this paper identifies the contextual nature of human agency and the mircopolitics of “tactical transgressions” 3 made possible in those embodied structures. By examining systems of meaning such as the intersections of comfort and discomfort in multiple discursive spaces, I argue that the bedroom, and more specifically, the bed, is a site of political activity that offers a framework for thinking about how sexual space works as a site that “speaks back” to disciplining structures, including that of the ethnographer, the state, and political asylum processes governed by the state.
The bedroom and the stories one tells while “sitting on his bed” creates a space where one can give testimony about sexuality in ways that subvert official discourse and legitimized space, such as asylum testimony in a courtroom. These kinds of performative narratives may be similar to Rodríguez’ concept of “Queer Latinidad” or Ahmed’s “queer feelings” as the discursive spaces that open up interpretive possibilities for representation, strategies for survival, and activism. The bedroom, then, carries with it opportunities to conceive Latinidad and queerness as “tactical transgressions” in the ethnographic method because questions of space and spatial practices are “accented” in the analysis of performance and agency. The bedroom is not an immediate space that one thinks of as a “cultural field” of investigation, but it has the potential to create meaningful dialogue, and it offers opportunities to examine a number of intersecting systems of meaning including comfort and discomfort for both the ethnographer-in-process and the asylee participant.

James Landau

Flying the Friendly Skies: AIDS, Risk and Mobility in the Age of the Gay Cosmopolitan

Gaetan Dugas liked sex. Within ten years of becoming sexually active in 1972, this Canadian airline steward had had sex with over 2,500 other men. By the early 1980s, though, he had also contracted the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Referred to as ‘Patient Zero’ in an early AIDS study by Dr. William Darrow of the Centers for Disease Control, Dugas featured prominently in both Randy Shilts’ non-fiction book And the Band Played On (1987) and the 1993 film based on it, in which a classic networking graph depicts Dugas’ position in a map of sexual connections.
In Dugan’s case, his sexual tally was facilitated by his occupation. As a flight attendant, Dugas traveled at little cost, having sexual relations with men scattered around the world. While neither the book nor the movie states that Dugas was the first to bring the virus to North America, he has nevertheless become, for many, the individual responsible for bringing AIDS to America. More generally, he has become a figure for the potential dangers of unsafe sex and/or sexual promiscuity.
Dugas, of course, was not alone in his peregrinations. As And the Band Played On and other AIDS histories quickly point out, three other flight attendants were similarly linked – at least in the early days of the epidemic – to the global spread of HIV. That gay male flight attendants became a focal point in both scientific and cultural discourses about AIDS speaks, however, to more than just the epidemiological role of transportation technologies. Indeed, it also suggests how gay men were associated with the risks of transnational mobility and the social networks this mobility produces.
With that in mind, this paper reads Jane DeLynn’s short story “Patient Zero” – a fictional narrative about Gaetan Dugas – against the short-lived British TV series Mile High (2003-2005), a comedy-drama about the flight crew of an upstart airline. More specifically, I interrogate how the gay male flight attendant serves in these texts to index not just the mobility of a certain subset of privileged gay men, but also the anxiety attendant to this mobility. For in both cases, each man faces a (potential) threat that emerges from his “lifestyle,” by which I do not mean his sexuality, but rather his occupational and cosmopolitan mobility. To put it another way, both men seem to have everything – as suggested by the theme song of Mile High: “The World is Mine” – yet in both cases this mobility, which typically signifies freedom and privilege, creates the scenario for disease transmission. In this way, both texts use the gay male – so frequently figured as an exilic figure – to code the risks of contemporary mobility and connectivity as fundamentally queer.

Reid Uratani

Disidentifying GID: Locating Resistance Within Mähüwahine Communities

In Hawaiʻi the term māhū originally referred to hermaphrodites or intersexed persons. Following the arrival of western explorers and missionaries, the term was marked as referring to sexual deviance, in stark contrast to the pre-contact kānaka maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) valuation of sexuality. Gender nonconformity and extramarital sexual relations were common until Protestant missionaries and oligarchical elites instituted sweeping changes, culminating in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Over the past fifty years, a surge of Hawaiian nationalist activity and cultural revitalization developed a strong transgender community in the islands, especially in Honolulu. However, Native Hawaiian transgenders in Hawaiʻi face disproportionate rates of unemployment, homelessness and poverty.
Within Honolulu’s economy of desire, queerness is always already oriented toward the seductions of the neocolonial visitor industry. In a 2008 article, the publisher of one of Honolulu’s regular queer publications suggested that “(Honolulu) can’t really support a (gay community) center.” The comment betrays the economic and political conditions that bolster the dominance of a magazine largely focused on Honolulu’s gay male bar culture. Gendered and racialized forms of pastoral power cultivate homonormative white and Asian gay communities while simultaneously depoliticizing Native Hawaiian and gender nonconforming queer communities.
Kulia Na Mamo, a nonprofit social justice organization centered in Honolulu, provides valuable services to the Native Hawaiian transgender, or māhūwahine, community. However, the appropriation of gender identity disorder (GID) language in the organization’s newsletters and website indicate a troubled intimacy with the mandates of government funding. Through readings of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, I aim to demonstrate the ways in which māhūwahine are excluded from queer citizenship and aggressively policed, a hypocritical underpinning of the symbolic clout of Honolulu’s self-presentation as an Edenic multicultural destination. This paper also seeks to canvas the depoliticizing implications of government and foundation funding and also give voice to the ways in which māhūwahine resist the pathologization of GID and make claims to political belonging within the larger queer community.

Anjali L. Nath

What’s Gay about the War on Terror?: Resisting Homonationalism in Transnational Feminist Pedagogies

The potential depth of any transnational intellectual endeavor is contingent upon the illumination of the power structures enabling, restricting, and simultaneously constructing the very knowledge project itself. This paper explores the role that queer subjectivity can occupy within emancipatory pedagogies through the case study of teaching feminist perspectives on the War on Terror. While sexuality has been markedly missing from counterterrorism discourse, Jasbir Puar’s 2007 Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times convincingly demonstrates that U.S. hetero- and homonationalisms are contingent upon sexuality, race, and gender to serve a multitude of functions, particularly, the constitution of terrorist and patriot corporealities. The U.S. gay travel industry, popular culture, and even feminist scholarship have all served to promote and broaden homonationalism, an Orientalist form of queer patriotism conceptually denoting U.S. sexual exceptionalism. Thus, homonationalism aids and is crucial to contemporary U.S. nationalism, as is illuminated through analyses of liberal multicultural inclusion for certain queer and gay subjectivities. When, and only when, it is beneficial to the state, some queers are consolidated into the nation. The nation, then, is both hetero- and homonormative. Examples are offered to illuminate the centrality of sexuality to U.S. patriotism, such as Abu Ghraib torture and the policing of sexuality via detention, deportation, and other control mechanisms.
Queer inquiry guides the creation of pedagogic strategies, in order to comprehensively highlight how various queer philosophies have conceived of the War on Terror in the past decade and how such theories have (and have not) been integrated into feminist pedagogies. I focus upon instructional materials used to teach about the War on Terror in Women’s Studies to see what attention being allocated to queer subjectivity. Inspired by Puar’s theoretical interventions, I wonder how our discussions of contemporary biopolitics might be enhanced were transnational feminist pedagogies to consider such an approach? The War on Terror is a vital site through which U. S. queer subjects must come to fully recognize the privileges we have and acknowledge our social location within the broader transnational scheme of power relations. When feminist educators within this nation fail to extend an analytic gaze outside of these national borders, an immense intellectual and ethical disservice is committed to ourselves and the global LGBT community. One of the major shortcomings of such an approach is the potential for national citizenship and empire to not be considered at the forefront of conversations regarding privilege and oppression, specifically, U.S. complicity in, and manufacturing of, oppression of foreign individuals, communities, and nation-states. Lastly, this paper surveys the most rigorous and thought-provoking themes for elucidating the basics of queer perspectives on the contemporary War on Terror, including analyses of militarization and varied LBGT roles as militant combatants, terrorists, pacifists, activists, and survivors. My pedagogic and philosophic commitments center a desire to teach a more robust theorization of the relationship between citizenship and sexual regulation, particularly during the War on Terror.

Colleen Jankovic

Out of the Closet and into the Bubble: Queering Terror in The Bubble

This paper explores the ways Eytan Fox’s 2006 film The Bubble visually articulates Israeli nationality in relation to both sexuality and terrorism. Through the metaphor of the bubble, gay citizenship in Tel Aviv, Israel, is portrayed as normalized and depoliticized for several Israeli roommates until a gay Palestinian man enters their lives. Positing identity as a kind of privileged domain of Western nationality, Palestine is represented in The Bubble as a place where homosexuality is unthinkable and unspeakable. For example, Ashraf, the Palestinian lover of Israeli Noam, can only understand Noam’s description of their sex as ‘explosive’ in violent terms—Ashraf lacks the language of a liberated homosexuality and is portrayed as closeted by language and culture. In the figure of Ashraf, who ultimately blows himself up near a café in Tel Aviv, terror is indicated by a racialized and Orientalist representation of his sexuality. Thus, I analyze The Bubble for the ways it uses homosexuality to portray a normative representation of national identity which has terror as its radical other. I explore, then, how The Bubble posits a normative Israeli national identity threatened not by homosexuality in general, but by a racialized queer terrorist other (the term homonormative becomes useful in this context). In the exceptional state of the West’s global (and globalizing) war on terror, terror is perhaps the primary site against which proper national citizenship and citizen subjectivity is produced and this seems particularly true for Israeli nationalism. Ashraf further represents several dangerous crossings in his movement between ‘the closet’ of Palestine and ‘the bubble’ of Tel Aviv that raise questions about a threat of queer mobility for the liberal nation.

Toby Beauchamp

Walking a Fine Line: Transgender Bodies and U.S. Biometrics Surveillance of Movement after 9/11

In January 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense established the Information Awareness Office (IAO), a component of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with the specific purpose of designing technology that could track, identify and classify terrorist threats to U.S. security. Contending that “terrorists are able to move freely throughout the world, [and] to hide when necessary,” the IAO supports over ten different initiatives, including the “Human ID at a Distance” program, which employs biometrics to identify humans through analysis of facial features, iris scans and gait. This paper considers the analysis of gait as a way to unpack the complicated relationship between transgender bodies, biometrics technologies and state regulation of mobility in the wake of September 11, 2001.
Reading the Human ID program through the lens of transgender studies, this paper reflects on the ways that biometrics relies on normative understandings of gendered and racialized bodies in its efforts to track and identify the citizen and the terrorist through physical characteristics. In particular, I am concerned here with the technological classification of gait, a relatively new area of biometrics that works in part through readings of movements as gendered. Considering this method of classification in relation to transgender studies opens a number of critical questions. How do biometrics technologies classify the movements of gender-nonconforming bodies? How are such technologies related to other material constraints on travel and mobility for bodies deemed deviant or non-normative? Does the pervasive cultural depiction of trans bodies as deceptive and secretive link them ideologically to the figure of the easily-hidden terrorist that the IAO references? How might this link complicate common representations of trans bodies as abstract figures inherently able to transgress or transcend borders?
In a broad sense, then, this paper is concerned with the concept of “movement” from three interrelated perspectives: state surveillance of possibly threatening bodies moving within and across U.S. borders, popular understandings of transgender bodies as deceptively moving from one sex/gender to another, and the analysis of literal movements of the body through biometric classification of gait. I argue that gender-nonconforming bodies – often read as such through regulatory norms of race, class, nationality and sexuality – both experience disproportionate scrutiny by biometrics programs and potentially disrupt or confound such programs. Importantly, the paper’s framework consciously departs from and critiques transgender studies’ tendency to position trans bodies as easy metaphors for border crossing, and considers instead the material realities of borders and surveillance of mobility in relation to gender-nonconforming populations.

Yumi Lee

Rights: Regulation and Resistance

In 1997, following a massive economic collapse, the South Korean state undertook a comprehensive neoliberal restructuring program under the direction of the International Monetary Fund. As tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest layoffs and cutbacks which primarily targeted the most marginalized sectors of society (migrant workers, contingent or “irregular” workers, rural farmers, women, the disabled), Korean queer activists marched under a rainbow flag, joining the broader left movement not only as workers fighting for their livelihoods, but also as queer people who were concurrently undergoing another form of repression: in the midst of the IMF bailout, the state suddenly banned and declared illegal films and websites with obscene and dangerous – coded as queer – content. This targeting of queer culture in the midst of the crisis-driven structural readjustment of the economy was no mere coincidence; rather, the state’s desperate attempts to stabilize economic markets in the face of major upheaval were intimately linked to its call for strong “family values” among its citizens.
Neoliberalism rhetorically fetishizes freedom and mandates deregulation, yet neoliberal regimes strictly demarcate the boundaries of good citizenship through the intense regulation of acts and identities. In the face of this regulation, what can rights offer? As human rights discourse has become emblematic of the fantasy of universal formal equality heralded by liberalism, gay rights have taken on special force in teleological narratives of progress. Wendy Brown has argued that “contemporary discourses of rights converge with the disciplinary production of identities seeking them,” emphasizing the ways in which rights can work to resubjugate rather than emancipate; likewise, Chandan Reddy has interrogated the ways in which “legal recognition become[s] an instrument of regulation, and political recognition become[s] an instrument of subordination” in neoliberal regimes. In this paper, taking up the case of gay rights struggles in post-1997 South Korea, I examine how the contemporary neoliberal state negotiates multiple tensions in rights discourse – between the universal and the particular, recognition and regulation, liberation and subordination – and how these tensions inflect and push activist strategy and practice in queer and allied communities. Who needs rights, and when, and why? What do rights accomplish, and what do they obscure? I argue that in a state whose political economy is structured by global capital and whose modern infrastructure is built upon colonialism and imperialist war, mapping the acceptance of queerness through time and space in a simple West-to-East, past-to-future, bad-to-good framework of less-to-more rights is insufficient. Rather, in this paper, I aim to take inspiration from radical activist practice – in local, regional, national, transnational, diasporic, and coalitional Korean formations – that works to situate the problematic of rights discourse in the context of a larger radical vision.

Melissa Autumn White

Intimate Archives, Migrant Negotiations: Notes on Recognition and Affective Regulation

After over a decade of lobby efforts by groups such as LEGIT (Lesbian and Gay Immigration Taskforce) and Egale (formerly Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere), Canada’s 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) expanded the family class to include “same-sex” common law and conjugal partners. Between 2002 and 2007, over three thousand “same-sex” trans- and bi-national couples have migrated to Canada from the United States, Australia, the Philippines, Britain, China, Mexico, and over sixty other countries. Common to all of these queer migration stories is the importance of what I call “intimate archives” (White 2009, forthcoming)—the document portfolios or ‘proof-of-relationship’ files required by the Canadian state. Drawing on my qualitative dissertation research with self-identified queer, gay, and lesbian family-class migrants, this paper explores the political economies of translation at work in the production and reception of these queerly intimate archives. Exemplary of what Ann Cvetkovich has termed a “problem archive—one that raises questions about how its materials got there and what materials are left out” (2003: 133, emphasis added), I suggest that these proof-of-relationship files tell not only fascinating stories about migration but simultaneously illuminate a moment of encounter between state and migrant, transgression and regulation, subversion and (hetero-, homo-)normativities. Theorizing this encounter allows for a charting of the effects of neoliberalism and homonationalism (Puar 2007) on strategies of articulation, representation, memory, forgetting, and recognition, while opening critical space for the beginnings of a micropolitical mapping of affective governance.

Shane Landrum

Queering Birthright Citizenship: Birth Certificates, Legal Identity, and Sexual Stigma in the US, 1933-2001

This paper examines the changing uses of United States birth certificates as documents of government statistical collection and legal identity. Building on Margot Canaday’s work about the “straight state,” I examine the ways that birth certificates encoded assumptions about sex, family structure, and race into the fundamental identity document used by native-born Americans. I demonstrate how the common uses of these documents by 1945 helped generate state-level laws which allowed for their amendment. By placing birth certificate amendment laws into a longer history of the documents themselves, I offer important context for transgender political movements which seek to negotiate current state birth certificate policies.
In their modern forms, United States birth certificates are largely a creation of the early 20th century. After 1933, when every state first documented 90% of its annual births, birth certificates became increasingly important as identity documents, particularly for younger citizens. They were required to register for school and for youth athletics, to hold a job before the age of 18, and for a wide range of other interactions with government and civil society. These common uses of birth certificates led, over time, to policies designed to protect children from the social shame of illegitimate birth or of being adopted. By the late 1940s, most states had enacted laws allowing the amendment of birth certificates for adoptees and for out- of-wedlock children whose parents later married. During the middle decades of the century, the overwhelming majority of adopted children at midcentury were born to white unmarried women. By sealing adoptees’ original birth certificates, reformers hoped to protect the social reputations of unwed mothers and adoptive parents and to reduce the impact of the original documents on children’s daily lives.
The creation of birth certificate amendment policies opened a Pandora’s box of questions about birth certificates and the Americans they recorded. I examine some of these questions, focusing particularly on situations of donor artificial insemination and medical sex reassignment. As judges and policymakers adapted the law of birth certificates to fit new sexual technologies, they helped turn these documents from relatively simple records of an event into complex, legally-constructed identity papers. By examining the impact a birth certificate (or the lack of a usable one) had on individuals’ ability to claim the benefits of social citizenship, I show how state-level birth certificate policies worked both to constrain and to enable social and spatial mobility for a wide range of individuals.