Friday Event Program

Memorial Union, King Lounge, University of California, Davis

All events free and open to the public

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM

Registration, Breakfast, and Opening Remarks

9:00 AM – 10:00 AM

Panel 1: PRIVATE PERFORMANCES

10:15 AM – 11:00 AM

Panel 2: PERIMETERS OF PERVERSITY

11:15 AM – 12:30 PM

Keynote Address: Mel Y. Chen (Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley)

  • “Toxic Bodies”

12:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Lunch (on your own)

1:45 PM – 2:45 PM

Panel 3: PUBLIC PRIVACY

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Featured Speaker: Miss Major (Executive Director, TGI Justice Project, San Francisco)

  • “Transgender = Social Justice and Social Justice = Transgender”
    Miss Major will be accompanied by Ms. Billie Copper, Ms. Trisha Wilson, and Ms. Bo Derek

4:15 PM – 5:30 PM

Roundtable: PRIVATIZING PUBLICS

  • Moderator: Liz Montegary (Cultural Studies, UC Davis)
  • Johnny Sanchez (UC Davis)
  • Morgan Bassichis (Community United Against Violence, San Francisco)
  • Jolie Harris (Asst Director, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Seattle University)

5:30 PM

Closing Remarks

Karli June Cerankowski

“Staging the Queer Body at the Border in Boys Like Her: Transfictions“

Four gender bending performance artists attempt to cross the US-Canada border on their way back home to Vancouver. Despite their documentation as Canadian citizens and prompt responses to the border guards’ questions, they are waved aside and their most personal and prized possessions are strewn about as their vehicle is inspected. A violin is carelessly placed on the pavement while the velvet lining is ripped from the case, there is laughter as the guards flip through journals and read the words aloud to each other, and they blush as their latex gloved hands lift dildos from suitcases, while one of these queers muses, “He’s touching my dick . . . Funny, I don’t feel a thing.”

This story comes in a collection of narratives translated from stage to page by performance troupe Taste This, who not only journey across international policed borders, but also cross and re-cross borders around gender and sexuality. Additionally, their stories constantly play with the ever shifting borders separating the private and public spheres – when can queer words be openly pronounced on stage and when must they be tucked away into journals for protection? When can dildos be displayed in photographs alongside intimate stories about the relation to and usage of these extended body parts, and when must they be packed into the folds of clothing at the bottom of a suitcase? When is it liberating to forego wearing underwear under one’s kilt, and when is such a choice violently dangerous?

For these artists, these negotiations arise at the border, where the bodies of national citizens are regulated, so their “contraband” words, stories, and music cannot be staged, but must be packed away to be formed into new stories retelling and republicizing the events at the border. Although the US-Canada border is typically conceived of as one of the more innocuous sites of border crossing, and I even suggest it is often a forgotten border, it is in reality very much a policed boundary. When these queers attempt to cross a border that is regulated by a legal system in which their bodies are not legible, they become immediately suspect, and particularly in this case, their whiteness doesn’t manage to outshine their queerness.

Through a reading of these “transfictions”, I examine the relationship of text to body, performance to text, and queerness to visibility, as boundaries are continually transgressed across gendered legibility of the body, across nations, and between the genres of text and performance. I discuss the ways in which this text and accompanying photographs are at play as a restaging of the silences that are endured and necessary at the border, as a strategic negotiation between publicizing queer privates and knowing when to keep them private, and as a storytelling of transgression that opens up possibilities for queer transformation.

Cael Keegan

“Queer Melodramatics: Queer Pathos and the Melodrama of Democratic Exceptionalism”

This paper investigates the history of the melodramatized queer image in American film, examining the popular appearance of “queer melodramatics” as an emergent incitement toward American democratic exceptionalism. While recent studies of queer affect such as Heather Love’s Feeling Backward point productively to considerations of queer negativity as a refusal of the terms of modern sexual identity proper, this paper engages with cinematic representations of queer negativity as they supplement the machinery of liberal democratic hegemony and the production of national futurity. In many popular American films, the pathos of the queerly melodramatic body presents a site for the production of emotively transcendent democratic narratives that ultimately obscure the inegalitarian nature of liberal democratic capitalism. The American democratic imagination unfolds its subjunctively wishful ethos through its attachment to popularly consumed, melodramatic expressions of queer feeling that translate concrete political problems into privatized and affective conflicts. The manner in which popular melodrama has instructed Americans to recognize and reconcile the appearance of queer difference subtends the conditions of domination that produce lived queerness as a collective experience of subjugation and invisibility. The queer body and the democratic future are thusly sealed in a paradoxical embrace that our most popularly hailed “progressive” melodramatic texts—such as Brokeback Mountain and Milk—actively work to cloak and contain.

American films championing the expansion of democratic justice through melodramatic effects frequently do so at the expense of the queer body and queer difference. These films often exploit the lurid display of queer pathos and exclusion in order to clear a pedagogical space in which we might wishfully imagine granting the queer body political subjectivity. Yet in doing so, they also reinforce the deferral of a real critique of democracy’s limitations, holding out an assuaged sentimentality as a reward for the viewer’s emotive compliance with their melodramatic conventionality. Queer melodramatics therefore operate as a subjunctive force of the American political imagination, through which we are persuaded to extend imaginatively the democratic project in ways that are nonetheless politically suspect. Still, the jouissance of the queerly melodramatic body provides us with the sense of democratic transcendence that makes life under liberal capital sustainable and survivable. Examining scenes from several contemporary films, this paper raises questions about the value of figuring the queer body as a purified sign of democratic catharsis, asking what this implies for the ongoing study of American democratic hegemony and for the future of queer freedom.

James M. Estrella

“Queer Cholo Style: Excavating an Archive of East L.A. Cholism and Same-Sex Latino Desire”

Chico is a bar in East Los Angeles with a reputation for being a haven for queer cholos. The cholo aesthetic is identifiable as an assemblage of key signifiers in Chicana/o popular culture: baggy pants, undershirts, shaven heads, and bold facial expressions. Although the style is popularly imagined as heterosexual from the outset, representations of cholos are also often subject to sexual fantasy in gay male entertainment. The cholo aesthetic is inevitably queered. However, Chico’s clientele and cultural productions urge us to inquire further into the performance of queer cholo style. What if the materialization of the queer cholo aesthetic has a separate valence dislocated from public discourses of criminality, sexual fantasy, and homoerotic masculinity, but instead conjures popular affect—being a homeboy, a friend in the neighborhood, or as we might say in the vernacular, someone that we enjoy “kicking it” with?

In this paper, I examine the visual and spatial renderings of Chicano and Latino sexualities within nightclub ephemera and Los Angeles’ metropolitan landscape in order to trace how the queering of the cholo aesthetic is “re-queered” by a gay bar and its clientele by not conforming to the expectations of both heteronormativity and homonormativity. Through this rather untraditional archive of queer documentation, I argue that the bar’s queer cholo aesthetic redresses strong romantic and sexual feelings between Chicano and Latino men under more private and intimate social bonding categories of friendship and neighbors. This alternative construction of queer Chicano and Latino subjectivity signifies a different language beyond sexual appetite and erotic desire that is perhaps more elusive in its enactments of a queer racial visibility, but nevertheless its appropriation has real consequences for transformative politics when examining the shifting terms of male-male desire through and from the lens of urban sexual subcultures in working-and-middle class racial and ethnic enclaves. Ultimately, the visual archive of Chico’s specific mode of self-representation documents a politic of queerness, leaving us with evidence of the profound socio-political implications shaping how race and sexuality are being constructed, understood and viewed through everyday performances of desiring, belonging and organizing in Chicana/o and Latina/o barrios.

Ren-yo Hwang

“‘Whose Community…? Our Community!’ as Negotiating Trans-Identity and Translocation In-between the Private and Public Spheres”

This paper is a excerpt from a larger working M.A. project on forms and configurations of transgender, GNC (gender non-conforming), gender variant and gender queer communities of color within the U.S., with a particular focus on New York City and Los Angeles, communities of trans-activism I have been a part of over the last nine or so years (Los Angeles most recently). This project values and discusses the disparate and vital ways in which communities build trust and legibility of selfhood amongst themselves (within a more private sphere) and alongside an imagined national and normative audience (the public realm). I use Jose Munoz’s work on disidentification to represent the dialectical, inextricable and interdependent relationship of the private and the public, and one could call this a negotiation. However, this paper goes on to explain that this very negotiation appears (whether willed and unwilled) within the public sphere as legible and/or visible based on capital production, social order and biopower. However, this negotiation is not in conflict with the ways in which the spheres of private and the public are distinguished as mutually exclusive within particular hegemonic frameworks like economic neoliberalism (where transfer of the economy from public to private is made distinct in order to avoid levies, fines, taxes, culpability etc).

Instead, this paper focuses in on the importance of locating the strains, slippages and moments of inbetweeness in order to argue for a more comprehensive transfiguring of how these spheres are in constant dialogue. This movement between the public and the private is described through the project as a rhetorical move of translocating and transfiguring one’s intended audience and mode of persuasion, and I argue this in order to challenge the assumed dichotomy between the two.

This development will bring us to the second half of the paper which focuses in on the ways in which public institutions, state agencies, non-profits and other social services look to create a normalized ‘transgender’ subject through a ‘looking glass’ process by which trans ‘bodies’ have no claims to a privacy as they are no longer subjects but simply (and literally) ‘bodies in transition’ (a Marxian ‘surplus labor’, and I look to Rod Ferguson’s work of Aberrations In Black: Toward A Queer Of Color Critique).

This paper concludes in highlighting the complexity and double impossibility in which one’s ‘private’ life (parts) are thus fair game for public speculation when and if the individual and/or community does not fulfill normative expectations of gender/race/sexuality/ ability/performance; and thus social coherence is only granted based on one’s ability to enter the public realm legitimately as a fully legible ‘private’ citizen. In other words, in order to access rights, services, and lay claims to ones own selfhood, trans subjects and communities have been asked to perform a linear meta- narrative of (pre/post op) medical transitioning. Where does this leave us? In returning to the beginning of this paper, I look to the ways in which trans subjects have challenged and dislodged the fixedness of private and public as well as the very sites and hegemonic discourses from which validation and knowledge is most commonly produced. Whether it be through local activism, on-line communities, video-blogs, internet forums, public resource sharing, social network sites, new media and so on, this paper discusses the possibilities created by these various alternative and ‘in-between’ spaces, and their function in heterogenizing and homogenizing trans communities.

Sima Shakhsari

“When Publicizing the Private is Profitable: Chic of Queer, Homo-politics, and the Iranian Diasporic Opposition”

In recent years, Iranian queers have become hypervisible in transnational media. “Gays in Iran” or “transgenders in Iran” are topics that increasingly appear in weblogs, print, television, internet news, YouTube, international film festivals, and international television programs. Curiously, this hypervisibility and the way that the Iranian queer is put into discourse has not always been the case. The sudden “tolerance,” and even celebration, of Iranian queers among some Iranian diasporic opposition groups is dubious, when Iranian queers have historically been denied a legitimate space in diasporic imaginations of the nation. How does one explain the proliferation of discussions about “gay rights” in the Iranian diasporic opposition discourse, which previously deemed queerness irrelevant to Iranian politics by relegating all queer matters to the “privacy of the bedroom?” How does one account for this “chic” of queer, a recent political position among Iranian opposition groups to move queer from the private to public, where “outness” becomes the condition for representability?

Through using Iranian bloggers’ discussions around homosexuality, “westoxification,” national unity, and individual freedom in Weblogistan, and by providing a discourse analysis of representational practices of a network of the “gay international” and diasporic Iranian opposition groups, I explore the recent “queering” of the Iranian opposition. I argue that the assumption of a purely transgressive queer politics ignores the neo-liberal and neo-colonial forms of governmentality and subject formation that do not necessarily erase “marginalized” subjects, but interpellate them in new ways to self- govern in the name of individual freedom. I suggest that in the period marked as the “war on terror,” discourses of regime change in Iran have compelled some Iranian diasporic opposition groups to strategically re-imagine notions of home and nation to include queers. There has been a shift from home/o-erotics of exile—a gendered disavowal of homoeroticism in exile, vis-à-vis a heterosexualized imagination of homeland—to home/o-politics of diaspora, where the Iranian homosexual is transferred from the position of the abject to that of the representable subject in transnational political realms. This shift involves not only Iranian opposition groups and mainstream media, but the “gay international” and the growing number of Iranian diasporic queers. Having been historically excluded from the heteronormative imaginations of the nation, some Iranian queers willingly take the opportunity to insert themselves into national imaginations in diasporic reterritorializations. As such through formative and performative processes, simultaneously national and neoliberal queer subjectivities are produced and deployed as markers of freedom in civilizational discourses and practices that divide the world into binaries of liberated/repressed, free/unfree, and democratic/theocratic.

Jessica Fishken-Harkins

“National and International Bodies: The Reflection of State Policy and Social Climate on the Bodies of Sexual Orientation-Based Asylum Seekers”

United States asylum law has been constructed in a specific historical context that has been composed by agendas of national belonging and disavowal of the home nation, as well as by heteronormativity through legal and social structures that privilege the concept of an ideal citizenry. Using sexual orientation-based asylum case reports as a primary resource, this paper looks at how these different structures have shaped asylum law, as well as different rulings on individual cases. Asylum law was originally established to handle cases of political asylum, in a way that directly addressed relationships between nation-states. In this way, the country of refuge is able to position itself in opposition to the country from which an asylee is fleeing, so that it offers itself as a safe haven and a space of political acceptance in a way that the home country is not. This hierarchical nation-state relationship continues to play out in asylum law today, and the model of the political asylum seeker has had lasting effects on the structure of the law, even for sexual orientation-based claims. For these cases, the U.S. is able to grant asylum in a way that positions itself as more progressive and rational than the seekers’ homelands. This has the double effect of disavowing itself from its role in larger global structures that create power and economic disparities among countries, as well as concealing the heteronormative legal structures and homophobic atmosphere within its own borders. Additionally, the law forces asylum seekers to renounce national ties to their homelands, thereby transferring the terms of the geopolitical nation-state relationship onto them, despite any ambivalent feelings they might have (for example, if they still have loving family members in the homeland). And lastly, by granting asylum to some while denying it to others, the U.S. is able to impose its own standards of both justifiable persecution and identity (for asylum based on membership to a social group, such as homosexuality), so that those claiming to be persecuted because they are gay, lesbian, or queer must be believably so in the eyes of the courts. Moving to a larger scale, this paper also looks at how current political climates in the U.S., such as anxieties over immigration and welfare (as manifested in the USA PATRIOT Act and the Real ID act, for example) are reflected in asylum law and individual case decisions. Ultimately, this paper seeks to understand the relationship between national belonging and (sexual orientation-based) asylum.

Bo Luengsuraswat

“Transgender People at the Limits of Privacy Rights: Reconceptualizing Freedom, Equality, and Difference Under Neoliberal Democracy”

The simultaneous operation of the neoliberal socioeconomic regime and liberal democracy in our contemporary moment produces an acutely oppressive climate for transgender people. Not only does the state refuse to recognize and protect the identities of transpeople due to their irreconcilable difference, which reveals the impossibility of “sameness” fundamental to liberal equality, it also, through the production and reinforcement of norms and the confinement of identity formation to the realm of the private, prevents transpeople from building, accessing, and maintaining sustainable networks of support necessary for their survival. In this paper, I argue that privacy rights negatively impact transpeople in two ways. First, the right to personal privacy as the right to be “different” ironically delimits the confines of acceptable individuality and situates transpeople outside of it. Thus, privacy rights function as a license that permits the state and the public to monitor, regulate, and control transpeople’s lives. Secondly, the right to personal privacy as the right to be “let alone” indirectly implies that identity formation can solely be done in private, without the support from public discourses whatsoever. Since the individual decision-making process and the formation of subjectivity are always already influenced by the norms, expert knowledge, and discourses generated in the realm of the public, it is merely an oversight to conclude that privacy rights provide an uninterrogated space for the development of individuality. I believe that the existence of public discourses, knowledge, and support, is undeniably vital to the formation of identity for minoritarian subjects and serves as a remedy for their feeling of invisibility. Transpeople’s ability to form support networks and circulate the knowledge of the self is unfortunately undercut by the concept of “negative” rights underlying the discourse of privacy.

Under the principle of liberalism, difference is the conceptual opposite of equality. If all humans are believed to share the same nature, and equality implies the condition under which the state is able to treat all of them in the same way, then the presence of differently situated subjects not only undermines the regime of equal treatment, but also challenges what society as a whole perceives as natural. The difficulties that transgender people face in demanding recognition, particularly in the process of physical transition and the change of legal gender, precisely illustrate the state’s erasure of difference in the name of equality. By insisting on treating all subjects “equally,” or “literally in the same way,” and naturalizing gender-normative personhood, the state violently repudiates the material and symbolic existence of transpeople. As a result, the association of difference with equality is simply an oxymoron, because it is impossible to successfully transform what has been fundamentally excluded from the notion of equality into an expression of justice. By coding injustice in the language of equality, the state deprives transgender people and other non-normative subjects of the means to articulate their feeling of invisibility and painful experiences of exclusion. Ultimately, the coding of pain in the vocabulary of happiness is the most severe form of violence that could possibly be done to human subjects.