QGrad 2003

Published: April 26, 2016

QGRAD 2003

A GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

Royce Hall, UCLA
Saturday, November 15, 2003

Our fifth annual conference devoted to research and other work in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, on queer topics, sexuality and gender by graduate students in all fields. An opportunity for graduate students to meet and exchange ideas on their research with each other and with scholars from southern California universities.

New This Year!

In addition to regular panels, we will host Open Workshops with the following people:

  • Sue-Ellen Case, UCLA Performing Queer
  • Judith Halberstam, UC San Diego Queer Cultural Studies
  • David Román, USC Race and Ethnicity
  • William B. Rubenstein, UCLA Law and Public Policy

The open workshops provide an opportunity for advanced graduate students to work more closely with distinguished scholars in the field. Limited to students who have passed their qualifying exams and are working on their dissertations, the students chosen for the workshops will present their papers at an open session. The workshop leader will present a commentary on the papers and the issues they raise in relation to the field as a whole.

Workshop on Law and Public Policy 

This workshop is sponsored by the Charles R. Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law at the UCLA Law School, which will cover travel expenses for those selected to participate. It is open to anyone–current law students, graduate students in other disciplines, or lawyers–who is currently pursuing a career in law school teaching and has a substantial work in progress to submit for discussion.

Parking Information 

Parking is available in UCLA Parking Structure 3 at a cost of $7 per day. Go to the parking kiosk at Hilgard Avenue & Wyton Dr. (one block of Sunset Blvd), let them know you are attending Qgrad Conference in Royce Hall & want to park in Lot 3.

Short Conference Schedule

Subject to change – last updated 11/12/03.
Click on panel titles to see paper abstracts below.
Download Schedule as RTF File

SESSION ONE 9:15 – 10:40 a.m.

(1A) Masculinities
Moderator: Peter Hammond, Anthropology, UCLA
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 148

  • Reconstructing masculinity and heterosexuality
    Eric Anderson (Sociology, U of California, Irvine)
  • Mounting Tony Leung’s “Gorgeous Ass”: Asian Masculinity in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover (1992)
    Nguyen Tan Hoang (Film Studies Program, Rhetoric, U of California, Berkeley)
  • Borders: the Experiences of Gay Thai Immigrants
    Vanessa Lynn Pool (American Studies, Boston U)

(1B) Porn, Performativity, and RuPaul
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 156
Moderator: Steven Nelson, Art History, UCLA

  • Queering Pornography?: Race, Fantasy, and Intimacy
    Zeb Tortorici (History, UCLA)
  • Is It All In The Act? The Use of Ephemerality and Repetition In Judith Butler’s Performativity Theory
    Tina Majkowski, (Performance Studies, New York U)
  • The Queen Bees: RuPaul, Lil’ Kim, and Drag
    Abimbola Cole (Ethnomusicology, UCLA)

(1C) Freud, Film, and Fantasy
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 150
Moderator: Kathleen McHugh, English, UCLA

  • Fantasy and the genetic power of melodrama
    Agustín Zarzosa (Film Studies, UCLA)
  • Mulholland Drive: The Royal Road to the Lynchian Unconscious
    Maria San Filippo (Critical Studies Program, Film, Television & Digital Media, UCLA)
  • Citizen Haynes, or Theses on a Philosophy of Queer History
    Nicholas Davis (English, Cornell)

(1D) Law and Public Policy Open Workshop
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 314
Chair: William Rubenstein, Law School, UCLA

  • Gender Outlawed: Transsexuality and the Invention of (Legal) Men and Women
    Stacey Meadow (Sociology, New York U)
  • Monogamy’s Law: Compulsory Monogamy and Polyamorous Existence
    Elizabeth F. Emens (Law School, U of Chicago)

SESSION TWO 10:55 am – 12:20 pm

(2A) Citizenship and Struggle
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 148
Moderator: James Tobias, English, University of California, Riverside

  • The Hybridity of the Gay and Lesbian Country-Western Dancer
    Peter Carpenter (World Arts and Cultures, UCLA)
  • Staked Claims: Female Masculinity, Nationalism, and Gender Identity Politics
    Christina Borel (Gender and Cultural Studies, Simmons College)
  • Hidden Stories: Behind the Narratives of a “Homosexual Reparative Therapy” Web Site
    David Weiss (Communication & Journalism, U of New Mexico)

(2B) Gender and Sex in History
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 150
Moderator: James A. Schultz, LGBTS and Germanic Languages, UCLA

  • “A Dress Not Belonging To His Or Her Sex:” Cross-Dressing Law In San Francisco, 1860-1920
    Clare Sears (Sociology, U of California, Santa Cruz)
  • Where is the Lesbian Sex in Victorian Literary Criticism?
    Jaimy Mann (English Literature, California State U, Los Angeles)
  • Utopias of Hermaphroditism: Sex and Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
    Teresa A. Algoso (Japanese Literature/ East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA)

(2C) Queer Cultural Studies Open Workshop
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 314
Chair: Judith Halberstam, Literature, University of California, San Diego

  • Asian Diasporic Streaming: Net Art, Visual Citizenship and Queerscapes
    Tammy Ko Robinson (Sociology, U of California, Santa Cruz)
  • A Queer n’ Healthy Body: Homonormativity, HIV/AIDS, and Drug Use in Queer Pilipino America
    Christine B. Balance (Performance Studies, New York U)

LUNCH 12:30 – 1:30 pm
(Box Lunches available for panelists and moderators only in Royce 306)

SESSION THREE 1:45 – 3:10 pm

(3A) Trans Issues
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 162
Moderator: Niko Besnier (Anthropology, UCLA)

  • Debating Trans Inclusion in a Feminist Movement: Challenging Anti-Trans Arguments Elizabeth Green (Applied Women’s Studies, Claremont Graduate University)
  • The Kings of the Midwest: An Oral History of Midwestern Drag Kings
    Donna Jean Troka (The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory U)
  • “Puberty Blues”: An Analysis of the Body Talk of FTMs and Anorexics
    Kristen Schilt (Sociology, UCLA)

(3B) History and Queer Visual Cultures
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 314
Moderator: Steven Nelson, Art History, UCLA

  • Moments of Shame: Queering Art History
    Robert Summers (Art History, UCLA)
  • Generational Dynamics and the Lesbian Presence: American Feminist Art in the 1970s and 1980s
    Aviva Dove-Viebahn (Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester)

(3C) Reinscribing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture
Moderator: Peter X. Feng (University of Delaware; Visiting Scholar, UCLA Race & Independent Media)
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 150

  • Heteropatriarchal Legitimation and Queer Containment in Lifetime’s An Unexpected Love Kathleen M. McGregor (Communication Studies, California State U, Los Angeles)
  • Straight People Love Him! David Sedaris and the Negotiations of Gay Visibility
    Greg Youmans (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
  • Queer, When Survival Is at Stake: Race and Sexuality in the Matrix Films
    Aimee Soogene Bahng (Literature, University of California, San Diego)

(3D) Race and Ethnicity Open Workshop
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 156
Chair: David Román, English, University of Southern California

  • Queer Futures: The New South Africa’s Coming Out Narratives
    Brenna Munro (English Literature, University of Virginia)
  • Global Queer Boys in Performance: The Politics of Performing “Gay” in Singapore
    Eng-Beng Lim (Theater, Critical Studies, UCLA)
SESSION FOUR 3:25 – 4:50 pm

(4A) Normativity/Queerness
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 148
Moderator: Ronni Sanlo, LGBT Resource Center, UCLA

  • Mixed Marriage: Bisexual Women in Relationships with Lesbians
    Amy Andre (Human Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University)
  • The Sexual Politics of Genius
    Moon Duchin (Mathematics, University of Chicago)

(4B) How to Write the Past
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 156
Moderator: Christopher Looby, English, UCLA

  • Notes on Queer Methodology 
    Joseph Rezek (English, UCLA)
  • The Inscription of Michel Foucault
    Nicholas A. De Villiers (Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota)
  • Doing Trashy History: Gay Historiography and Critical / Counter AIDS Memory[ials]
    Kara Thompson (English, University of California, Davis)

(4C) Beyond Binaries in Film and Video
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 314
Moderator: Chon Noriega, Critical Studies of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA

  • Queering in Defiance of Patriarchal Norms: Byun Young Ju’s Documentary Film on Sexually Abused Victims of World War II
    Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Art History, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University)
  • Unmasking the Invisible: Gender Variants¹ Entrance into American Popular Culture (1992-2002)
    Deborah Hanan (American Cultural Studies, California State University, Los Angeles)
  • Quivering: Notes on Patty Chang’s Video(taped) Performance Art
    Alison Hoffman (Critical Studies of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA)


(4D) Performing Queer Open Workshop

3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 162
Chair: Sue-Ellen Case, Theater, UCLA

  • Double Jeopardy: The Re-Trials of Leopold and Loeb on Stage and Screen
    Jordan Schildcrout (Theater, CUNY Graduate Center)
  • The Gothic Articulation of Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century
    L. Andrew Cooper (English, Princeton University)

(5) Faculty Scholars Panel 
5:00 – 6:00 pm | Royce 314
(6) Reception 
6:00 pm | Royce 306

FULL SCHEDULE
(subject to change – last updated 11/12/03)

 

SESSION ONE 9:15-10:40 a.m.

(1A) Masculinities
Moderator: Peter Hammond, Anthropology, UCLA
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 148

Reconstructing masculinity and heterosexuality
Eric Anderson (Sociology, U of California, Irvine)
This research uses ethnographical methodology and grounded theory as a way of examining heterosexual men who once approximated hegemonic masculinity as football players, but lost masculine capital by entering a culturally defined feminine space as male cheerleaders. Under orthodox notions of masculinity that requires “no sissy stuff” and compulsory heterosexuality, these men’s transgression calls both their masculinity and their heterosexuality into question. In response, most of the men reconstruct masculinity to be inclusive of gay men, limiting their transformative power against patriarchy, and reproducing sexism. However, once these men reformulate masculine identity to be inclusive of homosexuality, they open the door to redefine heterosexuality as well. And this research shows that many of these men remove compulsory heterosexual behavior from the construction of heterosexuality. Thus, this research suggests that when once privileged heterosexual men are faced with losing masculine capital they may reconstruct what it means to be both masculine and heterosexual.

Mounting Tony Leung’s “Gorgeous Ass”: Asian Masculinity in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover (1992)
Nguyen Tan Hoang (Film Studies Program, Rhetoric, U of California, Berkeley)
The Lover (1992) was the first time that an Asian man appears in explicit sex scenes in a high-profile Western production. I suggest that The Lover offers a different model of masculinity that departs from the traditional Western display of the male body. In the place of the hard, impenetrable, idealized Western male body, this Chinese male body is marked by lack, the lack of force, strength, and virility. In looking closely at the film’s sex scenes, I consider how the Chinese lover is accorded a certain amount of agency through the performance of sex onscreen, as well as through a different form of spectator identification based on processes of shame. Drawing on Eve Sedgwick’s and Douglas Crimp’s recent work, I will argue that it is the mutual flooding of shame between the two lovers that enables a recognition of their singularity, their respective vulnerability to be shamed, and makes possible desire, lust, and “love” between them.

Borders: the Experiences of Gay Thai Immigrants
Vanessa Lynn Pool (American Studies, Boston University)
The experiences of gay Thai immigrants touch upon a number of important issues for the gay community – self-acceptance and isolation, racial prejudice, different cultural conceptions of sexual orientation and Western misconceptions of Thailand and Thai culture. The experience of gay immigrants also helps to show how culture and ethnicity influence sexual identity. These issues are explored through interviews with immigrants and examinations of Thai culture and the gay community in the United States.

(1B) Porn, Performativity, and RuPaul
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 156
Moderator: Steven Nelson, Art History, UCLA

Queering Pornography?: Race, Fantasy, and Intimacy
Zeb Tortorici (History, UCLA)
The paper examines how bodies (including my own) can be used/manipulated in videos/photos to convey a particular type of masculinity and racial identity. I focus mainly on the ways in which mainstream gay porn in the United States serves to normalize whiteness and highly heteronormative tropes. The paper is based on my personal experiences as an amateur performer in gay porn, and will also be informed by questions and responses that I’ve received from people who responded to my article in UCLA’s queer student publication Ten Percent. Throughout the paper, I will attempt to problematize traditional conceptions of visibility and intimacy. I hope that broaching the ways pornography relates to the productions of race and masculinity will ultimately generate questions and discussion among the audience members. A preliminary draft of this paper can be viewed at http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~zeb/porn.htm.

Is It All In The Act? The Use of Ephemerality and Repetition In Judith Butler’s Performativity Theory
Tina Majkowski, (Performance Studies, New York University)
This paper examines the use of ephemerality and repetition within Judith Butler’s notion of performativity theory. By tracing the constitutive texts that formulate performativity theory against recent criticism, notably Kath Weston’s Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age, I address one of the most distinctive elements of queer theory: ephemerality — which has served in my own empirical research on drag king performance as a site for the construction of gender and sexuality. While ephemerality refers us to that which is short-lived, the focus of this paper will be on ephemerality as a theoretical means to witness and document the fleeting, the dispensable and the exhaustible. Of course, considerable attention will be given to queerness as a site of ephemeral gender and sexuality. Following Jose Muñoz’s contention that queerness has resided within performance, innuendo and other fleeting moments, I will attempt in this paper to counter the academic ideologies that repeatedly privilege the permanent and decidedly universal by offering ephemerality as a theoretical antidote able to take stock of the local and particular (Muñoz, 1996).

The Queen Bees: RuPaul, Lil’ Kim, and Drag
Abimbola Cole (Ethnomusicology, UCLA)
RuPaul Charles permanently changed the world of drag when he released his debut album Supermodel of the World in 1993. This paper will discuss his impact on artists who emerged in the wake of his successful career. One such artist, rapper Lil’ Kim, has relied on certain aspects of RuPaul’s image in fashioning her own identity. I will compare and contrast the ways RuPaul and Lil’ Kim have constructed their personalities and show that they both are enacting drag.

(1C) Freud, Film, and Fantasy
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 150
Moderator: Kathleen McHugh, English, UCLA

Fantasy and the genetic power of melodrama
Agustín Zarzosa (Film Studies, UCLA)
This paper focuses on two Mexican films with queer elements: El Lugar sin Límites [Place without Limits, (Ripstein, 1977)] and Y tu Mamá También (Cuarón, 2001). I focus on the seduction sequences, paying close attention to the role of fantasy in each of these two films. I argue that while fantasy plays an essential role in both sequences, it has an entirely different function in each of them. While fantasy in Y tu Mamá También functions by creating a parallel realm that suspends reality momentarily but leaves it somewhat untouched; in El Lugar sin Límites, fantasy does not allow for the withdrawal from the world, but its primarily function is precisely the transformation of reality to accommodate fantasy. El Lugar sin Límites shows how violence against queerness may be explained as a reaction against the lure of fantasy. Finally, I explore the way in which these queer fantasies are intertwined with social fantasies and how, by foregrounding this connection, there is a possibility of tragedy in these two films.

Mulholland Drive: The Royal Road to the Lynchian Unconscious
Maria San Filippo (Critical Studies Program, Film, Television & Digital Media, UCLA)
My paper confronts the overlap between Freud’s notion of the unconscious and David Lynch’s stylistic and thematic preoccupations, specifically related to issues of female identity, sexuality, and desire. Through his “deviant” (transgressive) structure and style, Lynch critiques the conventional Hollywood model just as his narrative content presents unconventional representations and invites non-traditional modes of spectatorship. Mulholland Drive aims primarily at expressing the unconscious, freeing the female subject from a “neurotic” ideological position through realization of repressed trauma and latent desires.

Citizen Haynes, or Theses on a Philosophy of Queer History
Nicholas Davis (English, Cornell)
Starting with a reading of Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine as a camp revision of Welles’ Citizen Kane, I will posit creative appropriation and melancholic reprisal as touchstones of Haynes’ form, theme, and story. By reading the film through other lenses, however, including the aesthetics of Benjamin, the theology of Kierkegaard, and the generic codes of melodrama, I hope to portray Velvet Goldmine not merely as a postmodern stunt but as a philosophical inquiry into gay male history and identity.

(1D) Law and Public Policy Open Workshop
9:15-10:40 am | Royce 314
Chair: William Rubenstein, Law School, UCLA

Gender Outlawed: Transsexuality and the Invention of (Legal) Men and Women
Stacey Meadow (Sociology, New York University)
Case law involving transgender litigants often provides courts with the unique challenge of making legal sex determinations, for the purposes of deciding various types of rights claims. This paper seeks to accomplish two tasks: to identify some of the fundamental inconsistencies and archaic social distinctions underlying those sex classifications, and to introduce some of the implications of those classifications for feminist legal theory and gaylaw. Analysis of significant federal and state case law shows that courts have effectively created a third sex, a class of people denied legal maleness and femaleness and denied membership in sexual orientation categories, who exist in an unprotected, un-gendered space. As courts struggle to produce workable definitions of legal sex, that discourse itself produces essentialist concepts of ideal “men” and “women” and of (hetero)normative masculinity and femininity, which have important implications for feminist and gaylaw scholars. Some newer case law begins to recognize sex discrimination as the ideal site for challenging those constructions, and is explored for its potential contribution to gaylaw and the evolving LGBT legal agenda.

Monogamy’s Law: Compulsory Monogamy and Polyamorous Existence
Elizabeth F. Emens (Law School, University of Chicago)
Both sides in the debate over same-sex marriage agree on one thing: Whatever happens with gay marriage, multi-party marriage should remain impossible. This paper aims to understand why, at a time of serious debate about the different-sex requirement of marriage (one man and one woman), eliminating the numerosity requirement (one man and one woman) is so widely agreed to be undesirable. To many people, relationships of more than two, called polyamorous relationships, sound preposterous, despite the reality of adultery, divorce, and remarriage in American society. In response to this view, the paper offers an account of the contemporary theory and practice of polyamory, defining key terms, describing four existing polyamorous relationships, and discussing ethical principles of polyamory. Drawing lessons from the theory and politics of homosexuality, the paper proposes that a key reason for the generally negative response to polyamory is, paradoxically, the widespread failure of monogamy. Rather than prompting outsiders to identify with polyamorists, the potential of practically everyone to imagine him or herself engaging in nonmonogamous behavior may lead outsiders to steel themselves against polyamory and to eschew the idea of legitimizing it through law. In light of this paradox of prevalence, the paper argues that recent efforts by legal scholars to define polyamory as any loving relationship of more than two are misguided, and recommends that polyamory should instead be defined narrowly to include only those multi-party relationships that involve both love and sex.

SESSION TWO 10:55 am -12:20 pm

(2A) Citizenship and Struggle
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 148
Moderator: James Tobias, English, University of California, Riverside

The Hybridity of the Gay and Lesbian Country-Western Dancer
Peter Carpenter (World Arts and Cultures, UCLA)
This essay will explore the bind of a unique form of hybridity performed in the gay and lesbian country-western dancer through ethnographic research conducted at Oil Can Harry’s in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Identifying the competing claims of gay-ness and American-ness, the patrons of Oil Can Harry’s will be seen as dancing toward an impossible concept of integration while crowding the cowboy’s claims to an uncontested, “American” symbol of physical and political power in the United States. Such crowding of the cowboy (specifically through detailed descriptions of dances that spatially assert identitarian dimensions of “presence”) will be linked to the unstable nature of contemporary gay and lesbian identity in the U.S.

Staked Claims: Female Masculinity, Nationalism, and Gender Identity Politics
Christina Borel (Gender and Cultural Studies, Simmons College)
An examination of the gender categories of “butch lesbians” and “transgender men” and the on-going border wars between these two marginalized communities reveals the pervasiveness of binary-gendering, as well as parallels to the formation of gender identity with that of national identity. Individuals are born into gender and nation simultaneously, and it can be argued that various minority groups stake claims to identities within gender in much the same way that European nations colonized territories in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These staked claims of collective identity form the backbone of identity politics in both the queer rights and transgender political movements. The fundamental contradiction of gender identity politics is that gender politics are structured externally while gender identity is arrived at internally. Therefore, current gender identity politics can only reinforce the socially constructed hierarchies of oppression embodied in nationalism.

Hidden Stories: Behind the Narratives of a “Homosexual Reparative Therapy” Web Site
David Weiss (Communication & Journalism, University of New Mexico)
In my paper, I apply insights from classic narrative criticism and contemporary cognitive science to show how narrative elements can both illuminate and obscure the worldviews and sociopolitical motivations of the people behind a leading “homosexual reparative therapy” organization. NARTH (the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) has as its purpose the refutation of current attitudes and research findings supportive of (or even neutral toward) gay people and homosexuality, a purpose that may be more deeply understood by analyzing the structural elements- parables, myths, and the heroes and villains that people them -incorporated in the narratives recounted throughout the group’s web site.

(2B) Gender and Sex in History
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 150
Moderator: James A. Schultz, LGBTS and Germanic Languages, UCLA

“A Dress Not Belonging To His Or Her Sex:” Cross-Dressing Law In San Francisco, 1860-1920
Clare Sears (Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Between the Civil War and World War One, laws prohibiting public cross-dressing were passed in twenty-six US cities. In this presentation, I use archival data, including newspapers, arrest records and municipal reports, to examine cross-dressing law in one city – San Francisco – between 1860 and 1920. Specifically, I examine the enactment and enforcement of San Francisco’s cross-dressing law in relation to the changing social meaning of cross-dressing practices during this period and to concurrent conflicts over gender, sexuality, immigration and race.

Where is the Lesbian Sex in Victorian Literary Criticism?
Jaimy Mann (English Literature, California State University, Los Angeles)
This paper focuses on the politics of female homoerotic desire in the poetry of Swinburne, Michael Field and Cristina Rosseti, in connection with the lesbian imaginings regarding the New Woman in H. Rider Haggard’s She. I address the silence and masculinization of lesbian sexuality in Victorian critical theory, namely the concepts of female homoeroticism as nonexistent/ nameless, and the New Woman’s male sexual identification being heterosexualized in theory despite the textual homoeroticism and Victorian awareness of the increasing subjectivity of male homo/bisexuality. I argue that sexualized lesbian readings are necessary, have justification even prior to lesbian subjective identity, and that the New Woman is a Victorian lesbian threat. I will explore female homosexuality challenging Thais Morgan’s “double voiced discourse”. Other research questions include: Who are Swinburne, Rossetti, and Michael Field addressing in the binarized majority/minority group? Does the male homosexual double-voiced discourse of dominant heterosexual discourse versus minority group interested in redefining masculinity translate into lesbian/feminine terms? How are majority/minority fractured and multiple?

Utopias of Hermaphroditism: Sex and Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Teresa A. Algoso (Japanese Literature/ East Asian Languages & Cultures, UCLA)
This paper investigates the status of “sex” in early twentieth-century Japan. I will argue that the portrayal of hermaphroditism in the 1922 book Thoughts on Hermaphroditism illustrates efforts by early-twentieth century writers to stabilize a dichotomous conception of the nature of humanity and a concept of stable “identity” that had not existed prior and that they were, rather, instrumental in producing.

(2C) Queer Cultural Studies Open Workshop
10:55 am -12:20 pm | Royce 314
Chair: Judith Halberstam, Literature, University of California, San Diego

Asian Diasporic Streaming: Net Art, Visual Citizenship and Queerscapes
Tammy Ko Robinson (Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz)
In this talk, I attempt to sketch out some of the relations between the material and symbolic practices constituting the cultural production of net art and representations of the web in new media at a (dis)juncture of queer migrant labor, new technologies, and financescape. In particular, I am interested in how the work of Asian diasporic visual artists indicates discourses that motor the cultural production of transensous belonging.

A Queer n’ Healthy Body: Homonormativity, HIV/AIDS, and Drug Use in Queer Pilipino America
Christine B. Balance (Performance Studies, New York University)
In 1997, queer Pilipino Americans reported the highest HIV/AIDS rates as well as the highest rates for high-risk behavior, namely drug use, in the queer Asian/Pacific Islander community. Rather than continuing a project of demonizing drug use, this paper attempts to open rather than foreclose a discussion around the intimate public sphere formed by queer Pilipino Americans in the face of HIV/AIDS. Drawing mainly from primary research and utilizing theories of deviance and contact/ networking, this project hopes to take to task hetero-normative as well as homo-normative ideals of community health.

LUNCH 12:30 – 1:30 pm
(Box Lunches available for panelists and moderators only in Royce 306)

SESSION THREE 1:45-3:10 pm

(3A) Trans Topics
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 162
Moderator: Niko Besnier (Anthropology, UCLA)

Debating Trans Inclusion in a Feminist Movement: Challenging Anti-Trans Arguments
Elizabeth Green (Applied Women’s Studies, Claremont Graduate University)
25 years after the publication of Janice Raymond’s highly divisive “Transsexual Empire: The Making of a She-Male,” the feminist movement is still heavily divided on the issue of trans-inclusion. The Ms. magazine bulletin boards function as a prominent battle ground in this heated debate and provides first hand documentation of the various arguments against trans-inclusion in the feminist movement. This paper / presentation analyzes some of the most prominent arguments presented on the boards, while working to deconstruct these statements by using an in-depth analysis of gender variant perspectives and experiences.

The Kings of the Midwest: An Oral History of Midwestern Drag Kings
Donna Jean Troka (The Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University)
This paper investigates the histories and subjectivity formation of drag kings in three Midwestern cities. It aims to centralize the voices of drag kings from the Midwest within the last decade. This scholarship also begins to interrogate how drag kings think about and theorize their performances of gender, race and sexuality. Lastly, this work investigates how dialogue with political movements such as the anti-racist or feminist movements can shape drag king subjectivities.

“Puberty Blues”: An Analysis of the Body Talk of FTMs and Anorexics 
Kristen Schilt (Sociology, UCLA)
While anorexia and “gender identity disorder” have been constructed as two, distinct “disorders” outlined in the DSM-IV, autobiographical accounts from female-to -male (FTMs) transsexuals and female anorexics suggest that there is overlap between the lived, embodied effects of feeling that one is either trapped “in the wrong body,” a common metaphor used by transsexuals, or in an “alien body,” a metaphor used by many anorexics. In this paper, I will explore the symbolic language used to describe alienation from the female body these autobiographical accounts. Focusing predominantly on puberty “body talk” in both types of accounts, I argue that while FTMs and anorexics offer different reasons for their rejection of the female body, the similarities between their descriptions warrants a deep analysis that teases out the relationship between FTMs who starve themselves at the onset of puberty and anorexics who express desire to have a boy’s body.

(3B) History and Queer Visual Cultures
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 314
Moderator: Steven Nelson, Art History, UCLA

Moments of Shame: Queering Art History
Robert Summers (Art History, UCLA)
I aim to theorize by way of anecdotes how some queer subjects are not only constituted and fractured – or, to put it another way, structured and de-structured – by shame, which usually happens by, through, and around our work and the work we look at and live with, but also how an affect such as shame is powerfully productive and instrumental to the becoming-field (which indeed never quite comes) of “queer art history” – or, as I would call it a queering of art history.

Generational Dynamics and the Lesbian Presence: American Feminist Art in the 1970s and 1980s
Aviva Dove-Viebahn (Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester)
Disparate strategies employed by lesbian artists struggling for visibility in the 1970s and the 1980s were strongly influenced by conflicting feminist approaches to art. Whereas first generation feminist artists celebrated women’s bodies and implied a female viewer, many artists of the second generation focused on the position of the female as a subject under the male gaze. The evolution of lesbian art practices within these opposing generations of feminist artists is significant for a broader discussion of the feminist movement.

(3C) Reinscribing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture
Moderator: Peter X. Feng (University of Delaware; Visiting Scholar, UCLA Race & Independent Media)
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 150

Heteropatriarchal Legitimation and Queer Containment in Lifetime’s An Unexpected Love
Kathleen M. McGregor (Communication Studies, California State University, Los Angeles)
Tracing intersections of sexual identity, gender, race and class through dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings of the Lifetime cable channel movie, An Unexpected Love, I will argue that the diegesis attempts to legitimate and heteropatriarchal capitalist discourse. The guiding research methodology and logic are from Madison (1999), in “Legitimation Crisis and Containment: The ‘Anti-Racist-White-Hero’ Film,” where Madison argued that ‘Anti-Racist-White-Hero’ films recuperate white identity in the wake of the legitimation crisis engendered by the civil rights movement.

Straight People Love Him! David Sedaris and the Negotiations of Gay Visibility
Greg Youmans (History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Through the example of best-selling humorist David Sedaris, the paper investigates the negotiations that occur when gay male representation is produced for and consumed by a mainstream straight audience. Sedaris’s example enables a consideration of a tension central to many negotiations of gay visibility: the tension between strategies of binary essentialism and strategies of heteronormativity-a tension that seeks resolution in the untenable positionality of “I am just like you, but don’t worry, you will never be like me.”

Queer, When Survival Is at Stake: Race and Sexuality in the Matrix Films
Aimee Soogene Bahng (Literature, University of California, San Diego)
The heavily mediated manner in which emergencies appear to the American public in the twenty-first century should point to the potential usefulness of an inquiry into the way popular films elicit responses to calamitous occurrences. Such conditioned reactions to crisis situations tend also to mobilize more damaging fears such as xenophobia, homophobia, and miscegenation. The apocalyptic musings of the Matrix films seem to endorse a humanist tale of a super-powered savior who will rescue his species and demonstrate a reproductive duty that is unimaginatively heteronormative for his fellow, enslaved humans. This paper, though, also offers up some alternative readings, which examine how a consideration of “race” at work in the Matrix dogma can complicate any understanding of how the films sort out sexuality.

(3D) Race and Ethnicity Open Workshop
1:45-3:10 pm | Royce 156
Chair: David Román, English, University of Southern California

Queer Futures: The New South Africa’s Coming Out Narratives
Brenna Munro (English Literature, University of Virginia)
South Africa’s 1996 post-apartheid constitution banned discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, making it the first state in the world to have such solid legal protection of gay rights: a very different situation from that of most other post-colonial locations. The figure of the (young) gay South African offers a model of postcoloniality that promises to defuse the history of racial conflict by bringing in an unexpected new identity, one which any race can presumably “be,” and which has thus been deployed as a symbol of unity, progress and the “rainbow future.” As Supreme Court Justice Albie Sachs said: “It’s not just the gay and lesbian community that is coming out…We’re all coming out…and we’ve become a better nation” (1988). This paper will show how gay and queer sexualities thus provide a rich metaphor for South Africa’s political transformations, and the coming-out narrative so strikingly recast by Ablate Sachem is a key template for critical allegories of the “new” nation.

Global Queer Boys in Performance: The Politics of Performing “Gay” in Singapore
Eng-Beng Lim (Theater, Critical Studies, UCLA)
This paper tracks the transmogrification of the “nativised boy” as a colonial trope endemic in the Asian Pacific islander imaginary. I focus on Singapore English-language theater as staging critical, mobile encounters that explore modern manifestations of “nativised boys” as diasporic and flexible queer subjects in drama. Reading the production of these boys as a modality of global queerness, I discuss global/local sexual meanings (identity, practices, politics) and how they are related to neocolonial constructions of ethnic and cultural “nativism”. Exploiting the apparent sexiness of queer cultures as “queerness sells,” globalization brings with it the promising potential for incorporating queer lives into its network. Seen through this optic, one might describe the “boys” in question as embodying the queer sexual dimensions of a globalizing world made possible by market forces and various cultural flows. Yet do these “boys” accomplish political work for queer sexualities in diverse contexts? Are these “boys” constructed by “Singaporeans ” staging gay identities in the fashion of Western sexual politics using the co-opted queer aesthetic of global consumerism? Are they enacting the political struggle, ambivalence and culturally charged visions of a local, subcultural community positioned in a transnational world? Confronting the problematic of queer globalizations using the geopolitical matrix of Singapore, Thailand and California-USA, I will examine how two playwrights construct queer visions of home, body and sexuality with global cultural resonance.

SESSION FOUR 3:25-4:50 pm

(4A) Normativity/Queerness
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 148
Moderator: Ronni Sanlo, LGBT Resource Center, UCLA

Mixed Marriage: Bisexual Women in Relationships with Lesbians
Amy Andre (Human Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University)
For female couples of mixed orientations, in which one woman identifies as bisexual and the other identifies as lesbian, negotiation of the constructs of that difference may challenge the relationships’ chances for success. This study involved in-depth interviews with five women in long-term mixed-orientation relationships with female partners. I found that the women experience a variety of emotional states during their attempts to negotiate their differences in orientation. Overall, the relationships were sustained through communication and a commitment to love.

The Sexual Politics of Genius
Moon Duchin (Mathematics, University of Chicago)
The idea of genius powerfully conditions conceptions of intellect, ability, and talent– and is persistently sexed male. I examine narratives of genius and their relationship to normative masculinities, focusing on mathematics and the “hard” sciences, where many compelling examples cluster. Beyond these stories, I look to philosophical sources, psychometrics, and some recent feminist work to consider the social functions of the genius ideal and finally argue that the possibility of female genius is blocked by a kind of cognitive dissonance.

(4B) How to Write the Past
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 156
Moderator: Christopher Looby, English, UCLA

Notes on Queer Methodology 
Joseph Rezek (English, UCLA)
In the introduction to Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), Eve Sedgwick acknowledges the hermeneutic risks of invoking the term “queer” in critical approaches to fiction. When used most convincingly, “queer” suggests a methodological approach; it suggest the “intimate anachronism” by which a critic in his or her analysis of a text can draw productively upon the insights that “the gay/lesbian studies and queer theory movements” have brought to our understandings of subjectivity, sexuality, gender, race and society. As Sedgwick suggests in Tendencies (1993), the word “queer” can never only denote, “nor can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locutionary position itself.” Yet many critics of pre-20th century literature (Sedgwick included) draw on the term’s apparent denotative potential with regard to particular texts, characters, and individuals. In my present inquiry, I explore the interstitial space the term “queer” often occupies in recent literary studies between a-historical, restrictive denotation and suggestive connotation. While few would argue that “queer” carries specific ontological implications, I show how some critics undermine their hermeneutic intentions by employing the term in just such a way. If, as David Halperin suggests, that “[queer] is an identity without an essence,” how are critics of pre-20th century literature to benefit from the indisputable presence and undeniable potency of its meaning?

The Inscription of Michel Foucault
Nicholas A. De Villiers (Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota)
This paper considers the late career and life of French philosopher/historian Michel Foucault, and addresses particular problems for those who attempt to write about Foucault and his life. Two of the major semi-biographical works on Foucault-James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault and David Halperin’s Saint Foucault-are contrasted with Hervé Guibert’s fictionalized representations of Foucault in a character named “Muzil” in his book To the friend who did not save my life. Guibert’s text is considered as a possible challenge to traditional forms of biography (Miller), “hagiography” (Halperin), and autobiography (Guibert’s account of Foucault and his own experience of AIDS takes the form of a “journal”).

Doing Trashy History: Gay Historiography and Critical / Counter AIDS Memory[ials]
Kara Thompson (English, University of California, Davis)
AIDS, as a critical rupture in the continuum of gay historiography, has shifted from a question of morality to one of epistemology. In tracing this mobility, we can recognize new ways of conceiving historicist methodology and public/private acts of memory. Walter Benjamin envisions one’s relationship to the past as a performative, discursive interaction with the present; using his methodologies, this project reads narratives of travel and movement as examples of counter/private memory[ials] that contrast to more collective, public memorials such as the Names Project.

(4C) Beyond Binaries in Film and Video
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 314
Moderator: Chon Noriega, Critical Studies of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA

Queering in Defiance of Patriarchal Norms: Byun Young Ju’s Documentary Film on Sexually Abused Victims of World War II
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (Art History, Institute of Fine Arts at New York University)
This paper examines visual constructions of the queer, which escape the typography of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender. The discussion will focus on Byun Young Ju’s film The Murmuring (1995), which documents the daily lives and struggles of nine elderly women who were forced to serve Japanese soldiers as “comfort women” during World War II. Their negotiations with the memory of sexual violence and their defiance against patriarchy will be critically analyzed.

Unmasking the Invisible: Gender Variants¹ Entrance into American Popular Culture (1992-2002)
Deborah Hanan (American Cultural Studies, California State University, Los Angeles)
This research examines queer epistemological encoding in films distributed in the U.S. between 1992-2002. It investigates the obstacles associated with constructing narratives that challenge binary identity models, and examines how the filmmakers of The Crying Game, Orlando, and Hedwig and The Angry Inch addressed those challenges. This study contributes to American Identity projects by advancing current discourses on social identity construction, subaltern appropriations of hegemonic codes, and transgressive messages’ ability to survive within, and be distributed through, popular culture products.

Quivering: Notes on Patty Chang’s Video(taped) Performance Art
Alison Hoffman (Critical Studies of Film, Television and Digital Media, UCLA)
Patty Chang’s experimental, video performances both image and inspire quivering, arousing the term in all of its meanings. A phenomenologically-charged engagement with Chang’s video art reveals a convulsive queer media politics that is feminist, coalitional, and perversely beautiful. Reflexive of Chang’s works’ polymorphousness, my presentation takes the form of a fragmented, quivering body as it pays special attention to the cross-modal sensorium.

(4D) Performing Queer Open Workshop
3:25-4:50 pm | Royce 162
Chair: Sue-Ellen Case, Theater, UCLA

Double Jeopardy: The Re-Trials of Leopold and Loeb on Stage and Screen
Jordan Schildcrout (Theater, CUNY Graduate Center)
For nearly a century, the “sin of homosexuality” and the crime of murder have intertwined on the stage and on the screen in the recurrent figure of the queer killer. The real life queer killers who have most consistently fascinated the public are Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who brutally murdered 13-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago in 1924. Over the past eight decades, in five different stage productions and three films, creative artists have recreated the case according to the genre conventions and cultural concerns of their own times. Each of these works fulfills the audience’s desire to retry the case for themselves and create new fantasies of justice based on different values and desires, re-imagining “Leopold & Loeb” variously as moral monsters, as pitiful neurotics, or as romantic heroes. This presentation, taken from a dissertation-in-progress about “reclaiming the queer killer” in contemporary drama, will focus on works including Patrick Hamilton’s Rope (1929), Meyer Levin’s Compulsion (1957), Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), John Logan’s Never the Sinner (1997), recent fringe theatre productions (including a Leopold & Loeb musical) and cinematic adaptations.

The Gothic Articulation of Homosexuality in the Nineteenth Century
L. Andrew Cooper (English, Princeton University)
This paper will discuss the ways in which Gothic fictions in English contributed to the meanings of “homosexuality” that emerged in the nineteenth century. The tropes of Gothic fiction, such as the trope of “pathological reproduction,” helped to shape the way both cultural authorities and the general population defined and perceived “the homosexual.”

(5) Faculty Scholars Panel 
5:00 – 6:00 pm | Royce 314
Sue-Ellen Case, University of California, Los Angeles
Judith Halberstam, University of California, San Diego
Richard Meyer, University of Southern California
David Román, University of Southern California

(6) Reception 
6:00 pm | Royce 306

Cosponsored by 
Graduate Division,
the Division of Humanities, the Division of Social Sciences,
the Center for the Study of Women,
the Chicano Studies Research Center,
Writing Programs
and the departments of
Anthropology, Art History, Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, Critical Studies/Film, Television & Digital Media, English, Musicology, and Spanish & Portuguese.