Biochemical Genetics

This essay analyzes Lucía Puenzo's 2007 film, XXY, to articulate a collaborative process of gender-ambiguous becoming, what the author ultimately calls a theory of child's play. Building on María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo's theorization of developmentalism and an extended engagement with work by Marlene Wayar and Mauro Cabral Grinspan, the article argues that XXY reveals an emergent “transition ideology” that aligns gender development with national development and internalizes a buried history of national racism. It then contextualizes XXY in a longer history of neoliberal politics in Argentina, connecting current divides between an older generation of travesti activists and younger trans people to long-standing invocations of generational kinship at the national level. The second part of the essay scales beyond scenes of individual and national transition to transnational notions of trans progress. Taking critiques from trans studies and anticolonial thought, the essay explains how the transnational abstraction of a “right to gender identity” in transition has shifted from its original activist framings of material access to limited notions of self-declaration.

During its military dictatorship's toughest years, Brazil witnessed the emergence and meteoric rise to (inter)national fame of the theater and dance group/family Dzi Croquettes in the 1970s. Their queer performances were so contagious that an increasingly visible entourage began to adopt the Dzi way of being and “philosophy of life.” This article examines the Dzi movement based on the existing literature and primary data generated through archival research and oral history interviews. It begins with an overview of the state of affairs surrounding the Croquettes's emergence and proceeds with two thematic sections where the primary data are presented and examined: the first one regarding the multidirectional identifications that formed between/among performers and spectators before, during, and after performances; and the second, focused on the enhanced but “costly” sense of freedom and transgression in/as the aftermath of the Dzi performances. Lastly, the article elaborates on the notion of the Dzi contagion and charts its affective and sociopolitical potentials by analyzing the articulation and dissemination of ontologies, subjectivities, and vocabularies (such as freedom, difference, and equality) beyond/against the liberal episteme. This piece contributes, both empirically and theoretically, to broader debates about the world-making and political powers of queer performances and utopias in/from the global South.

This essay focuses on Imogen Binnie's trans-centric road novel Nevada (2013), exploring it as an archive of queer and trans negative affect. Nevada, this essay proposes, offers an occasion to excavate the nuances, losses, and possibilities of queer and trans negative affectivity. Binnie's novel maps queer and trans negative affects in relation to economic history, revealing how these affects intertwine with those of precarity. It thus registers the impact of global forces in some queer- and trans-centered worlds, highlighting the historicity of queer and trans affects. Further, Nevada is written in opposition to hegemonic narratives of transition, rejecting the ideals of positivity and self-actualization embedded in such stories. In this sense, Nevada plumbs queer and trans negativity, but in so doing, it generates a more open-ended form for trans narrative, inviting the trans subject into spaciousness and porosity. Nevada thus practices a reparative negativity, presenting a paradoxically downbeat paradigm for queer and trans survival and possibility. It offers a resource for scholars seeking to grapple with queer and trans negative affectivity and to map some resources of queer and trans oppositional consciousness in the precarious present.

This article focuses on the 2015 Telangana Queer Swabhimana Walk to explore the relationality of trans activism to questions of culture and region. Documented by Moses Tulasi's film, Walking the Walk (2015), this pride march can be read as a site of decolonial theory-making that reorients the gaze of the mainstream public to hijra and other trans people's historic attachment to land and their fight for justice. The article employs podcast interviews with Tulasi and one of the organizers of the walk, Rachana Mudraboyina, to unpack the distinctiveness of swabhimana (roughly translates to “self-respect”) from globalized notions of pride and caste-based understanding of dignity and respect. In the process, it highlights how working-class trans activists “disidentify” with the Hindu caste system as well as Dalit and anti-caste critiques of sex work to rally for the dignity of their labor and everyday living.

Over the past decade, liberals have rallied around the cause of gender-inclusive public restrooms, putatively as a way to provide trans and gender-nonconforming people with access to safe facilities, while also building a social movement for gender freedom. At the same time, liberals have remained largely silent on the ongoing surveillance, harassment, assault, arrest, and public shaming of men who cruise public restrooms. How might we make sense of this discrepancy? This essay offers a hypothesis for this relative silence: cruising is intolerable to liberals insofar as it evokes the pleasure of antisocial and self-shattering relations, thereby threatening social commitments. This hypothesis helps explain why liberals, in defending trans and gender-nonconforming peoples’ restroom access, have characterized and reinforced restrooms as nonsexual spaces, effectively insulating gender non-normativity from the stain of sexual perversion. The issues of restroom access and cruising are thus more closely related than they may initially appear to be, as are the liberal silence surrounding cruising and conservative transphobia and transmisogyny.

This article expands the notion of queer domesticity from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing on autoethnography, ephemeral archives, and secondary sources, the authors examine Nanur Basha, the residence of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community mentor, which in 2016 was the site of two murders committed by a local chapter of Al-Qaeda. By empirically interrogating the events leading up to the unmaking of Nanur Basha, the authors argue that global South queer domesticities — constituted by quotidian practices of queer worlding and expanding from apartments to rooftops to streets to political discourses — aspire to greater political freedom by deploying imaginative and counterhegemonic practices. As queer domesticities open up interstitial sanctuaries in nationalist discourses and within the urban fabric, they are also unmade by competing postcolonial nationalisms. Contesting Nanur Basha's reduction to a site of victimhood under Islamic terrorism and homophobia, this article illustrates how Nanur Basha indexes a subterranean modality of southern queer domesticity that negotiates secrecy, safety, celebration, and survival under heterosexist nationalist surveillance and violence. Such queer domesticities underpin an affective sanctuary at the borderlands between queer joy and injury. The article contributes to emerging conversations in transnational queer studies by situating queer worldmaking practices within landscapes of authoritarianism and queerphobia.

The early AIDS epidemic in New York City revealed the intersection of two long-term crises impacting gay and lesbian tenants in the city: a critical lack of affordable housing and homophobic discrimination in private and public housing provision. People with AIDS and their family members faced tenant harassment, eviction, and structural homophobia in New York State's rent regulations. This article's microhistory of the eviction of Michael Brown, a rent-regulated tenant in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood, highlights how activists brought knowledge acquired in the traditional tenant movement into new gay and lesbian organizations. This collaboration was a result of Chelsea's history as a center of both militant tenant organizing and neighborhood-based gay and lesbian activism. In Chelsea, gay and lesbian residents joined the housing movement as low-income tenants, while also participating in neighborhood activism reflecting their concerns as gay and lesbian residents. Michael Brown's eviction case brought these two local organizing traditions into direct collaboration. This article builds on scholarship revealing the political agency of tenants and recent literature on housing and care during the AIDS epidemic by situating gay and lesbian advocacy for housing during the early AIDS crisis within a long trajectory of New York City tenant activism.