Daniel C. Brouwer

What Is This “Post-” in Postracial, Postfeminist… (Fill in the Blank)?

The events of the 2008 election continue to spark prognostications that we live in a world that is postracial/feminist, and so on. At the 2009 NCA (National Communication Association) convention, a panel of communication scholars discussed how to approach questions of identity and communication over the next 5 years. Participants suggested ways to be critical of assertions of “post” and elaborated ways to encounter new dimensions of identification in an era of immense sociopolitical challenges. This forum revisits the exchanged dialogues among the participants at the roundtable and further explores the meaning of post- in post-America.

In/discernible bodies: the politics of passing in dominant and marginal media

This essay explores news media coverage of two types of alleged “passing”: passing across racial lines from Black to White and across sex lines from female to male. Textual analysis of dominant print media and print media discourses produced by and/or addressed to Blacks and queers reveals prominent frames through which news consumers are invited to perceive these events. In particular, the analysis demonstrates that both dominant and marginal social groups express the desire to fix the identities of passers in a single, discrete category, although these groups wish to do so for disparate reasons. In addition, marginal groups frame passing events within broad cultural and historical contexts in contrast to the narrow contexts framed by dominant media. Comparison of race and sex passing exposes the similarities–including community consternation about the passer–and differences–including disparate focus on civil rights rather than identity issues–between Black and queer coverage of these events. Comparison of race and sex passing also exposes the way in which dominant media correlate race passing with class passing, while sex passing is correlated to sexuality passing (that is, queer passing for heterosexual).

The precarious visibility politics of self‐stigmatization: The case of HIV/AIDS tattoos

One of the ethical issues that emerges in discussions about HIV and AIDS is disclosure of serostatus‐who should know if an individual is HIV‐antibody positive, when, and by what means? For seropositive individuals, day‐to‐day existence is characterized by strategies of concealment and reveal‐ment about their seropositivity. Some seropositive individuals have chosen to disclose their serostatus rather indiscriminately by non‐verbal, rather than verbal, means through the acquisition of an HIV/AIDS tattoo. These tattoos‐indelible marks inked upon the skin‐textualize the body by rendering the surface of the skin communicative about the interior (seropositive) status of the blood, tissues, and organs. Asymptomatic tattoo wearers render the invisible visible. This phenomenon is politically precarious, functioning critically to problematize assumptions about space and appearances of health while simultaneously raising the specter of repressive or violent surveillance.

Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University.

The figure of the public intellectual galvanizes the imagination and catalyzes social commentary. Examination of contemporary debates about public intellectuals draws our attention to competing claims about the health of public lift, the conditions and resources of academe, and the relations between the academy and public life. In our analysis of popular commentary about public intellectuals, we discern three major topoi: breadth, site, and legitimacy. Additionally, we explore the ways in which John Dewey imagined the relationships between schools and public life, and we argue that reference to Dewey helps to illuminate contemporary discussion about public intellectuals. We conclude with a framework for understanding and practicing public intellectualism today.

Corps/corpse: The U.S. military and homosexuality

I examine testimony of over thirty military witnesses during four days of 1993 congressional hearings addressing the controversy over gays and lesbians serving openly in the United States military. Witnesses dispute two major topics: the “nature” of the military, and the “nature” of homosexuals. These topics parallel dual meanings of “corps” that structure this controversy—corps as a social body and corps as the flesh of physical bodies. More broadly, I argue that the rhetorical strategies of incorporation and disin‐corporation function as indices of power, for these strategies are unequally available to the disputants and engender disparate rhetorical effects.

Counterpublicity and Corporeality in HIV/AIDS Zines

This essay demonstrates how two U.S. zines produced from 1990 to 1999 by and for gay men with HIV/AIDS—Diseased Pariah News (DPN) and Infected Faggot Perspectives (IFP)—constitute counterpublics. I demonstrate how DPN and IFP constitute counterpublics through thematization of two important forms of difference—blood status (HIV-positive or HIV-negative), and political ideology. I then specify and elaborate primary modes of corporeal expressivity in the zines—the erotic/sexual and the grotesque—to demonstrate the work that each mode does for the counterpublics.

Potentialities and Ambivalences in the Performance of Queer Decorum

In this forum response, we collaborate to interrogate the faith and works of Dusty and Jason’s Gayla, a series of highly stylized performative events in which we participated in various roles and through which our queer intimacies with Jason and Dusty, and with each other, have been transformed. Performance holds open simultaneously promises and dangers of resistance and reinscription. To apprehend these openings, we introduce the notion of queer decorum both as a conceptual touchstone and as a name for the effects this joining ritual has had on us. Decorum names ‘‘the rules of conduct guiding the alignment of signs and situations, or texts and acts, or behavior and place’’ that are ‘‘embodied in practices of communication and display according to a symbolic system,’’ thereby ‘‘providing social cohesion and distributing power’’ (Hariman 156). Decorum names a social force, an embodied social force that organizes the spectacular and the mundane. Though a ‘‘flexible’’ principle ‘‘subject to revision in light of our concrete experience (Leff 61),’’ decorum is readily intelligible as a force that draws us together, unites ‘‘us.’’ It often feels like a centripetal force, a law, the Law, like Nature, so natural. The fact and force of decorum demand that we interrogate the conditions of ‘‘our’’ participation, the conditions that permit or thwart our entrances and exits, and the

The Cultural Politics of Progenic Auschwitz Tattoos: 157622, A-15510, 4559, …

Facing the loss of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, progeny of survivors have begun to tattoo their ancestors’ Auschwitz numbers on their own bodies. We investigate the rhetoricity of progenic tattooing through semiotic, affective, and pedagogical registers. We argue that shifting conditions of discourse across time alter decorum about public memory of the Holocaust. Further, the progenic practice, constituting a distinct form of trauma tattoo, enacts a mode of postmemory through a resignification of the original sign that makes visible the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust.

Negotiating Performances of “Real” Marriage in Chinese Queer Xinghun

Abstract This article explores how marriage is negotiated by Chinese queer subjects who face tension between the heteronormative expectations of their families and their desire to maintain a same-sex relationship. Specifically, we critically assess the cultural performances of xinghun (形婚), or contract marriage between a gay man and a lesbian woman. Focusing on the experiences of queer Chinese women, we investigate the enactment of marriage and gender dynamics in xinghun. Our analysis of personal accounts and online discourse in personal ads shows how Chinese queer subjects perform the “realness” of heteronormativity in their queer marriages. We argue that xinghun is an ambivalent cultural formation that at once reproduces heteronormativity and contests gender and sexual norms in a heteropatriarchal society.

Coming out, coming home, coming with: Models of queer sexuality in contemporary China

ABSTRACT The authors investigate coming out and coming home as models of queer sexuality for contemporary Chinese queer subjects. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 Chinese queer subjects, the authors investigate the distinctness of the coming-out and coming-home models, their points of dissonance and consonance, and the ways in which queer subjects take them up (partially or fully, temporarily or enduringly), revise them, or reject them. Finding that interview narratives exceed the normative parameters shaped by these two models, the authors elaborate a third, distinct model—coming with—which better accounts for how some contemporary Chinese queer subjects are crafting livable lives.