Dustin Bradley Goltz

It Gets Better: Queer Futures, Critical Frustrations, and Radical Potentials

In 2010, responding to several widely reported Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and/or Queer (LGBTQ) youth suicides, the It Gets Better project was developed to offer hope and outreach to alienated queer youths in crisis through personalized YouTube messages. Queer critiques of the project and its founder, Dan Savage, were quick to challenge the privileged and homonormative investments from the outset of the campaign, rejecting the campaign as passive, impractical, homogenizing, and exclusionary. This paper argues that the queer critiques launched at It Gets Better work to both strengthen and obscure the radical queer potentials of the campaign. Read as a project of queering future, It Gets Better enacts a mediated form of generativity, while continually expanding the possible significations for the symbol of “better,” in order to queer sedimented logics that cast LGBTQ persons as without future. Rejecting critical tragedy in favor of a model of critical frustration, this paper works with and through queer criticisms of It Gets Better to embrace and extend the multivocal and contradictory potentials of the project.

Frustrating the “I”: Critical Dialogic Reflexivity with Personal Voice

The essay demonstrates dialogic reflexivity in performance, performative response, and engaging criticism through the analysis of two stories. The first story, set in a bar, recounts a verbal homophobic assault, specifically crafted to examine the workings of masculinity, homophobia, and shame. The second story, a metanarrative of the first story, analyzes the ongoing process of uncovering the critical absences, fallibility, and tragic dimensions to how I have narrated this “bar story.” Using these two stories to ground the discussion, this essay asserts an ethical framework for critically and reflexively dialoguing personal narrative, auto-ethnographic, and autobiographical scholarship. Marking the inherent fallibility of self-accounting and the need for a dialogic reflexive processing of personal accounts, this essay calls for us to move beyond mere critical textualizing strategies of personal narrative to theorize the ethical dimensions of how we audience, engage, and respond to personal claims to experience. Asserting a guiding framework of fallibility and comic musement in processing the “I,” this essay argues that the concepts of “critical frustration” and “critical tragedy” offer productive tools for ethically guiding dialogic engagement with “ones” claimed experience. Furthermore, conceptions of self-reflexivity and intersectionality are reframed as guiding ethics, ongoing collaborative processes, rather than isolated standards or criteria for evaluating a personal account. The result is an ethical argument for rejecting critical tragedy in favor of a model of critical frustration.

The Intersectional Workings of Whiteness: A Representative Anecdote.

How do we see that which is defined by its invisibility? How do we begin to locate the pain, violence, and oppression in a system of postures, actions, and privileges that understands itself as normal, neutral, and unremarkable? For over nine years, we have worked with our students—in higher education contexts ranging from urban community colleges and a private Catholic university to a large state research institution and a suburban upper-division state university—to mark, examine, and understand how whiteness operates in our own lives, our classrooms, and the lived experiences of our diverse bodies of students. We open this article with a recurrent trend we find in pedagogical investigations. When asked to enact, embody, or locate heteronormativity in mediated examples or the everyday lives of our students, images are identified, performances are called out, and situated examples of privilege and oppression are rendered visible and concrete. In the engagement of scholarly literature on gender, age, national identity, and class, our students are adept at locating these hierarchal systems at work, both in the silent privileges garnered by normative positions (masculinity, youthfulness, citizenship, and upper=middle class) and the violences enacted upon nonnormative subjects (femininity, elderly, immigrants, working class, etc.). While students surely, and rightfully, debate and question the critical literature they engage that works to expose and dissect hegemonic systems, their lived and mediated experiences mark an important point of entry to ground, feel through, and make sense of these The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 33:215–241, 2011 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2011.585286

It's Not a Wedding, It's a Gayla: Queer Resistance and Normative Recuperation

The possibilities of performance to move audience/participants into challenging, resistant, and self-reflexive spaces is wrought with complications, notably, the complex ways dominant discourses quickly recuperate acts of resistance. This essay documents and theorizes our weekend-long Gayla celebration: a political performance project of love, community, protest, and activism that enacted a series of performative rituals reconfiguring notions of family, kinship, and patriarchy. Initially conceived as a ritualized celebration of our relations, both with each other and with our multiple families, we later made the decision to craft this self-reflective essay to examine and theorize the socio-political stakes, potentials, and shortcomings of the Gayla as a form of queer performance protest. We theorize queer utopian performance through the concepts of wander and futurity, examining moments of queer potentiality, queer imaginary, and discursive rupture, while also exploring how the performance event was audienced, negotiated, and recuperated through dominant discursive frames.

Treading Across Lines in the Sand: Performing Bodies in Coalitional Subjectivity

For all bodies, performance can be a site to untangle and grapple with ones place within hegemonic structures. Our bodies, the bodies of a WHITE-JEW-GAY-GUY and a BROWN-DYKE-GIRL, come to the stage to negotiate possibilities of joining our differently situated queer subjectivities through the process of generating and performing collaborative personal narrative. Through understanding, grounding, and interrupting the politics of our relation we describe and assert a coalitional subjectivity that destabilizes intact representations/memories of our own experiences. We do this as a gesture toward reconfiguring notions of the individual as an always already relational (and potentially coalitional) subject.

Ironic Performativity: Amy Schumer's Big (White) Balls

The essay examines Amy Schumers breakout performance in the controversial Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen to unpack and theorize the workings of ironic performativity. The essay offers processual language (the doing of racism, the doing of sexism, etc.) correctives for audiencing, naming, and making sense of layered ironic performances to foster more complex audiencing practices and engage the work with greater critical scrutiny and possibility. The analysis underscores the necessity of critical self-reflexivity in the processing of ironic comedy, as audiences are co-authors and co-owners of the meanings produced in this work (whether offense, laughter, subversion, or potentiality).

The Critical-Norm: The Performativity of Critique and the Potentials of Performance

Grounded in a topics course designed to examine the limits of “racial talk,” the paper examines how critical pedagogy faces a complex web of obstacles in the interrogation of racial discourses and systems. Next, the paper moves to assert and apply the concept of the critical-norm, marking the performativity of critical dialogues and critical analysis that have come to inhibit critical work through the normalization of critical patterns of engagement. The paper turns to performance theory as a space to resist the limitations of the critical-norm, specifically in the context of racial dialogue, marking aesthetic performance dialogue as a space where the trappings of the critical-norm can be expanded, troubled, and potentially reworked.

Love(sick) Aliens in the Wasteland: Queer Temporal Camp in Araki's Teen Apocalyptic Trilogy

The construction of time and temporality is an ideological, communicative, and discursive process, whereby the meanings of the past, present, and future ultimately work to support heteronormative ends. Dubbed “straight time” in contemporary queer theory, dominant constructions of time help shore up and confirm heteronormative investments, furthering the demonization and punishment of queers who choose not to, or fail to, abide by straight temporal logics that regulate marriage, procreation, and inheritance. Straight time functions according to heterosexually driven narratives, where monogamous love, wedding, and procreation are written as (the only possibility of) future, thus casting the queer future outside of discourse. Contemporary media representations and GLBT political platforms have worked to assimilate gays and lesbians into straight temporal logics, working within normative systems, ultimately resulting in the exclusion of queer lives. Through Gregg Arakis 1990s teen apocalyptic trilogy— comprised of Totally F**ked up, The doom generation, and Nowhere—this article theorizes queer temporal camp as a strategic intervention into the foreclosure and punishment of queer lives enacted through mainstream homonormative and heteronormative representation. Arakis non-progressing trilogy, which emerged as an aggressive response to the AIDS pandemic, grounds and coaches a queer temporal camp sensibility through the tactical use of narrative alienation, intertextual excess, and heteronormative temporal critique. Queer temporal camp calls for queers to rethink the ways temporal systems are reified in mainstream narrative structures through critical distance, representational memory, and irreverence.

Discursive negotiations of Kenyan LGBTI identities: Cautions in cultural humility

ABSTRACT This study identifies and analyzes sites of discursive negotiation regarding sexual and gender minority identities in Kenya. A demonizing master narrative of homosexuality is constructed through cultural myths prevalent in Kenyan media yet challenged by claims of innate identity through strategic essentialism and glocalized naming practices. Using participant observation and creative focus group methodologies with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and intersex community members and journalists in Nairobi, Kenya this research project demonstrates the necessity of cultural humility while addressing contemporary absences in the study of queer identities in intercultural scholarship and communication research within African contexts.

Narrating sexual identities in Kenya: “Choice,” value, and visibility

ABSTRACT This article examines the discursive construction of female same-sex sexual identities in Nairobi. We identify the discursive forces of “choice,” devaluation, and invisibility as influential within Kenyan media representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex citizens. Using creative focus groups and participant observation, we demonstrate how same-sex attracted women in Nairobi resist and rearticulate these discursive forces to assert their identity and agency as individuals and as a queer community.