Jason Zingsheim

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.

Developing Mutational Identity Theory: Evolution, Multiplicity, Embodiment, and Agency

This article extends poststructuralist theories of the self, expanding the discursive possibilities for (re)creating identities. Building on intersectionality, crystallized selves, and identity as assemblage, mutational identity theory works to increase the available discursive resources for conceptualizing identity as kinetic, diffuse, embodied, and contextual. Developed through a cultural analysis of contemporary mutants, mutational identity theory consists of a four-part framework— evolution, multiplicity, embodiment, and agency. Traversing multiple lines of flight and articulation, mutational identity faces the paradox of the self as generative and symptomatic of the radically contextual nature of existence within the (post) modern-day conjuncture.

X-Men Evolution: Mutational Identity and Shifting Subjectivities

Discourses of identity, as articulated through media culture, are contested and unstable sites of struggle. Individuals are hailed by multiple subject positions with varying degrees of recognition, misrecognition, rejection, and/or identification. From this process, identity continually (re)emerges as individuals accept, reject, and negotiate a variety of subjectivities. To enact a critical intervention adept at tracing these shifting discourses the author uses mutational identity to analyze the politics of representation within the X-Men trilogy. A specific focus on the mutational concept of evolution directs attention to the mobility and mutability of subject positions across space and time. The analysis highlights the role of citizenship and mobility in constructing recognizable, heroic subjects before turning to trace the racialized and gendered trajectories available as discursive resources for identity negotiation. The resulting insights of this analysis detail the strategies used to perpetuate dominant discourses of identity, offering a nuanced illumination of the processes used to continually re-imagine Whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. The conceptual flexibility offered by mutational identity highlights the speed and scale at which subject positions evolve to maintain hegemonic relations, while also illuminating subjective ruptures and the nodes of resistance already existing in/through discursive formations.

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.