Shaka McGlotten

Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities

This essay examines two gay zombie films by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. I look to the ways LaBruce brings together the already intimate genres of horror and porn to paint an ambivalent picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls ‘the death of gay culture’. Zombies and zombie sex are deployed to level an anarcho-punk critique at contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power. At the same time, explicit scenes of zombie sex gesture toward an always immanent political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Rather than herald only a dead or failed future, LaBruces gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities, and especially forms of sex and politics that are deemed retrograde but that paradoxically suggest undead presents and futures. These necropolitical socialities are stubbornly animate, undying efforts that improvise intimate publics appropriate to contemporary precarities.

The Geriatric Clinic: Dry and Limp: Aging Queers, Zombies, and Sexual Reanimation

This essay looks to the omission of aging queer bodies from new medical technologies of sex. We extend the Foucauldian space of the clinic to the mediascape, a space not only of representations but where the imagination is conditioned and different worlds dreamed into being. We specifically examine the relationship between aging queers and the marketing of technologies of sexual function. We highlight the ways queers are excluded from the spaces of the clinic, specifically the heternormative sexual scripts that organize biomedical care. Finally, using recent zombie theory, we gesture toward both the constraints and possibilities of queer inclusion within the discourses and practices that aim to reanimate sexual function. We suggest that zombies usefully frame extant articulations of aging queers with sex and the dangerous lure of medical treatments that promise revitalized, but normative, sexual function at the cost of other, perhaps queerer intimacies.

Black Gender and Sexuality: Spatial Articulations

How do Black gender and sexuality articulate spatially? At this moment, where are the quotidian spaces occupied by Black gendered and sexualized lives? We ask these questions in light of the years of scholarship that have mapped Black gender and sexuality in terms of emergent identities; scholars have talked about Black gender and sexuality as always in a process of becoming. While this point of view is intellectually and materially astute, there has been a concomitant, if implicit, assumption, namely that Black gender and sexuality has failed to actualize. In framing the essays included here in terms of spatial articulation, we assume that racialized, gendered and sexualized bodies have to some degree become concrete; they exist in spaces and they have histories. That is to say, they are discovered and known, not necessarily in process, but of processes. Black gender and sexualities exist and have been shaped by urbanization, ghettoization, segregation, as well as the other ways communities of color have realized and produced their own spaces, from squatting to making concrete their middle-class aspirations in forms familiar to the larger American Dream: home ownership, lawns, and even a few picket fences. This volume elaborates important issues and critiques of Black gender and sexuality in space—literally in places. In this, the second volume of our exploration of the ‘‘special issue’’ of Black gender and sexuality, the essays are thematically orchestrated around Souls

On Glass Closets and Not-Gay Gay Sex

You know that you are learning something when ideas disorganize you. The three books I review here forced me to rethink, to borrow from Sharon Holland’s (2012) recent book, how “the erotic life of racism” has materialized in my own life — in the ways my expectations that sexual or romantic partners be out was always situated within structures of race, or in the ways I have been fetishized as a black man. Perhaps most disturbingly, these texts led me to wonder: “Am I a snow queen?”1 That racism has an erotic life or that eroticism is shaped by racism are not wholly new ideas, of course. Yet, as Holland (2012: 14) observes, these realities seem to have become largely estranged in both critical race theory and queer studies. Jeffrey McCune’s Sexual Discretion, C. Riley Snorton’s Nobody Is Supposed to Know,

A Review of: “Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, Volume 1 Herukhuti (Hameed Williams)”

Conjuring Black Funk leaves the reader wanting more. As the title promises, this collection of reflections on a wide range of topics represents a beginning rather than an end. And as ‘‘notes,’’ many of the short essays in this volume, which were originally posted online, feel like sketches rather than developed academic arguments. Nonetheless, there is much to admire here. Not least of which are Herukhuti’s (who is also a colleague at Goddard College) capacious areas of interest and expertise, among them, pedagogy, spirituality, kink, academic culture, shamanism, anthropology, queer studies, and Afrocentric thought. Herukhuti’s short essays are intentionally wide-ranging, bespeaking a precocious intellectual curiosity, and kinkiness, reminiscent of Samuel Delany, who writes an enthusiastic introduction. And like Delany, Herukhuti tackles a range of controversial subjects, many related to sexuality and culture. ‘‘Conjuring black funk’’ refers simultaneously to black cultural histories of conjuring, of collective magic making that has the ability to affect the worlds through which we move, and to the mystery and force of the erotic. It is a magic infused with an oppositional political consciousness and a deep belief in the liberatory and transformational powers of sex. Black Funk began as an organization, a ‘‘sexual cultural center,’’ where Herukhuti performed the overlapping roles of sexologist, educator, and shaman in a range of courses and workshops. Although operating in these capacities would make many traditional academics wary, Herukhuti’s overlapping roles will be more recognizable Souls

Introduction: No Beached Whales

Whenever exception—as in ‘‘a special issue’’—frames the context of scholarly inquiry, it’s important to ask about what’s different. After all, special implies, among other things, something unusual or out of the ordinary. And what, precisely, is unusual about talking about black gender and sexuality? In general terms? In the context of this journal? This ‘‘special’’ issue embodies an attempt to mark black gender and sexuality as fields that are special without being inevitable. That is, we do not seek to consolidate or reproduce many of the most widely circulated iterations of black bodies and desires, or to situate them in stable locations (filial, political, geographic). This is not to suggest that past or present studies of black genders and sexualities have only reproduced stereotypes or fixed the range of identifications and practices that fall under the rubric of gender and sexuality. Indeed, the past three decades have given rise to challenging, critical scholarship on questions of gender and sexuality throughout the African diaspora. Yet, at the same time, we have been struck by the way so much of the scholarly literature on black gender and sexuality is so largely focused on racism, and the ways racism operates as both cause and effect, at once determining black gender and sexual deviance and emerging as an effect of that deviance. Are the range of black gender performatives, affinal bonds, emotions, and sexual practices, and their links to larger U.S. political economies, necessarily overdetermined by racist ideologies? We can gesture here toward a range of Souls

The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora by Gloria Wekker

It is challenging to write a review of a text as rich as Gloria Wekker’s The Politics of Passion. This is in part because the book makes meaningful contributions to such a wide range of disciplinary sites. As a rare (and perhaps singular) book-length ethnographic treatment of Black female sexuality, it is, minimally, relevant to critical race, feminist, and queer studies; to the understanding of the transnational and globalized dimensions of the Black diaspora; and to a growing body of literature on lesbian and gay anthropology. Yet even as it is squarely situated within the interests and investments of lesbian and gay studies and anthropology, it also offers a considerable challenge to their disciplinary boundaries and theoretical and methodological proprieties. Wekker’s book focuses on the mati work, a central feature of Afro-Surinamese working-class women’s culture ‘‘in which women have sexual relations with men or women simultaneously or consecutively’’ (1–2). Yet although the mati work involves both homosexual and heterosexual coupling, it is the complex and long-lasting erotic and companionate relationships between women that are especially socially significant within Surinamese culture and the Black diaspora more generally, and which are the central object of Wekker’s scholarly engagement. And it is through these relationships that she examines other, more traditional objects of anthropological analysis, including political economy, religion, kinship, gender, and globalization. Etymologically, the term ‘‘mati’’ was likely adopted into Surinamese Creole from the Souls