Resisting and conforming to the ‘lesbian look’ : the importance of appearance norms for lesbian and bisexual women

Appearance is one way in which lesbian and bisexual identities and affiliation to lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) subculture can be demonstrated. ‘Butch’ and ‘androgynous’ styles have been used by lesbian women to communicate a non-heterosexual identity. However, some LGB appearance researchers have argued that there has been a mainstreaming and diversification of lesbian style in the last couple of decades, which has resulted in less distinction between lesbian and straight looks. This research draws on the Social Identity approach to explore contemporary style in lesbian and bisexual communities. Fifteen lesbian and bisexual women took part in semi-structured interviews which were analysed using thematic analysis. Although some participants reported a diversification of lesbian style, most used the term ‘butch’ to describe lesbian style, and a ‘boyish’ look was viewed as the most common contemporary lesbian style. By contrast, most participants could not identify distinct bisexual appearance norms. The data provide evidence of conflicting desires (and expectations) to visibly project social identity by conforming to specific lesbian styles, and to be an authentic, unique individual by resisting these subcultural styles

Reading Videogames as (authorless) Literature

This article presents the outcomes of research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England and informed by work in the fields of new literacy research, gaming studies and the socio-cultural framing of education, for which the videogame L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games, 2011) was studied within the orthodox framing of the English Literature curriculum at A Level (pre-University) and Undergraduate (degree level). There is a plethora of published research into the kinds of literacy practices evident in videogame play, virtual world engagement and related forms of digital reading and writing (Gee, 2003; Juul, 2005; Merchant, Gillen, Marsh and Davies, 2012; Apperley and Walsh, 2012; Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2012) as well as the implications of such for home / school learning (Dowdall, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Potter, 2012) and for teachers’ own digital lives (Graham, 2012). Such studies have tended to focus on younger children and this research is also distinct from such work in the field in its exploration of the potential for certain kinds of videogame to be understood as 'digital transformations' of conventional ‘schooled’ literature. The outcomes of this project raise implications of such a conception for a further implementation of a ‘reframed’ literacy (Marsh, 2007) within the contemporary curriculum of a traditional and conservative ‘subject’. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Firstly, students contributing to a gamplay blog requiring them to discuss their in-game experience through the ‘language game’ of English Literature, culminating in answering a question constructed with the idioms of the subject’s set text ‘final examination’. Secondly, students taught their teachers to play L.A. Noire, with free choice over the context for this collaboration. Thirdly, participants returned to traditional roles in order to work through a set of study materials provided, designed to reproduce the conventions of the ‘study guide’ for literature education. Interviews were conducted after each phase and the outcomes informed a redrafting of the study materials which are now available online for teachers – this being the ‘practical’ outcome of the research (Berger and McDougall, 2012). In the act of inserting the study of L.A. Noire into the English Literature curriculum as currently framed, this research moves, through a practical ‘implementation’ beyond longstanding debates around narratology and ludology (Frasca, 2003; Juul, 2005) in the field of game studies (Leaning, 2012) through a direct connection to new literacy studies and raises epistemological questions about ‘subject identity’, informed by Bernstein (1996) and Bourdieu (1986) and the implications for digital transformations of texts for both ideas about cultural value in schooled literacy (Kendall and McDougall, 2011) and the politics of ‘expertise’ in pedagogic relations (Ranciere, 2009, Bennett, Kendall and McDougall, 2012a)

Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: methodological frameworks for social research

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural identities interrelate. Queer theory, when applied as a distinct methodological approach to the study of gender and sexuality, has sought to denaturalise categories of analysis and make normativity visible. By examining existing research projects framed as 'queer' alongside ones that use intersectionality, I consider the importance of positionality in research accounts. I revisit Judith Halberstam's (1998) 'Female Masculinity' and Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) 'Borderlands' and discuss the tension between the act of naming and the critical strategical adoption of categorical thinking. Finally, I suggest hybridity as one possible complementary methodological approach to those of intersectionality and queer studies. Hybridity can facilitate an understanding of shifting textual and material borders and can operate as a creative and political mode of destabilising not only complex social locations, but also research frameworks

Women and the art of fiction

Women wrote about art in the nineteenth century in a variety of genres, ranging from the formal historical or technical treatise and professional art journalism, to travel writing, poetry, and fiction. Their fiction is often less ideologically circumscribed than their formal art histories: the visual arts constituted a language for writing about the social position of women, and about questions of gender and sexuality. This essay considers how women introduced the visual arts and artist figures into their fiction in critically distinctive ways, and can be said in this form to have contributed to nineteenth-century art discourse and debate

Navigating the fat queer body: the impact of cultural discourses on identity construction and belonging

Dominant discourses about fat bodies construct the fat body as undesirable, a failed thin body, and immoral. Similarly, the culture of the United States constructs the queer body in very particular ways. This thesis explores how normative discourses and ideas about fatness and queerness come together to impact fat queer people\u27s experience with their gender expression. A thematic and discourse analysis of fat queer people\u27s personal narratives shows that fat queer people are impacted by how others view their gender, that finding community can create space for new imaginings of their bodies, and that for some, the most liberatory thing to do is to reject all categorization

Off‐colour? Mike Nicol’s Neo‐noir ‘Revenge Trilogy’ and the Postapartheid Femme Fatale

Abstract: This article critically examines the use of noir, neo‐noir and global noir conventions in Mike Nicol’s ‘Revenge Trilogy’ of crime novels, Payback (2008), Killer Country (2010), and Black Heart (2011). Nicol invents a black femme fatale who is shown to be an ‘evil’ concentrate of all that is perceived to be corrupt under postapartheid conditions. The ‘dame’ in question, Shemina February, is portrayed in such a way that she becomes a projection of what scholars and commentators increasingly see as a corrupt, neoliberal power‐base hijacking the legacy of the South African struggle against apartheid. However, the article raises the question: why locate such a pronounced sense of political ‘evil’ in a black female character? Coming from a white writer, regardless of his credentials, such a gesture raises the possibility of dubious racial and gender typecasting in an act of (perhaps unconscious?) projection. Might the white postapartheid writer, in this way, be seeking a sacrificial object for the perceived ills of postapartheid, in much the way classic noir projected its anxieties about the displacement of (white) male agency onto ‘bad’ women after the second world war? The article offers alternate readings of Nicol’s femme fatale

good dyke art

The work in good dyke art visually expands upon conversations about institutional critique and its contradictions, specifically questioning who dictates the boundaries between institutions and bodies: how divisions are made between them and who enacts or receives force. One’s participation in this critique, however, indicates a participation in the problematics of the institution and by extension, a desire to critique may also be considered a desire to participate in that system. Ceramic, glaze, and found objects manifest an allegorical formalism that utilizes coded languages of institutional spaces, traditions of queer-coding, and charged word-play. The ceramic vessel forms reference the Ancient Greek pottery form of the hydria, a three-handled water jug. I reinterpret and remake the hydria constructed with holes or bottomless forms, breaking the viewers expectations for how a vessel should function. The three-handled form is a literal interpretation of a non-binary way of approaching an object. In ‘good dyke art’ the hydria serves multiple functions: as a stand-in for the body, a reference to classical antiquity, and a marker of institutional influence. The hydria, glazed orange and turned on its head, takes the form of a traffic cone. Safety orange, hardware store blue, and fluorescent green are institutional symbols of caution and, in my work, function as gesture and a designation of space—both literally and formally. Materials found in hardware stores, academia, and corporate buildings are strapped or attached to the ceramic pots, emphasizing their precarity. Stressed objects enact force onto others—and give way to force in their breakage. The precariousness of the installations urges the viewer to be aware of their own body and of the space they take up—implicating them as well as the artist in the work

Locating Themselves: Black Womxn’s Geographies of Professional Socialization

This paper presents findings from a larger study that explored the relationship among Black graduate womxn’s (BGW) geospatial and social locations in their academic organizations, their professional socialization processes, and their abilities to access their desired career pipelines upon program completion. More specifically, it is concerned with manners in which Black womxn (co-)construct geographies for their professional growth that (a) retain Black womxnhood at their centers – and in doing so, (b) challenge academia’s dominant discourses about students’ socialization processes and outcomes. The study took place in a highly ranked college of education (“the College”), at a highly regarded predominately-white public research institution in the American Midwest (“Midwest”). I conducted the study using a bricolage approach. Black Critical Race Theory, postcolonialism, and ideas about everyday resistance informed the paper’s methodology. The findings illustrate a theorizing of Black womxn’s created geographies as sites of resistance, and their liberatory imaginations, against anti-Black and colonial violence in the education academy. They also offer implications for how academia must evolve its understandings, structures, locations, and practices of graduate studies to be more responsive to the evolving needs of a diversifying population of learners and professionals