The Racialization of Sexuality: The Queer Case of Jeffrey Dahmer

In this article I read media and subcultural representations of Jeffrey Dahmer, the white male U.S. serial killer who gained notoriety in the late 1980s for having sex with and then murdering and dismembering men of color in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My aim is to show the extent to which the degree of Dahmer\u27s homosexualization in a particular representation determines Dahmer\u27 s thinking and actions in the sphere of race, and to suggest how spiraling efforts to separate race from sexuality in the Dahmer case only further intricate the two analytic axes.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/english_books/1018/thumbnail.jp

Queer: Good Gay, Bad Gay, Black Gay, White Gay?

As Deadline .com bluntly put it, \u27Kevin Spacey Apologizes to Anthony Rapp for Alleged Sexual Advances; Chooses to Live As A Gay Man. \u27 The outraged response of progressive intellectuals, activists, and cultural critics to Spacey’s twofold tweet has demonstrated, inter alia, the resilience of old school assumptions and expectations about coming out and about gay identity and gay identifications. These outraged responses have come especially from younger generations of intellectuals, activists, and critics, but also across generations, genders, and sexual orientations. Despite decades of attacks on models of gay identity that center on teleological narratives of coming out, and critiques of the privileging of coming out as the apotheosis of a triumphalist gay identity as racist and ethnocentric in that privileging’s assumption of identity as coherent and univocal, and the assumption of a safe space to come out into (#BlackLivesMatter has served as a forceful reminder of the illusion of such safe spaces for black men, in particular), here we are again at a coming out crossroads, at a coming out as crossroad

“I Can’t Relate”: Refusing Identification Demands in Teaching and Learning

In literature, composition, and other areas of English Studies, relateability can be an important tool to inscribe marginalized subjects as academic citizens. However, its larger arc reproduces ethnocentric and individualistic ideologies at the national and personal levels that foreclose the true understanding of and engagement with Otherness that defines learning. What are the particular intellectual and other challenges, pleasures, and rewards of refusing the pedagogical imperative to engage and understand through identification? I conclude the article by deploying theorists of difference to ask what it means to understand difference as difference, how this understanding might be facilitated, and what the value of such an understanding might be

Rhetorical Commonsense and Child Molester Panic--A Queer Intervention

This article considers how contemporary representations of child molesters in scholarly, political, and popular culture participate in projects that revolve around the recuperation of heteronormativity. I argue that these multimodal obsessions with child molestation displace the resilience of entrenched homophobic fears, prejudices, and dispositions, giving the lie to the commonplace that the political advance of same-sex marriage in the United States signals the apotheosis of gay rights. My analysis focuses on two representative popular and scholarly texts: the long-running television series Law and Order: SVU and a scholarly article about the Jerry Sandusky case published in jac. The former capitalizes on a combination of stranger and familiar child molester figures, reflecting a mix of popular sex panic mythology and social reality. The latter reenacts this combination, so the discourse about the Sandusky case becomes imbricated in the convergences between mythology and social reality that characterize the television show

Twenty-First-Century Writing/Twentieth Century Teachers?

My students are writing in their everyday lives—indeed, their everyday lives are written—but we (teachers—writing teachers, in particular--and education administrators, no doubt nudged by politicians and “the public”) have to a large extent failed miserably in embracing and capitalizing on that writing: email, text messaging, instant messaging, blogging, twittering, responding, video gaming, Second Lifeing. Andrea and Karen Lunsford’s recent longitudinal study of Stanford students has shown the lie to the given that students today don’t write as much as they used to (they are writing much more). Are we becoming the stodgy, ungenerous, rigid English teachers that we ourselves were the victims of as children, obsessed with demanding the grammar with which we write and speak

Authorial Intent in the Composition Classroom

This article examines the disjunction between, on the one hand, critical theory’s critique of the privileging of authorial intent in protocols of textual interpretation, and, on the other hand, continued obeisance to authorial intent in composition textbooks and pedagogy. By unpacking the implications of this disjunction, I show the limitations that the reification of authorial intent creates for composition pedagogy and student writing. I conclude by suggesting how bracketing authorial intent in the composition classroom might enhance composition pedagogy and student writing, while also challenging fundamental epistemologies of the field

Review of Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony (film)

A review of the film Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony

Disciplining Queer

This article analyzes a particular set of disciplinings by students and colleagues that coalesced around my teaching of a university course in ‘Queer Theory.’ I use these regulatory discourses and practices as a springboard to investigate how academic and other disciplines (English, in particular) enable and reproduce certain stylizations, epistemologies, and methodologies, and what they implicitly and violently conceal and demonize; how style functions as politics and what the politics of style are; how queerness—queer inquiry and intervention, queer methodologies and epistemologies, queer activisms and insubordinations—might activate, exacerbate, and expose some of these questions and mechanisms. The form of the article enacts the (un)disciplinary politics that I advocate, juxtaposing anecdote, pedagogy and theory, and written in a style whose campiness and ellipticism flout prescriptions for conventional academic discourse. This style seeks to break down the borders between the rational and the irrational, between disciplines, and between the academic and the non-academic, and to interrogate the conventions that constitute the scholarly

Isoquinoline syntheses from dinitriles.

o-Cyanobenzyl cyanide does not form an imidate with methoxide but undergoes dimeric addition end cyclization to 1-amino-4-cyano-3-(o-cyanobengyl)isocruinoline. A better yield of this product is obtained from the action of sodamide in formamide on the dinitrile but with this reagent a secondary reaction occurs by attack of the formamido anion, generated in the reaction, on the dinitrile, to afford a mixture of cis-and trans-l-amino-3-formamidoisoquinoline. o-a-Dicyanostilbene, from the piperidine catalysed condensation of o-cyanobenzyl cyanide with benzaldehyde, suffers nucleophilic addition across the aryl nitrile group on treatment with sodamide in formamide to yield l-amino-4-cyano-3-phenylisoquinoline. Analogous 1-alkoxy isoquinolines are obtained by reacting the stilbene with catalytic amounts of alkoxides in the corresponding alcohols but, in the reactions examined, the yield decreases with increasing basicity of the alkoxide. The 3,4-dihydroisoquinoline is an intermediate which can be isolated by rigorously excluding oxygen from the system. Hydrazine does not add across the nitrile groups of o-a-dicyanostilbene but effects cleavage of the olefinic group to yield o-cyanobenzyl cyanide and benzaldehyde. Hydroxylamine, on the other hand, forms the acyclic bis-amidoxime which, whilst stable in base, suffers cleavage of the ethylenic group in mild acid and cyclises to homophthal-imide dioxime. Nucleophilio addition of o-cyanobenzyl cyanide to o-a-dicyanostilbene is achieved in the presence of methoxide, the product being a substituted isoquinoline. Reexamination of the reaction between o-cyanobenzyl cyanide and benzaldehyde in the presence of methoxide has led to determination of the structure of the major product, an adduct of two molecules of the dinitrile and one of the aldehyde