I <3 Tumblr. That is all.
Google Hangout for LGBT-related discussion
Anyone out there either LGBT-identified or queer-identified want to join me in a discussion of LGBT-related experience online and with the media? It’s for my thesis, and it’d be conducted over a Google+ hangout. Please contact me if you’re interested!
(Image: Handbook of action research.)
In which I leap from a speeding convertible onto a moving bus to interview the passengers about their experiences with their gender and sexual identities on the internet.
Help with my thesis?
I’m trying to get the word out about a survey for my thesis. I’ve mentioned the thesis on Tumblr before: it’s tentatively being called The internet and social change for people of diverse gender identities and sexual identities. The official page for the project is davidamrock.com/thesis.
Now I’ve posted a 20-question survey online to try and get more info about people of all different gender identities and sexual identities, of as many different ages and backgrounds with in the US as I can. I’m trying to learn more about how people of different gender identities and sexualities feel about the media and about expressing themselves online. If anyone has a minute to fill out the survey, I’d really appreciate it.
Also, since the thesis itself involves cataloguing people’s personal stories, I’m looking for contributors to share stories about their lives. If the idea of this interests you and you’d like to share something, please let me know. My contact info is on that thesis page.
Thanks to all!
A photo from the Wipeout Homophobia Facebook group. A (straight as it happens) soldier raises the gay pride flag in Afghanistan. In the words of his wife “this is not photoshopped. It actually happened”.
FUCK YES!
Homonationalism
Puar’s term to describe the process by which US national citizenship is extended to some lesbians, gays, and queers. This term draws heavily upon Lisa Duggan’s homonormativity, which we have already discussed in this class as a means of envisioning queer possibilities on the terms of heteronormativity. These strategies are inevitably built on exclusion in the name of a new ideal glbt figure. Homonationalism works to theorize the point of “collusion” between homosexuality and US patriotism, aligned against the terrorist.
Gay people began to perform nationalism in a certain way after 9/11. The symbolism of the flag appeared at gay bars and parades while other prominent gays favored US intervention in the region (70). Homosexual aligned themselves with an us vs them mentality and argued for inclusion based on the exclusion of terrorists and Arabs. They are complicit in racist construction (71).
Puar is also concerned, as is Duggan, about the role of consumption in offering admittance to the nation. She specifically looks to the gay tourism industry that is fueled by white, middle to upper class gays and lesbians who are able to access those services and fit within the national myth of consumption. Inclusion within the nation is based on patterns of consumption (77).
“What I aim to demonstrate in this article is that through this normativizing apparatus the war on terror has rehabilitated some— clearly not all or most—lesbians, gays, and queers1 to US national citizenship within a spatial-temporal domain I am invoking as ‘homo-nationalism’, short for ‘homonormative nationalism’.” (68)
“I argue that the Orientalist invocation of the ‘terrorist’ is one discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual ‘others’, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves: homo-nationalism.” (68)
“As national identity is reoriented towards excellence in consumption rather than public civic political participation, gay tourists are representative of a form of US exceptionalism expressed through patriotic consumption designed to recover the American nation’s psychic and economic health.” (77)
This is the clearest articulation of the concept of homonationalism I’ve read so far—though I should add that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard definitions that differed from this. I was under the impression that homonationalism also involved narrow (Western) views of the place of homosexuality in society (including concepts like the gay man and the closet). I could be wrong. I’m still trying to understand this.
In case it doesn’t go without saying, I’m not interested in promoting any “us vs. them” mentality in my thesis project. While one articulated audience for the website I’m building is the anti-gay conservative American—I’m hoping to challenge anti-gay sentiment—I’ll promote a pluralistic, accommodating, understanding view of sexuality and gender, as opposed to a singular one. In other words, I want to challenge both homonationalism and reductive “accepted” views of sexuality or gender.
The video shows people describing who they are in addition to being transgender. (“I’m an actress. I’m a producer. I’m a writer. I’m a sister. I’m a daughter. And I’m a transgender woman.”) From the YouTube page:
I AM: Trans People Speak is a project created by the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC) and sponsored by GLAAD to raise awareness about the diversity of transgender communities. It will lift the voices of transgender individuals, as well as their families, friends, and allies.
It’s fascinating to me that this project is using “stories,” posted in video, to try to send a positive social message of diversity. This has a lot in common with the work I’m trying to do with my thesis and with the work that several others have been doing to try to improve social perceptions of people of different gender and sexual identities.
Really hoping this project helps open people’s minds.
What up! Thesis business cards. Thesis URL on one side, heart on the other. davidamrock.com/thesis
"How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Academic Paper?" on the Atlantic →
This article gives the MLA format of Last Name, First Name. (username). “Full text of the tweet.” Date, Time. Tweet. A commenter called adam3smith lists the APA and Chicago styles for doing the same thing, and as APA includes the full permalink to the tweet (utterly necessary for corroboration), that’s the style I’ll want to use for my paper.
(However, I have to admit that I dislike the distinction of the company, Twitter, in all of these references. The concept of citing a webpage is probably more permanent, and it’s already established. Oh well.)
