There are scant few thinkers out there publishing critically productive work in the field of HIV prevention and public health more broadly. I have long been a fan and avid consumer of Australian Kane Race's scholarship. His analyses of HIV prevention, drug policies, and public health more broadly are beautifully incisive and incredibly helpful for anyone invested in thinking critically about these complicated issues. He is a master of explicating the taken-for-granted, and making you see what before was obscured. In his latest book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, he continues to advance his concept of "counterpublic health" -- a concept built on the work of feminist and queer scholars invested in understanding oppositional public spheres. I had the pleasure of interviewing Kane recently for this blog, and I'm thrilled to share his thoughts here. We talk about public health, HIV prevention, and his challenging concept that aims to shake up our conventional understandings of these complex phenomenon.


Question: In both published essays and your recent book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, you've advanced a concept you term "counterpublic health" - a concept that of course borrows from Michael Warner and other scholars' work on the concept of "counterpublics." Can you talk a bit about that original "counterpublics" concept, and how you came up with the idea to adapt it to your critical work on health?

A counterpublic has a critical or oppositional relation to the public. It's a term that queer and feminist scholars are using to refer to collective contexts of discussion, debate and performance in which we forge oppositional interpretations of our identities, interests and desires. The term is useful because it references the venues, media and forms of circulation which help constitute a sense of collective political agency. It also points to the exclusions and ideological dimensions of the public sphere proper - and hence the necessity of developing alternative spaces in which critical understandings and strategies can emerge.

"To refer to these fields of public health as counterpublic health is, first of all, to register the disastrous impact of these mainstream ideological investments on the health and life chances of the groups thus stigmatized - queers, sex workers, drug users. It is to critique moralized notions of 'the public,' and think about how they affect our work."

For me the term is immediately useful for thinking about those areas of public health where mainstream investment in a moral ideology compromises the ability to respond effectively to public health needs. HIV prevention is an obvious example. Drug education and policy is another. In both of these fields we have a situation where political investment in a particular idea of public membership (e.g. family values, a drug-free nation, etc.) thwarts rational responses to public health. Ideological investment in these figures consistently obstructs efforts to conduct education (for example queer-friendly, sex-positive HIV prevention education) and institute services (such as needle and syringe exchange provision) which are known to be effective in improving the life chances of affected groups. To refer to these fields of public health as counterpublic health is, first of all, to register the disastrous impact of these mainstream ideological investments on the health and life chances of the groups thus stigmatized - queers, sex workers, drug users. It is to critique moralized notions of "the public", and think about how they affect our work.

The concept of counterpublics is also useful because it pushes us to think about the collective contexts and modalities through which alternative strategies develop. So much health work and health education today advocates individual solutions to public health problems. But if we think about the early response to HIV/AIDS, it is quite clear that much of its success depended upon creating a shared horizon of concern about the threat, as well as specific contexts of collective self-activity. Nancy Fraser talks about the journals, bookstores, conferences, conventions, festivals, lectures, educational programs, and events which make up what she calls a feminist counterpublic. I began to picture the multiple public contexts that people have activated and engaged in order to undertake HIV education and prevention - the media, working groups, drag shows, conferences, blogs, sex venues, erotic performances, public forums, dance parties, research centres, internet sites, phone-lines, bars and service organizations. These spaces of collective activity have been crucial for the undertaking of HIV prevention. They've enabled us to transform our bodies, practices, and pleasures without denying or eliminating them. In order to develop reflexive contexts around stigmatized practices like gay sex and illicit drug use, it has been necessary to create public or semi-public forums for the acknowledgment, discussion and remodeling of these practices. In his work on counterpublics, Michael Warner also draws attention to the discourse pragmatics of different spheres of public address and performance, and this opens up an important set of questions for people engaged in HIV education and prevention. Questions like, how does this particular format/venue/event engage bodies, and what possibilities does this open up for collective reflexivity about certain risks and/or practices?

Question: How is this concept of "counterpublic health" useful in your own work, and how do you hope others will take it up?

I think it helps define a broad field of public health practice and understand the conditions in which certain public health initiatives operate. This field is characterized by a tension between public morality and what I like to call practical ethics of public health. One of the first lessons of health promotion, for example, is that education works best when it is couched in terms of the values, vernacular and practices of the group in question. But when it comes to HIV prevention or drug harm reduction, this necessarily involves an acknowledgement of practices that are difficult to acknowledge (without scandal at least) in the conventional public sphere - practices like gay sex or substance use. Paradoxically, public morality makes those initiatives which are most likely to connect with the relevant groups in effective ways most at risk of political intervention.

"The concept could be used to describe any public health work that discovers that it is necessary, as part of its project, to challenge hegemonic ideas of average personhood and create new collective contexts for the airing of otherwise stigmatized practices."

The scenario is familiar. An educational campaign or service which is explicit about drug use or gay sex gets picked up by a tabloid newspaper. Moral outrage ensues and the story dominates talkback radio for a couple of hours. The minister's office panics and condemns the organization that produced the resource. It's a constant possibility. And it is very damaging because it compromises the ability of health promotion practitioners to engage people at the level of their concrete embodied practices.
Counterpublic theory is useful here because it understands this dynamic as a product, in part, of the mass media's mode of address: the presumption of the reader as a member of an imaginary national family unit that is white, heterosexual and drug-free. This is the ideal with which we are encouraged to identify our deepest interests at the hands of this form of address. But it's a fiction, in the sense that it is based on untested presumptions about the average reader or listener or voter. So while many readers may not actually organize their lives in this way, this image of the public takes on a forceful reality which counterpublic health practitioners must contend with all the time. Counterpublic theory provides a useful handle on these dynamics and encourages us to think about the constraints and possibilities inherent in different scenes of circulation and modes of address - and develop new ones. The concept could be used to describe any public health work that discovers that it is necessary, as part of its project, to challenge hegemonic ideas of average personhood and create new collective contexts for the airing of otherwise stigmatized practices.

Question: I met you back in 2006 for the first time at the "Against Health" conference here at Michigan. Should we be against health? Does the concept of "counterpublic health" help answer that question?

One of the things that conference did well was highlight the use and abuse of the term health. Health is tricky like that: it's just as likely to evoke moral criteria as practical criteria around wellbeing. But "morality" does not always amount to healthiness, and frequently moralism has distinctly unhealthy effects. I think it's unfortunate that, because the term is so frequently abused, many of us find ourselves in a situation where we start believing that we are, indeed, "against health". To be sure, health is only one concern among many, and it is not always the most pressing one. But I agree with the conference organisers that our efforts to live longer, happier, more pleasurable lives would be greatly enhanced by bringing some critical force to bear on the ways in which the term 'health' is exploited to pursue other agendas. Counterpublic health may be a useful concept here, because it describes the situation of doing public health work in a context where hegemonic ideals of sexuality, personhood and citizenship are loaded against you. I don't think we are or should be against health, but frequently queers are constituted in precisely that way.

Question: There is a long history of both collaboration and tension between public health practitioners and HIV activists. They've been the best of friends and the worst of enemies at times. I wonder how you see that relationship evolving today, both in Australia where you work and more globally?

I think that today most HIV activists work within the frameworks and institutions of public health, and they do some very good and very important work there. Certainly this is the case in Australia. But I wonder how well the discourses and paradigms of public health are able register the importance of critical sex education, which has been a crucial component of the community response to HIV/AIDS. I think we need more than the professional frameworks of public health are able to offer if we are to sustain effective forms of HIV prevention. We need to promote literacy and reflexivity around sexual practice, and this is not necessarily something that public health specialists are particularly well trained to do, or that is easy to register within the professional frameworks of the field. Sexual practice is infinitely more complex than is recognized in public discourse, and the risks it gives rise to are often disguised or distorted by our desire to identify with normative forms. There's a critical literacy around sex, health and stigma that has developed within communities responding to HIV/AIDS that is worth sharing with people who are new to gay life. I don't know how you argue for a critical focus on heteronormativity as part of HIV education within official institutions of public health, but I think that's an important dimension of our work.

"How do we equip people to think flexibly and creatively and astutely about their sexual practice and intimate lives? What forms of pedagogy can be developed to this effect?"

In some ways, the concept of counterpublic health is my response to this situation. It is designed to conjure a critical "outside" to given institutions of public health while recognizing that most of our HIV activist talent is now fully immersed within these institutions. I want the concept to signal the practice of connecting with subcultural knowledge and queer critique, and to convey the importance of keeping that connection alive. How do we equip people to think flexibly and creatively and astutely about their sexual practice and intimate lives? What forms of pedagogy can be developed to this effect? I think these are crucial questions.

Question: In one of your forthcoming articles, you talk about the "risk of HIV prevention." Can you talk a bit about what you mean by that?

I use that phrase in my paper "Engaging in a Culture of Barebacking: Gay Men and the Risk of HIV Prevention", which first came out in 2007 and is being reprinted this year in HIV Treatment and Prevention Technologies in International Perspective, edited by Mark Davis and Corinne Squire. The article is concerned with the way risk is measured in the prevention sciences, and the effects of the mismatch between gay men's HIV prevention practices "on the ground" and what's identified as risk within the science. Barebacking is the case in point. I was amazed to discover that most of the initial articulations of barebacking in the US media from 1995 were made by HIV positive men, speaking about unprotected sex with other HIV positive men. There's no risk of newly infecting an HIV-negative individual with HIV in these circumstances. And in fact this strategy is even promoted today in some US contexts as serosorting. But these men were denounced as deliberate risk-takers at the time because they were talking about breaching the condom code. In the moral panic that ensued, the concerns around HIV prevention that were actually informing the practice got lost. I'm interested in the extent to which mainstream behavioural science was complicit in this process.

"In failing to attend to the cultural categories and practices according to which gay men are organising their sex lives, behavioural science misses innovative HIV prevention practices and mislabels them as risk."

The risk of HIV prevention which the title refers to is the risk that, in failing to attend to the cultural categories and practices according to which gay men are organising their sex lives, behavioural science misses innovative HIV prevention practices and mislabels them as risk. This promotes an image of gay men as intentional risk takers, irrespective of the precautions and conditions that actually animate their sexual practice. I think this is what has happened in the case of barebacking, and the effect has been to produce unprotected sex without condoms as a thrilling transgression of public health norms. When in fact it needn't be, and in some contexts it is actually quite safe.

More broadly, I think there is a related risk that current practices of HIV prevention, including social scientific practices, can't quite grasp the relationality of liminal practices like sex and drugs, and end up reifying the idea of the rational choice-making individual as the subject of these practices. Sometimes we overemphasize the intentionality of sexual actors, when it seems to me that part of the appeal of sex and drug practices, at least on some occasions, is a certain losing sight of the self. I think there's something important about the focus on relationality and liminality in these approaches that needs further elaboration. We need to develop better ways of accounting for sex and risk which take this dimension of erotic experience into account, without pathologizing it. I'm hoping that grappling with this problem may produce some new and better ways of doing practice-focused sexuality research. But this is an ongoing project.

Question: What do you think needs to change about the way public health approaches HIV prevention?

Well, that's a difficult question to answer, because public health approaches HIV prevention differently in different contexts. But I think this would be one area. We need knowledge practices that are better attuned to the cultural categories according to which people are organising their sex lives and which are better able to account for the relationality and variability of sexual practice. Sexual practices, drug practices and prevention practices change - in the context of new technologies, new environments, and new circumstances. I think HIV prevention needs to keep in touch with these changes if it wants to remain relevant and responsive to those groups that are most at risk. There is a lot of emphasis in the international field today on determining the predictability of interventions. I think this emphasis is misguided, given what we know about historical and cultural change. Instead we need research methods and pedagogies that promote both individual and public responsiveness to the unpredictable situations that inevitably emerge.

"I think sex education needs to be a central part of HIV prevention education, and it needs to go beyond biological descriptions of anatomy and risk to provide opportunities for reflection on the dynamics of specific sexual contexts and relations if it wants to equip people to protect themselves and each other effectively."

I've talked about the need for critical sex education as a feature of HIV prevention programs. There is a great deal of resistance to this internationally. Indeed, one of the drivers of official enthusiasm for very expensive trials of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis around the world at the moment seems to be the promise PREP holds out of avoiding difficult public discussions around sexual practice, drug use, and gendered relations. I think sex education needs to be a central part of HIV prevention education, and it needs to go beyond biological descriptions of anatomy and risk to provide opportunities for reflection on the dynamics of specific sexual contexts and relations if it wants to equip people to protect themselves and each other effectively. The same could be said for drug education. We need a less moralizing approach to drug education and service delivery that de-pathologizes people's desire for pleasure and proceeds pragmatically from that point.

I also believe that public health needs to resist current trends towards criminalizing HIV transmission. Sex is a relational practice. It takes place between two or more people. In criminalizing HIV transmission and non-disclosure of status, the criminal law produces a sense of HIV-positive individuals as exclusively responsible for HIV infection, and this in turn promotes a false sense of security and protection for HIV-negative individuals. So while one may well find willful or reckless transmission ethically troubling, there is a technical and practical question here about whether criminalization is an effective way to promote public health (not to mention a shared response to HIV). There is already a wealth of knowledge in the field about the negative public health effects of punitive strategies. Punitive strategies constitute individuals as stigmatized subjects; make them less likely to access services; promote evasiveness and disavowal; and reduce people's capacity to care for themselves. They also promote a climate of distrust, suspicion, hostility and fear - the very opposite of an enabling environment for public health. I believe public health needs to continue to insist on HIV prevention as part of its ambit, and not a matter for the criminal code.

Question: Many scholars today have trouble with the notion of social change, in part because both the foundation for advocating for that change and the notions of "progress" and "justice" have been so thoroughly challenged and at the very least made slippery. And yet, of course, many of us got involved in academia with some hope of our scholarship actually making some kind of impact on the world around us. How do you approach this problem?

Hmm. I think social change is already happening - sometimes very rapidly, sometimes quite slowly, always with complex implications - and the challenge is to work out how it is happening, and intervene in ways that you think will be productive. We have a habit in the HIV field of separating the concept of "science" from "intervention", but as someone who has been involved in the HIV field in various ways for almost 15 years now, I am utterly convinced that knowledge practices matter: they are performative - which is to say they are intimately involved in the production of certain realities over others. I've seen this happen. Science is intervention, whether we like it or not. So for me your question is a qualitative question. That is to say, if scholarship is already having an impact on the world around us, then what sort of impact is it having and how could things be improved?

"To me, to articulate and teach critical theories of sexuality is to develop one counterpublic space among others."

And for me this raises methodological questions. I'm attracted to fields like cultural studies because they provide models of embodied scholarship and a context for reflecting on practices of embodied scholarship which I find more promising, politically and ethically, than research methods which require you to cloak your subjectivity at the door as a condition of entry. I find it bizarre for example that we have so many people working in the HIV field (and also the drugs field) who are participants in affected communities but who are blocked if not actively discouraged by the professional or scientific frames within which they work from reflecting, as part of their work, on their experience in any structured or sustained or critically informed way. We need to be producing spaces and contexts for this to happen! In the mainstream field, it now seems as though "research" and "community" are conceived as entirely distinct domains, the first completely disembodied, the second increasingly tokenistic. We should refuse this binary. We need participants of affected communities to be engaged in critical reflection and research about the conditions and details of their experience, and for the knowledge they produce through this process to be taken seriously as part of policy debate. For the past couple of years I have been putting most of my energies into developing a large undergraduate course in sexualities here at the University of Sydney. There is nothing more exciting than seeing a student begin to pick up the tools of queer studies and cultural theory and start to use them to understand their world and their experience of it. I think the new generation of sexuality researchers will be critically astute, engaged with social policy, and produce work that is both conceptually innovative and empirically informed, and grounded in their experience of the world. Certainly, these are attributes I hope to foster in my teaching.

To me, to articulate and teach critical theories of sexuality is to develop one counterpublic space among others. And many need to be developed. Like other cultural researchers, I try to work at various interfaces and engage with multiple publics - some academic, some pedagogical, some policy-related, some popular, some subcultural - where the aim is to participate in debate and develop new ways of understanding, and therefore acting upon, experience. It's true that academic work has a quite specific field of circulation, but it connects to many others. One would hope that by identifying and giving weight to certain under-articulated or hidden forms of experience, new spaces for thought and practice - and new possibilities of responsiveness - open up.

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: PAUL AMAR (Law & Society Program, Global Studies, Feminist Studies, UC-Santa Barbara), ADAM GREEN (Sociology, U. of Toronto), JOON LEE (English, Rhode Island School of Design), HEATHER LOVE (English, U. of Pennsylvania).

WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF: DAVID HALPERIN, HOLLY HUGHES, ESTHER NEWTON, GAYLE RUBIN, VALERIE TRAUB.

What is queer about queer studies? Does queer refer to a set of topics or a mode of inquiry? What is the role of theory in queer studies? How is new scholarship bridging the social sciences and the humanities? What is the relationship between actual queer practices and queer studies? What is the relationship between scholarship and activism? How are radical sex critique and queer studies related? What are the limitations of queer?

These are some of the questions we are interested in twenty years after the emergence of queer theory. The purpose of this conference is to take stock of and provide a showcase for innovative practices and pursuits in queer studies, both in the humanities and social sciences, as well as emerging fields that bridge the two.

We are not calling for papers that engage these questions at a meta-level, but rather for work that is conditioned by them.

While we welcome a range of topics, some of the topics we are interested in include:

- the role of historical, political and economic forces in shaping queerness
- governmentality, state and biopolitics
- transnational flows of capital and migrations
- queer intersections with race, gender, class, ability, age, etc.
- queer subjectivities, experiences and identities
- queer historiography, phenomenology and temporality
- visual culture, new media

Paper abstracts of 250 to 300 words should be sent by June 1, 2010 to doingqueerstudiesnow2010 (at) umich (dot) edu. We wish to notify presenters by Monday, June 21. We will ask for the completed paper for respondents by October 1, 2010.

If you've ever spent more than twelve minutes with lefty activists or critical academics, you will notice that one word somehow manages to pop up as a way to describe a variety of things, people, phenomena, and social issues: "Problematic." Everything from homophobia to movie posters to legislation gets described in this way, to the detriment I think of the speaker, because this word is so grossly imprecise. I often get confused about the meaning of this word, and people often misread my use of it, creating a general state of confusion and misinterpretation that doesn't work towards anyone benefit.So today, I wanted to pause for a second today to reflect on this overused and imprecise word that so many of us find so appealing. What do I mean by it? What do I read others as meaning by it? And how might we find other ways of saying what we mean when we use it so that people understand us a bit better? I'll use the image above -- which came up as an early Google Images result when searching for "problematic" -- as a reference point to describe how these different meanings would result in different responses to the image.

In my experience, there are two broad uses of this word that relate to the differences I see in who's using them: Academics and activists. Let's begin with that activist-y definition, which I take to be the more common usage of the word (at least in my experience). For activists, I understand their intention when labeling something as problematic as a way to say that these things are generally bad and should be avoided -- and more specifically, evidence of oppressive systems such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. Thus, there is a moral valence here: Problematic things are morally bad, unjust, and something that should illicit shame in its maker, something that is perceived as grossly incompatible with "social justice" (another highly vague term, as is indicated by my critique yesterday. But I digress).

Thus, in this frame, if I refer to the image above as "problematic," I probably mean to say that it's blatantly racist for the way it represents Asian men in the role of women, feminizing them categorically while buttressing white male masculinity by way of making the white man look strong, tall, and manly in comparison with the small "geisha boy" dressed in traditional women's garbs. In more plain language, I'd also probably say that Jerry Lewis is a racist asshole and that he should be ashamed of being involved with its production. Thus, problematic often becomes a nicer way to call a person a jerk and to spank them verbally.

But there is another understanding of the word, which I take to be closer to the word's original meaning (though I make no claim that "original" meanings are the "right" meanings). I say this as a result of the definitions available online. From Merriam-Webster:

1 a : posing a problem : difficult to solve or decide b : not definite or settled : uncertain c : open to question or debate : questionable 2 : expressing or supporting a possibility

Thus, in this frame, to call something problematic is a bit like labeling it a thought-puzzle, as begging or requiring inquiry and explanation. This is much closer to the definition I think most academics are referring to when they invoke "problematic." I refer here to Chrys Ingraham's rather elegant explanation from her essay "The Heterosexual Imaginary," where she attempts to explain her goal as a feminist scholar trying to unpack the ways in which heteronormativity functions and is reproduced. Relying on Althusser's conception of "problematic," she argues:

"To examine the ways in which feminist sociology reproduces the heterosexual imaginary requires a theoretical framework capable of investigating the interests and assumptions embedded within any social text or practice. This mode of inquiry would make visible the frames of intelligibility or the 'permitted' meanings in constructions of gender and heterosexuality. More than this, it would connect heterosexuality and interests to a problematic. As Althusser has argued, 'A word or concept cannot be considered in isolation; it only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used: its problematic' (1982:253). To determine a text's problematic is to reveal another logic circulating beneath the surface. It appears as the answer to questions left unasked. It is not that which is left unsaid or unaccounted for, but that which the text assumes and does not speak. What is required, then, is a process of analysis capable of inquiring into the power relations organizing the allowed as well as the disallowed meanings in an effort to expose the artificiality of the theories and ideologies organizing the use of particular concepts." (p. 6, link)

In this conception of "problematic," the word here is meant to describe the "theoretical or ideological framework" in which a word or a "text" (an academic term that really refers to any kind of written word but also images and media that can be subjected to a critical interpretation) exists. She uses it here notably as a noun -- not an adjective. This "context" could be include a variety of approaches that relate to academic disciplinary practices and methods for analysis, such as a historical approach -- how did the historical moment in which the text was produced impact the symbols and meanings embedded within it -- or perhaps from a sociological perspective reading transcripts of interviews to understand how it is imbued with cultural narratives that give us some insight into the socio-cultural context in which they live.

Thus, relying on this conception of "problematic," morality is not called into question. Indeed, many scholars would argue against a universal conception of morality that could be imposed from the outside on a particular text, phenomenon, or practice. Thus, within this framework, calling this image above "problematic" would instead imply that there are various forms of representation simultaneously being invoked that require a bit of critical analysis. Thus, one might attempt to compare this image to historical representations of Japanese men (and East Asian men more broadly) that enabled this particular image to be legible or understandable to its audience. In order for this text to be meaningful as a marketing tool, its producers has to expect that -- to at least some degree -- people seeing it would be able understand how to interpret the boy's clothes, the term "geisha," and the larger social and historical relations between the Japanese and Americans.

Thus, to describe it as "problematic" in this sense would not necessarily entail it's condemnation -- or to imply that you think Jerry Lewis is a jerk (although they may well think so). In and of itself, the text cannot be morally "bad." Rather, it is the ways in which it relies on and is produced through various systems of power and social relations that are deserving of critical attention. Connecting this image to this socio-cultural and historical context helps reveal why we would want to describe it as "racist" today - even though it may not have been readily understood as such at the time. In this way, understanding something as "problematic" is to demand attention to this context -- that dwelling simply on the image as if it were in a vacuum is not productive analytically.

I don't think either are particularly "better," per se. The first version is motivated by various political agendas -- to use problematic in this sense is to call out practices or ideas that do indeed reinforce pervasive systems of injustice like racism, sexism and homophobia. I don't mean to imply that this isn't a worthwhile goal. But by posing it alongside an entirely different conception used often by academics, I want to just note how there are this disparate meanings in use that make understanding those who invoke it difficult. So I think we need to try to find a new word - or just explain what we mean when we use it. I'm constantly confused when people describe something as "problematic" - it seems to be a kind of catch-all colloquialism that people are expected to generally understand but not perfectly. So next time you want to call Jerry Lewis an asshole, just do it! No need to beat around the bush.

Anyhow, that's my totally academic and asinine indulgence for the week. If anyone is still reading, I'd love to hear thoughts!

xoxo

T

I was nostalgically flipping through my Master's thesis this morning, when I stumbled upon this quote from "Tom" - a 20 year old San Franciscan who I interviewed about being gay and staying HIV-negative. He was struggling to develop his own gay community, and I will never forget the passion and intensity with which he said this to me in our interview (note: "Jake" is one of the other participants, who in our focus group together came out against monogamy):

I'm really sort of a romantic idealist, you know? I always have this image of gay guys being very hard and very like cold, you know, one-night-standish - shunning love. When Jake said... 'monogamy doesn't work' - like, for me, and seriously, my heart just broke into a million pieces for like the millionth time. I was sad. I was like, GOD! That's a terrible thing to say. It can totally work! I totally want to get married - I'm so into getting married. I want to go to IKEA, I want to pickup my fucking furniture, I want to have parties, I want to have a good group of gay husbands, you know have dinner parties, and have fun, and yeah. It's in my future, I hope it is. It's what I want. So when he said that, it just made me totally sad. I totally got totally sad. I don't want that suspicion confirmed.

You know, I think some of my colleagues would quick to pounce and critique Tom's vision of his gay future. His "gay American dream," as I called it in my thesis. But he really, truly wants this. And who are we to critique him for that? Critique the (hetero)normative system in which he lives, sure. But I just can't critique Tom.

The first time I watched Twilight was too late: the whole world had already seen it, but I did not mind having my own opinion instead of listening to everyone talking about it. On my way to Frankfort, flying Lufthansa, I was enjoying my third glass of Cognac when I felt ready for an interview with Robert Pattinson.

My interest in vampires started last year, when I attended a seminar on European Romanticism in which I discovered - while reading Romantic Agony, by Mario Praz - that vampirism was the perfect trope to condense the main features of Romanticism: beauty as evil and fatal, seduction as a contagious disease, sexuality as deeply perverse and gender as confused. Lord Byron, because of his open bisexuality and scandalous incestuous affair with his sister, and certainly due to his tormented poetry and exotic odyssey in Greece, is said to have inspired the first vampire in Romantic prose: Lord Ruthven. Vampires, indeed, embody the otherness: they come from far away (Orient, Transylvania, etc), speak the universal language of seduction and prefer infection rather than reproduction. I guess you get the picture: there is something queer about vampires because these creatures are both mysterious and scary, because their sexuality does not fit the standards of heterosexual normalcy, and because their appeal mixes the Freudian concepts of eros (the libido) and thanatos (the death drive) in a disturbing, asocial way.

Having this definition of vampires in mind, try to imagine my shock when I started thinking about how the movie Twilight updates vampires. I was more than ready to decipher some subversive insights about Edward and the Cullens, but overall -- and for the first time of my life -- I had to face that Edward's kind of vampire is a cleaner, ethical, and more politically correct edition. Let's just think about his lifestyle and values: he explains to his lover, Bella, that he's not like other vampires, that he decided with his family to stop living by night and to stop eating human blood. Rather than a critique of kinship, he is very close to his family and he studies just like humans in order to become - like his father - a productive employee in the capitalist system. The least we can say is that, indeed, he's looking for integration when vampires have always and obviously been defined as dangerous, seductive and contagious outsiders. Edward and his family are,in short, vampires who have been recuperated into mainstream society!

The break is even more explicit when it comes to sex: Edward refuses to have sex with Bella (no sex before marriage?) and this embracement of chastity is based on health: he does not want her to convert and become a vampire - on the contrary, he's determined to reject any sexual temptation in order to protect Bella's status as human. The metaphor here seems to be clear: no sex with a beloved girl, her virginity is her treasure and the best way to express the purity of feelings is to block any sexual intercourse that could bring not just the loss of innocence but also pregnancy or AIDS or any other STI.

Edward and his family have made the decision to go mainstream, and by doing so they created a model of vampire without vampirism - by which I mean the adjustment to standards of humanist values and the will to deny one's origins and history. On the other hand, as a striking contrast with the Cullens, James, Victoria and Laurent, who are "old school" vampires, are faithful to their ancestors and keep on hunting for fresh, organic human blood. In the movie they clearly appear as evil whereas Edward, beautiful, melancholic and respectful of Bella's health, appears as the empathic hero par excellence. It is quite a tour de force that Twilight, both as a novel and a movie, managed to turn vampires into harmless, chaste, politically correct creatures -- and I am very impressed by this subversion of a subversive archetype (the negation of a negation becomes an affirmation).

But here I need to distinguish my admiration vis à vis a work of art and my frustration when it comes to its political message. Twilight can be used by conservative people as a propaganda to promote the fear of sex in the name of a religious, normative, disciplinary vision of love. If vampires don't scare us anymore, if reactionary people who hate sex manage to use them in order to promote chastity, then it's scary to think that even the most sexually transgressive archetypes in our society can become the object of a cultural castration. However, if I remember well the end of the movie, Bella begged Edward to infect and turn her into a vampire, which could leave a bit of hope in the next episodes of Twilight about the resistance to human norms and the will to embrace the status of vampire. Hopefully, Bella will be inspired by Lady Gaga's lyrics and whisper in Edward's ear: I am freak, bitch!

And she's not fucking around:

Those of us who were trying to develop a balanced critique of both the paralysis of the state economy and the questionable governance by UC administrators were incredulous when Yudof gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine in which he bragged about his own $800,000 salary, shamelessly displayed his anti-intellectualism, described his entry into the field of education as "an accident" and complained that he tries to speak to faculty and staff about the budget, but it is "speaking to the dead".

Suddenly, the problem was not only fiscal - "we don't have the money" - but a more profound loss of confidence in the mode of governance and the figure of authority entrusted with making the case for public education to the state and federal government during these hard times.

Faculty, staff and students are collectively outraged that the university has failed to make public and transparent what the cuts have been and will be, and by what criteria and set of priorities such cuts are made. Rage also centres on the devastation of "shared governance" - the policy that faculty must be part of any decision-making that affects the academic programmes and direction of the university. In its place, a "commission" was appointed by the administration with paltry representation by faculty. Emphatically missing are those in the arts and humanities.

Nice! Read the rest here.

Over 1200 faculty have signed on. From the website:

Under the cover of the summer months, UC administration has pushed through a program of tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes that harms students and jeopardizes the livelihoods of the most vulnerable university employees. These decisions fundamentally compromise the mission of the University of California. They are complicit with the privatization of public education, and they have been made in a manner that flouts the principle of shared governance at the core of the UC faculty's capacity to guide the future of the University in accordance with its mission.

On September 24, in solidarity with UC staff and students, faculty throughout the University of California system will walk out in defense of public education.

Good luck out there in Berkeley. It's times like these that make me glad to be unionized in Michigan.

You know me. Always saying things that get me in trouble. I've penned a new editorial for QueerToday.com by this title. Here's a taste:

Recently, when I posted an essay on Gay Masculinities on my blog, one of the first comments I received over email was a complaint that it was a farce to refer to any "gay community" as an identifiable and tangible concept. The reader seemed to scoff at the idea that any analysis beyond the level of the individual gay was silly. What could you possibly say about gay men categorically? There was and is so much variation.

Since the 1990s, both inside and outside of academia, it has become fashionable to reject or at least be highly skeptical of categorical statements about identity categories. We become highly suspicious when we hear things like "Black men do _____" or "Gay men love _____." These anxieties are born out of real, valid concerns. Let me begin by spelling out what I see as the two primary reactions against these kinds of statements:

Click here to read the rest!!!

Today is the first day of classes here at The University of Michigan, and thus I begin my two-year adventure as a Masters of Public Health in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education. Given my recent work, this may seem a bit contradictory. But I feel that if I'm going to engage in a serious critique of the field, I should get intimately familiar with its teachings.

So here I go! I just wrapped up my first seminar -- at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM -- on HIV/AIDS. The professor began with the usual epi data, but moved on to a bit of Goffman, Foucault, and stigma. Hey, things are looking up!

Aww isn't it so cute! You can really see the resemblance! This blog has been my lovechild for four years now, and I'm so proud to see it continue to flourish today with the addition this year of new voices and a brand spanking new design. I even was lucky enough to be attacked by Christina Aguilera fans who brought my site down for almost two weeks. I was so flattered. Thank you for thinking this blog matters enough to hack!

As has been my custom on this auspicious occasion, I'd like to highlight my favorite entries from over the years. Check them out and take a whirlwind tour of my life and thoughts!

Thanks for reading and supporting this project. It just keeps getting better and more wonderful to have more people logging on and showing an interest in hearing my thoughts. It's the ultimate flattery. For realz.

xoxo

T

From 2005:

Rehnquist Hospitalized, Bush to Take Over World (July 14)

I am a Political Scientist. What the hell does that mean? (July 28)

My FIRST Day as a Graduate Student (August 26)

Online Racial Power Disparities (August 28)

Why I Left the NC Fellows Program (September 8)

The Surreal Life, San Fran Style (October 16)

Creating Change Conference '05 (November 14)

From 2006:

Misogyny and Gay Men (January 22)

"Against Health" Conference (October 13)

Frustrated with San Francisco (October 29)

The Death of Fiscally Conservative Repubs, and the Rise of Libertarian Dems (October 30)

Feminist/Queer/Man: Dialoguing on Gender

From 2007:

LGBTI Health Summit - Philadelphia (March 17)

Beyond Identity Politics? (May 19)

Toronto = Fabulous (October 7)

Longtime Companion, Early AIDS Movies, and Mentorship (October 25)

What I'm Thankful For, 2007 (November 20)

Questions of Trans-Inclusion and Identity (December 3)

A Lovely Time in Mexico! (December 17)

From 2008:

Creating Change '08: Mourning / Celebration (February 10)

Making it Work: Mobilizing Gay and Lesbian Identities in the 21st Century (February 12)

Where's the Pleasure in Gay Sex? (February 16)

On the Staph Debate and the Swiss AIDS Study (February 17)

Barebacking and XTube: A Window Into Our Sex Lives (February 22)

Gay Men's Health Leadership Academy: Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3 (March 22-24)

Gay.com Conversations on Race: Part One / Part Two (April 1-2)

HIV Prevention Politics in Detroit (April 17)

The Gayest Podcast in Michigan - Episode 2a: Troy Wood (June 23)

Juanita More's 2008 PRIDE Party Extravaganza (June 30)

The Gayest Podcast in Michigan - Episode 2b: Troy Wood, Ctd. (July 4)

"DON'T ASK ME TO PAY FOR THEIR MEDICINE!" (July 23)

Gaycation '08 Photo Album (July 28)

Hooking Up (July 31)

Racial Diversity on Manhunt, Adam4Adam: San Francisco Edition (August 6)

Racial Diversity on Manhunt, Adam4Adam: Atlanta Edition (August 8)

Racial Diversity on Manhunt, Adam4Adam: NYC Edition (August 10)

The LAST Trannyshack EVER (August 13)

Me on "Getting it on with Bonnie" (August 21)

Dating Economics (September 13)

Three Fags in a Boat (October 12)

What is Sexual Health? (October 19)

Outrage! NC DJ Arrested for Having Unprotected Sex (October 23)

Resist "Lazy Structuralism": HIV Prevention as Case Study (October 27)

"BlacksOnBoys": The Construction of Black Masculinity (Vs. White Femininity) in Gay Porn (November 30)

Working Out, or, "What happens to twinks when they hit 25?" (December 8)

Positional Identity on Manhunt, Adam4Adam: SF Edition (December 18)

From 2009:

Positional Identity on Manhunt, Adam4Adam: NYC Edition (February 3)

Me and Loretta Devine!!!! (February 10)

Eric Leven's Recent Barebacking Video: "Why are we..." (March 3)

How Do I Trust Again?: Love, Betrayal, and Moving On (March 17)

Why are Hate Crimes Worse Than Other Crimes? (April 1)

What's New in Gay Sex?: "Natural" (April 11)

Recuperating "Heteronormativity": It's Not *Just* About Heterosexuals! (April 20)

Christina Aguilera Fans Crashed My Blog (May 10)

To Everyone Who Is Demanding Lambert Come Out... (May 28)

Hookups are not meaningless (And other thoughts on sex) (May 29)

Tonight for my "Sociology of Sexuality" class, I'm teaching a sizable chunk of David Halperin's important work on Foucault, Saint Foucault. I came across this quote while preparing that I thought was fabulous. Enjoy your Friday!:

"If there is something self-affirming and indeed liberating about coming out of the closet, that is not because coming out enables one to emerge from a state of servitude into a state of untrammeled liberty. On the contrary: to come out is precisely to expose oneself to a different set of dangers and constraints, to make oneself into a convenient screen onto which straight people can project all the fantasies they routinely entertain about gay people, and to suffer one's every gesture, statement, expression, and opinon to be totally an irrevocably marked by the overwhelming social significance of one' so openly acknowledged homosexual identity. If to come out is to release oneself from a state of unfreedom, that is not because coming out constitutes an escape from the reach of power to a place outside of power: rather, coming out puts into play a different set of power relations and alters the dynamics of personal and political struggle. Coming out is an act of freedom, then, not in the sense of liberation but in the sense of resistance."

-- David Halperin (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 30.

Scott De Orio here. Trevor has conscripted me into writing for his blog. I graduated in May from U of M in German and Women's Studies and am starting a PhD in fall at UPenn in the same fields. Some of my interests include daddies, science fiction movies, and L'il Kim.

xxoo
Scott

Conference organizers have just posted audio recordings of from the LumpenCity conference I attended in Toronto earlier this year (see my abstract here; see the conference website here; find my Powerpoint slides here). Here's the audio!

Thought this was funny, given all the postmodernist readings I've been doing lately! I was trying to type "knowledges" for a paper I was writing in MS Word, and Word didn't like that one bit!

xoxo

T

A friend posted this link on Facebook to Walter Kirn's wonderful story from Jan/Feb's Atlantic. It's really quite engaging. It's a memoir-style recounting of the author's days at Princeton, becoming adept not at reading critically or understanding the most important works of our time, but rather becoming an expert in scraping by while doing minimal work. Kirn's story rings true for many of my own experiences with Academia: The real skill is not to know the book you're talking about, but to know how to guesstimate to say something clever about the book without ever having read it. It's performativity in action.

Here's a memorable quote from the piece (which you can read in full here):

With no stored literary material about which to harbor critical assumptions, I relied on my gift for mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas disguised as conclusions that I'd reached myself. The deployment of key words was crucial, as the recognition of them had been on the SATs. With one professor the charm was "ambiguity." With another "heuristic" usually did the trick. Even when a poem or a story fundamentally puzzled me, I found that I could save face through terminology, as when I referred to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as "semiotically unstable."

The need to finesse my ignorance through such stunts left me feeling hollow and vaguely hunted. I sought solace in the company of other frauds (we seemed to recognize one another instantly), and together we refined our acts. We toted around books by Jacques Derrida, and spoke of "playfulness" and "textuality." We laughed at the notion of "authorial intention" and concluded, before reading even a hundredth of it, that the Western canon was illegitimate, an expression of powerful group interests that it was our sacred duty to transcend--or, failing that, to systematically subvert. In this rush to adopt the latest attitudes and please the younger and hipper of our instructors--the ones who drank with us in the Nassau Street bars and played the Clash on the tape decks of their Toyotas as their hands crept up pants and skirts--we skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism, deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we'd never constructed in the first place.

I came to suspect that certain professors were on to us, and I wondered if they, too, were actors. In classroom discussions, and even when grading essays, they seemed to favor us over the hard workers, whose patient, sedimentary study habits were ill adapted, I concluded, to the new world of antic postmodernism that I had mastered almost without effort. To thinkers of this school, great literature was a con, and I--a born con man who hadn't read any great literature and was looking for any excuse not to--was eager to agree with them.

This lucky convergence of intellectual fashion and my illiteracy restored my pride and emboldened me socially. Maybe I belonged at Princeton after all. I took up with a moody crowd of avant-gardists, who hung around one of the campus theaters tripping on acid and staging absurdist plays by Sartre, Albee, and Ionesco. One production, which I assisted with, required the audience to contemplate a stage filled with unoccupied metal folding chairs. My friends and I stood snickering in the wings, making bets on how long it would take for people to leave.

Who knew that serious drama could be like this? Who knew that the essence of high culture would turn out to be teasing the poor fools who still believed in it? Certainly no one back in Minnesota. Well, the joke was on them, and I was in on it. I could never go back there now, not with a straight face. It embarrassed me that I'd ever even lived there, knowing that people here on the East Coast (people like me--the new me) had been laughing at us all along.

My fellow Sociology PhD'er Natalie sent over a link to The Chronicle of Higher Education's wonderful video feature that documents how an essay mill works. If you're unfamiliar, increasingly popular online services have popped up that allow students to custom-order papers for their classes. This feature goes through the back-end of one of those websites, where writers log-in and select which orders they're interested in completing. Writers make up to $16 / page for their services on these sites. It's pretty fascinating stuff.

I can't embed the video -- so you'll have to click here to check it out! It's pretty fascinating.

My friend Rostom, speaking of the pioneering gay historian, John Boswell pictured above. What a handsome devil!

My dual book review of The Health of Sexual Minorities and Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice has been published in the journal, Culture, Health, and Sexuality! You can find it here if you have access to journal articles. If not, here are some choice quotes -- translated wonderfully into British English:

Perhaps the collection's most forward-thinking section, titled 'LGBT Health and the State', includes a series of essays on activism, social justice and legal issues facing sexual minorities. In 'The Importance of Being Perverse: Troubling Law, Identities, Health and Rights, in Search of Global Justice', legal scholars Stefano Fabeni and Alice M. Miller argue that 'policy makers and practitioners concerned with sexual health or with the health of persons of diverse sexualities can and should be part of a global struggle for justice and rights' (p. 93). Rather than rallying for social change under the banner of 'freedom' or 'equality', social justice movements globally are increasingly turning to health within an international human rights framework to organise their arguments. This is in part due to a realisation that foundations and government agencies are much more likely to be interested in funding HIVprevention programs than, say, a campaign to end homophobia (although the two may have similar ends). As such, this section's essays are timely and useful for understanding this shift in organising.

And:

Ironically, numerous articles throughout The Health of Sexual Minorities are focused on the very negative outcomes that Savin-Williams describes for LGBT youth. A cursory read of the book's included articlesmight leave an unfamiliar reader thinking that lesbians have high rates of breast cancer; Latino gay men are addicted to methamphetamine; LGBT people are alcoholics and heavy smokers; and of course, many men who have sex with men are having unprotected sex and contracting HIV (particularly men of colour). This is not to say that any of these things is particularly inaccurate, per se. Rather, it seems that getting public health research funded and published requires reporting the worst evidence possible from minority populations. Public health officials and scholars are continually allowed to denigrate and scold minority groups for their bad habits, while rarely (if ever) reporting on any of the positive potential health outcomes from being gay (or, for that matter, the negative health outcomes from being heterosexual). The same could be said for public health scholarship on race and/or gender. This perspective has unfortunately been buttressed by some scholars of 'queer theory' who have insisted on painting 'gay' and 'lesbian' identities as dangerous and backwards.ave

Enjoy!

As I'm compiling the syllabus for my "Sociology of Sexuality" class, I thought it'd be useful for some to share the list of resources I've been compiling. A fair amount of LGBT / Queer scholarship here, of course. But some broader material as well. I've divided the citations from books into those from full-length monographs and those from anthologies, to help distinguish the kind of material. These citations are all from books, but some articles from anthologies you can find elsewhere in journal publication or also in other anthologies. I'll continue adding to this list over the next few weeks. Enjoy!

Book Chapters

Sullivan, An Introduction to Queer Theory
"Queer: A Question of Being or a Question of Doing?"
"Performance, Performativity, Parody, and Politis"
"Transssexual Empires and Transgender Warriors"
"Sadomasachism as Resistance?"

Berube, Coming Out Under Fire
"GI Drag: A Gay Refuge"
"Pioneer Experts: Psychiatrists Discover the Gay GI"
"Fighting Another War"

Halperin, Saint Foucault
"The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault"

Seidman, Beyond The Closet
"Introduction"

Levine, Harmful to Minors
Entire Book

Laqueur, Making SEX
"One: Of Language and the Flesh"

Humphreys, Tearoom Trade
"Methods: The Sociologist as Voyeur"

Shilts, And the Band Played On
Chs. 27-31

Chapkis, Live Sex Acts
Ch 3, "The Emotional Labor of Sex"

Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body
Ch. 2, "Of Gender and Genitals: The Use and Abuse of the Modern Interssexual"

Anthology Chapters:

John D'Emilio, The World Turned
"Stonewall: Myth and Meaning"
"Placing Gay in the Sixties"

Califia, Public Sex
"Sadomasachism and Feminism"
"UnMonogamy: Loving Tricks and Tricking Lovers"
"Among Us, Against Us: Does Equation of Pornography with Violence Add up to Political Repression?"

Queer and Asian in America
Fung, "Looking for my Penis"
Roy, "Curry Queens and Other Spices"

Black Queer Studies
Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?"
Nero, "Why are the Gay Ghettos White?"

Different Rainbows
Altman, "The Emergence of Gay Identities in Southeast Asia"

Fear of a Queer Planet
Warner, "Introduction"
Sedgwick, "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay"
Halley, "The Construction of Heterosexuality"

Sex Wars
Duggan, "Holy Matrimony!"
Duggan and Kim, "Beyond Gay Marriage"

Queer Theory / Sociology
Esterberg, "'A Certain Swagger When I walk': Performing Lesbian Identity"
Gamson, "Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct?"

Policing Public Sex
Alexander, "Bathhouses and Brothels: Symbolic Sites in Discourse and Practice"

Pleasure and Danger
Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality"

Leatherfolk
Rubin, "The Catacombs: A temple of the butthole"

Journal Articles

Halperin, D. (2003) "The Normalization of Queer Theory." Journal of Homosexuality, 45 (2).

Movies:

Cote D'Azur (deconstruction of family)
Wildside (menage-a-trois; trans)
Teeth (myth of vagina-dente)
Empire of Senses
In the Realm of the Senses
The Pornographers
Belle du Jour (Prostitution)
The Confusion of Genders (bisexuality / polyamory)
Water Lilles (3 teenage girls / one lesbian)
Sexy and Lucia
Ma Vie En Rose (Trans youth)
But I'm a Cheerleader (Queer deconstruction of sexual identity)
Sordid Lives (Psychiatry / queer lives / the South)
Storytelling (1st 15 min on race -- rape / race)
Guardian of the Flutes
The Salt Mines / The Transformation (Religion / Race / Trans / HIV / America)
Bent (Nazis / gays / death camps)
The Pain Game (S&M documentary)
Longtime Companion (Impact of AIDS on NY Gay Comm)
It's My Party (AIDS)
XXY (Intersexuality)

So I was just assigned to teach undergraduates "The Sociology of Sexuality" this summer! Wew-hew! I'm really excited about this opportunity. It'll be the first time I'll be teaching my own class at the University, unsupervised by a faculty member. The only catch is that I have to submit a syllabus ASAP for the department's approval. I have a *LOT* of ideas about what to teach, but I wanted to get feedback on resources people though would be useful for me in the classroom. Obviously, books, articles, essays, and research studies are useful here. But equally useful are short films, documentaries, and feature-length movies. Keep in mind that it's an upper-division undergraduate course.

So what topics / essays / etc do I HAVE to cover? And what movies do I just HAVE to show? :) Let me know! It would be a huge help! Thanks!!!!!

xoxo

Trev