Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

Abstract

This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sectors that depend structurally and implicitly upon white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, heteronormative patriarchies, shoring up pre-existing racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit-accumulation. Former cultural investments in a fatherhood defined by biological procreation are accordingly dislodged by investments in fatherhoods abstracted from procreation, which circulate in a variety of commodity forms. Motherhood is geographically and socially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is geopolitically reconstituted, with the proprietary reach of patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother-father-son and into extrafamilial, and often transnationalized, domains of racialized and class-transected procreational purchase.Sister, sister where did we go wrong? Tell me what the fuck we're doing here Why are all the boys acting strange? We've got to show them we're worse than queer (Lyrics from Bikini Kill's song "Suck My Left One") Procreational Economies and Biological FatherhoodFreud defined the prototypical nuclear or oedipal family in terms of three elements: a father, a mother, and a child, normatively cast as a son-all implicitly white. The nuclear family ideal and form were not restricted to the household, per se, but were invested in, and mirrored throughout, many material and imaginary-symbolic levels of industrial society (see Figure 1 ;Nast 1998;Nast 2000;Nast and Kobayashi 1996). Many businesses and companies of the 19th and early 20th centuries depended upon images and practices of the white father-led nuclear family to subordinate and legitimate the presence and position of white, male, filialized labor. Investors, corporate heads, and financiers were cast as father figures, kind men who took the interests of childlike laboring sons to heart. Similarly, the prototypical scientist assumed paternal attributes, a disembodied "brain" wed to industry, a connection satirically depicted in Chaplin's (1936) filmic critique of industrial

Canaries in the mine? Gay community, consumption and aspiration in neoliberal Washington, DC

“…Gay residential choices and social lives therefore become entwined with individual aspirations that are increasingly difficult to meet. Queer geographers have often described gay men as allies of state institutions 'complicit' in capitalist projects (Nast 2002), and it would be easy to suggest that gay men in D.C. are emblematic of this trend. At the same time, one must consider the individual life trajectories that bring gay men to cities like Washington, D.C.…”

Away from prying eyes? The urban geographies of `adult entertainment'

“…Nascent debates in legal geography concerning property, propriety and citizenship are clearly relevant here given the regulation of adult entertainment involves value judgements being made about the types of premise that are appropriate in given locations (Blomley 2004). There are also, we suggest, important dimensions of adult entertainment that speak to debates in feminist and postcolonial geography; for example, the role of adult entertainment in normalising new forms of masculinity and femininity (Sanchez 2004); the exoticisation and racialisation of sexuality (Nast 2002), and the encouragement of sex-related tourism and migration (Wonders and Michalowski 2004). Western cities is hence a point of departure for further explorations of the geographies of adult entertainment rather than a definitive statement concerning the place of sex work in the urban West.…”

Best for society? Transnational opposition to sexual and gender equalities in Canada and Great Britain

“…While scholarship critiquing homonormativity remains important in the contemporary moment, we would argue that it is increasingly important to examine how various types of heteronormativity are now being asserted in resistance to LGBT rights gains (Bell and Binnie 2000;Chasin 2000;Nast 2002;Rushbrook 2002;Binnie 2006) We argue that the backlash to LGBT equalities needs to be conceptualised within interconnected understandings of space, sexualities and identities such that how resistances to LGBT equalities emerge is related to where these resistances are taking place. Understanding place as a node of interconnections between local, national and transnational, we examine how alliances and organisations operate through multi-scalar networks to resist LGBT equalities.…”