The perceptibility and intelligibility of queer students and teachers have been a central theme in queer politics in education. Can queer teachers be ‘out’ to their colleagues and students? Can queer relationships be seen at the school prom? Can queerness be seen and heard? At the same time, perceptibility and intelligibility are by no means uncontested political goals. This paper analyzes different school initiatives by and/or for queer students and asks how political these initiatives are from the perspective of Jacques (...) Rancière's conception of politics. In particular, it employs Rancière's work on the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible) to analyze conditions of visibility and sayability and the political risks and benefits that gaining visibility and sayability carries for queer students and teachers. The paper brings Rancière's distinction between identification and subjectification into conversation with Judith Butler's work on the governing of intelligibility by social norms, and the promise of ‘insurrectionary speech’. Finally, Rancière's work on the role of allies in political interventions that shift the distribution of the sensible provides a fresh reading of Gay‐Straight Alliances in schools and the work of queer allies more generally. (shrink)

The notion that body modification occurs when one undertakes practices like tattooing, piercing or scarification, engenders discourses in which: (i) body modifiers endorse such practices as self-constructive, distancing their practitioners from social regulation and a deterministic biology, whereas; (ii) critics condemn their seemingly violent, corporeal interference. However, in suspecting that such analysis should be attentive to the concurrent individual and social co-constitution of behaviours, a sociological and post-structural interrogation of this characterization of body modification as a “sovereign, denaturalizing” endeavour is (...) demanded. An engagement with the originary violence of Derridian deconstruction will duly re-conceive body modification practice as not something which introduces violence to corporeality. Rather, violence will present as a primordial differentiating process which bodies always already condition, and by which they are conditioned/produced/modified. The second issue at stake in this article will thus develop as a contestation to the characterization of “body modification” as an exclusive category of practice. Such practices do not arrive, pre-existing, but rather manifest as the originary violence/differentiation of bodies-as-modifications-which-modify. This re-defines modification from something that agentive subjects introduce to bodies, to something that subjects-as-bodies cannot help but be. Consequently, individual agency is not divorced from behaviour, but emerges as a corporeal, social production. (shrink)

What are ‘gay genes’ and are they real? This article looks at key research into these hypothesized gay genes, made possible, in part, by the Human Genome Project. I argue that the complexity of both genetics and human sexuality demands a truly critical approach: one that takes into account feminist epistemologies of science and queer approaches to the body, while putting into conversation resources from agential realism and critical realism. This approach is able to maintain the agential complexity of genetic (...) materiality, while also critically challenging the seemingly stable relationships between sex, gender and sexuality. (shrink)

Christliche Sexualitätsdiskurse sind sowohl auf der Ebene der theologischen Reflexion als auch in der Artikulation religiöser Akteur*innen mehrheitlich Regel- bzw. Regulationsdiskurse. Die Frage nach dem, was erlaubt und was verboten ist, lässt dabei nur wenig Raum für ein differenziertes Sprechen über sexuelles Begehren, Wünsche und Erfahrungen. Vielmehr lässt sich in der Geschichte des Christentums ein Sprechen identifizieren, das sich im Spannungsfeld von religiöser Dämonisierung und Überhöhung bewegt. Dabei wird ein binär strukturiertes Diskursfeld produziert, in dem durch verschiedene religiös legitimierte Normalisierungspraktiken (...) die Heterosexualität als exklusive Norm hervorgebracht wird. Auch wenn diese heteronormative Orientierung in liberalen Varianten des Christentums inzwischen abgelehnt wird, bleibt es eine Herausforderung, die Argumente kritisch zu analysieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden biblisch-hermeneutische Vermittlungsversuche sowie ethische Kriterienbildung reflektiert. Abschließend wird für die Entwicklung einer vertieften Ambiguitätstoleranz plädiert. (shrink)