Prof Yvette Taylor: Life and Death: Queer Fatalities, Queer Futures?

Date: 01 February 2012, 4.00pm
Location: Room G23, Baines Wing

Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Seminar Series

Title: Life and Death: Queer Fatalities, Queer Futures? Professor Yvette Taylor, Director of the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University

Abstract

This paper considers moments of US sexual citizenship situating these in terms of LGBT campaigning groups’ actions, institutional reactions and broader public relations evident in the course of claiming and lamenting citizenship, community and diversity. In celebrating new queer presences, the absence of ‘others’ must also be considered: queer and feminist literatures on the politics of grief, loss and mourning have shown the ways that some lives are already lost to public/activist/institutional concern, representing an outsider status beyond community and citizenship (Butler, 2004; Haritaworn, 2010; Taylor, 2010).

The implications of this are discussed in relation to sexual citizenship. Recent policies in the US and UK context – such as the Civil Partnership Act (2004) and the repeal of US military policy ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ – have been conceptualised as a moment of coming forward, gaining a new public visibility and viable presence within a human rights framework. The success of ‘the world we have won’ (Weeks, 2007) within these new presences often works to re-create a dominant ‘we’, as a classed and racialised construction, neglecting the intersectional dimensions of sexual citizenship (Taylor et al., 2010).

Such debates and their complex implications came to the fore around the recent Tyler Clementi suicide at a US campus following a suspected act of homophobia. This piece hopes to make broader resonances in relation to both institutional and activist responses to this event rather than to locate homophobia solely within the site discussed or on the bodies of the young people accused. The creation of broader publics, as called upon by different actors in the demand for citizenship, community and diversity, can be seen as contradictory, relying upon and re-creating privacy as the proper concern and place of civil engagements. This is witnessed in responses to different queer deaths and the affective relations – from ‘hate’ to ‘love’ – which are generated interpersonally and institutionally in pinpointing blame, in moving forwards and in securing rights, as a moment of loss and possible gain.

I ask which lives are already lost to public concern, to community activism and institutional apprehension – this is significant to dis-junctures in diversity rhetorics and realities enacted in community claims for citizenship.