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Jan. 9 | Call for papers: Identities and Technocultures
A 2-day conference about American culture and technologies that examines how new technologies dominate and define Americaness in the US and abroad. Co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (CESA) and the Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA).
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Moon, Jennifer. "Cruising and Queer Counterpublics: Theories and Fictions," American Culture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, December 2005.
My dissertation examines cruising—the aggressive solicitation of sexual contacts in public spaces—as a form of sexual and social interaction that contributes to the development of queer counterpublics. As depicted in post-WWII fiction and contemporary media representations, I argue that cruising offers a radically compelling vision of intimacy, sexual identity, and belonging that deviates from the normative model of the privatized conjugal couple and nuclear family, while also structuring alternative, publicly queer modes of existence. By drawing on queer social theory and contemporary cultural studies, I situate my analysis of cruising texts within the context of democratic cultural politics and queer media representation. My dissertation moves from the general to the particular—from a social-theoretical perspective on the relationship between public sexuality and identity, to a consideration of queer counterpublic intimacies and lesbian cruising representations. The first half develops the theoretical framework of the dissertation through the juxtaposition of social theory and contemporary cultural analysis, and it examines queer identity-formation in terms of mainstream recognition and belonging. It connects the public sphere’s exclusionary norms to theories of recognition and stigma, and it argues that queer identity-formation is an ongoing process shaped by both structural inequalities and interpersonal interaction. The second half considers the sexually non-normative subject in relation to queer counterpublics and attempts to articulate a theory of queer counterpublicity that is not organized around the identitarian categories of gay and lesbian. Instead, they propose a relational understanding of homosexuality and suggest that shared conditions of marginalization can constitute a queer form of belonging. My exploration of cruising as a form of intimacy seeks to document different configurations of queer sexual community and, in doing so, to reclaim aspects of queer public culture that may be seen as antithetical to the aims of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement.
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