Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

There is an unmistakable power in narrative to comment on and shape cultural lives. This special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies is comprised of often unheard stories that seek to queer the relational phenomena of family, home, love, and loss. Authors draw on a range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to disrupt and dismantle the normative conceptualizations that pervade research and everyday understanding concerning these thematic areas. These essays work in creative and experimental ways to evocatively demonstrate Queer Theory and queer as unique, needed, and generative paradigmatic orientations and conceptual tools for use in Cultural Studies research. They help to advance a more open and tentative understanding of relational stories and fluid and dynamic relational identities.

In this paper, I use a performance methodology to theorize how performances of family narratives might be queered through the disruptive or disorienting practices of collage and fracturing. Using Halberstam’s “queer art of failure” as a theoretical foundation and Etchells’s performance and writing practices as a methodological guide, I attempt to “fail” narratively as a way to explore the queer possibilities of some normative family stories. It is a story that involves several overt failures—failures of narrative potential, human intervention, and consumer products. The interwoven narratives in this paper were part of a larger ethnographic project about “consumer tragedies.” By juxtaposing multiple voices—including scholarly quotations, family narratives, and performance description—I create a fractured narrative. Such ruptures in narratives of family reveal how we accomplish normativity and how we resist it.

This essay is written in and as a queer fugue—a series of themes and variations on grief, on loss and remembering, on the constitutive and dispossessing dance of relationality, and on the possibilities of becoming and forgiving. It is an essay about public mourning, queer relationships, being undone by death and language, and about making a case for recognizing unrecognized and unspeakable grief. It is an essay that recognizes the debts we owe to those we’ve lost, celebrates the queer selves and lives we could not do without, and how the words and voices and lives of others who are not acknowledged as fully or equally human are significant and profound.

This autoethnographic essay, based upon the author’s performance of the same name, details a nexus of political and personal events that fostered suicidal ideation in the face of religious homophobia, as well as how an artifact of his late grandmother’s helped him move past that ideation. It uses the phrase “exit strategy” in multiple ways to reveal the limits of thinking that resistance to oppression can ever rest.

In this article, I examine the experience of loss through a phenomenological description of disorientation based in lived experience. Drawing on the insights of queer theory, I explore disorientation as pathway to narrate death and dying in a way that breaks from linear historical frameworks of cultural meaning. Embedded in this conversation is also a call for a method of resuscitating and making visible the fragments of difference lived under erasure. My purpose is to grasp at what it means to mourn loss while embracing the attendant feelings that escape neatly established cultural systems. Thus, I ask how do we think through loss as an experience of disoriented-difference-made-abject?

This poetic meditation engages homosexuality as pathology and inherited “disease” as propagated by some factions of the Black church. Reinterpreting the notion of genealogical “inheritance” the author pays tribute to his queer ancestors, tracing a legacy of racial and sexual struggle and how the two are imbricated. At the same time, the meditation points to the hypocrisy of Black clergy who always already carry within them a part of the Black queer.

This project draws together queer and phenomenological perspectives, stressing a critical orientation of digital interfaces and digital space. I investigate the surfaces of these digital geographies as well as the otherwise underlying orientations and disorientations of/in digital social place. More specifically, I use the It Gets Better Project as a case study to describe places of everyday practice in digital space as place and as home—turning, or queering, the idea of home away from normative conceptualizations of home as being physically situated and toward a possibility for home in the digital and mediated. While digital place can serve as digital home for transgender youth, there are also aspects of digital home in the popular online campaign that have the potential to do injury and create unrest. Those who find home in the digital also engage or contend with the current digital landscapes of surveillance, continued media conglomerates, digital divides, neoliberal ideologies, and circularly destructive political economies.

Through personal narrative, the author shows the experience of new motherhood by juxtaposing a social science relationship researcher role with middle-class cultural expectations of mothers. Autoethnographic scenes of the exhaustion of juggling expanding roles and cultural advice about what being a good mommy means with anxiety about being a bad mother help the author question (spank) entrenched mommy myths. The author uses poetic inquiry and personal narrative as forms to acknowledge, examine, and potentially alter the complex reality that although a mom might like and love her child, she might be anxious and abhor the prescribed role of being mommy.

Embodying change is never easy, especially when our history is often lost or overlooked. Performance allows us to reenact, reexperience, reclaim and bring those moments into the future. In 1973, a group of hippies moved into a beautiful house in the Oakland/Berkeley Hills. We didn’t know then that we would become a queer family that would endure many personal and political crises, including the AIDS epidemic and the destruction of our house in the great firestorm of 1991. Shifting through the ashes, stories emerge of the personal struggles and politics of the times that have much to offer us today, when we strive once again to do it differently. The following piece is an excerpt from the beginning of the play, which juxtaposes our early experiences with some of the more stark realities the fire would come to symbolize as the years progressed.

This performative essay is a collage of personal narratives of family woven together with theories of queer temporalities and crip theory. I juxtapose bits and pieces of performance scripts, papers from graduate seminars, attempts/experiments in performative writing, and other autoethnographic accounts of my families, to explore crises of meanings. My aim is to provide a space for possibilities, for new understandings of time, inheritance, (re)production, family interactions, and privilege. I use chrononormativity, the process of naturalizing dominant notions of time for maximum “productivity,” as a strategic framework to explore intersections of disability and queerness.

Researchers of bereavement have made great progress in their efforts to show the complexities of the grieving process. At the same time, psychologists have constructed multiple diagnostic categories of grief, commonly accepted prescriptions that further sustain a limiting way of understanding grief and loss. The bereaved either move on and find emotional closure from a loss, or they remained fixated in the emotional trauma of a loss. In this autoethnography, I challenge the assumed static boundaries between these categories by constructing a conversation with my deceased mother to show some of the power of continuing a relationship with the deceased through “re-membering” and the complexities inherent to the lived experience of grief. Through this evocative account, I also suggest possible connections researchers may explore between autoethnography, grief and loss scholarship, and queer theory.

This is an amended version of a paper presented in a panel discussion following the screening of The Stuart Hall Project (a new film by John Akomfrah) at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, Wales, in September 2013. It discusses six key features of Hall’s life and work: (1) a conception of intellectual work as serious, (2) a commitment to public engagement, (3) a commitment to collaboration as a mode of intellectual production, (4) long-term engagements with artists (especially Black British artists), (5) a commitment to practices of humility, and (6) a critical-intellectual stance that is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic.

Drawing on three culturally specific research projects, this paper examines how community-based knowledge brokers’ engagement in brokering knowledge shaped the projects’ processes. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conceptualization of the “rhizome,” we discuss how community knowledge brokers’ engagement in open research-creation practices embrace the relational foundation of Indigenous research paradigms in contrast to mainstream Western research practices that are engaged as linear, objective, and outcome-oriented activities. In turn, we offer propositions for building team environments where open research-creation practices can unfold, informing a periphery of shared space for Indigenous and Western paradigms.

Experimenting with a new interpretive methodology, Memeography, this article constructs an account of media experiences that go toward the construction of a sophisticated understanding of one’s place as a participant within the vast, confusing, globally networked media apparatus. The author works with the premise of Dawkin’s famous theory of memes as agents of cultural reproduction, and Aunger’s theory that electronic memes exist independently within the cybersphere. The goal of Memeography is, then, to document and understand the experiences, ideas, and sense-making processes of human actors within this complex machinic life-form, from a qualitative perspective. The work turns McLuhan’s theory of media as extensions of human beings on its head, claiming instead that humans are now appendages of the apparatus. The popular movies Artificial Intelligence, Surrogates, Caprica, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, and Avatar are used to exemplify key ideas.

As Head Man of the Rich Square Friends’ Meeting during the 1920s and 1930s, the author’s grandfather Myrton Lewis Johnson was at the center of a heated controversy concerning music, and whether the performance of music was consistent with Quaker beliefs. At the center of this controversy were competing ideas about how to experience “ultimate reality,” whether called God, the divine light, the inward light, the seed of truth, or the Christ within. This controversy raises important issues about the experience and meaning of music.

In this performative play without speech, the author demonstrates the various acrobatic negotiations she makes in her everyday life as a transnational feminist educational researcher who was born in India, raised in Canada, and educated and employed in higher education in the U.S. The author uses silence as a space of reflection, resistance, adaptation, retreat, and freedom in order to challenge the duality of silence and voice where silence is seen as the absence of voice. The author presents her negotiations in academia as a set of acrobatic moves in response to her everyday circumstances. She also demonstrates that for her home is always a shifting concept that continues to force her to shuttle between multiple national identities. The author uses the works of Kamala Visweswaran and Inderpal Grewal to theorize nomadic, diasporic, and transnational subject positions and ways in which silence and voice function. Using the form of silence as a performance, the author invites readers to find their own entry points of identification, resistance, and points that transcend both identification with and resistance to the scenes with which she works, works out, and plays.

In this ethnography, I report a shopping experience in Florence, Italy, and use it as an exemplar of cultural syncretism. Although I use poetic devices (such as alliteration, repetition, and assonance) to usher the reader into the experience, the experience happened as I have written it.

This ethnodrama critically examines conceptualizations of women’s empowerment in international development initiatives. It represents a collection of experience-based narratives from six Malian women who participated in a photovoice project centered on women’s empowerment in the specific context of microfinance. Deviating from normative neoliberal financially-based assumptions underlying the relationship between microfinance and women’s empowerment, wherein the prevailing belief is that increases in economic resources necessarily lead to increases in women’s empowerment, this article suggests that empowerment is a complex multi-dimensional construct that includes, yet extends beyond, the financial paradigm. This one act ethnodrama is intended as a form of talking back to the academic literature and Western discourses surrounding empowerment. It draws inspiration from Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s transnational feminist framework, particularly the concept of history from below, by creating spaces for the women in this project to have their voices heard and to be included in global practices of history-making.