Justice, Gender, Sexuality: Fall 2018

I was especially impressed with the immersion event I picked for the second half of the semester. I chose to attend the Drag show here on campus. It was extremely joyous and fun while also engaging and provoked a lot of critical thinking. Having drag on this campus specifically has had a lot of positive implications and has pushed the envelope but has also been doing so in the world of popular culture.                    On a religious campus, it pushes against the norm or mainstream to hold a drag show especially because we are a Catholic institution. However, the Jesuits are notorious for pushing against the grain and showing the many ways in which to accept all identities and celebrations even when the leadership of the church was not necessarily ready to. Having a drag show on this campus gives the message that we will support queer students no matter the cost because they are to be accepted here.             Recently there has been a lot of buzz about drag queens and shows ab

Queer can be defined in many ways, from many different perspectives of queer, but in a basic sense it means strange, abrasive, or odd. When thinking about what makes a space queer you have to ask if it meet the criteria of being odd or abrasive to the ‘norm’ that has been set by society and/or the institution in which they are in. For example, prison and the reason you end up there, is by nature abrasive or oppositional to society and its laws and norms. Therefore, prisons have been cast and may be defined as a queer spaces in the literal sense. For several reasons amongst meeting the definition, prisons show other forms of queerness in: the relationships that develop inside prison are amongst same-sex and while the person may not be queer, the situation they are in is, therefore so is the relationship, the fact that LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately victimized in prison for their gender nonconformity by both staff and fellow inmates, as well their identities are oppressed and no

For today's comment, please focus on the first article on our list, "Gay Shame." Based on your reading, explain what gay shame is as a form of activism. What kind of resistance do queer folks who participate in gay shame participate in and enact? What are their goals, and how does their work contribute to our evolving sense of queer justice? As always, aim for 250 words and integrate evidence from the reading to support and illustrate your points.

After completing the reading for today, which comes from Julia Serano's book Excluded , take some time to reflect on her arguments about gender, feminism, and transgender identities and experiences.  For Serano, what is the role for trans women (and/or other trans people for that matter) in feminism? How does she understand and think through sex and gender as terms of analysis? Ultimately, how should feminists and/or other queer folks work to be more inclusive of transgender women? Aim for 250 words and make sure to integrate examples and citations from the text to anchor your analysis.

Kushner’s Angels in America not only functions as a piece of literature in form for a play which, in the end, will serve as an entertainment piece but more importantly, a breakthrough to social and queer calling of the community during the time of the AIDS epidemic. The play represents the impact of AIDS on the characters, their relationships with one another along with the community and country as a whole. Kushner takes us on a journey in which we witness two kinds of communities being destroyed and then recreated again. In the first part of Millennium, Roy’s character falls into loneliness as he distorts the law. This section is one which also shows the physical destruction of the Angel’s appearance at the end of Part One. Perestroika shows the repairmen of the crumbled bonds within the community in unconventional ways seen through Hanna and Prior’s and Prior and Harper’s relationships. The play’s most difficult character even in the end comes full circle in not being abandoned to

While reading Joey Mogul’s Queer (In)justice, I was provoked with many questions about the US prison system and how it affects the LGBTQIA+ community who is incarcerated, and even who aren’t. The first questions I was presented with is what exactly is queer about the US prison system? One thing that immediately comes to mind is the fact that crime itself would be considered queer. Everything about crime goes against the social norms of what is considered okay and not okay. When thought about like this, prisons are one of the ultimate queer spaces. On page 95, Joey Mogul explains how any queer behavior “must be stamped out”. This eliminates all sexual behavior or feelings, queering the prison system because although society does make talking about sex taboo, there is sex happening and it is talked about, not cut out of our lives. Now this leads us to ask, if prisons are such queer spaces, how and why are the LGBTQIA+ people disproportionately victimized in prisons? The ways that they’re

“20 Years After Matthew Shepard’s Brutal Murder, LGBTQ People Are Still Facing Epidemic of Violence”, a headline from the Human Rights Campaign from October 12 of 2018. The headline showing the distance the community has come since the hate crime of Matthew Shepard. A quote from the article states, “The Anti-Violence Project reported an 86 percent increase in hate violence-related homicides of LGBTQ people between 2016 and 2017. Last year was also the deadliest year on record for the transgender community with at least 29 transgender people — mostly Black transgender women — killed.” (Viet Tran, Human Rights Campaign) These statistics are only some of the horrific things that have happened in recent years including states lacking in rights for the LGBTQIA+ community against hate crimes, “Currently, 32 states lack statutes that include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristic under state hate crimes prevention laws.” (Tran, Human Rights Campaign)   These

“There are just a few bad apples.” At the university hate crime forum last week, this is instantaneous the response I received when I asked the law enforcement representatives how they were working to be more accessible to marginalized communities who have historically-rooted reasons to distrust the police, providing the example of police brutality. The response was dismissive of the histories I was referring to, as well as the possibility of any bigger, systemic issues that could be called into question. By shifting blame to a few problematic individuals, they were absolving the criminal legal system as a whole of any accountability. This, to me, was representative of the issue with hate crime laws in general: Beyond our clear inability to enact criminal justice on behalf of minority communities, these laws cover up larger systemic issues and therefore offer a solution to falsely-framed problems. I felt soberingly unsurprised by this reply. While I do enjoy playing the contrarian

  If the United States prison population was a city, it would be ranked among the top 10 largest in the country.   It is estimated that by the end of 2016, over 2 million adults are setting behind bars in America’s prisons and jails. Over the years, new studies have shed light on the over-incarceration of queer people in particular. Gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals are three times more likely to be incarcerated than that of “American adults generally” ( Advocate) . Moreover, LGBT individuals are incarcerated at a rate of 1,882 per 100,000 compared to the “already high incarceration rate of 612 per 100,000 U.S. population” ( Reuters ). Jails and prisons are traumatizing and dangerous places, especially for those who are LGBTQ+. Not only are queer people disproportionately incarcerated, but once they are behind bars, they are often mistreated and degraded by fellow prisoners and staff. This then raises the question: what is causing all of this? Research shows that discriminati

As we have continued to examine and ponder the ways in which injustice against the LGBTQIA+ community is perpetuated, we have come across the question of hate crime laws. Hate crimes, according to the FBI, are: “ a criminal offense against a person, or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation ethnicity, gender or gender identity .” This definition and by extension the creation of such laws, is seemingly a step towards progress; it indicates a recognition, inclusion and punishment for acts of violence against people based on their individual preferences. However, the creation and push for hate crime laws is a band-aid response, a temporary relief for individual and exclusive acts of violence. This in and of itself, is problematic and arbitrary.  Violence against the LGBTQIA+ community is not an individualized act, it should therefore not be treated as so. Hate crime laws according to Mogul, Ritch

There is a question of who, or perhaps more fitting what, is a criminal in our country and in our world. As a society, we have done the great evil of seeing difference and naming it malicious. In doing this, we have created a history of trauma and pain for many individuals within our communities and cultures. While the experience may bubble to the surface in a multitude of ways, the results are always the same­—our human superpower to make difference into an identity marked by feelings of danger instead of curiosity seems to be the only way for us to understand ourselves. The focus here is on the queer body and soul. That is, how is it that we come into an understanding ourselves as queer, gay, bisexual, genderqueer, pansexual, transgender, or any other “non-normative” sexual identity, without answering the call of criminalization. The bath of freedom that so many of us queer folks experience as we come out, is still affected by years and years of systemic and cultural muddying. Thi