Search

In this paper I ask what is at stake when we move past static ontologies of the 'gayborhood' as a form of commercial and residential concentration in decline to theorise gay urban activism as a mode of queer social reproduction, through which queer caring labour 'redeems' the dislocations of the neoliberal city structured by oedipalised and capitalist social relations. Through well-documented formal and informal collective action, queers in the urban West have organised in response to health crises, exclusion and systemic threats of violence. Returning to socialist feminist imaginaries of care beyond the 'social', and to Guy Hocquenghem's often-overlooked theory of the sociality of the anus, this paper draws on excerpts from the film Milk, the poetry of Thom Gunn and a discussion of gay men's volunteering to examine San Francisco as a queer urban space constituted through a network of encounters, crossings, intimacies and labours enacted through the mundane caring practices of everyday life. I ask in what ways we can think of gay urban space as continuously made and remade through non-monogamous sex practices that perform the messy marrying of public and private, and erotic and platonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging out of in-person conversations, this interview was conducted over e-mail between May and September 2017. This is an edited version of that conversation. Max J. Andrucki and New York photographer Bryson Rand discuss the latter's recent body of work, Some Small Fever, emphasizing how Rand uses formal techniques like lighting and angles to queer his photos in ways that stage the queer home as a site of intimacy, community, and loss. They address how the work seems to produce and record a kind of "glitching" that informs the juxtaposition of bodies and objects in the photographs as both familiar and abject, registering an aesthetic of the queer domestic uncanny that archives an uneasy relationship between gay men, domesticity, sexuality, and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that Justice Kennedy, Citizens United's critics, and the modern pro-gun movement all share the same homesickness: a longing for the lost promises of the Framers' First Amendment. This ache was anticipated by refugee political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who longed not for her native Germany but for a post-revolutionary America in which true political freedom (for some) was successfully established by the Framers. The pro-gun movement's answer to this homesickness has been a Second Amendment "homecoming," seeking freedom in the personal right to bear arms. However, the outcome of Defense Distributed v. U.S. Department of State, a recent case about 3D printable gun codes, illustrates why the gun rights answer is misguided as it entangles the two amendments. Drawing on Arendt's notion of freedom, as opposed to liberty, this paper argues that a proper response to the current crisis in the jurisprudence of the First and Second Amendments should entail the understanding that: (I) "freedom of speech" should only protect speech-acts that concern public interest; and (II) "the security of a free State" requires adequate access to the infrastructures that make speech possible through an equitable distribution of power. As this paper concludes, by developing atomic weapons, the government has "constructively taken" the people's "right to keep and bear Arms," and guns are simply not a plausible remedy. Accordingly, this paper suggests a model for how the government may provide a "just compensation" for this "taking" as required by the Fifth Amendment's "taking clause." The model demands that equal to a portion of the defense budget should be diverted annually to publicly fund 501(c) non-profit organizations, modern-day "well-regulated Militias" that distribute freedom across society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]