In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

Notes

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1 Thanks to Glen Mimura for the phrase “epistemology of youth.” Notes to Chapter 2 1 For more on the erasure of Philip and the downplaying of the racial narrative, see the debates about Boys Don’t Cry in Screen, particularly the essay by Jennifer Devere Brody (2002). 2 I found out later that the filmmakers, Muska and Olafsdottir, had been present at an earlier screening of the film in Seattle where similar concerns had been raised and no satisfactory answers had been provided by the two directors. In some ways, I was fielding questions meant for Muska and Olafsdottir, but in other ways, I was being positioned as another “outsider” who seemed not to be able to comprehend the complexities of small-town life in the Midwest. I tried to correspond with Muska and Olafsdottir about this particular set of reactions to their work, but to no avail. They did not want to talk about the question of “condescension” at all and had no insights to offer about these readings of The Brandon Teena Story. 3 Alan Sinfield usefully defines the “metropolitan” for use in queer studies in his essay “The Production of Gay and the Return of Power.” He remarks on the interactive definitions of metropolitan and nonmetropolitan, and defines metropolitan sexualities as those that take place in the “global centers of capital” and the “principal cities in a nation state” (21). He qualifies this homogenizing notion of the metropolitan, however, by noting that “subordinated groups living at or near the centres of capital and specifically non-white minorities, may be in some aspects non-metropolitan; a Filipino living in New York may share some ideas and attitudes with people living in the Philippines ” (21). 4 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. Fabian writes that “the temporal discourse of anthropology as it was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized” (16). 189 5 For more on the overlap between deviance and race in the racial imaginary, see Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2003). 6 This notion of rural queers being stuck in one place resonates with Gayatri Gopinath’s theorizations of the meaning of queerness for those who “stay put” in postcolonial contexts rather than leaving a remote area for a seemingly liberated metropolis . See the chapter on queer South Asian diasporic literature in Gopinath’s Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 7 I recognize of course that “urban/rural” is not a “real” binary; it is rather a locational rubric that supports and sustains the conventional depiction of queer life as urban. 8 In “Qualities of Desire,” Lisa Rofel has brilliantly pointed to the structuring contradiction in Altman’s work that causes him to “assert cultural diversity and the need to respect it while also recuperating identification in a monumentalist history of gay identity, and, conversely, to further gay rights yet, in pursuing this goal, to elide diversity , articulation and alliance with radical cultural difference, thereby occluding the fault lines of power that emerge in global gay discourses and practices” (Rofel 1999, 451–474). Altman has also been criticized by North American diasporic critics like Martin Manalansan (1997), Jacqui Alexander (1998), and Gayatri Gopinath (1995) for ignoring the alternative sexual economies in different, particularly Third World, places and for assuming that Euro-American models of sexual identity are both desirable and desired . 9 For more on the tendency of Western queer anthropologists to produce unidimensional models of Euro-American queer subjects in order to emphasize the otherness of non-Western queers, see Gayatri Gopinath, “Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame” (1998). 10 Lisa Duggan also gives several full accounts of passing women in North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 11 The Ebony article she cites is from November 10, 1954 (Wilson 2000). Notes to Chapter 3 1 In an interview with Butler, Rubin says of her ethnographic research on the San Francisco gay male leather scene: “When I started this project I was interested in the whole question of sexual ethnogenesis. I wanted to understand better how sexual communities form” (Rubin 1994, 62–100). 2 See Don Williamson, “Interview with Little Jimmy Scott,” http://visionx.ian/jazz/ iviews/JScott.html (accessed January 2000). 3 See http://www.guggenheim.org...