Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1030-4312 (Print) 1469-3666 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20
Sexualities, creativities and contemporary publics Anne Harris & Yvette Taylor To cite this article: Anne Harris & Yvette Taylor (2016): Sexualities, creativities and contemporary publics, Continuum, DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2016.1210824 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1210824
Published online: 25 Jul 2016.
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Date: 25 July 2016, At: 17:16
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1210824
INTRODUCTION
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Sexualities, creativities and contemporary publics We open this special issue Continuum with attention to the intersection of sexualities and creativities as culturally productive sites. Ellsworth (2005), through a mapping of ‘anomalous places of learning’, invites us to revisit education (broadly conceived) and other cultural and creative practices as ‘the force through which we come to have the surprising, incomplete knowings, ideas, and sensations that undo us and set us in motion toward an open future’ (2005, 17, 18). This special issue encouraged critical analysis and dialogue about the objects and subjects of ‘creative sexualities’ for the twenty-first century; performative and creative approaches to considerations of gender and sexuality; and critical approaches to both creativity and sexuality used by scholars and other agents when arguing the influences (both generative and constraining) of digital technology, popular culture, and emerging publics of many kinds. A major concern in relation to the current scholarship on both sexualities and creativity studies is its lack of direct empirical evidence. While previous collections have done much to advance the theorization of creativity (e.g. McLoughlin and Brien 2012) and contemporary advances in gender and sexualities (Berlant 2009; Clough 2009; Munoz 2009a, 2009b; Puar 2009), there remains a dearth of analysis of what the role of creativity and sexualities might be in practice in a time of advanced neoliberalism and accelerated commodification. We also invited contributions from those who find current sexualities and/or creativity discourses problematic, who explore the sorts of boundaries that are placed around public creativity (Harris 2014, 2016), public expressions of sexualities and gender (Plummer 2011) and queer performativity (Sedgwick 2003), as well as public ways of accumulating and constructing sexual and creative capital (Taylor 2011; Taylor and Addison 2012). In doing so, we encouraged contributions that describe efforts to redefine these boundaries by artists, researchers, activists, teachers, youth and digital creatives (Wolfe 2012). The call for work clearly touched a methodological and epistemological nerve, and what a rich special issue it has turned out to be.
Creative relays Constraint and creativity are not in contradiction, but in cohabitation. One does not ground or contradict the other. Rather, they relay one another. (Massumi, in Ellsworth 2005, 129)
This special issue of Continuum contributes to the field of digital and cultural studies by identifying new areas for investigation into (and in some cases new intersections between and among) contemporary debates on gender, sexuality and creativity configurations, particularly as expressed through a range of media. We hope this issue is a flashpoint for new conversations that call out current contradictory trends towards neoconservative policing of both sexualities and creativity (Harris 2014), while at the same time recognizing such governmentality as generative contexts for both creativity and sexualities experimentation as contested cultural practices. To this end, theorists like McLuhan and Addison (1989), Ellsworth (2005) and others who blur the lines between art, architecture, advertising, learning and other forms of contemporary making fetishization help us think newly about the culturally constitutive roles of both creativity and sexuality. The authors in this issue articulate such contested ‘contemporary publics’ from diverse standpoints and for a wide range of scholarly purposes. Not unlike previous ‘commodifications’, the current co-option of both
CONTACT Anne Harris
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creativities and sexualities (including trans* and other gender identifications) offers critical scholars and citizens new avenues for resistance, social commentary and artistic activism. Just as Benjamin (on art, [1936] 1999), McLuhan (on hyperreality, [1964] 2001), Winterson (2012) and Munoz (on queer futurity, 2009a) urged us to think more expansively about how form contests and co-constitutes content, in this issue you will find essays that demand a reconsideration of sexualities, gender presentations and creative interventions into the research landscape and the ways in which the digital is affecting both interior and public global flows, as well as temporal and spatial realignments. For us, both sexualities and creativity discourses are inherently disruptive and interdisciplinary, cohabiting counter-culturally against hegemonizing trends in both fields. Such strange bedfellows suggest productive possibilities for new methodological approaches, theoretical framings and practical applications. For example, Munoz blazed new socially critical trails between performance studies and queer studies for attacking queer ‘assimilation’ and so-called nationhood. In these ways, both creativity and sexualities studies can be considered counter-discourses to mainstream social and cultural constructions. To this end, we are interested in both formal and informal arenas, approaches and institutions for understanding creativity and sexualities, and their social functions and cultural implications. This issue equally celebrates and repopulates the interstitial spaces in which our genders, our emotions and affects, and our more-than-human collaborators and environments fail to be tamed by neoliberal commodification. As Judith Halberstam reminds us, ‘For queers failing can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend on “trying and trying” again,’ (2011, 2), and in this issue you will find intergenerational, transcultural and transgendered embodiments of queer styles, ways of life and queer failures that are both creative and regenerative.
Queer interventions Spanning the globe in their considerations of genders, sexualities and creativities, the diverse manuscripts in this issue range from creativity as social imaginaries, to public pedagogies, to fictive publics that embody and restructure (both figuratively and literally) discussions of these contested terrains. In addition, the essays here demonstrate the breadth and depth of scholarly thinking on formations of gendered lives as creative landscapes, queer regeneration/degeneration and youth sexuality as dangerous (whilst commodified) spaces, places and enactments. If, as Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin have said, New materialism shows how the mind is always already material (the mind is an idea of the body), how matter is necessarily something of the mind (the mind has the body as its object), and how nature and culture are always already ‘naturecultures’ (Donna Haraway’s term) (48)
the authors in this special issue point us toward new ways of opposing dualist (and humanist) thinking that ‘are haunting cultural theory, standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 48). Several of the authors employ a new materialist frame for thinking creatively about cultural dualisms and discourses regarding what minds and bodies should be and do. The first essay in the collection, Helen Palmer’s Rewritings/refoldings/refleshings: Fictive publics and the material gesture of defamiliarization, develops the concept of fictive publics through the rewriting, refolding and refleshing of literary characters in canonical texts. Taking a new materialist spin on a familiar feminist intervention into patriarchal mythical structures, this essay combines a range of gendered, sexed and creative defamiliarizations to explore ‘the creative process of radical rewriting as a material gesture of intervention’ that is both imaginative and embodied and employs Michael Warner’s notion of ‘strangerhood’ through constant imagining and creative execution. Stacy Holman Jones and Anne Harris (2016) take imaginative and creative embodiments to a newly difficult place in their essay Monsters, desire, and the creative queer body. Through an interrogation of (un)intelligibility as monstrosity, they revisit the history of the discursive queering of the Frankenstein monster myth for gender and sexual outlaws, in order to explore the ways in which queer bodies are not
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only relationally unintelligible in Judith Butler’s sense, but also ceaselessly creative in our engagements with and by (despite rejection by/within) social bodies and traditional forms of kinship. Nonconforming bodies also populate Anna Hickey-Moody’s Being different in public, as she undoes accepted notions of disabled bodies and recasts them as performative creative bodies. By drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notions of swarm, affect and schizoanalysis, she argues ‘the aesthetics of reimagining what a disabled body can do, or what a dancing body should be’, offering readers a ‘refusal of dominant body ideologies and capitalist codings of dance’. Her essay brings together Butlerian and DeleuzoGuattarian notions around ‘lack as a mode of aesthetic refusal,’ and how non-traditionally ‘able’ bodies productively challenge such conceptual constraints. The next two essays in the issue focus specifically on how young people perform gender, sexuality and relationships in the very public spaces of competitive sports and digital landscapes. In The cheerleader: A feminist mom, her pre-teen daughter, and the spaces for girls in American football, Jessica Smartt Gullion uses feminist theoretical and epistemological calisthenics to problematize the complexities of the public structures available to girls in American football. Using both a non-conforming structural device and autoethnographic framework to ‘think with cheerleading’, Smartt Gullion explores the tension between her feminist and ‘cheer mom’ subjectivities, drawing readers into how young womens’ performance of feminine bodies not only implicates youth culture but the family and familiar entanglements around them. Linette Etheredge shares an innovative research design using video that examines the way young girls and boys interpret the intimate relationships they experience in digital spaces in her essay Complex and creative intimate and sexual citizens: Mapping a study that seeks to understand children outside the binary of sexual innocence or sexual contamination. Etheredge’s study acknowledges that sexuality is important in the lives of children, a notion well-advanced over the last few years, while acknowledging the constraints of educational settings. By shifting focus from sexuality to intimacies, Etheredge invites readers to think more broadly (and less contentiously) about how young people understand relationships within the governmentality of schools. Tingting Liu also takes up the question of young people’s diverse sexualities in Neoliberal ethos, state censorship, and sexual culture: A Chinese dating/hook-up app. Liu looks at the sanitization of China’s popular social media app Momo, focusing on an understudied and absolutely fascinating aspect of social media: the curation and indirect censorship commodification causes in social media development. Through a critical conversation with existing social media scholarship, the article considers how diverse genders and sexualities can constitute a useful lens for critically unpacking the intersection of sexualities, digital technology development and commodification, blurring lines between public and private subjectivities and worldings. The next two essays in the collection turn our attention from creatively public formations of sexual and gender subjectivities to the public archiving and representation of GLBT histories and queer lives. The first of these essays is Karen Charman’s A wandering archive – A nuanced creative enactment of GLBT histories, which invites an engagement with the queer performative past. Examining the lived and implied performativity of GLBT historical archives through a Foucauldian lens, Charman argues that queer histories offer resistance to the ahistorical neo-liberal commodification of queer in both public and private discourses. Karen Lambert’s Capturing’ queer lives and the poetics of social change both models and theorizes the ways that poetic inquiry can provide a public space for engaging with marginalized voices and contribute toward the project of social change. Lambert uses Butler’s (1997) theory of passionate attachments to critically interrogate a poem crafted from interview texts, and argues that creative research forms can provide affective spaces for doing research that matters. The final essay in the collection, Samuele Grassi’s article Negative Creep: the Anarchy of Living with Negativity turns our attention from passionate and seemingly positive attachments to the robust and powerful nature of the negative and disavowal. Grassi explores the unanticipated affinities she finds between Lee Edelman’s ‘politics of negativity’ and Saul Neman’s theorizations of an ‘anti-political politics’ of post-anarchism to demand an anti-essentialist queer politics where ‘anarchy’ and ‘queer’ combine.
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In so doing, Grassi shreds binaries like social/antisocial, politics/anti-politics and utopia/anti-utopia, and advances a politics of queer negativity understood as ‘creative destruction’ (from Edelman) to destabilize the creativity-negativity debate. We hope you enjoy the issue, and find here provocations that move you into new creative and considerations of genders, sexualities and cultures. We thank the editors of Continuum for the opportunity and freedom to curate this special issue, and to all the authors – those whose work appears here and those whose important contributions to the conversations we could not, for a range of reasons, include – for the pleasure we’ve had in encountering this powerful emerging scholarly work.
Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Anne Harris Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Yvette Taylor Strathclyde University, Glasgow, UK
