Queer Forms

Ramzi Fawaz

Published by New York University Press 2022

Queer Forms

Ramzi Fawaz

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479893782.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

How do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual outlaw?

In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation—including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet—were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called “normal” gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments—from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth—and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind’s eye and interpreted by diverse publics.

Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (1976–1983), Lizzy Borden’s Born in Flames (1983), and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1989–1991), Fawaz shows how artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass audiences in the modern United States.

Against the ideal of ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity and attachments to rigidly defined identities, Queer Forms argues for the value of shapeshifting as the imaginative transformation of genders and sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility, but to be better understood in all our dimensions.

Author / Editor information

Fawaz Ramzi :

Ramzi Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies. With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of American Literature, “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.Ramzi Fawaz is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies. With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of American Literature, “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

Reviews

R. Stone (Mt. St. Joseph University):
Including detailed footnotes, a thorough bibliography, and illustrative images, this volume will interest and engage those working in the field of women's and gender studies.

Karla Strand:
With Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz has examined gender and sexual formlessness illustrated by queer and feminist film, literature and visual culture. This 'shapeshifting' allows for greater evolution, authenticity and intimacy for all.

An inspirational history of queer and feminist cultural politics forged in the 1970s and extending to the 1990s. Ramzi Fawaz brilliantly maps the forms of relationality that feminist, lesbian, and gay communities invented to visualize themselves and their futures. In an argument that is both crystalline and capacious, he has discerned patterns across a wide range of popular cultural texts, objects, and images, and he demonstrates how radical change has been—and can be—imagined and enacted. Queer Forms is generously both history and manifesto. It calls on us to ask with each other how we want to see our future take shape.

Parting ways with queer theory’s preference for the ephemeral, Queer Forms feels the touch and re-touch of shapeshifting forms as it sets queer studies in new and dynamic relation to its objects in the world. In one of his signal claims, Fawaz uses the materiality of form to rethink the pervasive and privileged association of queerness with formlessness and fluidity. Thus, he argues that feminist and queer ideas become meaningful as they take material shape within the realm of popular cultural production, where they change audiences in ways that neither a pedantic politics nor a moralizing theory can.

An invigorating work of queer feminist political theory and imagination. Defying the received demand that instances of nonnormative gender identity remain fluid and formless, Ramzi Fawaz dares to present subversive examples of gender and sexual outlaws whose actions track an unfinished project of freedom. In a range of brilliant readings across political movements and cultural texts, he advances new figures of the thinkable and democratic worldmaking that inspire free action in the present.

This is the book I have been waiting for: fearless, brilliant, and filled with love for feminist and queer cultural forms. Rather than fetishizing formlessness as the pinnacle of freedom, Ramzi Fawaz assembles and mines a rich and moving archive of feminist and queer cultural forms that have given us tools to practice intimacy, radical vulnerability, friendship, and worldmaking. Queer Forms was written out of a deep affection for the visionary work of feminist and queer cultural producers, offering us a blueprint for allowing feminist and queer worlds to take shape.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Additional Praise for Queer Forms Publicly Available Download PDF	ii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introduction: Queer Forms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Stepford Wives and Female Men: The Radical Equality of Female Replicants Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
2. Entering the Vortex: Breaching the Boundaries of the Lesbian Separatist Frontier in Avant-Garde Science Fiction Film Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
3. “Beware the Hostile Fag”: Acidic Intimacies and the Gay Male Consciousness-Raising Circle in The Boys in the Band Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
4. Queer Love on Barbary Lane: The Serial Experience of Coming Out of the Closet with Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
5. Stripped to the Bone: Sequencing Sexual Pluralism in the Comic Strip Work of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
6. “I Cherish My Bile Duct as Much as Any Other Organ”: Political Disgust and the Digestive Life of AIDS in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Conclusion: “Something Else to Be”: On Friendship’s Queer Forms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	335
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	367
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	373
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	407
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	423
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	435