During the 1970s–1990s, hundreds of gay switchboards operated across the United States as volunteer-run telephone services providing information, referrals, and crisis support to gay and lesbian communities. This essay analyzes gay periodicals, call logs, volunteer training materials, classified advertisements, and organizational correspondence from Indianapolis and other cities. Through these fragmentary archives, I demonstrate how they can reveal alternative technological histories. I argue that gay switchboards embodied “prefigurative obsolescence”—a queer practice of building technologies designed to eliminate the oppressive conditions that necessitate them. Drawing on media archaeology, genealogy, and acoustemology, I contend that gay switchboards represented a fundamentally different technopolitics than today's crisis-industrial complex, where crisis becomes a domain of formalized work, value extraction, and biopolitical management. While contemporary crisis hotlines operate through surveillance, risk assessment, and carceral intervention, gay switchboards practiced distributed care aimed at community liberation rather than institutional self-perpetuation. My analysis reveals how an “acoustemology of common identification” enabled both care and exclusions along racial and class lines. Despite these limitations, prefigurative obsolescence offers crucial insights for abolitionist approaches to crisis response amid ongoing debates over police abolition, mental health reform, and community-controlled alternatives to state-sponsored intervention.
This article is an extended consideration of the cardboard box, elaborating upon various experiments of inhabiting the endless enfoldments of empire and its tetrising structures of violence across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Starting with the makeshift cardboard cribs used during Operation Babylift at the end of the war in Vietnam, part 1 charts how corrugation has been central to shaping the treacherous geometries of this containerized present, structured by the interlocking operations of militarism and capitalism. Yet, amid these totalizing forms and functions of empire are various corner infrastructures of living through, getting by, and making otherwise with the remnants and ruins of cardboard. In this way, part 2 troubles the seemingly total and telic structure of empire by tracing the labors of native and nomadic Vietnamese artists, waste workers, space/time travelers, and adoptees across their four respective corners of the world: the art gallery, the landfill, the interplanetary tree house, and the photograph. Such corner infrastructures, as this article conjectures, are incongruous and interstitial spaces wherein to visualize ways of abiding amid the ongoing afterlives of war. Corners are those queer and amorphous shapes of refurbishment and refabrication that are always already installed within the seemingly rigid geometries of modernity.
This article analyzes the assault on journalist Elena Kostyuchenko during Moscow Pride 2011 as a critical site for understanding how the Russian state governed queer life prior to the federal “gay propaganda” law of 2013. It argues that the state operated through strategic ambivalence, a mode of governance in which legality was theatrically activated but hollowed out through delay, denial, and selective enforcement. This ambivalence rendered queer existence simultaneously hypervisible in moments of protest and structurally excluded from legal protection. The analysis draws on the concept of violent affections and on queer archival methodologies that treat ephemeral traces such as blog posts, media reports, and legal complaints as affective artifacts of survival and erasure. Tracing how these fragments record both state violence and queer endurance, the article shows how ambiguity functioned not as hesitation but as an intentional technique of authoritarian governance. The adoption of regional “propaganda” laws in 2011 and their federal codification in 2013 marked the transition from ambivalence to explicit criminalization. In this light, Moscow Pride 2011 is not only an emblem of unpunished violence but also a turning point in the consolidation of antiqueer governance in Russia.
Drawing on empirical and theoretical traditions that approach people's movement through spaces as stories about culture and possibility, this article considers how the conditions occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic rigidified societal institutions — such as the home and the relations it envelops — and articulates “queer roaming” as an integral method of queer ontologies of mobility. The authors’ analysis of interviews conducted during the pandemic with queer people in Toronto, Ontario, considers queer people's ability to engage in physical and psychological roaming amid pandemic policies that relied on and affirmed cisheteronormative framings of home. The authors ask what happens when roaming — a method of queer exploration of self and community — is curtailed, and ways of moving beyond the protective and suppressive shell of home become less apparent? This article finds that queer movement toward, through, and past possibilities and destinations outside normative institutional structures was compromised by lockdowns and social distancing and that queer people roamed during lockdowns through new terrains and possibilities, both physical and virtual. In finding new ways to roam, queer people inhabit, rupture, and transform their worlds; make apparent persistent collective needs outside normative social structures; and insist on the ability to pursue new desires, paths, and ways of being.
This article proposes that Black queer blogs from the early 2000s demonstrate how to preserve Black life and personhood, as the case of Sakia Gunn demonstrates, while still offering a political platform. This differs from contemporary movements whose online discourse is overwhelmingly organized around the circulation of Black death, especially because spectacle and attention are fuel for virality and money. The preservation of life that these blogs afforded emerge from a history of Black counterpublics, and consistent with these publications, they have affordances for preserving Black life that social media today is missing. This article employs close readings of two blogs written by Keith Boykin and Alicia Banks. While both seek to flesh out Sakia's life, Boykin takes a postmortem approach, while Banks connects through experiences and understandings of Black lesbian sociality. In turn, the article also offers space to the potentials of lesbian personhood and masculinity within Black girlhood.
This article examines the interconnected legal history of queerness and sex work in contemporary Egypt, positing that the criminalization of queer individuals is not merely a de facto reality but is explicitly articulated through anti-vice legislation. Legally sanctioned sex work historically provided safe public spaces for queer expression. However, this article traces the evolution of anti-vice laws, particularly Law 10/1961, which were originally enacted to target sex workers but were subsequently expanded by the Court of Cassation to prosecute individuals not engaged in sex work. It details the government's political campaign during the 1990s, which sought to publicly equate the charge of debauchery with homosexuality, culminating in the landmark 2001 Queen Boat case. The article concludes by critiquing the post-2011 Egyptian LGBTQ+ movement for adopting a Western homonormative framework that neglects this shared history of persecution, thereby pinkwashing anti-vice laws as purely anti-queer laws and erasing any intersectionality in the process. This phenomenon of queer exceptionalism obscures the experiences of queer sex workers and impedes the development of a broader, more effective solidarity — a sodality of the immoral — between all individuals targeted by state moral campaigns, including non-queer sex workers, in opposition to state moral regulation.
Lyric poetry and legal discourse, as Barbara Johnson noted decades ago, grapple with the same single question: what is a person? But whereas Johnson concluded that lyric abetted legal constructions of personhood, this article argues for their meaningful divergence with respect to trans personhood. Juxtaposing government-issued identity documents with poetry by contemporary trans writers, I explore the poetic mode I call transtextuality, which emerges in response to the intensification of textual personhood in the post-9/11 era. Weaving together trans cultural studies, queer legal studies, and new lyric studies in close readings of poems as well as identity documents, this article contends that transtextuality is not just a robust rebuttal to the constraints imposed by state documentation, but is itself a public intervention in legal discourses of personhood rooted in the bureaucratic management of gender.
This article develops the concept of queer legal time to argue that recognition within the Hong Kong courts is achieved through suspension and not resolution. Focusing on the 2023 ruling in Sham Tsz Kit v. Secretary for Justice, it constructs an “architecture of delay” in which the court acknowledged that the lack of a partnership framework was unconstitutional yet still reaffirmed heterosexual marriage and imposed a two-year compliance period with no guidance. Using Hong Kong and Sinophone scholarship, the study demonstrates how appeals to tradition and the margin of appreciation enshrine postponement as care, endurance as civic virtue, and dissent as impropriety. In related cases and the administrative remedies that flowed therefrom, structural limits were preserved while progress, however partial, was simulated. Community responses constitute an affective counterpublic of fatigue, caution, and fragile solidarity, where waiting, rather than action, organizes intimacy and survival. The analysis positions delay as governance rather than dysfunction; legal temporality, it argues, manages affect, redistributes hope, and disciplines critique. It concludes that naming queer legal time offers a point of refusal and alternative practices of belonging that do not rely on the state's timetable, such as nonnormative kinship and mundane acts of solidarity.
The past few years have been apocalyptic for disabled people, or for many who identify as crip or cripqueer, for innumerable reasons. Not only was the COVID-19 pandemic itself disabling or lethal to millions of people, but also in many locations able-bodied people defiantly resisted any call for social distancing or masking that would protect disabled, sick, or immunocompromised people. Crip examples of apocalyptic situations such as these could be extended indefinitely. What might it mean to think cripistemologically, or to access crip rage (and perhaps paradoxically and simultaneously, crip joy) in such circumstances?
