Journal articles on the topic 'Gay and Lesbian Liaison Officers'

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1

Dwyer, Angela, Christine E. W. Bond, Matthew Ball, Murray Lee, and Thomas Crofts. "Support Provided by LGBTI Police Liaison Services: An Analysis of a Survey of LGBTIQ People in Australia." Police Quarterly 25, no. 1 (December 12, 2021): 33–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10986111211038048.

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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) police liaison programs were established around Australia from the late 1980s onwards to ameliorate discriminatory relationships between LGBTIQ people and police. With specialized training to better understand LGBTIQ issues, police liaison officers can provide support to LGBTIQ people as victims, offenders, or witnesses. Interestingly, very few LGBTIQ people seek support from these officers, even though many know they exist. This paper reports the results of a survey of a sample of LGBTIQ community members across two Australian states (Queensland and New South Wales) that explored why LGBTIQ people seek support from LGBTI police liaison officers. An online questionnaire asked LGBTIQ people about their perceptions of, and experiences with, police generally, and LGBTI police liaison officers specifically. Similar to past research, our analysis primarily found high levels of awareness of liaison officers, but very few participants accessed them. Further, and concerningly, the participants were generally reluctant to seek them out for support. Key implications of our findings for policy and practice development in police and LGBTIQ community services are discussed.
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Dwyer, Angela, and Matthew J. Ball. "“You’d Just Cop Flak From Every Other Dickhead Under the Sun”: Navigating the Tensions of (In)visibility and Hypervisibility in LGBTI Police Liaison Programs in Three Australian States." Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 36, no. 2 (January 29, 2020): 274–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1043986219894420.

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This article examines the different ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) police liaison officers in three states of Australia conceptualized and problematized the public visibility of LGBTI police liaison services. In a climate where LGBTI police liaison services are a prominent model for building relationships between police and LGBTI people, this article considers, through interview data with LGBTI police liaison officers, these officers’ perceptions of the role that the visibility of these programs played in their success. Specifically, it explores the tensions and difficulties for officers and LGBTI communities resulting from the general invisibility of liaison officers themselves (and, by extension, these programs), as well as the problems that increased visibility of these programs might bring to officers, to LGBTI communities, and to policing work itself. Although enhancing the visibility of liaison services may be an important goal, this research suggests that careful consideration is required regarding how this visibility is produced and maintained, particularly given the concerns that officers reported about the potential risks posed by adopting new forms of visibility, including the risk of hypervisibility. This article questions the conventional view that increased visibility is unproblematic and is the key to the success of such programs.
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3

Gatehouse, Cally, and James Pickles. "Methodologically materialising hate: Incorporating participatory design methods within qualitative research on crime and victimisation." Methodological Innovations 14, no. 3 (September 2021): 205979912110504. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20597991211050478.

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The use of ‘design’ within qualitative research on crime and victimisation, and within the social disciplines more generally, has seen very little commentary or discussion. ‘Design’ is referred to throughout as the professional and scholarly practice rather than the ‘research design’, that is, the practical plan for the methods used to generate data. Design in this former sense has historically drawn on both arts and engineering to give form to garments, products and visual communication. This article presents a case study, followed by a reflective discussion, of a research project in which research through design methods were used to construct two focus groups involving lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people and police liaison officers as part of a hate crime project. Participants were asked to design reporting devices that would respond to hateful behaviour. Through the design process, participants materialised their own experiences of hate and embodied emotional responses to those experiences. The authors argue that there are methodological, ideological and practical benefits for incorporating research through design methods within qualitative research on crime and victimisation. Design offers a way of critically and creatively reimagining how research methods are understood and utilised, challenging how criminological methodologies traditionally operate.
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4

Colvin, Roddrick. "Shared workplace experiences of lesbian and gay police officers in the United Kingdom." Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 38, no. 2 (May 18, 2015): 333–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm-11-2014-0121.

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explores the contemporary workplace experiences of lesbian and gay officers who serve across the UK. Design/methodology/approach – Using an online survey, the research asked lesbian and gay officers to share their experiences in law enforcement environments. Acknowledging the changing climate in many law enforcement environments, this respondents here were asked to focus on both positive and negative experiences in the workplace. Findings – The responses of 243 police officers revealed that lesbian and gay officers face barriers to equal employment opportunities similar to those faced by women and other minorities in law enforcement, but lesbian officers appear to experience and witness lower levels of discrimination than gay male police officers. Attitudinal bias against lesbian and gay officers remains a significant problem in the force. Lesbian officers report feelings of tokenism at higher levels than gay male police officers. Research limitations/implications – Future research endeavors should analyze any differences between the experiences of different lesbians and gay men at different levels of visibility within law enforcement, including “out” and “closeted” officers. Research about when officers come out as lesbian or gay – during training, on the force, after they retire – would be insightful in understanding officers’ perceptions. Practical implications – The research suggests that police departments in the UK have made good strides in opening the law enforcement workforce, but continue to face on-going challenges in creating fair, diverse, and representative work environments for lesbian and gay officers. Specifically, agencies should review policies where supervisor have discretion over the employment-related actions. By not meetings the challenges of a more diverse workplace, agencies risk lower job satisfaction, and decreased police effectiveness, especially on community policing environments. Originality/value – This research joins a small, but growing body of research that offers specific barriers and opportunities – as perceived by the officers. As other agencies engage in efforts to recruit and retain diversity police forces, the results of this research can enhance policies and practices, with regards to lesbian and gay officers.
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5

Hunt, John. "Liaison nurses could benefit lesbian and gay patients." Nursing Standard 21, no. 25 (February 28, 2007): 26–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.7748/ns.21.25.26.s41.

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6

Charles, Mark W., and Leah M. Rouse Arndt. "Gay- and Lesbian-Identified Law Enforcement Officers." Counseling Psychologist 41, no. 8 (February 12, 2013): 1153–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0011000012472376.

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7

Miles-Johnson, Toby, and Jodi Death. "Compensating for Sexual Identity: How LGB and Heterosexual Australian Police Officers Perceive Policing of LGBTIQ+ People." Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 36, no. 2 (December 14, 2019): 251–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1043986219894431.

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Police officers are highly criticized for their differential policing of people categorized by identity. One such group who has experienced differential policing is the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ+) community. Contributing new knowledge to the extant policing literature regarding intersectional identities of Australian police officers and perceptions of policing, this research applies Social Identity Theory to understand differences between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and heterosexual self-identified general-duties police officers ( N = 349) and policing of LGBTIQ+ people. Using an online survey, results suggest the sexual identity of a general-duties police officer does shape perceptions of policing of LGBTIQ+ people. Furthermore, there are distinct differences in the way heterosexual and lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) self-identified officers perceive police engagement with LGBTIQ+ people, with LGB and heterosexual self-identified officers equally compensating for their sexual identity in terms of policing LGBTIQ+ people and distancing themselves from the LGBTIQ+ community.
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8

Colvin, Roddrick. "Shared Perceptions Among Lesbian and Gay Police Officers." Police Quarterly 12, no. 1 (October 10, 2008): 86–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1098611108327308.

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9

Lyons, Phillip M., Michael J. DeValve, and Randall L. Garner. "Texas Police Chiefs' Attitudes Toward Gay and Lesbian Police Officers." Police Quarterly 11, no. 1 (March 2008): 102–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1098611107302655.

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10

Clark, Bev. "Lesbian Activism in Zimbabwe." Issue: A Journal of Opinion 25, no. 2 (1997): 31–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047160700502686.

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“I don’t believe they (lesbians and homosexuals) have any rights at all.”President Robert Mugabe, 2 August 1995I remember that it was a Monday. I had been running with my partner over lunch time and we had just returned to my office in town. The doorbell rang and standing outside were about nine policemen and women. Demanding entry, one of the senior officers brandished a search warrant for “pornographic material.”I was so angry I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had been targeted simply because I worked for the national Zimbabwean lesbian and gay organization. Furthermore, the police had no broader agenda other than to intimidate and harass me under the pretext of searching for pornography.
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11

Jones, M. "Who Forgot Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Police Officers? Findings from a National Survey." Policing 9, no. 1 (January 23, 2015): 65–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/police/pau061.

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12

Ahlin, Eileen M., and Anne S. Douds. "Many Shades of Green: Assessing Awareness of Differences in Mental Health Care Needs Among Subpopulations of Military Veterans." International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 62, no. 10 (August 3, 2017): 3168–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306624x17723626.

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The current study sought to examine access to services by various veteran subgroups: racial/ethnic minorities, females, rural populations, and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer). Generally, the Veteran Service Officers (VSOs) interviewed for this study did not feel that these subgroups were well served by the program and treatment options presently available, and that other groups such as males and urban veterans received better access to necessary psychosocial and medical care. This research extends studies that explore overall connection to services by further demonstrating barriers to receipt of services by specific subgroups of veterans, particularly those at risk for involvement in the criminal justice system.
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13

Jones, Matthew, and Matthew L. Williams. "Twenty years on: lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers' experiences of workplace discrimination in England and Wales." Policing and Society 25, no. 2 (July 16, 2013): 188–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2013.817998.

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14

Klotzbaugh, Ralph, and Gale Spencer. "Cues-to-Action in Initiating Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender-Related Policies Among Magnet Hospital Chief Nursing Officers." Advances in Nursing Science 38, no. 2 (2015): 110–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/ans.0000000000000069.

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15

Mennicke, Annelise, Jill Gromer, Karen Oehme, and Lindsey MacConnie. "Workplace experiences of gay and lesbian criminal justice officers in the United States: a qualitative investigation of officers attending a LGBT law enforcement conference." Policing and Society 28, no. 6 (October 2016): 712–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2016.1238918.

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16

Stewart, Brenton, and Kaetrena Davis Kendrick. "“Hard to find”: information barriers among LGBT college students." Aslib Journal of Information Management 71, no. 5 (September 16, 2019): 601–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ajim-02-2019-0040.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine collegiate information barriers and perceptions of academic library climate among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) college students in the USA. Design/methodology/approach The primary method used for this investigation was an online crowdsourced survey of 105 participants who attended two and four-year colleges in the USA. The questionnaire used free word association where participants shared information barriers encountered on colleges’ campuses. Responses from each questionnaire were interpreted using open coding. Findings Information barriers around sexuality continue to be a challenge for non- heteronormative information seekers on college campuses. One-third of students had distinctive information needs around their sexuality and experienced information barriers from both the institution and social stigma. The study reveals an evolution in sexual minority students’ sense of self, which has moved beyond the binary identity of gay/lesbian explored in previous studies; students identified bisexuality as a salient information need, and described a campus environment that often erased bisexuality. The academic library was described as an information barrier due to inadequate sexual minority-related resources. Practical implications Academic librarians as well as higher education professionals, such as recruitment/admissions officers, student counseling services, student health and student affairs, can leverage the results of this study to help establish a more inclusive and welcoming information environment that empowers students for academic and personal success. Originality/value A limited number of studies in information science have focused on sexual minority college students’ information behaviors and even fewer on information barriers. This study presents new insight and deeper understanding of the collegiate information environment of LGBT identified students in the USA.
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17

Lefkovitz, Alison. "“The Peculiar Anomaly”: Same-Sex Infidelity in Postwar Divorce Courts." Law and History Review 33, no. 3 (July 1, 2015): 665–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0738248015000243.

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It was a simple tale of betrayal. In 1950, a Pennsylvania husband returned home from a business trip to find his wife—known to us today only by her initials CD—having sex with the female athletic director of a local school. This wife was only one of many women caught having sex with other women in the era following World War II. Although many closeted men and women enjoyed vibrant sexual and social lives in gay and lesbian communities, sometimes commanding officers, bosses, and police officers caught and punished men and women engaging in “deviant” sexual activity. Punishments ranged from arrests during a bar raid to a dismissal from a job. A double life in the public sphere was fragile. Scholars have paid less attention, however, to the insecure closeted lives of husbands and wives such as CD. Although certainly not all men and women who engaged in same-sex encounters entered traditional heterosexual marriages, many did. Their motivations for marrying ranged from the hope that marriage would cure same-sex desire to financial concerns. Sometimes, a husband or wife discovered his or her spouse's homosexual infidelity. A potential punitive outcome for this encounter was not an arrest, pink slip, or a dishonorable discharge; instead a spouse could end up in divorce court. Like the federal government, the military, the local police, and private employers, then, divorce courts also had to devise strategies and philosophies with which to deal with the problem of homosexuality.
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May, Jennifer, Jason Wheeler, Ames Simmons, Mark Hensley, Jerry O’Donnell, Joseph Wheeler, and Kirby Ellis. "HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN TO DEVELOP A LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARD FOR SKILLED NURSING FACILITIES." Innovation in Aging 6, Supplement_1 (November 1, 2022): 847–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igac059.3038.

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Abstract Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) adults will require inclusive skilled nursing care as they age, but there is a paucity in LGBTQ+ specific training resources for skilled nursing facility (SNF) healthcare workers. Development of community advisory boards is becoming common in research studies as funders place emphasis on stakeholder engagement, but how advisory boards are created with community member involvement at the onset remains less clear. This presentation describes the creation of a community advisory board of LGBTQ+ community members, community organizations, and SNF administrators that work together to develop LGBTQ+ resources for 25 SNFs. Advisory board members were identified using a design thinking framework and the Field Guide to Human-Centered Design. Potential board members were identified through networking with community-based organizations, existing relationships with SNFs, and by word of mouth. The advisory board consists of 3 LGBTQ+ adults, 4 SNF administrators, 1 AARP community outreach and advocacy associate director, 1 advocacy coordinator for LGBTQ+ older adults, 1 SNF physician liaison, and 1 nurse scientist. To gain buy-in, individual interviews and focus groups with potential advisory board members were conducted. Meetings provided an opportunity to describe project goals and how potential member’s expertise would guide development of resources. LGBTQ+ adult community members received compensation for their participation. The advisory board is meeting monthly and approaching the design phase. Community stakeholder involvement in early stages of development will help ensure that LGBTQ+ resources are relevant and applicable to enhance health and well-being of LGBTQ+ older adults in the future.
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Pearson, Kim. "Children Are Human." Texas A&M Law Review 8, no. 3 (May 2021): 495–536. http://dx.doi.org/10.37419/lr.v8.i3.2.

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There are great benefits to be had should the United States, one of the global leaders in economic strength and political power, ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (“CRC”). The mystery of the United States’s ultimate reluctance to ratify the CRC, despite the nation’s central role in the drafting process, has been interrogated for years. Scholars and policy- makers have developed compelling narratives regarding obstacles to the United States’s ratification and implementation of the CRC. However well- reasoned the arguments for ratification are, there has been little progress in persuading the United States to ratify the CRC. While the work toward ratification should continue on every level, informal implementation before ratification would be advantageous and in line with historical methods of reform in the United States. One area that has been over- looked to the advantage of minority and vulnerable populations is domestic relations courts in the United States. In the United States, children’s rights advocacy work should be conducted like cause advocacy for historically disfavored groups to achieve legal recognition and protection of their rights. For example, parenting equality efforts were primarily focused on creating change in individual courts over time, allowing advocates to teach judicial officers and other legal decision-makers about positive outcomes for children of lesbian and gay parents while dispelling myths, misperceptions, and negative stereotypes about sexual minorities. Similarly, other disfavored parents, like working mothers, religious, and racial minorities, have used individual court cases to advocate and educate until new, progressive norms are adopted as national standards. Advocates for children’s rights should adopt institutional change theory and tailor cause advocacy efforts to implement the CRC principles in local domestic relations courts. Focusing on change from within institutions may shift legal norms more quickly, so children are recognized as fully human and thus rights holders in the United States, rather than relying on external legislative changes.
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Vermaak, Roch� F. "The polity debate regarding gay and lesbian ordination and/or installation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)." Verbum et Ecclesia 31, no. 1 (March 29, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v31i1.51.

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The paper summarises the formation process of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)�s (PC(USA)) polity regarding the ordination and/or installation of partnered gays and lesbians as officers, i.e. deacons, elders and ministers of the Word and Sacrament, in light of General Assemblies� decisions and General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commissions� ecclesiastical rulings since the 1970's.
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Lunau, Marie, and Rikke Andreassen. "Surveillance practices among migration officers: Online media and LGBTQ+ refugees." International Journal of Cultural Studies, December 5, 2022, 136787792211401. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/13678779221140129.

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Examining Denmark as a case study, and focusing on LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in particular, this article investigates migration authorities’ use of online surveillance to assess claims for asylum. Drawing on interviews with migration officers and asylum seekers, the article describes how asylum seekers’ social media and phone content comes to determine whether they are seen as having a ‘genuine’ or a ‘fraudulent’ LGBTQ+ identity. The article further shows how surveillance implicates asylum seekers’ movement and (im)mobility, thereby ‘fixing’ their identities across time, preventing their ephemeral online engagement and, ultimately, affecting the outcome of their asylum claims. It also argues that the utilisation of surveillance technologies (for example, to review porn consumption and dating applications) favours gay (cis) men, while depriving lesbian, bisexual and transgender asylum seekers of opportunities to prove their identity.
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Vermaak, Roch� F. "The historical development of Presbyterian ordination polity as background to the gay and lesbian ordination debate in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)." Verbum et Ecclesia 31, no. 1 (March 29, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v31i1.50.

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The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. united in 1983 to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Since 1978, these three denominations have been involved in an ongoing debate regarding same-gender relationships. Subsequently, General Assemblies and General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commissions (GAPJC) � the highest denominational court � have formed a polity regarding the election and ordination and/or installation of gays and lesbians as officers, i.e. deacons, elders, and ministers of the Word and Sacrament, as well as same-gender blessings and marriages. This first of three papers will focus on the historical development of Presbyterian ordination polity with emphasis on specific markers such as the Adopting Act of 1729 with its emphasis on scrupling and essentials, the five fundamentals of 1910 and the Special Commission of 1925 regarding subscription, G-6.0106b Book of Order, and relevant GAPJC rulings.
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Cover, Rob. "Queer Youth Resilience: Critiquing the Discourse of Hope and Hopelessness in LGBT Suicide Representation." M/C Journal 16, no. 5 (August 24, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.702.

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Introduction Discourses of queer youth suicide regularly represent non-heterosexual young men as vulnerable and as victims who are inherently without strategies for coping with adversity (qv. Rasmussen; Marshall; Driver 3). Alternatively, queer youth are sometimes marked as fundamentally resilient, as avid users of tools of resilience and community such as the internet (Smith & Gray 74; Wexler et al. 566; Hillier & Harrison; Bryson & McIntosh). In the latter approach, protective factors are typically presented as specific to queer youth (e.g., Russell 10), therefore also minoritising and essentialising resilience. Both approaches ignore the diversity of queer young lives and the capacity for a subject to be both vulnerable and resilient—concepts which need to be unpacked if we are to further our understanding of minority lives. Significantly, both approaches also ignore the fact that growing up occurs in a series of transitions, cultural encounters and circumstantial changes. Queer (LGBT) youth are neither all victims and vulnerable, nor are they all self-reliant and resilient. Recent research has indicated that non-heterosexual youth continue to have a higher rate of suicide and self-harm (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide), although this is by no means indicative that vast numbers of LGBTI require support, intervention or preventative measures throughout all aspects of the transition into adult life. This article has two objectives, both of which are best addressed together in order to come at an understanding as how best to frame approaches to queer youth suicide as an ongoing social concern. Firstly, to ask what human, psychological and subjective ‘resilience’ might be said to mean in the context of public discourses of queer youth suicidality, and secondly to ask what a concept of ‘resilience’ does for queer youth identity in terms of relationality. Neither objective, of course, can be met alone in a short article—the purpose here is to open thinking on the topic in ways that question normative assumptions about the conditions of queer youth in the context of liveable lives and the positioning of resilience as reliant on normative accounts of identity. The article begins with a brief overview of the different uses of resilience in the context of broad social representations of queer youth. It goes on to discuss the It Gets Better video site which aimed to produce resilience among predominantly bullied queer youth by ‘imparting hope’. Some remarks on the relationship between identity, sexuality, sociality and resilience will conclude. Resilience and the Queer Youth Subject Developed by Crawford Holling in the 1970s, the concept of resilience was used to describe the capacity of a system to “absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables” (Holling 14). In terms of ecology and the physical sciences, the notion of resilience operates within an assumption that future events will not be known but will be unexpected, thereby requiring a capacity to accommodate those events whatever form they take (21). When later used in the psychological sciences, the term resilience likewise assumes disruption and uncertainty in lived experience, requiring a resilient subject to be capable in both learning and adaptation. In the context of queer youth, resilience, then, can be applied to mean an adaptation to new situations which exacerbate vulnerability to suicidality for those who are positioned to seek escape from intolerable emotional pain or the perception of life as unliveable (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide 10, 148). Resilience in this use presumes that, for example, bullying has a detrimental causal relationship with suicidality when it newly occurs if the subject does not have the capacity to adapt and incorporate it into everyday life. Bullying, however, is generally related to suicide only by virtue of its ongoingness rather than it being a sudden shift in social relations. Striking about much of the discourse of resilience in the psychological sciences is that the concept of resilience presumes a unitary subject who is a subject prior to relationality and sociality (e.g. Leipold & Greve; Singh et al.; Smith & Gray). Resilience is thus seen as a capacity to cope with adversity as if adversity arises prior to the subject rather than being a form of relationality that conditions the subject. In that context, the queer youth subject is understood in essentialist terms, whereby sexual subjectivity is represented simultaneously as both a norm and abnormal, and is a factor of subjectivity that is understood to pre-exist sociality. That is, the queer youth subject is queer before relationality with others, thereby before the kinds of relationalities that might demand resilience. An alternative is to understand queer youth not as vulnerable because they are queer, but as subjects constituted in the (inequitably distributed) precarity of corporeal life in sociality, and thereby already formed in (inequitably distributed) resilience to the sorts of shifts, changes and adversities that shift one from an experience of vulnerability to an experience of a life that is unliveable (Butler, Precarious Life; Frames of War). Approaching queer youth suicide from a perspective not of risk but through the simultaneous fostering and critique of resilience opens the possibility of providing solutions that aid younger persons to resist suicidality as a flight from intolerable pain without articulating the self as inviolable and thereby losing the ethical value of the recognition of vulnerability. The question, then, is whether such critique can be found in sites of resilience discourse in relation to queer youth. Queer Youth and It Gets Better The video blogging site It Gets Better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org) was begun by columnist Dan Savage in response to a spate of reported queer student suicides in September/October 2010 in the United States. The site hosts more than a thousand video contributions, many from queer adults who seek to provide hope for younger persons by showing that queer adulthood is markedly different from the experiences of harassment, bullying, loneliness or surveillance experienced by queer youth in school and family environments. This is among the first widely-available communicative media form to address directly queer youth on issues related to suicide, and the first to draw on lived experiences as a means by which to provide resources for queer youth resilience. The fact that these experiences are related through video-logs (vlogs) provides the texts with a greater sense of authenticity and a framework which often addresses youth directly on the topic of suicidality (Cover, Queer Youth Suicide). Savage’s intention was to produce resilience in queer youth by imparting ‘hope for young people facing harassment’ and to create ‘a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that … it does indeed get better’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/). Hope, in this context, is represented as the core attribute of queer youth resilience. The tag-line of the site is: Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/). Hope for the future is frequently presented as hope for an end to school days. In the primary video of the site, Dan Savage’s partner Terry describes his school experiences: My school was pretty miserable … I was picked on mercilessly in school. People were really cruel to me. I was bullied a lot. Beat up, thrown against walls and lockers and windows; stuffed into bathroom stalls. . . . Honestly, things got better the day I left highschool. I didn’t see the bullies every day, I didn’t see the people who harassed me every day, I didn’t have to see the school administrators who would do nothing about it every day. Life instantly got better (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/pages/about-it-gets-better-project/) Such comments present a picture of school life in which the institutional norms of secondary schools that depend so heavily on surveillance, discriminative norms, economies of secrecy and disclosure permit bullying and ostracisation to flourish and become, then, the site of hopelessness in what to many appears at the time as a period of never-ending permanency. Indeed, teen-aged life has often been figured in geographic terms as a kind of hopeless banishment from the realities that are yet to come: Eve Sedgwick referred to that period as ‘that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood’ (4). The emphatic focus on the institutional environment of highschool rather than family, rural towns, closetedness, religious discourse or feelings of isolation is remarkably important in changing the contemporary way in which the social situation of queer youth suicide has been depicted. The discourse of the It Gets Better project and contributions makes ‘school’ its object—a site that demands resilience of its queer students as the remedy to the detrimental effects of bullying. Here, however, resilience is not depicted as adaptability but the strength to tolerate and, effectively, ‘wait out’, a bullying environment. The focus on bullying that frames the dialogue on queer youth suicide and youth resilience in the It Gets Better videos is the product of a mid-2000s shift in focus to the effects of bullying on LGBT youth in place of critiques of heterosexism, sexual identity, coming out and physical violence (Fodero), regularly depicting bullying as directly causal of suicide (Kim & Leventhal 151; Espelage & Swearer 157; Hegna & Wichstrøm 35). Bullying, in these representations, is articulated as that which is, on the one hand, preventable through punitive institutional policies and, on the other, as an ineradicable fact of living through school years. It is, in the latter depiction, that experience for which younger LGBT persons must manage their own resistance. In depicting school as the site of anti-queer bullying, the It Gets Better project represents queer youth as losing hope of escape from the intolerable pain of bullying in its persistence and repetition. However, the site’s purpose is to show that escape from the school environment to what is regularly depicted as a neoliberal, white and affluent representation of queer adulthood, founded on conservative coupledom (Cover, “Object(ives) of Desire”), careers, urban living, and relative wealth—depictions somewhat different from the reality of diverse queer lives. The shift from the school-bullying in queer youth to the liberal stability of queer adulthood is figured in the It Gets Better discourse as not only possible but as that which should be anticipated. It is in that anticipation that resilience is articulated in a way which calls upon queer youth to manage their own resiliency by having or performing hopefulness. Representing hope as the performative element in queer youth resilience has precedence as a suicide prevention strategy. Hopelessness is a key factor in much of the contemporary academic discussion of suicide risk in general and is often used as a predictor for recognising suicidal behaviour (Battin 13), although it is also particularly associated with suicidality and queer teenagers. Hopelessness is usually understood as despair or desperateness, the lack of expectation of a situation or goal one desires or feels one should desire. For Holden and colleagues, hopelessness is counter to social desirability, which is understood as the capacity to describe oneself in terms by which society judges a person as legitimate or desirable (Holden, Mendonca & Serin 500). Psychological and psychiatric measurement techniques frequently rely on Aaron T. Beck’s Hopelessness Scale, which utilises a twenty-question true/false survey designed to measure feelings about the future, expectation and self-motivation in adults over the age of seventeen years as a predictor of suicidal behaviour. Beck and colleagues attempted to provide an objective measurement for hopelessness rather than leave it treated as a diffuse and vague state of feeling in patients with depression. The tool asks a series of questions, most about the future, presenting a score on whether or not the answers given were true or false. Questions include: ‘I might as well give up because I can’t make things better for myself’; ‘I can’t imagine what my life would be like in ten years’; ‘My future seems dark to me’; and ‘All I can see ahead of me is unpleasantness rather than pleasantness’. Responding true to these indicates hopelessness. Responding false to some of the following also indicates hopelessness: ‘I can look forward to more good times than bad times’; and ‘When things are going badly, I am helped by knowing they can’t stay that way forever’ (Beck). While these questions and the scale are not used uncritically, the relationship between the discursive construction through the questions of what constitutes hopelessness and the aims of the It Gets Better videos are notably comparable. The objective, then, of the videos is to provide evidence and, perhaps, instil hope that would allow such questions to be answered differently, particularly to be able to give a true response to the last question above. Hallway Allies liaison support group, which operates across university campuses and high schools to prevent bullying, stated in this representative way in the introduction to their video contribution: ‘Remember to keep your head up, highschool doesn’t last forever’ (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video /entry/5wwozgwyruy/). Or, as Rebecca in the introductory statement of another video contribution put it: You may be feeling like this pain will last forever, like you have no control, it’s dark, oppressive and feels like there is no end. I know – I get it. but I promise … hang in there and you’ll find it … Wait – you’ll see – it gets better! (http://www.itgetsbetter.org/video/entry/wxymqzw3oqy/). As can be seen, such video examples respond to a discourse of hopelessness aligned with the framework exemplified by Beck’s scale, prompting queer youth audiences of these videos to imagine a future for themselves, to understand hope in temporal terms of future wellbeing, and to know that the future does not necessarily hold the same kinds of unpleasantness as experienced in the everyday high school environment. Sexual Identity, Resilience and the Normative Lifecycle In the It Gets Better framework, resilience is produced in the knowledge of a queer life that is linear and patterned through stages in relation to institutional forms of belonging (and non-belonging). That is, a queer life is represented as one which undergoes the hardship of being bullied in school, of leaving that institutional environment for a queer adulthood that is built on a myth of safety, pleasure, success and a distinctive break from the environment of the past (as if the psyche or the self is re-produced anew in a phase of a queer lifecycle). Working within a queer theoretical and cultural understanding of identity, sexual subjectivity can be understood as constituted in social and cultural formations. Overturning the previously-held liberal notion of power as the power which represses sex and sexualities, Foucault’s History of Sexuality provided queer theory with an argument in which power, as deployed through discourse and discursive formations, produces the coherent sexual subject. This occurs historically and only in specific periods. In Foucault’s analysis, homosexual identities become conceivable in the Nineteenth Century as a result of specific juridical, medical and criminal discourses (85). From a Foucauldian perspective, there is no subject driven by an inner psyche or a pre-determined desire (as in psychoanalysis). Instead, such subjectivity occurs in and through the power/knowledge network of discourse as it writes or scripts the subject into subjectivity. Canonical queer theorist Judith Butler has been central in extending Foucault’s analysis in ways which are pragmatic for understanding queer youth in the context of growing up and transitioning into adulthood. Her theory of performativity has usefully complexified the ways in which we can understand sexual identity and allowed us to overcome the core assumption in much queer youth research that heterosexual and homosexual identities are natural, mutually-exclusive and innate; instead, allowing us to focus on how the process of subject formation for youth is implicated in the tensions and pressures of a range of cultural, social, organisational and communicative encounters and engagements. Butler projects the most useful post-structuralist discussion of subjectivity by suggesting that the subject is constituted by repetitive performances in terms of the structure of signification that produces retroactively the illusion of an inner subjective core (Butler, Gender Trouble 143). Queer identity becomes a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience, and is the resultant effect of regimentary discursive practices (16, 18). The non-heterosexual subject, then, is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are formed as recognisable identity performances in the context, here, of a set of lifecycle expectations built through a vulnerable queer childhood, being bullied, attaining hope, leaving school and fruition in queer adulthood. Resilience, in the It Gets Better discourse, then, is seen to be produced in understanding the stages of a normative queer life. An issue emerges for how queer youth suicide is understood within this particular formation that posits non-heterosexuality as the problematic source of suicidality emerges in the assumption that the vulnerability to suicidal behaviours for queer youth is the result singularly of sexuality, rather than looking to the fact that sexuality is one facet of identity – an important and sometimes fraught one for adolescents in general – located within a complex of other formations of identity and selfhood. This is part of what Diana Fuss has identified as the “synecdochical tendency to see only one part of a subject’s identity (usually the most visible part) and to make that part stand for the whole” (116). This ignores the opportunity to think through the conditions of queer youth in terms of the interaction between different facets of identity (such as gender and ethnicity, but also personal experience), different contexts in which identity is performed and different institutional settings that vary in response and valuation of non-normative aspects of subjectivity, thereby allowing a vulnerability not to be an attribute of being a queer youth, but to be understood as produced across a nuanced and complex array of factors. While the very concept of resilience invokes both an individualisation of the subject and a disciplinary regime of pastoral care (Foucault, Abnormal), queer youth in the It Gets Better discourse of hope are depicted multiply as: Inherently vulnerable and lacking resilience as a result of an essentialist notion of sexual orientation.Constituted in a relationality within a schooling environment that is conditioned by bullying as the primary expression of diverse socialityFinding resilience only through a self-managed and self-articulated expression of ‘hope’ that is to be produced in the knowledge that there is an ‘escape’ from a school environment. What the discourse of that which we might refer to as “resilient hopefulness” does is represent queer youth reductively as inherently non-resilient. It ignores the multiple expressions of sexual identity, the capacity to respond to suicidality through a critique of normative sexual subjectivity, and the capabilities of queer youth to develop meaningful relationships across all sexual possibilities that are, themselves, forms of resilience or at least mitigations of vulnerability. At the same time, “resilient hopefulness” is produced within a context in which a normative sociality of bullying culture is expressed as timeless and unchangeable (rather than historical and institutional), thereby requiring queer younger persons to undertake the task of managing vulnerability, risk, resilience and identity as an individualised responsibility outside of communities of care. Whether the presentation of a normative lifecycle is genuinely a preventative measure for queer youth suicidality is that which suicidologists and practitioners must test, although one might argue at this stage that resilience is better produced through a broader appeal to social diversity rather than the regimentation of a queer life that must ‘wait in hope’ for a liveability that may never come. References Battin, Margaret Pabst. Ethical Issues in Suicide. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Beck, Aaron T., Arlene Weissman, Larry Trexler, and David Lester. “The Measurement of Pessimism: The Hopelessness Scale” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42.6 (1974): 861–865. Bryson, Mary K., and Lori B. MacIntosh. “Can We Play ‘Fun Gay’?: Disjuncture and Difference, and the Precarious Mobilities of Millennial Queer Youth Narratives.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 101-124. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009. Cover, Rob. “Object(ives) of Desire: Romantic Coupledom versus Promiscuity, Subjectivity and Sexual Identity.”Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.2 (2010): 251-263. Cover, Rob. Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? London: Ashgate, 2012. Driver, Susan. “Introducing Queer Youth Cultures.” Queer Youth Cultures. Ed. Susan Driver. Albany, NY: SUNY Press (2008). 1-18. Espelage, Dorothy L., and Susan M. Swearer. “Addressing Research Gaps in the Intersection between Homophobia and Bullying.” School Psychology Review 37.2 (2008): 155–159. Fodero, Lisa. “Teen Violinist Dies after Student Internet Lark.” The Age, 1 Oct. 2010. 1 Oct. 2010 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/world/>. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin, 1990. Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975. Eds. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salmoni. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2004. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. Hegna, Kristinn, and Lars Wichstrøm. “Suicide Attempts among Norwegian Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youths: General and Specific Risk Factors.” Acta Sociologica 50.1 (2007): 21–37. Hillier, Lynne, and Lyn Harrison. “Building Realities Less Limited than Their Own: Young People Practising Same-Sex Attraction on the Internet.” Sexualities 10.1 (2007): 82-100. Holden, Ronald R., James C. Mendonca and Ralph C. Serin. “Suicide, Hopelessness, and social desirability: A Test of an Interactive Model.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57.4 (1989): 500–504. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stabity of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1-23. Kim, Young Shin, and Bennett Leventhal. “Bullying and Suicide. A Review.” International Journal of Adolescent Medical Health 20.2 (2008): 133–154. Leipold, Bernhard, and Werner Greve. “Resilience: A Conceptual Bridge between Coping and Development.” European Psychologist 14.1 (2009): 40-50. Marshall, Daniel. “Popular Culture, the ‘Victim’ Trope and Queer Youth Analytics.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23.1 (2010): 65-86. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. Becoming Subjects: Sexualities and Secondary Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2006. Russell, Stephen T. “Beyond Risk: Resilience in the Lives of Sexual Minority Youth.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Issues in Education 2.3 (2005): 5-18. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel.” GLQ 1.1 (1993): 1–14. Singh, Anneliese A., Danica G. Hays, and Larel S. Watson. “Strength in the Face of Adversity: Resilience Strategies of Transgender Individuals.” Journal of Counseling & Development 89.1 (2011): 20-27. Smith, Mark. S., and Susan W. Gray. “The Courage to Challenge: A New Measure of Hardiness in LGBT Adults.” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 21.1 (2009): 73-89. Wexler, Lisa Marin, Gloria DiFluvio, and Tracey K. Burke. “Resilience and Marginalized Youth: Making a Case for Personal and Collective Meaning-Making as Part of Resilience Research in Public Health.” Social Science & Medicine 69.4 (2009): 565-570.
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Deffenbacher, Kristina. "Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto." M/C Journal 22, no. 4 (August 14, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1518.

Full text
Abstract:
Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.
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