PISSAR's Critically Queer and Disabled Politics

Reproducing and Transgressing Masculinity: A Rhetorical Analysis of Women Interacting With Digital Photographs of Thomas Beatie

“…Transgender studies in the field of communication are on the rise as well (e.g., Booth, 2011;Chavez, 2010;MacKenzie & Marcel, 2009;Reed, 2009;Sloop, 2004;West, 2008West, , 2010. There is a lot to learn from this literature, but two important points for my research questions are the following: there are possibilities for gender transgression, even when norms are reiterated, and it is the role of critical analysis to point out those possibilities.…”

Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest

“…54 Similarly, PISSAR (People in Search of Safe and Accessible Bathrooms) transformed public bathrooms ''into a space of coalitional politics'' by holding their meetings in bathrooms. 55 In these examples, the place itself is temporarily transformed to challenge dominant (and oppressive) meanings and replace them with places of safety and empowerment.…”

The Moral Panics of Sexuality

“…Pornography's explicit focus on bodies and bareback porn's fetishizing of semen (HIV infected or not) and "cum-swapping" (the explicit exchange of semen between men whether from penis to anus, penis to mouth, anus to mouth or mouth to mouth) serve as shameful representations of queerness that contradict the assimilationist model of a politics of respectability. West (2010) also intimates that the imagery of bathrooms is too closely aligned to a "shameful" history of gay male sex in public restrooms and so remains unaddressed by the mainstream gay and lesbian movement. Surely, the blatant sexuality of pornography serves as a distancing element in this manner as well.…”

“…As Isaac West (2010) has commented in relation to the reticence of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement concerning bathroom politics for both transgendered and disabled queers, both the body and its abjections (piss and shit and perhaps semen?) serve as potential sites of shame that gay and lesbian politics consistently avoid.…”