https://doi.org/10.51897/interalia/BTUS6277
Editorial
InterAlia Editorial Board
Abstract
The 19th issue of InterAlia is characterized by geographical diversity – from India, through Norway, Slovakia and Poland, to the Iberian Peninsula – as well as disciplinary diversity – from the social sciences to linguistics and literary studies.
Swakshadip Sarkar acknowledges the considerable progress in India in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, but points out that the queer movement is limited to relatively privileged English-speaking queer urbanites and insists that this movement should address the needs of hitherto marginalized sexual subalterns, such as Dalit and Muslim youth, sex workers, those living in rural areas, and the disabled.
Daniel Lenghart, Michal Čerešník, Martin Dolejš and Nikoleta Kontová report on a quantitative psychological study that assessed Slovakian boys’ and girls’ susceptibility to unsubstantiated claims and myths about LGBTQ+ behaviour, in an age when the new media facilitate the spread of misinformation and disinformation about non normative sexuality and gender. The study, which included both heterosexually- and homosexually-identified teenage girls and boys, reveals high levels of homonegativity, binegativity, and transnegativity in both cohorts, but particularly among heterosexually-identified boys. The article closes with an interesting discussion of the results, as well as suggestions for systemic ways to remedy the situation.
Joanna Chojnicka analyses transgender expressions and terminology in Polish, dating from the state-socialist era to the present. While pointing to the many borrowings which characterize the trans* sociolect, she insists that the language mix illustrates trans* individuals’ inventiveness and sovereignty rather than their cultural dependence on the anglophone West.
Anna Artwich’s comparative reading of selected contemporary Polish and Norwegian theatre plays points up their common reliance on camp sensibility and a simultaneous divergence in how they use camp: Polish playwrights use it to expose social issues, while their Norwegian counterparts make a lighter use of it by playing with camp esthetics.
Finally, Álvaro González Montero examines the Catalan writer and queer theorist David Vilaseca’s diary Els homes i els dies for tensions and connections between universality and particularity, resistance and integration, kinship and individualism. Calling on Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and on theoretical writings by Edelman, Laclau and Muñoz, as well as by Villaseca himself, Montero provides a comprehensive picture of an instance of queer Catalan life-writing from the last decade of the twentieth century.
