Shane Vogel

Divorce, American Style: The Letitia Ernestine Brown Case

Panel Abstract: This panel suggests that, for some, the distinction between official publics and counter-publics has never been clear. For many racialized, queer, and gendered subjects the public is a highly contested, deeply regulated space for the body marked by difference who is forced to perform in accordance with the coordinates of social, legislative, and ideological subjection. In turn, the seemingly oppositional spaces of the counter-public have been structured by their own terms of exclusion and limits of possibility. These papers address minoritarian performances that realize sites of belonging that negotiate the space between public and counter-public. Balance assesses Most Wanted, a musical based on the life of Andrew Cunanan, alongside other queer Filipino cultural production, to mount a critique of the politics of racial and sexual publicity and visibility. Chambers-Letson studies immigration law that obscures public recognition of children born from U.S. military expansion abroad, turning to recent performances by and about war babies that offer alternative models of political belonging beyond the official categories of race and nation. Scheper examines Showtime’s L-Word as policytainment that challenged the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy as well as 15 years of homonormative strategies by advocacy groups, demonstrating how public/counter-public rubrics fail to capture the politics of race, gender, and militarization in DADT debates. Finally, Vogel’s study of a 1920’s interracial divorce case critiques the paradigm of public and private? race defined by the concept of passing, arguing for different models of racial performativity as the location for the deconstruction of race.