Brendan Maclean’s House of Air (2017) music video is a campy enfleshment of the structuralist aesthetics of Gay Semiotics (1977), Hal Fischer’s photography series of sex codes for gay men in San Francisco. In House of Air, queer sex is on full display (concocted from foodstuffs): golden showers, fecal smearing, and semen ejaculated onto the nonbinary star performers face—all set to a bouncy, synth pop beat. Within weeks, the video becomes a meme hoax, shared to trick people into watching explicit content. House of Air is forcibly removed by YouTube for its failure to meet community guidelines, but the viral uptake of House of Air reveals a continued, public paranoia around contagion as thousands voice their repulsion. Queer audiences claim that they are “too vanilla” to appreciate the music video, while others comment that the performers are destined to live “forever in the House of AIDS.” In 2020, Yekaterina Lakhova implores Vladimir Putin to ban an ice cream product called Rainbow for “promoting homosexual behavior.” Ukrainian and Russian TikTok creators, mostly Gen-Z, use the song “House of Air” as a viral sound to mock the prohibition of colourful desserts. They kiss, dance, and lick rainbow cones to the rhythm of Maclean’s lyrics, “we talk / without a word.” Thinking transnationally with virality (as theorized by Jih-Fei Cheng), I argue that House of Air’s “queer gestures function as viruses,” allowing covert forms of communication and survival through humour. Sweet aesthetics and sounds figure uncanny queerness in the world of the music video. As this sound replicates on TikTok, a transnational history of HIV/AIDS can be sensed and downloaded for further use.
Keywords: taste, HIV/AIDS, TikTok, transnational studies, queer sex

Linda Brancaleone √ (Law, Economy and Sociology, University "Magna Græcia", Greece)

Queer, Diversity and Intimacy: Some Reflections about Law and Humanities from "Sense8"

Sense8 is a science fiction tv-series that aired on Netflix from 2015 to 2018. The plot of the series focuses on the mental - and science fictional - connection that the eight main characters have; they’re all born at the same time, in the same day, but they are all different from each other. The use of science fictional scenarios in the series makes the bond between the characters clearer, reflecting the cultural, sexual and ethnic diversity of our society and of all of them as well. By analyzing the plot and, specifically, the main characters of Sense8, one will proceed to analyze the relation between citizenship, identity (especially from the point of view on law Queer Theory and Critical Legal Studies offer), intimacy and law, underlining how helpful law can be in the comprehension of our reality which is more and more “liquid” and differentiated.
Keywords: Queer, Critical Theories of Law, Law and Humanities, Belonging, Science-fiction

Mark Lipton ∆ (University of Guelph)

Sensory Pedagogy, Queer Methods and the Urgency of Queer and Trans* Joy

Social research related to any minority status group takes a deficit model to assess how oppressive and structural forces impact the lives of people outside society's norms. This leads to social myths and epistemic forces directing how society senses the meanings of each particular community--more, these narratives often drive of these 'other' people learn to sense themselves. Current divisive political discourse, promoted through platforms that amplify misinformation can lead dangerously close to bleak hopelessness. Activities related to sensory pedagogy and queer methods highlight the urgency of queer and trans* joy. Let's welcome a little joy into our lives as we sense the social world together.
Keywords: queer methods, queer and trans* joy, pedagogy, embodiment