Please join the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies for a talk with Shane T. Moreman, PhD, Department of Communication, California State University, Fresno, titled “Displaced Practices of Discursive Change Circulations of Social Justice Ephemeralities within a Leather Bar Context.” 

"While not the only ones, three normative discourses still dominate U.S. Western society: Whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality. As a critical communication scholar working through a performance studies paradigm, my work codifies these discourses with the goal of recognizing moments of social justice reconstitutions. My latest communication performance ethnography focuses on discursive interactions within a leather gay bar—Falcon—located in a mostly commercial neighborhood on the northeast side of a major U.S. northwestern city. I am drawn to learn how Whiteness and its adjacent cis male and masculine positionalities are circulating within contemporary, shifting registers of social codes around race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. As the world changes, how are these discourses adapting and changing? Steeped within the Whiteness, cis-maleness, and masculinity of a leather gay bar context, Falcon is a context for a bar culture that modulates and incorporates macro-level discursive conceptions into its localized performative acts all situated within contemporary frameworks. Influenced by Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, and José Esteban Muñoz, I embrace a ontoepistemological approach so as to empirically cruise Falcon for creativity that disrupts normative reductions and advances complex co-existence. As Whiteness and its adjacent cis male and masculine positionalities co-mingle with contemporary expressions of nonnormative race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, I observe moments of co-mmuning and possibly co-muting with transness, nonbinariness, and gender diversity. When normativity tries to adapt to queer worldmaking, how are those adaptations manifested in the moment? In what ways are social codes reconfigured to generate a better presence? And, as queer worldmaking is ephemeral, what might we move forward with to improve the normative worlds in which we all predominantly must exist—at least for now? I begin answering those questions as a joto with a tequila soda in my hand at a mostly White, mostly cis male, and mostly masculine leather gay bar named Falcon."