Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

    Drawing on a wide variety of films and primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials, fanzines, men's magazines, and popular news weeklies, the book examines the historical figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious and social models of homosexuality. While recent work within gay and lesbian studies has explored how the genetic tropes of the horror film intersect with popular culture's understanding of queerness, this is the first book to examine how the concept of the monster queer has evolved from era to era. From the gay and lesbian sensibilities encoded into the form and content of the classical Hollywood horror film, to recent films which play upon AIDS-related fears. Monster in the Closet examines how the horror film started and continues, to demonize (or quite literally "monsterize") queer sexuality, and what the pleasures and "costs" of such representations might be both for individual spectators and culture at large.

    They discuss the themes which have fuelled their work, from sex, gender, race, fashion, the body and nature. the photographers featured include Della Grace, Jill Posener, Morgan Gwenwald and Honey Lee Cottrell.

    Here are accounts of revealing one's sexual identity to parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and, in one notable instance, to a stockbroker. Men tell of their first sexual encounters from their preteens to their thirties, with childhood friends who rejected or tenderly embraced them, with professors, with neighbors, with a Broadway star. These are poignant, sometimes unexpectedly funny tales of romance and heartbreak, repression and liberation, rape and first love defining moments that shaped their authors' lives. Arranged chronologically from Manhattan in the Forties to San Francisco in the Nineties, these essays ultimately form a documentary of changing social and sexual mores in the United States--a literary, biographical, sociological and historical tour de force.

    Suffragettes to She-Devils captures the excitement of women's revolutionary campaigns and movements from the vibrant visual identity of the militant suffragettes, through the humour and sniping of the cartoons of Women's Lib in the sixties, to the virtual-reality explorations of end-of-the-century cyberfeminists. It studies the developing role of graphics and related media in the struggle for women's liberation, focusing on the way women have used graphics as a tool for their empowerment - finding a voice through visual or graphic means.

    The Western notion of the aggressive, sexually dominant male and the passive female reaches back through Freud to Roman times, but as Boyarin makes clear, such gender roles are not universal. Analyzing ancient and modern texts, he reveals early rabbis—studious, family-oriented—as exemplars of manhood and the prime objects of female desire in traditional Jewish society.Challenging those who view the "feminized Jew" as a pathological product of the Diaspora or a figment of anti-Semitic imagination, Boyarin argues that the Diaspora produced valuable alternatives to the dominant cultures' overriding gender norms. He finds the origins of the rabbinic model of masculinity in the Talmud, and though unrelentingly critical of rabbinic society's oppressive aspects, he shows how it could provide greater happiness for women than the passive gentility required by bourgeois European standards.Boyarin also analyzes the self-transformation of three iconic Viennese modern Jews: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; and Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.), the first psychoanalytic patient and founder of Jewish feminism in Germany. Pappenheim is Boyarin's hero: it is she who provides him with a model for a militant feminist, anti-homophobic transformation of Orthodox Jewish society today.Like his groundbreaking Carnal Israel, this book is talmudic scholarship in a whole new light, with a vitality that will command attention from readers in feminist studies, history of sexuality, Jewish culture, and the history of psychoanalysis.

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    Tracing the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, We AreEverywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within the movement; and finally, alook at the future of lesbian and gay politics.

    Between the Sheets, In the Streets considers these videos and films, testifying to the unavoidable connections between sexuality (the sheets) and activism (the streets) for all who identify as gay, lesbian, or queer in the 1990s.Among the topics discussed are representations of young queers on such shows as MTV's The Real World; pre-Stonewall films; portrayals of lesbians and aging; video activism in Oregon and the South; and the works of Derek Jarman, Su Friedrich, Cheryl Dunye, and Sadie Benning. A range of films and videos is examined, including Strangers in Good Company, Paris Is Burning, Juggling Gender, Silverlake Life, and Without You I'm Nothing.

    Thousands have attended its events, featuring hundreds of scholars, activists, and cultural workers; many thousands more have lamented how they would have liked to have been there. With this book, they finally, vicariously, can be.Divided into five parts--on identities as they revolve around gender and sexuality; on the terrains of homosexual history; on mind-body relations; on laws and economics; and on policy issues related to gay youth, AIDS, and aging--A Queer World offers a compelling panorama of gay and lesbian life. Featuring the work, among others, of such figures as Yukiko Hanawa, Will Roscoe, Jewelle L. Gomez, Jonathan Ned Katz, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Jeffrey Escoffier, Janice M. Irvine, Kendall Thomas, Gilbert Herdt, Vivien Ng, Douglas Crimp, Walt Odets, Serena Nanda, Cindy Patton, Michael Moon, William Byne, and Randolph Trumback, A Queer World is distinctive in its focus on the social sciences and issues relating to public policy. Consisting largely of previously unpublished essays, this volume--and its companion volume Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures--is an invaluable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the study of sexuality.

    Analyzing different instances of injured bodies, Peggy Phelan considers what sustained attention to the affective force of trauma might yield for critical theory. Advocating what she calls "performative writing", she creates an extraordinary fusion of critical and creative thinking which erodes the distinction between art and theory, fact and fiction. The bodies she examines here include Christ's, as represented in Caravaggio's painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, Anita Hill's and Clarence Thomas's bodies as they were performed during the Senate hearings, the disinterred body of the Rose Theatre, exemplary bodies reconstructed through psychoanalytic talking cures, and the filmic bodies created by Tom Joslin, Mark Massi, and Peter Friedman in Silverlake Life: The View From Here. This new work by the highly-acclaimed author of Unmarked makes a stunning advance in performance theory in dialogue with psychoanalysis, queer theory, and cultural studies.

    Gay Liberation in the Words of Its FounderThis is the first collection of the words and speeches of the founder of the Mattachine Society and the modern gay movement, and "provides wonderful glimpses into Hay's evolution from Marxist pedant to shamanic faerie elder."