It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

    Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature.

    nation-state, of Native peoplehood, and of the roles culture plays in processes of political expression and identification. Recent bans on same-sex marriage within the Cherokee and Navajo nations suggest the importance of charting the relationship between discourses of sexuality and dominant ideologies of political legitimacy. Exploring how marriage, family, homemaking, kinship, personal identity, and everyday experience are linked to legal institutions and public policy, the contributors investigate the complex interweaving of histories of queerness and indigeneity.Challenging operative assumptions in these two fields by putting them into dialogue, the collection opens up new ways of approaching the matrix of settlement, sexuality, and sovereignty. One essay cross-examines the heterosexism of the Cherokee government’s outlawing of same-sex marriage by revisiting that culture’s traditional embrace of variation. Another essay theorizes the politics of visibility surrounding Native writers whose work takes a queer turn but who do not publicly contest the presumption of their straightness. Several essays address the possibilities and limits of queer theoretical frameworks in conceptualizing the legacies of settler colonialism. The final essay traces the history of gendercide in Native California and argues for the recovery of traditional notions of two-spirit identity within contemporary projects of decolonization.

    This volume contains the texts of 39 interviews Milk did for newspapers, radio, and television, in which he describes his life, struggles, strategies, and dreams. It includes transcripts from three famous debates between Milk and John Briggs over the notorious Proposition 6 Briggs Initiative. This groundbreaking treasure trove provides insights into how Milk viewed the economic, social, sexual, and political issues that shape our lives today.

    Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, using the same narrative tools as the rabbis of old, Ramer has crafted stories that anchor LGBT lives in the three thousand year old history of the Jewish people. "The universe is made up of stories, not atoms," wrote poet Muriel Ruckeyser. The stories in this book will transport you to a new universe the one we are striving to create, right here and now.

    This pocket-sized book of archival texts lays out some of the historical foundations of queer resistance to the gay marriage mainstream alongside more contemporary inter-subjective critiques that deal directly with issues of race, class, gender, citizenship, age, ability, and more. In portable book form, the critical conversations that are happening so readily on the internet will no longer be withheld from those with little to no online access like queer and trans prisoners, people of low income, rural folks and the technologically challenged. Contributors include Kate Bornstein, Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, Craig Willse, Kenyon Farrow, Kate Raphael, Deeg, John D’Emilio, Ryan Conrad, Yasmin Nair, Martha Jane Kaufman, Katie Miles, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.- - -"Against Equality makes the powerful argument that same-sex marriage is an essentially conservative cause, an effort to prop up a fundamentally unfair system. As an alternative, it offers us the inspiring vision of a truly radical queer politics, devoted to attacking injustice, not just allowing a few more gay people to benefit from it." – Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality"Rather than being merely anti-marriage, the book deliberately articulates multiple alternative visions – such as building and valuing our own grassroots familial 'networks of accountability' – thus edging us closer to true 'equality,' or dare I say liberation, celebrating our differences as queers. – Jessica Max Stein (Make/Shift Magazine)"A powerful, moving read from a side often overlooked by mainstream society. A must read for anyone 'for' or 'against' gay marriage." – Steve Mason (California State Inmate/Queer Librarian)[This Anthology] brings to light that a venomous black-and-white rhetorical split has developed on gay marriage. The dichotomous engagement with the issue is damaging to the cohesion of the GLBTQ community and stops discussions short. This collection offers valuable, if controversial, much needed nuance to a radically fractured debate." – Ericka Steckle (Bitch Magazine)

    notions of normality and shifting forms of Native American governance and self-representation. Examining a wide range of texts (including captivity narratives, fiction, government documents, andanthropological tracts), Mark Rifkin offers a cultural and literary history of the ways Native peoples have been inserted into Euramerican discourses of sexuality and how Native intellectuals have sought to reaffirm their peoples' sovereignty and self-determination.

    The articles selected for this anthology are written by some of the most active researchers in the field and address a broad cross-section of topics. These articles were specifically chosen to complement the basic material available in most current textbooks on love and relationships, and to provide a more in-depth look at some of the hottest areas of current research, including the neurobiology of bonding, long-term predictors of marital satisfaction and stability, same-sex relationships, intimate violence, and the health implications of love. The mix of empirical articles and chapters make the book lively and interesting, providing a balance between breadth and depth, and allowing even non-psychology students to get a close-up perspective on this exciting topic. The editor, Dr. Lisa M. Diamond, integrates a broad cross-section of readings that reflect the diverse methodological and theoretical approaches taken to this topic. The result is an accessible, insightful collection of readings that can be used as a standalone teaching text or supplement the range of textbooks current available on this topic. Lisa M. Diamond is Associate Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She received her Ph.D. in Human Development from Cornell University. Dr. Diamond is an internationally-recognized expert on female sexuality and specifically on female sexual fluidity, and is best known for her unprecedented 15-year longitudinal study of 100 lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, and unlabeled women. Her 2008 book, Sexual Fluidity, published by Harvard University Press, has been awarded the Distinguished Book award from the International Association for Relationship Research. Dr. Diamond has received other numerous awards for her work from the American Association of University Women, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, and the American Psychological Association."

    The author demonstrates that representations of racialization actually depend on the sexual and that a racialized sexuality is an unrecognized organizing principle of Chican@ literature.

    Delany, Extravagant Abjection asks: If we're racialized through domination and abjection, what is the political, personal, and psychological potential in racialization-through-abjection? Using the figure of male rape as a lens through which to examine this question, Scott argues that blackness in relation to abjection endows its inheritors with a form of counter-intuitive power--indeed, what can be thought of as a revised notion of black power. This power is found at the point at which ego, identity, body, race, and nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary. Yet in Extravagant Abjection, "power" assumes an unexpected and paradoxical form.In arguing that blackness endows its inheritors with a surprising form of counter-intuitive power--as a resource for the political present--found at the very point of violation, Extravagant Abjection enriches our understanding of the construction of black male identity.

    Cohen offers an authoritative and empirically powerful analysis of the state of black youth in America today. Utilizing the results from the Black Youth Project, a groundbreaking nationwide survey, Cohen focuses on what young Black Americans actually experience and think--and underscores the political repercussions. Featuring stories from cities across the country, she reveals that black youth want, in large part, what most Americans want--a good job, a fulfilling life, safety, respect, and equality. But while this generation has much in common with the rest of America, they also believe that equality does not yet exist, at least not in their lives. Many believe that they are treated as second-class citizens. Moreover, for many the future seems bleak when they look at their neighborhoods, their schools, and even their own lives and choices. Through their words, these young people provide a complex and balanced picture of the intersection of opportunity and discrimination in their lives. Democracy Remixed provides the insight we need to transform the future of young Black Americans and American democracy.

    A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.