Best of
Queer-Studies

2013

I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft, Volume 1


S.T. Joshi - 2013
    As a child, he revealed remarkable precocity in his early interests in literature and science. Ill-health dogged him in youth, rendering his school attendance sporadic; and in 1908 he experienced a nervous breakdown that rendered him a virtual recluse for several years. In 1914 he discovered the world of amateur journalism and began slowly emerging from his hermitry. He wrote tremendous amounts of essays, poetry, and other work; in 1917, under the encouragement from W. Paul Cook and others, he resumed the writing of horror fiction, and his career as a dream-weaver began anew. In 1921 Lovecraft met his future wife, Sonia H. Greene, at an amateur journalism convention. It was at this time that he began expanding his horizons, both geographical and intellectual: he traveled widely, from New England to New York to Cleveland; and he absorbed such literary and intellectual influences as Lord Dunsany, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Machen. In 1924 he and Sonia decided to marry, and Lovecraft moved to New York to pursue his literary fortune. But, as the first volume of this biography concludes, his metropolitan adventure would be bittersweet at best. S. T. Joshi's award-winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) provided the most detailed portrait of the life, work, and thought of the dreamer from Providence ever published. But that edition was in fact abridged from Joshi's original manuscript, and this expanded and updated two-volume edition restores the 150,000 words that Joshi omitted and, in addition, updates the texts with new findings.

Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities


Karma R. Chávez - 2013
    Advocating a politics of the present and drawing from women of color and queer of color theory, this book contends that coalition enables a vital understanding of how queerness and immigration, citizenship and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion are linked. Queer Migration Politics offers activists, queer scholars, feminists, and immigration scholars productive tools for theorizing political efficacy.

She Has a Name


Kamilah Aisha Moon - 2013
    The speakers in these poems sisters, mother, father, teacher seek to answer questions science can't yet answer, seek to protect the young woman, and seek to understand what autism means to their own lives as well.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit


Marlon M. Bailey - 2013
    Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community.

Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination


Nicole Seymour - 2013
    By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of "natural" categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.

That's So Gay!: Microaggressions and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community


Kevin L. Nadal - 2013
    Microaggressions are commonplace interactions that occur in a wide variety of social settings, including school or the workplace, among friends and family, and even among other LGBT people. These accumulated experiences are associated with feelings of victimization, suicidal thinking, and higher rates of substance abuse, depression, and other health problems among members of the LGBT community. In this book, Kevin Nadal provides a thought-provoking review of the literature on discrimination and microaggressions toward LGBT people. The generous use of case examples makes the book ideal for gender studies courses and discussion groups. Each case is followed by analysis of the elements involved in microaggressions and discussion questions for the reader to reflect upon.This book includes advice for mental health practitioners, organizational leaders, educators, and students who want to adopt LGBT-accepting worldviews and practices. It has tips for how to discuss and advocate for LGBT issues in the realms of family, community, educational systems, and the government.

New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut


B. Ruby Rich - 2013
    Ruby Rich designated a brand new genre, the New Queer Cinema (NQC), in her groundbreaking article in the Village Voice in 1992. This movement in film and video was intensely political and aesthetically innovative, made possible by the debut of the camcorder, and driven initially by outrage over the unchecked spread of AIDS. The genre has grown to include an entire generation of queer artists, filmmakers, and activists. As a critic, curator, journalist, and scholar, Rich has been inextricably linked to the New Queer Cinema from its inception. This volume presents her new thoughts on the topic, as well as bringing together the best of her writing on the NQC. She follows this cinematic movement from its origins in the mid-1980s all the way to the present in essays and articles directed at a range of audiences, from readers of academic journals to popular glossies and weekly newspapers. She presents her insights into such NQC pioneers as Derek Jarman and Isaac Julien and investigates such celebrated films as Go Fish, Brokeback Mountain, Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and Milk. In addition to exploring less-known films and international cinemas (including Latin American and French films and videos), she documents the more recent incarnations of the NQC on screen, on the web, and in art galleries.

This Assignment Is So Gay: LGBTQI Poets on the Art of Teaching


Megan Volpert - 2013
    LGBT Studies. "About 'it gets better,' they were never wrong, the path-forgers, the ground-breakers. How it gets better is another question, for a new century has brought changing minds, but also new hardships. That is why this extraordinary book matters. Teaching is such a sacred office, and we who teach today know the attentiveness that must be brought to the profession. These poems track, record, memorialize, and meditate on that office. There are poems of the student one lost, the student who reached out at last, of the daily commitment that teaching who you are requires, of why it matters. There is nothing like this thoughtful collection of trenchant, witty, poignant, blunt, and luminous poems on the art of teaching by LGBTIQ poets assembled with judicious vision by Megan Volpert. THIS ASSIGNMENT IS SO GAY is a beautiful and necessary book, not just for teaching, but for us all."--Cynthia Hogue

What's Wrong With Homosexuality?


John Corvino - 2013
    In this timely book, he shares that experience--addressing the standard objections to homosexuality and offering insight into the culture wars more generally.Is homosexuality unnatural? Does the Bible condemn it? Are people born gay (and should it matter either way)? Corvino approaches such questions with precision, sensitivity, and good humor. In the process, he makes a fresh case for moral engagement, forcefully rejecting the idea that morality is a "private matter." This book appears at a time when same-sex marriage is being hotly debated across the U.S. Many people object to such marriage on the grounds that same-sex relationships are immoral, or at least, that they do not deserve the same social recognition as heterosexual relationships. Unfortunately, the traditional rhetoric of gay-rights advocates--which emphasizes privacy and tolerance--fails to meet this objection. Legally speaking, when it comes to marriage, "tolerance" might be enough, Corvino concedes, but socially speaking, marriage requires more. Marriage is more than just a relationship between two individuals, recognized by the state. It is also a relationship between those individuals and a larger community. The fight for same-sex marriage, ultimately, is a fight for full inclusion in the moral fabric. What is needed is a positive case for moral approval--which is what Corvino unabashedly offers here.Corvino blends a philosopher's precision with a light touch that is full of humanity and wit. This volume captures the voice of one of the most rational participants in a national debate noted for generating more heat than light.

The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution


Matt Richardson - 2013
    It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget.Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies-—Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson-—in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity.