Best of
Queer-Studies

2016

Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement


Jennifer Patterson - 2016
    Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement locates them at the center of the anti-violence movement and creates a space for their voices to be heard. Moving beyond dominant narratives and the traditional “violence against women” framework, the book is multi-gendered, multi-racial and multi-layered. This thirty-seven piece collection disrupts the mainstream conversations about sexual violence and connects them to disability justice, sex worker rights, healing justice, racial justice, gender self-determination, queer & trans liberation and prison industrial complex abolition through reflections, personal narrative, and strategies for resistance and healing. Where systems, institutions, families, communities and partners have failed them, this collection lifts them up, honors a multitude of lived experiences and shares the radical work that is being done outside mainstream anti-violence and the non-profit industrial complex.

Sad Girl Poems


Christopher Soto - 2016
    Their first chapbook Sad Girl Poems delves into their relationship with domestic violence, queer youth homelessness, & the suicide of a close friend. Of the chapbook, Eileen Myles wrote "Sad Girl Poems are revolutionary and sad and finely wrought on the fly… I keep reading, needing to be living in the world of them.” CAConrad wrote “You are an asshole if you read this book and are not destroyed and renewed and see through the poet Loma a way to redemption for us all.” Christopher Soto is originally from the Los Angeles area but now lives in Brooklyn.

Purple Prose: Bisexuality in Britain


Kate Harrad - 2016
    This accessible collection of interviews, essays, poems and commentary explores topics such as definitions of bisexuality, intersections of bisexuality with other identities, stereotypes and biphobia, being bisexual at work, teenage bisexuality and bisexuality through the years, the media’s approach to bisexual celebrities, and fictional bisexual characters. Filled with raw, honest, first-person accounts as well as comments from leading bisexual activists in the UK, this is the book you’ll buy for your friend who’s just come out to you as bi-curious, or for your parents who think your bisexuality is weird or a phase, or for yourself, because you know you’re bi but you don’t know where to go or what to do about it.

Queer


David J. Getsy - 2016
    Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities.Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists' queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists' writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.

Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity


Morgan Mann Willis - 2016
    Read these passionate, complex autobiographical glimpses into the many layers of identity as the authors offer olive branches to old and new lovers.This anthology is designed to be uplifting, as it considers and explores our masculine identities as non cis-gendered males, or those traditionally born with the "XY" chromosome. It is a radical act of self-love and affirmation. Outside the XY is a labor of love.

Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York


Donald Albrecht - 2016
    Queer people have always flocked to New York seeking freedom, forging close-knit groups for support and inspiration. Gay Gotham brings to life the countercultural artistic communities that sprang up over the last hundred years, a creative class whose radical ideas would determine much of modern culture. More than 200 images—both works of art, such as paintings and photographs, as well as letters, snapshots, and ephemera—illuminate their personal bonds, scandal-provoking secrets at the time and many largely unknown to the public since.Starting with the bohemian era of the 1910s and 1920s, when the pansy craze drew voyeurs of all types to Greenwich Village and Harlem, the book winds through midcentury Broadway as well as Fire Island as it emerged as a hotbed, turns to the post-Stonewall, decade-long wild party that revolved around clubs like the Mineshaft and Studio 54, and continues all the way through the activist mobilization spurred by the AIDS crisis and the move toward acceptance at the century’s close. Throughout, readers encounter famous figures, from James Baldwin and Mae West to Leonard Bernstein, and discover lesser-known ones, such as Harmony Hammond, Greer Lankton, and Richard Bruce Nugent. Surprising relationships emerge: Andy Warhol and Mercedes de Acosta, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cecil Beaton, George Platt Lynes and Gertrude Stein. By peeling back the overlapping layers of this cultural network that thrived despite its illicitness, this groundbreaking publication reveals a whole new side of the history of New York and celebrates the power of artistic collaboration to transcend oppression.

Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time


Jeffrey Masten - 2016
    In Queer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like homosexual, sodomy, and tribade in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, the love of the word, require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality.Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender--terms such as conversation and intercourse, fundament and foundation, friend and boy--that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter Q is perhaps the queerest character of all.

Out


Scott McGlynn - 2016
    His writing takes a close look at his experiences growing up and learning to accept his true self. His mission is to end bullying once and for all. McGlynn’s autobiographical story about his struggles with peer pressure and coming to grips with his sexuality at a young age gives readers a personal insight into the life of a young man's growth and his newfound ability to embrace who he is. His aim is to inspire people of all walks of life so that they can be proud of who they are.

Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility


Jonathan Goldberg - 2016
    Focused on the notion of what Douglas Sirk termed the "impossible situation" in melodrama, such as impasses in sexual relations that are not simply reflections of social taboo and prohibitions, Goldberg pursues films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes that respond to Sirk's prompt. His analysis hones in on melodrama's original definition--a form combining music and drama--as he explores the use of melodrama in Beethoven's opera Fidelio, films by Alfred Hitchcock, and fiction by Willa Cather and Patricia Highsmith, including her Ripley novels. Goldberg illuminates how music and sound provide queer ways to promote identifications that exceed the bounds of the identity categories meant to regulate social life. The interaction of musical, dramatic, and visual elements gives melodrama its indeterminacy, making it resistant to normative forms of value and a powerful tool for creating new potentials.

The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics


Ramzi Fawaz - 2016
    1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes.In The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies - including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants -alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States.

Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy


Shane Brown - 2016
    Until now, however, relatively little attention has been paid to how queer sexualities were portrayed in films from the silent and early sound period. By looking in detail at a succession of recently-found films and revisiting others, Shane Brown examines images of male-male intimacy, buddy relationships and romantic friendships in European and American films made prior to 1934, including Different from the Others and All Quiet on the Western Front. He places these films within their socio-political and scientific context and sheds new light on how they were intended to be viewed and how they were actually perceived. In doing so, Brown offers his readers a unique insight into a little known area of early cinema, queer studies and social history.

Trans/Feminisms


Susan Stryker - 2016
    Exploring the ways in which trans issues are addressed within feminist and women’s organizations and social movements around the world, contributors ask how trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary issues are related to feminist movements today, what kind of work is currently undertaken in the name of trans/feminism, what new paradigms and visions are emerging, and what questions still need to be taken up. Central to this special issue is the recognition that trans/feminist politics cannot restrict itself to the domain of gender alone.This issue features numerous shorter works that represent the diversity of trans/feminist practices and problematics and, in addition to original research articles, includes theory, reports, manifestos, opinion pieces, reviews, and creative/artistic productions, as well as republished key documents of trans/feminist history and international scholarship.Contributors: Miriam Abelson, Sara Ahmed, Aitzole Araneta, Alexandre Baril, Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier, micha cárdenas, Daniel Chávez, Jeanne Córdova, Pedro J. DiPietro, Lucía Egaña, A. Finn Enke, Karine Espineira, Sandra Fernández, Simon D. Fisher, Tania Hammidi, Christoph Hanssmann, Emma Louise Heaney, Hailey Kaas, Cael Keegan, Faris Khan, Yana Kirey-Sitnikova, Terence Kumpf, Riki Lane, Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Claudia Sofia Garriga López, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, L. Leigh Ann van der Merwe, Scott Morgensen, Marcio Jose Ornat, Ruin S. M. Pae, José Quiroga, Naomi Scheman, Joseli Maria Silva, reese simpkins, Miriam Solá, Sandy Stone, Stefania Voli, Rinaldo Walcott, Lori Watson, Cristan Williams, Shana Ye, Asli Zengin

The HIV Monologues


Patrick Cash - 2016
    But hold on. He’s about to tell you he’s got HIV. How will you respond emotionally? Brush it aside and practise safe sex? Go on to a deeper relationship? Or do you walk away?In these eloquently interwoven and often funny monologues Patrick Cash invites you to explore these emotions of living with a virus that attacks the emotions as well as the body.