Best of
Queer-Studies
2017
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Jasbir K. Puar - 2017
Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.
The Combahee River Collective Statement
The Combahee River Collective - 2017
Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility
Reina GossettMiss Major Griffin-Gracy - 2017
Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered “doors”—entrances to visibility and recognition—that are actually “traps” accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.
How to Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide for Exploring Who You Are
Alex Iantaffi - 2017
- Kate Bornstein, author of Gender OutlawHave you ever questioned your own gender identity? Do you know somebody who is transgender or who identifies as non-binary? Do you ever feel confused when people talk about gender diversity?This down-to-earth guide is for anybody who wants to know more about gender, from its biology, history and sociology, to how it plays a role in our relationships and interactions with family, friends, partners and strangers. It looks at practical ways people can express their own gender, and will help you to understand people whose gender might be different from your own. With activities and points for reflection throughout, this book will help people of all genders engage with gender diversity and explore the ideas in the book in relation to their own lived experiences.
I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
James Allen Hall - 2017
“Growing up queer in Florida in the 1980s, James Allen Hall’s life has taken him to places that high culture rarely treads … In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family’s meth addiction, and mental illnesses … and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive. I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well is a tragic, funny, graceful book.”—Chris Kraus“Hall’s work lays bare all manner of vulnerability, not to confess or shock, but to reckon into language the nearly unsayable. And who exactly is at the center of this drive toward the light? A witness, an unrelenting seeker, a survivor, someone who’s earned the right to judge but who withholds that too-easy gesture in favor of a clearer sight and the hard won belief that while we are bound together by so many complex tethers … we are especially linked by compassion, a force abundantly evident in this moving collection.” —Lia Purpura“‘What I am should be extinguished,’ writes James Allen Hall about his queerness, which despite a journey through youth troubled with violence and homophobia, manages to exist and persist. Yet the personal essays in I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well are more than expressions of pain, they are testaments to perseverance shaped by the acceptance of a flawed self, love for a complicated family and an unflappable wit.”—Rigoberto González
Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community
John Chaich - 2017
Designed by Todd Oldham and edited by John Chaich, this 192-page, hardcover, 8 x 10-inch book features full-color spreads of each artist's work, along with intimate details of selections and artist studios, as well as an introductory essay by Chaich, who curated the exhibition of the same name that inspired this book. To further examine how queerness informs their work in fiber and textiles, or vice versa, the artists are interviewed by makers and thinkers from the worlds of dance, design, fashion, media, music, museums, scholarship, and more--many members of the LGBTQ community themselves, and otherwise passionate allies. Smart yet playful, critical yet celebratory, the resulting dialogues are as colorful, challenging, personal, and universal as the works discussed and talents showcased. "Queer Threads" is not just an exploration of fiber art and crafts, but also a celebration of the creativity, diversity, and vibrancy of contemporary queer culture.
Queer Game Studies
Bonnie Ruberg - 2017
Immersion in new worlds, video games seem to offer the perfect opportunity to explore the alterity that queer culture longs for, but often sexism and discrimination in gamer culture steal the spotlight. Queer Game Studies provides a welcome corrective, revealing the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games.These in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. Demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world, they establish an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture. Queer Game Studies covers important subjects such as the representation of queer bodies, the casual misogyny prevalent in video games, the need for greater diversity in gamer culture, and reading popular games like Bayonetta, Mass Effect, and Metal Gear Solid from a queer perspective. Perfect for both everyday readers and instructors looking to add diversity to their courses, Queer Game Studies is the ideal introduction to the vast and vibrant realm of queer gaming. Contributors: Leigh Alexander; Gregory L. Bagnall, U of Rhode Island; Hanna Brady; Mattie Brice; Derek Burrill, U of California, Riverside; Edmond Y. Chang, U of Oregon; Naomi M. Clark; Katherine Cross, CUNY; Kim d’Amazing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Aubrey Gabel, U of California, Berkeley; Christopher Goetz, U of Iowa; Jack Halberstam, U of Southern California; Todd Harper, U of Baltimore; Larissa Hjorth, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Chelsea Howe; Jesper Juul, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts; merritt kopas; Colleen Macklin, Parsons School of Design; Amanda Phillips, Georgetown U; Gabriela T. Richard, Pennsylvania State U; Toni Rocca; Sarah Schoemann, Georgia Institute of Technology; Kathryn Bond Stockton, U of Utah; Zoya Street, U of Lancaster; Peter Wonica; Robert Yang, Parsons School of Design; Jordan Youngblood, Eastern Connecticut State U.
After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images
Avram Finkelstein - 2017
Cofounder of the collective Silence = Death and member of the art collective Gran Fury, Avram Finkelstein tells the story of how his work and other protest artwork associated with the early years of the pandemic were created. In writing about art and AIDS activism, the formation of collectives, and the political process, Finkelstein reveals a different side of the traditional HIV/AIDS history, told twenty-five years later, and offers a creative toolbox for those who want to learn how to save lives through activism and making art.
The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors
Elizabeth Beier - 2017
Beier tackles the complexities of sexuality and self image with a conversational and immediate art style and stories anyone who’s ever struggled with dating can relate to.
A Queer Love Story: The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout
Marilyn R. Schuster - 2017
Rule lived in a remote rural community on Galiano Island, British Columbia, but wrote a column for the magazine. Bébout resided in and was devoted to Toronto's gay village. Both were transplanted Americans. At turns poignant, scintillating, and incisive, their exchanges include ruminations on queer life and the writing life even as they document some of the most pressing LGBT issues of the '80s and '90s, including HIV/AIDs, censorship, and state policing of desire.
Desire: A Memoir
Jonathan Dollimore - 2017
He writes honestly and movingly about his teenage attraction to risk and danger; of accidents and escapes; of curiosity as a flight from boredom; of suicidal depression and ecstasy; and, beneath all, of the life of desire haunted and torn by loss.For more than thirty years Jonathan Dollimore has been one of contemporary culture's most influential critics of politics, literature, and sexuality. Desire: A Memoir, a hybrid of autobiography, meditation and philosophical reflection, explores the existential sources of his writing.
Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing (Pitt Comp Literacy Culture)
Stacey Waite - 2017
Rather than positioning queerness as connected only to queer texts or queer teachers/students (as much work on queer pedagogy has done since the 1990s), this book offers writing and teaching as already queer practices, and contends that the overlap between queer theory and composition presents new possibilities for teaching writing. Teaching Queer argues for and enacts “queer forms”—non-normative and category-resistant forms of writing—those that move between the critical and the creative, the theoretical and the practical, and the queer and the often invisible normative functions of classrooms.
Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.
C Ondine ChavoyaIvan a Ramos - 2017
Working between the 1960s and early 1990s, the artists profiled in this compendium represent a broad cross section of L.A.'s art scene. With nearly 400 illustrations and ten essays, this volume presents histories of artistic experimentation and reveals networks of collaboration and exchange that resulted in some of the most intriguing art of late 20th-century America. From -mail art- to the rise of Chicano, gay, and feminist print media; the formation of alternative spaces to punk music and performance; fashion culture to the AIDS crisis--the artists and works featured here comprise a boundary-pushing network of voices and talents.
Oscar's Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde's Legacy
Laura Lee - 2017
The centrepiece of the conflict was Ross’s handling of Wilde’s prison manuscript, De Profundis. The furious struggle led to stalking, blackmail, witness tampering, prison, and a series of dramatic lawsuits. The feud had long-lasting repercussions, not only for the two men, but also for how we remember Oscar Wilde today.Oscar's Ghost includes previously unpublished information about one of the most mysterious figures in the Wilde scandal, Maurice Schwabe, who set in motion the chain of events that led to the playwright's imprisonment. Ross was systematic, had more friends, and as Wilde's executor had access to all of Wilde's papers, including personal letters from Douglas to Wilde; as the controller of Wilde’s copyright, he had sole discretion as to which of Wilde’s views of Douglas could be published. Douglas had a tenacious fighting spirit, and the sense of entitlement that came with being a lord. This is the first book to focus on the heated feud and to assess the motivations, misconceptions, and actions of all parties involved.
Queering Translation, Translating the Queer: Theory, Practice, Activism
Brian James Baer - 2017
The volume presents a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives through fifteen contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field to demonstrate the interconnectedness between translation and queer aspects of sex, gender, and identity. The book begins with the editors' introduction to the state of the field, providing an overview of both current and developing lines of research, and builds on this foundation to look at this research more closely, grouped around three different sections: Queer Theorizing of Translation; Case Studies of Queer Translations and Translators; and Queer Activism and Translation. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to not only shed light on this promising field of research but also to promote cross fertilization between these disciplines towards further exploring the intersections between queer studies and translation studies, making this volume key reading for students and scholars interested in translation studies, queer studies, politics, and activism, and gender and sexuality studies.
Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940
Julio Capó, Jr. - 2017
As Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami's transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami's queer past from its 1896 founding through World War II, Capo shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own.Drawing from a multilingual archive, Capo unearths the forgotten history of "fairyland," a marketing term crafted by boosters that held multiple meanings for different groups of people. In viewing Miami as a contested colonial space, he turns our attention to migrants and immigrants, tourism, and trade to and from the Caribbean--particularly the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti--to expand the geographic and methodological parameters of urban and queer history. Recovering the world of Miami's old saloons, brothels, immigration checkpoints, borders, nightclubs, bars, and cruising sites, Capo makes clear how critical gender and sexual transgression is to understanding the city and the broader region in all its fullness.
The Gay Science: Intimate Experiments with the Problem of HIV
Kane Race - 2017
What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences intelligible. Through a series of empirically and historically detailed case studies, the book examines how new technologies and scientific artifacts - such as antiretroviral therapy, digital hookup apps and research methods - mediate sexual encounters and shape the worlds and self-practices of men who have sex with men.Rather than debunking scientific practices or minimizing their significance, The Gay Science approaches these practices as ways in which we 'learn to be affected' by HIV. It explores what knowledge practices best engage us, move us and increase our powers and capacities for action. The book includes an historical analysis of drug use as a significant element in the formation of urban gay cultures; constructivist accounts of the emergence of barebacking and chemsex; a performative response to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and its uptake; and, a speculative analysis of ways of thinking and doing sexual community in the digital context.Combining insights from queer theory, process philosophy and science and technology studies to develop an original approach to the analysis of sexuality, drug use, public health and digital practices, this book demonstrates the ontological consequences of different modes of attending to risk and pleasure. It is suitable for those interested in cultural studies, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, digital culture, public health and drug and alcohol studies.
Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders
Christina Richards - 2017
It considers theoretical, research, practice, and activist perspectives; and outlines a basis for good practice when working with non-binary individuals. The first section provides an overview of historical, legal and academic aspects of this phenomenon. The second section explores how psychotherapeutic, psychological and psychiatric theory and practice are adapting to a non-binary model of gender, and the third section considers the body related aspects, from endocrinology to surgery. This work will appeal to a wide readership, from practitioners working with non-binary individuals - including psychologists, surgeons, social workers, nurses, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, psychotherapists and counselors, lawyers, and healthcare workers - to researchers interested in the study of gender identities, to students and gender activists.
Out: Lgbtq Poland
Maciek Nabrdalik - 2017
Back in 2004, gay rights marches were banned in Warsaw and homosexuality was a taboo subject. Since then, as the economy has grown, the LGBTQ community has become more widely accepted.In OUT, award-winning Warsaw-based photographer Maciek Nabrdalik, whose work has been published in Smithsonian, L'Espresso, Stern, Newsweek, and the New York Times, takes us deep into this community. Exploring issues of identity and citizenship and taking its inspiration from the passport photo format, OUT features dozens of formal color portraits of writers, artists, and people working in a variety of occupations from across Poland. Each is accompanied by a short interview and is shaded to indicate how comfortable that person is with revealing their own sexuality publicly.Intimate and profoundly humane, OUT is a testament to the great strides that can be made in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in a short space of time--a document that will be inspiring to other nations where the queer community does not enjoy the same freedoms.
Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History
Jaclyn Pryor - 2017
Jaclyn I. Pryor introduces the concept of "time slips," moments in which past, present, and future coincide, moments that challenge American narratives of racial and sexual citizenship. Framing performance as a site of resistance, Pryor analyzes their own work and that of four other queer artists—Ann Carlson, Mary Ellen Strom, Peggy Shaw, and Lisa Kron—between 2001 and 2016. Pryor illuminates how each artist deploys performance as a tool to render history visible, trauma recognizable, and transformation possible by laying bare the histories and ongoing systems of violence woven deep into our society. Pryor also includes a case study that examines the challenges of teaching queer time and queer performance within the academy in what Pryor calls a post-9/11 “homeland” security state. Masterfully synthesizing a wealth of research and experiences, Time Slips will interest scholars and readers in the fields of theater and performance studies, queer studies, and American studies.
Queer Dance
Clare Croft - 2017
Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queerwork the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through thesepleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?
Queering Femininity: Sexuality, Feminism and the Politics of Presentation
Hannah McCann - 2017
Drawing on a range of feminist texts and interviews with self-identifying queer femmes from the LGBTQ community, Hannah McCann argues that the tendency to evaluate femininity as only either oppressive or empowering limits our understanding of its possibilities. She considers the dynamic aspects of feminine embodiment that cannot simply be understood in terms of gender normativity and negotiates a path between understanding both the attachments people hold to particular gender identities and styles, and recognising the punitive realities of dominant gender norms and expectations. Topics covered range from second wave feminist critiques of beauty culture, to the importance of hair in queer femme presentation.This book offers students and researchers of Gender, Queer and Sexuality Studies a fresh new take on the often troubled relationship between feminism and femininity, a critical but generous reading that highlights the potential for an affirmative orientation that is not confined by the demands of identity politics.