That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation


Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreBenjamin Shepard - 2004
    This timely collection of essays by writers such as Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Charlie Anders, Benjamin Shepard, and others shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commoditized, and hyper objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," "Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay," and "Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?"

Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire


C.B. Daring - 2013
    These pieces are sure to raise the level of debate about sexuality, gender, and the ways that they tie in with struggles against our ruling institutions." - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, "Outlaw Woman""Against the austerity of straight politics, "Queering Anarchism "sketches the connections between gender mutiny, queer sexualities, and anti-authoritarian desires. Through embodied histories and incendiary critique, the contributors gathered here show how we must not stop at smashing the state; rather normativity itself is the enemy of all radical possibility." - Eric A. Stanley, "Captive Genders"What does it mean to "queer" the world around us? How does the radical refusal of the mainstream codification of GLBT identity as a new gender norm come into focus in the context of anarchist theory and practice? How do our notions of orientation inform our politics - and vice versa? "Queering Anarchism "brings together a diverse set of writings ranging from the deeply theoretical to the playfully personal that explore the possibilities of the concept of "queering," turning the dominant, and largely heteronormative, structures of belief and identity entirely inside-out. Ranging in topic from the economy to disability, politics, social structures, sexual practice, interpersonal relationships, and beyond, the authors here suggest that queering might be more than a set of personal preferences - pointing toward the possibility of an entirely new way of viewing the world.Contributors include Jamie Heckert, Sandra Jeppesen, Ben Shepard, Ryan Conrad, Jerimarie Liesegang, Jason Lydon, Susan Song, Stephanie Grohmann, Liat Ben-Moshe, Anthony J. Nocella, A.J. Withers, and more.C.B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon and Abbey Volcano are anarchists and activists who work in a wide variety of radical, feminist, and queer communities across the United States.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion


Ryan Conrad - 2014
    These queer thinkers, writers, and artists are committed to undermining a stunted conception of “equality.” In this powerful book, they challenge mainstream gay and lesbian struggles for inclusion in elitist and inhumane institutions. More than a critique, Against Equality seeks to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility!

Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage


Ryan ConradCraig Willse - 2010
    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)

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation


Kate Bornstein - 2010
    Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers — new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity


Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore - 2006
    By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.

Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity


Chloë Brushwood Rose - 2003
    Undeniably celebratory and deeply troubling, this sharp-edged collection (of fiction, prose poetry, personal essay, photographs, and illustration) figures the un-hyphenated femme experience emerging in performance, betrayal, violence, humor and survival.Brazen Femme recognizes femme as an identity in flux and in motion, as constantly being reinvented. This mutability sets the stage for creative and thoughtful representation featuring critically acclaimed writers including Michelle Tea, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Amber Hollibaugh and Anurima Banerji. The collection includes the entertaining and challenging work of writers and artists whose stories are missing from existing explorations of femme that exclude experiences of men, transsexual women, and sex workers.Whether by choice or necessity, these frenzied femmes each explore their desires to make (and remake) femininity fit their own queer frames. Darlings, drag queens, whores and action heroes . . . a femme by any other name is spectacular.With writings by Debra Anderson, Anurima Banerji, T.J. Bryan, Anna Camilleri, Daniel Collins, Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, Camilla Gibb, Sky Gilbert, Tara Hardy, Amber Hollibaugh, Suzann Kole, Heather Mc-Callister, Elaine Miller, Kathryn Payne, Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha, Elizabeth Ruth, Trish Salah, Abi Slone and Allyson Mitchell, Michelle Tea, Zoe Whittal and Karin Wolf.With photographs by Chloë Brushwood Rose, and Daniel Collins, and illustrations by comic artists Sandi Rapini, Suzy Malik and Allyson Mitchell.Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri have been collaborating in Toronto as curators, editors and art-makers for the past four years. Anna co-founded the interdisciplinary performance troupe Taste This, who collaborated on the acclaimed Boys Like Her.

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex


Eric A. Stanley - 2011
    The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.

Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution


Shiri Eisner - 2013
    In this forward-thinking and eye-opening book, feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist Shiri Eisner takes readers on a journey through the many aspects of the meanings and politics of bisexuality, specifically highlighting how bisexuality can open up new and exciting ways of challenging social convention.Informed by feminist, transgender, and queer theory, as well as politics and activism, Bi is a radical manifesto for a group that has been too frequently silenced, erased, and denied—and a starting point from which to launch a bisexual revolution.

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond


Leslie Feinberg - 1996
    Transgender Warriors is an eye-opening jaunt through the history of gender expression and a powerful testament to the rebellious spirit.

The Queer Art of Failure


J. Jack Halberstam - 2011
    Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity


José Esteban Muñoz - 2009
    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power


Audre Lorde - 1978
    The false dichotomies that Lorde debunks persist in our cultural imagination: the separation of the erotuc from the spiritual and political. Now, Kore Press brings this essay into stand-alone focus, reprinting it in a fine, handbound pamphlet illustrated with photographs by Tucson photographer Camille Bonzani. Designed by book artist Nancy Solomon, the essay is offset and letterpress printed in an edition of 1000.

GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary


Joan NestleLucas Dzmura - 2002
    The questions go beyond the nature of male/female to a yet-to-be-traversed region that lies somewhere between and beyond biologically determined gender. In this groundbreaking anthology, three experts in gender studies and politics navigate around rigid, societally imposed concepts of two genders to discover and illuminate the limitless possibilities of identity. Thirty first-person accounts of gender construction, exploration, and questioning provide a groundwork for cultural discussion, political action, and even greater possibilities of autonomous gender choices. Noted scholar Joan Nestle is joined by internationally prominent gender warrior Riki Anne Wilchins and historian Clare Howell to provide a societal, cultural, and political exploration of gender identity.Marketing Plans: National Advertising: The Advocate Academic mailing to gender studies and queer studies professors Media campaign hilighting authors Nestle and WilchinsJoan Nestle is the cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the writer and editor of six books including the groundbreaking Women on Women series. Riki Anne Wilchins is the executive director of GenderPAC, the national gender advocacy group, and the cofounder of the Gender Identity Project of New York City's Lesbian and Gay Center. She is the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Clare Howell is a senior librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times


Jasbir K. Puar - 2007
    Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.