Book picks similar to
Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit by Marie Laing


academic
decolonization-anti-imperialism
indigenous-studies
queer

#ChurchToo: How Purity Culture Upholds Abuse and How to Find Healing


Emily Joy Allison - 2021
    Not a single denomination is unaffected. And the reasons are somewhat different than those you might find in the #MeToo stories coming out of Hollywood or Washington. While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be.#ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing. It also lays the groundwork for not one but many paths of healing from a religious culture of sexual shame, secrecy, and control, and for victims of assault to live full, free, healthy lives.

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.

The Bone People


Keri Hulme - 1984
    One night her solitude is disrupted by a visitor—a speechless, mercurial boy named Simon, who tries to steal from her and then repays her with his most precious possession. As Kerewin succumbs to Simon’s feral charm, she also falls under the spell of his Maori foster father Joe, who rescued the boy from a shipwreck and now treats him with an unsettling mixture of tenderness and brutality. Out of this unorthodox trinity Keri Hulme has created what is at once a mystery, a love story, and an ambitious exploration of the zone where indigenous and European New Zealand meet, clash, and sometimes merge.Winner of both a Booker Prize and Pegasus Prize for Literature, The Bone People is a work of unfettered wordplay and mesmerizing emotional complexity.

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House


Audre Lorde - 2018
    Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers


Jake Skeets - 2019
    Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, “the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all.”But if Jake Skeets’s collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place―full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover’s body: A spine becomes a railroad. “Veins burst oil, elk black.” And “becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal.”Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros.

The Fetterman Massacre


Dee Brown - 1962
    Providing a vivid backdrop to the battle, Brown offers a portrait of Wyoming's Ft. Phil Kearney and the remarkable men who built and defended it. Based on a wealth of historical sources and sparked by Brown's narrative genius, "The Fetterman Massacre" is an essential look at one of the frontier's defining conflicts.

Controlled Burn


Erin McLellan - 2017
    His boyfriend died in a car crash while reading a sext from him, the local newspaper outed them both in the aftermath, and his parents got a divorce. Joel did everything possible to outrun his past: he moved to Oklahoma for college, legally changed his name, and started over.Since then, he hasn’t let anyone get close—not his classmates, not his roommate, and definitely not his hookups. The strategy has served him well for over three years. Why would he change it now?But Joel doesn’t plan on the articles about his boyfriend’s death being used as a case study in one of his classes. And he doesn’t plan on Paulie McPherson, who is sweet and giving and fun. In Paulie, he finds a home for the first time in years.But love isn’t simple, and lies have a tendency to get in the way. Joel must figure out if he’ll allow his grief to rule him, or if his connection with Paulie is worth letting all of his walls come tumbling down.

Stolen Life: Journey Of A Cree Woman


Rudy Wiebe - 1998
    This is a story about justice, and terrible injustices, a story about a murder, and a courtroom drama as compelling as any thriller as it unravels the events that put Yvonne Johnson behind bars for life, first in Kingston's Federal Prison for Women until the riot that closed it, and presently in the Okimaw Ochi Healing Lodge in the Cypress Hills. But above all it is the unforgettable true story of the life of a Native woman who has decided to speak out and break the silence, written with the redeeming compassion that marks all Rudy Wiebe's writing, and informed throughout by Yvonne Johnson's own intelligence and poetic eloquence.Characters and events spring to life with the vividness of fiction. The story is told sometimes in the first person by Rudy Wiebe, sometimes by Yvonne herself. He tracks down the details of Yvonne's early life in Butte, Montana, as a child with a double-cleft palate, unable to speak until the kindness of one man provided the necessary operations; the murder of her beloved brother while in police custody; her life of sexual abuse at the hands of another brother, grandfather and others; her escape to Canada - to Winnipeg and Wetaskiwin; the traumas of her life thatled to alcoholism, and her slow descent into hell despite the love she found with her husband and three children.He reveals how she participated, with three others, in the murder of the man she believed to be a child abuser; he unravels the police story, taking us step by step, with jail-taped transcripts, through the police attempts to set one member of the group against the others in their search for a conviction - and the courtroom drama that followed. And Yvonne openly examines her life and, through her grandmother, comes to understand the legacy she has inherited from her ancestor Big Bear; having been led through pain to wisdom, she brings us with her to the point where she finds spiritual strength in passing on the lessons and understandings of her life. How the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear reached out to the author of The Temptations of Big Bear to help her tell her story is itself an extraordinary tale. The co-authorship between one of Canada's foremost writers and the only Native woman in Canada serving life imprisonment for murder has produced a deeply moving, raw and honest book that speaks to all of us, and gives us new insight into the society we live in, while offering a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

A Concise History of Australia


Stuart Macintyre - 2000
    In addition to frontier violence between European settlers and Aborigines and the Stolen Generations, the volume covers the Sydney Olympics, the refugee crisis and the Pacific solution.

Half-Breed


Maria Campbell - 1973
    At 15 she tried in vain to escape by marrying a white man, only to find herself trapped in the slums of Vancouver—addicted to drugs, tempted by suicide, close to death. But the inspiration of her Cree great-grandmother, Cheechum, gives her confidence in herself and in her people, confidence she needs to survive and to thrive.Half-Breed offers an unparalleled understanding of the Métis people and of the racism and hatred they face. Maria Campbell's story cannot be denied and it cannot be forgotten: it stands as a challenge to all Canadians who believe in human rights and human dignity.

Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths


Helen Morales - 2020
    Many of today's harmful practices, like school dress codes, exploitation of the environment, and rape culture, have their roots in the ancient world.But in Antigone Rising, classicist Helen Morales reminds us that the myths have subversive power because they are told -- and read -- in different ways. Through these stories, whether it's Antigone's courageous stand against tyranny or the indestructible Caeneus, who inspires trans and gender queer people today, Morales uncovers hidden truths about solidarity, empowerment, and catharsis.Antigone Rising offers a fresh understanding of the stories we take for granted, showing how we can reclaim them to challenge the status quo, spark resistance, and rail against unjust regimes.

Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology


Patrick S. Cheng - 2011
    The classic problems of theology apply: the problems of both natural and human evil; the problem of God, or the ultimate source of the universe; the problem of the purpose of human life; the problem of ethical conduct; and the problem of human desire for eternal life.Part One of this new book provides a historical survey of how queer theology has developed from the 1950's to today. Part Two is a substantive, but highly readable introduction to the themes of queer theology using the ecumenical creeds as a general framework. Topics include revelation, God, Trinity, creation, Jesus Christ, atonement, sin, grace, Holy Spirit, church, sacraments, and last things, as seen through the lenses of LGBTtheologians.

The History of Puerto Rico From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation


Rudolph Adams Van Middeldyk - 1975
    

A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Around the World


R.B. Parkinson - 2013
    Explored are the issues behind forty artefacts from ancient times to the present, and from cultures across the world, to ask a question that concerns us all: how easily can we recognize love in history? Concise and beautifully illustrated with objects from the British Museum’s far-ranging collection, A Little Gay History provides an intriguing and valuable insight into the range, diversity and complexity of same-sex experiences. It has been named a Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Honor Book for 2014.AuthorR. B. Parkinson is internationally known as a specialist in Ancient Egyptian texts and a curator of ancient Egyptian culture at the British Museum. His books for the British Museum Press include Voices from Ancient Egypt, The Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun, and (for children) The Pocket Guide to Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Lemons in the Chicken Wire


Alison Whittaker - 2016
    At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms.It is an audacious, lyrical and linguistically lemon flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess and seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary. Alison Whittaker demonstrates that borders, whether physical or imagined, are no match for our capacity for love."Lemons in the Chicken Wire is truly an astounding, proudly experimental, innovative, daring, disjunctive, playful and unique poetry debut" – Dr AJ Curruthers, Rabbit Poetry Journal