Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America


Samhita MukhopadhyaySady Doyle - 2017
    Twenty-Three Leading Feminist Writers on Protest and SolidarityWhen 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump's America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.Featuring essays by REBECCA SOLNIT on Trump and his "misogyny army," CHERYL STRAYED on grappling with the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's loss, SARAH HEPOLA on resisting the urge to drink after the election, NICOLE CHUNG on family and friends who support Trump, KATHA POLLITT on the state of reproductive rights and what we do next, JILL FILIPOVIC on Trump's policies and the life of a young woman in West Africa, SAMANTHA IRBY on racism and living as a queer black woman in rural America, RANDA JARRAR on traveling across the country as a queer Muslim American, SARAH HOLLENBECK on Trump's cruelty toward the disabled, MEREDITH TALUSAN on feminism and the transgender community, and SARAH JAFFE on the labor movement and active and effective resistance, among others.

Stuck in the Middle: 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age


Ariel SchragDash Shaw - 2007
    Fortunately, some of those people have grown up to be clever and talented comic artists, with an important message to share: Everyone can survive middle school! Edited by underground comics icon Ariel Schrag, this anthology of illustrated tales about the agonies and triumphs of seventh and eight grade features some of America's leading graphic novelists, including Daniel Clowes, Joe Matt, Lauren Weinstein, and Ariel herself. With a sense of humor as refreshing as it is bitingly honest, seventeen artists share their stories of first love, bullying, zits, and all the things that make middle school the worst years of our lives.

Everywhere Antennas


Julie Delporte - 2014
    Told in the first person, it offers diary-like entries from an anonymous narrator who is undergoing a nervous breakdown and struggling to hold together a failing relationship. In soft, flowing colored pencil, Delporte shows her narrator coming to terms with a rare and misunderstood sensitivity to the radiation emitted by the televisions, cell phones, and computers that permeate urban life. On each page a few words are paired with an image or two, conveying a moment or a thought simply but effectively. Over the course of the book, the anonymous narrator moves from place to place, looking for solutions to her melancholy in the countryside via isolation and in the city with friends, sometimes turning to medication for answers. Throughout, her emotional and intellectual landscape receives as much attention as her physical surroundings.Everywhere Antennas is the portrait of a woman caught in the margins, struggling to balance the demands of technology and modern life with the need to find meaningful relationships and work. Roughly hewn figures, sketched in pencil crayon on brightly contrasting backgrounds, populate the pages of this flowing, emotive work. With Everywhere Antennas, Delporte proves herself a master craftswoman of heartbreakingly personal, beautifully literary graphic fiction.

The V-Word: True Stories about First-Time Sex


Amber J. KeyserJamia Wilson - 2016
    The V-Word captures the complexity of this important life-decision and reflects diverse real-world experiences. Includes helpful resources for parents and teens.Losing it. Popping your cherry. Handing in your V-card.First time sex is a big unknown. Will it be candlelight and rose petals or quick and uncomfortable? Is it about love or about lust? Deciding to have sex for the first time is a choice that’s often fraught with anxiety and joy. But do you have anyone telling you what sex is really like?In The V-Word seventeen writers (including Christa Desir, Justina Ireland, Sara Ryan, Carrie Mesrobian, Erica Lorraine Scheidt, and Jamia Wilson) pull back the sheets and tell all, covering everything from straight sex to queer sex, diving-in versus waiting, and even the exhilaration and disappointment that blankets it all. Some of their experiences happened too soon, some at just the right time, but all paint a broad picture of what first-time sex is really like.Funny, hot, meaningful, cringe-worthy, gross, forgettable, magnificent, empowering, and transformative, the stories in The V-Word are never preachy, but provide a map for teens to chart their own course through the steamy waters of sex. With The V-Word girls can finally take control, learn what’s on the horizon, and eliminate the fear and mystery surrounding this important milestone.

Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever


Joel Derfner - 2008
    At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him—he’ll tell you himself).In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to “meet” men—many, many men—or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones—but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets—is a hero destined for legend.Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers—gay, straight, and in between.

Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World


Shereen El Feki - 2013
    The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future.  This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.

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.

Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience


Katrina Karkazis - 2008
    Since the 1950s, standard treatment has involved determining a sex for these infants and performing surgery to normalize the infant’s genitalia. Over the past decade intersex advocates have mounted unprecedented challenges to treatment, offering alternative perspectives about the meaning and appropriate medical response to intersexuality and driving the field of those who treat intersex conditions into a deep crisis. Katrina Karkazis offers a nuanced, compassionate picture of these charged issues in Fixing Sex, the first book to examine contemporary controversies over the medical management of intersexuality in the United States from the multiple perspectives of those most intimately involved. Drawing extensively on interviews with adults with intersex conditions, parents, and physicians, Karkazis moves beyond the heated rhetoric to reveal the complex reality of how intersexuality is understood, treated, and experienced today. As she unravels the historical, technological, social, and political forces that have culminated in debates surrounding intersexuality, Karkazis exposes the contentious disagreements among theorists, physicians, intersex adults, activists, and parents—and all that those debates imply about gender and the changing landscape of intersex management. She argues that by viewing intersexuality exclusively through a narrow medical lens we avoid much more difficult questions. Do gender atypical bodies require treatment? Should physicians intervene to control the “sex” of the body? As this illuminating book reveals, debates over treatment for intersexuality force reassessment of the seemingly natural connections between gender, biology, and the body.

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale


Belle Yang - 2010
    The history she’d ignored while growing up became a source of comfort and inspiration, and narrowed the gap separating her—an independent, Chinese-American woman—from her Old World Chinese parents.In Forget Sorrow, Yang makes her debut into the graphic form with the story of her father’s family, reunited under the House of Yang in Manchuria during the Second World War and struggling—both together and individually—to weather poverty, famine, and, later, Communist oppression. The parallels between Belle Yang’s journey of self-discovery and the lives and choices of her grandfather, his brothers, and their father (the Patriarch) speak powerfully of the conflicts between generations—and of possibilities for reconciliation.Forget Sorrow demonstrates the power of storytelling and remembrance, as Belle—in telling this story—finds the strength to honor both her father and herself.

Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century


Barbara Carrellas - 2005
    With a juicy mix of erotic how-to and pleasure-centered spiritual wisdom, acclaimed sex educator Barbara Carrellas radically updates the ancient practice of Tantra for modern sexual explorers desiring to push past their edge in search of the great cosmic orgasm.With more than one hundred easy-to-follow techniques for expanded orgasmic states and solo and partner play (as well as more adventurous practices), this in-depth guide reveals the delicious worlds of ecstasy available to all, including:The Erotic Awakening Massage • Breath and Energy Orgasms • Twenty-Minute Tantra Evolutionary Selfloving • Sex and Healing • Tantric BDSMNo matter what your gender, sexual preference, or erotic tastes, URBAN TANTRA will expand your notions about pleasure and open you up to new heights of intimacy and sexual fulfillment.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden


Mannie Murphy - 2021
    This work of graphic nonfiction, told in the style of an illustrated diary, begins as an affectionate reminiscence of the author’s 1990s teenage infatuation with the late actor River Phoenix but morphs into a remarkable, sprawling account of the city of Portland and state of Oregon's dark history of white nationalism. Murphy details the relationship between white supremacist Tom Metzger (former KKK Grand Wizard and founder of the White Aryan Resistance) and the "Rose City" street kids like Ken Death that infiltrated Van Sant's films -- a relationship that culminates in an infamous episode of Geraldo. Murphy brilliantly weaves 1990s alternative culture, from Kurt Cobain and William Burroughs to Keanu Reeves and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with two centuries of the Pacific Northwest's shameful history as a hotbed for white nationalism: from the Whitman massacre in 1847 and the Ku Klux Klan's role in Portland's city planning in the early 1900s to the brutal treatment of Black people displaced in the 1948 Vanport flood and through the 2014 armed standoff with Cliven Bundy's cattle ranch. In Murphy's personal reflections and heart-racing descriptions of scenes like infamous campfire kiss in My Own Private Idaho, the artist's story becomes a moral anchor to a deeply amoral regional history and marks the incredible debut of a talented new voice to the graphic medium.

How to They/Them: A Visual Guide to Nonbinary Pronouns and the World of Gender Fluidity


Stuart Getty - 2020
    From a real-deal they/them-using genderqueer writer, this book makes it humorous and easy to learn so that everyone can get it. No soap boxes or divisive comment section wars here. Sometimes funny, sometimes serious, always human, this 101 primer is about more than just bathrooms and pronouns. It's about gender expression and the freedom to choose how to identify. While they might only be for some, that freedom is for everyone!

Dancing After TEN


Vivian Chong - 2020
    As she was losing her sight, she put down as many drawings on paper as she could to document the experience. In Dancing After TEN, Chong teams up with cartoonist Georgia Webber — whose graphic autobiography, Dumb, chronicled her own disability — to trace her journey out of the darkness and into the spotlight. Chong now expresses her art through singing, stand-up, drumming, running, and dancing. This graphic novel is an inspirational tale and a powerful work of graphic medicine.

Shortcomings


Adrian Tomine - 2007
    Along the way, Tomine tackles modern culture, sexual mores, and racial politics with brutal honesty and lacerating, irreverent humor, while deftly bringing to life a cast of painfully real antihero characters. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Tomine has acquired a cultlike fan following and has earned status as one of the most widely acclaimed cartoonists of our time.Shortcomings was serialized in Tomine's iconic comic book series Optic Nerve and was excerpted in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #13.

A + E 4ever


I. Merey - 2011
    Guys punch him, girls slag him and by high school he's developed an intense fear of being touched. Art remains his only escape from an otherwise emotionally empty life. Eulalie Mason is the lonely, tough-talking dyke from school who befriends Ash. The only one to see and accept all of his sides as a loner, a fellow artist and a best friend, she's starting to wonder if ash is ever going to see all of her.... a + e 4EVER is a graphic novel set in that ambiguous crossroads where love and friendship, boy and girl, straight and gay meet. It goes where few books have ventured, into genderqueer life, where affections aren't black and white. A Stonewall Youth Book Award Honoree for its frank portrayal of queer, contemporary youth.