Book picks similar to
Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires by Francisca Lai


politics-history-society
sinophone-queer-fiction
anthropology
feminism-and-lgbtq

Until We Break


Cynthia Dane - 2020
    The only thing missing from her picturesque, countryside life is companionship. But with a great distaste for dating – and the city – Stefani approaches an international service to make her marital dreams come true.Enter Yulia, the alluring Russian woman with a penchant for heavy flirtation. She occasionally puts her money where her mouth is, too, driving Stefani wild with fantasies that this marriage might be more than convenience.Yet she can’t shake the feeling that Yulia has an ulterior motive. Or maybe that’s the Valettis’ collective past coming back to bite them.YULIA PETROVAYulia Petrova will do whatever it takes to get to America. Specifically, the Pacific Northwest, where the only person who matters is waiting for her.She’ll even marry a total stranger. A woman, no less.The trick isn’t balancing her own preferences. No, the trick is keeping her new fiancée from finding out the truth too quickly. First, she must ensure that Stefani is in love with her. Then, Yulia must reveal the tragic truth that has brought her to America.DO SVIDANIYA, MI AMORETheir budding passion and rising trust in one another is about to be severely complicated by the illness sweeping the world. For Stefani, that means shutting down the winery and hiding behind her chronic anxiety. For Yulia, that means taking all matters into her own hands. The whole world could burn, and she would still get what she came here for.And she will do it alone – with or without the woman she’s come to love

Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty and Sexuality Among a Saharan People: Fatness and Beauty in the Sahara


Rebecca Popenoe - 2003
    Feeding Desire analyses this beauty ideal in the context of Islam, conceptions of health, and notions of desire Full description

The Gifts We Keep


Katie Grindeland - 2015
    When she reluctantly agrees to care for Addie, a young Native Alaskan girl, she discovers she must seek help from the family she’s kept at arm’s length for years, and returns to the big home on Looking Lake and all her memories there.Her sister Tillie, the gardener, the artist, still has unspoken questions about the teenage accident with Emerson that claimed her legs from the knee down. Their aging mother Eve spreads her joy for life indiscriminately and wonders how she could ever have failed her daughters. Their neighbor Henry, the handsome sculptor, has his own silent history with Emerson, and knows more than he’s telling about her husband’s suicide.And ten-year-old Addie has come into this house full of strangers, bringing her own grief over her mother's illness, and an uncanny ability to recognize the aches these grown-ups carry inside themselves. As the five come together, new alliances are forged and old secrets are forced to the surface, weaving together questions of identity, forgiveness, and the bravery it takes to open our true selves to the ones we love.

Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us


Jesse Bering - 2013
    Whether it’s voyeurism, exhibitionism, or your run-of-the-mill foot fetish, we all possess a suite of sexual tastes as unique as our fingerprints—and as secret as the rest of the skeletons we’ve hidden in our closets.Combining cutting-edge studies and critiques of landmark research and conclusions drawn by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and the DSM-5, Bering pulls the curtain back on paraphilias, arguing that sexual deviance is commonplace. Bering confronts hypocrisy, prejudice, and harm as they relate to sexuality on a global scale. Humanizing so-called deviants while at the same time asking serious questions about the differences between thought and action, he presents us with a challenge: to understand that our best hope of solving some of the most troubling problems of our age hinges entirely on the amoral study of sex.

I Am a Bacha Posh: My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan


Ukmina Manoori - 2014
    These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work—and in some cases, it saves them from the disgrace of not having a male heir. But in adolescence, religion restores the natural law. The girls must marry, give birth, and give up their freedom.Ukmina decided to confront social and family pressure and keep her menswear. This brave choice paved the way for an extraordinary destiny: she wages war against the Soviets, assists the mujaheddin and ultimately commands the respect of all whom she encounters. She eventually becomes one of the elected council members of her province.But freedom always has a price. For "Ukmina warrior" that price was her life as a woman. This is a stunning and brave memoir about a little known practice that will challenge your perceptions about gender and the courage it takes to live your life to the fullest.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Staying at Eleni's


Michelle Vernal - 2014
    One minute you’re trying to live the suburban dream in New Zealand and the next minute you’re living the dream in…the Greek Islands.Sometimes life doesn’t go to plan. Take Annie’s for instance. Her fiancé won’t commit to setting a date and the zipper of her dream dress won’t quite do up. Her cat’s just died and her best friend, Carl thinks getting married will be the biggest mistake of her life. Annie’s had enough and when her Greek pen pal invites her to come and stay at the family guesthouse on the island of Crete, she wings her way over.Under Crete’s brilliant blue skies Annie’s about to discover that sometimes you have to let go of the future you thought you had mapped out and let your life make a map all of its own.

Picture Perfect?


Kordale Lewis - 2014
    With inspiring candor, Kordale Lewis describes his struggles with childhood sexual abuse, a drug-addicted mother, suicide, the trials of teen fatherhood, and much more. His story provides a bold challenge for readers to redefine their own meaning of a perfect family.

Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir)


Jackson Bird - 2019
    When Jackson Bird was twenty-five, he came out as transgender to his friends, family, and anyone in the world with an internet connection. Assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, he often wondered if he should have been born a boy. Jackson didn’t share this thought with anyone because he didn’t think he could share it with anyone. Growing up in Texas in the 1990s, he had no transgender role models. He barely remembers meeting anyone who was openly gay, let alone being taught that transgender people existed outside of punchlines. In this “soulful and heartfelt coming-of-age story” (Jamia Wilson, director and publisher of the Feminist Press), Jackson chronicles the ups and downs of growing up gender-confused. Illuminated by journal entries spanning childhood to adolescence to today, he candidly recalls the challenges and loneliness he endured as he came to terms with both his gender and his bisexual identity. With warmth and wit, Jackson also recounts how he navigated the many obstacles and quirks of his transition––like figuring out how to have a chest binder delivered to his NYU dorm room and having an emotional breakdown at a Harry Potter fan convention. From his first shot of testosterone to his eventual top surgery, Jackson lets you in on every part of his journey—taking the time to explain trans terminology and little-known facts about gender and identity along the way. “A compassionate, tender-hearted, and accessible book for anyone who might need a hand to hold as they walk through their own transition or the transition of a loved one” (Austin Chant, author of Peter Darling), Sorted demonstrates the power and beauty in being yourself, even when you’re not sure who “yourself” is.

Money for Something: Sex Work. Drugs. Life. Need.


Mia Walsch - 2020
    Look where we are. What else do we have to hide?'When nineteen-year-old Mia is fired from her job at an insurance company, she answers an ad in the newspaper. The ad says: 'Erotic Massage. Good Money. No Sex.'Mia takes to her new job with recklessness, aplomb and good humour. Over the next few years, as she works her way through Sydney's many parlours, she meets exquisite and complex women from every walk of life who choose sex work for myriad reasons. While juggling the demands of her new job, she battles her problematic drug use, and the mental illness that has shaped her life.But rather than needing saving from sex work, it is the work that sometimes helps to save Mia from herself.A raw and honest memoir about surviving, sex work, friendships, drugs and mental illness.

Love and Honor in the Himalayas: Coming to Know Another Culture


Ernestine McHugh - 2001
    It was in their steep Himalayan villages that McHugh came to know another culture, witnessing and learning the Buddhist appreciation for equanimity in moments of precious joy and inevitable sorrow.Love and Honor in the Himalayas is McHugh's gripping ethnographic memoir based on research among the Gurungs conducted over a span of fourteen years. As she chronicles the events of her fieldwork, she also tells a story that admits feeling and involvement, writing of the people who housed her in the terms in which they cast their relationship with her, that of family. Welcomed to call her host Ama and become a daughter in the household, McHugh engaged in a strong network of kin and friendship. She intimately describes, with a sure sense of comedy and pathos, the family's diverse experiences of life and loss, self and personhood, hope, knowledge, and affection. In mundane as well as dramatic rituals, the Gurungs ever emphasize the importance of love and honor in everyday life, regardless of circumstances, in all human relationships. Such was the lesson learned by McHugh, who arrived a young woman facing her own hardships and came to understand--and experience--the power of their ways of being.While it attends to a particular place and its inhabitants, Love and Honor in the Himalayas is, above all, about human possibility, about what people make of their lives. Through the compelling force of her narrative, McHugh lets her emotionally open fieldwork reveal insight into the privilege of joining a community and a culture. It is an invitation to sustain grace and kindness in the face of adversity, cultivate harmony and mutual support, and cherish life fully.

Sex Lives of the Roman Emperors


Nigel Cawthorne - 2004
    Takes you emperor by emperor, through the entire sexual history of ancient Rome, its mores and its literature, and lays bare, if not the heart, other organs of the civilization that laid the foundations of our own.

The Girl from Moscow's Edge


Nadya Frank - 2021
    But her partner in crime is dead.Zoya Volkova finds him at the garage icy floor. Her friend and accomplice, in a puddle of his own blood. Maybe it was one of the rich Muscovites they scammed for a car repair in that very garage. Maybe it has to do with a heist they’ve planned, the job that would change their lives.Her boyfriend wants to go on with the rip-off. Her bestie talks her out of it. Caught up in a whirlwind of mistrust, Zoya learns about terrible things her estranged mother had done to Zoya’s siblings. Now she needs this money to mitigate the damage, but is it safe when she suspects everyone?Racing against the time, at odds with the police, a local crime boss and her own conscience, Zoya needs to find out who murdered her partner. Will she fix her life or will she lose everything?An unputdownable prequel novella to the Zoya Volkova thriller series.

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl


John Colapinto - 2000
    The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's—and one family's—amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.

Host Dormitory Housekeeper (Yaoi Manga)


Midori Suzukino - 2017
    32 pages

Molave and the Orchid and Other Children's Stories


F. Sionil José - 2004
    Gallado whose talents in magazine, book design and illustrating were first honed in the old and defunct Philippines Herald and Manila Times. From there, he became Art Director of The Asia Magazine and subsequently a series of publishing firms in Hong Kong, including Asian Finance, Ltd., Pacific Communications, Ltd., Communication Management Ltd., and Flair Publishing Asia Ltd., before returning to Manila, where he has held several one-man exhibitions of his paintings, the most recent of which was a collection of pen and ink drawings. Bert Gallardo's flair for drawing recommends this book to young artists.These four stories as crafted by the country's foremost novelist are meant for children but in reality, they are also for adults. Readers will find in these stories the author's familiar themes as depicted in his longer fiction. F. Sionil Jose's latest distinction comes from Chile—The Pablo Neruda Centennial Award.