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Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

Tavia Nyong'o

In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, the cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the wake of post-blackness. ... More

In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, the cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong’o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the wake of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960s and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. Tracking how the bodies that were speculated in as commodities became speculative bodies, he develops an account of black fabulation that is always already feminist and queer. In so doing, he revises accounts of post-humanism and new materialism that ignore the subversive potential of life lived outside the sovereign coordinates of the human. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a black polytemporality is invented and sustained. “Angular sociality” names the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself, providing its internal dynamism and drama. To outline his theory of afro-fabulation, Nyong’o takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.Less

The Battle over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism through the Media

Leigh Moscowitz

Over the past decade, the controversial issue of gay marriage has emerged as a primary battle in the culture wars and a definitive social issue of our time. The subject moved to the forefront of ... More

Over the past decade, the controversial issue of gay marriage has emerged as a primary battle in the culture wars and a definitive social issue of our time. The subject moved to the forefront of mainstream public debate in 2004, when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom began authorizing same-sex marriage licenses, and it has remained in the forefront through three presidential campaigns and numerous state ballot initiatives. This book examines how prominent news outlets presented this issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. During this time, gay rights leaders sought to harness the power of news media to advocate for marriage equality and to reform their community's public image. Building on in-depth interviews with gay rights activists and a comprehensive, longitudinal study of news stories, this book investigates these leaders' aims and how their frames, tactics, and messages evolved over time. In the end, media coverage of the gay marriage debate both aided and undermined the cause. Media exposure gave activists a platform to discuss gay and lesbian families. But it also triggered an upsurge in opposing responses and pressured activists to depict gay life in a way calculated to appeal to heterosexual audiences. Ultimately, this book reveals both the promises and the limitations of commercial media as a route to social change.Less

Boys' Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan

Maud Lavin, Ling Yang, and Jing Jamie Zhao (eds)

Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, ... More

Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, this book explores extended, diversified, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that have cultivated various forms of queerness. To right an imbalance in the scholarly literature on queer East Asia, this volume is weighted toward an exploration of queer elements of mainland Chinese fandoms that have been less often written about than more visible cultural elements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Case studies drawn from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the flows among them include: the Chinese online Hetalia fandom; Chinese fans’ queer gossip on the American L-Word actress Katherine Moennig; Dongfang Bubai iterations; the HOCC fandom; cross-border fans of Li Yuchun; and Japaneseness in Taiwanese BL fantasies; among others.Less

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

A transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism, this book focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy. It unpacks this as the central ... More

A transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism, this book focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy. It unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, the book formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, the book follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, the book addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around “Asian performance”.Less

Citizen, Invert, Queer: Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Deborah Cohler

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did ... More

In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? This book illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture. Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, the text maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. It integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.Less

Coming Together: The Cinematic Elaboration of Gay Male Life, 1945-1979

Ryan Powell

This book is a historiographic exploration of the first wave of films made as a part of the consolidation of gay liberation movement politics and philosophy in the U.S. between the mid 1940s and the ... More

This book is a historiographic exploration of the first wave of films made as a part of the consolidation of gay liberation movement politics and philosophy in the U.S. between the mid 1940s and the late 1970s. It looks at how numerous kinds of film, movie-going contexts and industrial materials (advertisements, posters, reviews) operated in relation to gay liberationist discourse. A primary consideration is how this body of 200+ films—including home movies, avant-garde and experimental films, feature length independent dramas, and hardcore porn—moved beyond representational concerns to offer complex elaborations of what it might mean to be a participant in gay life. The book weaves together an expansive range of archival materials and case studies, exploring how proto gay and gay liberation era cinema took form through discourses both dominant and countercultural, how specific places and moments fostered censorship-challenging, antinormative cinema and cinema-going practices, and how gay cinema facilitated new and emergent publics. Through four chapters, the book charts changes in film and promotion as the sociopolitical organization of male-desiring men moved from a discourse of homosexuality to one of gay liberation, showing how both were taken up as self-reflexive zones of cultural production and performance.Less

Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe

Amy Adamczyk

Across the world, public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, in other countries, very few people find ... More

Across the world, public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, in other countries, very few people find homosexuality acceptable. Why are there such big differences in attitudes about homosexuality? Using survey data from almost ninety societies, this book shows that cross-national differences in how residents view homosexuality can largely be explained by three country characteristics: the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context. While these factors can explain a lot of the differences across the world, the way they shape attitudes within individual nations varies substantially. Each country has a different story to tell about how these forces affect public opinion. Country case studies, a content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews are used to unpack the characteristics working within individual and key sets of nations. Attention is given not only to demographic and country characteristics that shape public opinion but also to the way these factors work within specific countries and combine with a nation’s unique history and social context to shape attitudes, laws, policies, and enforcement regarding homosexuality.Less

Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid

Jill Robbins

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. ... More

In the past two decades the city of Madrid has been marked by pride, feminism, and globalization—but also by the vestiges of the machismo nurtured during the long years of the Franco dictatorship. This book examines how lesbian literary culture fares in this mix from the end of the countercultural movement la movida madrileña in 1988 until the gay marriage march in 2005. This book traverses the various literary spaces of the city associated with queer culture, in particular the gay barrio of Chueca, revealing how it is a product of interrelations—a site crisscrossed by a multiplicity of subjects who constitute it as a queer space through the negotiation of their sexual, racial, gender, and class identities. The book recognizes Chueca as a political space as well, a refuge from homophobia. It also shows how the spatial and literary practices of Chueca relate to economic issues. In examining how women’s sexual identities have become visible in and through the Chueca phenomenon, this work is a revealing example of transnational queer studies within the broader Western discussion on gender and sexuality.Less

Discourses on LGBT Asylum in the Uk: Constructing a Queer Haven

Thibaut Raboin

Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK analyses fifteen years of debate, activism and media narrative and examines the way asylum is conceptualized at the crossroads of nationhood, post colonialism and ... More

Discourses on LGBT asylum in the UK analyses fifteen years of debate, activism and media narrative and examines the way asylum is conceptualized at the crossroads of nationhood, post colonialism and sexual citizenship, reshaping in the process forms of sexual belongings to the nation. Asylum has become a foremost site for the formulation and critique of LGBT human rights. This book intervenes in the ongoing discussion of homonationalism, sheds new light on the limitations of queer liberalism as a political strategy, and questions the prevailing modes of solidarity with queer migrants in the UK. This book employs the methods of Discourse Analysis to study a large corpus encompassing media narratives, policy documents, debates with activists and NGOs, and also counter discourses emerging from art practice. The study of these discourses illuminates the construction of the social problem of LGBT asylum. Doing so, it shows how our understanding of asylum is firmly rooted in the individual stories of migration that are circulated in the media. The book also critiques the exclusionary management of cases by the state, especially in the way the state manufactures the authenticity of queer refugees. Finally, it investigates the affective economy of asylum, assessing critically the role of sympathy and challenging the happy goals of queer liberalism. This book will be essential for researchers and students specializing in refugee studies and queer studies.Less

Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger

Kelly Cogswell

EATING FIRE: MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN AVENGER is an activist’s memoir spanning two decades from the Culture Wars of the ‘90’s through today’s War on Terror. Engaging the reader with a picaresque activist ... More

EATING FIRE: MY LIFE AS A LESBIAN AVENGER is an activist’s memoir spanning two decades from the Culture Wars of the ‘90’s through today’s War on Terror. Engaging the reader with a picaresque activist adventure, Cogswell simultaneously explores questions of identity, resistance, and citizenship, evoking Richard Wright’s Black Boy as she attempts to insert lesbians into America’s ongoing narrative of liberty and justice for all.Less

Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina

Wilton Barnhardt (ed.)

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the ... More

Some of North Carolina's finest fiction and nonfiction writers come together in Every True Pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume-featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight-are stories and essays that view the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, all native or connected to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LGBTQ life, including young love and gay panic, the minefield of religion, military service, having children with a surrogate, family rejection, finding one's true gender, finding sex, and finding love. One of the only anthologies of its kind, Every True Pleasure speaks with insight and compassion about living LGBTQ in North Carolina and beyond. Contributors include Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, Brian Blanchfield, Belle Boggs, Emily Chávez, Garrard Conley, John Pierre Craig, Diane Daniel, Allan Gurganus, MinroseGwin, Aaron Gwyn, Wayne Johns, Randall Kenan, Kelly Link, Zelda Lockhart, Toni Newman, Michael Parker, Penelope Robbins, David Sedaris, Eric Tran, and Alyssa Wong.Less

Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence

Darius Bost

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, black gay men produced a rich and diverse body of cultural work—poetry, fiction, literary journals and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual ... More

From the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, black gay men produced a rich and diverse body of cultural work—poetry, fiction, literary journals and anthologies, magazines, newspapers, performance and visual art—to narrate their experiences with and everyday struggles against racism, homophobia, capitalism, and HIV/AIDS. This book discusses this cultural renaissance, and focuses on activities in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Drawing on literary analysis, archival materials, oral histories, and interviews, the book demonstrates how black gay men used these literary and cultural forms to address trauma and violence in their communities, build connections among black gay men, engage in political mobilization, and assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood. Individual chapters focus on the magazine Blacklight and the performance group Cinque; the works of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam; the history and cultural production of writers’ group, Other Countries Collective; and the diaries of poet, novelist, translator, and scholar Melvin Dixon.Less

Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church Coalition

Ellen Lewin

This book explores the worship and community central to the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a coalition of predominantly African American, LGBT congregations with a Pentecostal style of ... More

This book explores the worship and community central to the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM), a coalition of predominantly African American, LGBT congregations with a Pentecostal style of worship. TFAM's central doctrine is "radical inclusivity," a commitment to embrace all those who might have been rejected or marginalized by mainstream black churches, but which has been expanded to include all persons regardless of race, sexuality, or religious background. The book looks closely at how TFAM worship is legitimated through the use of historical insignia of black culture, how it challenges traditional concepts of charismatic leadership, and how it elaborates ideas about authenticity.Less

The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts

Andrew E. Stoner

First-ever biography of controversial journalist and author Randy Shilts, one of the nation’s first openly gay reporters for a major daily newspaper. Known for his tenacity in reporting, he quickly ... More

First-ever biography of controversial journalist and author Randy Shilts, one of the nation’s first openly gay reporters for a major daily newspaper. Known for his tenacity in reporting, he quickly became the “AIDS scribe” among American journalists. His work was not without controversy, however, with posthumous reviews of his “new journalism” techniques called into question, including the accuracy of some of his research. Review is provided of Shilts’s childhood struggles with physical abuse, his adult battles with alcohol and drug addiction, and his ultimate death from AIDS. The critical review of Shilts is most focused on his 1987 book, And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic – although his work on The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982) and Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military (1993)Less

Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota

Stewart Van Cleve

For too long, LGBTQ communities—including Minnesota’s—have been maligned, misrepresented, and often outright ignored. Myths regarding the queer experience have grown and become embedded in local and ... More

For too long, LGBTQ communities—including Minnesota’s—have been maligned, misrepresented, and often outright ignored. Myths regarding the queer experience have grown and become embedded in local and national consciousness. The absence of queer stories over time in local historical and popular writing only served to further this ignorance, but great strides have been made in recent decades to celebrate Minnesota’s vibrant queer history. This book presents a history of queer life in Minnesota. The text blends oral history, archival narrative, newspaper accounts, and fascinating illustrations to paint a remarkable picture of Minnesota’s queer history. More than 120 concise historical essays lead readers from the earliest evidences of queer life in the state before the Second World War—for example, Oscar Wilde’s visit to Minnesota and “rumors” at the Alexander Ramsey house—to riverfront vice districts, protest and parade sites, bars, 1970s collectives, institutions, public spaces, and private homes.Less

My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

Allan Berube

John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (eds)

This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube, a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda ... More

This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube, a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. The editors of this book, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while documenting the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.Less

The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

David Caron

1.2 million people in the United States are currently living with HIV, and over 30 states have laws criminalizing HIV nondisclosure and/or exposure. As more people continue to be infected (at a rate ... More

1.2 million people in the United States are currently living with HIV, and over 30 states have laws criminalizing HIV nondisclosure and/or exposure. As more people continue to be infected (at a rate of about 50,000 per year in this country alone), and as mortality continues to decline, HIV infection will become an increasingly common, shared experience. Yet, today, in Western countries where effective treatments are easily available to many of those who need them, to disclose one’s HIV-positive status is not as easy a proposition as some may think. A personal narrative of a gay man’s life with HIV, the book tells a story of diagnosis and adaptation to what is essentially a new life. It focuses on the experience of having one’s own body caught in a catastrophic pandemic and in an intricate web of discourses—medical, legal, academic, moral, etc.—and spaces—urban, institutional, virtual. How does one deal with a disease that is no longer the automatic death sentence it once was but continues to terrify people as if it were? What is it like to live with HIV after 9/11 and the so-called war on terror, when fear and suspicion have become the order of the day? Going beyond personal experience, the book goes on to probe popular culture and politics as well as literary memoirs and films in order to ask deeper questions about our relationships with others.Less

Oye Loca: From the Mariel Boatlift to Gay Cuban Miami

Susana Peña

THE 1980 MARIEL BOATLIFT was a turning point in Miami’s Cuban American and gay histories. My work begins with this moment of cultural collision. It examines discourses about Mariel that both ... More

THE 1980 MARIEL BOATLIFT was a turning point in Miami’s Cuban American and gay histories. My work begins with this moment of cultural collision. It examines discourses about Mariel that both sensationalized and silenced the gay presence, the challenges faced by homosexual men who entered as part of the boatlift, and the emergent Cuban American gay culture that transformed Miami’s ethnic and sexual landscapes.Less

Receptive Bodies

Leo Bersani

This book is centered on a surprisingly simple image: a newborn baby simultaneously crying out and drawing its first breath. These twin ideas—absorption and expulsion, the intake of physical and ... More

This book is centered on a surprisingly simple image: a newborn baby simultaneously crying out and drawing its first breath. These twin ideas—absorption and expulsion, the intake of physical and emotional nourishment, and the exhalation of breath—form the backbone of this book. These titular bodies range from fetuses in utero to fully eroticized adults, all the way to celestial giants floating in space. The author illustrates his exploration of the body's capacities to receive and resist what is ostensibly alien using a typically eclectic set of sources, from literary icons like Marquis de Sade to cinematic provocateurs such as Bruno Dumont and Lars von Trier. This book will be of interest to scholars of Freud, Foucault, and film studies, or anyone who has ever stopped to ponder the give and take of human corporeality.Less

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where ... More

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. This book uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts. Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th-century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—the book employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the book renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, it proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. The book is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.Less