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During the Middle Ages in Europe, some sexual and gendered behaviors were labeled “sodomitical” or evoked using ambiguous phrases such as the “unmentionable vice” or the “sin against nature.” How, though, did these categories enter the field of vision? How do you know a sodomite when you see one? Challenging the view that medieval ideas about sexual and gender dissidence were too confused to congeal into a coherent form, this book demonstrates that sodomy had a rich, multimedia presence in the period—and that a flexible approach to questions of terminology sheds new light on the many forms this presence took. Arguing that we need to take account of the role played by translation—whether visual, verbal, or cultural—in endowing sodomy with a pictorial or textual form, the book also considers the extent to which medieval materials can be re-visioned in light of twenty-first-century categories of thought. Also, the book advances discussion by showing how greater attention needs to be paid to motifs of gender slippage and to notions of imitation and derivation in medieval encounters with sex. Among the topics covered are depictions of the practices of sodomites in illuminated Bibles; motifs of gender transformation and sex change as envisioned by medieval artists and commentators on Ovid; sexual relations in religious houses and other enclosed spaces; and the applicability of modern categories such as “transgender,” “butch” and “femme,” “queer,” and “sexual orientation” to medieval culture.

Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight have been problematized as symbols of the stigmatization and erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters of Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries as well as on a number of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered and sexual lives of speakers in various contexts. Some chapters focus on the limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a retheorization of the binary that affords more complex and contextually grounded engagement with speakers’ own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries—including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by researchers, and those that recontextualize familiar divisions with innovative meanings. With each chapter having a perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities, what the contributions to Queer Excursions together demonstrate is that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities we study.

This book examines a controversial topic that has yet to be addressed in the literature on Argentine tango, the most recent incarnation of tango nuevo (new tango) dance. Alternately attributed to acrobatic moves, disrespectful kids, electronic music, the influx of foreign bodies and cash into Buenos Aires, and increasing globalization of the contemporary tango community/industry, nuevo and the debates surrounding it illustrate the complexity of cultural politics today. Surveying Argentine and tango history, the book underscores the role of the imagination in the dance's evolution, as well as the presence of elements associated with nuevo-fusion, innovation, and foreign influence-from its origins over a century ago. Testaments of the dance's healing and addictive properties are juxtaposed with portraits of machismo and violence in tango venues old and new to illustrate tango's emotional depth and psychological challenges, while also pointing to questions surrounding the “newness” of nuevo. Highlighting the tensions between evolution and preservation in the survival of cultural phenomena, the book attends to the intersection of culture, economics, and globalization in contemporary tango, where modern yearnings for authentic experience, tourism and heritage programs that commodify and politicize culture, and contemporary efforts to push the boundaries of tango, meet. Throughout, individual voices speak to the romance of tradition and the enduring significance of place in a globalized era. The result is a moving exploration of the continued transformations of a beloved cultural tradition.

This book contains chapters covering theology, history, law, and media studies of religion about the current situation and potential of Catholic intellectual life. Most of the chapters originated as presentations in a September 2013 conference but have been expanded and edited for this book. Their organizing idea is that Catholic intellectual work always occurs “in the lógos of love,” as described by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate. This description of truth opening and uniting minds offers rich possibilities for thinking about contemporary intellectual life. Topics include the place of Catholic intellectual tradition in professional education and in the secular university; emerging understandings of the role of women, especially in the study of gender and sexuality, but in many other areas as well; the relationship between the United States and the global church; and the role of the media in depicting Catholicism and in transforming what is necessary in handing on a tradition.

Resisting Paradise asserts the importance of both tourism and diaspora in shaping Caribbean cultural and sexual identity. It examines Caribbean cultural producers who contend with the region’s overdependence on the tourist industry and address the many ways that tourism continues the legacy of colonialism. The book explores the relationship between culture and sex within the production of paradise and investigates the ways in which Caribbean writers, artists, activists, and other cultural producers respond to and powerfully resist this production. Forms of resistance include critiquing exploitation, challenging dominant narratives of history, exposing tourism’s influence on cultural and sexual identity in the Caribbean and its diaspora, and offering alternative models of tourism and travel. Resisting Paradise offers an intriguing emphasis on Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora subjects as travelers and as cultural workers contributing to alternative and resistant understandings of tourism in the Caribbean. Through a unique multi-disciplinary approach to comparative literary analysis, interview material, and participant observation, Angelique V. Nixon analyzes the ways Caribbean cultural producers are taking control of representation and sustaining subjectivity. While focused mainly on the Anglophone Caribbean, the study covers a range of geographical territories including Antigua, The Bahamas, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Overall, the book utilizes a transnational feminist postcolonial framework in order to theorize “resisting paradise” and the sexual-cultural politics of tourism. This research posits an intervention within tourism and diaspora studies by making gender and sexuality the center of inquiry and analysis.

This book argues that Cold War struggles against “subversion” must be understood in cultural terms, as a reaction to the consequences—both real and perceived—of modernization. Inscribing Brazil’s Cold War military rulers and their supporters into a decades-long trajectory of right-wing activism and ideology, and locating them in a transnational network of right-wing cultural warriors, the book demonstrates that anti-modern moral panic animated powerful, hard-line elements of Brazil’s countersubversive dictatorship (1964-1985). This moral panic conflated communist subversion with the accoutrement of modernity, and coalesced around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to “modern” youth, women, and mass media. Transformations in these realms were anathema to the Right, who echoed the anxieties of generations past, pathologizing and sexualizing these phenomena, and identifying in them a “crisis of modernity” and of communist subversion. Hence the Cold War became more than a military struggle against rural guerrillas and urban terrorists; from the perspective of key activists and technocrats, the battle must be waged across sexual and bodily practice, clothing, music, art, mass media, and gender. Addressing historiographical neglect of the Right in Brazil and beyond, the book culturally historicizes the Western Cold War in a transnational sense by uncovering Atlantic networks of right-wing activism that validated anti-modern and anticommunist anxieties. These networks included Brazilian, European, and North Atlantic anticommunists, from the famous to those whose stars waned after the Cold War.

This book argues that cooking and talking are at the very quick of Black Atlantic religions. It shows that tasks like butchering, although manual, are far from menial, and “idle chatter” does a surprising amount of heavy lifting in Afro-Diasporic houses of worship. Its thesis is that such activities get under the skin of practitioners, equipping them with the repertoire of skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for religious norms to be internalized, then reproduced. The book maintains that to understand Black Atlantic religions, one must grasp not only their ethics and aesthetics but also their synaesthetics—the somatic and emotional dimensions of everyday experience. The book centers on two commonplace yet transformative kinds of kitchen work and talk: preparation of food for the gods and narration of stories about ritual experience. These undertakings are best described as “micropractices.” Micropractices like plucking chickens and trading anecdotes not only organize space, time, and intensities of affect for participants; they also progressively implicate their performers in the material and conceptual worlds of religious authorities.Indeed, the book demonstrates that individuals are transformed into religious subjects through their enactment of micropractices at the interstices of better-known rituals. Furthermore, in seeking to provide a more accurate understanding of women and gay men—particularly those deemed effeminate—as social actors within Afro-Diasporic houses of worship, it reconceptualizes the role of race, gender, and sexuality in religious subjectivity.

Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam redefines global modernism in terms of realism. The monograph challenges some of the central assumptions about the literary aesthetics of colonial modernity. The book has two interlocking arguments. First, it underscores the radical transformation of Vietnam’s literary field from a 1000-year-old Chinese-influenced mandarin system to the supply-and-demand market of 20th-century print culture—linguistically, from Examination Chinese to the Vietnamese romanized alphabet of quốc ngữ. Second, it shows that as much as this transformation was an intellectual disruption, it was equally a gendered historical upheaval. The book demonstrates how the dissolution of the all-male mandarinate and the simultaneous emergence of a female reading public underwrote the significant realist aesthetics of Vietnamese modernity. The project employs the term “post-mandarin” to describe how native intellectuals educated in the French baccalaureate system adopted European fields of knowledge, a new romanized writing script, and print media—all of which were foreign and illegible to their fathers. Post-mandarin intellectuals mediated their critique of colonial modernity through the various subjectivities of modern women, portraying these women as transgressive romantics, sex workers catering to European men, patients in colonial dispensaries, and readers of novels. The book’s focus on sexuality reveals how masculine anxiety undercut the purportedly objective genre of journalistic reportage, how Vietnam’s modernist turn was a turn toward literary realism, and how Vietnamese socialist realism derived from a queer internationalism.