An impressionistic memoir offers images of a life in progress, including scenes from Boyer Rickel’s rural Tempe, Arizona, childhood in the 1950s; his relationship with a physically shrinking father; his eccentric teenage friendships; his growing awareness of his sexuality among young, Hispanic gays; and a trip through Italy with his lover. A personal book, but also wholly universal, Taboo investigates the way one breaks through taboos and becomes a self-realized adult.

Tacit Subjects is a pioneering analysis of how gay immigrant men of color negotiate race, sexuality, and power in their daily lives. Drawing on ethnographic research with Dominicans in New York City, Carlos Ulises Decena explains that while the men who shared their life stories with him may self-identify as gay, they are not the liberated figures of traditional gay migration narratives. Decena contends that in migrating to Washington Heights, a Dominican enclave in New York, these men moved from one site to another within an increasingly transnational Dominican society. Many of them migrated and survived through the resources of their families and broader communities. Explicit acknowledgment or discussion of their homosexuality might rupture these crucial social and familial bonds. Yet some of Decena’s informants were sure that their sexuality was tacitly understood by their family members or others close to them. Analyzing their recollections about migration, settlement, masculinity, sex, and return trips to the Dominican Republic, Decena describes how the men at the center of Tacit Subjects contest, reproduce, and reformulate Dominican identity in New York. Their stories reveal how differences in class, race, and education shape their relations with fellow Dominicans. They also offer a view of “gay New York” that foregrounds the struggles for respect, belonging, and survival within a particular immigrant community.

Now associated with family health clubs, the YMCA's bland image is the result of relentless outreach and the studied avoidance of controversy. But, as John Gustav-Wrathall shows in his revealing social history of the organization, the life of the YMCA has been filled with strife, tragedy, and irony, a life that itself reflects the struggle over the shifting societal mores regarding masculine friendship and intimacy. Take the Young Stranger by the Hand presents the YMCA as an institution of profound contradictions, reflective of society's views of same-sex love and sexuality.

"Gustav-Wrathall's book offers an in-depth history of the origins and purposes of the Young Men's Christian Association and how it evolved into—and out of—a gay playland."—Arnie Kantrowitz, Lambda Book Report

"The book's absorbing exploration of the sometimes schismatic, sometimes synergistic relationship between spirituality and sexuality is a fascinating addition to the growing body of social history."—Jim Van Buskirk, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Tendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" (Rolling Stone). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing.
The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

Starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, Albuquerque examines the way the Modernist movement both fueled and inhibited the use of gay imagery in Brazilian drama. This elegant and fluid study ultimately becomes an examination of a whole Latin society, and the ways in which Latin theatre has absorbed and reflected the culture's own changing sensibilities, that will intrigue anyone interested in Latin American culture, literature, or theater.

Winner, 2008 Elizabeth A. Steinberg Prize

Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition

Ten years on, Jasbir K. Puar’s pathbreaking Terrorist Assemblages remains one of the most influential queer theory texts and continues to reverberate across multiple political landscapes, activist projects, and scholarly pursuits. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, shifting queers from their construction as figures of death to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity. This tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends, however, on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by what Puar calls homonationalism—a fusing of homosexuality to U.S. pro-war, pro-imperialist agendas. 

As a concept and tool of biopolitical management, homonationalism is here to stay. Puar’s incisive analyses of feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, the decriminalization of sodomy in the wake of the Patriot Act, and the profiling of Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers are not instances of a particular historical moment; rather, they are reflective of the dynamics saturating power, sexuality, race, and politics today. 

This Tenth Anniversary Expanded Edition features a new foreword by Tavia Nyong’o and a postscript by Puar entitled “Homonationalism in Trump Times.” Nyong’o and Puar recontextualize the book in light of the current political moment while reposing its original questions to illuminate how Puar’s interventions are even more vital and necessary than ever.

In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation.

Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

Thinking Sexuality Transnationally examines the emergence of new forms of sexuality and desire from a global perspective. Legal, pop-culture, and academic approaches to these new forms are considered from both national—China, Brazil, Indonesia, and Thailand—and transnational—Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and the United States—standpoints. The contributors approach their subjects with the corollary understanding that these new forms of sexuality and desire arise in borderlands, and what constitutes a borderland has been redefined with the onset of mass media and communication abilities.
Included in this collection are a study of the construction of male gay identities in China; a consideration of sexual pedagogy, the state, and the “new Brazilian homosexuality”; the format of amnesty applications submitted by lesbians in Guatemala; the roles of gender and sexuality in Taiwanese opera; and a review of transgender literature and language. One of the first comprehensive inquiries into the effects of globalization on sexuality and desire, Thinking Sexuality Transnationally brings together essayists from several disciplines to look at how sexuality and global movement are involved and evolving.

Contributors. Tom Boellstorff, George Chauncey, Peter Jackson, Don Kulick, Patrick Larvie, Heather McClure, Frances Negron-Munter, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Lisa Rofel, Teri Silvio

A gold mine of information about a hidden queer culture

Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions--both medical and political--about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition.

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.  Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.

Thoughts and Things posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being—of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us.  He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, Thoughts and Things will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship, and Sex in Queer Mexico City is the first ethnography in English to focus primarily on women’s sexual and intimate cultures in Mexico. The book shows the transformation of intimacy in the lives of three generations of women in queer spaces in contemporary Mexico City, as their sexual citizenship changes, including references to same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws. The book shows how these individuals reconfigure relationships through marriage, polyamory, friendship, and sex. Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy suggests that “new” intimate cartographies are emerging in Mexico City, ultimately redefining relationships, gender, and mexicanidad. Building on ethnographic data collected over the past decade, including forty-five in-depth interviews with women between the ages of twenty-two and sixty-five participating in LGBT spaces, Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy shows how lesbian women (mainly cis, but some trans) negotiate friendship, same-sex marriage, polyamory, and sexual practices, reinventing love, eroticism, friendship, and ultimately the social organization of Latin American societies.

Often depicted as deviant or pathological by public health researchers, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, male-with-male sex and sex work is, in fact, an increasingly mainstream pursuit. Based on a qualitative investigation of the practices involved in male-with-male—or m4m—Internet escorting, Touching Encounters is the first book to explicitly address how masculinity and sexuality shape male commercial sex in this era of Internet communications.

 

By looking closely at the sex and work of male escorts, Kevin Walby tries to reconcile the two extremes of m4m sex—the stereotypical idea of a quick cash transaction and the tendency toward friendship and mutuality. In doing so, Walby draws on the work of Foucault to make visible the play of power in these physical and commercial relations between men. At once a revelation to the sociology of work and a much-needed critical engagement with queer theory, Touching Encounters responds to calls from across the social sciences to connect Foucault with sociologies of sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Walby does this and more, retying this sexual practice back to society at large.

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

While much attention has been paid in recent years to heterosexual prostitution and sex tourism in Brazil, gay sex tourism has been almost completely overlooked. In Tourist Attractions, Gregory C. Mitchell presents a pioneering ethnography that focuses on the personal lives and identities of male sex workers who occupy a variety of roles in Brazil’s sexual economy.

Mitchell takes us into the bath houses of Rio de Janeiro, where rent boys cruise for clients, and to the beaches of Salvador da Bahia, where African American gay men seek out hustlers while exploring cultural heritage tourist sites. His ethnography stretches into the Amazon, where indigenous fantasies are tinged with the erotic at eco-resorts, and into the homes of “kept men,” who forge long-term, long-distance, transnational relationships that blur the boundaries of what counts as commercial sex. Mitchell asks how tourists perceive sex workers’ performances of Brazilianness, race, and masculinity, and, in turn, how these two groups of men make sense of differing models of racial and sexual identity across cultural boundaries. He proposes that in order to better understand how people experience difference sexually, we reframe prostitution—which Marxist feminists have long conceptualized as sexual labor—as also being a form of performative labor. Tourist Attractions is an exceptional ethnography poised to make an indelible impact in the fields of anthropology, gender, and sexuality, and research on prostitution and tourism.

Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.

This special issue of TSQ prompts a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Américas to investigate how shifts in cultural practices, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theories of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment. Contributors to this issue offer a hemispheric perspective on trans and travesti issues to the Anglophone academy, expand transgender studies to engage geopolitical connections, and bring interdisciplinary approaches to topics ranging from policy to cultural production. This issue is an unprecedented English-language collection by Latin American and Latinx scholars on trans and travesti issues.

Contributors. Lino Arruda, Daniel Coleman, Cynthia Citlallin Delgado, El Colectivo del Archivo de la Memoria Trans, Juan Carlos Garrido, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Bernadine Hernández, Hillary Hiner, Denilson Lopes, Andrés Lopez, Cole Rizki, Juana María Rodríguez, Oli Rodriguez, Marcia Lucia Machuca Rose, Martín de Mauro Rucovsky, Dora Silva Santana, Susy Shock, Sayak Valencia

This special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies presents essays that each adopt a methodologically distinctive analysis of a particular concern in transgender studies. Taken together, these pieces demonstrate the wide-ranging and sometimes antagonistic viewpoints of scholars and activists pursuing different political and intellectual goals.

Essays include a documentation of how readers of mass-circulation print media became aware of new medical possibilities for the surgical and hormonal alteration of sex characteristics and began agitating for them; a challenge from feminist theorists to transgender movement activists to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous feminist, gay, and lesbian political mobilizations; a critique of the overreliance on discursive analysis in much current transgender scholarship; and paired essays exploring the so-called Butch/FTM Border Wars from either side of that divide. There are also pieces that focus on intersex activism, the bioethics of gender dysphoria management, and the mobilization of transgender advocacy organizations.
Considering perceptions of queer embodiment past and present, these essays explore the sweeping changes in professional and popular attitudes regarding the transgender community and the issues that affect it. The timeliness of this issue as well as the diversity of its viewpoints makes it a significant contribution to the growing body of transgender literature.

Contributors. Cheryl Chase, Patricia Elliot, Judith Halberstam, C. Jacob Hale, Joanne Meyerowitz, James Lindeman Nelson, Katrina Roen, Henry Rubin, Susan Stryker

This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.

Contributors. Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Maya Mikdashi, Robert Mills, Carlos Motta, Marcia Ochoa, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Louise Wilson

While psychoanalysis has traditionally been at odds with transgender issues, a growing body of revisionist psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice has begun to tease out the trans-affirming potential of the field. This issue features essays that highlight this potential by simultaneously critiquing and working within the boundaries of psychoanalytic concepts and theories guiding clinical work. Featuring a range of clinicians and scholars, this issue centers on questions pertaining to trans* experience, desire, difference, otherness, identification, loss, mourning, and embodiment. The contributors explore these questions through topics like bathroom bans, ethics, popular culture, and the Freudian couch. By setting up this dialogue between psychosocial studies and trans* cultural studies, this revisionist work may radically transform psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Contributors. Sheila L. Cavanagh, Chris Coffman, Elena Dalla Torre, Kate Foord, Patricia Gherovici, Oren Gozlan, Griffin Hansbury, Jordon Osserman, Amy Ray Stewart, Simon van der Weele

For two years, Philip Gambone traveled the length and breadth of the United States, talking candidly with LGBTQ people about their lives. In addition to interviews from David Sedaris, George Takei, Barney Frank, and Tammy Baldwin, Travels in a Gay Nation brings us lesser-known voices—a retired Naval officer, a transgender scholar and “drag king,” a Princeton philosopher, two opera sopranos who happen to be lovers, an indie rock musician, the founder of a gay frat house, and a pair of Vermont garden designers.
    In this age when contemporary gay America is still coming under attack, Gambone captures the humanity of each individual. For some, their identity as a sexual minority is crucial to their life’s work; for others, it has been less so, perhaps even irrelevant. But, whether splashy or quiet, center-stage or behind the scenes, Gambone’s subjects have managed—despite facing ignorance, fear, hatred, intolerance, injustice, violence, ridicule, or just plain indifference—to construct passionate, inspiring lives.