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Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women’s quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women’s challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

In Everyday Erotics, Denise Tse-Shang Tang explores the lives of older women with same-sex desire in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Tang interviews women born in the 1930’s through the 1960’s, looking at how their lives differ across culture, class, and place, and how they lived and understood their own desires and social worlds. Through these tales of love, intimacy, family obligations, and personal respectability, she presents narrative accounts and analyses that complicate cultural notions of romance and desire at the intersections of gender roles, social class, and history. An ethnography grounded in inter-Asian cultural flows and connected histories, Everyday Erotics builds an archive of queer women’s lives and a genealogy of their experiences.