Results by title

Discovers parallels between modern gay and lesbian views of urban life and Benjamin’s Paris, “the capital of the nineteenth century”

Queer Constellations investigates the dreams and catastrophes of recent urban history viewed through new queer narratives of inner-city life. The “gay village,” “gay mecca,” “gai Paris,” the “lesbian flaneur,” the “lesbian bohème”—these and other urban phantasmagoria feature paradoxically in this volume as figures of revolutionary utopia and commodity spectacle, as fossilized archetypes of social transformation and ruins of haunting cultural potential.

Dianne Chisholm introduces readers to new practices of walking, seeing, citing, and remembering the city in works by Neil Bartlett, Samuel R. Delany, Robert Glück, Alan Hollinghurst, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, Edmund White, and David Wojnarowicz. Reading these authors with reference to the history, sociology, geography, and philosophy of space, particularly to the everyday avant-garde production and practice of urban space, Chisholm reveals how—and how effectively—queer narrative documentary resembles and reassembles Walter Benjamin’s constellations of Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century.” Considering experimental queer writing in critical conjunction with Benjamin’s city writing, the book shows how a queer perspective on inner-city reality exposes contradictions otherwise obscured by mythic narratives of progress.If Benjamin regards the Paris arcade as a microcosm of high capitalism, wherein the (un)making of industrial society is perceived retrospectively, in contemporary queer narrative we see the sexually charged and commodity-entranced space of the gay bathhouse as a microcosm of late capitalism and as an exemplary site for excavating the contradictions of mass sex. In Chisholm’s book we discover how, looking back on the ruins of queer mecca, queer authors return to Benjamin to advance his “dialectics of seeing;” how they cruise the paradoxes of market capital, blasting a queer era out of the homogeneous course of history.

Knowing that queer voices have been making themselves heard in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria decades before Stonewall, editors Gary Schmidt and Merrill Cole curated thrilling snapshots of prose fiction from more than twenty contemporary writers whose work defies stereotypes, disciplines, and expectations. These authors produce fiction for adults and young people that celebrates the multiplicity of the present, casts a queer eye on the past, and interrogates LGBTQ+ futures.

These outstanding texts exemplify the glittering variety of styles, themes, settings, and subjects addressed by openly queer authors who write in German today. They explore identity, sexuality, history, fantasy, loss, and discovery. Their authors, narrators, and characters explore gender nonconformity and living queer everywhere from city centers to rural communities. They are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and nonbinary. They are exiles, immigrants, and travelers through time and space.

Witty, titillating, and a delight to read, Quertext opens up new worlds of experience for readers interested in queer life beyond the Anglophone world.

Featuring work by Jürgen Bauer • Ella Blix • Claudia Breitsprecher • Lovis Cassaris • Gunther Geltinger • Joachim Helfer • Odile Kennel • Friedrich Kröhnke • Anja Kümmel • Marko Martin • Hans Pleschinski • Christoph Poschenrieder • Peter Rehberg • Michael Roes • Sasha Marianna Salzmann • Angela Steidele • Antje Rávik Strubel • Alain Claude Sulzer • Antje Wagner • J. Walther • Tania Witte • Yusuf Yeşilöz