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Global perspectives on policing within LGBTQ+ communities

Relationships between law enforcement and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities have always been varied and complex. On one hand, history is filled with incidents of police harassment: raids that sparked famous uprisings and rebellions; shoddy police investigations into the murders of LGBTQ+ community members; a corrosive organizational culture marked by heteronormativity and misogyny. Yet positive changes are being made, such as the creation of LGBTQ+ police associations, participation by police officers in Pride Parades around the world, and formal apologies for past actions. To some LGBTQ+ community members, police are the physical manifestations of state-sanctioned oppression and abuse. To others, they are guardians who have become partners in public safety.

Q Policing features eighteen contributors from around the world who explore the nature of the relationship between LGBTQ+ communities and the police. Part 1 of the book offers insights on policing and racial and ethnic constructions, including efforts to build collaborative models of community-building within groups and with law enforcement. Part 2 highlights the experiences of individuals who may be marginalized due to various social constructions such as transgender, unhoused, southern, or kink-involved. Finally, Part 3 shares perspectives of queer folks inside policing.

The contributors—scholars, social workers, police officers, and other community leaders—cover diverse topics, including queer experiences of policing in southern India, clinical implications for mental health professionals working with Latinx LGBTQ+ people, transgender and nonbinary peoples’ presentation management during encounters with law enforcement, discriminatory policies in place in the southern United States, the pathologization of kink, and more. Essays analyze interviews with the “Pride Defenders” in Hamilton, Canada, as well as British and American police officers transitioning while in uniform. They explore the experiences of gay, lesbian, and genderqueer police officers, map principal findings and central concerns that structure extant scholarship on gay police officers in the UK, use queer theory to explore the effectiveness of LGBTQ+ liaisons, and more.

The volume editors adopt an inclusive global perspective to account for contextually located experiences of queer people within and outside of the United States. The book incorporates a variety of voices, data sources, and methodologies, but contributors share an intentional focus on race, age, sex, gender, and other identities that helps explain and contextualize queer people’s experiences around and in policing. The diverse, international group of contributors—whose voices are not often heard in traditional outlets and mainstream media—demonstrates that despite discrimination, harassment, and violence, LGBTQ+ communities continue to thrive.

As educators and legislators across the country debate how to improve public schools, the most vital factor often disappears from the equation—the relationship between the teacher and the student. According to veteran educators Rita and Marco Portales, this relationship is the central issue in the education of students, especially Latino/a students who often face serious barriers to school success because of the legacy of racism, insufficient English-language skills, and cultural differences with the educational establishment.

To break down these barriers and help Latino/a students acquire a quality education, the Portaleses focus attention on the teacher-student relationship and offer a proven method that teachers can use to strengthen the print and oral skills of their students. They begin by analyzing the reasons why schools too often fail to educate Latino/a students, using eloquent comments from young Latinos/as and their parents to confirm how important the teacher-student relationship is to the student's success. Then they show how all educational stakeholders—teachers, administrators, state education agencies, legislators, and parents—can work together to facilitate the teacher-student relationship and improve student education. By demonstrating how teachers can improve students' reading, critical thinking, writing, and oral communication skills across the curriculum, they argue that learning can be made more relevant for students, keeping their interest levels high while preparing them for academically competitive colleges.

How girls of color from eight global communities strategize on questions of identity, social issues, and political policy through spoken word poetry.

Around the world, girls know how to perform. Grounded in her experience of “putting a mic in the margins” by facilitating workshops for girls in Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States, scholar/advocate/artist Crystal Leigh Endsley highlights how girls use spoken word poetry to narrate their experiences, dreams, and strategies for surviving and thriving. By centering the process of creating and performing spoken word poetry, this book examines how girls forecast what is possible for their collective lives.

In this book, Endsley combines poetry, discourse analysis, photovoice, and more to forge the feminist theory of “quantum justice,” which forefronts girls’ relationships with their global counterparts. Using quantum justice theory, Endsley examines how these collaborative efforts produce powerful networks and ultimately map trajectories of social change at the micro level. By inviting transnational dialogue through spoken word poetry, Quantum Justice emphasizes how the imaginative energy in hip-hop culture can mobilize girls to connect and motivate each other through spoken word performance and thereby disrupt the status quo.

Gender and sexual identity formation is an ongoing anthropological conversation in both Middle Eastern studies and urban studies, but the story of gay and lesbian identity in the Middle East is only just beginning to be told. Queer Beirut is the first ethnographic study of queer lives in the Arab Middle East. Drawing on anthropology, urban studies, gender studies, queer studies, and sociocultural theory, Sofian Merabet’s compelling ethnography suggests a critical theory of gender and religious identity formations that will disrupt conventional anthropological premises about the contingent role that society and particular urban spaces have in facilitating the emergence of various subcultures within the city.

From 1995 to 2014, Merabet made a series of ethnographic journeys to Lebanon, during which he interviewed numerous gay men in Beirut. Through their life stories, Merabet crafts moving ethnographic narratives and explores how Lebanese gays inhabit and perform their gender as they formulate their sense of identity. He also examines the notion of “queer space” in Beirut and the role that this city, its class and sectarian structure, its colonial history, and religion have played in these people’s discovery and exploration of their sexualities. In using Beirut as a microcosm for the complexities of homosexual relationships in contemporary Lebanon, Queer Beirut provides a critical standpoint from which to deepen our understandings of gender rights and citizenship in the structuring of social inequality within the larger context of the Middle East.

One of the twentieth century’s most important filmmakers—indeed one of its most important and influential artists—Ingmar Bergman and his films have been examined from almost every possible perspective, including their remarkable portrayals of women and their searing dramatizations of gender dynamics. Curiously however, especially considering the Swedish filmmaker’s numerous and intriguing comments on the subject, no study has focused on the undeniably queer characteristics present throughout this nominally straight auteur’s body of work; indeed, they have barely been noted.

Queer Bergman makes a bold and convincing argument that Ingmar Bergman’s work can best be thought of as profoundly queer in nature. Using persuasive historical evidence, including Bergman’s own on-the-record (though stubbornly ignored) remarks alluding to his own homosexual identifications, as well as the discourse of queer theory, Daniel Humphrey brings into focus the director’s radical denunciation of heteronormative values, his savage and darkly humorous deconstructions of gender roles, and his work’s trenchant, if also deeply conflicted, attacks on homophobically constructed forms of patriarchic authority. Adding an important chapter to the current discourse on GLBT/queer historiography, Humphrey also explores the unaddressed historical connections between post–World War II American queer culture and a concurrently vibrant European art cinema, proving that particular interrelationship to be as profound as the better documented associations between gay men and Hollywood musicals, queer spectators and the horror film, lesbians and gothic fiction, and others.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a “unified” agenda. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history.

Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic arts, and science fiction, Queer Chimerica unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United States. By examining the intersecting timelines of the rise of queer theory and the rise of China in the late Cold War era, Shana Ye explores the relationship between the discourse of queer fluidity and capital’s demands for labor flexibility. 

Drawing on rare archival material and oral historical accounts of queer life from the 1950s to the late 2010s, the author shows how these accounts make sense of the variegated landscapes of desires, transformations, and conundrums in postsocialist China. The author illustrates party cadres in the Cultural Revolution, tongzhi activism mediated by the explosive politics of Tiananmen upheaval, HIV/AIDS community outreach workers, feminist artists and digital activists, leftist queer theorists, and fictional bio-engineers, layering these vivid depictions to reveal the poetic messiness of queer world-making. Queer Chimerica offers insight into the governmentality of LGBT rights, the rules of legibility and recognition, the geo- and bio-politics of identity, and the class-ridden appropriation of queer history and community. Thus understanding the production of queerness unveils the uneven distributions of capital, knowledge, affect, and opportunity that reproduce queer precarity and agency.  
 

• A Variety Best Music Book of 2022
• A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022
• A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022
• A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022
• A Boot Best Music Book of 2022
• A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022
• A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022
• Woody Guthrie First Book Award winner
• Awarded a Certificate of Merit in the 2023 ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in the category Best Historical Research in Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music.

Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities.

Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.

Exploring the relationship between queer sexuality and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century

Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity approaches modern sexuality by way of music. Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences, repertoires, venues, and specific works, this intriguing volume explores points of intersection between music and queerness in Europe and the United States in the years 1870 to 1950--a period when dramatic changes in musical expression and in the expression of individual sexual identity played similar roles in washing away the certainties of the past. Pursuing the shadowy, obscured tracks of queerness, contributors unravel connections among dissident identities and concrete aspects of musical style, gestures, and personae.

Contributors are Byron Adams, Philip Brett, Malcolm Hamrick Brown, Sophie Fuller, Mitchell Morris, Jann Pasler, Ivan Raykoff, Fiona Richards, Eva Rieger, Gillian Rodger, Sherrie Tucker, and Lloyd Whitesell.

The seven Indigenous directions—east, south, west, north, down, up, and center—provide a map of understanding gender in media history.

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholar Gabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book’s seven chapters—each one of the directions—look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak. Estrada discusses how the cinema brings into focus the ways that many Indigenous genders do not conform with the male/female binary, genders and sexualities that may or may not overlap with contemporary constructions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and two-spirit (LGBTQI2+) identities.

Highlighting the struggles and resistances of two-spirit peoples, Estrada’s analysis engages with films that represent the diverse and sovereign identities of queer Indigenous peoples. Estrada provides a framework for understanding how queer Indigenous media producers confront colonial trauma and reclaims space for the spiritual and bodily sovereignty of LGBTQI2+ peoples.

Queer Joy in Theory and Practice: Essays on Resistance, Thriving, and Liberation centers queer joy as a radical method of resistance and world-building in the face of rising homophobia, transphobia, and systemic violence. Rather than framing queer and trans lives solely through trauma, this groundbreaking collection explores how joy functions as a site of possibility, solidarity, and social change. This book bridges theory, research, and practice to examine queer joy across classrooms, communities, art, public spaces, and activism. With chapters on education, abolitionist politics, drag, parenting, street art, and festivals, this timely and interdisciplinary volume illuminates joy as a transformative force—one that refuses despair and instead imagines liberatory, life-affirming futures for queer and trans communities worldwide.

Challenging the myths about LGBTQ+ kids and bullying: what it means to protect queer kids in schools

 

Conversations around LGBTQ+ kids in school have become dominated by the subject of bullying. Although this may be due to good-faith efforts to protect vulnerable students, Queer Kids and Social Violence demonstrates that a focus on bullying as acts of individual peer aggression fails to address the social norms that perpetuate the violence. Considering the broader contexts of bullying, this volume offers ways to engage with queer youth that are both more humanizing and more likely to create sustainable change.

Essays by leading international scholars analyze how bullying discourse shapes policy and practice, using in-depth case studies, research findings, and examinations of political policy to guide readers through the various forms of violence, identity regulation, and identity erasure in schools. Offering conversation-shifting interventions to respond to a difficult and frightening political moment for LGBTQ+ youth, Queer Kids and Social Violence is a rounded, empathetic picture that does queer youth justice and points the way toward safer schools for all.

Contributors: Ana María Amigo-Ventureira, Durell M. Callier, Cristyn Davies, Renée DePalma, Tania Ferfolja, Jessica Fields, Elliot Fonarev, Jen Gilbert, Tristan Gleason, Dominique C. Hill, Angela Ingram, Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Cris Mayo, Mollie McQuillan, Aoife Neary, C.J. Pascoe, Victoria Rawlings, EJ Renold, Jessica Ringrose, Kerry H. Robinson, Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Cris Townley, Jacqueline Ullman, Boni Wozolek.

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