Results by title

936 books match the query 'LGBTQ+ Studies' and 78 start with q

Sort by

Queer Tourism

Jasbir K. Puar, ed.

Duke University Press, 0

Over the last several decades, queer sexualities, tourism industry marketing, tourist practices, and consumption patterns have converged to produce burgeoning outlets for the mobility of queer subjects. In the first collection ever devoted to scholarly articles on queer tourism, this special double issue of GLQ highlights the connections between political economy and sexuality and contributes to an emgerging body of literature on queer sexualities and globalization.
Essays explore a range of geographical areas and cover topics that include an autoethnographic account of a queer traveler in Cuba, the development of gay and lesbian tourism in Madrid and Mexico, and gay and lesbian tourist events such as World Pride 2001 in Rome. The collection also includes an essay focusing on lesbian tourism—a study of the history of lesbian tourism on Eresos, Lesvos.

Contributors. Lionel Cantú, Gabriel Giorgi, Venetia Kantsa, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Michael Luongo, Kevin Markwell, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Dereka Rushbrook

[more]

Queer Traffic

Sex, Panic, Free Trade

Jennifer Tyburczy

Duke University Press, 2025

In Queer Traffic, Jennifer Tyburczy traces how sexual dissidents across the Mexico-Canada-US borderlands transport the objects and experiences that nourish their sexual and social lives. She situates the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a pivot point in the formation of panics aimed at stamping out these outlaw sex practices. Highlighting NAFTA’s erotic investments in hetero- and homonormativity, racial capitalism, markets of dispossession, and neocolonialism, Tyburczy directly engages with art, activism, and archives to revisit the struggles of people who invented circuits of sexual exchange through four decades of violence and criminalization. In conversing with actors from bureaucrats to pornographers and in studying choreographies, social movements, and street vocabularies, she examines an array of tactics that undermine the market logics of trade law and policy. Dreaming of other forms of living that go beyond mere survival, Queer Traffic guides us through the renegade pathways that circumvent the seemingly endless reach of free-trade capitalism toward other routes to pleasure.

[more]

Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender, Volume 15

Anne McClintock, Phillip Brian Harper, José Esteban Muñoz and Trish Rosen, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

Until now, queer theory has largely been silent about questions of race, especially when considered in an international context. Much postcolonial theory has been silent about questions regarding gender and sexuality. This special issue of Social Text explores the relations between race and queer sexuality by focusing on the politics of transgression in a transnational world.
In the first section of this issue, Race and Queer Sexuality, international authors address topics ranging from Asian American queer identity and its relation to transnational and diasporic concerns to homophobia and its relationship to black nationalism in South Africa. Other subjects include, sexuality, race, and public space; lesbian pedagogy and the nation in Latin America; and an analysis of cross-race and cross-gender drag in the work of L.A. drag queen Vaginal Creme Davis. In the second section, The Politics of Transgression, contributors focus on transgression and its relationship to power and history. One essay explores Irish immigration in the U.S. and the Irish female body as a figure of transnational contagion and blood panic, while another focuses on Oscar Wilde, race, and queer sexuality. Other pieces include a meditation on British filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman’s film, Blue.
Race and Queer Sexuality confronts the limitations of prior work in queer theory while providing a starting point for discussion of race, queer sexuality, and the politics of transgression that will be part of queer theory of the future.

Contributors. Judith Butler, David Eng, Licia Fiol-Mata, Judith Halberstam, Phillip Brian Harper, Neville Hoad, Rachel Holmes, Don Kulick, Tim Lawrence, Rosalind Morris, José Esteban Muñoz, Ben Singer, David Valentine, Priscilla Wald, Riki Anne Wilchins

[more]

Queer Twin Cities

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

A pioneering look at the queer history, politics, and spaces of the Twin Cities

The Twin Cities is home to one of the largest and most vital GLBT populations in the nation—and one of the highest percentages of gay residents in the country. Drawn from the pioneering work of the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project—a collective organization of students, scholars, and activists devoted to documenting and interpreting the lives of GLBT people in Minneapolis and St. Paul—Queer Twin Cities is a uniquely critical collection of essays on Minnesota’s vibrant queer communities, past and present.

A rich blend of oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Queer Twin Cities uses sexuality to chart connections between people’s lives in Minnesota. Topics range from turn-of-the-century Minneapolis amid moral reform—including the highly publicized William Williams murder trial and efforts to police Bridge Square, aka ‘skid row’—to northern Minnesota and the importance of male companionship among lumber workers, and to postwar life, when the increased visibility of queer life went hand in hand with increased regulation, repression, and violence. Other essays present a portrait of early queer spaces in the Twin Cities, such as Kirmser’s Bar, the Viking Room, and the Persian Palms, and the proliferation of establishments like the Dugout and the 19 Bar. Exploring the activism of GLBT Two-Spirit indigenous people, the antipornography movements of the 1980s, and the role of gay men in the gentrification of Minneapolis neighborhoods, this volume brings the history of queer life and politics in the Twin Cities into fascinating focus.Engaging and revelatory, Queer Twin Cities offers a critical analysis of local history and community and fills a glaring omission in the culture and history of Minnesota, looking not only to a remarkable past but to our collective future.

[more]

Queer Visibility in Post-socialist Cultures

Edited by Nárcisz Fejes and Andrea P. Balogh

Intellect Books, 2013

Queer Visibility in Post-socialist Cultures explores the public constructions of gay, lesbian, and queer identities, as well as ways of thinking about sexuality and gender, in post-socialist cultures across the European region formerly known as the Eastern bloc. Featuring eleven essays by scholars and activist researchers focusing on Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus, and Russia, the collection encompasses a wide range of fields, including gender and sexuality studies, Eastern European studies, media and film studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology. Together, the essays reveal a paradigm of visibility politics centered on the vexed interaction between the post-socialist notions of queerness in activist strategies and the nationalist, mainstream representations of non-normative sexualities.

[more]

Queer Voices in Hip Hop

Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance

Lauron J. Kehrer

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. In Queer Voices in Hip Hop, Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and positions them within a longer Black queer musical lineage. Combining musical, textual, and visual analysis with reception history, this book reclaims queer involvement in hip hop by tracing the genre’s beginnings within Black and Latinx queer music-making practices and spaces, demonstrating that queer and trans rappers draw on Ballroom and other cultural expressions particular to queer and trans communities of color in their work in order to articulate their subject positions. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of hip hop’s queer roots.

[more]

Queer Wars

The New Gay Right and Its Critics

Paul Robinson

University of Chicago Press, 2004

From the 1969 rebellion at Stonewall to recent battles over same-sex marriage, Gay Liberation in the United States has always been closely associated with the political left. But in recent years, Gay Liberation has taken a dramatic turn toward the right. And gaycons, as they were once archly referred to in the Nation, have taken politics and the media by storm. New Republic columnist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, is one of the most popular bloggers on the Internet. Writer Bruce Bawer, meanwhile, is celebrated for his incisive criticism of gay culture and its connections with camp and diva worship.

Queer Wars limns this new gay right, offering the first extended consideration of gay conservatism and its more trenchant critics. Here celebrated historian of gay culture Paul Robinson draws particular attention to three features of this new political movement. First, he explores how gay conservatives have rejected the idea that commitment to gay freedom should involve equal dedication to the causes of other marginalized people, be they racial minorities, women, or the poor. Second, Robinson demonstrates why gay conservatives embrace more traditional gender ideals—why they are hostile to effeminacy among men and mannishness among women. Finally, exploring the support for sexual restraint among gay conservatives, Robinson dissects their condemnation of promiscuity and their assault on behavior they deem dissolute.

Timely and rich in suggestive propositions, Queer Wars will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in gay culture and contemporary politics.

[more]

Queer about Comics

Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2018

This special issue explores the intersection of queer theory and comics studies. The contributors provide new theories of how comics represent and reconceptualize queer sexuality, desire, intimacy, and eroticism, while also investigating how the comic strip, as a hand-drawn form, queers literary production and demands innovative methods of analysis from the fields of literary, visual, and cultural studies.

Contributors examine the relationships among reader, creator, and community across a range of comics production, including mainstream superhero comics, independent LGBTQ comics, and avant-garde and experimental feminist narratives. They also address queer forms of identification elicited by the classic X-Men character Rogue, the lesbian grassroots publishing networks that helped shape Alison Bechdel’s oeuvre, and the production of black queer fantasy in the Black Panther comic book series, among other topics.

Contributors andré carrington, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Yetta Howard, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Kate McCullough, Darieck Scott, Jessica Q. Stark, Shelley Streeby, Rebecca Wanzo

[more]

Queer and Trans Aesthetics

Lloyd Whitesell

University of Michigan Press, 2026

If a creative individual identifies as queer or trans, does that fact belong solely to the realm of biography, or does it pertain to their artistic achievement? In Queer and Trans Aesthetics, Lloyd Whitesell discusses literature, visual culture, audio-visual media, music, and performance from the 19th to the 21st century. Through this analysis, Whitesell develops a systematic framework to enrich our understanding of LGBTQ aesthetics and cultural production. He traces the history of queer aesthetic inquiry, develops a justification for a synthetic approach, identifies a fund of expressive strategies motivated by queer subjectivity, and highlights how such strategies create affinity across differences of gender, race, local context, and artistic media.

Rooted in a gender-inclusive theory of queer/trans subjectivity, the book draws on testimony from people of diverse backgrounds, genders, and races. Whitesell engages with debates in the existing scholarly literature while making connections between a wide range of artists: some from mainstream canons, some established subcultural figures, and others only now emerging as notable contributors to queer culture. The book explores five expressive archetypes or poses which have had profound significance in queer art traditions: the Monster, the Victim, the Trickster, the Dandy, and the Dreamer. Each offers a repertoire of creative responses to social oppression and configures queer subjective experience in a unique way. With its unique systematic approach, Queer and Trans Aesthetics enhances our knowledge of queer aesthetic traditions across genres and time.

[more]

Queer and Trans Migrations

Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation

Edited by Eithne Luibheid and Karma R. Chavez

University of Illinois Press, 2020

More than a quarter of a million LGBTQ-identified migrants in the United States lack documentation and constantly risk detention and deportation. LGBTQ migrants around the world endure similarly precarious situations. Eithne Luibhéid's and Karma R. Chávez’s edited collection provides a first-of-its-kind look at LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists, and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention, and deportation in national and transnational contexts, and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse, and critique these processes. The works contribute to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, borders and migration studies, and decolonial studies.

Bridging voices and works from inside and outside of the academy, and international in scope, Queer and Trans Migrations illuminates new perspectives in the field of queer and trans migration studies.

Contributors: Andrew J. Brown, Julio Capó, Jr., Anna Carastathis, Jack Cáraves, Karma R. Chávez, Ryan Conrad, Elif, Katherine Fobear, Monisha Das Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Edward Ou Jin Lee, Leece Lee-Oliver, Eithne Luibhéid, Hana Masri, Yasmin Nair, Bamby Salcedo, Fadi Saleh, Rafael Ramirez Solórzano, José Guadalupe Herrera Soto, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Ruben Zecena

[more]

Queer in Russia

A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other

Laurie Essig

Duke University Press, 1999

In Queer in Russia Laurie Essig examines the formation of gay identity and community in the former Soviet Union. As a sociological fieldworker, she began her research during the late 1980s, before any kind of a public queer identity existed in that country. After a decade of conducting interviews, as well as observing and analyzing plays, books, pop music, and graffiti, Essig presents the first sustained study of how and why there was no Soviet gay community or even gay identity before perestroika and the degree to which this situation has—or has not—changed.
While male homosexual acts were criminalized in Russia before 1993, women attracted to women were policed by the medical community, who saw them less as criminals than as diseased persons potentially cured by drug therapy or transsexual surgery. After describing accounts of pre-perestroika persecution, Essig examines the more recent state of sexual identities in Russia. Although the fall of communism brought new freedom to Russian queers, there are still no signs of a mass movement forming around the issue, and few identify themselves as lesbians or gay men, even when they are involved in same-sex relations. Essig does reveal, however, vibrant manifestations of gay life found at the local level—in restaurants, discos, clubs, and cruising strips, in newspapers, journals, literature, and the theater. Concluding with a powerful exploration of the surprising affinities between some of Russia’s most prominent nationalists and its queers, Queer in Russia fills a gap in both Russian and cultural studies.

[more]

Queer in Translation

Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

Evren Savci

Duke University Press, 2021

In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

[more]

Queer under Siege

How Global Repression Works and How We Resist

Baris Cayli Messina

Temple University Press, 2027

Queer Under Siege reveals that collective repression is not only a global system, but also a moral process that shapes how people tolerate (and even justify) exclusion and oppression. Baris Cayli Messina probes the question of what kind of society sustains its morality by expelling those who are already most vulnerable? and interrogates why societies continually generate the conditions that produce repression, requiring the unyielding struggle of queer people to survive.

Cayli Messina draws on archives, court records, suicide letters, and activist testimony from the around the world to develop a conceptual framework to trace this process through three interlocking forms and mechanisms: moral eviction, which defines moral repression; punitive hypervisibility, which animates political repression; and sanctioned oblivion, which consolidates epistemic repression.

Queer Under Siege shows that the criminalization of queer life is not a misfire, but an intentional and systematic action that makes disparate societies perceive social order as safe. Arguing that survival is a political act across borders and generations, Cayli Messina traces effective methods of queer activism.

[more]

Queer/Early/Modern

Carla Freccero

Duke University Press, 2006

In Queer/Early/Modern, Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term “queer,” in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography” that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labé, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin’s take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and France’s domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Turning to French cleric Jean de Léry’s account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

[more]

Queer/Migration, Volume 14

Eithne Luibhéid ,spec issue ed

Duke University Press, 0

This special double issue of GLQ explores the interface between queerness and migration, challenging heterosexist and heteronormative assumptions that often underpin traditional migration scholarship. Refusing to treat queer migrants as a homogeneous group, the issue insists that sexuality scholarship must rethink the role of migration in constructing heterogeneous sexual identities, communities, politics, and practices. Considering queer migration to the United States, from the Philippines, and between Australia and Asia, Russia and Israel, and France and the Dominican Republic, contributors critically examine how sexuality shapes all migration processes and experiences.

The issue, featuring essays by both established and emerging scholars, situates queer migration within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, nationalism, and slavery. One contributor argues that a queer Atlantic history emerged during the Middle Passage experience of slavery, connecting this history to the contemporary movement of Haitian refugees and Dominican migrant laborers. Another contributor considers how the policing of queer migrant bodies and of “unnatural offenses” by colonial administrations in the Nicobar and Andaman islands ultimately reconfigured the ecology of the entire Indian Ocean archipelago. Still another contributor theorizes how gay couples composed of young Asian émigrés and considerably older white citizens negotiate Australian immigration policy to subvert dominant forms of nationalism and citizenship embedded in long histories of inequality between Australia and Asia. Other essays explore how transgender histories and theories transform queer migration scholarship; how “queer complicities” with contemporary neoliberal migration politics uphold regimes of violence and inequality; and how migration regimes and settlement policies in various parts of the world identify individuals as “queer,” “deviant,” or “abnormal” within racial, gender, class, cultural, and geopolitical hierarchies.

Contributors. Bobby Benedicto, Carlos Ulises Decena, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Maja Horn, Adi Kuntsman, Eithne Luibhéid, Clare Sears, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Kath Weston, Audrey Yue

[more]

Queer/Tongzhi China

New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures

Edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder

National University of Singapore Press, 2015

This book brings together some of the most exciting, original and cutting-edge work being conducted on contemporary queer China. The volume includes original essays by some of the most prolific and central queer activists and artists in the PRC, placing their writing alongside work by emergent and established scholars from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. The book offers unique perspectives by presenting primary accounts of the creative and multi-faceted strategies that activists and community organizers have developed in their various activities. The volume also presents rich, empirical evidence of every-day queer lives across China, offering a unique record not only of cosmopolitan community and activist perspectives but also of voices and experiences from a broad range of locations and identifications. As a whole it offers invaluable insights into sexual and gender diversity in China today. Queer/Tongzhi China thus breathes as it speaks, providing through its diverse approaches a different understanding of queer China than standard mono-ethnographies or social-scientific documentaries.

[more]

Queerbaiting and Fandom

Teasing Fans through Homoerotic Possibilities

Joseph Brennan

University of Iowa Press, 2019

In this first-ever comprehensive examination of queerbaiting, fan studies scholar Joseph Brennan and his contributors examine cases that shed light on the sometimes exploitative industry practice of teasing homoerotic possibilities that, while hinted at, never materialize in the program narratives. Through a nuanced approach that accounts for both the history of queer representation and older fan traditions, these essayists examine the phenomenon of queerbaiting across popular TV, video games, children’s programs, and more.

Contributors: Evangeline Aguas, Christoffer Bagger, Bridget Blodgett, Cassie Brummitt, Leyre Carcas, Jessica Carniel, Jennifer Duggan, Monique Franklin, Divya Garg, Danielle S. Girard, Mary Ingram-Waters, Hannah McCann, Michael McDermott, E. J. Nielsen, Emma Nordin, Holly Eva Katherine Randell-Moon, Emily E. Roach, Anastasia Salter, Elisabeth Schneider, Kieran Sellars, Isabela Silva, Guillaume Sirois, Clare Southerton

[more]

Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies

Thomas Piontek

University of Illinois Press, 2005

Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies is a broadly interdisciplinary study that considers a key dilemma in gay and lesbian studies through the prism of identity and its discontents: the field studies has modeled itself on ethnic studies programs, perhaps to be intelligible to the university community, but certainly because the ethnic studies route to programs is well established. Since this model requires a stable and identifiable community, gay and lesbian studies have emphasized stable and knowable identities. The problem, of course is that sexuality is neither stable, tidy, nor developmental. With the advent of queer theory, there are now other perspectives available that frequently find themselves at odds with traditional gay and lesbian studies.
In this pioneering new study, Thomas Piontek provides a critical analysis of the development of gay and lesbian studies alongside the development of queer theory, the disputes between them, and criticism of their activities from both in and outside of the gay academic community. Examining disputes about transgendering, gay male promiscuity, popular culture, gay history, political activism, and non-normative sexual practices, Piontek argues that it is vital to queer gay and lesbian studies--opening this emerging discipline to queer critical interventions without, however, further institutionalizing queer theory.

[more]

Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas

Remembering Xicana Indigena Ancestries

Susy J. Zepeda

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Acts of remembering offer a path to decolonization for Indigenous peoples forcibly dislocated from their culture, knowledge, and land. Susy J. Zepeda highlights the often overlooked yet intertwined legacies of Chicana feminisms and queer decolonial theory through the work of select queer Indígena cultural producers and thinkers. By tracing the ancestries and silences of gender-nonconforming people of color, she addresses colonial forms of epistemic violence and methods of transformation, in particular spirit research. Zepeda also uses archival materials, raised ceremonial altars, and analysis of decolonial artwork in conjunction with oral histories to explore the matriarchal roots of Chicana/x and Latina/x feminisms. As she shows, these feminisms are forms of knowledge that people can remember through Indigenous-centered visual narratives, cultural wisdom, and spirit practices.

A fascinating exploration of hidden Indígena histories and silences, Queering Mesoamerican Diasporas blends scholarship with spirit practices to reimagine the root work, dis/connection to land, and the political decolonization of Xicana/x peoples.

[more]

Queering Mestizaje

Transculturation and Performance

Alicia Arrizón

University of Michigan Press, 2006

Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje---the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous peoples, with European colonizers---and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizón argues that, as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites. Arrizón offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo, and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Queering Mestizaje is unique in the connections it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas. An engagingly eclectic array of cultural materials---including examples from performance art, colonial literature, visual art, fashion, and consumer products---are discussed, and included in the book's twenty-nine illustrations. "Arrizón takes as her point of departure the connections and distinctions between the four keywords in the title (each with a long, specific, and convoluted history in its own right) while bringing together the Philippines, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and the United States to configure a map carved by the same blade of colonialism and imperialism. In its conjoining of queer, mestizaje, transculturation and performance, the pleasurable and enlightening variety of its textual examples, and its commitment to theorize desire from the space of queer mestizaje, her book makes a unique and accomplished contribution." ---Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Stanford University Alicia Arrizón is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is author of Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage and co-editor of Latinas on Stage: Practice and Theory. Illustration: Judith F. Baca, La Mestizaje (1991), pastel on paper. © SPARC.

[more]

Queering Rehoboth Beach

Beyond the Boardwalk

James T. Sears

Temple University Press, 2024

“Create a More Positive Rehoboth” was a decades-long goal for progress and inclusiveness in a charming beach town in southern Delaware. Rehoboth, which was established in the 19th century as a Methodist Church meeting camp, has, over time, become a thriving mecca for the LGBTQ+ community. In Queering Rehoboth Beach, historian and educator James Sears charts this significant evolution.

Sears draws upon extensive oral history accounts, archival material, and personal narratives to chronicle “the Battle for Rehoboth,” which unfolded in the late 20th century, as conservative town leaders and homeowners opposed progressive entrepreneurs and gay activists. He recounts not just the emergence of the gay and lesbian bars, dance clubs, and organizations that drew the queer community to the region, but also the efforts of local politicians and homeowners, among other groups who fought to develop and protect the traditional identity of this beach town. Moreover, issues of race, class, and gender and sexuality informed opinions as residents and visitors struggled with the AIDS crisis and the legacy of Jim Crow.

Queering Rehoboth Beach is more than just an inspiring story about a community’s resilience and determination to establish a safe space for itself in the wake of the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. It is also a terrific beach read.

[more]

Queering Reproduction

Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience

Laura Mamo

Duke University Press, 2007

Originally developed to help heterosexual couples, fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have provided lesbians with new methods for achieving pregnancy during the past two decades. Queering Reproduction is an important sociological analysis of lesbians’ use of these medical fertility treatments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians who have been or are seeking to become pregnant, Laura Mamo describes how reproduction has become an intensely medicalized process for lesbians, who are transformed into fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities. Mamo argues that this medicalization of reproduction has begun to shape queer subjectivities in both productive and troubling ways, destabilizing the assumed link between heterosexuality and parenthood while also reinforcing traditional, heteronormative ideals about motherhood and the imperative to reproduce.

Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.

[more]

Queering the Color Line

Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture

Siobhan B. Somerville

Duke University Press, 2000

Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality.
At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.
Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.

[more]

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil

Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies

Rafael de la Dehesa

Duke University Press, 2010

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the historical development and contemporary dynamics of LGBT activism in Latin America’s two largest democracies. Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state.

De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

[more]

Queering the Renaissance

Jonathan Goldberg, ed.

Duke University Press, 1994

Queering the Renaissance offers a major reassessment of the field of Renaissance studies. Gathering essays by sixteen critics working within the perspective of gay and lesbian studies, this collection redraws the map of sexuality and gender studies in the Renaissance. Taken together, these essays move beyond limiting notions of identity politics by locating historically forms of same-sex desire that are not organized in terms of modern definitions of homosexual and heterosexual.
The presence of contemporary history can be felt throughout the volume, beginning with an investigation of the uses of Renaissance precedents in the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, to a piece on the foundations of 'our' national imaginary, and an afterword that addresses how identity politics has shaped the work of early modern historians. The volume examines canonical and noncanonical texts, including highly coded poems of the fifteenth-century Italian poet Burchiello, a tale from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and Erasmus's letters to a young male acolyte. English texts provide a central focus, including works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Crashaw, and Dryden. Broad surveys of the complex terrains of friendship and sodomy are explored in one essay, while another offers a cross-cultural reading of the discursive sites of lesbian desire.

Contributors. Alan Bray, Marcie Frank, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Graham Hammill, Margaret Hunt, Donald N. Mager, Jeff Masten, Elizabeth Pittenger, Richard Rambuss, Alan K. Smith, Dorothy Stephens, Forrest Tyler Stevens, Valerie Traub, Michael Warner

[more]