Results by title

Care has re-entered the zeitgeist. In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, #selfcare exploded across media platforms. Beyond this popular focus on self-care rituals, care has also emerged as a driving force within new collective movements. Situating discussions of care within a historical trajectory of feminist, queer, and Black activism, contributors to this special issue consider how individuals and communities receive and provide care in order to survive in environments that challenge their very existence. They explore how trans activists find resilience and vitality through coalitional labor; argue that social movements should expand mutual aid strategies, focusing on solidarity over charity; discuss a neoliberal university wellness culture that seeks to patch up structural care deficits with quick fixes like meditation apps and yoga classes; and more. As the traditionally undervalued labor of caring becomes recognized as a key element of survival, contributors show how radical care provides a roadmap for not only enduring precarious worlds but also envisioning new futures. In the face of state-sanctioned violence, economic crisis, and impending ecological collapse, collective care offers a way forward.

Contributors. Nicole Charles, Elijah Adiv Edelman, Hi‘ilei Hobart, Tamara Kneese, Micki McGee, Leyla Savloff, Cotten Seiler, Dean Spade

An intersectional approach to the radicality of desire.

Despite a historically rich tradition of thinking about the relation between sexuality, desire, and revolution, there is little engagement with desire’s radicality today. This volume attends to the radicality of desire as a starting point for overcoming heteropatriarchal capitalism by turning to the specific radical homosexual critique as it was first formulated in France in the 1970s in the writings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes and the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, as well as in the conceptions of their most important protagonists, Monique Wittig and Guy Hocquenghem. 

Radical Desires seeks to emphasize the anti-identitarian character of the French gay liberation movement, as well as its implicit and explicit critique of gender and sexual binaries. At the same time, the volume is also interested in intersectionally expanding this critique by confronting it with anticolonial and queer of color perspectives. As French gay liberation activists’ relations to North African men were often problematic, several contributions engage with the latent orientalist and racist tropes that appear in the movement’s writings. By aiming to go beyond a mere historicization of these ambivalences and exploring which contemporary problems appear in a different light as a result, Radical Desires highlights the (dis-)continuous relationship between current debates and those in 1970s France. 

To explore the multiplicity of forms with or in which these critiques were expressed, this volume places theoretical perspectives in conversation with artistic perspectives on queer liberation in a transnational context. Contributors include Friederike Beier, Antoine Idier, Émilie Notéris, Lukas Betzler, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Sido Lansari, Todd Shepard, and Julian Volz.
 

A powerful collection of personal essays from lesbian moms who fought for the right to raise children  

For generations, lesbians across the United States were systematically denied opportunities to raise children and build families, opportunities that were readily available to straight people. Radical Family honors the history-making struggles and triumphs of lesbian families in Madison, Wisconsin, who raised children in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s—a time when lesbian motherhood was widely considered extreme and unnatural. In a collection of nine profoundly personal essays, the contributors recount their diverse paths to parenthood, as well as the hopes and challenges each family experienced. While the stories in Radical Family are unique, they all share a common thread: the mothers’ resilience and the risks they took, both small and sweeping, to defend their family’s right to exist.  

For lesbians, the desire to raise children has historically been met with vilification and legal and social prejudice. Adoption agencies consistently rejected applications from out lesbians. Doctors and clinics refused to provide fertility treatments and other medical options to help them get pregnant. Lesbians who were able to raise children commonly lost custody to estranged spouses or grandparents.  

Trailblazing lesbian mothers—and their children—fought to defy and, ultimately, shift this paradigm. Lesbian parents, like those in Radical Family, created informal networks in their local communities, where they could share survival strategies and find acceptance among other families that looked like theirs. With no rule book to guide them, and few laws to protect them, lesbian mothers created a new—some might even say radical—standard for what it means to be a family.  

Over and over, the stories in Radical Family show how families fought back against hatred and homophobia with love, resilience, commitment, and creativity. Their stories deepen our understanding of what it means to be a mother—while showing how safety, belonging, and acceptance are universal human needs.  

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent mass displacement of black neighborhoods in New Orleans, black queer performers redefined notions of belonging throughout the city. These unlikely figures, such as artists Big Freedia and Vockah Redu, played a significant role in calling the displaced back home and serving as beacons of hope. In Raising the Bottom, Alix Chapman engages in performance ethnography, taking to the stage while writing about the lives of these bounce artists and their extended community. He theorizes an epistemology of the bottom—a way of knowing, praxis, and aesthetic—which contests hierarchies of value that place black and queer bodies at the lowest rungs of the social ladder. By engaging in this bottom episteme, bounce performers leverage pleasure and coalition to transform collectives not meant to survive crisis and disaster. Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity.

What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

Over the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading Sedgwick reflect on Sedgwick's many critical inventions, from her elucidation of poetry's close relation to criticism and development of new versions of queer performativity to highlighting the power of writing to engender new forms of life. As the essays in Reading Sedgwick demonstrate, Sedgwick's work is not only an ongoing vital force in queer theory and affect theory; it can help us build a more positive world in the midst of the bleak contemporary moment.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Ramzi Fawaz, Denis Flannery, Jane Gallop, Jonathan Goldberg, Meridith Kruse, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Chris Nealon, Andrew Parker, H. A. Sedgwick, Karin Sellberg, Michael D. Snediker, Melissa Solomon, Robyn Wiegman

In Reattachment Theory Lee Wallace argues that homosexuality—far from being the threat to “traditional” marriage that same-sex marriage opponents have asserted—is so integral to its reimagining that all marriage is gay marriage. Drawing on the history of marriage, Stanley Cavell's analysis of Hollywood comedies of remarriage, and readings of recent gay and lesbian films, Wallace shows that queer experiments in domesticity have reshaped the affective and erotic horizons of heterosexual marriage and its defining principles: fidelity, exclusivity, and endurance. Wallace analyzes a series of films—Dorothy Arzner's Craig's Wife (1936); Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009); Lisa Cholodenko's High Art (1998), Laurel Canyon (2002), and The Kids Are All Right (2010); and Andrew Haigh's Weekend (2011) and 45 Years (2015)—that, she contends, do not simply reflect social and legal changes; they fundamentally alter our sense of what sexual attachment involves as both a social and a romantic form.

An examination of the rhetorical linkage of queer theory in the academy with street-level queer activism in the 1980s and early 1990s

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a defining historical moment for both queer activism and queer theory in the United States. LGBTQ communities, confronted with the fatal indifference and homophobia of the AIDS crisis, often responded with angry, militant forms of activism designed not merely to promote acceptance or tolerance, but to forge identity and strength from victimization and assert loudly and forcefully their rights to safety and humanity. The activist reclamation of the word “queer” is one marker of this shift in ideology and practice, and it was mirrored in academic circles by the concurrent emergence of the new field of “queer theory.” That is, as queer activists were mobilizing in the streets, queer theorists were producing a similar foment in the halls and publications of academia, questioning regulatory categories of gender and sexuality, and attempting to illuminate the heteronormative foundations of Western thought. Notably, the narrative of queer theory’s development often describes it as arising from or being inspired by queer activism.

In Reclaiming Queer, Erin J. Rand examines both queer activist and academic practices during this period, taking as her primary object the rhetorical linkage of queer theory in the academy with street-level queer activism. Through this strategic conjuncture of activism and academia, Rand grapples with the specific conditions for and constraints on rhetorical agency in each context. She examines the early texts that inaugurated the field of queer theory, Queer Nation’s infamous “Queers Read This” manifesto, Larry Kramer’s polemic speeches and editorials, the Lesbian Avengers’ humorous and outrageous antics, the history of ACT UP, and the more recent appearance of Gay Shame activism. From these activist and academic discourses, Rand builds a theory of rhetorical agency that posits queerness as the very condition from which agency emerges.

Reclaiming Queer thus offers a critical look at the rhetoric of queer activism, engages the history of queer theory’s institutionalization and the politics of its proliferation, suggests a radically contextual understanding of rhetorical agency and form, and argues for the centrality of queerness to all rhetorical action.

Recovering Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) relationality and belonging in the land, memory, and body of Native Hawai’i

Hawaiian “aloha ʻāina” is often described in Western political terms—nationalism, nationhood, even patriotism. In Remembering Our Intimacies, Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio centers in on the personal and embodied articulations of aloha ʻāina to detangle it from the effects of colonialism and occupation. Working at the intersections of Hawaiian knowledge, Indigenous queer theory, and Indigenous feminisms, Remembering Our Intimacies seeks to recuperate Native Hawaiian concepts and ethics around relationality, desire, and belonging firmly grounded in the land, memory, and the body of Native Hawai’i.

Remembering Our Intimacies argues for the methodology of (re)membering Indigenous forms of intimacies. It does so through the metaphor of a ‘upena—a net of intimacies that incorporates the variety of relationships that exist for Kānaka Maoli. It uses a close reading of the moʻolelo (history and literature) of Hiʻiakaikapoliopele to provide context and interpretation of Hawaiian intimacy and desire by describing its significance in Kānaka Maoli epistemology and why this matters profoundly for Hawaiian (and other Indigenous) futures. 

Offering a new approach to understanding one of Native Hawaiians’ most significant values, Remembering Our Intimacies reveals the relationships between the policing of Indigenous bodies, intimacies, and desires; the disembodiment of Indigenous modes of governance; and the ongoing and ensuing displacement of Indigenous people.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is primarily known for her foundational work in queer and affect theory, but her artistic work with textiles remains largely unexplored. In Reparative Craft, Jason Edwards examines a range of her textile art from a ten-year period in which she was also writing Touching Feeling. Employing the reparative approach that Sedgwick pioneered and analyzing her works from a series of four exhibitions, Reparative Craft demonstrates the necessity of connecting Sedgwick’s fiber art practice to her work as a theorist. Richly illustrated and presented in full color, this volume invites readers to connect Sedgwick’s art with her theory, presenting a new model of reparative reading that exemplifies ideas of queer and trans craft so vital to Sedgwick’s body of work.

For three years the author did participant-observation at three nationally prominent queer organizations in Los Angeles-Christopher Street West, which produces L.A.'s queer pride festival; the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, a 37-year-old multi-site organization; and Bienestar, an HIV services organization for gay Latinos. Ward documents the evolution of these organizations, including class and race conflicts within them, but she especially focuses on the misuses of diversity culture.

Respectably Queer reveals how neoliberal ideas about difference are becoming embedded in the daily life of a progressive movement and producing frequent conflicts over the meaning of "diversity." The author shows how queer activists are learning from the corporate model to leverage their differences to compete with other non-profit groups, enhance their public reputation or moral standing, and establish their diversity-related expertise. Ward argues that this instrumentalization of diversity has increased the demand for predictable and easily measurable forms of difference, a trend at odds with queer resistance.

Ward traces the standoff between the respectable world of "diversity awareness" and the often vulgar, sexualized, and historically unprofessional world of queer pride festivals. She spotlights dissenting voices in a queer organization where diversity has become synonymous with tedious and superficial workplace training. And she shows how activists fight back when prevailing diversity discourses-the ones that "diverse" people are compelled to use in order to receive funding-simply don't fit.

Exploring how language shapes sexuality, power, and belonging.

Davin Allen Grindstaff, through a series of close textual analyses examining public discourse, uncovers the rhetorical modes of persuasion surrounding the construction of gay male sexual identity. In Part One, Grindstaff establishes his notion of the "rhetorical secret" central to constructions of gay male identity: the practice of sexual identity as a secret, its promise of a coherent sexual self, and the perpetuation of secrecy as a product and strategy of heteronormative discourse.

Grindstaff continues in Part Two to examine major issues related to contemporary conceptions of gay male identity: overturning sodomy laws; public debates over same-sex marriages; medical and social responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis; the rhetorical power of hyper-masculine body images and homoeroticism to creative communities; and, finally, what Grindstaff considers to be the most mysterious and significant rhetorical practice of all: coming out of the closet.

By investigating the public discourse--texts and images that circulate, produce knowledge, and become means of persuasion--surrounding the constructions of sexual identity, Grindstaff challenges heteronormative concepts of sexuality itself, thus creating new maps of social power and new paths of resistance.

 

Exploring gender and sexuality in the Gilded Age through one sensationalized life

Addie Liona Walker. Leon A. Belmont. Nova McClure Carr. Romantic Sensation tells the full story of this one ordinary person’s singular life. Assigned a female sex at birth, Addie was born in Massachusetts in 1853 and lived as a woman for twenty-five years. After transitioning in 1878, Addie became Leon and lived as a man for twenty-four years before making a second gender transition and living as a woman, Nova, for the rest of her life. Placing these milestones within the historical context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lizzie Ehrenhalt traces Belmont’s life, from child laborer to husband, from outlaw to heartthrob, and from stepfather to single mother.

Belmont was a Gilded Age celebrity: he made national news for breaking an ordinance against dressing as the “opposite” sex in Minneapolis, and he inspired a media frenzy when one of his girlfriends told police that he was a woman. While newspapers labeled Belmont a “curious and romantic sensation,” Ehrenhalt shows that he was not much of a sensation after all. Illuminating what his story can tell us about Americans’ developing understandings of sexuality and gender in the 1850s through the 1920s, she reveals how Belmont’s run-ins with police, doctors, courts, and reporters resonate in the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ identities we recognize today.

An empathetic case study of a figure often denied respect in the telling of his story, Romantic Sensation presents Belmont’s gender transitions not as puzzles in need of solving but as acts grounded in the cultural milieu of the Gilded Age. Traversing the dramatic economic upheavals of the second industrial revolution, the Era of Good Stealings, and the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, and spanning the Cult of Domesticity, the invention of sexology, and the rise of New Womanhood, Ehrenhalt uses Belmont’s example to demonstrate how trans, queer, and intersex histories are inseparable from American history.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Blending social science, fine arts, and the humanities, Rural Queer Joy explores how the telling of rural LGBTQ+ stories affects young rural queer people today. The stories of well-known Wyoming LGBTQ+ people like Matthew Shepard, Sissy Goodwin, and Artemis Langford often center experiences of trauma and hardship, leaving little space for experiences of triumph or joy.

Author Jennifer Tabler and photographer Bailey Russel provided rural LGBTQ+ community members with an opportunity to represent their own experiences through participation in a social practice art project, asking what about being LGBTQ+ brings them joy. They then took the participants’ portraits and invited them to annotate these portraits with paint, markers, paper, or other media. This kind of social practice art provides an opportunity to engage in epistemic activism through the self-empowerment of marginalized voices and perspectives, while also centering visuals of rural queer people that counter existing stereotypes and add nuance to our understanding of rural LGBTQ+ people.

The dynamic artwork and quotes from young rural LGBTQ+ people displayed in this book highlight how their identities are sources of joy and opportunity rather than constraint and hardship. Rural and/or LGBTQ+ people, researchers, and teachers in the fields of community-engaged arts, gender studies, sociology of sexualities, and public humanities will find inspiration in Rural Queer Joy—inspiration to rethink what it means to be rural and LGBTQ+ as well as to use social practice art to increase the visibility of other underserved communities.