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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.

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.

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.

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