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To be taken seriously, therapies that claim to “cure” homosexuality wrap themselves in lab coats. Even though the fit is bad, and such therapies and their theorists now inhabit the scientific fringe, the science of sexuality has made some adjustments, too, Tom Waidzunas tells us in this provocative work.

Intervening in the politics of sexuality and science, The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of sexual orientation do not merely reflect the results of investigations into human nature, but rather emerge through a process of social negotiation between opposing groups. The demedicalization of homosexuality and the discrediting of reparative therapies, ex-gay ministries, and reorientation research have, Waidzunas contends, required scientists to enforce key boundaries around scientific expertise and research methods. Drawing on extensive participant observation at conferences for ex-gays, reorientation therapists, mainstream psychologists, and survivors of ex-gay therapy, as well as interviews with experts and activists, The Straight Line traces reorientation debates in the United States from the 1950s to the present, following homosexuality therapies from the mainstream to the margins. As the ex-gay movement has become increasingly transnational in recent years, Waidzunas turns to Uganda, where ideas about the scientific nature of homosexuality influenced the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.

While most studies treat the ex-gay movement as a religious phenomenon, this book looks at how the movement, in its attempts to establish legitimacy, has engaged with scientific institutions, shaping virulent anti-gay public policy.

William S. Burroughs arrived in Mexico City in 1949, having slipped out of New Orleans while awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Still uncertain about being a writer, he had left behind a series of failed business ventures—including a scheme to grow marijuana in Texas and sell it in New York—and an already long history of drug use and arrests. He would remain in Mexico for three years, a period that culminated in the defining incident of his life: Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing William Tell with a loaded pistol. (He would be tried and convicted of murder in absentia after fleeing Mexico.)

First published in 1995 in Mexico, where it received the Malcolm Lowry literary essay award, The Stray Bullet is an imaginative and riveting account of Burroughs’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Mexico, Jorge García-Robles makes clear, was the place in which Burroughs embarked on his “fatal vocation as a writer.”

Through meticulous research and interviews with those who knew Burroughs and his circle in Mexico City, García-Robles brilliantly portrays a time in Burroughs’s life that has been overshadowed by the tragedy of Joan Vollmer’s death. He re-creates the bohemian Roma neighborhood where Burroughs resided with Joan and their children, the streets of postwar Mexico City that Burroughs explored, and such infamous figures as Lola la Chata, queen of the city’s drug trade. This compelling book also offers a contribution by Burroughs himself—an evocative sketch of his shady Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado.

A gold mine of information about a hidden queer culture

Thirty-two years before Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, popular French novelist Willy published The Third Sex, a vivid description of the world of European homosexuals in France, Italy, and Germany during the late 1920s. Stepping directly into the heart of gay men's culture, Willy follows homosexual nightlife into music halls, nightclubs, casinos, bars, and saunas. While he finds plenty of drug and alcohol abuse, he also discovers homosexual publishers, scientific societies, group rivalries, and opinions--both medical and political--about the nature of homosexuality itself. Lawrence R. Schehr's introduction provides context and translator's notes for this first-ever English edition.

This special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies presents essays that each adopt a methodologically distinctive analysis of a particular concern in transgender studies. Taken together, these pieces demonstrate the wide-ranging and sometimes antagonistic viewpoints of scholars and activists pursuing different political and intellectual goals.

Essays include a documentation of how readers of mass-circulation print media became aware of new medical possibilities for the surgical and hormonal alteration of sex characteristics and began agitating for them; a challenge from feminist theorists to transgender movement activists to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous feminist, gay, and lesbian political mobilizations; a critique of the overreliance on discursive analysis in much current transgender scholarship; and paired essays exploring the so-called Butch/FTM Border Wars from either side of that divide. There are also pieces that focus on intersex activism, the bioethics of gender dysphoria management, and the mobilization of transgender advocacy organizations.
Considering perceptions of queer embodiment past and present, these essays explore the sweeping changes in professional and popular attitudes regarding the transgender community and the issues that affect it. The timeliness of this issue as well as the diversity of its viewpoints makes it a significant contribution to the growing body of transgender literature.

Contributors. Cheryl Chase, Patricia Elliot, Judith Halberstam, C. Jacob Hale, Joanne Meyerowitz, James Lindeman Nelson, Katrina Roen, Henry Rubin, Susan Stryker

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.

Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

The Un-Natural State is a one-of-a-kind study of gay and lesbian life in Arkansas in the twentieth century, a deft weaving together of Arkansas history, dozens of oral histories, and Brock Thompson's own story. Thompson analyzes the meaning of rural drag shows, including a compelling description of a 1930s seasonal beauty pageant in Wilson, Arkansas, where white men in drag shared the stage with other white men in blackface, a suggestive mingling that went to the core of both racial transgression and sexual disobedience. These small town entertainments put on in churches and schools emerged decades later in gay bars across the state as a lucrative business practice and a larger means of community expression, while in the same period the state's sodomy law was rewritten to condemn sexual acts between those of the same sex in language similar to what was once used to denounce interracial sex. Thompson goes on to describe several lesbian communities established in the Ozark Mountains during the sixties and seventies and offers a substantial account of Eureka Springs's informal status as the "gay capital of the Ozarks." Through this exploration of identity formation, group articulation, political mobilization, and cultural visibility within the context of historical episodes such as the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the AIDS epidemic, The Un-Natural State contributes not only to our understanding of gay and lesbian history but also to our understanding of the South.

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights.

Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso

The Weather in Proust gathers pieces written by the eminent critic and theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the last decade of her life, as she worked toward a book on Proust. This book takes its title from the first essay, a startlingly original interpretation of Proust. By way of Neoplatonism, Buddhism, and the work of Melanie Klein, Sedgwick establishes the sense of refreshment and surprise that the author of the Recherche affords his readers. Proust also figures in pieces on the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, object relations, affect theory, and Sedgwick’s textile art practices. More explicitly connected to her role as a pioneering queer theorist are an exuberant attack against reactionary refusals of the work of Guy Hocquenghem and talks in which she lays out her central ideas about sexuality and her concerns about the direction of US queer theory. Sedgwick lived for more than a dozen years with a diagnosis of terminal cancer; its implications informed her later writing and thinking, as well as her spiritual and artistic practices. In the book’s final and most personal essay, she reflects on the realization of her impending death. Featuring thirty-seven color images of her art, The Weather in Proust offers a comprehensive view of Sedgwick’s later work, underscoring its diversity and coherence.

On September 3, 1971, Michael McConnell and Jack Baker exchanged vows in the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States. Their remarkable story is told here for the first time—a unique account of the passion and energy of the gay liberation movement in the sixties and seventies. 
 
At the dawn of the modern gay movement (while New York’s Stonewall riots and San Francisco’s emerging political activism bloomed), these two young men insisted on making their commitment a legal reality. They were already crusaders for gay rights: Jack had twice been elected the University of Minnesota’s student president—the first openly gay university student president in the country, an election reported by Walter Cronkite on network TV news. They were featured in Look magazine’s special issue about the American family and received letters of support from around the world.
 
The couple navigated complex procedures to obtain a state-issued marriage license. Their ceremony was conducted by a Methodist minister in a friend’s tiny Minneapolis apartment. Wearing matching white pantsuits, exchanging custom-designed rings, and sharing a tiered wedding cake, Michael and Jack celebrated their historic marriage. After reciting their vows, they sealed their promise to love and honor each other with a kiss and a signed marriage certificate.
 
Repercussions were immediate: Michael’s job offer at the University of Minnesota was rescinded, leading him to wage a battle against job discrimination with the help of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. The couple eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court with two precedent-setting cases. 
 
Michael and Jack have retired from the public spotlight, but after four decades their marriage is still their joy and comfort. Living quietly in a Minneapolis bungalow, they exemplify a contemporary version of the American dream. Only now, with marriage equality in the headlines and the Supreme Court decision to make love the law of the land, are they willing to tell the entire story of their groundbreaking experiences. TIME magazine listed the twenty-five most influential marriages of all time and included Michael and Jack, and they were recently profiled in a cover story in the Sunday New York Times. Their long campaign for marriage equality and insistence on equal rights for all citizens is a model for advocates of social justice and an inspiration for everyone who struggles for acceptance in a less-than-equal world.

The sudden and premature death of Alan Bray deprived gay and lesbian studies of a founding figure. Best known for his 1982 book Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Bray paved the way for subsequent scholars in early modern gay and lesbian studies. This special issue of GLQ collects essays that draw on and expand Bray’s work of the past two decades, as well as offer new work in the emerging field of friendship studies, of which he was a pioneer.

Contributors to the collection include some of the most prominent scholars in the field of early modern sexualities. They think expansively about Bray’s impact on their own work and, most importantly, test the applicability of his theories (that same-sex desire has a history that can be reconstructed and that the actual object of study is difficult to capture, as its expression varies radically across cultures and societies) in areas where they have not been previously employed. Two essays in this collection explore friendships or intimacies between women or between men and women—topics Bray did not pursue extensively. Others deal with locations outside Bray’s heavily English focus, including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, or apply his theories to periods beyond the Renaissance. Additionally, the issue includes a review of Bray’s The Friend, published posthumously, and an assessment of his scholarly career from his earliest writings to this final work.

Contributors. George Chauncey, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, George E. Haggerty, Jeffrey Masten, Jeffrey Merrick, Stephen Orgel, Laurie Shannon, Valerie Traub

Something happened in the 1990s, something dramatic and irreversible. A group of people long considered a moral menace and an issue previously deemed unmentionable in public discourse were transformed into a matter of human rights, discussed in every institution of American society. Marriage, the military, parenting, media and the arts, hate violence, electoral politics, public school curricula, human genetics, religion: Name the issue, and the the role of gays and lesbians was a subject of debate. During the 1990s, the world seemed finally to turn and take notice of the gay people in its midst. In The World Turned, distinguished historian and leading gay-rights activist John D’Emilio shows how gay issues moved from the margins to the center of national consciousness during the critical decade of the 1990s.

In this collection of essays, D’Emilio brings his historian’s eye to bear on these profound changes in American society, culture, and politics. He explores the career of Bayard Rustin, a civil rights leader and pacifist who was openly gay a generation before almost everyone else; the legacy of radical gay and lesbian liberation; the influence of AIDS activist and writer Larry Kramer; the scapegoating of gays and lesbians by the Christian Right; the gay-gene controversy and the debate over whether people are "born gay"; and the explosion of attention focused on queer families. He illuminates the historical roots of contemporary debates over identity politics and explains why the gay community has become, over the last decade, such a visible part of American life.

Marquis Bey’s debut collection, Them Goon Rules, is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know.

A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms.

Fashioning fugitive Blackness and feminism around a line from Lil’ Wayne’s “A Millie,” Them Goon Rules is a work of “auto-theory” that insists on radical modes of thought and being as a refrain and a hook that is unapologetic, rigorously thoughtful, and uncompromising.

Thinking Sexuality Transnationally examines the emergence of new forms of sexuality and desire from a global perspective. Legal, pop-culture, and academic approaches to these new forms are considered from both national—China, Brazil, Indonesia, and Thailand—and transnational—Puerto Rico, Guatemala, and the United States—standpoints. The contributors approach their subjects with the corollary understanding that these new forms of sexuality and desire arise in borderlands, and what constitutes a borderland has been redefined with the onset of mass media and communication abilities.
Included in this collection are a study of the construction of male gay identities in China; a consideration of sexual pedagogy, the state, and the “new Brazilian homosexuality”; the format of amnesty applications submitted by lesbians in Guatemala; the roles of gender and sexuality in Taiwanese opera; and a review of transgender literature and language. One of the first comprehensive inquiries into the effects of globalization on sexuality and desire, Thinking Sexuality Transnationally brings together essayists from several disciplines to look at how sexuality and global movement are involved and evolving.

Contributors. Tom Boellstorff, George Chauncey, Peter Jackson, Don Kulick, Patrick Larvie, Heather McClure, Frances Negron-Munter, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Lisa Rofel, Teri Silvio

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory.  Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness.

Thoughts and Things posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts (the human subject) and things (the world). Bersani departs from his psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being—of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us.  He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, Thoughts and Things will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond.

Tongzhi, which translates into English as “same purpose” or “same will,” was once widely used to mean “comrade.” Since the 1990s, the word has been appropriated by the LGBT community in China and now refers to a broad range of people who do not espouse heteronormativity.

Tongzhi Living, the first study of its kind, offers insights into the community of same-sex-attracted men in the metropolitan city of Dalian in northeast China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by Tiantian Zheng, the book reveals an array of coping mechanisms developed by tongzhi men in response to rapid social, cultural, and political transformations in postsocialist China. According to Zheng, unlike gay men in the West over the past three decades, tongzhi men in China have adopted the prevailing moral ideal of heterosexuality and pursued membership in the dominant culture at the same time they have endeavored to establish a tongzhi culture. They are, therefore, caught in a constant tension of embracing and contesting normality as they try to create a new and legitimate space for themselves.

Tongzhi men’s attempts to practice both conformity and rebellion paradoxically undercut the goals they aspire to reach, Zheng shows, perpetuating social prejudice against them and thwarting the activism they believe they are advocating.

Often depicted as deviant or pathological by public health researchers, psychoanalysts, and sexologists, male-with-male sex and sex work is, in fact, an increasingly mainstream pursuit. Based on a qualitative investigation of the practices involved in male-with-male—or m4m—Internet escorting, Touching Encounters is the first book to explicitly address how masculinity and sexuality shape male commercial sex in this era of Internet communications.

 

By looking closely at the sex and work of male escorts, Kevin Walby tries to reconcile the two extremes of m4m sex—the stereotypical idea of a quick cash transaction and the tendency toward friendship and mutuality. In doing so, Walby draws on the work of Foucault to make visible the play of power in these physical and commercial relations between men. At once a revelation to the sociology of work and a much-needed critical engagement with queer theory, Touching Encounters responds to calls from across the social sciences to connect Foucault with sociologies of sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Walby does this and more, retying this sexual practice back to society at large.

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

While much attention has been paid in recent years to heterosexual prostitution and sex tourism in Brazil, gay sex tourism has been almost completely overlooked. In Tourist Attractions, Gregory C. Mitchell presents a pioneering ethnography that focuses on the personal lives and identities of male sex workers who occupy a variety of roles in Brazil’s sexual economy.

Mitchell takes us into the bath houses of Rio de Janeiro, where rent boys cruise for clients, and to the beaches of Salvador da Bahia, where African American gay men seek out hustlers while exploring cultural heritage tourist sites. His ethnography stretches into the Amazon, where indigenous fantasies are tinged with the erotic at eco-resorts, and into the homes of “kept men,” who forge long-term, long-distance, transnational relationships that blur the boundaries of what counts as commercial sex. Mitchell asks how tourists perceive sex workers’ performances of Brazilianness, race, and masculinity, and, in turn, how these two groups of men make sense of differing models of racial and sexual identity across cultural boundaries. He proposes that in order to better understand how people experience difference sexually, we reframe prostitution—which Marxist feminists have long conceptualized as sexual labor—as also being a form of performative labor. Tourist Attractions is an exceptional ethnography poised to make an indelible impact in the fields of anthropology, gender, and sexuality, and research on prostitution and tourism.

First published in Italian in 1977, Mario Mieli's groundbreaking book is an early landmark of revolutionary queer theory - now available for the first time in a complete and unabridged English translation.

Among the most important works ever to address the relationship between homosexuality, homophobia and capitalism, Mieli's essay continues to pose a radical challenge to today's dominant queer theory and politics.

With extraordinary prescience, Mieli exposes the efficiency with which capitalism co-opts 'perversions' which are then 'sold both wholesale and retail'. In his view the liberation of homosexual desire requires the emancipation of sexuality from both patriarchal sex roles and capital.

Drawing heavily upon Marx and psychoanalysis to arrive at a dazzlingly original vision, Towards a Gay Communism is a hitherto neglected classic that will be essential reading for all who seek to understand the true meaning of sexual liberation under capitalism today.

Shifting the geopolitics of trans studies, travesti theory is a Latinx American body of work with an extensive transregional history. As a particular body politics, travesti identification is not only a sexed, gendered, classed, and racialized form of relation, but a critical mode and an epistemology. Throughout the Américas, trans and travesti studies take a multiplicity of forms: scholarly work that engages identitarian and anti-identitarian analytical frameworks as well as interventions into state practices, cultural production, and strategic activist actions. These multiple critical approaches—both travesti and trans—are regionally inflected by the flows of people, ideas, technologies, and resources that shape the hemisphere, opening up space to explore the productive tensions and expansive possibilities within this body of work.

This special issue of TSQ prompts a conversation between trans and travesti studies scholars working across the Américas to investigate how shifts in cultural practices, aesthetics, geographies, and languages enliven theories of politics, subjectivity, and embodiment. Contributors to this issue offer a hemispheric perspective on trans and travesti issues to the Anglophone academy, expand transgender studies to engage geopolitical connections, and bring interdisciplinary approaches to topics ranging from policy to cultural production. This issue is an unprecedented English-language collection by Latin American and Latinx scholars on trans and travesti issues.

Contributors. Lino Arruda, Daniel Coleman, Cynthia Citlallin Delgado, El Colectivo del Archivo de la Memoria Trans, Juan Carlos Garrido, Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, Bernadine Hernández, Hillary Hiner, Denilson Lopes, Andrés Lopez, Cole Rizki, Juana María Rodríguez, Oli Rodriguez, Marcia Lucia Machuca Rose, Martín de Mauro Rucovsky, Dora Silva Santana, Susy Shock, Sayak Valencia

Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.   

 

Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.

 

Winner of the 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.   

 

Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.

 

This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.

Contributors. Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Maya Mikdashi, Robert Mills, Carlos Motta, Marcia Ochoa, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Louise Wilson

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title​

Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin’s The Masquerader to Garbo’s androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch,and A Fantastic Woman.
 
As it traces the evolution of trans people onscreen, Transgender Cinema also considers the ongoing controversies sparked by these movies and series both within LGBTQ communities and beyond. Ultimately it reveals how film and television have shaped not only how the general public sees trans people, but also how trans people see themselves.

Selected Filmography:

To date, media and scholarly attention to gay politics and policy has focused on the morality debates over sexual orientation and the legal aspects of rights for non-heterosexuals. However, transgender concerns as such have received little attention. With transgender activism becoming more visible, policymakers in the United States and around the world have begun to respond to demands for more equitable treatment.

Jami K. Taylor and Donald P. Haider-Markel bring together new research employing the concepts and tools of political science to explore the politics of transgender rights. Volume contributors address the framing of transgender rights in the U.S. and in Latin America. They discuss transgender interest groups, the inclusion of transgender activists in advocacy coalitions, policy diffusion at the state and local levels, and, importantly, the implementation of transgender public policy. This volume sets the standard for empirical research on transgender politics and demonstrates that the study of this topic can contribute to the understanding of larger questions in the field of political science.