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936 books match the query 'LGBTQ+ Studies' and 15 start with u

cover of Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground

Ugly Differences

Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground

Yetta Howard

University of Illinois Press, 2018

What would it mean to turn to ugliness rather than turn away from it? Indeed, the idea of ugly often becomes synonymous with non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual physicality and experience. That same pejorative migrates to become a label for practices within underground culture. In Ugly Differences, Yetta Howard uses underground contexts to theorize queer difference by locating ugliness at the intersection of the physical, experiential, and textual. From that nexus, Howard contends that ugliness—as a mode of pejorative identification—is fundamental to the cultural formations of queer female sexuality. Slava Tsukerman's postpunk film Liquid Sky, Sapphire's poetry, Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Butch comix, New Queer Cinema such as High Art—these and other non-canonical works contribute to an audacious critique. Howard reveals how the things we see, read as, or experience as ugly productively account for non-dominant sexual identities and creative practices. Ugly Differences offers eye-opening ways to approach queerness and its myriad underground representations.
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cover of Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

Underdogs

Social Deviance and Queer Theory

Heather Love

University of Chicago Press, 2021

A pathbreaking genealogy of queer theory that traces its roots to an unexpected source: sociological research on marginal communities in the era before Stonewall.
 
The sociology of “social deviants” flourished in the United States at midcentury, studying the lives of outsiders such as homosexuals, Jews, disabled people, drug addicts, and political radicals. But in the following decades, many of these downcast figures would become the architects of new social movements, activists in revolt against institutions, the state, and social constraint. As queer theory gained prominence as a subfield of the humanities in the late 1980s, it seemed to inherit these radical, activist impulses—challenging not only gender and sexual norms, but also the nature of society itself.

With Underdogs, Heather Love shows that queer theorists inherited as much from sociologists as they did from activists. Through theoretical and archival work, Love traces the connection between midcentury studies of deviance and the antinormative, antiessentialist field of queer theory. While sociologists saw deviance as an inevitable fact of social life, queer theorists embraced it as a rallying cry. A robust interdisciplinary history of the field, Underdogs stages a reencounter with the practices and communities that underwrite radical queer thought.
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cover of Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History

Edited by Leila J. Rupp and Susan K. Freeman

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

Taking into account recent historic changes, this second edition updates the essays on the Supreme Court, same-sex marriage, the Right, and trans history. Authors of several other essays have taken the opportunity to add new material and references where warranted.
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cover of Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope?

Undertale

Can a Game Give Hope?

Anastasia Salter

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A powerful exploration of the importance and social complexity of the indie gaming sensation
 
On the surface, the 2015 game Undertale didn’t seem like much, supported by fan funding and with minimalist retro graphics. But despite its pixelated monsters and dated role-playing mechanics, Undertale invited fans and players to rethink their very relationship with gaming and game characters. Players encountered an extraordinary range of possible play experiences, with paths through the game’s unassuming world leading to both empathy and extreme violence, offering room for reflection and growth. Players could befriend (sometimes queer) monsters or kill them, for instance, appealing to each monster’s unique personality to negotiate survival and find community.
 
Contextualizing this game’s success in the wake of the Gamergate online harassment campaign and meditating on questions of violence and authenticity, writer and game scholar Anastasia Salter offers a profound exploration of this game sensation and a personal story of hope at a time when Salter was otherwise “done” with games. Undertale’s unique structure helped make it synonymous with “indie” games, built outside of the studio as a passion project and inspiring similar passion among its many fans even a decade later. But Undertale’s story also speaks to an auteur dream: What game developer Toby Fox and his collaborators accomplished on a small budget, with relatively simple tools, has left people replaying, arguing, and creating in its wake.
 
As we enter a cultural moment where intense interest is shifting towards flashy creativity, powered by generative artificial intelligence, Undertale reminds fans and newcomers of the power of thoughtful and intentional human design.

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cover of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology

Undoing Monogamy

The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology

Angela Willey

Duke University Press, 2016

In Undoing Monogamy Angela Willey offers a radically interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of monogamy in U.S. science and culture, propelled by queer feminist desires for new modes of conceptualization and new forms of belonging. She approaches the politics and materiality of monogamy as intertwined with one another such that disciplinary ways of knowing themselves become an object of critical inquiry. Refusing to answer the naturalization of monogamy with a naturalization of nonmonogamy, Willey demands a critical reorientation toward the monogamy question in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The book examines colonial sexual science, monogamous voles, polyamory, and the work of Alison Bechdel and Audre Lorde to show how challenging the lens through which human nature is seen as monogamous or nonmonogamous forces us to reconsider our investments in coupling and in disciplinary notions of biological bodies. 
 
 
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cover of Unfolding Corpus: Radical Creativity and Vulnerability in Times of Plague

Unfolding Corpus

Radical Creativity and Vulnerability in Times of Plague

George Ayala

Rutgers University Press, 2027

UnfoldingCorpus is a carefully curated collection of visual and textual works by artists and writers from past issues of Corpus, a community produced journal, which was originally published between 2003 and 2008 by the AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). Corpus was a publication that held open valuable space for Black, Brown, and queer people to see themselves reflected in an honest exploration of HIV and sex, but it was also a celebration of sexuality, connectivity, curiosity, and resilience. 

Unfolding Corpus uses contributions from the original journal to draw parallels between HIV, COVID, and monkey pox, all of which have disproportionately affected the queer community. By centering the experiences of communities historically excluded from public health decision-making, the mix of art, poetry, essays, and radical storytelling throughout the collection aims to disrupt and reveal the wrongs waged on low income, Black, Brown, and queer bodies across time and across pandemics. This collection once again confronts a hostile state and cultural environment by celebrating a world in which queer and trans sexuality can flourish, be seen, and be understood as a tool to envision radical futures rooted in equality and unfurling justice.

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cover of Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming

Unfurl

Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming

Eli Clare

Duke University Press, 2025

A queer disabled love song to trees and beavers, tremors and dreams, Unfurl explores the pulsing core and porous edges of survival, sorrow, and dreaming. Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, emotion and activist thinking, Eli Clare invites us to unfurl ourselves into the lovely multitude of genders beyond the binary of woman and man, the fierceness of street protest, and the long slow time of granite. He sings to aquifers. Wrestles with the aftermath of child abuse and his family’s legacy as white settlers occupying Dakota homelands. He leans into history. Calls the names of the living and the dead. Connects his own tremoring body to a world full of tremors—earthquakes, jackhammers, quaking aspens. Unfurl reveals deep queer kinships between human and more-than-human, sentient and nonsentient. At every juncture, these poems and essays embrace porousness and the power of dreaming. Ultimately, Unfurl is an invitation to rebellion and joy.
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cover of Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking

Unlimited Intimacy

Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking

Tim Dean

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Barebacking—when gay men deliberately abandon condoms and embrace unprotected sex—has incited a great deal of shock, outrage, anger, and even disgust, but very little contemplation. Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean’s riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it.

Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean’s profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean’s extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene’s bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and Unlimited Intimacy explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus—especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits—one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal—barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works.

Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, Unlimited Intimacy will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.

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cover of Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

Unruly Comparison

Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone

Alvin K. Wong

Duke University Press, 2025

In Unruly Comparison, Alvin K. Wong examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. Wong analyzes queer interracial desire in WWII; a cinema of gay male cosmopolitanism; queer intimacy among migrant workers; trans visuality and legality; cross-border sex work; and the queer diaspora of Hong Kong after the 2019 protests. Through Wong’s readings, Hong Kong becomes a queer region of racial, gender, and sexual incommensurability. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.
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cover of Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Unsafe Words

Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Shantel Gabrieal Buggs

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. While responding to the need for sex to be consensual and mutually pleasurable, these chapter authors resist the heteronormative assumptions, class norms, and racial privilege underlying much #MeToo discourse. The essays reveal the tools that queer communities themselves have developed to practice ethical sex—from the sex worker negotiating with her client to the gay man having anonymous sex in the back room. At the same time, they explore how queer communities might better prevent and respond to sexual violence without recourse to a police force that is frequently racist, homophobic, and transphobic. 
 
Telling a queerer side of the #MeToo story, Unsafe Words dares to challenge dogmatic assumptions about sex and consent while developing tools and language to promote more ethical and more pleasurable sex for everyone.
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cover of Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil

Unseen Flesh

Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil

Nessette Falu

Duke University Press, 2023

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings.
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cover of Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

Unsettling Queer Anthropology

Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures

Margot Weiss, editor

Duke University Press, 2024

This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life.

Contributors. Jafari Sinclair Allen, Tom Boellstorff, Erin L. Durban, Elijah Adiv Edelman, Lyndon K. Gill, K. Marshall Green, Brian A. Horton, Nikki Lane, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Shaka McGlotten, Scott L. Morgensen, Kwame Otu, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Lucinda Ramberg, Sima Shakhsari, Savannah Shange, Anne Spice, Margot Weiss, Ara Wilson
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cover of Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century

Unsettling Sexuality

Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century

Jeremy Chow

University of Delaware Press, 2025

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition on Manifold, here: https://openpub.udel.edu/projects/unsettling-sexuality.

Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century challenges the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging criticisms in Middle Eastern and Asian studies, Black studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the collected authors perform intersectional queer readings, reimagine queer historiographic methods, and spearhead new citational models that can invigorate the field. Contributors read with and against diverse European, transatlantic, and global archives to explore mutually informative frameworks of gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, ability, and class. In charting multidirectional queer horizons, this collection locates new prospective desires and intimacies in the literature, culture, and media of the period to imagine new directions and simultaneously unsettle eighteenth-century studies.

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cover of Untold Stories: Tyler Clementi's Death and Crisis Leadership in Higher Education

Untold Stories

Tyler Clementi's Death and Crisis Leadership in Higher Education

Judy Farmer Jarvis

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Untold Stories: Tyler Clementi’s Death and Crisis Leadership in Higher Education delves into the well-known but poorly understood death of gay first-year Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in 2010 and explains how social identities shaped the responses to his tragic death, the media firestorm, Rutgers University’s actions, and the legacy of his life and death. It offers insights for higher education crisis responders and anyone who wants to learn more about this well-known but poorly understood case.

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cover of Urbanist Desire: Queer and Trans Survival in the City

Urbanist Desire

Queer and Trans Survival in the City

Davy Knittle

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

How writers and artists have used city planning strategies to push back against harm

Black queer feminist thinker Audre Lorde famously declared that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This language is normally understood as a metaphor, but as author Davy Knittle argues in this provocative book, queer and trans activists have long used the tools of city planning and urban design to create written and visual art that critiques those in power and offers points of resilience to their own communities.

A close look at the ways queer and trans writers and artists resisted predatory redevelopment in New York City from 1950 to 2020, Urbanist Desire draws on the work of James Schuyler, June Jordan, David Wojnarowicz, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Zeyn Joukhadar, exploring how they intervened in major political flashpoints like the War on Poverty, the AIDS-era housing crisis, and gentrification in Brooklyn and Queens. Presenting a new cultural history of New York City, Knittle explains how urban change and the more-than-human life of cities have been foundational concerns for queer and trans cultural production since the 1950s.

Ending with analysis of the 2022 speculative novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, Urbanist Desire looks to the past to imagine a better future for New York City and for all marginalized people. Knittle demonstrates how to move past a recuperative response to harm and toward one that can change the structure of society by documenting how queer and trans activists have engaged the strategies of planning and design to address spatial, social, and economic inequality.

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