- Table View
- List View
A Queer History of the Ballet
by Peter StoneleyDesigned for students, scholars and general readers with an interest in dance and queer history, A Queer History of the Ballet focuses on how, as makers and as audiences, queer men and women have helped to develop many of the texts, images, and legends of ballet. Presenting a series of historical case studies, the book explores the ways in which, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, ballet has been a means of conjuring homosexuality – of enabling some degree of expression and visibility for people who were otherwise declared illegal and obscene. Studies include: the perverse sororities of the Romantic ballet the fairy in folklore, literature, and ballet Tchaikovsky and the making of Swan Lake Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the emergence of queer modernity the formation of ballet in America the queer uses of the prima ballerina Genet’s writings for and about ballet. Also including a consideration of how ballet’s queer tradition has been memorialized by such contemporary dance-makers as Neumeier, Bausch, Bourne, and Preljocaj, this is an essential book in the study of ballet and queer history.
A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History #1)
by Michael BronskiWinner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfictionThe first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to “Publick Universal Friend,” refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized “female marriage.” And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book. Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a “who’s who” of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history. A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history—the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today. At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is. From the Hardcover edition.
A Queer History of the United States
by Michael BronskiThe first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present. In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to "Publick Universal Friend," refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York. In the mid-nineteenth century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized "female marriage." And in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter. These are just a few moments of queer history that Michael Bronski highlights in this groundbreaking book. Intellectually dynamic and endlessly provocative, A Queer History of the United States is more than a who's who of queer history: it is a book that radically challenges how we understand American history. Drawing upon primary documents, literature, and cultural histories, noted scholar and activist Michael Bronski charts the breadth of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from 1492 to the 1990s, and has written a testament to how the LGBT experience has profoundly shaped our country, culture, and history. A Queer History of the United States abounds with startling examples of unknown or often ignored aspects of American history-the ineffectiveness of sodomy laws in the colonies, the prevalence of cross-dressing women soldiers in the Civil War, the impact of new technologies on LGBT life in the nineteenth century, and how rock music and popular culture were, in large part, responsible for the devastating backlash against gay rights in the late 1970s. Most striking, Bronski documents how, over centuries, various incarnations of social purity movements have consistently attempted to regulate all sexuality, including fantasies, masturbation, and queer sex. Resisting these efforts, same-sex desire flourished and helped make America what it is today. At heart, A Queer History of the United States is simply about American history. It is a book that will matter both to LGBT people and heterosexuals. This engrossing and revelatory history will make readers appreciate just how queer America really is.
Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880–1945
by Clayton WhisnantGermany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. Queer Identities and Politics in Germany describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps.Clayton J. Whisnant recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early homosexual activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, he enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today.
Queer Imaginings: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship (Queer Screens)
by David A. GerstnerHow do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? In eighteen eloquent chapters, David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cáel Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire. Queer Imaginings argues for a queer-auteur in which critical theory is reenabled to reconceptualize the auteur in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Gerstner succinctly defines the contours of a history and the ongoing discussions that situate queer and auteur theories in film studies. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships.
Queer in Africa: LGBTQI Identities, Citizenship, and Activism (Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities)
by Surya Monro Zethu Matebeni Vasu ReddyAfrican sexualities are dynamic, multi-faceted and resilient. However, people with non-heterosexual sexualities and gender variant identities are often involved in struggles for survival, self-definition, and erotic rights. Queer in Africa forms an entry point for understanding the vulnerabilities of queer Africans as shaped by social, cultural and political processes, aiming to provide innovative insights about contentious disagreements over their lives. The volume mediates Southern and Northern scholarship, directing attention toward African-centred beliefs made accessible to a wide audience. Key concerns such as identity construction and the intersections between different social forces (such as nationalist traditionalism and sexualities) are addressed via engaging chapters; some empirically based and others providing critical cultural analysis. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, Queer in Africa provides a key resource for students, academics, and activists concerned with the international support of sex and gender diversity. It will appeal to those interested in fields such as anthropology, film studies, literary studies, political science, public health, sociology, and socio-legal studies.
Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (Queer Interventions Ser.)
by Robert GillettQueer in Europe takes stock of the intellectual and social status and treatment of queer in the New Europe of the twenty-first century, addressing the ways in which the Anglo-American term and concept 'queer' is adapted in different national contexts, where it takes on subtly different overtones, determined by local political specificities and intellectual traditions. Bringing together contributions by carefully chosen experts, this book explores key aspects of queer in a range of European national contexts, namely: Belgium, Cyprus, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, The Nordic Region, The Netherlands, Poland, Russia and Spain. Rather than prescribing a universalizing definition, the book engages with a wide spectrum of what is meant by 'queer', as each chapter negotiates the contested border between direct queer activist action based on identity categories, and more plural queer strategies that call these categories into question. The first volume in English devoted to the exploration of queer in Europe, this book makes an important intervention in contemporary queer studies.
Queer in Russia: A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other
by Laurie EssigIn 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.
Queer in the Tropics: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South (SpringerBriefs in Sociology)
by Pedro Paulo PereiraThis book aims to reflect on how to translate “queer” in the context of Latin America. Queer theory is becoming consolidated on an international scale as an effort to understand dissident bodies and their inventions. But how can we utilize such a rich body of literature and proposals without merely applying in the Global South what has been formulated in the Global North?Through meetings between dissident bodies in the Global South, the book suggests that the theoretical-poetic inventions formulated in this part of the world cannot be forgotten and proposes a discussion on how to approach queer theory from a decolonial point of view. There is still only a scant body of literature that systematizes and approaches these questions from a Latin American point of view; or, to use the term that gives this book its name, the “tropics.” The book points out the necessity of staying aware of the connections between western modernity and colonial practices. The book therefore invites us to pass through borders, to question limits, and to allow ourselves to be affected by Others, a fundamental exercise in the context of social inequality as drastic as that in which the majority of the population live in Latin America and in the Global South in general. Theories, like bodies, travel; in being translated, they transform themselves. The movements and the bending of bodies and theories are disturbing and subversive. Queer in the Tropics arises from these translations, from this bending, and from these subversions.
Queer in Translation (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies)
by B. J. Epstein Robert GillettAs the field of translation studies has developed, translators and translation scholars have become more aware of the unacknowledged ideologies inherent both in texts themselves and in the mechanisms that affect their circulation. This book both analyses the translation of queerness and applies queer thought to issues of translation. It sheds light on the manner in which heteronormative societies influence the selection, reading and translation of texts and pays attention to the means by which such heterosexism might be subverted. It considers the ways in which queerness can be repressed, ignored or made invisible in translation, and shows how translations might expose or underline the queerness – or the homophobic implications – of a given text. Balancing the theoretical with the practical, this book investigates what is culturally at stake when particular texts are translated from one culture to another, raising the question of the relationship between translation, colonialism and globalization. It also takes the insights derived from intercultural translation studies and applies them to other fields of cultural criticism. The first multi-focus, in-depth study on translating queer, translating queerly and queering translation, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory and queer studies, literature, film studies and translation studies.
Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
by Evren SavciIn 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.
Queer Inclusion in the United Methodist Church (New Approaches in Sociology)
by Amanda Udis-KesslerThe United Methodist Church has been in conflict over lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender inclusion issues since 1972. That year, in response to the gay liberation and gay rights movements, wording was added to the UMC Book of Discipline (the compilation of denominational policies and doctrines) characterizing homosexuality as "incompatible with Christian teaching." Since then, United Methodist ministers have been forbidden to perform same-sex commitment ceremonies (and United Methodist churches forbidden to host them), a rule has been passed that non-heterosexual United Methodist ministers must be celibate, and the UMC has forbidden the funding of any program or organization "supporting" homosexuality. These policies have been met with significant resistance by those fighting for GLBT inclusion. In this groundbreaking book, Udis-Kessler examines this struggle, analyzing both sides of this divisive debate among one of the most prominent religious organizations in the United States.
Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions: Public Recognition of Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States
by David RaysideNo area of public policy and law has seen more change than lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and trans-gender rights, and none so greatly needs careful comparative analysis. Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions explores the politics of sexual diversity in Canada and the United States by analyzing three contentious areas - relationship recognition, parenting, and schooling. It enters into long-standing debates over Canadian-American contrasts while paying close attention to regional differences. David Rayside's examination of change over time in the public recognition of sexual minorities is based on his long experience with the analysis of trends, as well as on a wide-ranging search of media, legal, and social science accounts of developments across Canada and the United States. Rayside points to a 'take off' pattern in Canadian policy change on relationship recognition and parenting, but not in schooling. At the same time, he explores the reasons for a 'pioneering' pattern in early gains by American LGBT activists, a surprising number of court wins by American lesbian and gay parents, and changes in American schooling that, while still modest, are more substantial than those instituted by the Canadian system. Queer Inclusions, Continental Divisions is a timely examination of controversial policy areas in North America and a reasoned judgment on the progress of lesbian and gay issues in our time.
Queer Interruptions: Temporality in Femslash Fandom (Palgrave Fan Studies)
by Evangeline AguasThis book explores the experiences of queer female and genderqueer fans through interviews and an original documentary. Inspired by fan reactions to the death of a popular lesbian character on the television series The 100 (2014–2020), the book focuses on the fans’ experiences with the “Bury Your Gays” trope and seeks to illustrate the enduring impact of these fi ctional deaths on contemporary viewers. The book draws on queer theory to frame the experiences of queer female and genderqueer fans as experiences of queer time: as deviations from heteronormative life timelines, as anachronistic backward turns, and as queer melancholia. By exploring the “backward” feelings and experiences of fans, this book illustrates how the pain and abjection of the queer past are still with us in the present, challenging simplistic narratives of progress and highlighting the continuing marginalisation of the queer community onscreen and in the wider political context.
Queer Jews
by David Shneer Caryn AvivQueer Jews describes how queer Jews are changing Jewish American culture, creating communities and making room for themselves, as openly, unapologetically queer and Jewish. Combining political analysis and personal memoir, these essays explore the various ways queer Jews are creating new forms of Jewish communities and institutions, and demanding that Jewish communities become more inclusive.
Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel
by null Orit AvishaiOffers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities.Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement.Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith.
Queer Kids: The Challenges and Promise for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth
by Robert E OwensPacked to the hilt with living narratives, scholarly research, and problem-solution scenarios, Queer Kids: The Challenges and Promise for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youth examines the unique challenges faced by today’s homosexual young adults. You’ll learn what modern-day queer kids do to cope, survive, and find understanding in a world riddled with homophobic intolerance. Queer Kids is a lens of clarity that will help the average straight adult--and maybe even the average gay adult--see things from a kid’s point of view. Its detail-oriented, well-wrought chapters will provide you with literally hundreds of stories of young people who are trying to define themselves sexually and emotionally in a society of criss-crossing judgment, stereotyping, anger, and expectation. Aimed at three target groups--counselors, parents, and youth--this book introduces you to a variety of interesting kids, offers you a look at the process of coming out, and helps you grasp the experience of queer identification. Specifically, you’ll read about: queer kids and their families and peers the medical/health care profession’s impact on queer kids the teachers and counselors of gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth how to alleviate harrassment, abuse, withdrawal, and loneliness the effects of familial denial, prejudiced counselors, and standoffish gay adultsBeing a kid is tough--but being a queer kid can be even tougher. Fortunately, Queer Kids is available for students, ministers, teachers, youth- and health-care workers, and especially the friends and families of teens who are working through the personal turbulence that too often accompanies sexual and emotional definition. Guided by its upfront approach and practical resource list of written, computer, and telephone aids, you’ll see that a solution is not as distant as you think. Read it, and relearn what it means to be a kid again.
Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Theory Q)
by Tyler BradwayThe contributors to this volume assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship.Contributors. Aqdas Aftab, Leah Claire Allen, Tyler Bradway, Juliana Demartini Brito, Judith Butler, Dilara Çalışkan, Christopher Chamberlin, Aobo Dong, Brigitte Fielder, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Nat Hurley, Joseph M. Pierce, Mark Rifkin, Poulomi Saha, Kath Weston
Queer Kinship: South African Perspectives on the Sexual politics of Family-making and Belonging (Routledge/UNISA Press Series)
by Vasu Reddy Racy Morison Ingrid LynchWhat makes kinship queer? This collection from leading and emerging thinkers in gender and sexualities interrogates the politics of belonging, shining a light on the outcasts, rebels, and pioneers. Queer Kinship brings together an array of thought-provoking perspectives on what it means to love and be loved, to ‘do family’ and to belong in the South African context. The collection includes a number of different topic areas, disciplinary approaches, and theoretical lenses on familial relations, reproduction, and citizenship. The text amplifies the voices of those who are bending, breaking, and remaking the rules of being and belonging. Photo-essays and artworks offer moving glimpses into the new life worlds being created in and among the ‘normal’ and the mundane. Taken as a whole, this text offers a critical and intersectional perspective that addresses some important gaps in the scholarship on kinship and families. Queer Kinship makes an innovative contribution to international studies in kinship, gender, and sexualities. It will be a valuable resource to scholars, students, and activists working in these areas.
Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature: New Approaches (Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference)
by Anchit Sathi Alice FerrebeThis edited collection provides a critical forum for scholars to examine the evolution of queer kinship—encompassing the wide range of relationships, both biological and nonbiological, that queer individuals choose (or are compelled) to establish—through its representation in literature over time and across cultural contexts. In particular, the ten essays in this collection utilize close readings, philosophy, and theory to address the following question: How can we conceptualize the nature of queer kinship based on its textual representations? To this end, the essays engage with a diverse array of texts, from Buddhist writing to contemporary song lyrics, French literature from the 17th and 18th centuries to contemporary drama and novels from Sweden, Israel, and the Anglosphere. This broad temporal and geographic scope yields new critical insights into the varied ontologies of queer kinship and highlights the inherent paradoxes and fundamental messiness in queer kinship formations across different times, spaces, and contexts. In doing so, the collection makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of kinship studies, queer studies, and comparative literature.
Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan (Families in Focus)
by Amy BrainerInterweaving the narratives of multiple family members, including parents and siblings of her queer and trans informants, Amy Brainer analyzes the strategies that families use to navigate their internal differences. In Queer Kinship and Family Change in Taiwan, Brainer looks across generational cohorts for clues about how larger social, cultural, and political shifts have materialized in people’s everyday lives. Her findings bring light to new parenting and family discourses and enduring inequalities that shape the experiences of queer and heterosexual kin alike. Brainer’s research takes her from political marches and support group meetings to family dinner tables in cities and small towns across Taiwan. She speaks with parents and siblings who vary in whether and to what extent they have made peace with having a queer or transgender family member, and queer and trans people who vary in what they hope for and expect from their families of origin. Across these diverse life stories, Brainer uses a feminist materialist framework to illuminate struggles for personal and sexual autonomy in the intimate context of family and home.
Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Transforming LGBTQ Lives)
by Joanna MizielińskaQueer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on a rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life course. This study is suitable for those interested in LGBT studies, sexuality studies, kinship and Eastern European studies.
Queer Korea (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
by Todd A. HenrySince the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” Koreans were ignored, minimized, and erased in narratives of their modern nation, East Asia, and the wider world. This interdisciplinary volume challenges such marginalization through critical analyses of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Considering both personal and collective forces, contributors extend individualized notions of queer neoliberalism beyond those typically set in Western queer theory. Along the way, they recount a range of illuminating topics, from shamanic rituals during the colonial era and B-grade comedy films under Cold War dictatorship to toxic masculinity in today’s South Korean military and transgender confrontations with the resident registration system. More broadly, Queer Korea offers readers new ways of understanding the limits and possibilities of human liberation under exclusionary conditions of modernity in Asia and beyond.Contributors. Pei Jean Chen, John (Song Pae) Cho, Chung-kang Kim, Timothy Gitzen, Todd A. Henry, Merose Hwang, Ruin, Layoung Shin, Shin-ae Ha, John Whittier Treat
Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World (Sexual Cultures)
by null Sarah EnsorWhat queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapseWhat does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that “to last” is itself also one way to go on. Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s, in which the spread of the AIDS epidemic threatened the total loss of gay lives and of specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its intimacy with death and loss, offers a rich archive for imagining new ways of thinking through environmental collapse. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the terminal paradigms that environmentalism fears, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (Sexual Cultures #24)
by null Juana María RodríguezAn examination into queer identity in relation to Latino/a AmericaAccording to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields.As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.