LGBTQ+ Resources

Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018; Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives--ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials--early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films--Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the "father of American gynecology," to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of "cross dressing" and canonical black literary works that express black men's access to the "female within," Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

Why does society have difficulty discussing sexualities? Where does fear of Black sexualities emerge and how is it manifested? How can varied experiences of Black females and males who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), or straight help inform dialogue and academic inquiry? From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism. Contributors seek resolution to Blacks' understanding of their lives as sexual beings through stories of empowerment, healing, self-awareness, victories, and other historic and contemporary life-course panoramas and provide practical information to foster more culturally relative research, tolerance, and acceptance.

In Bodies That Matter, renowned theorist and philosopher Judith Butler argues that theories of gender need to return to the most material dimension of sex and sexuality: the body. Butler offers a brilliant reworking of the body, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She clarifies the notion of "performativity" introduced in Gender Trouble and via bold readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud explores the meaning of a citational politics. She also draws on documentary and literature with compelling interpretations of the film Paris is Burning, Nella Larsen's Passing, and short stories by Willa Cather.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents new critical approaches to gay and lesbian literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for gay and lesbian literature for years to come.

The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future. In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions contributes to the critical field of queer decolonial studies by demonstrating how sexuality, race, gender and religion intersect transnationally. The volume maps some of the specifically local issues as well as the common ones affecting queer/trans people of colour (qtpoc). The contributions are not delimited by traditional academic style but rather draw on creative inspiration to produce knowledge and insight through various styles and formats, including poetry, essays, statements, manifestos, as well as academic mash-ups. Queering coloniality and the epistemic categories that classify people means to disobey and delink from the coloniality of knowledge and of being. At this intersection, decolonial queerness is necessary not only to resist coloniality but, above all, to re-exist and re-emerge decolonially. "The volume is more than timely. First, it contributes to the field of decolonial queer theory, second it offers a transnational approach, third it never seeks to fix categories, and finally, and more importantly, it centred on narratives of solidarity and alliance which are so important today in a world under the assault of financial capitalism, new politics of dispossession and colonization, and new politics of division and fragmentation." -- Fran oise Verges (Chair Global South(s), College d' tudes mondiales, Paris) "The brave and thoughtful pieces in this book span across 'intellectual' and 'artistic' categorisations, and together make an important contribution not only to the field of sexuality/queer studies, but also to the ongoing battle to keep such studies from racist cooptation." -- Dr Sarah Keenan, Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck, University of London. "The range and depth of these contributions make this an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike. Above all, these essays highlight the fact that we can no longer assume or theorize an LGBT identity or politics that is constituted outside of racialization, coloniality, place and time." -- Momin Rahman (Professor of Sociology, Trent University, Canada) "In a world in which colonialism and neocolonialism make their marks on sexuality as well as race and class, this rich volume shows that decolonial thinking and doing cannot be done without an attention to queer politics." -- Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique

Everyday Violence is based on ten years of scholarly rage against catcalling and aggression directed at women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) people of New York City. Simone Kolysh recasts public harassment as everyday violence and demands an immediate end to this pervasive social problem. Analyzing interviews with initiators and recipients of everyday violence through an intersectional lens, Kolysh argues that gender and sexuality, shaped by race, class, and space, are violent processes that are reproduced through these interactions in the public sphere. They examine short and long-term impacts and make inroads in urban sociology, queer and trans geographies, and feminist thought. Kolysh also draws a connection between public harassment, gentrification, and police brutality resisting criminalizing narratives in favor of restorative justice. Through this work, they hope for a future where women and LGBTQ people can live on their own terms, free from violence.  

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.

This book reflects on 'the political' in queer theory and politics by revisiting two of its key categories: hegemony and heteronormativity. It explores the specific insights offered by these categories and the ways in which they augment the analysis of power and domination from a queer perspective, whilst also examining the possibilities for political analysis and strategy-building provided by theories of hegemony and heteronormativity. Moreover, in addressing these issues the book strives to rethink the understanding of the term "queer", so as to avoid narrowing queer politics to a critique of normative heterosexuality and the rigid gender binary. By looking at the interplay between hegemony and heteronormativity, this ground-breaking volume presents new possibilities of reconceptualizing 'the political' from a queer perspective. Investigating the effects of queer politics not only on subjectivities and intimate personal relations, but also on institutions, socio-cultural processes and global politics, this book will be of interest to those working in the fields of critical theory, gender and sexuality, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and feminist political theory.

The Big Idea shortlisted for series design in the British Design and Production AwardsWhen we are born, we are each assigned a gender based on our physical anatomy. But why is it that some people experience such dissonance between their biological sex and their inner identity? Is gender something we are or something we do? Is our expression of gender inborn or does it develop as we grow? Are the traditional binary male and female gender roles relevant in an increasingly fluid and flexible world? This intelligent, stimulating volume assesses the connections between gender, psychology, culture and sexuality, and reveals how individual and social attitudes have evolved over the centuries.

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

A guide to the bi community in the UK, and an exploration of the issues facing bisexual people everywhere.

Activist-academic Meg John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel. From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged. Along the way we look at key landmarks which shift our perspective of what's 'normal'--Alfred Kinsey's view of sexuality as a spectrum, Judith Butler's view of gendered behaviour as a performance, the play Wicked, or moments in Casino Royale when we're invited to view James Bond with the kind of desiring gaze usually directed at female bodies in mainstream media."--Publisher description.
Though not a graphic novel, this highly illustrated nonfiction book explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do. Barker and Scheele show how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged. Each page focuses on a specific aspect of the subject.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives--to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes "low theory" as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one's way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children's films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as 'fat-phobia'. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged 'obesity epidemic', this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the "orientation" aspect of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism," Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being "orientated" means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear--and those that do not--as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl's Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts--by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon--with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality has been one of the most influential books of the last two decades. It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault's history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault's tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race. Drawing on Foucault's little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as "racisms of the state." In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault's insights have in the past constrained--and in the future may help shape--the ways we trace the genealogies of race. Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The collection is edited by leading scholars in the field and presents: individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contexts essays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borders writings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

This far-reaching and contemporary new Encyclopedia examines and explores the lives and experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) individuals, focusing on the contexts and forces that shape their lives. The work focuses on LGBTQ issues and identity primarily through the lenses of psychology, human development and sociology, emphasizing queer, feminist and ecological perspectives on the topic, and addresses questions such as:   ·         What are the key theories used to understand variations in sexual orientation and gender identity? ·         How do Gay-Straight Alliances (GSA) affect LGBTQ youth? ·         How do LGBTQ people experience the transition to parenthood? ·         How does sexual orientation intersect with other key social locations, such as race, to shape experience and identity? ·         What are the effects of marriage equality on sexual minority individuals and couples?   Top researchers and clinicians contribute to the 400 signed entries, from fields such as:   ·         Psychology ·         Human Development ·         Gender/Queer Studies ·         Sexuality Studies ·         Social Work ·         Sociology   The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies is an essential resource for researchers interested in an interdisciplinary perspective on LGBTQ lives and issues.

This book re-examines political, conceptual and methodological concerns of 'intersectionality', bringing these into conversation with sexuality studies. It explores sexual identifications, politics and inequalities as these (dis)connect across time and place, and are re-constituted in relation to class, disability, ethnicity, gender and age.