To celebrate Pride 2021 we have composed a recommended reading list focused around activism, politics, religion and art.
Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context »
"Easily the best study of Sendak to appear; deeply researched and utterly engaging. Moskowitz brings rich new context to Sendak's life, showing how the artist's historically sidelined queer and Jewish identity inspired his work. Even the notoriously cranky Sendak would have liked it."
—Kenneth Kidd, University of Florida
Wild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928–2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and culture. Raising the stakes of children's books, Sendak painted childhood with the dark realism and wild imagination of his own sensitive "inner child," drawing on the queer and Yiddish sensibilities that shaped his singular voice.
Interweaving literary biography and cultural history, Golan Y. Moskowitz follows Sendak from his parents' Brooklyn home to spaces of creative growth and artistic vision—from neighborhood movie palaces to Hell's Kitchen, Greenwich Village, Fire Island, and the Connecticut country home he shared with Eugene Glynn, his partner of more than fifty years. Further, he analyzes Sendak's investment in the figure of the endangered child in symbolic relation to collective touchstones that impacted the artist's perspective—the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and the AIDS crisis. Through a deep exploration of Sendak's picture books, interviews, and previously unstudied personal correspondence, Wild Visionary offers a sensitive portrait of the most beloved and enchanting picture-book artist of our time.
Queer Alliances: How Power Shapes Political Movement Formation »
"In the real world, queer alliances come together and fall apart again and again. Erin Mayo-Adam's fascinating grassroots interviews show how these often uncontrolled and uncontrollable 'rights episodes' both empower and exploit sexually marginalized, vulnerable people. A must read for anyone interested in twenty-first century rights formation and the future of the LGBTQ movement."
—Susan Burgess, Ohio University
Queer Alliances investigates coalition formation among LGBTQ, immigrant, and labor rights activists in the United States, revealing how these new alliances impact political movement formation.
In the early 2000s, the LGBTQ and immigrant rights movements operated separately from and, sometimes, in a hostile manner towards each other. Since 2008, by contrast, major alliances have formed at the national and state level across these communities. Yet, this new coalition formation came at a cost. Today, coalitions across these communities have been largely reluctant to address issues of police brutality, mass incarceration, economic inequality, and the ruthless immigrant regulatory complex. Queer Alliancesexamines the extent to which grassroots groups bridged historic divisions based on race, gender, class, and immigration status through the development of coalitions, looking specifically at coalition building around expanding LGBTQ rights in Washington State and immigrant and migrant rights in Arizona. Erin Mayo-Adam traces the evolution of political movement formation in each state, and shows that while the movements expanded, they simultaneously ossified around goals that matter to the most advantaged segments of their respective communities.
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique »
"This utterly brilliant book will be a classic. Sa'ed Atshan's comprehensive study of queer Palestinian activism provides a rich understanding of the complex intersections of selfhood, activism, and belonging. By demonstrating the limits of binarisms of East/West and self/other through detailed empirical analysis and powerful theoretical interventions, Atshan has given us a landmark work valuable to Middle East studies, queer studies, and anthropology in the broadest sense."
—Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine, author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia
From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an "empire of critique" from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.
With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.
Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from Nineteenth-Century France »
"Mesch is careful not to make her subjects too representative of modern ideas about gender roles, and delivers multifaceted portraits of complex individuals, rather than caricatures in service of buzzwords and slogans. This sensitive triple biography will appeal to scholarly readers interested in the origins of trans, queer, and feminist perspectives."
—Publishers Weekly
Before the term "transgender" existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity.
Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War and traveled with him to the Middle East; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read "Rachilde, Man of Letters." Montifaud began her career as an art critic before turning to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut for much of her life and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends.
Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming increasingly fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' lifelong efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not precisely align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their intricate, personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity and the ways in which it might be expressed.
Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction »
"In this groundbreaking, meticulously researched book, Stephen Hong Sohn teases out how specific formal strategies in novels by queer Asian North American writers are used to develop and explore alternative kinship networks, forms of social recognition, and survival plots in the face of physical death as well social death, in which a Asian North American LGBTQ existence literally cannot be imagined. In its theorizing of queer racial formalisms, Inscrutable Belongings is the genuine melding of narrative theory, queer theory, and ethnic studies that we have been waiting for."
—Sue J. Kim, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Inscrutable Belongings brings together formalist and contextual modes of critique to consider narrative strategies that emerge in queer Asian North American literature. Stephen Hong Sohn provides extended readings of fictions involving queer Asian North American storytellers, looking to texts including Russell Leong's "Camouflage," Lydia Kwa's Pulse, Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters, and Noël Alumit's Letters to Montgomery Clift. Despite many antagonistic forces, these works' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their "survival plots," and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Sohn calls "inscrutable belongings."
Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma. In these texts, Asian North American queer people are often excluded from normative family structures and must contend with multiple histories of oppression, erasure, and physical violence, involving homophobia, racism, and social death. Sohn's work makes clear that for such writers and their imagined communities, questions of survival, kinship, and narrative development are more than representational—they are directly tied to lived experience.
Queer Theory: The French Response »
"Bruno Perreau's brilliant and compelling analysis of queer theory's controversial arrival on the French scene covers the full range of repercussions of this cultural encounter and translation. Not only does he offer glimpses into the outer reaches of French public hysteria over the unwanted cultural import called "gender," but he reveals how debates on sexuality, gender, and parenthood strike at the heart of national belonging. Taking into account the various anxieties about French and European inclusion that come to over-determine the so-called gender debates, his book demonstrates that queer theory becomes something new and foreign when it seeps into French soil. The consequences are at once alarming and illuminating."
—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
In 2012 and 2013, masses of French citizens took to the streets to demonstrate against a bill on gay marriage. But demonstrators were not merely denouncing its damaging effects; they were also claiming that its origins lay in "gender theory," an ideology imported from the United States. By "gender theory" they meant queer theory in general and, more specifically, the work of noted scholar Judith Butler. Now French opponents to gay marriage, supported by the Vatican, are attacking school curricula that explore male/female equality, which they claim is further proof of gender theory's growing empire. They fear that this pro-homosexual propaganda will not only pervert young people, but destroy the French nation itself.
What are the various facets of the French response to queer theory, from the mobilization of activists and the seminars of scholars to the emergence of queer media and the decision to translate this or that kind of book? Ironically, perceiving queer theory as a threat to France means overlooking the fact that queer theory itself has been largely inspired by French thinkers. By examining mutual influences across the Atlantic, Bruno Perreau analyzes changes in the idea of national identity in France and the United States. In the process, he offers a new theory of minority politics: an ongoing critique of norms is not only what gives rise to a feeling of belonging; it is the very thing that founds citizenship.
On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility »
"I submit that it is both brilliant and as near to flawless as I can imagine a book to be. It is a book that is both theoretical and pedagogical in the most generous sense of both terms for it refuses to shy away from the thorny, complex theoretical problems of identity while remaining crystal clear in its assertions . . . It is, in my modest estimation, hard not to walk away from this book without having learned something substantial about the flawed social world we inhabit and the need to continue to address the misguided logic upon which it has been built and rebuilt. I can envision this book having an impact on the work of scholars of race and sexuality, but also on classrooms of graduate and even undergraduate students."
—John Riofrio, Journal of American Studies
On Making Sense juxtaposes texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to understand how knowledge is acquired and produced in contexts of racial and gender oppression. From James Baldwin's 1960s novel Another Country to Margaret Cho's turn-of-the-century stand-up comedy, these works all exhibit a preoccupation with intelligibility, or the labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others. In their efforts to "make sense," these writers and artists argue against merely being accepted by society on society's terms, but articulate a desire to confront epistemic injustice—an injustice that affects people in their capacity as knowers and as communities worthy of being known.
The book speaks directly to critical developments in feminist and queer studies, including the growing ambivalence to antirealist theories of identity and knowledge. In so doing, it draws on decolonial and realist theory to offer a new framework to understand queer writers and artists of color as dynamic social theorists.
God’s Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and Around the Bible »
"Too often the debate about the Bible and homosexuality is reduced to a dull episode of Crossfire. On the right, the Book of Romans condemns queers! On the left, the Book of Romans celebrates queers! In four essays Moore queers the debate for both sides, discussing the gay iconography of Jesus, the Song of Solomon, and the masculinity of the apostles as well as his own travels through the study of the good book. Deftly combining easy humor with academic theory, Moore turns up the disco music and hangs a mirror ball over the debate."
—Out Magazine
God's Beauty Parlor opens the Bible to the contested body of critical commentary on sex and sexuality known as queer theory and to masculinity studies. Through a series of dazzling rereadings staged not only in God's beauty parlor, but also in God's boudoir, locker room, and war room, the author pursues the themes of homoeroticism, masculinity, beauty, and violence through such texts as the Song of Songs, the Gospels, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of Revelation.
He ponders such matters as the curious place of the Song of Songs in the history of sexuality, or how an apparent paean to male-female love became a pretext for literary cross-dressing for legions of male Jewish and Christian commentators; Jesus' face and physique in relation to ideologies of beauty, ranging from the patristic era, when the "earthly" Jesus was regularly represented as ugly, to the contemporary global culture industry, with its trademark equation of looks with worth; the gendered and sexual substratum of Paul's doctrine of salvation embedded in his most influential epistle—not least his gendering of righteousness as masculine and sin as feminine; and the intimate imbrication of masculinity and mass death in Revelation, a book about war making men making war-making men . . . some of whom also happen to be gods.
God's Beauty Parlor is an exhilarating attempt to bring some of the most significant currents in contemporary gender studies to bear on a text that, even in the post-Christian West, remains the ultimate cultural icon, cipher, and shibboleth.
Recommended Pride Reading from Other University Presses
NYU Press Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives » by Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle
Rutgers University Press King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South » by Baker A. Rogers
Yale University Press Blog Pride 2021 Reading List »
Duke University Press There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life » byJafari S. Allen
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