Alle afleveringen
537 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Susan Stinson, "Martha Moody" (Small Beer Press, 2020)
28 mei 2023 · 25 min
Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction, Susan Stinson's Martha Moody (Small Beer Press, 2020) is a speculative western that follows Amanda, a woman with a vibrant, sensuous imagination, as she falls in love with Martha, a luxuriously fat shop owner. Funny, tender, and undeniably sexy, this novel delights readers as much as Amanda’s homemade butter delights her lover’s lips. Lees meer
Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
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The Gentrification of Queer Desire
27 mei 2023 · 58 min
Writer Huw Lemmey (Chubz, Red Tory, Unknown Language) speaks with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about her most recent book The Freezer Door and searching for connection in a world that enforces bland norms of gender, sexuality, and friendship. Lees meer
Produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen GallerneauxSoundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux
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Srila Roy, "Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India" (Duke UP, 2022)
22 mei 2023 · 1 uur 14 min
In Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke UP, 2022), Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world. Lees meer
Shraddha Chatterjee has a PhD in Gender, Feminist & Women’s Studies from York University, Toronto, and is the author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018).
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Julia Serano, "Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back" (Seal Press, 2022)
20 mei 2023 · 59 min
Today I interview Julia Serano about her new book, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back (Seal, 2022). Serano is an activist, performer, and acclaimed author of Whipping Girl, Excluded, and other books. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, TIME, Salon, and Ms. In Sexed Up, Serano argues that sexualization is a far more pervasive problem that we might recognize. She explores such questions as: Why do we perceive men as sexual predators and women as sexual objects? Why are LGBTQ+ people stereotyped as being sexually indiscriminate and deceptive? Why are people of color still being hyper-sexualized? Serano offers not only a clear-eyed understanding of how sexualization occurs and the harms it creates, but she also offers ways of leading us out of these dynamics toward a more kind, humane, and sex-positive future. Lees meer
Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.
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Alvin J. Henry, "Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
13 mei 2023 · 1 uur 1 min
Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “Black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past. Lees meer
Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonis…
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Leyla Jagiella, "Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey" (Hurst, 2022)
12 mei 2023 · 1 uur 21 min
In the powerful book Among the Eunuchs: A Muslim Transgender Journey (Hurst Publishers, 2022), Leyla Jagiella reflects on her story as a trans Muslim living among a third-gender community known as Khwajasira in Pakistan and hijra in India. Throughout the book, we learn about this community, the ways they forge relationships with each other and with the mainstream community, the roles they play, the challenges they face, all told from an inviting, loving perspective. Jagiella’s academic background as an anthropologist is especially prominent in her writing, given her attention to the everyday in this book. Jagiella also pays close attention to religious history, to Islam more specifically, and the role of trans people in Islam. However, as Jagiella emphasizes in our conversation, this book is not about trans people – it is specifically her own journey, and as a part of a community, she cannot be separated from the community she is part of. The book in fact resists attempts to essentialize and clearly define identity. Lees meer
In our conversation, Jagiella discusses the origins of the book, its contributions to our understanding of gender and sexuality in the Muslim South Asian context, the evolution of the terms for this third-gender community, her own experiences as a trans person traveling throughout South Asia, colonialism and its impact on trans identity, homonationalism and identity as ideology, and the importance and beauty of nuance, complexity, and ambiguity, which the book embraces.
Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at haqqani_s@mercer.edu.
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Jack Parlett, "Fire Island" (Hanover Square Press, 2022)
7 mei 2023 · 1 uur 9 min
A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination--its history, its meaning and its cultural significance--told through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution. Lees meer
Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island (Hanover Square Press, 2022) is the definitive book on an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.
Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation.
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Sita Balani, "Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race" (Verso, 2023)
5 mei 2023 · 48 min
If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? In Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race (Verso, 2023), Sita Balani argues that the trickery of race comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race. Lees meer
Louisa Hann attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester in 2021, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com.
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Edgar Gomez, "High-Risk Homosexual: A Memoir" (Soft Skull, 2022)
3 mei 2023 · 43 min
Writing Latinos, from Public Books, is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. Lees meer
For this episode, we caught up with Edgar Gomez on his memoir High-Risk Homosexual (Soft Skull, 2022). The conversation with Gomez was one of our most wide-ranging, flowing, and honest yet. We talk about machismo, cockfighting, reconciling with parents, the Pulse nightclub shooting, bilingualism in contemporary literature, and the “messiness” of latinidad.
The New York Times called High-Risk Homosexual “a breath of fresh air.” The book is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography; an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award; and was named a Best Book of the Year by BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, and Publishers Weekly. Born in Florida but with roots in Nicaragua and Puerto Rico, Gomez received an MFA from the University of California, Riverside.
Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos."
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Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics
25 april 2023 · 32 min
In this podcast we discuss visibility, haunting and fascism with art historian and theorist Elizabeth Otto. Otto's book Haunted Bauhaus explores the marginalized histories of occult spirituality, gender fluidity and queer identity within the Bauhaus; offering fresh insight into one of the most canonized periods of European art history. Lees meer
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational move…
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Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston, "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix" (Routledge, 2022)
24 april 2023 · 1 uur
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This is a book that’s as big as it is rich. It brings together 50 previously published articles that track both the history and the current directions in the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies. The reader shows the conversations taking place not only within transgender studies but also between transgender studies and such fields as feminist theory, queer theory, Black studies, history, biopolitics, and the posthumanities. In our conversation, editors Stryker and Blackston gives us a sense of this range and also the crucial issues that inform the creation of the reader itself and the importance of transgender studies as a field. Blackston is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona, founding co-editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, founding co-editor of Duke University Press’s ASTERISK book series, and co-editor of Routledge’s two previous transgender studies readers. And here’s our conversation. Lees meer
Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.
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Simon(e) van Saarloos, "Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto" (Emily Carr UP, 2023)
13 april 2023 · 1 uur 17 min
Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto starts with what it is not: it is not a socio-economic argument against ageism, celebrating “the elderly” as economically viable. Author Simon(e) van Saarloos is not interested in natural arguments about age, which portray different age groups as valuable because of assumed inherent qualities. Instead, this manifesto starts with an experience of childhood sexual abuse, and moves on to dissect the ways in which constructions of “age” and “youth” function to support and reproduce white supremacist patriarchy. The book includes two reproductions of works by painter Samantha Nye. Lees meer
"Age! What is good for? Absolutely nothing! (Apart from greasing the wheels of capitalist reproduction.) In this queer manifesto, Simon(e) van Saarloos weaves a wealth of militant sex-liberationist, afrofuturist, transfeminist and decolonial imaginaries into their anti-ageist sails, charting a confident course across contemporary society's generational hang-ups as well as visiting, in some more personal moments, their own."
-Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Take ‘em Down (Publication Studio Guelph) and Playing Monogamy (Publication Studio Rotterdam). They were the curator of the 2021 exhibition on Abundance (“We must bring about the end of the world as we know it” – Denise Ferreira da Silva) in Het HEM and are also the host of *The Asterisk Conversations podcast.
Lani Hanna is a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz. Her dissertation considers the strategies and tactics of queer, transfeminist, and left political counter-institutional archives that operate as community gathering spaces to survive against displacement in gentrifying cities. She lives in Oakland and is a part of the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and Interference Archive Collective in Brooklyn.
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Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities
6 april 2023 · 1 uur 2 min
Today’s book is: Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, 2018), by Jonathan Coley. Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Christian colleges and universities. Drawing on interviews with student activists at a range of Christian institutions of higher learning, Dr. Coley shows that students, initially drawn to activism because of their own political, religious, or LGBT identities, are forming direct action groups that transform university policies, educational groups that open up campus dialogue, and solidarity groups that facilitate their members’ personal growth. He also shows how these LGBT activists apply their skills and values after graduation in subsequent political campaigns, careers, and family lives, potentially serving as change agents in their faith communities for years to come. Dr. Coley’s findings shed light on a new frontier of LGBT activism and challenge prevailing wisdom about the characteristics of activists, the purpose of activist groups, and ultimately the nature of activism itself. Gay on God’s Campus won the 2018 Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award, from the Mid-South Sociological Association. For more information about this project’s research methodology and theoretical grounding, please visit http://jonathancoley.com/book Lees meer
Our guest is: Dr. Jonathan Coley, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University and Deputy Editor of The Sociological Quarterly. His research focuses on social movements, politics, religion, education, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. His current research projects examine LGBTQ activism at Christian colleges and universities; the presence of political, religious, and social activist groups at U.S. colleges and un…
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Greta LaFleur et al., "Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern" (Cornell UP, 2021)
5 april 2023 · 50 min
Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska's edited volume Transhistorical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives--literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts--that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Lees meer
Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.
Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Net…
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Susan Burgess, "LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights" (NYU Press, 2023)
30 maart 2023 · 51 min
LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imaginations, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) is a tour de force that weaves together the various narratives about the transformation of a counter public, in this case, LBGT citizens, into rights bearing citizenship, and the transformation of mainstream political and cultural narratives, incorporating shifting conceptions that open up space for this integration. As Political Scientist Susan Burgess explains throughout the book, a basic exploration of public opinion data reflects the substantial shift that many Americans have had in their thinking about individuals who are part of the LGBT community, and about the community itself. But the public opinion data only goes so far in telling the story of this rapid transformation. Using the American political development framework of political time, Burgess sees profound political transformation, but through what she describes as queered political time, noting that substantive ideas in this context are vitally important. Thus, the focus of LGBT Inclusion in American Life is on the space where narratives and imagination are able to project new ideas that can then open up our thinking and provide opportunities to re-imagine fundamental social and political concepts. Lees meer
Political imagination gives us a chance to consider alternatives; we can see new or different worlds that provide us with different ways to think about institutions and power, about families, about gender and sexuality. This space also provides us with paths into thinking about the future. Burgess focuses on worlds that have been created in popular culture that construct different situations, or that deconstruct our ideas and we can imagine what might come out of that deconstruction. Through plays, television shows, and movies, as are the focus here, we can see power—which is at the heart of politics—differently conceived, implemented, constructed, wielded. Burgess integrates nuanced and important anal…
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E. Cram, "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West" (U California Press, 2022)
25 maart 2023 · 1 uur 25 min
Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (U California Press, 2022) deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it. Transfusing queer eco-criticism with archival and ethnographic research, Cram reconstructs the linkages—"land lines"—between infrastructure, violence, sexuality, and energy and shows how racialized sexual knowledges cultivated settler colonial cultures of both innervation and enervation. From the residential school system to elite health seekers desiring the "electric" climates of the Rocky Mountains to the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, Cram demonstrates how the environment promised to some individuals access to vital energy and to others the exhaustion of populations through state violence and racial capitalism. Grappling with these land lines, Cram insists, helps interrogate regimes of value and build otherwise unrealized connections between queer studies and the environmental and energy humanities. Lees meer
Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies.
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Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
18 maart 2023 · 1 uur
Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close. Lees meer
Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France.
James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP, 2009) expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration.
Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical T…
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Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, "Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives" (Duke UP, 2023)
17 maart 2023 · 44 min
In Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke UP, 2023), Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and non-normative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film. Lees meer
Moving from The Thousand and One Nights and the Golden Era of Egyptian cinema to contemporary novels, autobiographical writing, and prints and graphic novels that imagine queer Arab futures, Shomali uses what she calls queer Arab critique to locate queer desire amid heteronormative imperatives. Showing how systems of heteropatriarchy and Arab nationalisms foreclose queer Arab women’s futures, she draws on the transliterated term “banat”—the Arabic word for girls—to refer to women, femmes, and nonbinary people who disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.” By attending to Arab women’s narration of desire and identity, queer Arab critique substantiates queer Arab histories while challenging Orientalist and Arab national paradigms that erase queer subjects. In this way, Shomali frames queerness and Arabness as relational and transnational subject formations and contends that prioritizing transnational collectivity over politics of authenticity, respectability, and inclusion can help lead toward queer freedom.
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Book Chat: Queering the Anthropocene in Taiwan Sci-Fi
12 maart 2023 · 32 min
In this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi reviews this work which was published in the 90s and provides his reflection on how to re-read the novel in the context of the Anthropocene. We also chat about the influence of Japanese manga and anime on his Sci-fi world-creating and his view on contemporary speculative fiction. Chi further shares with us his thoughts on the next generation of Taiwanese sci-fi novelists. Lees meer
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Joey Merlo, "On Set with Theda Bara" (1080 Press, 2023)
11 maart 2023 · 49 min
Joey Merlo's On Set With Theda Bara is a one-person four-character play about the nearly-forgotten silent film "vamp" Theda Bara, but also about fan culture, contemporary queerness, and the timeless allure of a mysterious and possibly cursed castle. The play premiered at The Brick's Exponential Festival, and is now available in an expanded edition from Eureka! Press and 1080 Press, including gorgeous artwork by artist, poet, and critic Wayne Koestenbaum. Even people who don't typically read plays will find a lot to love in this book, which is written without traditional character headings or stage directions. On Set With Theda Bara is a strange, beguiling, and brilliant piece of writing. Lees meer
Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts.
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Measure for Measure Episode 7: Kinsey
8 maart 2023 · 23 min
Scientist Alfred Kinsey tried to differentiate human sexualities on a seven-point scale. In so doing, he brought us the basics of bisexuality. But the scale leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of a spectrum, Special Guest Kate Sisk leads us into a gay fog. Lees meer
GUEST
Kate Sisk (she/they/he) is a professional stand up comedian, amateur drag king, and co-host of the award-winning podcast, We’re Having Gay Sex.
This episode was produced by Andrew Middleton and Liya Rechtman.
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Charlie Samuelson, "Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
3 maart 2023 · 58 min
In Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues that the genres’ juxtaposition opens up radical new perspectives on the deviant poetics and gender and sexual politics of both. Contrary to a critical tradition that locates the queer Middle Ages at the margins of these courtly genres, Courtly and Queer emphasizes an unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and that inhabits the core of a literary tradition usually assumed to be conservative and patriarchal. Ultimately, Courtly and Queer contends that one facet of texts commonly referred to as their “courtliness”—namely, their literary sophistication—powerfully overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness. Lees meer
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Who Do You Think You Are?: Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine
2 maart 2023 · 1 uur 13 min
Garret Johnson works with Courage, the Catholic apostolate for people experience same-sex attractions. He describes his experience living the gay lifestyle and responds to my interview with Father Jim Martin, SJ, author of Building a Bridge, and several things Fr Jim said in that conversation that Garrett disagrees with. This is—please be warned—an honest, raw, and redeeming discussion about sex, gay culture, drugs, pornography, identity politics, Catholic doctrine, and the secular narrative. Lees meer
Garrett’s website, brotherwithoutorder.com.
The websites for Courage and also Encourage. Courage serves people experiencing same sex attraction and Encourage is for the people—parents, siblings, others—who love them.
Bishop Barron’s sorrowful mysteries of the rosary.
Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics.
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Terry M. Chase, "Spoke by Spoke: How a Broken Back and a Broken Back Led to a WholeHearted Life" (Push on Press, 2021)
26 februari 2023 · 28 min
In this episode of Queer Voices I talk to Dr. Terry Chase about her book Spoke by Spoke: How a Broken Back and a Broken Bike Led to a WholeHearted Life, released in November 2021 by Push On Press. Lees meer
Spoke by Spoke takes the reader on one woman’s journey to reinvent herself following a hit and run accident which left her back broken, and her bike crumpled by a speeding motor vehicle. The stories Terry shares will take you from the depths of despair and edges of darkness to bringing you up with her amazing spirit of perseverance and resilience. This book is not a how-to manual for facing the challenges of life but rather an inspirational guide for living a whole-hearted life no matter what hand someone is dealt.
Terry Chase, ND, MA, RN, CEIP-Ed, is dedicated to health, growth & learning. She has a deep and multi-faceted background of advanced education and hands-on experience in healthcare, education, and professional development. A professional coach and speaker offering keynotes, experiential workshops and break-out sessions in communication, team skill and education practices, as well as coaching programs to develop extraordinary leaders. To learn more visit www.DrTerryChase.com.
Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which has been optioned for TV/film development. He also writes about medicine and health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education. He lives in New York City. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, cook, and a bayou boy living in New York City, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Instagram: morrisardoin.
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Ashley Brown, "Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson" (Oxford UP, 2023)
24 februari 2023 · 46 min
From her start playing paddle tennis on the streets of Harlem as a young teenager to her eleven Grand Slam tennis wins to her professional golf career, Althea Gibson became the most famous black sportswoman of the mid-twentieth century. In her unprecedented athletic career, she was the first African American to win titles at the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. Lees meer
In this comprehensive biography, Ashley Brown narrates the public career and private struggles of Althea Gibson (1927-2003). Based on extensive archival work and oral histories, Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson (Oxford UP, 2023) sets Gibson's life and choices against the backdrop of the Great Migration, Jim Crow racism, the integration of American sports, the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and second wave feminism. Throughout her life Gibson continuously negotiated the expectations of her supporters and adversaries, including her patrons in the black-led American Tennis Association, the white-led United States Lawn Tennis Association, and the media, particularly the Black press and community's expectations that she selflessly serve as a representative of her race.
An incredibly talented, ultra-competitive, and not always likeable athlete, Gibson wanted to be treated as an individual first and foremost, not as a member of a specific race or gender. She was reluctant to speak openly about the indignities and prejudices she navigated as an African American woman, though she faced numerous institutional and societal barriers in achieving her goals. She frequently bucked conventional norms of femininity and put her career ahead of romantic relationships, making her personal life the subject of constant scrutiny and rumors. Despite her major wins and international recognition, including a ticker tape parade in New York City and the covers of Sports Illustrated and Time, Gibson endeavored to find commercial sponsorship and permanent economic stability. Committed to self-sufficien…
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Joseph Plaster, "Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin" (Duke UP, 2023)
20 februari 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
In Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the queer kinship networks, religious practices, performative storytelling, and migratory patterns that allowed these kids to foster social support and mutual aid. He shows how they collectively and creatively managed the social trauma they experienced, in part by building relationships with johns, bartenders, hotel managers, bouncers, and other vice district denizens. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride. Lees meer
In this episode, Dr. Plaster references an oral history that was produced called “Polk Street Stories.” You can listen to “Polk Street Stories” here.
Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability and mad studies, and religious studies.
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Lauron J. Kehrer, "Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
14 februari 2023 · 56 min
Notions of hip hop authenticity, as expressed both within hip hop communities and in the larger American culture, rely on the construction of the rapper as a Black, masculine, heterosexual, cisgender man who enacts a narrative of struggle and success. Lees meer
In Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2022), Lauron J. Kehrer turns our attention to openly queer and trans rappers and presents an alternative and more inclusive narrative about the development of hip hop that includes the contributions of queer people throughout the history of the genre. They consider the role of disco, house music, and the ballroom scene in New York City to demonstrate how these different communities and networks played and continue to play a role in hip hop. Kehrer also explores Bounce, a regional form of hip hop with deep roots in New Orleans and its queer communities that has recently entered national circulation. By centering the performances of openly queer and trans artists of color, Queer Voices in Hip Hop reclaims their work as essential to the development and persistence of hip hop in the United States as it tells the story of the queer roots of hip hop.
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Rolf Nolasco, "Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul" (Morehouse Publishing, 2022)
12 februari 2023 · 46 min
Hearts Ablaze: Parables for the Queer Soul (Morehouse Publishing, 2022), written by Dr. Rolf R. Nolasco Jr., was published by Morehouse Publishing in 2022. In this powerful book, Dr. Nolasco takes us on a journey deeper into the queerness of Jesus and his movement. Lees meer
These meditations also address the spiritual needs of queer Christians.
This book is a new look at ten selected parables of Jesus, that expands the scope of interpretation of each story to highlight God's extravagant welcome of all people. The perspective in the reflections is deeply personal and written to be used by both individuals and groups. Queer affirming churches, seminaries, and retreat centers will benefit from this resource as they continue to champion the flourishing of their queer siblings in Christ.
Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino.
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Erin in the Morning: A Interview with Erin Reed, LGBTQ+ Activist and Substacker
6 februari 2023 · 49 min
Today I interview Erin Reed. Reed is an activist, public speaker, and writer across multiple platforms, including a Substack newsletter, all of which she gathers under the title “Erin in the Morning.” Reed’s work centers on advocacy for the transgender community and the greater queer community. At the moment, she’s undertaken the momentous task of tracking the anti-trans legislation that’s being forwarded in state houses across the country and exposing its troubling, deceitful, and vicious nature. Through her newsletter, social media posts, and in-person appearances, Reed supports not only trans and queer rights, but also a vision for our communities and our country in which mutual care and kindness are our abiding values. To say it another way, Erin supports the fight against cruel ant-trans legislation currently underway and she also connects her readers with trans girl scouts so she can help these kids with their annual cookie sale. Lees meer
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Clare Forstie, "Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBTQ Community" (NYU Press, 2022)
1 februari 2023 · 1 uur 13 min
Drag shows that test the capacity of bars persist alongside wishes for stronger community among River City's LGBTQ population. In this examination of LGBTQ community in a small, Midwestern city, Clare Forstie highlights the ambivalence of LGBTQ lives in the rural Midwest. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and friendship mapping, Forstie reveals the ways that community spaces are disappearing and emerging, LGBTQ people feel safe and unrecognized, and friendships do and don't matter. In this community, non-LGBTQ allies are essential support for their LGBTQ friends and organizations, but, sometimes, their support comes at a cost. Those who find they feel most comfortable and safe also align with community norms, forming with and connecting to families and identities that are the majority in River City. Lees meer
In Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBTQ Community (NYU Press, 2022), Forstie offers the story of a community that does not fit neatly into a narrative of progress or decline. Rather, it's a little bit of both. Forstie's ambivalent community framework reveals the ways we might think about our communities and relationships more authentically, embracing the contradictions that inform the possibilities for change.
Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability studies, mad studies, and religious studies.
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Queer Space
30 januari 2023 · 16 min
In this episode of High Theory, Jack Jen Gieseking tells us about queer space. Queer geographies matter alongside queer temporalities. And it turns out that lesbian life in the 1950s cannot be generalized from the specific history of Buffalo, New York. Lees meer
In the episode they reference a number of scholarly books including J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press, 2005); Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke UP, 2010); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (Routledge, 1993); Mairead Sullivan, Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger between Feminist and Queer (Minnesota UP, 2022); Henri Lefebre, The Production of Space (La production de l'espace, Editions Anthropos, 1974, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1919). He also names a number of scholars, including the geographer Gill Valentine, the historian David Harvey, and cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality.
Jack Jen Gieseking is a Research Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center. Their book A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers was published by NYU Press in 2020, and has a companion website called An Everyday Queer New York. They are working on a new book called Dyke Bars*: Queer Spaces for the End Times that uses the trans asterisk to invite consideration of queer spaces not historically claimed as dyke bars.
Image: “Last Lesbian Bars in New York City” © 2023 Saronik Bosu
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What if You're Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics
27 januari 2023 · 52 min
Since 2016, and with the blessing of Pope Francis, Father Jim Martin has been talking with LGBT Catholics about their relationship with their church. That’s the subject of his book, Building a Bridge, and also a documentary film by the same title; we talk about what the bridge is and where it might take us. He also reflects on his vocation as a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America Magazine: the Jesuit Review and about his travels in the Holy Land. Lees meer
In this episode we refer back to earlier conversations, including episode 16 with Colleen Dulle of America Media and episode 17 with Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ of Homeboy Industries, both from May of 2022.
Fr. James Martin at America Magazine
Outreach, an LGTBQ Catholic Resource
Fr. Jim’s article on the Good Samaritan and the Road to Jericho
Fr. Jim’s 2009 article, “What Should a Gay Catholic Do?”
Fr. Jim’s books on Amazon.com.
Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 16: Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution
Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 17: Eternity Now: Talking about Mysticism with the Apostle to the Gangs of LA.
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Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
20 januari 2023 · 1 uur
Fatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Hil Malatino theorizes the centrality of bad feelings in a world of quotidian and spectacular anti-trans misrecognition, hostility, and violence. He does so not only to understand how bad feelings arise and how they can be hard to survive, but also what they can make possible when they are taken up through political practices of care. Centered on trans experience as it is represented through many cultural productions, Malatino highlights the pressure on trans folks to be made happy by transition. He takes the analysis further by arguing for the power of communal care to enable survival not despite, but through these feelings. Lees meer
Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver.
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Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021)
16 januari 2023 · 49 min
Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violence Lees meer
Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke UP, 2021), theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures.
Dr. Eric A. Stanley is an associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support.
Links referenced in the episode:
LGBT Books to Prisoners project
Ashley Diamond fundraiser
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Benjamin Hegarty, "The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia" (Cornell UP, 2022)
15 januari 2023 · 1 uur 3 min
In The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. Lees meer
The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.
Like this interview? If so, you might also be interested in:
David Reeve, To Remain Myself: The History of Onghokham
Lynette J. Chua, The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life
Anjalee Cohen, Youth Culture and Identity in Northern Thailand: Fitting in and Sticking Out
Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia.
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Sarah Imhoff, "The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist" (Duke UP, 2022)
11 januari 2023 · 1 uur 4 min
In The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke UP, 2022), Sarah Imhoff tells the story of an individual full of contradictions. Jessie Sampter (1883-1938) was best known for her Course in Zionism (1915), an American primer for understanding support of a Jewish state in Palestine. In 1919, Sampter packed a trousseau, declared herself "married to Palestine," and immigrated there. Yet Sampter's own life and body hardly matched typical Zionist ideals. Although she identified with Judaism, Sampter took up and experimented with spiritual practices from various religions. While Zionism celebrated the strong and healthy body, she spoke of herself as "crippled" from polio and plagued by sickness her whole life. While Zionism applauded reproductive women's bodies, Sampter never married or bore children; in fact, she wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships. By charting how Sampter's life did not neatly line up with her own religious and political ideals, Imhoff highlights the complicated and at times conflicting connections between the body, queerness, disability, religion, and nationalism. Lees meer
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Mairead Sullivan, "Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
1 januari 2023 · 57 min
The loss of lesbian spaces, as well as ideas of the lesbian as anachronistic, has called into question the place of lesbian identity within our current culture. In Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Mairead Sullivan probes the perception that lesbian status is in retreat, exploring the political promises—and especially the failures—of lesbian feminism and its usefulness today. Lees meer
Lesbian Death reads how lesbian is conceptualized in relation to death from the 1970s onward to argue that lesbian offers disruptive potential. Lesbian Death examines the rise of lesbian breast cancer activism in San Francisco in conversation with ACT UP, the lesbian separatist manifestos “The C.L.I.T. Papers,” the enduring specter of lesbian bed death, and the weaponization of lesbian identity against trans lives.
By situating the lesbian as a border figure between feminist and queer, Lesbian Death offers a fresh perspective on the value of lesbian for both feminist and queer projects, even if her value is her death.
Cover alt text: Background covered entirely by yellow text, quoting the reasons the author wrote this book; the main title in black follows the block of text
Mairead Sullivan is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University.
Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate and Vanier Scholar in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.
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Nicholas de Villiers, "Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
14 december 2022 · 59 min
A critical figure in queer Sinophone cinema—and the first director ever commissioned to create a film for the permanent collection of the Louvre—Tsai Ming-liang is a major force in Taiwan cinema and global moving image art. Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy: Sexual Disorientation in the Films of Tsai Ming-Liang (U Minnesota Press, 2022) offers a fascinating, systematic method for analyzing the queerness of Tsai’s films. Lees meer
Nicholas de Villiers argues that Tsai expands and revises the notion of queerness by engaging with the sexuality of characters who are migrants, tourists, diasporic, or otherwise displaced. Through their lack of fixed identities, these characters offer a clear challenge to the binary division between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the Orientalist binary division of Asia versus the West. Ultimately, de Villiers explores how Tsai’s films help us understand queerness in terms of spatial, temporal, and sexual disorientation.
Conceiving of Tsai’s cinema as an intertextual network, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy makes an important addition to scholarly work on Tsai in English. It draws on extensive interviews with the director, while also offering a complete reappraisal of Tsai’s body of work. Contributing to queer film theory and the aesthetics of displacement, Cruisy, Sleepy, Melancholy reveals striking connections between sexuality, space, and cinema.
Nicholas de Villiers is professor of English and film at the University of North Florida. He is author of Opacity and the Closet: Queer Tactics in Foucault, Barthes, and Warhol and Sexography: Sex Work in Documentary.
Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.
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Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, "Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
28 november 2022 · 48 min
In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes" and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” Professor Row’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lees meer
John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies.
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Marquis Bey, "Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender" (Duke UP, 2022)
24 november 2022 · 46 min
In Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus. Lees meer
Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of several books, most recently Black Trans Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.
Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.
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J. Logan Smilges, "Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
24 november 2022 · 39 min
In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence (U Minnesota Press, 2022) insists, however, that silence can be a generative and empowering mode of survival. Triangulating insights from queer studies, disability studies, and rhetorical studies, J. Logan Smilges explores what silence can mean for people whose bodyminds signify more powerfully than their words. Lees meer
Queer Silence begins by historicizing silence’s negative reputation, beginning with the ways homophile activists rejected medical models pathologizing homosexuality as a disability, resulting in the silencing of disability itself. This silencing was redoubled by HIV/AIDS activism’s demand for “out, loud, and proud” rhetorical activities that saw silence as capitulation.
Reading a range of cultural artifacts whose relative silence has failed to attract queer attachment, from anonymous profiles on Grindr to ex-gays to belated gender transitions to disability performance art, Dr. Smilges argues for silence’s critical role in serving the needs of queers who are never named as such. Queer Silence urges queer activists and queer studies scholars to reconcile with their own ableism by acknowledging the liberatory potential of silence, a mode of engagement that disattached queers use every day for resistance, sociality, and survival.
J. Logan Smilges is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia.
Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.
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Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, "Hatred of Sex" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
17 november 2022 · 1 uur 4 min
Hatred of Sex (U Nebraska Press, 2022) links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a range of fields and institutions, including queer studies, attachment theory, the #MeToo movement, and “traumatology,” demonstrating how hatred of sex has been optimized and exploited by neoliberalism. Advancing strong claims about sex, pleasure, power, intersectionality, therapy, and governance, Davis and Dean shed new light on enduring questions of equality at a historical moment when democracy appears ever more precarious. Lees meer
Matthew Pieknik is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.
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Howard Chiang, "Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific" (Columbia UP, 2021)
14 november 2022 · 59 min
As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Lees meer
Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia UP, 2021) highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.
Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum.
Please join Howard in conversation with Thomas Baudinette to learn more about this book's exciting theoretical interventions into the fields of trans studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Sinophone studies.
Thomas Baudinette is Lecturer in International Studies at Macquarie Universi…
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Peter Rehberg, "Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt'" (Routledge, 2022)
4 november 2022 · 1 uur 9 min
It’s easy to forget that the cultural archetypes that pass for queerness today have historical roots. Some of these roots are mere years away from today’s reality but they are nonetheless distinct and come with their own artefacts and subcultures. Lees meer
Peter Rehberg’s book Hipster Porn: Queer Masculinities and Affective Sexualities in the Fanzine 'Butt' (Routledge, 2022) looks at one such source artefact and its fandom, using as its matter the pink-papered magazine Butt which gained a cult following among European gay men in the first decade of the 2000s. The book reconstructs an important chapter of recent gay and queer history in order to make sense of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years in the contemporary gay world.
Peter Rehberg speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about pornography after porn, Butt‘s outsized influence and the ultimate failures of its politics, as well as queer theory’s urgent need to refocus on the realities of sex and sexuality.
Peter Rehberg is a writer, critic, and curator. He holds a PhD in German Literature from New York University and has taught and researched at universities and institutes including Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, University of Bonn, The University of Texas at Austin, and The University of Illinois, Chicago. He has published two novels and a collection of short stories. He also writes regularly for German media. In his academic work, he focusses on queer theory, queer visual culture, and popular culture. He is also the head of collections and archives at Schwules Museum, Berlin.
Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.
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Elizabeth F. Schwartz, "Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise" (New Press, 2016)
27 oktober 2022 · 41 min
Not long ago, same-sex couples had to jump through endless hoops to make their relationships even close to legal. Happily, those days are over. But here's the rub: many gay and lesbian couples, accustomed to living off-grid, are so thrilled to have the benefits of marriage that they jump into it without fully considering the consequences. Lees meer
In Before I Do: A Legal Guide to Marriage, Gay and Otherwise (New Press, 2016), leading gay rights attorney Elizabeth F. Schwartz spells out the range of practical considerations any couple should address before tying the knot. She explains the rights married couples have--and those they do not. With cameos from some of the most prominent LGBTQ+ professionals, Schwartz explores all of the implications of marriage from name changes and getting a license to taxes, insurance, Social Security, and much more.
Chapters on estate planning, pre- and post-nuptial agreements, and organizing finances make Before I Do a crucial handbook for anyone considering marriage--because, as Schwartz explains, just because you can get married does not mean you should.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in Miami.
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Hongwei Bao, "Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism" (Routledge, 2020)
26 oktober 2022 · 58 min
In Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the transformation of subjectivity, desire and sense of belonging in the postsocialist era” (4). After exploring the history of homosexuality’s (re-)emergence in China’s reform era by tracing public, intellectual discourse, Bao counters the misperception that Chinese gay and lesbian identities are the result of the influence of global (Western) gay culture. Instead, he identifies a variety of gender and sexual subjectivities unique to China’s postsocialist conditions and historical context. Each chapter then explores rich case studies from queer China, touching upon a wide variety of cultural production types. From poetry to papercutting art, from comrade (tongzhi)/gay literature to girls’ love fan fiction, from lesbian films to activist documentaries, and from a drag show in Shanghai to a public performance of a same-sex wedding in Beijing, Queer China provides unique analysis and insights and also acts as an archive of queer cultural production in postsocialist China. Lees meer
Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu.
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Kwame Edwin Otu, "Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana" (U California Press, 2022)
24 oktober 2022 · 55 min
Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (University of California Press, 2022) is an ethnographic study of a community of self-identified effeminate men--known in local parlance as sasso--residing in coastal Jamestown, a suburb of Accra, Ghana's capital. Drawing on the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye's notion of "amphibious personhood," Kwame Edwin Otu argues that sasso embody and articulate amphibious subjectivity in their self-making, creating an identity that moves beyond the homogenizing impulses of western categories of gender and sexuality. Such subjectivity simultaneously unsettles claims purported by the Christian heteronationalist state and LGBT+ human rights organizations that Ghana is predominantly heterosexual or homophobic. Weaving together personal interactions with sasso, participant observation, autoethnography, archival sources, essays from African and African-diasporic literature, and critical analyses of documentaries such as the BBC's The World's Worst Place to Be Gay, Amphibious Subjects is an ethnographic meditation on how Africa is configured as the "heart of homophobic darkness" in transnational LGBT+ human rights imaginaries. Lees meer
Kwame Edwin Otu is a Visiting Associate Professor of African Studies at Georgetown University and an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He wrote and starred in the award-winning short film Reluctantly Queer.
Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University of Southern California.
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Sabine Frühstück, "Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
21 oktober 2022 · 2 uur 16 min
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a new addition to a list of publications by Sabine Fruhstuck, one of the leading scholars in the world on the topic. Written for both academics and the general public alike, this book introduces and discusses debates about sex, gender, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Japan, spanning from the 1860s to the 2020s. In Fruhstuck’s own words, this book aims to “balance descriptions of individual experience; institutional mechanisms based in law, pedagogy, and statecraft; and the socioculturally inflected politics within which those mechanisms have been embedded and which they have in turn shaped over an extended period that began with the nation- and empire-building of the late nineteenth century.” Lees meer
The book is divided into seven chapters, each tracing the movements of individuals, ideas, and things between and beyond the nation, empire, and cyberspace. At the end of each chapter, readers can find a handful of recommendations for pairing the text with literary works, documentaries, and other films.
As Fruhstuck explains, the chapters share three analytical sensibilities. First, deriving from research in several nations’ archives and bodies of knowledge in Japanese, German, and English, the book is a transnational historical study in which “’Japan’ is configured as a malleable entity, as both a subject and object of global modernity, and a mediator between a global and a regional East Asian modernity.” Second, this book draws from History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Visual Studies, via a wide variety of sources ranging from print media and government documents to biographical accounts, from political pamphlets to pulp comics and contemporary art. Third, this book adopts a sensibility of “flexible intersectionality,” which aims to “invite readers to think at the varying levels of structures, dynamics, and subjectivities.”
Sabine Frühstück is Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Ja…
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Cameron Awkward-Rich, "The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment" (Duke UP, 2022)
19 oktober 2022 · 55 min
In The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke UP, 2022), Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationships among trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development. Lees meer
The Terrible We is the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Cameron Awkward-Rich is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Dispatch and Sympathetic Little Monster.
Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies.
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Ramzi Fawaz, "Queer Forms" (NYU Press, 2022)
13 oktober 2022 · 58 min
Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and women’s liberation, the gay liberation movement, feminist and queer theory, and iconic popular culture artifacts in order to understand gendered and sexual forms in context of gender and sexual fluidity. This is a brilliant book, interdisciplinary in scope and approach, taking the reader on a journey through theoretical frameworks and interpretive understandings of where we often see queer forms, and what we think about those forms. Fawaz notes that he is working to tell a story, interpreting cultural artifacts to forefront the ideas from feminist and queer theory, knitting these approaches together to guide us through a fascinating understanding of what we see when we watch films, or television, or read comics, or enjoy Broadway performances. These interpretations provide us with ways of seeing identity and shape within narrative forms and creative storytelling. But Fawaz is also pushing against an excess of thinking that all identities and forms are fluid—instead, Queer Forms (NYU Press, 2022) examines the capacity of identity and forms to, essentially, shapeshift, which is not the same as being fluid, since shapeshifting is an adaption, and thus is not without form itself. Form has little meaning until or unless they are/it is interpreted by others. Lees meer
The thrust of the work that Fawaz is doing in Queer Forms ultimately is about freedom and how we can each exist as free individuals, especially when there are often social and legal rules that constrain us as individuals with distinct identities that traverse a host of markers and qualities. Popular culture artifacts can provide the room and opportunity to imagine identities in different forms and contexts. Queer Forms provides the reader with an archive of culture forms as a kind of gift, helping us to see and understand how we might interpret or reinterpret the…