Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy
Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide
Indiana University and the city of Bloomington occupy lands of enduring historical and cultural significance, and that for some was, is, and will always be home, to a number of Indigenous groups, including the Myaamiaki (Miami), Lënape (Delaware), saawanwa (Shawnee), kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), and Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi) peoples. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral and contemporary caretakers of this place, as well as our nonhuman spirits, elders, and guides, offer gratitude for being held and nourished by the land, and recognize the inherent sovereignty and resilience of all Native communities who have survived and still thrive to this day on Turtle Island in spite of the systemic subjugation, dispossession, and genocide that constitute the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism.
We encourage all, settlers and guests alike, to look beyond acknowledgement and engage with local Indigenous communities while also cultivating thoughtful relations of reciprocity with the sacred land you live on, as well as the many vibrant beings with whom you share it.
Further Resources & Reading
- Land Reparations & Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
- Resource Guide to Reparations and Land Rematriation on Turtle Island
- Native Land Interactive Map
- First Nations Educational & Cultural Center @ IU (FNECC)
- FNECC Land Acknowledgment & Resources
If you'd like to learn more about the practice and history of Indigenous land acknowledgments and the tribes, nations, and communities with ties to this land colonially known as the state of Indiana, consult our full resource guide.
About
Welcome to the Gender Studies subject guide for Indiana University Bloomington
We're glad you're here. This guide contains information and resources pertaining to the field of gender studies. Here you'll find featured content, new titles, helpful resources and services for scholars, instructional support information, research & writing tips, and curated, subject-specific resources for performing research in gender studies. You will also find a list of campus & community resources for women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning, and more (LGBTQ+) people. For a description of what you'll find in each section of this guide, just hover over each item in the navigation menu on the left-hand side of this page; if you're using a mobile device, you'll also find a summary on each page.
The subject specialist and collection manager for this area is nicholae cline. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form.
To learn more about who we are and the services we offer, including links to key general library services, take a look at the About Us page of this guide.
About Gender Studies
The study of gender as a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis, while also considering the intersection of gender with other substantive categories of identity, including sexuality, race, religion, class, disability, and nationality. Gender studies encourages scholars to think beyond common sense accounts of gender to examine its complex construction in a range of historical epochs, cultural arenas, and global processes. The field of gender studies utilizes a wide variety of innovative approaches and methodologies, broad in reach, yet unified through a critical angle of vision.
To learn more about the IU Department of Gender Studies, visit their website.
Featured | Spotlight on Queer Aging
Without our queer elders, we would not be here today. Current LGBTQ+ seniors fought for and bore witness to dramatic changes in queer rights, coming of age when homosexuality was considered a crime in the United States, all the way to same-sex marriage being legalized in 2015. Innumerable other small and large changes took place throughout their lives, and those who were able to age have encountered new challenges and hardships with growing older. In a society that already stigmatizes and obscures aging, queer elders face compounded barriers. When seeking senior housing, 48% of all LGBTQ+ couples experience adverse treatment and 34% of all LGBTQ+ older adults fear having to re-closet themselves. Nearly 60% of LGBTQ+ older adults report feeling a lack of companionship. With society’s preoccupation with youth, queer elders are often rendered invisible. That is where this spotlight comes in.
One step towards fixing this imbalance is through education. This guide provides an introduction to queer aging through a wide array of queer seniors' experiences, from memoirs and poetry to research articles and films. Each section has been compiled to highlight underrepresented and minoritized voices of LGBTQ+ older adults. To aid in that representation, there is also a tab with a collection of archives solely dedicated to documenting and sharing the voices and stories of queer elders for years to come.
Another path to remedy this disparity is through reorienting our perception of aging. If certain milestones weren’t expected of aging, and the stigma surrounding aging didn’t exist, the world would be a much different place. By queering the concept of aging, we are able to confront all of society’s expectations of a worthwhile person. That idea is further developed in the final tab of this guide, with resources from leading minds on the topic.
Video: Senior Prom: LGBTQ+ Seniors Get the Prom of Their Dreams PBS Voices (2021).
National and International Queer Elder Resources
Video: Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities OurStories eTextbook (2018).
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A Two-Spirit Journey
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ISBN: 9780887558122Publication Date: 2016-04-22From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community, Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social and economic legacies of colonialism. As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual violence, and in her teen years became an alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby took her children and, fleeing an abusive marriage, moved to Thunder Bay. Despite the abuse, racism, and indifference she often found there, Chacaby marshalled the strength and supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety, trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor, raised her children and fostered many others, learned to live with visual impairment, and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay. Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, and humour. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people. -
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir
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ISBN: 9781250251176Publication Date: 2020-04-07Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation. As Moraga charts her mother's journey—from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's—she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. -
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
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ISBN: 1839763345Publication Date: 2023-05-16Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the HIV/AIDS crisis and a world that white supremacy has built. Miss Major Speaks is both document of her brilliant life-told with intimacy, warmth and an undeniable levity-and a roadmap for the challenges black, brown, queer and trans youth will face on the path to liberation today. Her incredible story of a life lived and a world survived becomes a conduit for larger questions about the riddle of collective liberation. Miss Major offers something that cannot be found elsewhere: an affirmation that our vision for freedom can and must be more expansive than those on offer by mainstream institutions. -
The Old Gays Guide to the Good Life
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ISBN: 9780063333604Publication Date: 2023-11-28From America's most beloved foursome--the TikTok sensation @oldgays--a book of unexpected aspirational advice and inspirational stories drawn from their decades of living, from pre-Stonewall to the rise of the LGBTQ+ movement to gay marriage and beyond. Ranging in age from sixty-seven to eighty, Mick, Jessay, Robert, and Bill are the real-life Golden Girls of the social media era, a quartet of old gays whose hard-won confidence and awesome authenticity have taken the culture by storm. They are America's queens--and, more important, they are survivors whose lives have been transformed by sweeping cultural change. In this fabulously fun and entertaining book, they share their stories--humorous, heartbreaking, shocking, and profound tales that only older gay men can tell. -
So many stars : an oral history of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit people of color
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ISBN: 9781643756875Publication Date: 2025-05-13So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations--who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers. The anecdotes in these pages are riveting, joyful, heartbreaking, full of personality and wisdom, and artfully woven together into one immersive narrative. In De Robertis’s words, So Many Stars shares “behind-the-scenes tales of what it meant—and still means—to create an authentic life, against the odds.”
Video: My Life is Poetry 2020 Reading Steven Reigns (2020).
Video: Where We Stand: Poetry by Lesbians Over 60 The DC LGBTQ Community Center (2023).
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Scattered Snows, to the North
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ISBN: 9780374612412Publication Date: 2024-08-06Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that's based on human memory. If the poet's last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition. -
Dances of Time and Tenderness
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ISBN: 9781643622347Publication Date: 2024-06-04A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch. Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith's forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: "what we do with our bodies changes worlds."
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My Real Children
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ISBN: 9780765332653Publication Date: 2014-05-20It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know-what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War-those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives...and of how every life means the entire world. -
Cantoras
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ISBN: 9780525521693Publication Date: 2019-09-03A revolutionary new novel about five wildly different women who, in the midst of the Uruguayan dictatorship, find one another as lovers, friends, and ultimately, family. In 1977 Uruguay, a military government crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In this environment, where the everyday rights of people are under attack, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression to be punished. And yet Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz, and Malena--five cantoras, women who "sing"--somehow, miraculously, find one another. A genre-defining novel and De Robertis's masterpiece, Cantoras is a breathtaking portrait of queer love, community, forgotten history, and the strength of the human spirit. At once timeless and groundbreaking, Cantoras is a tale about the fire in all our souls and those who make it burn. -
Fishwives
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ISBN: 9781612941899Publication Date: 2021-02-09Eighty-nine-year-old Regina and ninety-year-old Jackie met in 1955, an era when women were rounded up and jailed simply for dancing together or dressing like a man. On a cold winter day they manage to get themselves out of the house with the help of TJ and Ramon, two young men from their working-class neighborhood in Western Massachusetts. They tie their long-dead Christmas tree to the top of their car and, using a screwdriver in place of a broken gearshift, slowly make the drive to the dump. This is also the day when everything changes. During the course of their adventure, memories are triggered, leading the reader across a lifetime through the eyes of two old women behaving badly. -
Light from Uncommon Stars
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ISBN: 9781250789068Publication Date: 2021-09-28Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found. -
The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle
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ISBN: 9781496737755Publication Date: 2022-05-31Three months before his sixty-fifth birthday, Albert receives a letter from the Royal Mail thanking him for decades of service and stating that he is being forced into retirement. At once, Albert’s simple life unravels. Without the work that fills his days, what will he do? He has no friends, family, or hobbies—just a past he never speaks of, and a lost love that fills him with regret. And so, rather than continue his lonely existence, Albert forms a brave plan to start truly living, to be honest about who he is . . . and to find George, the man with whom he spent one perfect spring and summer long ago.
Graphic Novels
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Bingo Love
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ISBN: 9781534307506Publication Date: 2018-02-20When Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at first sight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both married young men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Mari reunite again at a church bingo hall. Realizing their love for each other is still alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength and courage. Bingo Love is a touching story of love, family, and resiliency that spans over 60 years. -
Snapdragon
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ISBN: 9781250171115Publication Date: 2020-02-04Snap's town had a witch. At least, that's how the rumor goes. But in reality, Jacks is just a crocks-wearing, internet-savvy old lady who sells roadkill skeletons online--after doing a little ritual to put their spirits to rest. It's creepy, sure, but Snap thinks it's kind of cool, too. They make a deal: Jacks will teach Snap how to take care of the baby opossums that Snap rescued, and Snap will help Jacks with her work. But as Snap starts to get to know Jacks, she realizes that Jacks may in fact have real magic--and a connection with Snap's family's past. -
Shadow Life
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ISBN: 9781626723566Publication Date: 2021-03-30When Kumiko's well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it's not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret even while communicating online with her eldest daughter. Kumiko revels in the small, daily pleasures: decorating as she pleases, eating what she wants, and swimming in the community pool. But something has followed her from her former residence--Death's shadow. Kumiko's sweet life is shattered when Death's shadow swoops in to collect her. With her quick mind and sense of humor, Kumiko, with the help of friends new and old, is prepared for the fight of her life. But how long can an old woman thwart fate?
Books
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Middle-Aged Gay Men, Ageing and Ageism
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ISBN: 9781137435231Publication Date: 2015-09-29Is midlife for gay men the start of a slide towards the rejection, exclusion and misery associated with the spectre of the lonely old queen? Whilst exclusion is possible as gay men age, Middle Aged Gay Men, Ageing and Ageism offers a more nuanced view of gay ageing, using sociological tools to advance understanding beyond stereotypes. -
Queer Aging: the gayby boomers and a new frontier for gerontology
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ISBN: 9780190276348Publication Date: 2016-08-15As the first generation of gay men enters its autumn years, these men's responses to the physical and emotional tolls of aging promise to be as revolutionary as their advances in AIDS and civil rights activism. Older gay men's approaches to friendship, caregiving, romantic and sexual relationships, illness, and bereavement is upending conventional wisdom regarding the aging process, LGBTQ communities, and the entire field of gerontology. Queer Aging comprises scholar Jesus Ramirez-Valles's probing conversations with 11 racially and economically diverse representatives of this pioneering generation of gay men - the gayby boomers. Spanning sociology, history, cultural studies, and social work, Queer Aging will be a vital resource for students as well as health professionals who serve the gay community and communities of color. -
Older Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans People
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ISBN: 9781138644939Publication Date: 2018-09-19What does it mean to grow older as a lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans (LGBT) person? What gaps in knowledge about LGBT ageing remain? This timely and innovative book reports on a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council which aimed to address gaps in knowledge about older LGBT people and their experiences of ageing. Informed by a range of theoretical perspectives, empirical research studies, critical observations as well as lived experiences, this book explores areas of LGBT ageing that have been under-studied. These include: bisexual ageing; trans ageing and older trans people's mental health; ethnicity, culture and religion in the lives of older LGBT people and gaps in knowledge about older LGBT people from minority ethnic communities; intergenerational networks; residential and end-of-life care; and the effects of austerity on services. -
Growing Older As a Trans and/or Non-Binary Person
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ISBN: 9781787753631Publication Date: 2021-02-18Drawing on the experiences of older trans people and those transitioning later in life, this is a definitive guide to ageing as a trans and/or non-binary person. It covers the key health concerns and social issues affecting older trans people, including care homes, pensions, inheritance and funeral planning, as well as hormone use and physical changes, isolation and dementia. Kermode also provides guidance for professionals looking to better meet the needs of these individuals and highlights the important factors that need to be considered at an institutional level to provide the best care for people across the gender spectrum.
Articles
- Chen, J., McLaren, H., Jones, M., & Shams, L. (2020). The aging experiences of LGBTQ ethnic minority older adults: A systematic review. The Gerontologist, 62(3), e162–e177. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnaa134
- Diamant-Wilson, R., Ray-Novak, M., Gillani, B., Prince, D. M., Mintz, L. J., & Moore, S. E. (2024). “I felt like a freak when I would go to the doctor”: Investigating healthcare experiences across the lifespan among older LGBT and transgender/gender diverse adults.. Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.4081/qrmh.2024.11879
- Furlotte, C., Gladstone, J. W., Cosby, R. F., & Fitzgerald, K.-A. (2016). “Could we hold hands?” Older lesbian and gay couples’ perceptions of long-term care homes and home care. Canadian Journal on Aging, 35(4), 432–446. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980816000489
- King, A. (2016). Queer categories: Queer(y)ing the identification ‘older lesbian, gay and/or bisexual (LGB) adults’ and its implications for organizational research, policy and practice. Gender, Work & Organization, 23(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12065
- Kum, S. (2017). Gay, gray, black, and blue: An examination of some of the challenges faced by older LGBTQ people of color. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 21(3), 228–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2017.1320742
- Oswald, A. G. (2019). A poetic gaze into gay aging. The Qualitative Report, 24(7), 1610–1617. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3490
- Ribeiro-Gonçalves, J. A., Pocinho, M., Costa, P. A., & Leal, I. (2025). The experiences of intimacy, commitment and passion throughout life: A qualitative study of older gay and bisexual men Sexuality & Culture, 29(5), 2069–2095. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-025-10358-9
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Wilson, K., Kortes-Miller, K., & Stinchcombe, A. (2018). Staying out of the closet: LGBT older adults’ hopes and fears in considering end-of-life. Canadian Journal on Aging, 37(1), 22–31. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0714980817000514
Feature Films
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Cloudburst
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Publication Date: 2011Stella and Dot have been together for 31 years and have faithfully accompanied one another through life's ups and downs. Now in their seventies, Stella is hard of hearing and Dot is legally blind. Dotty's prudish granddaughter, Molly, decides the best place for Dot is a nursing home that will provide all the necessities. This forces Stella and Dot to make a bold decision: they will leave their hometown in Maine and make their way to Canada, where same-sex marriage is legal. -
Love is Strange by
Publication Date: 2015After Ben and George get married, George is fired from his teaching post, forcing them to stay with friends separately while they sell their place and look for cheaper housing - a situation that weighs heavily on all involved. -
Grandma by
Publication Date: 2015A misanthropic poet, estranged from her daughter and recovering from a breakup, agrees to take her granddaughter across Los Angeles and help her find the money she needs to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. -
Twilight's Kiss by
Publication Date: 2020Two closeted gay men in their twilight years contemplate a possible future together after unexpectedly falling in love.
Documentaries
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Ten More Good Years
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Publication Date: 2007Ten More Good Years follows four LGBT elders and explores the reasons why so many in this community age alone, without financial stability and often return to the closet. We meet men and women who work in the field of aging that help to explain why it is that so many of our Heros have been left behind. Yet there is hope; one thing the AIDS crisis taught the world is that LGBT people take care of their own. While the government continues to ignore the unique challenges and concerns these elders are facing, the gay community is finding ways to care for themselves. Ten More Good Years sheds light on the injustices LGBT elders are facing and offers hope for the future. -
Being Lucy
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Publication Date: 2011At 85 years old, Lucy tells us with passion and eloquence how as a transgender person she managed to navigate the most transcendental moments of the 20th century, such as fascism, post-war Italy, and the sexual liberation movement. -
Gen Silent by
Publication Date: 2011The documentary follows the lives of six LGBT seniors living in the Boston area who must choose if they will hide their sexuality in order to survive in the long-term health care system. -
Maria Luiza
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Publication Date: 2019Maria Luiza da Silva is the first transgender in the history of the Brazilian Armed Forces. After 22 years of work in the military, she retired due to disability. The film explores the complex barriers she faced and her path of affirmation as a trans, military and Catholic woman.
TV Shows
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Vicious
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Publication Date: 2013Freddie Thornhill and Stuart Bixby are an old gay couple who have been together for nearly fifty years. Their lives now revolve around entertaining their frequent guests and hurling insults at each other at every opportunity. Available to stream on Tubi. -
Grace and Frankie by
Publication Date: 2015For as long as they can recall, Grace and Frankie have been rivals. Their one-upmanship comes crashing to a halt, however, when they learn that their husbands have fallen in love with each other and want to get married. As everything around the ladies is coming apart, the only thing they can really rely on is each other. Available to stream on Netflix. -
The Cool Kids
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Publication Date: 2018"The Cool Kids" is a comedy about a rowdy, rag-tag group of friends living in a retirement community who are willing to break every rule to have fun, because, at their age, what do they really have to lose? -
Mr Loverman by
Publication Date: 2024Based on the book by Booker Prize-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo. A moving and funny drama about a closeted family man who wants to end his marriage and live with his best friend, with whom he has been having an affair for 50 years. A groundbreaking story of love and being true to yourself, exploring the consequences of a secret on three generations of one family. Available to stream on Britbox. -
Stories from My Gay Grandparents by
After a near-death experience, Grandma and Grandpa reveal their long-hidden truth: they're both gay. Finally, they embrace their true selves after decades of concealing it, leaving their small-town life behind. Available to stream on YouTube. -
Mid-Century Modern by
Publication Date: 2025The series follows three best friends – gay gentlemen of a certain age – who, after an unexpected death, decide to spend their golden years living together in Palm Springs where the wealthiest one lives with his mother. As a chosen family, they prove that no matter how hard things get, there’s always someone around to remind you it would be better if you got your neck done. Available to stream on Hulu.
Other Online Videos
Video: Not Another Second: LGBT+ seniors share their stories Watermark Retirement Communities (2021).
- In their own words
- LGBT Seniors Tell Their Stories - This short film captures the perspective of eleven LGBT seniors in Los Angeles who came of age during a time in which imprisonment, daily discrimination, physical violence and abuse were commonplace.
- Then and Now - Older Lesbians Share Their Stories - Dorothy, Barb and Vera share their experiences of being lesbians then and now.
- Queer Elders Sharing - Gay and Grey Montreal’s 6 part podcast series called “Queer Elders Sharing”, funded by le Bureau de lutte contre l’homophobie et la transphobie, hosts 2SLGBTQIA+ guests sharing how they overcame instances of homophobia and transphobia to become who they are today.
- A Queer Elder Couple Finds New Roots - After years in the city, John and Lee embark on a new adventure in suburban Los Angeles. Guided through Claremont by queer filmmaker Brooke Sebold, they share candid stories about coming out, finding love, and creating intentional community in this next chapter.
- Queer senior housing
- Where do LGBTQIA+ people go in their later lives? - Trans activist Julie Peters is on a mission to find out what options exist for LGBTQIA+ people in their twilight years. She visits ‘Regnbågen/Rainbow’ is the first residency for senior LGBT people in Stockholm, in Sweden, and in Europe.
- A Brief But Spectacular take on caring for LGBTQ seniors - SAGE, a national advocacy leader for LGBTQ+ elders, created a system of training programs for care providers. H.O.M.E. housing director Nikki Moustafa and SAGEcare trainer Britta Larson highlight how the training has improved their abilities to support residents.
- Retirement village offers safe haven for LGBTQ seniors - A CBS Evening News story on Village Hearth in Durham, North Carolina, one of the nation's first co-housing developments created specifically for an aging, queer population.
Archives have historically been molded by and modeled after those in power looking to document their reign. As a result, queer elder voices are systematically underrepresented. Of the LGBTQ+ records that do exist, the perspectives documented skew towards younger voices. Although the subjects of these records might now be elders, their voices haven’t aged with them. The only way to have documentation of queer elders is to seek out their stories, and the archives below are doing just that.
Video: Old Lesbians: reclaiming old age and queerness through storytelling The Guardian (2024)
For an article exploring these topics:
Gelfand, R. (2021). Between archives: Yerushe, intergenerational collaboration, and aging in queer family Radical History Review, 2021(139), 200–210. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-8822687
Archives
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The Old Lesbian Oral Herstory ProjectThe Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project is designed to capture the Herstories of old lesbians in order to: preserve their personal and cultural history, educate lesbians of all ages about the lives that women led in the years before coming out was a safe and viable option, remind us all of the relative freedom we now enjoy because of the women who were strong enough to live their lives and love whom they wanted in a hostile society, to provide an archival resource for scholars, to help younger generations understand the variety of experiences of old lesbians in areas of work, love, relationships, coming out, activism, and more.
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The OUTWARDS ArchiveOUTWORDS records, preserves, and shares the stories of LGBTQ+ elders across the U.S. to build community and catalyze social change. Their stories are browsable by a variety of categories such as LGBTQ+ identities, race/ethnicities, and history, and the website also offers a variety of videos and a podcast. The interviewees all have biographies, photos, and other information along with transcribed interviews and videos providing detailed records of these elders' existences.
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Baldwin-Emerson Elders ProjectThe Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project captures and celebrates untold and underrepresented stories of activists, storytellers, and community builders who have witnessed and shaped great change in American public life. Spanning over 230 oral history interviews and 1,000 personal mementos, the project examines topics from the emergence of social justice movements, to gender and diversity politics, to housing inequality and displacement, stories of protest, rebuilding, love, and liberation.
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Lesbian Elders Oral Herstory ProjectThe Lesbian Elders Oral Herstory Project seeks to continue the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ commitment to collecting and sharing Lesbian stories. These oral histories of Lesbian Elders offer experiential insight into the history of Lesbian culture and activism, complementing LHA’s already rich collections. For a unifying theme we have asked our participants to share their experiences with LHA as part of their life history. For the purposes of this project, Elders includes those ages 60 and up. The oral histories that have already been collected will be available either online here or on-site only at the Archives.
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Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors ArchiveThe Nova Scotia LGBT Seniors Archive is a multi-year project to preserve and provide access to records of the activities of senior members of the LGBT community across Nova Scotia. Due to the longstanding, state-sanctioned suppression of LGBT voices in Canada through initiatives such as the LGBT Purge, these records are of particular importance as they provide evidence of LGBT lives, stories, and activism that have often been ignored. The Archive's mandate is to increase the visibility and community involvement of LGBT seniors in Nova Scotia by working with them to preserve the cultural memory of their activities.
In recent years, there has been a trend towards the idea of “successful aging”, with many profiting off the “proper” or “best” way to age. But when those goalposts are inherently tied with ableist, white, straight, cis ideals, it is hard for minoritized elders to live up to them. Applying queer theory to aging, or queering aging, provides another outlook. As Hostetler argues, “at its best, a queer vision is not beholden to specific narratives of the past, nor is it synonymous with the nihilism and hedonism of an eternal present; rather, it gestures toward an inclusive, equitable, and always provisional imagined future informed by the multiplicity of present lived realities” (Generativity and Time in Gay Men's Life Stories). See below for other resources on queering aging.
- Hess, L. M. (2021). Queering ageism University of Toronto Quarterly, 90(2), 207–224. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.90.2.10
- Hostetler, A. J. (2009). Generativity and Time in Gay Men’s Life Stories In B. J. Cohler & P. J. Hammack (Eds.), The story of sexual identity : Narrative perspectives on the gay and lesbian life course (pp. 397–424). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195326789.003.0017
- Sandberg, L. (2008). The Old, the Ugly and the Queer: Thinking old age in relation to queer theory Graduate Journal of Social Science, 5(2), 117–139.
- Sandberg, L. J., & Marshall, B. L. (2017). Queering Aging Futures Societies, 7(3), 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc7030021
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Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation
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ISBN: 9780415898157Publication Date: 2011-07-01Through the analysis of over seventy films and thirty television series, ranging from Shortbus, Sweet Home Alabama, and Poseidon to Noah's Arc, Brothers & Sisters, and Dawson's Creek, Goltz examines reoccurring narrative structures in popular media that perpetuate the extreme value placed upon "young" gay male bodies, while devaluing health, aging, and longevity. Alienated from the future -- outside of limited and exclusionary systems of marriage and procreation -- the gay male is narrated within a circular tragedy that draws upon cultural mythologies of "older" gay male predation, the absence of gay intergenerational mentorship, and the gay male as sacrificial victim. Using a Burkean framework, Goltz makes a theoretical, rhetorical, and cultural investigation of how the increased visibility of "positive" gay representation in dominant media shapes contemporary meanings of gay aging, heteronormative future, homonormative future, and queer potential.
Featured | Spotlight on Disability Studies
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Throughout history, communities of disabled, neurodiverse, crip, and sick people have been overlooked and oversimplified in academic conversations. Disability activism and political movements carved out a space for addressing ableism in research and academia; as a result, disability studies has emerged. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores disabled identities in the humanities and social sciences. For this spotlight on disability studies, we include neurodiverse, crip, and sick identities in our definition of disability.
To read more about disability language and the use of "crip," enjoy this article by Dean Strauss: "Queer Crips: Reclaiming Language," and Brittany Wong's Huffington Post article "It's Perfectly OK to call a Disabled Person 'Disabled,' And Here's Why."
We also recommend the following resources that helped with this feature:
- Disability Studies: Foundations & Key Concepts By JSTOR Daily
- Disability Studies By The University of Chicago Press
Resources for Further Exploration
A selection of articles, online compilations, and other resources relevant to disability studies
- "10 Principles of Disability Justice" (Sins Invalid)
- "Critical Disability Theory" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- "Disability: Definitions and Models" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- "Disability Pride: A Q&A with Dr. Susan Ghiaciuc, Disability Studies Co-Coordinator" (James Madison University)
- "Disability: Part of the Equity Equation" (Office of Disability Employment Office)
- "College Students with Disabilities Deserve Accessible Campuses" (The Washington Post)
- "Disability Studies Resource List" (American Council of Learned Societies)
- "Academia's Ableist Culture Laid Bare" (Springer Nature)
Next Steps
The following features also cover topics of disability studies:
- Disability and Art (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Disability Awareness & Pride Months (Media Studies)
- National Disability Awareness Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
- Recommended Disabled Reads from the Children's Collection (Education Library)
- Disability Awareness Resources (Indiana Institute on Disability and Community Library)
Image Description: A group of activists, including Judy Heumann (center, with yellow stockings) protest for the enforcement of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, in April of 1977. Later that month, the protesters would occupy a federal building in San Francisco in protest in a sit-in that lasted more than 25 days. Photo by Wally McNamee / CORBIS / via Getty Images.
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Black Disability Politics
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ISBN: 9781478025009Publication Date: 2022-10-31In Black Disability Politics Sami Schalk explores how issues of disability have been and continue to be central to Black activism from the 1970s to the present. Schalk shows how Black people have long engaged with disability as a political issue deeply tied to race and racism. She points out that this work has not been recognized as part of the legacy of disability justice and liberation because Black disability politics differ in language and approach from the mainstream white-dominant disability rights movement. Drawing on the archives of the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women's Health Project alongside interviews with contemporary Black disabled cultural workers, Schalk identifies common qualities of Black disability politics, including the need to ground public health initiatives in the experience and expertise of marginalized disabled people so that they can work in antiracist, feminist, and anti-ableist ways. Prioritizing an understanding of disability within the context of white supremacy, Schalk demonstrates that the work of Black disability politics not only exists but is essential to the future of Black liberation movements. -
Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance
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ISBN: 9781479874156Publication Date: 2018-01-16Broadly attentive to the political and economic shifts of the last several decades, Robert McRuer asks how disability activists, artists and social movements generate change and resist the dominant forms of globalization in an age of austerity, or “crip times.” Throughout Crip Times, McRuer considers how transnational queer disability theory and culture—activism, blogs, art, photography, literature, and performance—provide important and generative sites for both contesting austerity politics and imagining alternatives. The book engages various cultural flashpoints, including the spectacle surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games; the murder trial of South African Paralympian Oscar Pistorius; the photography of Brazilian artist Livia Radwanski which documents the gentrification of Colonia Roma in Mexico City; the defiance of Chilean students demanding a free and accessible education for all; the sculpture and performance of UK artist Liz Crow; and the problematic rhetoric of “aspiration” dependent upon both able-bodied and disabled figurations that emerged in Thatcher’s England. Crip Times asserts that disabled people themselves are demanding that disability be central to our understanding of political economy and uneven development and suggests that, in some locations, their demand for disability justice is starting to register. Ultimately, McRuer argues that a politics of austerity will always generate the compulsion to fortify borders and to separate a narrowly defined “us” in need of protection from “them.” -
Critical Readings in Interdisciplinary Disability Studies
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ISBN: 9783030353070Publication Date: 2020-03-14This edited volume includes chapters on disability studies organized around three themes: Theory, Philosophy and Critique. Informed by a range of scholars who may or may not fashion their work beneath the banner of disability studies in explicit terms, it draws connections across a range of identities, knowledges, histories, and struggles that may, on the face of the text seem unrelated. The chapters are cross-categorical and interdisciplinary for purposes of complicating disability studies across international contexts and multiple locations that consider practice-oriented and intersectional approaches for analysis and advocacy. This integrative approach heralds more powerful ways to imagine disability and the conversation on disability. -
Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence
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ISBN: 9781517914097Publication Date: 2022-10-25In queer culture, silence has been equated with voicelessness, complicity, and even death. Queer Silence 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. 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, 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. -
Introducing Disability Studies
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ISBN: 9781588268662Publication Date: 2013-01-04Ronald Berger provides students with a comprehensive, accessible introduction to the key themes and controversies in disability studies. This innovative textbook: provides historical context, from ancient times to the present; traces disability's impact throughout the life course; gives prominence to the voices of people with disabilities; explores popular culture's role in distorting ideas about disability; addresses emerging ethical issues, such as the implications of genetic selection. Illustrating the profound consequences of differing conceptions of physical, sensory, and cognitive impairments, Berger provides a solid foundation for making sense of disability as a social phenomenon. -
May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future
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ISBN: 9780063020153Publication Date: 2022-08-09Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to "fix" them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts? May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator's journey to understand and communicate with his students -- and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student's breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human. Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers -- Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace -- and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called "deficit" can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity. -
Ableism in Academia: Theorising Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education
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ISBN: 9781787354982Publication Date: 2020-10-13Rather than embracing difference, academic ecosystems seek to normalize and homogenize ways of working and of being a researcher. As a consequence, ableism is an endemic experience in academia, though to date no attempt has been made to theorize those experiences. Ableism in Academia provides an interdisciplinary outlook on ableism that is currently missing. Through reporting of research data and exploring personal experiences, the contributors explore the concept of what it means to be and to work outside the so-called norm. The volume brings together a range of perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism, Derridean and Foucauldian theory, crip theory, and disability theory, and draws on a number of related disciplines. Contributors use various schools of theory to raise awareness and increase understanding of the marginalized. These theories are placed in the context of neoliberal academia, and used to interrogate aspects of identity and how disability is performed, and to argue that ableism is not just a disability issue. This timely collection will be of interest to researchers in disability studies, higher education studies, and sociology, as well as to those working across the social sciences. -
Blackness and Disability: critical examinations and cultural interventions
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ISBN: 9781611860108Publication Date: 2012-02-01Disability Studies diverge from the medical model of disability (which argues that disabled subjects can and should be "fixed") to view disability as socially constructed, much in the same way other identities are. The work of reading Black and disabled bodies is not only recovery work, but work that requires a willingness to deconstruct the systems that would keep those bodies in separate spheres. This pivotal volume uncovers the misrepresentations of Black disabled bodies and demonstrates how those bodies transform systems and culture. Drawing on key themes in Disability Studies and African American Studies, these collected essays complement one another in interesting and dynamic ways, to forge connections across genres and chronotopes, an invitation to keep Blackness and disability in conversation. With an analysis of disability as a result of war, studies of cognitive impairment and slavery in fiction, representations of slavery and violence in photography, deconstructions of illness (cancer and AIDS) narratives, comparative analyses of Black and Latina/o and Black and African subjects, analysis of treatments of disability in hip-hop, and commentary on disability, Blackness, and war, this volume shows that the historical lines of demarcation in this field are permeable and should be challenged. -
Feminist, Queer, Crip
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ISBN: 9780253009340Publication Date: 2013-05-16In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world. -
Feminist Disability Studies
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ISBN: 9780253223401Publication Date: 2011-10-24Disability, like questions of race, gender, and class, is one of the most provocative topics among theorists and philosophers today. This volume, situated at the intersection of feminist theory and disability studies, addresses questions about the nature of embodiment, the meaning of disability, the impact of public policy on those who have been labeled disabled, and how we define the norms of mental and physical ability. The essays here bridge the gap between theory and activism by illuminating structures of power and showing how historical and cultural perceptions of the human body have been informed by and contributed to the oppression of women and disabled people. -
The Rejected Body: feminist philosophical reflections on disability
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ISBN: 0415910463Publication Date: 1996-07-02The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. -
Extraordinary Bodies: figuring physical disability in American culture and literature
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ISBN: 9780231183178Publication Date: 2017-03-07Extraordinary Bodies is a cornerstone text of disability studies, establishing the field upon its publication in 1997. Framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, the book added depth to oppressive narratives and revealed novel, liberatory ones. Through her incisive readings of such texts as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson exposed the social forces driving representations of disability. She encouraged new ways of looking at texts and their depiction of the body and stretched the limits of what counted as a text, considering freak shows and other pop culture artifacts as reflections of community rites and fears. Garland-Thomson also elevated the status of African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Extraordinary Bodies laid the groundwork for an appreciation of disability culture and an inclusive new approach to the study of social marginalization. -
Beginning with Disability: A Primer
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ISBN: 9781138211377Publication Date: 2017-09-28While there are many introductions to disability and disability studies, most presume an advanced academic knowledge of a range of subjects. Beginning with Disability is the first introductory primer for disability studies aimed at first year students in two- and four-year colleges. This volume of essays across disciplines--including education, sociology, communications, psychology, social sciences, and humanities--features accessible, readable, and relatively short chapters that do not require specialized knowledge. Lennard Davis, along with a team of consulting editors, has compiled a number of blogs, vlogs, and other videos to make the materials more relatable and vivid to students. -
The Disability Studies Reader
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ISBN: 9781138930223Publication Date: 2016-11-01The fifth edition of The Disability Studies Reader addresses the post-identity theoretical landscape by emphasizing questions of interdependency and independence, the human-animal relationship, and issues around the construction or materiality of gender, the body, and sexuality. Selections explore the underlying biases of medical and scientific experiments and explode the binary of the sound and the diseased mind. The collection addresses physical disabilities, but as always investigates issues around pain, mental disability, and invisible disabilities as well. -
The Oxford Handbook of Disability History
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ISBN: 9780190234959Publication Date: 2018-07-18Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world - and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place. -
A Disability History of the United States
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ISBN: 9780807022047Publication Date: 2013-10-01Disability is not only the story of someone we love or the story of whom we may become; rather it is undoubtedly the story of our nation. Covering the entirety of US history from pre-1492 to the present, A Disability History of the United States is the first book to place the experiences of disabled people at the center of the American narrative. In many ways, it's a familiar telling. In other ways, it is a radical repositioning of US history. By doing so, the book casts new light on familiar stories, such as slavery and immigration, while breaking ground about the ties between nativism and oralism in the late nineteenth century and the role of ableism in the development of democracy. A Disability History of the United States pulls from primary-source documents and social histories to retell US history through the eyes, words, and impressions of the people who lived it. As historian and disability scholar Nielsen argues, to understand disability history isn't to narrowly focus on a series of individual triumphs but rather to examine mass movements and pivotal daily events through the lens of varied experiences. Throughout the book, Nielsen deftly illustrates how concepts of disability have deeply shaped the American experience--from deciding who was allowed to immigrate to establishing labor laws and justifying slavery and gender discrimination. Included are absorbing--at times horrific--narratives of blinded slaves being thrown overboard and women being involuntarily sterilized, as well as triumphant accounts of disabled miners organizing strikes and disability rights activists picketing Washington. -
Disability Histories
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ISBN: 9780252080319Publication Date: 2014-12-16The field of disability history continues to evolve rapidly. In this collection, Susan Burch and Michael Rembis present essays that integrate critical analysis of gender, race, historical context, and other factors to enrich and challenge the traditional modes of interpretation still dominating the field. Contributors delve into four critical areas of study within disability history: family, community, and daily life; cultural histories; the relationship between disabled people and the medical field; and issues of citizenship, belonging, and normalcy. As the first collection of its kind in over a decade, Disability Histories not only brings readers up to date on scholarship within the field but fosters the process of moving it beyond the U.S. and Western Europe by offering work on Africa, South America, and Asia. The result is a broad range of readings that open new vistas for investigation and study while encouraging scholars at all levels to redraw the boundaries that delineate who and what is considered of historical value. Informed and accessible, Disability Histories is essential for classrooms engaged in all facets of disability studies within and across disciplines.
Journals
- Disability and Society
- Annual Disability Statistics Compendium
- Review of Disability Studies
- Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities
- Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies
- Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
- Research in Developmental Disabilities
- Sexuality and Disability
Journal Articles
- Brown, N., & Ramlackhan, K. (2022). Exploring experiences of ableism in academia: a constructivist inquiry. Higher Education (00181560), 83(6), 1225–1239.
- Brueggemann, B. J., Garland-Thomson, R., & Kleege, G. (2005). What Her Body Taught (Or, Teaching about and with a Disability): A Conversation. Feminist Studies, 31(1), 13–33.
- Davis, L. J. (2022). Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: Disability Studies Then, Now, and When. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 16(3), 253–264.
- Davis, L. J. (1999). Crips Strike Back: The Rise of Disability Studies. American Literary History, 11(3), 500–512.
- Ginsburg, F., & Rapp, R. (2013). Disability Worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 53–68.
- Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2021). Key Concerns for Critical Disability Studies. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, 1(1), 27–49.
- McRuer, R. (2005). Crip Eye for the Normate Guy: Queer Theory and the Disciplining of Disability Studies. PMLA, 120(2), 586–592.
- Brown, N. & Leigh, J. (2018) Ableism in Academia: Where are the Disabled and Ill Academics? Disability & Society, 33(6), 985-989.
Databases
Study Resources
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Studying with Dyslexia
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ISBN: 9780230390560Publication Date: 2012-08-01As a dyslexic student you have a unique learning style. Understanding this can help you take control and study in a way that is most effective for you. Full of practical advice and visual examples, this friendly book will guide you through the dyslexic learning style. It gives you all the essential knowledge and ideas needed to manage your dyslexia positively. Handy for students at any level, this easy-to-read guide: suggests core strategies for doing things differently to work with your dyslexia, instead of against it; covers individual study skills, including organisation, reading, writing and taking exams; provides information on the support that should be available to you as a student. -
Navigating College: A Handbook on Self Advocacy
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ISBN: 9781938800009Publication Date: 2013-07-01Leaving high school and going to college is complicated for everyone. But if you're a student on the autism spectrum who is about to enter higher education for the first time, it might be a little bit more complicated for you. Maybe you're worried about getting accommodations, getting places on time, or dealing with sensory issues in a new environment. Maybe you could use some advice on how to stay healthy at school, handle dating and relationships, or talk to your friends and classmates about your disability. Maybe you want to talk to someone who's already dealt with these issues. That's where we come in. Navigating College is an introduction to the college experience from those of us who've been there. The writers and contributors are Autistic adults, and we're giving you the advice that we wish someone could have given us when we headed off to college. We wish we could sit down and have a chat with each of you, to share our experiences and answer your questions. But since we can't teleport, and some of us have trouble meeting new people, this book is the next best thing. So as you go back to school, check out a copy of Navigating College for yourself or your loved one. We have done this all before -- let us help you out.
New Titles in Gender Studies
The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood
How Black women's reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy--and remains key to their dismantling. In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain. The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts.
The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
Abolition Feminisms
This groundbreaking anthology engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.
Black Boy Out of Time
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead.
Brown and Gay in LA
The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents and finding community in each other. Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
Divergent Women
A 'good woman' is hard to find. To be 'good', after all, women face expectations that are shifting, internally contradictory, emotionally extreme, and prospectively even deadly. To be divergent, on the other hand, is an expansive position, encompassing cackling witches, childfree women, struggling mothers, insecure teenagers, and persecuted innocents. Exploring divergent women from a variety of critical and creative perspectives, this edited collection puts forth a dialogic discussion of how non-conforming women are coded as 'evil', and asks, what happens when women choose to be divergent? Delving into reflective and auto-ethnographic perspectives which explore subjective responses to the influence of the representation and treatment of evil women, Divergent Women is ultimately a celebratory reclamation of the concept of feminine transgression. Encompassing global perspectives and bringing together artistic and academic work, the authors invite readers to explore the possibilities for divergence that exist under the label of womanhood.
Feminist African Philosophy
The book argues that women's perspectives and gender issues must be mainstreamed across African philosophy in order for the discipline to truly represent the thoughts of Africans across the continent. This book argues that African philosophy cannot claim to have liberated people of African descent from marginalization until the androcentric nature of African philosophy is addressed. Key concepts such as Ujamaa, Negritude, Ubuntu, Consciencism, and African Socialism are explored as they relate to African women's lives or as models of inclusion or exclusion from politics. In addition to offering a feminist critique of African philosophy, the book also discusses topics that have been consistently overlooked in African philosophy. These topics include sex, sexuality, rape, motherhood, prostitution, and the low participation of women in politics. By highlighting the work of women feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ifi Amadiume, Amina Mama, and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the book engages with African philosophy from an African feminist viewpoint.
Making Love with the Land
A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.
The Natural Mother of the Child
Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood--conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson--eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully align with Belc's own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one's life--childhood photos, birth certificates--and addresses his deep ambivalence about the "before" and "after" so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Our Work Is Everywhere
A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities. In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life. Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.
Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights
The first out transgender judge to be appointed in the United States, the first attorney to obtain corrected birth certificates for transgender people who had not undergone gender confirmation surgery, a survivor of conversion therapy, and author of a law review article that helped thousands of employers adopt supportive policies for their workers, Phyllis Frye is truly a pioneer in the fight for transgender rights. Among her many accomplishments, Frye founded the first national organization devoted to shaping transgender law--the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, which has since created a body of work that includes the International Bill of Gender Rights--trained a cadre of future trans activists, and built the first national movement for transgender legal and political rights. Based on interviews with Frye, Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights covers her early life, the discrimination she faced while struggling with her identity--including being discharged from the army and fired from a subsequent job at her alma mater, Texas A&M--her transition in 1976, her many years of activism, and her current position as an associate judge for the municipal courts of Houston. This gripping account of Frye's efforts to establish and protect the constitutional rights of transgender individuals not only fills a gap in existing histories of LGBTQ+ activism but will also inform and instruct contemporary trans activists.
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource By and For Transgender Communities
There is no one way to be transgender.Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource - a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender and gender expansive authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written by and for cisgender women,Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts. Each chapter takes the reader through an important issue, such asrace, religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more. Anonymous quotes, testimonials, art and poetry from transgender people are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In thisunique way, hundreds of viewpoints from throughout the community have united to create this strong and pioneering book. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.
Convening Black Intimacy
An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans' ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity. In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system.
The Theory of Love
The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy
This encyclopedia reviews and interprets a broad array of social science and humanities research on LGBT people, politics, and public policy around the world. The articles are organized around six major themes of the study of identity politics, with a focus on movement politics, public attitudes, political institutions, elections, and the broader context of political theory. Under the editorial directorship of Donald P. Haider-Markel and associate editors Carlos Ball, Gary Mucciaroni, Bruno Perreau, Craig A. Rimmerman, and Jami K. Taylor, this publication brings together peer-reviewed contributions by leading researchers and offers the most comprehensive view of research on LGBT politics and policy to date. As a result, the Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy is a necessary resource for students and as well as both new and established scholars.
Why Gender?
Why is a focus on gender so important for interpreting the world in which we live? Sixteen world-famous scholars have been brought together to address this question from their respective fields: Political Theory, Philosophy, Medical Anthropology, Law, Geography, Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Science, Literature, Psychoanalysis, History of Art, Education and Economics. The resulting volume covers an extraordinary array of contexts, ranging from rethinking trans* bodies, to traumatized tribal communities, to sexualized violence, to assisted reproductive technologies, to the implications of epigenetics for understanding gender, and yet they are all connected by their focus on the importance of gender as a category of analysis. The publication of this volume celebrates the anniversary of the launch of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, and features contributions from past and future Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professors to the University.