Spotlight on Queer & Trans* Asian Literature and Poetics
This feature highlights literature & poetics by Queer and/or Transgender Asian creatives. Here you will primarily find contemporary authors, artists, filmmakers, and poets writing from the intersections of LGBTQ+ experience and Asian identities. The number of creatives who hold these identities is vast and just a small section is included here. Explore the tabs to discover fiction, memoirs, poetry, zines, films/shorts, and graphics novels from Queer and Transgender Asian and Pacific Islander (QTAPI) creators. In celebration of AAPI Heritage month and beyond, we hope that you explore this guide during the month of May and year-round!
Video: ‘We’re Asians, Gay & Proud’: The Story Behind The Photo | NBC Asian America (2018)
Additional resources:
- Kundiman LGBTQIA+ Book List: 2021 Pride
- The Blasian March comes to Chicago : Rohan Zhou-Lee on the “intersectional power exchange” in Black and Asian communities
- What does the queer Asian experience mean to you? We asked 19 LGBTQ Asians for Pride Month by Tim Lam
- Hearabouts: Asian American Midwest Radio produced at WFHB in Bloomington, Indiana, in partnership with the Indiana University Asian Culture Center
For an introductory look at Queer & Asian voices in North America, check out the anthology featured below .
Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America by ISBN: 9781439921104Publication Date: 2021-07-16First published in 1998, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, edited by David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, became a canonical work in Asian American studies and queer studies. This new edition of Q & A is neither a sequel nor an update, but an entirely new work borne out of the progressive political and cultural advances of the queer experiences of Asian North American communities. The artists, activists, community organizers, creative writers, poets, scholars, and visual artists that contribute to this exciting new volume make visible the complicated intertwining of sexuality with race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Sections address activism, radicalism, and social justice; transformations in the meaning of Asian-ness and queerness in various mass media issues of queerness in relation to settler colonialism and diaspora; and issues of bodies, health, disability, gender transitions, death, healing, and resilience. The visual art, autobiographical writings, poetry, scholarly essays, meditations, and analyses of histories and popular culture in the new Q & A gesture to enduring everyday racial-gender-sexual experiences of mis-recognition, micro-aggressions, loss, and trauma when racialized Asian bodies are questioned, pathologized, marginalized, or violated. This anthology seeks to expand the idea of Asian and American in LGBTQ studies.
Next Steps
If you would like to engage more with this month-long celebration, the Libraries have curated a number of interrelated resources and features to continue and deepen the conversation. You'll find these, below:
- Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (Pasifika) Feature (Media Studies)
- Asian American Representation in the Media (Media Studies)
- Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (Media Studies)
- Korea Remixed (Media Studies)
- Asian American and Pacific Islander Philosophies (Philosophy)
- Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Media Resources (Media Services)
- Asian American Artists, Architects, and Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- AAPI Identity - Recommended Reads from the Children's Collection (Education Library)
Video: Malinda Lo, 2021 Young People’s Lit NatBookAward Winner, reads from Last Night at the Telegraph Club | National Book Foundation (2022).
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by ISBN: 9780525555254Publication Date: 2021-01-19Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.
Fiona and Jane by ISBN: 9780593296042Publication Date: 2022-01-04Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely highways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying with them the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father's sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other's lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they've lost.
Beating Heart Baby by ISBN: 9781250819093Publication Date: 2022-07-26When artistic and sensitive Santi arrives at his new high school, everyone in the wildly talented marching band welcomes him with open arms. Everyone except for the prickly, proud musical prodigy Suwa, who doesn't think Santi has what it takes to be in the band. But Santi and Suwa share painful pasts, and when they open up to each other, a tentative friendship begins. And soon, that friendship turns into something more...Will their fresh start rip at the seams as Suwa seeks out a solo spotlight, and both boys come to terms with what it'll take, and what they'll have to let go, to realize their dreams?
She Who Became the Sun by ISBN: 9781250621801Publication Date: 2021-07-20In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness... In 1345, China lies under harsh Mongol rule. For the starving peasants of the Central Plains, greatness is something found only in stories. When the Zhu family's eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family's clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected. When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate. After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother's abandoned greatness.
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by ISBN: 9781250834805Publication Date: 2023-12-05Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia's heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city. When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When their relationship is discovered by an Aunty in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her own future. Punctuated by both joy and loss, full of '80s music and beloved novels, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a new classic: a fiercely compassionate coming-of-age story of a girl struggling to reconcile her heritage and faith with her desire to be true to herself.
Light from Uncommon Stars by 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. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. 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 Subtweet by ISBN: 9781770415836Publication Date: 2020-04-07Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela's songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.
Small Beauty by ISBN: 9780994047120Publication Date: 2016-05-13Small Beauty tells the story of Mei, a mixed race trans woman managing the death of her cousin, the ways she contorts to navigate racism and transphobia, and her desire for community as she takes an opportunity to leave the city and revisit a town from her family’s past, where she discovers queer family history while parsing through her own anger and trauma. Coping with the death of her cousin, Mei abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt's long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind. Small Beauty explores the protagonist's transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation, and then breaks it.
Afterparties by ISBN: 9780063049901Publication Date: 2021-08-03A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle's snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a "safe space" app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter.
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace by ISBN: 9781944211301Publication Date: 2017-03-14Helen Moran is thirty-two years old, single, childless, college-educated, and partially employed as a guardian of troubled young people in New York. She's accepting a delivery from IKEA in her shared studio apartment when her uncle calls to break the news: Helen's adoptive brother is dead. According to the internet, there are six possible reasons why her brother might have killed himself. But Helen knows better: she knows that six reasons is only shorthand for the abyss. Helen also knows that she alone is qualified to launch a serious investigation into his death, so she purchases a one-way ticket to Milwaukee. There, as she searches her childhood home and attempts to uncover why someone would choose to die, she will face her estranged family, her brother's few friends, and the overzealous grief counselor, Chad Lambo; she may also discover what it truly means to be alive.
Video: Samra Habib on the complexities of being Ahmadi Muslim and queer | The Walrus Talks (2019)
We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by ISBN: 9780735235007Publication Date: 2019-06-04How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist? Samra Habib has spent most of their life searching for the safety to be themself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, they faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From their parents, they internalized the lesson that revealing their identity could put them in grave danger. When their family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, their need for a safe space—in which to grow and nurture their creative, feminist spirit—became dire. The men in Samra's life wanted to police them, the women in their life had only shown them the example of pious obedience, and their body was a problem to be solved. So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes them to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within them all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.
Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by ISBN: 9781952271434Publication Date: 2022-03-01When Neema Avashia tells people where she's from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving "There are Indian people in West Virginia?" A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles. Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia's identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.
Antiman: a Hybrid Memoir by ISBN: 9781632062802Publication Date: 2021-06-22Growing up a Guyanese Indian immigrant in Central Florida, Rajiv Mohabir is fascinated by his family's stifled Hindu history and the legacy of his ancestors, who were indentured laborers on British sugarcane plantations. In Toronto he sits at the feet of Aji, his unlettered grandmother, listening to her stories and songs in her Caribbean Bhojpuri. By now Aji's eleven children have immigrated to North America and busied themselves with ascension, Christianity, and the erasure of their heritage and Caribbean accents. But Rajiv wants to know more: where did he come from, and why does he feel so out of place? Embarking on a journey of discovery, he lives for a year in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, perfecting his Hindi and Bhojpuri and tracing the lineage of his Aji's music. Returning to Florida, the cognitive dissonance of confederate flags, Islamophobia, and his father's disapproval sends him to New York, where finds community among like-minded brown activists, work as an ESL teacher, and intoxication in the queer nightlife scene. Emerging from the chrysalis of his ancestral poetics into a new life, he embraces his identity as a poet and reclaims his status as an antiman—forging a new way of being entirely his own.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by ISBN: 9780994047137Publication Date: 2016-11-15At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age. A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runs away from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood—and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles. There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man by ISBN: 9781551527536Publication Date: 2019-05-14According to Didier Eribon, melancholy is where it all starts and where it also ends: the lifelong process of mourning that each homosexual experiences, and through which they construct their own identity. In this beguiling book, an introverted, anxious, ambitious, artistically gifted queer Filipino-Canadian boy finds solace, inspiration, and a "syllabus for living" in art—works of literature and music, from the children's literary classic Anne of Green Gables to the music of Maria Callas. But their contribution to his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual edification belies the fact that they were largely heteronormative and white, which had the effect of invisibilizing him as a queer person of colour. Part memoir, part cultural commentary, and a hybrid of besotted aesthetic appreciation and unsparing critique, Double Melancholy is by turns a passionate love letter to art and an embattled examination of its oppressive complicity with the society that produces it, and the depths to which art both enriches and colonizes us.
Fairest by ISBN: 9780525561309Publication Date: 2020-05-26Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni's Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.
Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home by ISBN: 9781551526003Publication Date: 2015-11-03A transformative memoir by a queer disabled person of colour and abuse survivor. In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet they remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams their way home."
Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons by ISBN: 9781479824250Publication Date: 2022-09-19Growing 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. He shows what it was like for these young men to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. 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.
Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly by ISBN: 9780826364265Publication Date: 2022-09-15Renowned Korean American modern-dance choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess shares his deeply personal hyphenated world and how his multifaceted background drives his prolific art-making in Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. The memoir traces how his choreographic aesthetic, based on the fluency of dance and the visual arts, was informed by his early years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This insightful journey delves into an artist's process that is inspired by the intersection of varying cultural perspectives, stories, and experiences. Candid and intelligent, Burgess gives readers the opportunity to experience up close the passion for art and dance that has informed his life.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by ISBN: 9781328764416Publication Date: 2018-04-17How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is Alexander Chee's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing—bookselling and cater-waiting for William F. Buckley—the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
Females by ISBN: 9781788737371Publication Date: 2019-10-29This provocative and searing take on the current feminist movement explores the intersections of gender and desire. Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. Females is Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she's just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the "second wave" of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.
The Collected Schizophrenias by ISBN: 9781555978273Publication Date: 2019-02-05Powerful, affecting essays on mental illness, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Whiting Award. An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.
All Who Live on Islands by ISBN: 9781776562688Publication Date: 2021-02-16All Who Live on Islands introduces a bold new voice in New Zealand literature. In these intimate and entertaining essays, Rose Lu takes us through personal history—a shopping trip with her Shanghai-born grandparents, her career in the Wellington tech industry, an epic hike through the Himalayas—to explore friendship, the weight of stories told and not told about diverse cultures, and the reverberations of our parents' and grandparents' choices. Frank and compassionate, Rose Lu's stories illuminate the cultural and linguistic questions that migrants face, as well as what it is to be a young person living in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand.
Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics by ISBN: 9780814214886Publication Date: 2022-08-24Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores how race, migration, gender, and disability entwine in conceptions of deserving citizens. V. Jo Hsu explores three archives of trans and queer Asian American (QTAPI) rhetorics, considering a range of texts including oral histories, photography, personal essays, and performance showcases. To demonstrate how QTAPI use personal narrative to critique and revise the conditions of their exclusion, Hsu forwards a critical approach to storytelling, homing, which deliberately engages sites of alienation and belonging. Through a practice of diasporic listening, Hsu tracks confluences among seemingly divergent journeys and locates trans and queer Asian American experiences within broader US and global politics. The stories at the heart of Constellating Home center the voices of trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, and others often overlooked in conceptions of US citizenry. Hsu's analyses demonstrate the inextricability of Asian American activism from queer politics, disability activism, and racial justice, and they consider how stories network individual experiences with resonant histories and struggles. Finding unlikely intimacies among individual and communal histories, Constellating Home provides tools for fostering mutual care, revealing harmful social patterns, and orienting shared values and politics.
Beyond the Gender Binary by ISBN: 9780593094655Publication Date: 2020-06-02In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the gender binary. Pocket Change Collective is a series of small books with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists. In this installment, Beyond the Gender Binary, Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the world to see gender not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, they show us that gender is a malleable and creative form of expression. The only limit is your imagination.
Geisha of a Different Kind by ISBN: 9781479831951Publication Date: 2015-05-08In gay bars and nightclubs across America, and in gay-oriented magazines and media, the buff, macho, white gay man is exalted as the ideal—the most attractive, the most wanted, and the most emulated type of man. For gay Asian American men, often viewed by their peers as submissive or too 'pretty,' being sidelined in the gay community is only the latest in a long line of racially-motivated offenses they face in the United States. Repeatedly marginalized by both the white-centric queer community that values a hyper-masculine sexuality and a homophobic Asian American community that often privileges masculine heterosexuality, gay Asian American men largely have been silenced and alienated in present-day culture and society. In Geisha of a Different Kind, C. Winter Han travels from West Coast Asian drag shows to the internationally sought-after Thai kathoey, or "ladyboy," to construct a theory of queerness that is inclusive of the race and gender particularities of the gay Asian male experience in the United States. Through ethnographic observation of queer Asian American communities and Asian American drag shows, interviews with gay Asian American men, and a reading of current media and popular culture depictions of Asian Americans, Han argues that gay Asian American men, used to gender privilege within their own communities, must grapple with the idea that, as Asians, they have historically been feminized as a result of Western domination and colonization, and as a result, they are minorities within the gay community, which is itself marginalized within the overall American society.
Paradise Camp by ISBN: 9781760762551Publication Date: 2022-07-19Interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is the first Pasifika and first Fáfafineartist to be presented by New Zealand at the prestigious 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. With a groundbreaking exhibition ofnew work that addresses some of the most pressing issues of our time, Kihara's work interrogates and dismantles gender roles, consumerism,(mis)representation, and colonial legacies in the Pacific. Edited by Natalie King, who has commissioned provocative essays by contributors from around the world, this publication contextualizes Kihara's works from her entire career, which puncture and expose, queer and question dominant narratives, turning history on its head.
Video: Chrysanthemum Tran reads "I Don't Even Like Sports" | Ours Poetica (2022). See more of her work here.
The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by ISBN: 1643620363Publication Date: 2021-02-02Jackie Wang's magnetic and spellbinding debut collection of poetry that attempts to speak in the language of dreams. The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight.
More Than Organs by ISBN: 9781943977741Publication Date: 2020-03-12A love letter to Brown, Queer, and Trans futures, Kay Ulanday Barrett's More Than Organs questions "whatever wholeness means" for bodies always in transit, for the safeties and dangers they silo. These poems remix people of color as earthbenders, replay "the choreography of loss" after the 2015 Pulse shooting, and till joy from the cosmic sweetness of a family's culinary history. Barrett works "to build / a shelter // of / everyone / they] meet," from aunties to the legendary Princess Urduja to their favorite air sign. More Than Organs tattoos grief across the knuckles of its left hand and love across the knuckles of its right, leaving the reader physically changed by the intensity of experience, longing, strength, desire, and the need, above all else, to survive.
Ask the Brindled by ISBN: 9781639550005Publication Date: 2022-08-01Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between "seed" and "summit" of a life—the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians—and it does not let readers look away. In this debut collection, No'u Revilla crafts a lyric landscape brimming with shed skin, water, mo'o, ma'i. She grips language like a fistful of wet guts and inks the page red—for desire, for love, for generations of blood spilled by colonizers. Wedding the history of the Kingdom of Hawai'i with contemporary experiences of queer love and queer grief, Revilla writes toward sovereignty: linguistic, erotic, civic. Through the medium of formal dynamism and the material of Hawai'i culture and mythos, this living decolonial text both condemns and creates. Ask the Brindled is a song from the shattered throat that refuses to be silenced. It is a testament to queer Indigenous women who carry baskets of names and stories, "still sacred."
Queer Heartache by ISBN: 9780985110529Publication Date: 2016-05-01Queer Heartache is a full length poetry collection adapted from Kit Yan's award-winning one-person slam poetry theater show with the same name. Kit's poetry explores his identity as transgender, queer, Asian American from Hawaii, while asking what queer hearts and families are made of and interrogating the forces that are constantly working to break them apart. Queer Heartache is a testament to the resilience of queer love in all its forms—between cis and trans siblings, lovers, pride parade attendees, and many more—in the face of heartbreaking barriers everywhere from the dating pool to the medical establishment. If you've ever had your heart broken, wondered how your pets self-identify, or wanted to tell someone your gender is none of their business, this book is for you. So wrap yourself in a rainbow and enjoy the ride.
Time Is a Mother by ISBN: 9780593300237Publication Date: 2022-04-05In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break. The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On by ISBN: 9780063240087Publication Date: 2022-11-01From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi's third book features poems about historical and impending apocalypses, alongside musings on our responsibilities to each other and visions for our collective survival. Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time—from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness—between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.
If They Come for Us by ISBN: 9780525509783Publication Date: 2018-08-07From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series, Brown Girls, comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people's histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by ISBN: 9781942683346Publication Date: 2017-04-17In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family—the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Holding all accountable, this collection fully embraces the loss, grief, and abundant joy that come with charting one's own path in identity, life, and love.
Not Here by ISBN: 9781566895095Publication Date: 2018-04-10Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the giddy terrors of allowing yourself to hope for love, and revel in moments of connection achieved.
Cutlish by ISBN: 9781945588884Publication Date: 2021-09-15In Cutlish, a title referencing the rural recasting of the cutlass or machete, Rajiv Mohabir creates a form migrated from Caribbean chutney music in order to verse the precarity of a queer Indo-Caribbean speaker in the newest context of the United States. By joining the disparate threads of his fading, often derided, multilingual Guyanese Creole and Guyanese Bhojpuri linguistic inheritances, Mohabir mingles the ghosts that haunt from the cane fields his ancestors worked with the canonical colonial education of his elders, creating a new syncretic American poetry—pushing through the "post" of postcolonial, the "poet" in the poetic.
Zines are small-circulation, self-published works, usually reproduced via a copy machine. Historically, zines have provided community for marginalized individuals or groups and act as tangible traces of these communities, many of which are otherwise under-documented. Zines are also a great lower-cost option for readers to get into collecting. Below is a small sampling of zines and webcomics by LGBTQ+ Asian-identifying people.
Documentary: But I Love The Zine | KQED Truly CA featuring Jeffrey Cheung (Unity Press), V. Vale (Re/Search), Tiny Splendor, and Jess Wu (Mixed Rice Zine) (2019)
For more zines/small press/self-published content, check out the following links:
- Indiana University Zines LibGuide
- Jeffrey Cheung: Unity and Community, One Board at a Time Interview by Eben Benson
- Queer Zine Archives Project: "first launched in November 2003 in an effort to preserve queer zines and make them available to other queers, researchers, historians, punks, and anyone else who has an interest DIY publishing and underground queer communities."
- Queer Zest Zine Fest Asian Zines : The Queer Zest Zine Fest folks are a coalition of like-minded queer zinesters with a host of event experience under our belts. We were introduced through online queer zine scenes and decided to join together to make this event a reality!
- Transmissions: Asian Artists in Motion from Printed Matter
- "name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion" by Printed Matter
Mixed Rice Zines is a small diy press run by artist J Wu, featuring a mixture of voices in celebrating QTBIPOC resilience. Their zines invite queer and trans artists of color to send in writing, photography, comics, poetry, interviews, illustration and more.
View some of these zines for free on their website!
From the website: A "new weekly long-format webzine featuring stories and perspectives from yours truly, ~the Queer Asian community~. We invite you into the clubhouse: share your thoughts, discover art, make new friends, and experience a kind of soft love that you could previously only equate with a platter of freshly cut fruit. All Queer, Trans, APISWAD (Asian/ Pacific Islander/ Southwest Asian/ Desi) identifying folx are welcome here—but please, leave your shoes at the door!"
Trans Man Walking (2017-2019) by Andi Santagata is currently on hiatus but you can read past episodes for free online.
Tropic Zine is a forum for critical engagement with contemporary culture that seeks connections between Hawaiʻi and the tropical diaspora worldwide. Imagine the publication as a dynamic web of relations, simultaneously drawn together and repelled by experiences of place. It prioritizes independent, self-aware, queer, hybrid, engaged, contemporary voices who define culture on their own terms through new editorial projects and collaborations. Tropic Zine produces one print publication a year, which follows no set format or timeline, and publishes digital features on e-Tropic.
Canto Cutie is a juried art and literature zine that publishes the work of Cantonese artists and writers around the world. Founded in 2019 by Katherine Leung, it is edited by Tsz Kam and translated by G. The Cantonese diaspora has roots in Hong Kong, Southern China, Taiwan, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam Concentrations of Cantonese speakers can be found in every English-speaking country. Canto Cutie zines are available for purchase and to view for free online.
Dominique Duong is an illustrator and comic artist working in London, UK. Since her career began, her work has been published by SelfMadeHero, Discord Comics and Limit Break Comics, among others. She’s one of Broken Frontier’s Six Small Press Creators to Watch of 2020 and her comic The Dog & The Cat was nominated for an Ignatz Award. She’s worked on editorial and book illustration, theatre set designs, concept art, story-boarding and comics. Explore her webcomics here. Image from The Dog and the Cat, a short Ignatz Award-nominated queer fantasy romance comic based on the myth of the Cat and the Chinese Zodiac.
Sarula Bao is a Chinese American illustrator and graphic novelist based in Brooklyn. She graduated from RISD’s illustration department in 2016 and has since published a graphic novel, Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution and currently works as a comics instructor and freelance illustrator. You can explore some of her comics on her website. Left image: "To all the White Girls I've loved before." Right image: from "Thnks fr th mmrs"
Video: MariNaomi, Cartoonist/Community Organizer | XOXO Festival (2018)
Turning Japanese: Expanded Edition by ISBN: 9781637150948Publication Date: 2023-06-06The year is 1995. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, twenty-two-year old MariNaomi finds herself in San Jose, California. Mari, a mixed-race Japanese American, has for many years felt disconnected from the culture of her mother. Immersed in the pan-asian diaspora of San Jose, Mari searches for cultural and romantic connections. It doesn't take long for Mari to find new loves, and a new job—at a hostess bar for Japanese expats—in a bid to learn the Japanese language and culture. Turning Japanese moves as Mari does, from San Jose to Tokyo, as she tries to get by in an unfamiliar city with rudimentary language skills--all in the hopes of finally connecting with her Japanese relatives without the use of her mother as a translator. Turning Japanese: Expanded Edition includes new story pages that bring fresh insight and a new resolution to this classic comics memoir of our times.
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking up with Me by ISBN: 9781626722590Publication Date: 2019-05-07Laura Dean, the most popular girl in high school, was Frederica Riley's dream girl: charming, confident, and SO cute. There's just one problem: Laura Dean is maybe not the greatest girlfriend. Reeling from her latest break up, Freddy's best friend, Doodle, introduces her to the Seek-Her, a mysterious medium who leaves Freddy some cryptic parting words: Break up with her. But Laura Dean keeps coming back, and as their relationship spirals further out of her control, Freddy has to wonder if it's really Laura Dean that's the problem. Maybe it's Freddy, who is rapidly losing her friends, including Doodle, who needs her now more than ever. Fortunately for Freddy, there are new friends and the insight of advice columnists like Anna Vice to help her through being a teenager in love.
Flamer by ISBN: 9781250756145Publication Date: 2020-09-01Award-winning author and artist Mike Curato draws on his own experiences in Flamer, his debut graphic novel, telling a difficult story with humor, compassion, and love. It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
Stone Fruit by ISBN: 9781683964261Publication Date: 2021-05-11Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray's niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties—Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn't fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones—and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.
SuperMutant Magic Academy by ISBN: 9781770461987Publication Date: 2015-04-28Unrequited love, underage drinking, and teen angst rule at a high school for mutants and witches. SuperMutant Magic Academy, which she has been serializing online for the past four years, paints a teenaged world filled with just as much ennui and uncertainty, but also with a sharp dose of humor and irreverence. Tamaki deftly plays superhero and high-school Hollywood tropes against what adolescence is really like: The SuperMutant Magic Academy is a prep school for mutants and witches, but their paranormal abilities take a backseat to everyday teen concerns. Science experiments go awry, bake sales are upstaged, and the new kid at school is a cat who will determine the course of human destiny. In one strip, lizard-headed Trixie frets about her nonexistent modeling career; in another, the immortal Everlasting Boy tries to escape this mortal coil to no avail. Throughout it all, closeted Marsha obsesses about her unrequited crush, the cat-eared Wendy. Whether the magic is mundane or miraculous, Tamaki's jokes are precise and devastating.
100 Crushes by ISBN: 9781927668061Publication Date: 2014-06-10100 Crushes compiles five years of queer comics by Elisha Lim, including excerpts from Sissy, The Illustrated Gentleman, Queer Child in the Eighties, and their cult series 100 Butches, as well as new work. It's an absorbing documentary that travels through Toronto, Berlin, Singapore, and beyond in the form of interviews, memoirs, and gossip from an international queer vanguard. Toronto-based artist Elisha Lim's work celebrates the dignity and power of being neither straight, nor white, nor cis-gendered. In 2011 they also successfully advocated for Canadian gay media to adopt the gender neutral pronoun "they."
Messy Roots: a Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American by ISBN: 9780063067776Publication Date: 2022-03-08After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name. In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter. Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao's debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by ISBN: 9781626926035Publication Date: 2017-06-06My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman's exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist's burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.
A Map to the Sun by ISBN: 9781250146687Publication Date: 2020-08-04A Map to the Sun is a gripping YA graphic novel about five principle players in a struggling girls' basketball team. One summer day, Ren meets Luna at a beachside basketball court and a friendship is born. But when Luna moves to back to Oahu, Ren's messages to her friend go unanswered. Years go by. Then Luna returns, hoping to rekindle their friendship. Ren is hesitant. She's dealing with a lot, including family troubles, dropping grades, and the newly formed women's basketball team at their high school. With Ren's new friends and Luna all on the basketball team, the lines between their lives on and off the court begin to blur. During their first season, this diverse and endearing group of teens are challenged in ways that make them reevaluate just who and how they trust. Sloane Leong's evocative storytelling about the lives of these young women is an ode to the dynamic nature of friendship.
Access options to the films and shorts below are either linked or noted in their description. See the following list for additional resources, lists, articles, and film festivals!
- List of BIPOC Trans Filmmakers from Transgender Media Portal
- What to Watch: 7 LGBTQ+ Movies to Stream for AAPI Heritage Month by Chingy Nea. them, 2022.
- Six Queer Asian Artists on “The Half of It” and the Future of Queer Asian Cinema. Autostraddle, 2020.
- Check out information on the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival held in Toronto and Ottawa.
- Chicago South Asian Film Festival’s mission is to advance diversity in Chicagoland through cinema, conversation and culture. The festival gives South Asian talent, stories and themes a world platform and is committed to providing an experience in cinema for filmmakers and moviegoers alike.
Video: "it's a girl!" short film by trâm anh nguyễn. (3 min). "It’s a Girl! is a self-portrait drawn from a Southeast Asian trans male perspective." (2020)
See You Then by
Publication Date: 2021A decade after abruptly breaking up with Naomi, Kris invites her to dinner to catch up on their complicated lives, relationships, and Kris' transition. Over a night of intimate and vulnerable conversations, a shocking truth is revealed. This film is available on Tubi (linked above), Vudu, and The Roku Channel.
Were You Gay in High School? by Publication Date: 2020Two queer women recall their awkward, closeted high school days of kissing boys and straight-girl crushes.Leitis in Waiting by
Publication Date: 2021Leitis In Waiting is the story of Joey Mataele and the Tonga Leitis, an intrepid group of transgender women fighting a rising tide of religious fundamentalism in their highly religious and conservative South Pacific Kingdom. With unexpected humor and extraordinary access to the Kingdom's royals and religious leaders, this emotional journey reveals what it means to be different in a society ruled by tradition, and the challenge of being yourself without forsaking culture and tradition.Fire Island by
Publication Date: 2022A group of queer best friends gather in the Fire Island Pines for their annual week of love and laughter, but when a sudden change of events jeopardizes their summer in gay paradise, their bonds as a chosen family are pushed to the limit. This film is currently only available to stream with a Hulu subscription.Saving Face by
Publication Date: 2004Wilhelmina is a Chinese-American lesbian and a young surgeon who has kept her sexual orientation secret from her conservative Chinese community in New York. But when her widowed mother becomes pregnant and is kicked out by her own parents, Wil suddenly has to juggle her mother's secrets with her own.Gaysians by
Publication Date: 2015Gaysians is an exploration of family, immigration and language through the voices of five queer and trans Asian-Americans from New York City. The subjects share stories about their families, and in doing so, shed light on the complicated histories that have shaped these intimate and personal relationships. This moving short is an illuminating patchwork documentary exploring family and culture through the personal stories of a diverse panoply of LGBTQ individuals.Transfinite by
Publication Date: 2019Transfinite is a sci-fi omnibus feature film composed of seven standalone short stories where supernatural trans and queer people from various cultures use their powers to protect, love, teach, fight and thrive. This film is available to rent on YouTube and Vimeo (linked above).
Your Name Engraved Herein by Publication Date: 2020In 1987, as martial law ends in Taiwan, Jia-han and Birdy fall in love amid family pressures, homophobia and social stigma. This film is available to stream with a Netflix subscription.The Half of It by
Publication Date: 2020A shy, straight-A Chinese-American student helps the school jock woo a girl whom, secretly, they both desire. They find themselves connecting and learn about the nature of love. This film is available with a Netflix subscription.
Performing Girl by Publication Date: 2013A look at the early life of D'Lo: a queer, transgender, Tamil Sir Lankan American writer, actor, director, comedian, activist and music producer who grew up in Lancaster, CA. This film is available to rent on Prime Video.
Video: Desi Queer with Rahul Mehta, SJ Sindu & Sreshtha Sen | AAWWTV (2017)
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) is devoted to creating, publishing, developing and disseminating creative writing by Asian Americans, and to providing an alternative literary arts space at the intersection of migration, race, and social justice. Since our founding in 1991, we have been dedicated to the belief that Asian American stories deserve to be told. At a time when migrants, women, people of color, Muslims, and LGBTQ people are specifically targeted, we offer a new countercultural public space in which to imagine a more just future. Explore The Margins digital magazine, The Margins Fellowship, and upcoming events.
Kaya Press is a group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas. We believe that people’s lives can be changed by literature that pushes us past expectations and out of our comfort zone. We believe in the contagious potential of creativity combined with the means of production. Founded in 1994, Kaya Press has established itself as the premier publisher of cutting-edge Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic writers in the United States. Our diverse list of titles includes experimental poetry, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, “lost” novels, and everything in between. Check out Milkteeth Books, the intern-run chapbook imprint of Kaya Press
Kundiman is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. Kundiman creates a space where Asian Americans can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the ever changing diaspora. We see the arts as a tool of empowerment, of education and liberation, of addressing proactively the legacy we will leave the future. In the 2000s, poets Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi envisioned a space that would facilitate the creation of new work, foster mentoring relationships, and address the challenges facing Asian American writers. Out of those discussions, Kundiman presented its inaugural Workshop Retreat for poets at The University of Virginia in 2004. The Retreat has taken place annually since then, welcoming over 250 fellows and 50 acclaimed faculty members, and is now hosted by Fordham College at Rose Hill.
The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) empowers LGBTQ+ Asians and Pacific Islanders through movement capacity building, policy advocacy, and representation. Founded in 2005 as a federation of dozens of small, volunteer-run groups across the country, NQAPIA is embedded in generations- and centuries-old traditions of resistance, resilience, and community-making among LGBTQ+ Asians and Pacific Islanders.
The Queer Asian Social Club started out as The Gaysian Project. In 2018, I developed a panel for a queer fandom convention to explore Queer Asian Representation in the Media. We are now the Queer Asian Social Club focusing on sharing and celebrating stories of individuals and activists in our community through our weekly web-zine DIS-ORIENT, our instagram page, and our podcast the Queer Asian Podcast Club! While our name is changing, the core of who we remains the same. We are a collective that is focused on using visibility to empower community for queer and trans-APISWAD folks.
unerased book club: community through Asian American literature. A project of Rising Voices. Join unerased May book club where they will be reading Almost American Girl by Robin Ha.
Asian Pride Project celebrates the journeys, triumphs and struggles of LGBTQ individuals and our Asian and Pacific Islander (API) families and communities. We seek to capture these stories by using the arts – film, video, photography and the written word – as a medium for social justice and advocacy in the LGBTQ realm.
Articles
How Uniting Queer Asians Through Nightlife Became a Global Movement: From Bubble T in New York City to Worship in Sydney, Arthur Tam looks at the nightlife spaces that are uplifting and unifying the queer Asian diaspora all over the world
How Bubble_T is Shaping the Asian LGBTQ Community’s Future
Meet the Photographer Taking Intimate Portraits of Queer Asian Nightlife in NYC by Leila Ettachfini. "Photographer Aki Kame focuses on lifestyle portraiture by day, but at night they head to parties like NYC's Bubble T to capture their friends and community."
Podcasts
Nancy is a critically-acclaimed podcast featuring queer stories and conversations, and hosted by two best friends, neither of whom are named Nancy. It’s a podcast about how we define ourselves, and the journey it takes to get there. Hosted by Tobin Low and Kathy Tu. Nancy is no longer in production but you can listen to their archive of episodes for free here.
Yellow Glitter with Steven Wakabayashi is a podcast on mindfulness through the eyes & soul of queer Asian perspectives. Every episode, my guests and I share with you what’s on our minds on topics around racial identity, queerness, activism, and life. Come join our conversation. Listen here!
Transfeminine Worlds: Works by Trans Women & Other Femme Folk
Introduction
In recognition of Women's* History Month in March, we have curated a selection of materials and resources from our collections to honor the contributions of transgender women across the arts, from fiction and poetry, to feature films and documentaries, to podcasts. We have also put together a sampling of important transgender studies texts, to help ground an understanding of transgender identity and embodiment.
As an introduction to this feature, we have also created a playlist of music by transwomen and other artists who explore and embody femininity outside of cisnormative conceptions of gender. In this extensive, genre-spanning mix, you'll find a variety of musical styles and sounds, including hip hop, electronic, ambient, heavy metal, and punk, among others. To learn more about this, feel free to explore some of the resources we used to make the playlist:
- "A Brief History of Queer and Trans Women in American Music" (udiscovermusic.)
- "themstory: A Century in Genderqueer Music" (them)
- "A Brief History of Transgender People in Music" (video, Polyphonic)
- "Black Trans Women in Music" (video, Shea Diamond)
- "Exploring the Trans Roots of Hyperpop" (Orange Mag)
- "How Hyperpop Gives Trans Artists a Voice" (Ringtone)
- "How SOPHIE and Other Trans Musicians Are Using Vocal Modulation to Explore Gender" (Pitchfork)
- "7 Trans Women Who Are Redefining the Future of Pop Music" (them)
- "7 Transgender Musicians Changing the Music Industry" (Insider)
- "11 Transgender & Non-Binary Musicians You Need to Know" (Billboard)
- "17 Songs by Trans & Nonbinary Artists You Need on Your Playlist" (Pride)
- "Hyperpop Transness" (The Cooper Point Journal)
- "The Musical Beyond: Gender and Genre in the Hyperpop Scene" (Trans Artivism)
*Note: Trans women are women. For the purposes of this feature, we have chosen to center feminine expression and embodiment, and so include contributions from artists and scholars who identify as women, whether cisgender or transgender, as well as nonbinary and genderqueer individuals who are femme, femme-of-center, or who identify with or perform femininity in some way. For more on these concepts, check out this article from the ACLU ("Trans Women are Women") or explore some of the resources from this feature on "The Metaphysics of Gender" from the Philosophy Research Guide.
Beyond the Playlist
As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm and systemic oppression they've experienced. We recognize that resisting and rejecting (trans)misogyny and cisheteropatriarchy cannot be manifested simply through resource lists and guides, however important and well-intentioned, and that justice and liberation for women, expansively defined, and all who challenge and live outside of binary gender is the work of generations. We are, nevertheless, committed to doing what we can to work towards a different, more equitable and caring future.
If you'd like to engage more deeply with Women's History Month, units across the Libraries have created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this commemoration. You'll find those, below:
- Feminist Media Studies (Media Studies)
- The Sounds of Women's History Month (Media Studies)
- Feminism & Feminist Philosophies (Philosophy)
- In Memoriam: bell hooks (Philosophy)
- Spotlight on Victorian Women Writers Project (English & American Literature)
- Women-led Architecture Firms (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Art & Gender (Gender Studies + Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Women of Ukraine (Area Studies)
- Women's History Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
- Primary Sources on Women in University Collections (Archives & Special Collections)
- Youth Materials on Women's History and Women’s Lives (Education Library)
Anthologies
We Want It All: an anthology of radical transpoetics by ISBN: 9781643620336Publication Date: 2020-11-24Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standpoint, can go as a fellow traveler with social movements and revolutionary demands. Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.
Troubling the Line: trans and genderqueer poetry and poetics by ISBN: 9781937658106Publication Date: 2013-03-01The first of its kind, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, gathers together a diverse range of 55 poets with varying aesthetics and backgrounds. In addition to generous samples of poetry by each trans writer, the book also includes "poetics statements" -- reflections by each poet that provide context for their work covering a range of issues from identification and embodiment to language and activism.
Subject to Change: trans poetry and conversation by ISBN: 9781943977437Publication Date: 2017-11-16Subject to Change is an anthology celebrating the work of five poets who are unapologetically trans: Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Christopher Soto, beyza ozer, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. Featuring poetry and interviews, this collection is a testament to the power of trans poets speaking to one another -- about family, race, class, disability, religion, and the body. This anthology includes a range of trans experiences and poetics, expanding the possibilities of what it means to be both trans and a writer in the twenty-first century.
Nepantla by ISBN: 9781937658786Publication Date: 2018-05-01The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States. In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
Sovereign Erotics: a collection of two-spirit literature by ISBN: 9780816502424Publication Date: 2011-10-01Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.
Individual Collections
Bodymap by ISBN: 9781927494509Publication Date: 2015-05-01In Bodymap, Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice. In this volume, Leah Lakshmi maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.
Day/break by ISBN: 9781771665735Publication Date: 2020-04-02day/break, poet Gwen Benaway's fourth collection of work, explores the everyday poetics of the trans feminine body. Through intimate experiences and conceptualizations of trans life, day/break asks what it means to be a trans woman, both within the text and out in the physical world. Shifting between theory and poetry, Benaway questions how gender, sexuality, and love intersect with the violence and transmisogyny of the nation state and established literary institutions. In beautiful lyric verse, day/break reveals the often-unseen other worlds of trans life, where body, self, and sex are transformed, becoming more than fixed binary locations.
Feeld by ISBN: 9781571315052Publication Date: 2018-08-14Jos Charles's revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. "i care so much abot the whord i cant reed." In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English --Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect -- what is old is made new again. "gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage." "did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye." The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer -- making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new and highly inventive lyrical narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.
Gumbo Ya Ya by ISBN: 9780822966661Publication Date: 2021-09-21Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie's stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies "by the barrel of the law" or "for loving another Black gxrl." Part familial archival, part map of Black resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogs the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with punching cultural commentary and a poetic voice that holds tenderness and sharpness in tandem. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and the tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away more whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.
Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by ISBN: 9781943977420Publication Date: 2017-11-14Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story's sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening.
There Is a Case That I Am by ISBN: 9780997826753Publication Date: 2017-09-25In There is a Case That I Am, torrin a. greathouse goes on a profoundly courageous journey, delving into the self, in search of knowledge and definition. These poems are delicately wrapped gifts, full of terror and hope, anguish and humor. greathouse softly sings an elegy for a body still breathing. They are “afraid of the red stains they make of / these queer bodies,” yet they will teach you to smile with a bloody mouth. This phenomenal collection of vulnerable strength, of existing in the in-between, in an everything, will show you all the ways pain can be both ugly and exquisite.
There Should Be Flowers by ISBN: 9781937865733Publication Date: 2016-08-15"Espinoza's debut is a searing interrogation of the world and the self at once. Here, the body is a fixation-as if to look away from it, even briefly, is to risk having it erased. As such, this is a book of unblinking human preservation, and how we trespass ourselves seeking safer spaces. "There is nothing I love more than an honest storm," Espinoza writes. There Should Be Flowers is a storm to ravage and rearrange us from our crushing certainties. This book doesn't need a blurb. It simply needs to be read." -Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Transverse by ISBN: 9781733038430Publication Date: 2021-11-01TRANSVERSE weaves between languages and forms, cultivating the questions and lacunae that emerge in their encounter. In the three parts that make up the book, music, mathematics, philosophical logic, and lyric convention come in and out of relation to press upon questions of form and meaning-making, and attend to the moments when coherence appears to take place or dissolve. Following sonic and visual echos, practices and plays upon citation, TRANSVERSE traces and distorts logics of allegory, repetition, and representation, moving towards an inquiry into the nature of our encounter with and recognition of the world.
Water I Won't Touch by ISBN: 9781556596179Publication Date: 2021-04-20Both radically tender and desperate for change, Water I Won't Touch is a life raft and a self-portrait, concerned with the vitality of trans people living in a dangerous and inhospitable landscape. Through the brambles of the Pennsylvania forest to a stretch of the Jersey Shore, in quiet moments and violent memories, Kayleb Rae Candrilli touches the broken earth and examines the whole in its parts. Written during the body's healing from a double mastectomy--in the wake of addiction and family dysfunction--these ambitious poems put new form to what's been lost and gained. Candrilli ultimately imagines a joyful, queer future: a garden to harvest, lasting love, the insistent flamboyance of citrus.
X/ex/exis by ISBN: 9780816544073Publication Date: 2021-08-17Written in the early days of the rise of world-wide fascism and the poet's gender transition, x/ex/exis: poemas para la nación/poems for the nation accepts the invitation to push poetic and gender imaginaries beyond the bounds set by nation. From teen dysphoria, to the incarceration of anticolonial activists Oscar López and Nina Droz Franco, to the entanglement of church and state, these poems acknowledge the violence of imposed binaries. For Salas Rivera, the x marks Puerto Rican transness in a world that seeks trans death, denial, and erasure. Instead of justifying his existence, he takes up the flag of illegibility and writes an apocalyptic book that screams into an uncertain future, armed with nothing to lose. In today's post-disaster Puerto Rico and a world shaped by the recurring waves of an ecological apocalypse, Salas Rivera's words feel visionary, mapping a decolonizing territory, a body, and identity of both soil and heart.
Crossbones on My Life by ISBN: 9781736396315Publication Date: 2021-02-20Poetry. African & African American Studies. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. California Interest. CROSSBONES ON MY LIFE borrows its title from an invocation by Assotto Saint and honors the memory of snap queens, black lesbians, gay latinos, two-spirit natives, feral city youth, trans icons, and 'round the way girls. This debut chapbook from Mason J. chronicles their first-hand experiences with the HIV pandemic, brown girlhood, and sexuality, urban development/gay meccas, queercore cruising, leather daddies, Ghostship, gender identity, hood life, love, loss of a hometown, and more.
The Good Arabs by ISBN: 1999058895Publication Date: 2021-09-21Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Parc-Extension balcony in summer, the verse and prose poems in The Good Arabs ground the reader in place, language, and the body. Peeling and rinsing radishes. Dancing as a pre-teen to Nancy Ajram. Being drenched in stares on the city bus. The collection is an interlocking and rich offering of the speaker's communities, geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, and family both biological and chosen. The Good Arabs gifts the reader with insight into cycles and repetition in ourselves and our broken nations. This genre-defying collection maps Arab and trans identity through the immensity of experience felt in one body, the sorrow of citizens let down by their countries, and the garbage crisis in Lebanon. Ultimately, it shows how we might love amid dismay, adore the pungent and the ugly, and exist in our multiplicity across spaces.
- Light from Uncommon Stars by 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. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. 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.
Nevada by ISBN: 9780983242239Publication Date: 2013-03-01Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she'd carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly change her forever.
A Safe Girl to Love by ISBN: 9781627290050Publication Date: 2014-09-01Eleven unique short stories that stretch from a rural Canadian Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn, featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.- Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: a dangerous trans girl's confabulous memoir by ISBN: 9780994047137Publication Date: 2016-11-15Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents' abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, the protagonist blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, she joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.
All the Birds in the Sky by ISBN: 9780765379948Publication Date: 2016-01-26An ancient society of witches and a hipster technological startup go to war in order to prevent the world from tearing itself apart. To further complicate things, each of the groups' most promising followers (Patricia, a brilliant witch and Laurence, an engineering "wunderkind") may just be in love with each other. As the battle between magic and science wages in San Francisco against the backdrop of international chaos, Laurence and Patricia are forced to choose sides. But their choices will determine the fate of the planet and all mankind. In a fashion unique to Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky offers a humorous and, at times, heart-breaking exploration of growing up extraordinary in a world filled with cruelty, scientific ingenuity, and magic.
Detransition, Baby by ISBN: 9780593133378Publication Date: 2021-01-12Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese--and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby -- and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it -- Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family -- and raise the baby together? This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
I've Got a Time Bomb by ISBN: 9781627290111Publication Date: 2014-06-12The year is 286. The city of Morteville has been flooded by a devastating hurricane but Sybil D'Lye has never been happier. She's making out with girls, squatting an abandoned mansion, and looting every pharmacy within wading distance. Everything's going swimmingly until the night Sybil is beaten with a pipe and left for dead. Though doctors are able to reconstruct her skull, her mind is altogether another matter. Thus begins her incredible and unbelievable journey, looking for love among the loners, losers, and leave-behinds in the forgotten corners of Amerika. Based on a true* story. *Guaranteed minimum 88% true content by weight
If I Was Your Girl by ISBN: 9781250078407Publication Date: 2016-05-03Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school. Like anyone else, all she wants is to make friends and fit in. But Amanda is keeping a secret, and she's determined not to get too close to anyone. But when she meets sweet, easygoing Grant, Amanda can't help but start to let him into her life. As they spend more time together, she realizes just how much she is losing by guarding her heart. She finds herself yearning to share with Grant everything about herself, including her past. But Amanda's terrified that once she tells him the truth, he won't be able to see past it. Because the secret that Amanda's been keeping? It's that at her old school, she used to be Andrew. Will the truth cost Amanda her new life, and her new love?
We Won't Be Here Tomorrow by ISBN: 9781849354752Publication Date: 2022-09-20Spaceships, man-eating mermaids, swords, demons, ghouls, thieves, hitchhikers, and life in the margins. Margaret Killjoy's stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They'll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes fearless, mind-expanding fiction.
Meanwhile, Elsewhere: science fiction and fantasy from transgender writers by ISBN: 1627290184Publication Date: 2017-09-07The #1 post-reality generation device approved for home use. This manual will prepare you to travel from multiverse to multiverse. No experience is required. Choose from twenty-five preset post-realities Rejoice at obstacles unquestionably bested and conflicts efficiently resolved. Bring denouement to your drama with THE FOOLPROOF AUGMENTATION DEVICE FOR OUR CONTEMPORARY UTOPIA.
Summer Fun by ISBN: 9781641292382Publication Date: 2021-07-27Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B----. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun? And so she writes letters to B---- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B---- and Gala form a dialogue about creation--of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture. Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.
A Dream of a Woman by ISBN: 9781551528564Publication Date: 2021-09-21Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days. In "Hazel and Christopher," two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In "Perfect Places," a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In "Couldn't Hear You Talk Anymore," the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman. An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.
- Fairest: a memoir by ISBN: 9780525561309Publication Date: 2020-05-26Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of U.S. citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity. As an immigrant to the United States, Talusan came to be perceived as white. An academic scholarship to Harvard provided access to elite circles of privilege but required Talusan to navigate through the complex spheres of race, class, sexuality, and her place within the gay community. She emerged as an artist and an activist questioning the boundaries of gender. Talusan realized she did not want to be confined to a prescribed role as a man, and transitioned to become a woman, despite the risk of losing a man she deeply loved. Throughout her journey, Talusan shares poignant and powerful episodes of desirability and love that will remind readers of works such as Call Me By Your Name and Giovanni's Room. Her evocative reflections will shift our own perceptions of love, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.
Redefining Realness: my path to womanhood, identity, love & so much more by ISBN: 9781476709123Publication Date: 2014-02-04In 2011, Marie Claire magazine published a profile of Janet Mock in which she publicly stepped forward for the first time as a trans woman. Since then, Mock has gone from covering the red carpet for People.com to advocating for all those who live within the shadows of society. Redefining Realness offers a bold new perspective on being young, multiracial, economically challenged and transgender in America.
Trans: a memoir by ISBN: 9781784781675Publication Date: 2016-11-15'Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation.' In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery -- a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment -- a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics. Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive.- Dirty River by ISBN: 9781551526003Publication Date: 2015-11-03In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a community of queer punks of colour offering promises of love and revolution, yet they remained haunted by the reasons she left home in the first place. This passionate, riveting memoir is a mixtape of dreams and nightmares, of immigration court lineups and queer South Asian dance nights; it is an intensely personal road map and an intersectional, tragicomic tale that reveals how a disabled queer woman of colour and abuse survivor navigates the dirty river of the not-so-distant past and, as the subtitle suggests, "dreams their way home."
She's Not There: a life in two genders by ISBN: 076791404XPublication Date: 2003-07-29The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She's Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story. By turns funny and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the remarkable territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. She's Not There is a portrait of a loving marriage and the love of James for his wife, Grace, and, against all odds, the enduring love of Grace for the woman who becomes her sister; Jenny. To this extraordinary true story, Boylan brings the humorous, fresh voice that won her accolades as one of the best comic novelists of her generation. With her distinctive and winning perspective, She's Not There explores the dramatic outward changes and unexpected results of life as a woman: Jenny fights the urge to eat salad, while James consumed plates of ribs; gone is the stability of one damn mood, all the damn time. While Boylan's own secret was unusual, to say the least, she captures the universal sense of feeling uncomfortable, out of sorts with the world, and misunderstood by her peers.
Tranny: confessions of punk rock's most infamous anarchist sellout by ISBN: 9780316387958Publication Date: 2016-11-15It began in a bedroom in Naples, Florida, when a misbehaving punk teenager named Tom Gabel, armed with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a headful of anarchist politics, landed on a riff. Gabel formed Against Me! and rocketed the band from its scrappy beginnings --banging on a drum kit made of pickle buckets -- to a major-label powerhouse that critics have called this generation's The Clash. Since its inception in 1997, Against Me! has been one of punk's most influential modern bands, but also one of its most divisive. With every notch the four-piece climbed in their career, they gained new fans while infuriating their old ones. They suffered legal woes, a revolving door of drummers, and a horde of angry, militant punks who called them "sellouts" and tried to sabotage their shows at every turn. But underneath the public turmoil, something much greater occupied Gabel -- a secret kept for 30 years, only acknowledged in the scrawled-out pages of personal journals and hidden in lyrics. Through a troubled childhood, delinquency, and struggles with drugs, Gabel was on a punishing search for identity. Not until May of 2012 did a Rolling Stone profile finally reveal it: Gabel is a transsexual, and would from then on be living as a woman under the name Laura Jane Grace. Tranny is the intimate story of Against Me!'s enigmatic founder, weaving the narrative of the band's history, as well as Grace's, with dozens of never-before-seen entries from the piles of journals Grace kept. More than a typical music memoir about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll -- although it certainly has plenty of that -- Tranny is an inside look at one of the most remarkable stories in the history of rock.
Conundrum by ISBN: 015122563XPublication Date: 1974-04-01The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man's man. Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman. "Conundrum", one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris's hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.
Crossing by ISBN: 0226556689Publication Date: 1999-11-10We have read the stories of those who have "crossed" lines of race and class and culture. But few have written of crossing -- completely and entirely -- the gender line. Crossing is the story of Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald), once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s and 1960s privilege, and her dramatic and poignant journey to becoming a woman. McCloskey's account of her painstaking efforts to learn to "be a woman" unearth fundamental questions about gender and identity, and hatreds and anxieties, revealing surprising answers.
Tomorrow Will Be Different: love, loss, and the fight for trans equality by ISBN: 9781524761479Publication Date: 2018-03-06Sarah McBride is on a mission to fight for transgender rights around the world. But before she was a prominent activist, and before she became the first transgender person to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, she was a teenager struggling with her identity. With emotional depth and unparalleled honesty, Sarah shares her personal struggle with gender identity, coming out to her supportive but distraught parents, and finding her way as a woman. She inspires readers with her barrier-breaking political journey that took her, in just four years, from a frightened, closeted college student to one of the nation's most prominent transgender activists walking the halls of the White House, passing laws, and addressing the country in the midst of a heated presidential election. She also details the heartbreaking romance with her first love and future husband Andy, a trans man and activist, who passed away from cancer in 2014 just days after they were married. Sarah's story of identity, love, and tragic loss serves as a powerful entry point for readers who want to gain a deeper understanding of gender identity and what it means to be openly transgender. From issues like bathroom access to healthcare, identification and schools, Sarah weaves the important political milestones, cultural and political debates, and historical context into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds. Tomorrow Will Be Different highlights Sarah's work as an activist and the key issues at the forefront of the fight for trans equality, providing a call-to-arms and empowering look at the road ahead. The fight for equality and freedom has only just begun.
Scholarly Texts
Transgender History: the roots of today's revolution by ISBN: 9781580056892Publication Date: 2017-11-07Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990, the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.
Trap Door: trans cultural production and the politics of visibility by ISBN: 9780262036603Publication Date: 2017-12-15Essays, conversations, and archival investigations explore the paradoxes, limitations, and social ramifications of trans representation within contemporary culture. The increasing representation of trans identity throughout art and popular culture in recent years has been nothing if not paradoxical. Trans visibility is touted as a sign of a liberal society, but it has coincided with a political moment marked both by heightened violence against trans people (especially trans women of color) and by the suppression of trans rights under civil law. Trap Door grapples with these contradictions. The essays, conversations, and dossiers gathered here delve into themes as wide-ranging yet interconnected as beauty, performativity, activism, and police brutality. Collectively, they attest to how trans people are frequently offered "doors" -- entrances to visibility and recognition -- that are actually "traps," accommodating trans bodies and communities only insofar as they cooperate with dominant norms. The volume speculates about a third term, perhaps uniquely suited for our time: the trapdoor, neither entrance nor exit, but a secret passageway leading elsewhere. Trap Door begins a conversation that extends through and beyond trans culture, showing how these issues have relevance for anyone invested in the ethics of visual culture.
Histories of the Transgender Child by ISBN: 9781452958156Publication Date: 2018-10-23With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today's transgender children are a brand new generation -- pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender. Beginning with the early 1900s when children with "ambiguous" sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children's sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and '70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children's bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender's plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies. Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century -- a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents.
Invisible Lives: the erasure of transsexual and transgendered people by ISBN: 0226568105Publication Date: 2000-12-15Invisible Lives is the first scholarly study of transgendered people -- cross-dressers, drag queens and transsexuals -- and their everyday lives. Through combined theoretical and empirical study, Viviane K. Namaste argues that transgendered people are not so much produced by medicine or psychiatry as they are erased, or made invisible, in a variety of institutional and cultural settings. Namaste begins her work by analyzing two theoretical perspectives on transgendered people -- queer theory and the social sciences -- displaying how neither of these has adequately addressed the issues most relevant to sex change: everything from employment to health care to identity papers. Namaste then examines some of the rhetorical and semiotic inscriptions of transgendered figures in culture, including studies of early punk and glam rock subcultures, to illustrate how the effacement of transgendered people is organized in different cultural sites. Invisible Lives concludes with new research on some of the day-to-day concerns of transgendered people, offering case studies in violence, health care, gender identity clinics, and the law.
Selfie Aesthetics by ISBN: 1478022752Publication Date: 2022-03-18In Selfie Aesthetics, Nicole Erin Morse examines how trans feminine artists use selfies and self-representational art to explore transition, selfhood, and relationality. Morse contends that rather than being understood as shallow emblems of a narcissistic age, selfies can produce politically meaningful encounters between creators and viewers. Through close readings of selfies and other digital artworks by trans feminist artists, Morse details a set of formal strategies they call selfie aesthetics: doubling, improvisation, seriality, and nonlinear temporality. Morse traces these strategies in the work of Zackary Drucker, Vivek Shraya, Tourmaline, Alok Vaid-Menon, Zinnia Jones, and Natalie Wynn, showing how these artists present improvisational identities and new modes of performative resistance by conveying the materialities of trans life. Morse shows how the interaction between selfie creators and viewers constructs collective modes of being and belonging in ways that envision trans feminist futures. By demonstrating the aesthetic depth and political potential of selfie creation, distribution, and reception, Morse deepens understandings of gender performativity and trans experience.
Essays
I Hope We Choose Love by ISBN: 9781551527758Publication Date: 2019-10-15What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith? In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
Care Work: dreaming disability justice by ISBN: 9781551527383Publication Date: 2018-10-30In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative "collective access" -- access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure -- in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour. Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
Whipping Girl: a transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity by ISBN: 9781580051545Publication Date: 2007-05-14Biologist and trans woman Julie Serano reveals a unique perspective on femininity, masculinity, and gender identity. A provocative manifesto, Whipping Girl tells the powerful story of Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist. Serano shares her experiences and observations-both pre- and post-transition-to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole. Serano's well-honed arguments stem from her ability to bridge the gap between the often-disparate biological and social perspectives on gender. She exposes how deep-rooted the cultural belief is that femininity is frivolous, weak, and passive, and how this 'feminine' weakness exists only to attract and appease male desire. In addition to debunking popular misconceptions about transsexuality, Serano makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity-in all of its wondrous forms.
Gender Outlaw: on men, women, and the rest of us by ISBN: 0415908973Publication Date: 1994-05-12Gender Outlaw is the work of a woman who has been through some changes--a former heterosexual male, a one-time Scientologist and IBM salesperson, now a lesbian woman writer and actress who makes regular rounds on the TV (so to speak) talk shows. In her book, Bornstein covers the "mechanics" of her surgery, everything you've always wanted to know about gender (but were too confused to ask) addresses the place and politics of the transgendered and interrogates the questions of those who give the subject little thought, creating questions of her own.
Other Nonfiction
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves by ISBN: 9780199325351Publication Date: 2014-06-10There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their gender identities. Only recently have sex and gender been thought of as separate concepts, and we have learned that sex (traditionally thought of as physical orbiological) is as variable as gender (traditionally thought of as social). While trans people share many common experiences, there is immense diversity within trans communities. There are an estimated 700,000 transgendered individuals in the US and 15 million worldwide. Even still, there's been a notable lack of organized information for this sizable group. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource - a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender or genderqueer authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written for and by 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 transgender issue, such as race, religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health topics, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more. Anonymous quotes and testimonials from transgender people who have been surveyed about their experiences are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In this unique 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.
Queer and Trans Artists of Color by ISBN: 9781492215646Publication Date: 2014-06-05A collection of sixteen unique and honest conversations you won't read anywhere else...Mixed-race queer art activist Nia King left a full-time job in an effort to center her life around making art. Grappling with questions of purpose, survival, and compromise, she started a podcast called We Want the Airwaves in order to pick the brains of fellow queer and trans artists of color about their work, their lives, and "making it" - both in terms of success and in terms of survival. In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses fat burlesque with Magnoliah Black, queer fashion with Kiam Marcelo Junio, interning at Playboy with Janet Mock, dating gay Latino Republicans with Julio Salgado, intellectual hazing with Kortney Ryan Ziegler, gay gentrification with Van Binfa, getting a book deal with Virgie Tovar, the politics of black drag with Micia Mosely, evading deportation with Yosimar Reyes, weird science with Ryka Aoki, gay public sex in Africa with Nick Mwaluko, thin privilege with Fabian Romero, the tyranny of "self-care" with Lovemme Corazón, "selling out" with Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik, the self-employed art activist hustle with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and much, much more. Welcome to the future of QPOC art activism.
Feature Films
The Matrix by
Publication Date: 1999Neo (Reeves) -- mild-mannered software author by day, feared hacker by night -- is recruited into a cell of cyber-rebels, led by Morpheus (Fishburne) and the warrior Trinity (Moss). They have made a fundamental discovery about the world: It does not exist. It is only a seedy utopia where humanity is preserved, protected, and endlessly recycled by a mega-computer. Cypher (Pantoliano) turns traitorous for access to comforts unmatched by the drab post-apocalyptic real world, while Agent Smith (Weaving) dismisses humans as "a plague"- -- for which non-organic life is "the cure." In a dystopian future, the "real" world as we know it is nothing more than a computer construct, created by an all-powerful artificial intelligence. A small group of humans has found a way out of the construct, and are now fighting for the future of the human race.Drunktown's Finest by
Publication Date: 2015Three young Native Americans -- an adopted Christian girl, a rebellious father-to-be, and a promiscuous transsexual -- strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation.
Tangerine by Publication Date: 2015It's Christmas Eve in Tinseltown and Sin-Dee is back on the block. Upon hearing that her pimp boyfriend hasn't been faithful during the 28 days she was locked up, the working girl and her best friend, Alexandra, embark on a mission to get to the bottom of the scandalous rumor. Their rip-roaring odyssey leads them through various subcultures of Los Angeles.
Documentaries
Prodigal Sons by
Returning home to Montana for her high school reunion, filmmaker Kimberly Reed (previously the school quarterback and now a transgender woman) hopes for reconciliation with her long-estranged adopted brother. But along the way she uncovers stunning revelations (including a connection to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth), intense sibling rivalries, and unforeseeable twists of plot and gender that force them to face challenges no one could imagine.
Documentary Series
True Trans with Laura Jane Grace The story of Punk rock singer Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! who came out as a woman in 2012, and other members of the trans community whose experiences are woefully underrepresented and misunderstood in the media.
My Genderation Documentary Films A selection of documentaries by My Genderation
Short Films
Atlantic is a Sea of Bones by An experimental short film drawing from the Lucille Clifton poem of the same name and starring Egyptt LaBeija about how small every day acts of refusal, resistance, and existence—such as performance and self expression—have a tremendous impact on the world.
Southern for Pussy by Looking ahead to a world in which a protagonist’s transness is not the crux of their story arc, Southern for Pussy (2015) simply finds a mother and daughter discussing pussy. Written by the performers, Zackary Drucker and Penny Sori (Drucker’s real-life mother), Southern for Pussy is semi-autobiographical and presents an evolved relationship in which honesty has no boundaries. Circling around hot button topics such as online dating, sex, aging, and anatomy, the film proposes an advanced world where transness is incidental and so embedded in everyday life that it’s not even mentioned by name.
Get Off My Turf! by Get Off My Turf! is a short film about a transgender woman who finds out that her neighbour is transphobic. The film delves into some of the modern depictions of transphobia and explores friendship, solidarity and conflict between two very different women.
A Trans With a Movie Camera by A non-narrative cine-essay that collaboratively explores the potentials for trans-feminine representation in film.
Soless by A transgender woman begins to lose track of reality as she navigates the space between what is natural and what is artificial.
Uma noite sem lua by The limit of the languages used to describe our transfigurations is the word. The word Travesti is a limit, an invitation and a reminder. And my darkness pre-exists with race and gender. The community is both poison and honey. I am bantu. I am the messenger who announces the transmutation that we call Travesti.
Over Stigmatized by Created by and for trans, gender non-conforming, non-binary and allies from GAP’s SupaFriends LGBTQ media program, this thriller tells the story of how Brave, a racial justice activist and filmmaker, responds to the loss of his ex-girlfriend Kelly, a trans justice organizer, and grapples with his own guilt about hiding their relationship. This film tackles the epidemic of transphobic violence and the silence around the murders of trans women. Starring Devin Lowe, Giselle Ariel Bleuz, Brooke Lynn, Tamera M. Willams, Chiche Ahoffe And Indya Moore.
Other Media Resources
- Transgender Media Portal
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The Transgender Media Portal aims to make audiovisual work by trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people more available to artists, activists, festival programmers, researchers, instructors, and the public.
One From the Vaults One From the Vaults, a trans history podcast by Morgan M Page. We bring you all the dirt, gossip, and glamour from trans history!
Transgeneral Transgeneral is a weekly podcast covering a range of topics with guest speakers from our community. Hosted by two trans women: Chelsey and Charlotte.
The Black Girl Dangerous Podcast with Raquel Willis BGD Podcast was a podcast all about current events, pop culture and whatever the hell else was happening on social media discussed from a dope intersectional lens. Host Raquel Willis and the illustrious guests of the week used hilarity and insight to give you everything you need.
Hoodrat to Headwrap A Decolonized Podcast for lovers on the margins, join your resident sexuality educator Ericka Hart and Deep East Oakland's very own Ebony Donnley, as we game give, dismantle white supremacy and kiki in the cosmos somewhere between radical hood epistemological black queer love ethics, pop culture, house plants and a sea of books.
Queer Sex Ed Each month, Sara and Jay explore topics in sex health, relationships, queer identities, BDSM, kink, sex work, and more. Queer Sex Ed is an imperative statement. When we call to "Queer" Sex Ed, it is a call-to-arms for sexual health educators, schools, parents, and people in all types of relationships to intentionally "queer" the institutions of sexual communication, sexual health, interpersonal relationships, and relationship structure.
What the Trans!? UK-based news podcast for trans and non-binary folks and our allies. Join snarky trans fact-finding team Michelle and Ashleigh as they dissect the news, interview guests and chat about pop culture.Primetime
Dig into the hidden history of television with Vox’s critic-at-large, Emily VanDerWerff. Each season, we explore the tragic, comedic, and occasionally world-changing stories that have marked a medium that’s dominated the global conversation for the last 75 years.
Marsha's Plate Marsha’s Plate is a lively podcast where three friends come together every Thursday to share opinions and perspectives through a black trans lens. Hosted By Diamond Stylz, Mia Mix, and Zee. All Houston-Based digital strategist, civil right advocates, and TPOC. As poor black trans people, We stand at the intersections of racial oppression, gender inequality, and the consequences of phobias of all of our identities. So our voices is often silenced in just as many intersectional ways.
GenderGP The GenderGP Podcast is a series of interviews and discussions hosted by GenderGP Founder, Dr. Helen Webberley and GenderGP Lead Therapist, Marianne Oakes, covering all aspects of life as a member of the trans community. Chatting with experts, healthcare professionals, influencers and most importantly, transgender people themselves, the GenderGP Podcast aims to provide information, insight and inspiration to those on their own gender journey. It also aims to be a valuable source of information for family, friends, and anyone looking to understand more about this wonderfully diverse community.
A Woman's Smile by A podcast where Patti Harrison and Lorelei Ramirez talk about, well, everything! But especially the gentle and kind nature of a woman’s smile.
Celeste by Help Madeline survive her inner demons on her journey to the top of Celeste Mountain, in this super-tight platformer from the creators of TowerFall. Brave hundreds of hand-crafted challenges, uncover devious secrets, and piece together the mystery of the mountain.
Able to play on: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, itch.io, Steam, Epic Games Store
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LIONKILLER by LIONKILLER is a choose-your-own-adventure game made in Twine. Play as Hua Mulan, who is conscripted into the First Opium War against the British Empire. Run a flower shop, kiss a girl, shoot a matchlock rifle, and uncover a military conspiracy! Your actions will lead you to one out of four different endings. Will you get the girl, or will you die an inglorious death?
Able to play on: itch.io
Resurrection Lands by “Having lost all our history, we needed a way to bring it back. So we resurrected our Black Trans ancestors using the most advanced technology we had. Those that were resurrected now live out their second life in a digital environment built to sustain them. However, when this environment begins to be appropriated for trans tourism, a group of Black Trans people decide to form a team to prevent the exploitation of the archive…”
Able to play on: itch.io
Wayward Strand by Wayward Strand is a heartfelt story told in a curious way. Hop aboard an airborne hospital and meet its fully-voiced cast of eclectic characters. As time passes for everyone on board, explore the interwoven lives of the patients and staff; discover something new on each and every playthrough.
Able to play on: PlayStation 4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam
Bloom: Memories by Bloom is a refreshing new take on the action RPG. --- Inspired by games such as the classic Zelda (with deeper mechanics / art / story) --- Where killing is optional and creatures act on realistic desires.
Coming soon to play on: Steam
Dys4ia by In four sections, the players experience how the artist decides to have hormone therapy and they accompany her through the transition from her birth gender to her new gender. The game documents a period of six months through a series of mini-games that reflect gender politics, identity, personal responsibility, white privileges, and personal development.
Able to play on: freegames.org
Spotlight on Queer Poetry & Poetics
Poetry often touches the core of our complex and intersecting identities as human beings. From the outset of recorded history the identities embodied in poems are often those of marginalized groups. This is certainly true with regard to queer poets. From classical poets like Sappho to luminaries of literary modernism like Hart Crane to contemporary poets like Ocean Vuong, queer experience and desire is an undeniable presence in the poetry and poetics of the global canon. Here below is just a small sampling of poetry from queer poets from a variety of backgrounds and intersectionalities.
Image on right: Cover image for feature. Text reads "Queer Poetry and Poetics, an introduction."
Resources for Further Exploration
A selection of articles, online compilations, and other resources relevant to queer poetry & poetics
- "Queer Poetics: Deviant Swerves, in Three" (from The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies)
- "Queer Love Poems: LGBTQ love poetry by and for gay men, lesbians, and the queer community" (Poetry Foundation)
- "LGBTQ Poetry: The Tradition" (Poets.org)
- "12 queer and trans poets to read for National Poetry Month" (NBC News)
- "7 Queer Poetry Books I Wish I Could Give to My Teenage Self" (Electric Literature)
- "Queering Poetics, or “Werking” It" (Lambda Literary)
Next Steps
If you'd like to engage more deeply with National Poetry Month, the Indiana University Libraries Arts & Humanities department has put together a number of features and guides to showcase our holdings relevant to this month-long celebration of poetry. You'll find those, below:
- Poetry & Poetics in Music & Media (Media Studies)
- Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry (Gender Studies)
- Black American Poets and Poetry (English & American Literature)
Anthologies
Anthologies of poems by queer poets
- Nepantla: an anthology for queer poets of color by ISBN: 9781937658786Publication Date: 2018-05-01In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States. Now, Nepantla will appear for the first time in print as a survey of poetry by queer poets of color throughout U.S. history, including literary legends such as Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Ai, and Pat Parker alongside contemporaries such as Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Robin Coste Lewis, Joy Harjo, Richard Blanco, Erika L. Sánchez, Jericho Brown, Carl Phillips, Tommy Pico, Eduardo C. Corral, Chen Chen, and more!
The World That Belongs to Us: an Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia by ISBN: 9789353574574Publication Date: 2020-09-22This first-of-its-kind anthology brings together the best of contemporary queer poetry from South Asia, both from the subcontinent and its many diasporas.The anthology features well-known voices like Hoshang Merchant, Ruth Vanita, Suniti Namjoshi, Kazim Ali, Rajiv Mohabir as well as a host of new poets. The themes range from desire and loneliness, sexual intimacy and struggles, caste and language, activism both on the streets and in the homes, the role of family both given and chosen, and heartbreaks and heartjoins. Writing from Bangalore, Baroda, Benares, Boston, Chennai, Colombo, Dhaka, Delhi, Dublin, Karachi, Kathmandu, Lahore, London, New York City, and writing in languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Urdu, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, and, of course, English, the result is an urgent, imaginative and beautiful testament to the diversity, politics, aesthetics and ethics of queer life in South Asia today.
Flicker and Spark: a contemporary queer anthology of spoken word and poetry by ISBN: 9780982955390Publication Date: 2013-02-01"When we talk about literature, there are tweets and there are three-volume novels. And, selected poems and collected poems and a poem. There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through. I think post-identity is sort of a zen concept. You know like, "Wake up " (Smacks hands with a sharp clap). Whats the identity of that moment? Whats the gender of that moment? There are spots where there is no identity whatsoever. But by the nature of who I am or who any of us are we will need to be in groups that resemble us. Its so crucial to have those identity groups where you gather and are reinforced by your conversations. And dont live there. Something Im really interested in is how queer identity is like an immigrant group. We need to find each other at various points to say, "God-Iceland" But we dont live in Iceland. I think "post" is a desire to have a little space, but I dont think its a place where you get to stay." -Eileen Myles
QDA: a queer disability anthology by ISBN: 9781941960028Publication Date: 2015-11-12Featuring fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and comics by 48 writers from around the world, QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology proves that intersectionality isn't just a buzzword. It's a penetrating and unforgettable look into the hearts and souls of those defiant enough to explore their own vulnerabilities and demonstrate their own strengths. Here is a gathering of people with the transformative -- and political -- power of love that transcends gender and ability. Ignorance is the biggest barrier.
Building Fires in the Snow: a collection of Alaska LGBTQ short fiction and poetry by ISBN: 9781602233010Publication Date: 2016-09-15Diversity has always been central to Alaska identity, as the state's population consists of people with many different backgrounds, viewpoints, and life experiences. This book opens a window into these diverse lives, gathering stories and poems about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer life into a brilliant, path-breaking anthology. In these pages we see the panoply of LGBTQ life in Alaska today, from the quotidian urban adventures of a family -- shopping, going out, working -- to intimate encounters with Alaska's breathtaking natural beauty. At a time of great change and major strides in LGBTQ civil rights, Building Fires in the Snow shows us an Alaska that shatters stereotypes and reveals a side of Alaska that's been little seen until now.
Individual Collections
Works by queer poets exploring queerness, from across time
The Renunciations by ISBN: 9781644450536Publication Date: 2021-05-04An extraordinary collection of endurance and transformation by the award-winning author of Bestiary The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one's sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle" -- an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends -- the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility. In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma -- a home whose construction starts "with a razing."
Postcolonial Love Poem by ISBN: 9781644450147Publication Date: 2020-03-03Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages -- bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers -- be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: "Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden." In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: "I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible." Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope -- in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
Thrown in the Throat by ISBN: 9781571315212Publication Date: 2020-08-11"Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages." And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon's butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when "because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes." Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country's long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. "Sometimes even a diamond was once alive" writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says "has deadly superpowers." And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia's debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive.
The Year of Blue Water by ISBN: 9780300242645Publication Date: 2019-03-26How can a search for self-knowledge reveal art as a site of community? Yanyi's arresting and straightforward poems weave experiences of immigration as a Chinese American, of racism, of mental wellness, and of gender from a queer and trans perspective. Between the contrast of high lyric and direct prose poems, Yanyi invites the reader to consider how to speak with multiple identities through trauma, transition, and ordinary life. These poems constitute an artifact of a groundbreaking and original author whose work reflects a long journey self-guided through tarot, therapy, and the arts. Foregrounding the power of friendship, Yanyi's poems converse with friends as much as with artists both living and dead, from Agnes Martin to Maggie Nelson to Robin Coste Lewis. This instructive collection gives voice to the multifaceted humanity within all of us and inspires attention, clarity, and hope through art-making and community.
This Wound Is a World by ISBN: 9781452962238Publication Date: 2019-09-03"i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
Black Queer Hoe by ISBN: 9781608469529Publication Date: 2018-09-04Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation. Women's sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.- Feeld by ISBN: 9781571315052Publication Date: 2018-08-14Jos Charles's revolutionary second collection of poetry, feeld, is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary. "i care so much abot the whord i cant reed." In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles's electrifying transliteration of English--Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect--what is old is made new again. "gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage." "did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye." The world of feeld is our own, but off-kilter, distinctly queer -- making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy. Urgent and vital, feeld composes a new narrative of what it means to live inside a marked body.
Don't Call Us Dead by ISBN: 9781555977856Publication Date: 2017-09-05Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Night Sky with Exit Wounds by ISBN: 9781556594953Publication Date: 2016-04-05Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night--sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side -- waiting.
IRL by ISBN: 9780991429868Publication Date: 2016-09-01IRL is a sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message, rooted in the epic tradition of A.R. Ammons, ancient Kumeyaay Bird Songs, and Beyonce's visual albums. It follows Teebs, a reservation-born, queer NDN weirdo, trying to figure out his impulses/desires/history in the midst of Brooklyn rooftops, privacy in the age of the Internet, street harassment, suicide, boys boys boys, literature, colonialism, religion, leaving one's 20s, and a love/hate relationship with English. He's plagued by an indecision, unsure of which obsessions, attractions, and impulses are essentially his, and which are the result of Christian conversion, hetero- patriarchal/colonialist white supremacy, homophobia, Bacardi, gummy candy, and not getting laid. IRL asks, what happens to a modern, queer indigenous person a few generations after his ancestors were alienated from their language, their religion, and their history? Teebs feels compelled towards "boys, burgers, booze," though he begins to suspect there is perhaps a more ancient goddess calling to him behind art, behind music, behind poetry.
Jimmy's Blues by ISBN: 9780312051044Publication Date: 1990-11-01Baldwin's language is deceptively simple--this poetry is easily understood. But the emotions behind the words go to the core not only of the poet's soul, but of America's. Readers will see Baldwin here in both a familiar and an altogether different light.
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by ISBN: 0393040909Publication Date: 1997-09-01A complete collection—over 300 poems—from one of this country's most influential poets.
Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems by ISBN: 9780307268150Publication Date: 2008-02-26Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) was one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century. Although he grew up in Grafton, Massachusetts, O'Hara developed into the quintessential poet of mid-century Manhattan; soon after his arrival in New York in 1951 he evolved a new kind of urban poetry that brilliantly captures the heady excitements of a golden period in the city's artistic life. O'Hara's style exudes an insistent, seductive glamour; his mercurial poems, at once open-ended and startlingly immediate, radiate an insouciant confidence that has lost none of its freshness over the decades. O'Hara was at the heart of a vibrant artistic circle that embraced fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, as well as experimental painters such as Willem de Kooning, Larry Rivers, and Jasper Johns.
Poems by ISBN: 9780374126568Publication Date: 2011-02-01This is the definitive edition of the work of one of America's greatest poets, increasingly recognized as one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century, loved by readers and poets alike. Bishop s poems combine humor and sadness, pain and acceptance, and observe nature and lives in perfect miniaturist close-up. The themes central to her poetry are geography and landscape from New England, where she grew up, to Brazil and Florida, where she later lived, human connection with the natural world, questions of knowledge and perception, and the ability or inability of form to control chaos. This new edition offers readers the opportunity to take in, entire, one of the great careers in twentieth century poetry.
White Buildings Poems by ISBN: 9780871401793Publication Date: 1926This first book of poems by hart Crane, one of his three major collections, was originally published in 1926. The themes in White Buildings are abstract and metaphysical, but Crane's associations and images spring from the American scene.
Heliodora, and Other Poems by ISBN: 9781334364273Publication Date: 1924The poem Lais has in italics a translation of the Plato epigram in the Greek Anthology. Heliodora has in italics the two Meleager epigrams from the Anthology. In Nossis is the translation of the opening lines of the Garland of Meleager and the poem of Nossis herself in the Greek Anthology. The four Sappho fragments are re-worked freely. The Odyssey is a translation of the opening of the first book. The Ion is a translation of the latter part of the first long choros of the Ion of Euripides.
Monographs
Selection of texts from our catalog with an emphasis on queerness and poetry
Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: rethinking the sexed body in verse and visual culture by ISBN: 9781472468147Publication Date: 2017-01-23Augmenting recent developments in theories of gender and sexuality, this anthology marks a compelling new phase in queer scholarship. Navigating notions of silence, misunderstanding, pleasure, and even affects of phobia in artworks and texts, the essays in this volume propose new and surprising ways of understanding the difficulty -- even failure -- of the epistemology of the closet. By treating "queer" not as an identity but as an activity, this book represents a divergence from previous approaches associated with Lesbian and Gay Studies. The authors in this anthology refute the interpretive ease of binaries such as "out" versus "closeted" and "gay" versus "straight," and recognize a more opaque relationship of identity to pleasure. The essays range in focus from photography, painting, and film to poetry, Biblical texts, lesbian humor, and even botany. Evaluating the most recent critical theories and introducing them in close examinations of objects and texts, this book queers the study of verse and visual culture in new and exciting ways.
Queer Lyrics: difficulty and closure in American poetry by ISBN: 9780312294977Publication Date: 2003-05-02Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.
The Poetics of Cruising: queer visual culture from Whitman to Grindr by ISBN: 9781452966502Publication Date: 2022-02-15The Poetics of Cruising explores the relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of leading poets, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first. What is it that happens, asks Jack Parlett, and what is it that is sought, in this often transient moment of perception we call cruising, this perceptual arena where acts of looking between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett believes that this moment is not only optical in nature but visual: a mode of looking that warrants comparison with the ways in which we behold still and moving images. Whether it's Whitman's fixation with daguerreotypes, Langston Hughes's hybrid photographic works, or Frank O'Hara's love of Hollywood movie stars, argues Parlett, the history of poets cruising abounds with this intermingling between the verbal and the visual, the passing and the fixed. To look at someone in the act of cruising, this history suggests, is to capture, consider, and aestheticize, amid the flux and instantaneity of urban time. But it is also to reveal the ambivalence at the heart of this erotic search, where power may be unevenly distributed across glances, and gendered and racialized bodies are marked. Thus, in identifying for the first time this confluence of cruising, poetry, and visual culture, Parlett concludes that the visual erotic economy associated with gay cruising today, exemplified by the photographic grid of an app like Grindr, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon. Innovative, astute, and highly readable, and drawing on compelling archival material, The Poetics of Cruising is a must for scholars of queer and LGBTQ literature and culture, modern and contemporary poetry, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.
Queer Troublemakers: the poetics of flippancy by ISBN: 9781350079359Publication Date: 2019-08-08Irreverent and provoking, the figure of the 'queer troublemaker' is a disruptive force both poetically and politically. Tracing the genealogy of this figure in modern avant-garde American poetry, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain develops innovative close readings of the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson. Exploring how these writers play with identity, gender, sexuality and genre, Bussey-Chamberlain constructs a queer poetics of flippancy that can subvert ideas of success and failure, affect and affectation, performance and performativity, poetry and being.
Queer Optimism: lyric personhood and other felicitous persuasions by ISBN: 9780816649990Publication Date: 2008-12-03'Queer Optimism' presents a new paradigm for queer theory. Through fresh, perceptive, and sensitive readings of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and Elizabeth Bishop, Snediker reveals that each of these poets demonstrated an interest in the durability of positive affects.
Chaucer's Queer Poetics: rereading the dream trio by ISBN: 9780802090355Publication Date: 2006-10-07Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems -- the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles -- began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.
The Poetics of Waste by ISBN: 9781137402783Publication Date: 2014-06-05Modernist debates about waste -- both aesthetic and economic -- often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.
Articles
Selection of scholarly articles from journals in our holdings
- Galarte, F. J. (2014). “Transgender Chican@ Poetics: Contesting, Interrogating, and Transforming Chicana/o Studies.” Chicano/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas En Letras Y Cambio Social, 13(2), 118–39.
- Spitzer, J. (2019). “The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s.” Journal of Modern Literature, 42(3), 19.
- Vincent, J. (1998). “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics.” Twentieth Century Literature, 44(2), 155–75.
- Vogel, S. (2006). “Closing Time: Langston Hughes and the Queer Poetics of Harlem Nightlife.” Criticism, 48(3), 397–425.
- Flint, K. (2009). “The ‘Hour of Pink Twilight’: Lesbian Poetics and Queer Encounters on the Fin-de-Siecle Street.” Victorian Studies, 51(4), 687.
- Arckens, E. (2016). “‘In This Told-Backward Biography’: Marianne Moore Against Survival in Her Queer Archival Poetry.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 44(1/2), 111–27.
- Phillips, S. (2019). “Intimacy, Epistolarity, and the Work of Queer Mourning in James Schuyler’s Poetry.” Journal of Modern Literature, 42(3), 55–73.
- Quashie, K. (2016). “Black Masculinity and Queer Gendering in Rita Dove’s ‘Thomas and Beulah.’” CLA Journal, 59(4), 364–80.
- Merrydew, A. (2020). “Reflecting (On) the Body: Trans Self-Representation and Resistance in the Poetry of Ely Shipley.” Comparative American Studies, 17(1), 58–72.
- Boone, B. & O'Hara, F. (1979). “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara.” Social Text, 1, 59–92.
Podcasts
Episodes of podcasts featuring queer poets
- "Ocean Vuong: A Life Worthy of Our Breath" (On Being)
- "Jericho Brown Small Truths and Other Surprises" (On Being)
- "Natalie Diaz vs. the Lexicon" (The VS Podcast)
- "Cyrée Jarelle Johnson vs. Satisfaction" (The VS Podcast)
- "Tommy Pico vs Instinct" (The VS Podcast)
- "Aurielle Marie vs. Audacity" (The VS Podcast)
- "Yanyi vs. the Personal" (The VS Podcast)
- "All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt. 1)" (Roll Call)
- "All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt. 2)" (Roll Call)
Recitations
Audio readings of poems by queer poets
- "Of Course She Looked Back," Natalie Diaz (Poetry Unbound)
- "I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party," Chen Chen (Poetry Unbound)
- "i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense," Danez Smith (Poetry Unbound)
- "In the Chapel of St. Mary’s," Donika Kelly (Poetry Unbound)
- "Sestina," Elizabeth Bishop (Poetry Unbound)
- "Daybreak," Jake Skeets (Poetry Unbound)
- “Seventh Circle of Earth," Ocean Vuong (Poetry Unbound)
Interviews
Text and video interviews with queer poets
- "Survival as a Creative Force: An Interview with Ocean Vuong" (The Paris Review)
- "Layli Long Soldier Interviews Billy-Ray Belcourt" (BOMB)
- "What’s Queer Form Anyway? An Interview with Maggie Nelson" (The Paris Review)
- "Ways to Become Unpinnable: Talking with Natalie Diaz" (The Rumpus)
Online Collections
Queer poetry collections, available freely online
Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry
Black LGBTQ+ poets write from the intersections of Black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer identities and experiences. Black LGBTQ+ poets explore issues of gender expression and discrimination, love, sex, sexuality, desire, culture, race, and more through their creative work. Due to compounding oppressions, the history of Black LGBTQ+ poetry and poetics has not been given adequate attention by scholars or mainstream audiences. What follows is a list of poetry books by Black LGBTQ+ poets, anthologies of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) poets who are LGBTQ+, and scholarly articles on the topic, in celebration of Black History Month. We have also included a very brief introduction to African American poetry and recommendations for further reading on that subject.
Video: Poet Danez Smith reading "Genesissy" | Button Poetry (2015).
Next Steps
As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough time to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm they've experienced. We recognize that there is much more to be done, that racism and anti-blackness can't be eliminated simply through the creation of resource guides, and that the work of realizing justice won't soon be over. But nevertheless, we keep trying, contributing how we can and building upon the efforts of those who came before us, and we continue to learn from and with one another.
If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this remembering. You'll find those, below:
- Black Histories & Futures Month (Media Studies)
- The Sound of Black History Month (Media Studies)
- Black Philosophy & Thought (Philosophy)
- In Memoriam: bell hooks (Philosophy)
- Local Black History (Race, Migration, & Indigeneity)
- Black American Poets and Poetry, 1770-Present (Literature)
- Black Freedom Movements in American History (History)
- Contemporary Black Playwrights You Should Know (Theatre & Drama)
- Performance and Protest: Theatre, Politics, and Activism in America (Theatre & Drama)
- Black Artists & Designers (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Pan-Africanism in Art and Literature (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Afrocentric Architecture (Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- Black History Month Streaming and DVD Resources (Media Services)
- Youth Materials on Africa & African Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on African American Identity (Education Library)
- Youth Materials on Afro-Latine Identity (Education Library)
And for all things Black culture, you can never go wrong with the resources, services, and collections of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library .
- Don't Call Us Dead by ISBN: 9781555977856Publication Date: 2017-09-05Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality -- the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood -- and a diagnosis of HIV positive. Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America -- "Dear White America" -- where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus by ISBN: 9780986046186Publication Date: 2017-09-01"Reading Anaïs Duplan's chapbook, you realize you are more than an assemblage of ideologies, a cellular plan, or even an estranged, familial relation possessing the accoutrements of a melancholic nation, but also, too, the glorious product of dense, self-referential layered texts that call to the surface your loneliness and feelings of kinship. Here are poems that revel in post- hybridity and borderless threnodies, and go straight to the stillness of the heart, to performances of language that are fierce and juicier than a papaya, and frankly, that one would only expect from a brilliant, young mind as theirs." --Major Jackson
The New Testament by ISBN: 9781619321199Publication Date: 2015-10-15In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest thing -- and the truth is coming on fast.
Play Dead by ISBN: 9781938584374Publication Date: 2016-04-18Lyrically raw and dangerously unapologetic, play dead challenges us to look at our cultivated selves as products of circumstance and attempts to piece together patterns amidst dissociative chaos. harris unearths a ruptured world dictated by violence—a place of deadly what ifs, where survival hangs by a thread. Getting by is carrying bruises and walking around with "half a skull."
Prelude to Bruise by ISBN: 9781566893749Publication Date: 2014-09-09Prelude to Bruise is a song from a tightrope, balancing ecstatic existence and the chaos that always threatens to engulf a life on the margins. Danger is everywhere in these poems but it never overwhelms them; the poet is always on the other side of them, anchoring them. And his story carries us relentlessly along.
Bestiary by ISBN: 1555977588Publication Date: 2016-10-11Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters--half human and half something else. Donika Kelly's Bestiary is a catalogue of creatures--from the whale and ostrich to the pegasus and chimera to the centaur and griffin. Among them too are poems of love, self-discovery, and travel, from "Out West" to "Back East." Lurking in the middle of this powerful and multifaceted collection is a wrenching sequence that wonders just who or what is the real monster inside this life of survival and reflection. Selected and with an introduction by the National Book Award winner Nikky Finney, Bestiary questions what makes us human, what makes us whole.
Boy with Thorn by ISBN: 9780822981060Publication Date: 2015-09-01In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation -- the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself--confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.
Dub by ISBN: 9781478005414Publication Date: 2020-02-14The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.- Black Queer Hoe by ISBN: 9781608469529Publication Date: 2018-09-04Black Queer Hoe is a refreshing, unapologetic intervention into ongoing conversations about the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation. Women's sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this powerful debut, Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, sexuality, reclamation, and power, in a world that refuses Black Queer women permission to define their own lives and boundaries.
Funeral Diva by ISBN: 9780872868113Publication Date: 2020-10-27A poetic memoir about coming-of-age in the AIDS era, and its effects on life and art. In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears--like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde--whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts the most pressing issues of our time with acerbic wit and audacity.
Then the War by ISBN: 9780374603762Publication Date: 2022-02-01Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips's work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.
Homie by ISBN: 9781644450109Publication Date: 2020-01-21Homie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family -- blood and chosen -- arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours.
Blessed Are the Peacemakers by ISBN: 9780810145177Publication Date: 2022-04-15Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. At once interested in the cyclical nature of domestic dysfunction and what we do when secrets of buried harm come to light, Blessed Are the Peacemakers asks what it means to make peace in the wake of intrafamilial violence and child sexual assault. These poems explore the ways the truth is often hidden behind layers of bleach and shame, and the ways we fail survivors by dismissing their stories and tolerating their abusers. Filled with elegies to the people who have been murdered by state violence, racism, and anti-Blackness in the United States, Blessed Are the Peacemakers interrogates the lengths and limitations of grace. Brionne Janae examines what it means to survive -- particularly as a Black girl, woman, queer person, or human -- and uses self-portraiture to explore how familial and communal trauma plague our mental health. How do we survive the grief of the past and present without becoming numb to or consumed by it? How do we remember, despite our pain, to enjoy our bodies and our lives while we still have them?
Manifesto by ISBN: 9780802158901Publication Date: 2022-01-18Bernadine Evaristo's astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is a vibrant and inspirational account of Evaristo's life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, Evaristo describes her childhood as one of eight siblings, with a Nigerian father and white Catholic mother, tells the story of how she helped set up Britain's first Black women's theatre company, remembers the queer relationships of her twenties, and recounts her determination to write books that were absent in the literary world around her. She provides a hugely powerful perspective to contemporary conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging. She reminds us of how far we have come, and how far we still have to go. In Manifesto, Evaristo charts her theory of unstoppability, showing creative people how they too can visualize and find success in their work, ignoring the naysayers. Both unconventional memoir and inspirational text, Manifesto is a unique reminder to us all to persist in doing work we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted. Evaristo shows us how we too can follow in her footsteps, from first vision, to insistent perseverance, to eventual triumph.
The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson by ISBN: 0195052528Publication Date: 1988-04-14Spanning the gamut of literary genres, from autobiographical short stories to poetry, journalism, and novelettes, this is a comprehensive collection of one of America's most seminal women writers.- The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by ISBN: 0393040909Publication Date: 1997-09-01A complete collection—over 300 poems—from one of this country's most influential poets.
Ceremonies by ISBN: 0452268176Publication Date: 1992-06-01Ceremonies offers provocative commentary on highly charged topics such as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of African-American men, feminism among men, and AIDS in the black community.
Directed by Desire by ISBN: 1556592280Publication Date: 2005-10-01Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of the poetry of June Jordan, considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets of the late twentieth century. Directed by Desire gathers the finest work from Jordan's 10 volumes, as well as 70 new, never-before-published poems that she wrote while dying of breast cancer. Throughout over 600 pages readers will find intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power--of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value. . . . She believed, and nourished the belief, that genuine, up-from-the-bottom revolution must include art, laughter, sensual pleasure, and the widest possible human referentiality." From These Poems These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready?
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by ISBN: 0679426310Publication Date: 1994-11-15A complete anthology of the poetry of Langston Hughes presents 860 poems that capture the rhythms, emotions, cultural significance, and political awareness of African-American life, from his earliest works to his final collection.
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by ISBN: 9780060541330Publication Date: 2003-11-25For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures. When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial, and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape. The first of its kind, this omnibus collection covers Nikki Giovanni's complete work of poetry from three decades, 1968-1998. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni contains Giovanni's first seven volumes of poetry: Black Feeling Black Talk, Black Judgement, Re: Creation, My House, The Women and the Men, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, and Those Who Ride the Night Winds. Arranged chronologically with a biographical timeline and introduction, a new afterword from the author, title and first-line indexes, and extensive notes to the poems, this collection is the testimony of a life's work -- from one of America's most beloved daughters and powerful poets.
Collected Poems by ISBN: 9780871406798Publication Date: 2013-04-01Robert Hayden was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He left behind an exquisite body of work, collected in this definitive edition, including A Ballad of Remembrance, Words in the Mourning Time, The Night-Blooming Cereus, Angle of Ascent, and American Journal, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Also included is an introduction by American poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, as well as an afterword by Arnold Rampersad that provides a critical and historical context. In Hayden's work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice -- characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern -- is a seminal one in American life and literature.
Here to Dare: 10 Gay Black Poets by ISBN: 0962167525Publication Date: 1992-07-01A collection that reveals the acute and poignant double-consciousness of men born Black and gay, and their fierce determination to survive.- Nepantla by ISBN: 9781937658786Publication Date: 2018-05-01The first major literary anthology for queer poets of color in the United States. In 2014, Christopher Soto and Lambda Literary Foundation founded the online journal Nepantla, with the mission to nurture, celebrate, and preserve diversity within the queer poetry community, including contributions as diverse in style and form, as the experiences of QPOC in the United States.
Afrekete by ISBN: 0385473559Publication Date: 1995-04-01An anthology of black lesbian writing. Twenty essays in prose and verse on subjects ranging from abortion to men's attitudes to family life.
Open Access Resources with African American Poetry Features
- Lift Every Voice: 250 Years of African American Poetry : Includes a timeline, features on poets, videos, and virtual events & programming.
- American Academy of Poets Black History Month feature
Scholarly sources on Black Queer Poetics:
- Priest, J. (2018) "Towards a Black Femme Fugitive Poetics." CrossCurrents, 68(4).
- . (2019). "An ImPossibility: Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics." The Black Scholar, 49(1).
- Lecture on Black Queer Poetics by MKE Melton, assistant professor of English at Gettysburg College (video, 2019)
Lists of books, articles, and media related to Black Queer Studies:
Black Queer Studies: a critical anthology by ISBN: 9780822336181Publication Date: 2005-11-01While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this groundbreaking work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Including work by scholars based in English, film studies, black studies, sociology, history, political science, legal studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, the volume showcases the broadly interdisciplinary nature of the black queer studies project. The contributors consider representations of the black queer body, black queer literature, the pedagogical implications of black queer studies, and the ways that gender and sexuality have been glossed over in black studies and race and class marginalized in queer studies. Whether exploring the closet as a racially loaded metaphor, arguing for the inclusion of diaspora studies in black queer studies, considering how the black lesbian voice that was so expressive in the 1970s and 1980s is all but inaudible today, or investigating how the social sciences have solidified racial and sexual exclusionary practices, these insightful essays signal an important and necessary expansion of queer studies.
No Tea, No Shade: new writings in Black queer studies by ISBN: 9780822362425Publication Date: 2016-10-28The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study. Topics include "raw" sex, pornography, the carceral state, gentrification, gender nonconformity, social media, the relationship between black feminist studies and black trans studies, the black queer experience throughout the black diaspora, and queer music, film, dance, and theater. The contributors both disprove naysayers who believed black queer studies to be a passing trend and respond to critiques of the field's early U.S. bias. Deferring to the past while pointing to the future, No Tea, No Shade pushes black queer studies in new and exciting directions.
Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies by ISBN: 9781138503472Publication Date: 2019-12-20This handbook offers diverse perspectives on queer Africa, incorporating scholarly contributions on themes that reflect and inflect the trajectories of queer contributions to African studies within and outside academia. The Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies incorporates a range of unique perspectives, reflecting ongoing struggles between regimes of inclusion and those of transformation premised upon different relational and reflexive engagements between queer embodiment and Africa's subjectivities. All sections of this handbook blend contributions from public intellectuals and practitioners with academic reflections on topics not limited to neoliberalism, social care, morality and ethics, social education, and technology, through the lens of queer African studies. The book renders visible the ongoing transformations and resistance within African societies as well as the inventiveness of queer presence in negotiating belonging. This handbook will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality in Africa, queer studies, and African culture and society.
A very brief introduction to the African American / Black Poetic Tradition
African American poetry predates the written word and has its roots in a rich oral tradition. shares sonic qualities with Black musical forms like gospel, jazz, blues, hip-hop, and rap, and includes a rich array of poetic sound devices: alliteration, rhyme, anaphora (the repetition of lines or fragments), to name a few. Black Poetry can be about any theme or subject, but the Black experience is often at the center of Black Poetry, which is informed by the distinctiveness of Black culture. Black Poets often unpack and critiques the systemic oppressions and individual discriminations that they, as Black Americans, have endured, like slavery, segregation, and police brutality. Notable writers and movements in Black Poetry are described in the Power of Poetry series of blog posts from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Critics and supporters of the distinction between African American and American literature abound. The positions of each side are outlined in this wikipedia article on the subject.
Books and essays on African American poetry
- Langston Hughes, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926).
- June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” (2002).
The Black Poets by ISBN: 0553275631Publication Date: 1985-04-01"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it represents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Turning away from White models and returning to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress." --from the Introduction by Dudley Randall
Furious Flower by ISBN: 9780810141544Publication Date: 2019-12-16Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?
Freedom Time by ISBN: 9781421415208Publication Date: 2014-12-01Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature likewise have a hard time accounting for the distinctiveness of experimental writing, which is part of a general shift in emphasis among black writers away from appeals for social recognition or raising consciousness. In Freedom Time, Anthony Reed offers a theoretical reading of "black experimental writing" that presents the term both as a profound literary development and as a concept for analyzing how writing challenges us to rethink the relationships between race and literary techniques.
The Poetry of Black America by ISBN: 0060200898Publication Date: 1973-05-08An anthology of the works of African-American poets, including James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Angelina Weld Grimke, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, and others.
Renegade Poetics by ISBN: 9781609380588Publication Date: 2011-10-28Evie Shockley's Renegade Poetics separates what we think we know about black aesthetics from the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. The study reminds us, first, that even among the radicalized young poets and theorists who associated themselves with the Black Arts Movement that began in the mid-1960s, the contours of black aesthetics were deeply contested and, second, that debates about the relationship between aesthetics and politics for African American artists continue into the twenty-first century.
Indiana University Resources
- African American Poetry
This link opens in a new window
African American Poetry contains nearly 3,000 poems by African American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
- Twentieth-Century American Poetry
- This link opens in a new window
Collection of poetry surveying the movements, schools, and voices of modern and contemporary American poetry. The collection includes 50,000 poems by over 300 poets.
Open Access Resources with African American Poetry Features
- Lift Every Voice: 250 Years of African American Poetry : Includes a timeline, features on poets, videos, and virtual events & programming.
- American Academy of Poets Black History Month feature
- Poetry Foundation's Black History Month collection
Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples
This page provides suggested resources (books, video & film, articles & databases) relevant to Two-Spirit Identity and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual (LGBTQIA) Indigenous Identity.
The term Two-Spirit (2S, 2Spirit, Two Spirit, Twospirited) was coined in 1990 at the Indigenous lesbian and gay international gathering in Winnipeg. The term is a pan-Indian, umbrella term used by a number of Indigenous Native Americans to describe Native Peoples who fulfill traditional third-gender or variant-gender roles in their communities and cultures. The term is generally accepted but faces controversy from critics who consider it as reinforcing western notions of binary gender or attempting to erase terms that already exist in traditional communities for gender-variant members.
Acceptance, treatment, status, and rights of LGBTQIA Indigenous peoples and Two-Spirit individuals have varied historically. Contemporary understandings of Two-Spirit identity and what it means to be Indigenous and LGBTQIA vary greatly from tribe to tribe. We hope the resources collected in these pages will help readers gain a nuanced understanding of Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA Indigenous Identity.
Video: Nick Metcalf gives insight into his experiences being a two spirit, and explains why gender fluidity is necessary in today’s world | TEDx (2015).
About the Playlist
This mix features two-spirit and other Indigenous LGBTQIA and nonbinary/transgender artists from across Turtle Island, as well as other parts of the world. A work in progress, we welcome suggestions for artists from these groups for inclusion.
Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.
To learn more about the artists and communities represented in this playlist, check out some of the resources we consulted:
- Great Videos and Music from 8 Indigenous LGBTIA and/or Two Spirit Musicians (Indian Country Today)
- 6 Anthems by Queer and Two-Spirit Indigenous Artists to Pump You Up (WeRNative)
- Decolonial love: These Indigenous artists are taking back the self-love that colonialism stole (CBC)
- Pride Concert: A Queer, Trans, Two-Spirit Indigenous Showcase (video, University of Toronto SGDO)
Further Reading & Resources
- Annotated Bibliography on LGBTQ/TwoSpirit Native Americans and First Nations People (ALA - GLBTRT)
- How Indigenous Communities Can Support Two-Spirit People (Black Girl Dangerous)
- 8 Things You Should Know About Two Spirit People (Indian Country Today)
- Indigenous Identity and the Significance of the Term "Two-Spirit" (them: inqueery)
- 10 Queer Indigenous Artists on Where Their Inspirations Have Led Them (The New York Times Style Magazine)
- Map of Gender-Diverse Cultures (PBS)
Next Steps
If you'd like to learn more about this month-long celebration of Indigenous communities and identity, we've created a guide with list of resources, as well as a playlist featuring Indigenous musicians, on the Media Studies Research Guide. There is also an overview of Indigenous Philosophy on the Philosophy Research Guide.
For more information about the Indigenous communities with ongoing and traditional ties to this land, and how to support Indigenous groups and movements, take a look at our Land Acknowledgment and Local Indigenous Resources guide.
Fiction
Love after the End: an anthology of two-spirit and indigiqueer speculative fiction by ISBN: 9781551528113Publication Date: 2020-10-20This exciting and groundbreaking fiction collection showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer) Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism's histories. Here, readers will discover bioengineered AI rats, transplanted trees in space, the rise of a 2SQ resistance camp, a primer on how to survive Indigiqueerly, virtual reality applications, mother ships at sea, and the very bending of space-time continuums queered through NDN time. Love after the End demonstrates the imaginatively queer Two-Spirit futurisms we have all been dreaming of since 1492.
Jonny Appleseed by ISBN: 9781551527253Publication Date: 2018-05-15'You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine' is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishises himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the 'rez,' and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's world is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages—and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of Indigenous life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Food and Spirits by ISBN: 0932379923Publication Date: 1991-04-01Eight stories deal with homecoming, endurance, loss, grief, tradition, and survival.
Kiss of the Fur Queen by ISBN: 0806132361Publication Date: 2000-05-01One of Canada’s most celebrated authors and playwrights, Highway mixes humor with difficult subjects in his work ranging from Kiss of the Fur Queen, a coming-of-age novel that follows two Cree boys through residential school to adulthood, to The Rez Sisters, which is full of laughter as well as revelations about life. His essays have also featured in the collections Me Funny and Me Sexy, where he argues that his native language, Cree, is both the funniest and sexiest of all languages. (-Kai Minosh, BGDBlog)
Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time by ISBN: 0993997074Publication Date: 2016-09-30Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time is a collection of indigenous science fiction and urban fantasy focusing on LGBT and two-spirit characters. These stories range from a transgender woman undergoing an experimental transition process to young lovers separated through decades and meeting in their own far future. These are stories of machines and magic, love and self-love.
Drowning in Fire by ISBN: 0816521670Publication Date: 2001-09-01Josh Henneha has always been a traveler, drowning in dreams, burning with desires. As a young boy growing up within the Muskogee Creek Nation in rural Oklahoma, Josh experiences a yearning for something he cannot tame. Quiet and skinny and shy, he feels out of place, at once inflamed and ashamed by his attraction to other boys. Driven by a need to understand himself and his history, Josh struggles to reconcile the conflicting voices he hears -- from the messages of sin and scorn of the non-Indian Christian churches his parents attend in order to assimilate, to the powerful stories of his older Creek relatives, which have been the center of his upbringing, memory, and ongoing experience. In his fevered and passionate dreams, Josh catches a glimpse of something that makes the Muskogee Creek world come alive. Lifted by his great-aunt Lucille's tales of her own wild girlhood, Josh learns to fly back through time, to relive his people's history, and uncover a hidden legacy of triumphs and betrayals, ceremonies and secrets he can forge into a new sense of himself. When as a man, Josh rediscovers the boyhood friend who first stirred his desires, he realizes a transcendent love that helps take him even deeper into the Creek world he has explored all along in his imagination. Interweaving past and present, history and story, explicit realism and dreamlike visions, Craig Womack's Drowning in Fire explores a young man's journey to understand his cultural and sexual identity within a framework drawn from the community of his origins. A groundbreaking and provocative coming-of-age story, Drowning in Fire is a vividly realized novel by an impressive literary talent.
Rough Paradise by ISBN: 9781927443620Publication Date: 2014-05-31Born with an Intersex condition in a rough, working-class city, the harassment and hate Terry Tomey experiences for being bi-gendered and Two-Spirit drives them to the brink of suicide -- yet they are saved by the love and acceptance of Darla. The two incur the wrath of their families and their community as they fall in love and graphically explore their queer sexuality. Forcefully separated, they spend the next twenty years trying to find each other and to uncover the real truth as to why they were kept apart.
Poetry
Feed by ISBN: 9781947793576Publication Date: 2019-11-05Feed is the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy. It's an epistolary recipe for the main character, a poem of nourishment, and a jaunty walk through New York's High Line park, with the lines, stanzas, paragraphs, dialogue, and registers approximating the park's cultivated gardens of wildness. Among its questions, Feed asks what's the difference between being alone and being lonely? Can you ever really be friends with an ex? How do you make perfect mac & cheese? Feed is an ode of reconciliation to the wild inconsistencies of a northeast spring, a frustrating season of back-and-forth, of thaw and blizzard, but with a faith that even amidst the mess, it knows where it's going.
Fire Power by ISBN: 088974047XPublication Date: 1995-09-01Telling the truth is powerful medicine. It is a fire that lights the way for others. When we speak our "Fire Power", we join a long & honored line of warriors against injustice. Each of us is born with innate power & purpose, a sacred direction for which we have been created. Our task is to find the place where we belong & do our work there.- This Wound Is a World by ISBN: 9781452962238Publication Date: 2019-09-03"i am one of those hopeless romantics who wants every blowjob to be transformative." Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut poetry collection, This Wound Is a World, is "a prayer against breaking," writes trans Anishinaabe and Métis poet Gwen Benaway. "By way of an expansive poetic grace, Belcourt merges a soft beauty with the hardness of colonization to shape a love song that dances Indigenous bodies back into being. This book is what we've been waiting for." Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to "cut a hole in the sky / to world inside." Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where "everyone is at least a little gay." Presented here with several additional poems, this prize-winning collection pursues fresh directions for queer and decolonial theory as it opens uncharted paths for Indigenous poetry in North America. It is theory that sings, poetry that marshals experience in the service of a larger critique of the coloniality of the present and the tyranny of sexual and racial norms.
My Woman Card Is Anti-Native, and Other Two-Spirit Truths by ISBN: 9781729873472Publication Date: 2018-12-02"My Woman Card is anti-Native & Other Two-Spirit Truths" is a book of free verse poems, haikus and sonnets inspired by a conversation with the Legendary Venus Selenite, by the author's love for classical theatre, by her connection to her community, and by her experiences navigating eurocentrism in medicine & social life.
Holy Wild by ISBN: 9781771664394Publication Date: 2018-09-01In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.
Witness, I Am by ISBN: 9780889713239Publication Date: 2016-10-01Witness, I Am is divided into three gripping sections of new poetry from one of Canada's most recognized poets. The first part of the book, "Dangerous Sound," contains contemporary themed poems about identity and belonging, undone and rendered into modern sound poetry. "Muskrat Woman," the middle part of the book, is a breathtaking epic poem that considers the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women through the reimagining and retelling of a sacred Cree creation story. The final section of the book, "Ghost Dance," raids the autobiographical so often found in Scofield's poetry, weaving the personal and universal into a tapestry of sharp poetic luminosity. From "Killer," Scofield eerily slices the dreadful in with the exquisite: "I could, this day of proficient blooms, / take your fingers, / tie them down one by one. This one for the runaway, / this one for the joker, / this one for the sass-talker, / this one for the judge, / this one for the jury. / Oh, I could kill you."- Prayers for My 17th Chromosome by ISBN: 9781943977420Publication Date: 2017-11-14"Amir Rabiyah is a magician who has tasted salt of the creation story's sea. The cleaving of human to spirit found in Prayers for My 17th Chromosome is a blood tangle that will kiss your cells till you sweat / constellations. Rabiyah reminds their reader that to exist in between boxes of national belongings, migrations, queer kinships, and disability is not to swallow war. Rather, in these verses, complications find respite in one another, [becoming] the endless, / the source, / the horizon / awakening." - Rajiv Mohabir, author of The Cowherd's Son and The Taxidermist's Cut
Full-Metal Indigiqueer by ISBN: 9781772011876Publication Date: 2017-11-28This poetry collections focuses on a hybridized Indigiqueer Trickster character named Zoa who brings together the organic (the protozoan) and the technologic (the binaric) in order to re-beautify and re-member queer Indigeneity. This Trickster is a Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer invention that resurges in the apocalypse to haunt, atrophy, and to reclaim. Following oral tradition (à la Iktomi, Nanaboozho, Wovoka), Zoa infects, invades, and becomes a virus to canonical and popular works in order to re-centre Two-Spirit livelihoods. Zoa world-builds a fourth-dimension, lives in the cyber space, and survives in NDN-time - they have learned to sing the skin back onto their bodies and remain #woke at the end of the world. "Do not read me as a vanished ndn," they ask, "read me as a ghastly one." It is a project of resurgence for Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer folk who have been ghosted in policy, page, tradition, and hi/story - the very lives of Two-Spirit / Indigiqueer youth are rarely mentioned (and even dispossessed in our very mandates for reconciliation), our lives are precarious but they too are precious. We find ourselves made spectral in settler and neocolonial Indigenous nationalisms - if reconciliation is a means of "burying the hatchet," Zoa seeks to unearth the bones buried with those hatched scalps and perform a séance to ghost dance Indigiqueerness into existence. Zoa world-destroys in order to world-build a new space - they care little for reconciliation but rather aim to reterroritorialize space in literature, pop culture, and oral storytelling. The space made is a post-apocalyptic hub of sex and decolonization - a world where making love is akin to making live.
Nature Poem by ISBN: 9781941040638Publication Date: 2017-05-09Nature Poem follows Teebs--a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet--who can't bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He'd slap a tree across the face. He'd rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he'd rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he's adamant -- bratty, even -- about his distaste for the word "natural," over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the "natural world," he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.
Drama
Two-Spirit Acts by ISBN: 9781770911840Publication Date: 2014-04-15With a refreshing spin, the plays touch on topics of desire, identity, and community as they humorously tackle the colonial misunderstandings of Indigenous people. From a female trickster story centred on erotic lesbian tales to the farcical story about a new nation of Indigenous people called the Nation of Mischief, this collection creates a space to explore what it means to be queer and Indigenous.
Essays
A History of My Brief Body by ISBN: 9781937512934Publication Date: 2020-07-14Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.
Living the Spirit: a gay American Indian anthology by ISBN: 0312018991Publication Date: 1988-08-01A groundbreaking collection of essays and stories by, about, and selected by gay American Indians from over twenty North American tribes.
she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) by ISBN: 9780888013262Publication Date: 2008In she walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two spirit story), Sharron Proulx-Turner combines poetry and history to delve into the little-known lives of two-spirit women. Regarded with both wonder and fear when first encountered by the West, First Nations women living with masculine and feminine principles in the same body had important roles to play in society, as healers and visionaries, before they were suppressed during the colonial invasion. She walks for days inside a thousand eyes (a two-spirit story) creatively juxtaposes first-person narratives and traditional stories with the voices of contemporary two-spirit women, voices taken from nature and the teachings of Water, Air, Fire and Mother Earth. The author restores the reputation of two-spirit woman that had been long under attack from Western culture as she re-appropriates the lives of these individuals from the writings of Western anthropologists and missionaries.- Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature by ISBN: 9780816502424Publication Date: 2011-10-01Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century.
Memoirs
Bad Indians by ISBN: 9781597142014Publication Date: 2013-01-01This beautiful and devastating book -- part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir -- should be required reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family as well as the experience of California Indians as a whole through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. The result is a work of literary art that is wise, angry, and playful all at once, a compilation that will break your heart and teach you to see the world anew.
Forty-Three Septembers by ISBN: 1563410370Publication Date: 1993-12-01A collection of autobiographical essays about identity, the author's family, growing up and growing older, and related topics.
One Bead at a Time by ISBN: 9781771332651Publication Date: 2016-06-25One Bead at a Time is the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada. Transcribed and edited by two-spirit writer Sharron Proulx-Turner, Little Thunder's narrative is told verbatim, her melodious voice and keen sense of humour almost audible overtop of the text on the page. Early in her story, Little Thunder recounts a dream from her early adulthood, "I stared at these lily pads for the longest time and I decided that there was one part of the pond that had lots of lily pads and no frogs. I said, 'I want to go there because there's lots of lily pads but no frogs and I like creating community.'" And create community she does. Little Thunder established the first and today, the only all-women's Sundance in the world, securing a land base in the Green Mountains of Vermont for future generations of Indigenous women's ceremony. She was active in the A.I.M. movement and she continues to practice and promote political and spiritual awareness for Indigenous women around the world. A truly remarkable visionary.
Thunder Through My Veins by ISBN: 9780385692748Publication Date: 2019-09-10Born into a Metis family of Cree, Scottish, English and French descent but never told of his heritage, Gregory Scofield knew he was different. His father disappeared after he was born, and at five he was separated from his mother and sent to live with strangers and extended family. Only his love for his sensitive but battered mother and his Aunty Georgina, a neighbor who befriended him, kept him alive. This is Gregory's traumatic, tender and hopeful story of his fight to rediscover and accept himself in the face of a heritage with diametrically opposed backgrounds.
A Two-Spirit Journey by ISBN: 9780887558122Publication Date: 2016-04-22A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery."A Two-Spirit Journey" is Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby's story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health 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 abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found 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, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
Featured Videos
Video: Author and Indigenous elder Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities | Out Saskatoon (2018)
Documentaries
2 Spirits: Native Lesbians and Gay Men by Call Number: StreamingPublication Date: 19942-Spirited people (Native lesbians and Gay men) from the Bay Area share their experience of overlapping gender, ethnic and cultural identities as they explore and define their visions of utopia.- Two Spirits');" />Two Spirits byCall Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDsPublication Date: 2009Examines the role of two-spirit people in the Navajo culture in the context of the story of a gay youth named Fred Martinez. Martinez was a nádleehí or a male-bodied person with a feminine essence, who was murdered in a hate crime at the age of sixteen. Discusses the traditional Native American perspective on gender and sexuality and the need for a balanced interrelationship between the feminine and masculine.
Two Spirits by Call Number: StreamingPublication Date: 2007Joey Criddle, a Native American gay man, recounts the story of how he underwent a transformation from a closeted Pentecostalist in Mississippi to the co-director of the Two Spirit Society of Denver.
Byron Chief-Moon: Grey Horse Rider by Call Number: StreamingPublication Date: 2007Byron Chief-Moon, Grey Horse Rider: Father of three, successful TV actor and artist and proud member of the First Nations two-spirited gay community, Byron Chief-Moon is a fascinating mesh of dynamic personae. But when he dances alone in the forest, the complexity of the real world washes away, and we can see his spiritual self take hold. Interviews combine with mesmerizing footage of his performances to capture the essence of this cutting-edge artist who founded the Coyote Arts Percussive Performance Association. By melding the history and art of his Canadian Blackfoot Confederacy tribe with issues of contemporary life, Chief-Moon's work makes profound statements about identity and tradition.- Water Flowing Together');" />Water Flowing Together byCall Number: StreamingPublication Date: 2008Offers an intimate portrait of a remarkable dancer, Jock Soto, who retired from the New York City Ballet at age forty, after a twenty-four-year career. Soto's journey as an openly gay man of Navajo Indian and Puerto Rican descent provides a rare glimpse into the life of a dancer and the disparate worlds which shaped this important artist. Soto was asked to join the New York City Ballet by George Balanchine at sixteen after first studying at the affiliated School of American Ballet on a full scholarship.
Kumu Hina by Call Number: StreamingPublication Date: 2013Imagine a world where a little boy can grow up to be the woman of his dreams, and a young girl can rise to become a leader among men. Welcome to Kumu Hina's Hawai'i. During a momentous year in her life in modern Honolulu, Hina Wong-Kalu, a native Hawaiian māhū, or transgender, teacher uses traditional culture to inspire a student to claim her place as leader of the school's all-male hula troupe. But despite her success as a teacher, Hina longs for love and a committed relationship. Will her marriage to a headstrong Tongan man fulfill her dreams? An incredible docu-drama that unfolds like a narrative film, KUMU HINA reveals a side of Hawai'i rarely seen on screen.
Being Thunder by Publication Date: 2021Sherenté, a Two Spirit Genderqueer teenager from Rhode Island's Narragansett tribe performs in dance competitions at annual regional powwows of New England tribes. There is no formal rule which prohibits Two Spirit Genderqueer people from competing in a category different from their birth gender. Wearing female fancy shawl regalia, Sherenté dances with joy and beauty. Behind the scenes, tribal leaders manipulate Sherenté's scores or disqualify them outright because of their belief in traditional binary gender roles. Blindsided by ongoing dishonesty and deception, Sherenté continues to perform in spite of insensitive behavior by tribal leaders and others in their community. Sherenté's enduring courage and self-respect are met with an outpouring of support from family, powwow attendees, and fellow competitors.
Two Spirits');" />
Water Flowing Together');" />Feature Films
The business of fancydancing by Call Number: Wells Library - Media Services - DVDsPublication Date: 2002Former Spokane Reservation best friends, Seymour and Aristotle have taken different paths when they are brought together for the funeral of an old friend. Both went off to college; one is now a successful poet, the other returned home embittered. Tensions and resentments flare as they meet again.- Johnny Greyeyes');" />Johnny Greyeyes byCall Number: Auxiliary Library Facility - Media ItemPublication Date: 2000Johnny Greyeyes is a powerful story of a Native American woman struggling to maintain strength, love and spirit. Since the shooting death of her father, Johnny has spent most of her life in prison. There, she forms a new family and falls in love with her cellmate Lana.
- Publication Date: 2015Three young Native Americans -- an adopted Christian girl, a rebellious father-to-be, and a promiscuous transsexual -- strive to escape the hardships of life on an Indian reservation.
- Wildhood');" />Wildhood byPublication Date: 2021In a rural east-coast trailer park, Link lives with his toxic father and younger half-brother Travis. When Link discovers his Mi’kmaw mother could still be alive, it lights a flame and they make a run for a better life. On the road they meet Pasmay, a pow wow dancer drawn to Link. As the boys journey across Mi’kma’ki, Link finds community, identity, and love in the land where he belongs.
Johnny Greyeyes');" />
Wildhood');" />Short Films
- "I Still Believe" - Short film by Raven Davis about love, hope and wonder.
- "It's Not Your Fault" - Short movie by Raven Davis about the violence of online comments made towards Indigenous people, specifically Indigenous Women, children and 2 Spirit people. Bringing attention to the negligence of online/social media outlets allowing hate speech in Canada.
- Kent Monkman Studios - compilation of short films on YouTube from Kent Monkman (also known as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle), a Canadian artist of Cree ancestry working in a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance and installation.
- "Mars-Womb-Man" - short film by James Diamond. Man from Venus (super 8, 4 min, 1998) meets Mars Womb-Man. She's an answer without a question and he a question without answer. A sustainable foreground emerges only when they forge paths. A motion portrait where opposites distract and the peripheral rule is born.
- "Meskanahk (My Path)" - 'Meskanahk' is a video narrative of a young 'half-breed' man's journey off a Cree reserve. This video highlights the motivations that progressed his journey and the questions, regrets and fears raised on his path from childhood to adulthood. 'Meskanahk' chronicles the plight of this young man's fears of being in situations where he was always labeled as an: 'other', and how this had propelled him to run from situation to situation. In the end, when this young man stops running, he wonders if his parents hate him for having run away.
- The Misadventures of Pussy Boy - series of animated shorts by Alec Butler, featuring Alick, a trans/2spirit/intersex teen, going on various misadventures.
- Thirza Cuthand - collection of short films by queer transgender Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand.
- Two-Spirit & Queer (NFB) - Collection of films by Indigenous two-spirit and queer filmmakers, from the National Film Board of Canada.
- Tits on a Bull - short film by Tim Worrall. Set in a Maori women's rugby team, Tits on a Bull follows Phoenix, the young star player, as she struggles to choose between her longtime friendship with aging coach Rusty or her new relationship with lesbian team-captain, Mel.
Other Online Videos
- 21st International Two Spirit Gathering Powwow - footage is of the Grand Entry of the 21 International Two-Spirit Gathering held at Aspen Lodge in Estes Park Colorado, for the Two-Spirit Society of Denver.
- As They Are: Two-Spirit People in the Modern World - 20 minute film by Mike Garrido and Tarek Tohme featuring Elton Naswood (Navajo), Ben Lucero Wolf (Kiowa), and Richard Eric Dearmore (Paiute).
- C2C: Two Spirit and Queer People of Colour Conference - C2C: Two Spirit & Queer People of Colour Call to Conversation with LGBT & Allies" met from Friday, October 20 to Sunday, October 22, 2017 at The University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Manitoba. C2C was hosted by the University of Winnipeg (UW) in partnership with Two-Spirit People of Manitoba and QTPOC Winnipeg.
- The Candy Show - The Candy Show is a National variety TV series featuring the Aboriginal Comedian Candy Palmater and her music guest and a Performing artist on each episode.
- Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities - Author and Indigenous elder Ma-Nee Chacaby talks about Two Spirit identities.
- Our Families: LGBT / Two Spirit Native American Stories - We all go through some of the same struggles: we struggle to access healthy food, quality education, and affordable healthcare. These struggles affect Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) families of color in very unique ways. This Our Families video features Native LGBT/Two Spirit families sharing their personal stories of struggle, acceptance, and family.
- Queer Profiles: Alec Butler (Cathexis LGBTQ Oral History) - In this fascinating interview, award-winning filmmaker, playwright and 2spirit/trans/intersex activist Alec Butler shares his story of growing up queer in Cape Breton and being drawn to art as a way of getting through decades of questioning his identity and gender.
- Two Spirit (Injunuity) - Two Spirit: A person of First Nations or Native American descent possessing both a male and female spirit. An umbrella term used to describe the fluidity of First Nations/Native American gender identity and sexuality with respect to traditional tribal roles. Featuring: Mica Valdez (Mexica), Nazbah Tom (Navajo/Diné), Arlando Teller (Navajo/Diné), Charlie Ballard (Anishinaabe, Sac & fox), Esther Lucero (Navajo/Diné).
- Two Spirit People - An overview of historical and contemporary Native American concepts of gender, sexuality and sexual orientation. This documentary explores the berdache tradition in Native American culture, in which individuals who embody feminine and masculine qualities act as a conduit between the physical and spiritual world, and because of this are placed in positions of power within the community.
Streaming Resources
- Ethnographic Video Online
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Access to classic and contemporary documentaries, previously unpublished footage from anthropologists and ethnographers working in the field, and some feature films. Includes searchable transcripts.
- Kanopy Streaming Video
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Kanopy Streaming Video gathers streaming videos from a variety of producers and makes them available to students. Faculty and instructors may request titles for purchase by the Libraries via the Kanopy Streaming Video site. Priority access will be given to faculty and instructors for class use.
Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Drag Artists
Lady Shug Lady Shug, also known as Ky Victor is a 30-something nonbinary queer who uses the pronouns she, her, they, and them. A “proud three-quarters indigenous person of the Diné — Navajo — tribe,” Victor says they were born into the Kinłichii’nii (Red House) and Bit’ahnii (Folded Arms) clans and grew up int he four corners area of New Mexico.
Landa Lakes Originally from Oklahoma but based in San Francisco, Landa Lake’s career spans decades and platforms, although her name is mostly linked to the two-spirit drag community. Between participating in both American Indian and Gay and Lesbian student organizations in college as a youth and acting as a mentor to younger drag performers, two-spirit Chickasaw drag queen and community organizer Landa always played a massive part in the LGBTQ2S+ community and continues to. In addition to serving as a board member of Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits (BAAITS), a community-based volunteer organization offering culturally relevant activities for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex Native Americans of the Bay Area, she’s been a judge on drag pageants. She has utilized drag to raise funds and awareness for communities. Currently, she and her drag troupe Brush Arbor Gurlz perform nationwide to educate others about Native politics and issues.
Sage Chanell Sage Channell (Shawnee) is the co-founder of the Oklahoma City Two Spirit Society, former Ms. International Two Spirit, and one hell of a shell shaker who has done a lot of work to build acceptance of two spirits at ceremonial grounds in Oklahoma.
Buffalo Barbie Travis ‘Buffalo Barbie’ Goldtooth switches gender depending on the context. She has typically identified as male when working in construction jobs and as female in her life outside of work. After Buffalo Barbie’s coming out was met with severe community backlash, her grandmother gave her the confidence to continue life as a transgender individual: “Don’t let anyone else tell you how to be!” Buffalo Barbie’s experiences are mirrored by those of Michelle Sherman. “When I came out to my family, they kicked me out,” she tells me, “but my grandma told them that this was a normal part of Navajo culture.”
Ilona Verley Ilona Verley is a drag artist and one of the Season 1 contestants of Canada's Drag Race. She is the first Indigenous, Two-Spirit and LA-Based queen to appear on Canada's Drag Race.
Ella Lamoureax Lamoureux has been doing drag for more than a decade and is a fixture — and trailblazer — in Kelowna’s vibrant drag scene. Recently, she was propelled into the national spotlight by appearing on the OutTV drag competition show Call Me Mother. Without drag, Lamoureux said she can’t imagine life being nearly as colourful.
Riel Deadly Riel Deadly is a tastawiyiniwak (two-spirit) mixed otipemisiwak (Cree-Metis person). He started doing drag after his Elder encouraged him to find ways to celebrate his masculinity. Riel is an active bi/pansexual recruiter, enticing everyone to fall in love with him by dual-wielding his masculine and feminine wiles.
Academic Texts
Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory by ISBN: 9780816533640Publication Date: 2016-04-01In Cherokee Asegi udanto refers to people who either fall outside of men's and women's roles or who mix men's and women's roles. Asegi, which translates as "strange," is also used by some Cherokees as a term similar to "queer." For author Qwo-Li Driskill, asegi provides a means by which to reread Cherokee history in order to listen for those stories rendered "strange" by colonial heteropatriarchy. As the first full-length work of scholarship to develop a tribally specific Indigenous Queer or Two-Spirit critique, Asegi Stories examines gender and sexuality in Cherokee cultural memory, how they shape the present, and how they can influence the future. The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of Asegi Stories derive from activist, artistic, and intellectual genealogies, referred to as "dissent lines" by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Driskill intertwines Cherokee and other Indigenous traditions, women of color feminisms, grassroots activisms, queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric, Native studies, and decolonial politics. Drawing from oral histories and archival documents in order to articulate Cherokee-centered Two-Spirit critiques, Driskill contributes to the larger intertribal movements for social justice.
Erotics of Sovereignty: queer native writing in the era of self-determination by ISBN: 9780816677825Publication Date: 2012-04-18In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote "the Indian's sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community." In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. Rifkin focuses on four Native writers -- Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Deborah Miranda (Esselen), Greg Sarris (Graton Rachería), and Chrystos (Menominee) -- approaching their fiction and poetry as forms of political theory. Rifkin shows how the work of these queer or two-spirit Native writers affirms the significance of the erotic as an exercise of individual and community sovereignty. In this way, we come to see how their work contests the homophobic, sexist, and exclusivist policies and attitudes of tribal communities as well as those of the nation-state.
Queer Indigenous Studies: critical interventions in theory, politics, and literature by ISBN: 9780816529070Publication Date: 2011-03-15"This book is an imagining." So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue -- a "writing in conversation" -- among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few.
Spaces Between Us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization by ISBN: 9780816656325Publication Date: 2011-11-17We are all caught up in one another, Scott Lauria Morgensen asserts, we who live in settler societies, and our interrelationships inform all that these societies touch. Native people live in relation to all non-Natives amid the ongoing power relations of settler colonialism, despite never losing inherent claims to sovereignty as indigenous peoples. Explaining how relational distinctions of "Native" and "settler" define the status of being "queer," Spaces between Us argues that modern queer subjects emerged among Natives and non-Natives by engaging the meaningful difference indigeneity makes within a settler society. Morgensen's analysis exposes white settler colonialism as a primary condition for the development of modern queer politics in the United States. Bringing together historical and ethnographic cases, he shows how U.S. queer projects became non-Native and normatively white by comparatively examining the historical activism and critical theory of Native queer and Two-Spirit people. Presenting a "biopolitics of settler colonialism" -- in which the imagined disappearance of indigeneity and sustained subjugation of all racialized peoples ensures a progressive future for white settlers -- Spaces between Us newly demonstrates the interdependence of nation, race, gender, and sexuality and offers opportunities for resistance in the United States.
Becoming Two-Spirit: gay identity and social acceptance in Indian country by ISBN: 0803271263Publication Date: 2006-10-01The Two-Spirit man occupies a singular place in Native American culture, balancing the male and the female spirit even as he tries to blend gay and Native identity. The accompanying ambiguities of gender and culture come into vivid relief in the powerful and poignant Becoming Two-Spirit, the first book to take an in-depth look at contemporary American Indian gender diversity. Drawing on a wealth of observations from interviews, oral histories, and meetings and ceremonies, Brian Joseph Gilley provides an intimate view of how Two-Spirit men in Colorado and Oklahoma struggle to redefine themselves and their communities. The Two-Spirit men who appear in Gilley's book speak frankly of homophobia within their communities, a persistent prejudice that is largely misunderstood or misrepresented by outsiders. Gilley gives detailed accounts of the ways in which these men modify gay and Native identity as a means of dealing with their alienation from tribal communities and families. With these compromises, he suggests, they construct an identity that challenges their alienation while at the same time situating themselves within contemporary notions of American Indian identity. He also shows how their creativity is reflected in the communities they build with one another, the development of their own social practices, and a national network of individuals linked in their search for self and social acceptance.
Identities and Place: changing labels and intersectional communities of LGBTQ and two-spirit people in the United States by ISBN: 9781789204797Publication Date: 2019-11-01With a focus on historic sites, this volume explores the recent history of non-heteronormative Americans from the early twentieth century onward and the places associated with these communities. Authors explore how queer identities are connected with specific places: places where people gather, socialize, protest, mourn, and celebrate. The focus is deeper look at how sexually variant and gender non-conforming Americans constructed identity, created communities, and fought to have rights recognized by the government. Each chapter is accompanied by prompts and activities that invite readers to think critically and immerse themselves in the subject matter while working collaboratively with others.
Indian Blood: HIV and Colonial Trauma in San Francisco's Two-Spirit Community by ISBN: 9780295998503Publication Date: 2016-06-01The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.
Reclaiming Two-Spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal, & sovereignty in Native America by ISBN: 9780807003466Publication Date: 2022-04-26A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí'skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism's written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed--and Indigenous resistance is core to this story.
The Spirit and the Flesh: sexual diversity in American Indian culture by ISBN: 0807046159Publication Date: 1992-04-01Walter L. Williams's excellent research has produced one of the most extensive studies of the berdache culture among Native Americans. Unlike the larger American society, Native Americans historically have respected, and in many tribal nations venerated, homosexuals. Williams explains the berdache as a custom, its social roles, and the berdache history, including its introduction to the European concept of sin and intolerance of sexual diversity. The word berdache applies almost exclusively to males, mainly because historical records only relate dealings with aboriginal males, but Williams also includes a chapter on female sexual diversity, using the word amazon to describe these often warrior-like women.
Selected Scholarly Articles
- Driskill, Q-L. (2011). Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16(1), 69-92.
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Hames-García, M. (2013). What's After Queer Theory? Queer Ethnic and Indigenous Studies. Feminist Studies 39(2), 384-404.
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Robinson, M. (2020). Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity. Journal of Homosexuality, 67(12), 1675–1690.
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Robinson, M. (2017). Two-Spirit and Bisexual People: Different Umbrella, Same Rain. Journal of Bisexuality, 17(1), 7–29.
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Morgensen, S. L. (2011). Unsettling Queer Politics: What Can Non-Natives Learn from Two-Spirit Organizing? In Q.-L. Driskill, C. Finley, B. J. Gilley, & S. L. Morgensen (Eds.), Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, 132–152.
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Lang, S. (2016). Native American men-women, lesbians, two-spirits: Contemporary and historical perspectives. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 20(3/4), 299–323.
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Kongerslev, M. (2018). Dance to the Two-Spirit. Mythologizations of the Queer Native. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 27(4).
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Greensmith, C., & Giwa, S. (2013). Challenging Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Queer Politics: Settler Homonationalism, Pride Toronto, and Two-Spirit Subjectivities. American Indian Culture & Research Journal, 37(2), 129–148.
Suggested Keywords for database searches relating to Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous* identity:
*while there is some overlap and commonalities in understandings of gender and sexuality across groups, when doing research relevant to Indigenous identities, it is always best practice to search using the names of individual tribes, nations, and communities when possible
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Indigenous Aboriginal Native First Nations Race POC (people of color) BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color)
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Queer Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Identity Sexuality Sexual Orientation Two-spirit (sometimes "two spirit", "two spirited" or "two-spirited") LGBT LGBTQ LGBTQ2S |
Gender Studies Gender Colonial(ism) Decolonial(ism) Decolonizing |
Relevant Databases
- Academic Search (EBSCO)
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Provides full-text coverage of magazine, newspaper, and scholarly journal articles for most academic disciplines.
- Alternative Press Index
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Bibliographic database of journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from international alternative, radical, and leftist periodicals.
- Archives of Sexuality and Gender
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Provides access to materials exploring important aspects of LGBTQ life. Includes periodicals, newsletters, manuscripts, government records, organizational papers, correspondence, an international selection of posters, and other primary source materials.
- Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America
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Bibliographic database covering all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America. Includes more than 350,000 citations for newspapers, magazines, academic journals, books, reviews, and trade publications from the United States and Canada with expanded content from Great Britain and Australia.
- Gender: Identity and Social Change
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Primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. Includes sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.
- Gender Studies Database
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Citations to articles, books, conference papers, pamphlets, dissertations and other publications about gender inequality, masculinity, post-feminism, and gender identity.
- GenderWatch
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Full text database with a focus on how gender impacts a variety of subject areas.
- Indigenous Peoples of North America
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Covers the historical experiences, cultural traditions and innovations, and political status of Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Canada. The archive includes monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, periodicals and photographs. Includes access to Part I and Part II: The Indian Rights Association, 1882-1986. - LGBTQ+ Library Catalog
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The LGBTQ+ Library Catalog contains materials pertaining to asexual, bisexual, gay, intersex, lesbian, transgender, and queer issues. These resources include books, videos, CDs, and periodicals. This collection is intended to be a resource for both research and entertainment. - LGBTQ+ Source
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Index citations and selected full-text literature in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender studies - LGBT Thought and Culture
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LGBT Thought and Culture is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day.
Online Resources
Selection of resources freely available online
- Queer Indigenous Poetics (ANMLY)
Lists of Resources & Readings
Lists of recommended titles from online sources
- Queer Native Pride 2022 (Letterboxd)
Women's Equality Day 2020
In honor of Women's Equality Day, which commemorates the passage, ratification, and later certification of the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920 (and this year is also a celebration of the 100th anniversary thereof), we present a series of playlists honoring the contributions of women, femmes, and trans+nonbinary folks in music across genres (many of which have traditionally excluded or undervalued their work).
We recognize, additionally, that, despite the work of many women of color suffragettes (read more here), the 19th Amendment only guaranteed the right to vote for some (read: white) women; BIPOC women had to wait many years before suffrage was accorded to them, and even then (even today) many people, including BIPOC, remain disenfranchised.
You can read more about the work of Indiana University historians, and the history of suffrage in Indiana, here.
Scroll through to see the playlists we've created.
Image: Two individuals holding signs, one reading "vote baby vote," the other "voting is people power." Image from Getty Images, courtesy of Gabriel Hackett.
Retrospective of folk artists from the 60s & 70s. From chart topping artists like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez to lesser known artists like Linda Perhacs and Elizabeth Cotten, explore the sound of female artists who shaped the course of folk, rock, and pop music into the 21st century.
"Buffy Sainte-Marie: 75 Things to know about the Canadian Icon" (CBC Magazine)
Retrospective of punk acts, from its inception through recent times. Explore the sounds of femme artists in punk and the ways they evolved the genre.
Blondie, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Page
"For Laura Jane Grace, Punk was a Form of Armor" (NPR)
"ESG's Otherworldly Sound" (The New Yorker)
Queer-feminist punk: an anti-social history
Revenge of the she-punks: a feminist music history from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot
Retrospective of artists (pop, rock, folk, etc.) from the 80s & 90s (and even a few from the early 00s). Explore the ways femme artists influenced the transitional decades from the 20th to 21st centuries.
"Liz Phair is not your Feminist Spokesmodel" (The New York Times)
Retrospective of women and femmes in hip hop, from the 80s to today. Explore how femme artists have shaped the sound of hip hop across its evolution.
"Inside the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" (Rolling Stone Magazine)
"Princess Nokia: 'At My Shows, Girls Can Take Up Space the Way Men Do'" (The Guardian)
"Rapper Kodie Shane: Confident, Young, Black, Queer, and About to Take Over" (Billboard Magazine)
God save the queens: the essential history of women in hip-hop
The new ladies of the canyon; folk and indie artists from the early 00s to today. Explore the influence of "ladies of the canyon" as it plays out in the next generation's music.
"Mitski is the 21st Century's Poet Laureate of Young Adulthood" (NPR)
"Weyes Blood on Stunning New LP, the Titanic Sinking, and Climate Change" (Rolling Stone Magazine)
"Courtney Barnett Talks About Taking on Misogyny and Self-Doubt with Her New Album" (Pitchfork)
Bisexual Awareness Day (9/23)
September 23rd is a day designated for recognizing and celebrating bisexual people, their history, and their community. Bisexuality is the quality or characteristic of being sexually and/or romantically attracted to people of one’s own gender as well as another gender or genders. This playlist brings together songs by, about, and for bisexual people in honor of the B in LGBTQ+! From artists suspected of being bisexual or bicurious (Britney Spears, Harry Styles), to out & proud bisexuals (Janelle Monae, Frank Ocean) this playlist encompasses a variety of genres (punk, pop, indie, r&b) through time. From Billie Holliday to Demi Lovato, bisexuals have always existed, despite attempts to erase their queerness. Enjoy this playlist on Bisexual Awareness Day (September 23rd) or any time you want to celebrate bi pride!
Click through the tabs to see some of the media we've highlighted to celebrate bisexual identity and experience.
Bi: Notes for a bisexual revolution by Call Number: HQ74 .E35 2013ISBN: 1580054749Publication Date: 2013Depicted as duplicitous, traitorous, and promiscuous, bisexuality has long been suspected, marginalized, and rejected by both straight and gay communities alike. Bi takes a long overdue, comprehensive look at bisexual politics, from the issues surrounding biphobia/monosexism, feminism, and transgenderism to the practice of labeling those who identify as bi as either "too bisexual" (promiscuous and incapable of fidelity) or "not bisexual enough" (not actively engaging romantically or sexually with people of at least two different genders). In this forward-thinking and eye-opening book, feminist bisexual and genderqueer activist Shiri Eisner takes readers on a journey through the many aspects of the meanings and politics of bisexuality, specifically highlighting how bisexuality can open up new and exciting ways of challenging social convention. Informed by feminist, transgender, and queer theory, as well as politics and activism, Bi is a radical manifesto for a group that has been too frequently silenced, erased, and denied -- and a starting point from which to launch a bisexual revolution.
Bi Any Other Name by ISBN: 1555831745Publication Date: 1994-07-01More than seventy women and men from all walks of life describe their lives as bisexuals.
Bisexuality by ISBN: 3319715348Publication Date: 2018-03-19This pathbreaking volume brings together a diverse body of sexual, behavioral, and social science research on bisexuality. Arguing for a clear, evidence-based definition of bisexuality and standardized measures for assessing sexual orientation, it spotlights challenges that need to be addressed toward attaining these goals. The book's deep trove of findings illuminates the experiences of bisexual men and women in key aspects of life, as well as common mental health issues in the face of stigma, prejudice, and outright denial from the heterosexual and homosexual communities. Throughout, contributors examine the paradoxical invisibility of bisexuality even as society and science have become more inclusive of lesbians and gay men, and emphasize the critical role of thoughtful, respectful support across societal and mental health domains. Bisexuality is a substantial reference for psychologists, scholars and graduate students in LGBTQIA+ studies, and clinicians seeking both theoretical and applied perspectives on the research into bisexuality. It also offers instructors a supplemental research-based textbook option for teaching courses related to sexuality and bisexuality.
Her Body and Other Parties by ISBN: 9781555977887Publication Date: 2017-10-03In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Giovanni's Room by ISBN: 0440328810Publication Date: 1988-04-01Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.
Ode to Lata by ISBN: 1893329135Publication Date: 2002-02-01In Ode to Lata, Ali has left behind a tempestuous childhood in postcolonial Kenya, the overprotective mother who raised him on a steady diet of Hindi cinema, an emotionally abusive bisexual lover, and confused memories of his father's violent death at the hands of his mistress. Now his mother's messages ramble on his answering machine when he wants no one but his one obsession, Richard, to call. Passionate and unflinchingly honest in its narrative, Ode to Lata scavenges the depths of one man's misguided search for love in a world of emotionally-void encounters and tangled memories. All the while, Ali's story is intertwined with the unraveling of his parents' own doomed relationship and the film music of Bollywood's eminent singer Lata Mangeshkar. And it is this hopelessly romantic music that scores their tormented lives and goads them to pursue love through chaos and ecstasy.
TV
The Bisexual (Available on Hulu)
Sex Education (Available on Netflix)
The L Word (Available on Hulu)
Broad City (Available on Hulu)
Webseries
Strangers (Facebook Video)
Brown Girls
Movies
Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Nowhere (1997)
Appropriate Behavior (2014)
Disobedience (2017)
Moonlight (2017)