Gender Studies

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

Simone de Beauvoir's masterpiece weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to analyze the Western notion of "woman" and to explore the power of sexuality.

The Feminine Mystique (1963) is a powerful critique of women's roles in contemporary American society. Drawing on new scholarship in the social sciences, Betty Friedan attacked a wide range of institutions—among them women's magazines, women's colleges, and advertisers—for promoting a one-dimensional image of women as happy housewives. This image, Friedan suggested, created a "feminine mystique," a belief that "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949—the housewife-mother."

All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave is a landmark feminist anthology in Black Women's Studies.

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of woman in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory, In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice. Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women.

Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray is incontestably one of the most important works in feminist theory to have been published in this generation. For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. In the first section of the book, "The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry," Irigaray rereads Freud's essay "Femininity," and his other writings on women, bringing to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.

Based on in-depth interviews with 135 women, explains why many, despite the progress of the women's movement, still feel silenced in their families and schools. Despite the progress of the women's movement, many women still feel silenced in their families and schools.

'It is my thesis that this general production of life, or subsistence production - mainly performed through the non-wage labour of women and other non-wage labourers as slaves, contract workers and peasants in the colonies - constitutes the perennial basis upon which "capitalist productive labour" can be built up and exploited.' First published in 1986, Maria Mies's progressive book was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory, and it remains a major contribution to development theory and practice today. Tracing the social origins of the sexual division of labour, it offers a history of the related processes of colonization and 'housewifization' and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labour. Mies's theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant today. This new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

Although Michel Foucault's ideas on sexuality, ideology, and power have established him as one of this century's most influential thinkers, the implications of his work for feminists continue to be the subject of heated debate. This book fosters an unprecedented dialogue between Foucault and the fertile ground of contemporary feminism and explores the many ways these disparate approaches to cultural analysis converge and interact.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

These essays document the debates, conflicts, and contradictions among those engaged in developing third world feminist theory and politics. Evelyne Accad, M. Jacqui Alexander, Carmen Barroso, Cristina Bruschini, Rey Chow, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Angela Gilliam, Faye V. Harrison, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, Barbara Smith, Nayereh Tohidi, Lourdes Torres, Cheryl L. West, & Nellie Wong.

A roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? In "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal," J. Jack Halberstam answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real lived experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos With equal parts edge and wit, Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage.

This thought-provoking book focuses on the evolution of heterosexuality from opprobrium to the gold standard of sexuality. It is a challenging and controversial demonstration of how our conceptions of human sexuality derive not from immutable definitions of nature, but from evolving historical perspective.

This enthralling and provocative book provides a new grounding for the understanding of sexual rights. It argues that all varieties of sexuality under capitalism are materially constructed out of the complex interrelationship between the market and the state. Meticulous, focused and challenging, it will be required reading for anyone interested in modern human sexualities.

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture.

If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety—from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships—has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey's suburbs. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values." Unless we overcome our fears and claim our "community of contact," it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism. Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. Muñoz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color—in Carmelita Tropicana's "Camp/Choteo" style politics, Marga Gomez's performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis's "Terrorist Drag," Isaac Julien's critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat's disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's performances of "disidentity," and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serial The Real World.

Beyond Sexuality points contemporary sexual politics in a radically new direction. Combining a psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a deep respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this original work of queer theory makes the case for viewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Tim Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that—rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst—brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire. Dean shows how the Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education.

Publics and Counterpublics revolves around a central question: What is a public? The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction, present in the modern world in a way that is very different from other or earlier societies. Publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that. Publics have some regular properties as a form, with powerful implications for the way our social world takes shape; but much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelation. There are ambiguities, even contradictions in the idea of a public. As it is extended to new contexts and media, new polities and rhetorics, its meaning can be seen to change, in ways that we have scarcely begun to appreciate. Michael Warner offers a revisionist account at the junction of two intellectual traditions with which he has been associated: public-sphere theory and queer theory. To public-sphere theory, this book brings a new emphasis on cultural forms, and a new focus on the dynamics of counterpublics. To queer theory, it brings a new way of seeing how queer culture (among other examples) is shaped by the counterpublic environment.

A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion." In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others–emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of "reproductive futurism." Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the "orientation" aspect of "sexual orientation" and the "orient" in "orientalism," Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being "orientated" means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself.

Working from classic texts of European and American writers including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde, Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.

The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

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

Halperin's subject is the erotics of male culture in ancient Greece. Arguing that the modern concept of "homosexuality" is an inadequate tool for the interpretation of these features of sexual life in antiquity, Halperin offers an alternative account that accords greater prominence to the indigenous terms in which sexual experiences were constituted in the ancient Mediterranean world. Wittily and provocatively written, Halperin's meticulously drawn windows onto ancient sexuality give us a new meaning to the concept of "Greek love."

As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

In recent years, lesbians and gay men have developed a new, aggressive style of politics. At the same time, innovative intellectual energies have made queer theory an explosive field of study. In "Fear of a Queer Planet", Michael Warner draws on emerging new queer politics, and shows how queer activists have come to challenge basic assumptions about the social and political world.

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry James's The Bostonians, Castle shows how a lesbian presence can be identified in the literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries.

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance.

American media now regularly focuses an often sympathetic beam on gay life—and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favour of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America.

In this essay on the dangers of normality, Michael Warner sends a warning shot to the gay rights movement, which has cleaned up its image in order to blend in with the mainstream. He presents an analysis of the politics of shame and the stigma of sexual identity.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

No one raises an eyebrow if you suggest that a guy who arranges his furniture just so, rolls his eyes in exaggerated disbelief, likes techno music or show tunes, and knows all of Bette Davis's best lines by heart might, just possibly, be gay. But if you assert that male homosexuality is a cultural practice, expressive of a unique subjectivity and a distinctive relation to mainstream society, people will immediately protest. Such an idea, they will say, is just a stereotype-ridiculously simplistic, politically irresponsible, and morally suspect. The world acknowledges gay male culture as a fact but denies it as a truth. David Halperin, a pioneer of LGBTQ studies, dares to suggest that gayness is a specific way of being that gay men must learn from one another in order to become who they are. Inspired by the notorious undergraduate course of the same title that Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, provoking cries of outrage from both the right-wing media and the gay press, How To Be Gay traces gay men's cultural difference to the social meaning of style.

First published in 1985, Between Men was a decisive intervention in gender studies, a book that all but singlehandedly dislodged a tradition of literary critique that suppressed queer subjects and subjectivities. With stunning foresight and conceptual power, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work opened not only literature but also politics, society, and culture to broader investigations of power, sex, and desire, and to new possibilities of critical agency. Between Men engages with Shakespeare's Sonnets, Wycherley's The Country Wife, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Tennyson's The Princess, Eliot's Adam Bede, Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, among many other texts. Its pathbreaking analysis of homosocial desire in Western literature remains vital to the future of queer studies and to explorations of the social transformations in which it participates.

Woman or man? That's the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue-collar town in the 1950's, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist '60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early '70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgender person in a world demanding simple explanations. Leslie Feinberg is also the author of Trans Liberation, Trans Gender Warriors and Transgender Liberation, and is a noted activist and speaker on transgender issues.

Gender 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.

Transgender Warriors is an essential read for trans people of all ages who want to learn about the towering figures who have come before them—and for everyone who is part of the fight for trans liberation. This groundbreaking book—far ahead of its time when first published in 1996 and still galvanizing today—interweaves history, memoir, and gender studies to show that transgender people, far from being a modern phenomenon, have always existed and have exerted their influence throughout history. Leslie Feinberg—hirself a lifelong transgender revolutionary—reveals the origin of the check-one-box-only gender system and shows how zie found empowerment in the lives of transgender warriors around the world, from the Two Spirits of the Americas to the many genders of India, from the trans shamans of East Asia to the gender-bending Queen Nzinga of Angola, from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and beyond.

Invisible 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.

How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all. From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.

The first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. In their first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. Halberstam presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms' especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture. In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don't Cry, Halberstam turns attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music.

Biologist and trans woman Julie Serano reveals a unique perspective on femininity, masculinity, and gender identityA 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 makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activist must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms.

What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny. In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.

In 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.

Small 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.

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives–ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the "father of American gynecology," to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

This book, first published in 1987, is both simple in conception and ambitious in intention. It aims at legitimating the new interdisciplinary field of men's studies as one of the most significant and challenging intellectual and curricular developments in academia. The fourteen essays included here are drawn from such diverse disciplines as men's studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, Black studies, biology, English literature, and gay studies.

Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. Halberstam rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity and considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship.

Why is there so much talk of a "crisis" of masculinity? How have ideas of manhood been transformed by feminism? Does feminism hold the key to the development of more egalitarian forms of masculinity? Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory addresses central questions about the analysis and construction of masculinity in contemporary society. The volume examines the ways male privilege and power are constituted and represented and explores the effect of such constructions on both men and women. Looking particularly at literature, film, and classroom practices, Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory links the analysis of masculinities with feminism's ethical and political agenda for the future. Its authors share a conviction that such a link not only reveals the persistence, now more subtle and varied, of male entitlement but also promises to create an enriched and reinvigorated feminism for a new century.

In this groundbreaking book, hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, ethnicity, or cultural persuasion.

This is an exciting new edition of R.W. Connell's groundbreaking text, which has become a classic work on the nature and construction of masculine identity. In its first edition, Masculinities provided one of the most important voices in feminist scholarship by men. Connell argued that there is no such thing as a single concept of masculinity, but, rather, that many different masculinities exist, each associated with different positions of power. In a world in which gender order continues to extend privilege to men over women, but that also raises difficult issues for men and boys, Connell's account is more pertinent than ever.

For more than three decades, the women's movement and its scholars have exhaustively studied women's complex history, roles, and struggles. In Manhood in America, Second Edition, author Michael Kimmel—a leading authority in gender studies—argues that it is time for men to rediscover their own evolution. Drawing on a myriad of sources, including advice books, magazine columns, political pamphlets, and popular novels and films, he demonstrates that American men have been eternally frustrated by their efforts to keep up with constantly changing standards. Kimmel contends that men must follow the lead of the women's movement; it is only by mining their past for its best qualities and worst excesses that men will free themselves from the constraints of the masculine ideal.

High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.

Drawing on qualitative studies of teamsport athletes and fraternity members, this book describes the rapidly changing world of masculinities among men in both the United States and Great Britain. As cultural homophobia decreases, university-aged men are influenced to construct a softer version of masculinity: one that is not predicated in homophobia. Inclusive Masculinity shows that today's youth express decreased sexism, racism and masculine bullying. As Eric Anderson demonstrates, men who value inclusive masculinities are also shown to be more likely to bond in emotional relationships with other men and to embrace a variety of behaviors once coded as feminine, including certain same-sex sexual behaviors.

One of the enduring legacies of the 2012 Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape. On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a distressed Bill O'Reilly lamented that he didn't live in "a traditional America anymore." He was joined by others who bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so angry? Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men—from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students—in pursuit of an answer. Angry White Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage.

In this "refreshing and radical" (The Guardian) narrative, Thomas McBee, a trans man, sets out to uncover what makes a man—and what being a "good" man even means—through his experience training for and fighting in a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden. A self-described "amateur" at masculinity, McBee embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of gender in society, examining sexism, toxic masculinity, and privilege. As he questions the limitations of gender roles and the roots of masculine aggression, he finds intimacy, hope, and even love in the experience of boxing and in his role as a man in the world. Despite personal history and cultural expectations, "Amateur is a reminder that the individual can still come forward and fight" (The A.V. Club).

In this “stunning collection of documents” (Washington Post Book World), African-American women speak of themselves, their lives, ambitions, and struggles from the colonial period to the present day. Theirs are stories of oppression and survival, of family and community self-help, of inspiring heroism and grass-roots organizational continuity in the face of racism, economic hardship, and, far too often, violence. Their vivid accounts, their strong and insistent voices, make for inspiring reading, enriching our understanding of the American past.

This landmark work from a renowned feminist historian is a foundational demonstration of the uses of gender as a conceptual tool for cultural and historical analysis. Joan Wallach Scott offers a trenchant critique of the compartmentalization of women's history, arguing that political and social categories are always fundamentally shaped by gender and that questions of gender are essential to considerations of difference in history. Exploring topics ranging from language and class to the politics of work and family, Gender and the Politics of History is a vital contribution to feminist history and historical methodology that also speaks more broadly to the ongoing redefinition of gender in our political and cultural vocabularies.

This richly revealing anthology brings together for the first time the vital new scholarly studies now lifting the veil from the gay and lesbian past.

Unequal Sisters has become a beloved and classic reader in American Women’s History. It provides an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s history in the United States today. When it was first published in 1990, it revolutionized the field with its broad multicultural approach, and continued, through its next two editions, to emphasize feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, region, and sexuality.

Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is. A three volume set.

What are the relations between feminism and history, feminist politics and historical practice? What are the connections between gender and class? What part have racial identities and ethnic difference played in the construction of Englishness?
Through a series of provocative and richly detailed essays, Catherine Hall explores these questions. She argues that feminism has opened up vital new questions for history and transformed familiar historical narratives. Class can no longer be understood outside of gender, or gender outside of class.

'The lives of working women and their contributions to American economic history are considered in a fine blend of biography and social and political history.' Reviewer's BookwatchWith new data on women's economic status in the 1990s, this classic feminist book explores the intersecting effects of race and gender on women from diverse backgrounds.

David M. Halperin argues that hetero- and homosexuality are not biologically constituted but are, instead, historically and culturally produced. Halperin offers a vigorous defense of the historicist approach to the construction of sexuality, an approach that sets a premium on the description of other societies in all their irreducible specificity and does not force them to fit our own conceptions of what sexuality is or ought to be.

Perhaps no topic today is politically more divisive than homosexuality, particularly when it is coupled with the deeply rooted concept of civil rights. This work focuses on 20th/21st- century U. S. history as it pertains to GLBT history. Major issues and events such as the Stonewall riot, Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the military, same-sex marriage, gay rights, gay pride, organizations and alliances, AIDS, and legal battles and court cases are discussed. Also included are sidebars highlighting major debates, legal landmarks and key individuals. A timeline and further reading sections concluding each chapter as well as a full bibliography and black and white images enhance the text.

An instant best-seller and now the leading book for the course, Wade and Ferree's Gender is a sophisticated yet accessible introduction to sociological perspectives on gender. Drawing on memorable examples mined from history, pop culture, and current events, Gender deftly moves between theoretical concepts and applications to everyday life. New discussions of #metoo, toxic masculinity, and gender politics in the Trump era help students participate in today's conversation about gender.

This textbook introduces key feminist concepts and analytical frameworks used in the interdisciplinary Women, Gender, Sexualities field. It unpacks the social construction of knowledge and categories of difference, processes and structures of power and inequality, with a focus on gendered labor in the global economy, and the historical development of feminist social movements. The book emphasizes feminist sociological approaches to analyzing structures of power, drawing heavily from empirical feminist research.

As women's studies departments and programs undergo rapid transformation in higher education, there has been a burgeoning demand for instructional material that addresses feminist and queer studies at all levels in the curricula. Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and TransnationalReader reflects this vibrantly expanding field and meets the urgent need for theory courses.Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader is not simply a feminist theory text that includes queer theories; rather, it theorizes at the intersection of feminist and queer theories, and by doing so, transforms and reshapes the boundaries of the fields. The book invites students to think critically about the limitations of understanding feminist theory as separate, but tangentially related, to queer theory and moves them beyond transnationalism as "additive" to U.S.-centered intersectional perspectives.

A one-stop, no-nonsense introduction to the work of postmodern theorists like Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault and Judith Butler that has redefined women's, gay and gender studies. Nationally known gender activist Riki Wilchins combines straightforward prose with concrete examples from LGBT and feminist politics to guide the reader through the ideas that have forever altered our understanding of bodies, sex and desire.

The reclamation of the term queer over the last several decades marked a shift in the study of sexuality from a focus on supposedly essential categories such as gay and lesbian, to more fluid notions of sexual identity. On the cutting-edge of this significant shift was Annamarie Jagose's classic text Queer Theory: An Introduction. In this groundbreaking work, Jagose provides a clear and concise explanation of queer theory, tracing it as part of an intriguing history of same-sex love over the last century.

Breaking new ground, both substantively and stylistically, Introducing the New Sexuality Studies Second Edition offers students and academics an engaging, thought-provoking introduction and overview of the social study of sexualities. Its central premise is to explore the social construction of sexuality, the role of social differences such as race or nationality in creating sexual variation, and the ways sex is entangled in relations of power and inequality. Through this approach the field of sexuality is considered in multicultural, global, and comparative terms, and from a truly social perspective. The second edition of this definitive textbook consists of over seventy-five short, original essays on the key topics and themes in sexuality studies.

Bringing together forty-two groundbreaking essays—many of them already classics—The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader provides a much-needed introduction to the contemporary state of lesbian/gay studies, extensively illustrating the range, scope, diversity, appeal, and power of the work currently being done in the field. Featuring essays by such prominent scholars as Judith Butler, John D'Emilio, Kobena Mercer, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader explores a multitude of sexual, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic experiences.

Transgender studies is the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.

This is the first introductory textbook intended for transgender/trans studies at the undergraduate level. The book can also be used for related courses in LGBTQ, queer, and gender/feminist studies. It encompasses and connects global contexts, intersecting identities, historic and contemporary issues, literature, history, politics, art, and culture. Ardel Haefele-Thomas embraces the richness of intersecting identities—how race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, nation, religion, and ability have cross-influenced to shape the transgender experience and trans culture across and beyond the binary. Written by an accomplished teacher with experience in a wide variety of higher learning institutions, this new text inspires readers to explore not only contemporary transgender issues and experiences but also the global history of gender diversity through the ages.

Men's Lives reflects on the question "What does it mean to be a man in contemporary U.S. society?" Edited by two of the field's most prominent researchers, and organized around themes that define masculinity, this best-selling reader uses a social-constructionist view to examine how men construct masculinity within a social and historical context.

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag-ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate portrait of rival fashion “houses, ” from fierce contests for trophies to house mothers offering sustenance in a world rampant with homophobia, transphobia, racism, AIDS, and poverty.

Filmmaker Derek Jarman narrates a reflection of his losing battle with AIDS against the backdrop of a blue screen.

In San Francisco, a group of aging Chinese women (Kiều Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen, Lisa Lu) meet regularly to trade familial stories while playing Mahjong. In a series of sixteen vignettes that spans generations and continents, this adaptation of Amy Tan's bestselling novel explores cultural conflict and the often-turbulent relationships between four first-generation Chinese-American women (Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao) and their mothers.

This documentary tells the little known story of the first known act of collective, violent resistance to the social oppression of queer people in the United States. The riot at Compton's cafeteria occurred in 1966 in San Fransisco's impoverished Tenderloin neighborhood three years before the famous gay riot at New York's Stonewall Inn.

After hearing that her boyfriend/pimp cheated on her while she was in jail, a transgender sex worker and her best friend set out to find him and teach him and his new lover a lesson.

A young African-American man grapples with his identity and sexuality while experiencing the everyday struggles of childhood, adolescence, and burgeoning adulthood.

A woman's life is thrown into turmoil following the death of her partner. Mourning the loss of the man she loved, she finds herself under intense scrutiny from those with no regard for her privacy.

In Mexico City's upscale Colonia Roma district, a quiet but swift change is on its way. Pivoting around Dr Antonio's middle-bourgeoisie family, the lives of two women--the devoted live-in maid and housekeeper of Mixteco heritage, Cleo, and her academic employer, Sofía--become inextricably intertwined, as a seemingly ordinary business trip to Quebec paves the way for a bitter heartbreak. Over a span of one long year--from the quadrennial 1970s World Cup to the blood-drenched Corpus Christi Massacre--the unforeseen and sometimes unbearable complications of love; a new life amid death, and an almost stubborn will to find good in evil, pepper Sofía and Cleo's daily routines. And before irrevocable transformations and startling revelations, life always finds a way.

France, 1770. Marianne, a painter, is commissioned to do the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Héloïse is a reluctant bride to be and Marianne must paint her without her knowing. She observes her by day, to paint her secretly.