Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy
nicholae cline
they/them
Land Acknowledgment & Resource Guide
Indiana University and the city of Bloomington occupy lands of enduring historical and cultural significance, and that for some was, is, and will always be home, to a number of Indigenous groups, including the Myaamiaki (Miami), Lënape (Delaware), saawanwa (Shawnee), kiikaapoa (Kickapoo), and Neshnabé/Bodwéwadmik (Potawatomi) peoples. We honor and acknowledge the ancestral and contemporary caretakers of this place, as well as our nonhuman spirits, elders, and guides, offer gratitude for being held and nourished by the land, and recognize the inherent sovereignty and resilience of all Native communities who have survived and still thrive to this day on Turtle Island in spite of the systemic subjugation, dispossession, and genocide that constitute the ongoing reality of settler-colonialism.
We encourage all, settlers and guests alike, to look beyond acknowledgement and engage with local Indigenous communities while also cultivating thoughtful relations of reciprocity with the sacred land you live on, as well as the many vibrant beings with whom you share it.
Further Resources & Reading
- Land Reparations & Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit
- Resource Guide to Reparations and Land Rematriation on Turtle Island
- Native Land Interactive Map
- First Nations Educational & Cultural Center @ IU (FNECC)
- FNECC Land Acknowledgment & Resources
If you'd like to learn more about the practice and history of Indigenous land acknowledgments and the tribes, nations, and communities with ties to this land colonially known as the state of Indiana, consult our full resource guide.
About
Welcome to the Gender Studies subject guide for Indiana University Bloomington
We're glad you're here. This guide contains information and resources pertaining to the field of gender studies. Here you'll find featured content, new titles, helpful resources and services for scholars, instructional support information, research & writing tips, and curated, subject-specific resources for performing research in gender studies. You will also find a list of campus & community resources for women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning, and more (LGBTQ+) people. For a description of what you'll find in each section of this guide, just hover over each item in the navigation menu on the left-hand side of this page; if you're using a mobile device, you'll also find a summary on each page.
The subject specialist and collection manager for this area is nicholae cline. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form.
To learn more about who we are and the services we offer, including links to key general library services, take a look at the About Us page of this guide.
About Gender Studies
The study of gender as a fundamental category of social and cultural analysis, while also considering the intersection of gender with other substantive categories of identity, including sexuality, race, religion, class, disability, and nationality. Gender studies encourages scholars to think beyond common sense accounts of gender to examine its complex construction in a range of historical epochs, cultural arenas, and global processes. The field of gender studies utilizes a wide variety of innovative approaches and methodologies, broad in reach, yet unified through a critical angle of vision.
To learn more about the IU Department of Gender Studies, visit their website.
Transmaculine Worlds: Works by Trans Men & Other Masc Folk
Introduction
In recognition of Pride Month in June, we have curated a selection of materials and resources from our collections to honor the contributions of transgender men and transmasculine folks across the arts—from fiction and poetry, to feature films and documentaries, to podcasts and music. In many of the tabs of this feature, we have included links to articles by and interviews with the authors at the top of the lists. We have also put together a sampling of important transgender studies texts, to help ground an understanding of transgender identity and embodiment. For more academic texts, please see our Recommended Resources for Gender Studies and Transgender Resources guides. This is a sibling guide to our Transfeminine Worlds: Works by Trans Women & Other Femme Folk feature.
About the Playlist
As an introduction to this feature, we have also created a playlist of music by trans men and other artists who explore and embody masculinity 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, and indie rock, among others. To learn more about this, feel free to explore the following articles that highlight some of the artists on our playlist:
- Here’s How I Learned to Love Myself as a Transgender Man in the Music Industry (Emerson Mancini, Billboard)
- Christine and the Queens on Expanding His Voice and Making Art Accessible to Everyone (Kory Grown, Rolling Stone)
- ‘My fluidity, my dignity’: The radical kingdom of Christine and the Queens (Daisy Jones, Dazed)
- Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Revolution Songs (Lazarus Letcher, them)
- NoSo's debut album is a care package for someone in need: Their younger self (Elle Mannion, NPR)
- The Amalgamation of Al Menne (Matt Mitchell, Paste Magazine)
- Girlpool's Avery Tucker: How I Learned to Hold My Shame By Releasing Songs Made Pre-Transition (Avery Tucker, them)
- Bend the Binary with Dorian Electra (TIDAL)
- Interview: The Sonic Symbiosis of Anjimile (with Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp, Atwood Magazine)
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.
Beyond the Playlist
Articles:
- Organizing my transmasculine library (Kyle Ranson-Walsh)
- The Coming of Age of Transgender Literature (Peter Haldeman, The New York Times)
- Ten Trans Books I Love (P.S. They're Not All "Trans") (Jordy Rosenberg, LitHub)
- Gender Trouble on Mother’s Day (Jordy Rosenberg, LA Review of Books)
- Visceral Mythology and Transformational Songs (A Conversation with Jeanne Thornton and Alex Difrancesco, Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
- Danez Smith: Reimagining Ourselves in an Increasingly Queer World (Danez Smith, The New York Times)
For more resources, see our additional curated guides:
- Transgender Resources A curated selection of resources managed by IU Libraries with information on transitioning at IU Bloomington, transgender health & legal services, academic resources, media, resources for allies, and student/community organizations
- Spotlight on Queer & Trans* Asian Literature and Poetics (Gender Studies)
- Spotlight on Black LGBTQ+ Poetry (Gender Studies)
- Spotlight on Queer Poetry & Poetics (Gender Studies)
- Spotlight on Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA Peoples (Gender Studies)
- Metaphysics of Gender (Gender Studies)
- Introduction to Queer Theory (Philosophy)
- Art & Gender (Gender Studies + Art, Art History, & Architecture)
- LGBTQIA+ Health Information Resources (Gender Studies, Health Sciences)
Interviews
- Ponyboy: a novel from the POV of a trans-masc ‘hot mess express’ (Eliot Duncan with Sam Moore, Dazed)
- ‘Write what terrifies you’: 21 Questions with Rivers Solomon (Penguin)
- Real Space: An Interview with Patrick Cottrell (with Colin Winnette, The Paris Review)
- 'It's Very Easy to Imagine a Dystopia': An Interview with Joss Lake (Joss Lake with Ilana Masad, Hazlitt)
- An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City (with Jessica Mannion, PANK)
Books
Confessions of the Fox by ISBN: 9780399592270Publication Date: 2018-06-26Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers, and lovers of eighteenth-century London. Yet no one knows the true story; their confessions have never been found. Until now. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript—a gender-defying exposé of Jack and Bess's adventures. Is Confessions of the Fox an authentic autobiography or a hoax? As Dr. Voth is drawn deeper into Jack and Bess's tale of underworld resistance and gender transformation, it becomes clear that their fates are intertwined—and only a miracle will save them all.
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.
The Earthquake Room by ISBN: 0997044470Publication Date: 2017-10-16In the near future, Oakland is haunted by natural disaster and political collapse. When k realizes that she has infected her girlfriend, bea, with a disease, she loses herself in a masochistic quest for atonement, leaving bea to contend with her fears about an increasingly precarious world by herself. Literary and adventurous, lyrical yet anchored, Davey Davis’ work explores the meanings of responsibility, romantic love, and queer resistance in a late-capitalist hellscape where futurity is always in question.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by ISBN: 9781617755880Publication Date: 2017-10-03For generations, the Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster, who they consider to be less than human. When the autopsy of Matilda's sovereign reveals a surprising link between his death and her mother's suicide some quarter-century before, Aster retraces her mother's footsteps. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer and sowing the seeds of civil war, Aster learns there may be a way off the ship if she's willing to fight for it.
Stone Butch Blues by ISBN: 9781555838539Publication Date: 2004-04-01Woman 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.
Dead Collections by ISBN: 9780143136910Publication Date: 2022-02-22A whirlwind romance between an eccentric archivist and a grieving widow explores what it means to be at home in your own body in this clever, humorous, and heartfelt novel. When archivist Sol meets Elsie, the larger than life widow of a moderately famous television writer who's come to donate her wife's papers, there's an instant spark. But Sol has a secret: he suffers from an illness called vampirism, and hides from the sun by living in his basement office. On their way to falling in love, the two traverse grief, delve into the Internet fandom they once unknowingly shared, and navigate the realities of transphobia and the stigmas of carrying the "vampire disease." Then, when strange things start happening at the collection, Sol must embrace even more of the unknown to save himself and his job. Dead Collections is a wry novel full of heart and empathy, that celebrates the journey, the difficulties and joys, in finding love and comfort within our own bodies.
Several People Are Typing by ISBN: 9780593313534Publication Date: 2022-09-27Told entirely through clever and captivating Slack messages, this irresistible, relatable satire of both virtual work and contemporary life is The Office for a new world. Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm has been uploaded into the company's internal Slack channels—at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it's an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from home policy, but now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his co-worker Pradeep to help him escape, and to find out what happened to his body. In a time when office paranoia and politics have followed us home, Calvin Kasulke is here to capture the surprising, absurd, and fully-relatable factors attacking our collective sanity...and give us hope that we can still find a human connection.
Future Feeling by ISBN: 9781593766887Publication Date: 2021-06-01The year is 20__, and Penfield R. Henderson is in a rut. When he's not walking dogs for cash or responding to booty calls from his B-list celebrity hookup, he's holed up in his dingy Bushwick apartment obsessing over holograms of Aiden Chase, a fellow trans man and influencer documenting his much smoother transition into picture-perfect masculinity on the Gram. After an IRL encounter with Aiden leaves Pen feeling especially resentful, Pen enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to put their respective talents to use in hexing Aiden. Together, they gain access to Aiden's social media account and post a picture of Pen's aloe plant, Alice, tied to a curse-—Whosoever beholds the aloe will be pushed into the Shadowlands. When the hex accidentally bypasses Aiden, sending another young trans man named Blithe to the Shadowlands (the dreaded emotional landscape through which every trans person must journey to achieve true self-actualization), the Rhiz (the quasi-benevolent big brother agency overseeing all trans matters) orders Pen and Aiden to team up and retrieve him. Magnificently imagined, linguistically dazzling, and riotously fun, Future Feeling presents an alternate future in which advanced technology still can't replace human connection but may give the trans community new ways to care for its own.
Ponyboy by ISBN: 9781324051220Publication Date: 2023-06-13Ponyboy unravels in his Paris apartment. Cut to the bar. Cut to the back room. Ponyboy is strung out and struggling. He is falling into the widening chasm between who he is--trans, electrically so--and the blank canvas his girlfriend, Baby, wants him to be. Cut to Berlin. Ponyboy sinks deeper into drugs and falls for Gabriel, all the while pursued by a photographer hungry for the next hot thing. As his relationships crumble, he overdoses. Cut to open sky. In a rehab back home in Iowa, Ponyboy is his mother's son. In precise, atmospheric prose, Eliot Duncan's debut novel lays bare the innate splendor, joy, and ache of becoming one's self.
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by ISBN: 9780525566182Publication Date: 2019-04-23It's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Paul transforms his body and his gender at will as he crossed the country—a journey and adventure through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman whose hero/ine wends his/her way through a world gutted by loss, pulsing with music, and opening into an array of intimacy and connections.
The Borrow a Boyfriend Club by ISBN: 9780593568583Publication Date: 2023-09-12A feel-good, coming-of-age rom-com from debut author Page Powars that follows a trans teen who joins a boyfriend borrowing service masquerading as an Italian Club to prove that he's one of the guys, especially to its frustratingly handsome leader. Noah Byrd is the perfect boy. At least, that's what he needs to convince his new classmates of to prove his gender. His plan? Join the school's illustrious (and secret) Borrow a Boyfriend Club, whose members rent themselves out for dates. Once he's accepted among the bros, the "slip-ups" end. But Noah's interview is a flop. Desperate, he strikes a deal with the club's prickly but attractive president, Asher. Noah will help them win an annual talent show--and in return, he'll get a second shot to demonstrate his boyfriend skills in a series of tests that include romancing Asher himself.
A Natural History of Transition: Stories by ISBN: 9781999058876Publication Date: 2021-04-27A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters. They grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
Transmutation: Stories by ISBN: 9781644210666Publication Date: 2021-06-22A wry, and at the same time dark and risk-taking, story collection that pushes the boundaries of transgender awareness and filial bonds. Here is the hate between 16-year-old Junie, who is transitioning, and their mum's boyfriend Chad when the family moves into Chad's house on Lake Erie. And here is the love being tested between Sawyer and his dad, who named his boat after his child and resists changing it from Sara to Sawyer now. These stories enter lands that are violent and comfortless, testing the limits of what it means to be human, sometimes returning stronger and wiser and sometimes not returning at all.
Interviews
- An Interview with Author Lio Min (with Michele Kirichanskaya, Geeks OUT)
- Banned in the USA Q&A: Kyle Lukoff on the ‘desperate importance’ of fighting book bans (PEN America)
- Family, Identity And A Hot Ghost: Questions For 'Cemetery Boys' Author Aiden Thomas (with Petra Mayer, NPR)
-
Kacen Callender | The PEN Ten Interview (with Kori Davis)
Books
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?
Felix Ever After by ISBN: 9780062820259Publication Date: 2020-05-05From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he's painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it's like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What's worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he's one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after. When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix's deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn't count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle...But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself. Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognizing the love you deserve.
Too Bright to See by ISBN: 9780593111154Publication Date: 2021-04-20It's the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug's best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn't particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there's something more important to worry about- A ghost is haunting Bug's eerie old house in rural Vermont...and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they're trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light--Bug is transgender.
May the Best Man Win by ISBN: 9781250625120Publication Date: 2021-05-18A trans boy enters a throw-down battle for the title of Homecoming King with the boy he dumped last summer in ZR Ellor's contemporary YA debut. Jeremy Harkiss, cheer captain and student body president, won't let coming out as a transgender boy ruin his senior year. Instead of bowing to the bigots and school administration, Jeremy decides to make some noise--and how better than by challenging his all-star ex-boyfriend, Lukas for the title of Homecoming King? Lukas Rivers, football star and head of the Homecoming Committee, is just trying to find order in his life after his older brother's funeral and the loss of his long-term girlfriend--who turned out to be a boy. But when Jeremy threatens to break his heart and steal his crown, Lukas kick starts a plot to sabotage Jeremy's campaign. When both boys take their rivalry too far, the dance is on the verge of being canceled. To save Homecoming, they'll have to face the hurt they're both hiding--and the lingering butterflies they can't deny.
The (un)Popular Vote by ISBN: 9780063025769Publication Date: 2021-06-01Red, White, & Royal Blue meets The West Wing in Jasper Sanchez's electric and insightful #ownvoices YA debut, chronicling a transmasculine student's foray into a no-holds-barred student body president election against the wishes of his politician father. Optics can make or break an election. Everything Mark knows about politics, he learned from his father, the Congressman who still pretends he has a daughter and not a son. Mark has promised to keep his past hidden and pretend to be the cis guy everyone assumes he is. But when he sees a manipulatively charming candidate for student body president inflame dangerous rhetoric, Mark risks his low profile to become a political challenger. Soon Mark feels emboldened to engage with voters--and even start a new romance. But with an investigative journalist digging into his past, a father trying to silence him, and the bully frontrunner standing in his way, Mark will have to decide which matters most: perception or truth, when both are just as dangerous.
The Passing Playbook by ISBN: 9781984815408Publication Date: 2021-06-01Fifteen-year-old Spencer Harris is a proud nerd, an awesome big brother, and a David Beckham in training. He's also transgender. After transitioning at his old school leads to a year of isolation and bullying, Spencer gets a fresh start at Oakley, the most liberal private school in Ohio. At Oakley, Spencer seems to have it all: more accepting classmates, a decent shot at a starting position on the boys' soccer team, great new friends, and maybe even something more than friendship with one of his teammates. The problem is, no one at Oakley knows Spencer is trans--he's passing. But when a discriminatory law forces Spencer's coach to bench him, Spencer has to make a choice: cheer his team on from the sidelines or publicly fight for his right to play, even though it would mean coming out to everyone--including the guy he's falling for.
Obie Is Man Enough by ISBN: 9780593379479Publication Date: 2021-10-19Obie knew his transition would have ripple effects. He has to leave his swim coach, his pool, and his best friends. But it's time for Obie to find where he truly belongs. As Obie dives into a new team, though, things are strange. Obie always felt at home in the water, but now he can't get his old coach out of his head. Even worse are the bullies that wait in the locker room and on the pool deck. Luckily, Obie has family behind him. And maybe some new friends too, including Charlie, his first crush. Obie is ready to prove he can be one of the fastest boys in the water—to his coach, his critics, and his biggest competition: himself.
Brooklyn, Burning by ISBN: 9780761375265Publication Date: 2011-08-01When you're sixteen and no one understands who you are, sometimes the only choice left is to run. If you're lucky, you find a place that accepts you, no questions asked. And if you're really lucky, that place has a drum set, a place to practice, and a place to sleep. For Kid, the streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, are that place. Over the course of two scorching summers, Kid falls hopelessly in love and then loses nearly everything and everyone worth caring about. But as summer draws to a close, Kid finally finds someone who can last beyond the sunset. Brooklyn, Burning is a fearless and unconventional love story. Brezenoff never identifies the gender of his two main characters, and readers will draw their own conclusions about Kid and Scout. Whatever they decide, Brooklyn, Burning is not a book any teen reader will soon forget. Brooklyn, Burning is the story of two summers in Brooklyn, two summers of fires, music, loss, and ultimately, love.
Hell Followed with Us by ISBN: 9781682633243Publication Date: 2022-06-07Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him--the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world's population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can't get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with. But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC's leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji's darkest secret: the cult's bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all. Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick's terms...until he discovers the ALC's mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own.
Cemetery Boys by ISBN: 9781250250469Publication Date: 2020-09-01A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in Aiden Thomas's New York Times-bestselling paranormal YA debut Cemetery Boys. Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him. When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.
Escape from St. Hell: A Graphic Novel by ISBN: 9781338824476Publication Date: 2024-05-07In this sequel to the Indie bestseller Welcome to St. Hell, Lewis Hancox tells the hilarious, inspiring story of coming into his own as a trans man For Lew, figuring out he was a guy and wanted to live life as a guy was the end of our journey... and the start of a whole other journey. Escape From St. Hell charts all the changes that Lew wanted to be made in order for him to live as a young trans man -- changes not just to his own body and perspective, but to the perspectives of the family, friends, and enemies around him. As he did in his bestselling graphic memoir Welcome to St. Hell, Lewis Hancox charts his journey with plenty of laughs, a good number of cringes, and an honesty that takes readers along for the ride of Lew's life.
Different Kinds of Fruit by ISBN: 9780593111185Publication Date: 2022-04-12In this funny and hugely heartfelt novel from the Newbery Honor-winning author of Too Bright to See, a sixth-grader's life is turned upside down when she learns her dad is trans Annabelle Blake fully expects this school year to be the same as every other- same teachers, same classmates, same, same, same. So she's elated to discover there's a new kid in town. To Annabelle, Bailey is a breath of fresh air. She loves hearing about their life in Seattle, meeting their loquacious (and kinda corny) parents, and hanging out at their massive house. And it doesn't hurt that Bailey has a cute smile, nice hands (how can someone even have nice hands?) and smells really good. Suddenly sixth grade is anything but the same. And when her irascible father shares that he and Bailey have something big--and surprising--in common, Annabelle begins to see herself, and her family, in a whole new light. At the same time she starts to realize that her community, which she always thought of as home, might not be as welcoming as she had thought. Together Annabelle, Bailey, and their families discover how these categories that seem to mean so much-boy, girl, gay, straight, fruit, vegetable-aren't so clear-cut after all.
When Aidan Became a Brother by ISBN: 9781620148372Publication Date: 2019-06-04This sweet and groundbreaking picture book, winner of the 2020 Stonewall Book Award, celebrates the changes in a transgender boy's life, from his initial coming-out to becoming a big brother. When Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl. His parents gave him a pretty name, his room looked like a girl's room, and he wore clothes that other girls liked wearing. After he realized he was a trans boy, Aidan and his parents fixed the parts of life that didn't fit anymore, and he settled happily into his new life. Then Mom and Dad announce that they're going to have another baby, and Aidan wants to do everything he can to make things right for his new sibling from the beginning--from choosing the perfect name to creating a beautiful room to picking out the cutest onesie. With a little help, Aidan comes to understand that mistakes can be fixed with honesty and communication, and that he already knows the most important thing about being a big brother: how to love with his whole self.
Interviews
- Love is Something We Inherit: Yanyi Interviewed (with Sarah M. Sala, BOMB)
- Interview of Anaïs Duplan (with Xtian W., NYC Trans Oral History Project)
- Interview with Danez Smith (with Sandeep Parmar, The White Review)
- Interview: Trying to Feel a Part of Some Kind Of ‘We’ (Cameron Awkward-Rich with Robin Gow, Adroit)
-
“Queerness is plain as the sea; it only gets politicized as being unnatural”: Interview with Oliver Baez Bendorf (with Kaveh Akbar, DiveDapper)
Books
I Need Music by ISBN: 0900575115Publication Date: 2021-10-01Poetry. In his fourth book, AnaÏs Duplan reinvents ekphrasis as an act of devotion to art as both the sense-archive and future tense of Black embodiment. In this vibrant think space (where thinking is singing), Duplan hosts a vivid community of Black musicians, performers, painters, photographers, poets, critics, filmmakers and video artists, even a chorus of lovelorn chatroom denizens. I Need Music hosts the lyric re-arrivals of unquiet pasts, enacts a haptic intimacy with the present, and vibrates with the immanence of Black, queer futures.
Advantages of Being Evergreen by ISBN: 9781880834008Publication Date: 2019-09-10"Written from and with death, the poems in Advantages of Being Evergreen offer elegies; they utter prayers that ask our dead to stay; they come as breath constrained and animated by a form that narrates an excess of natures, an excess of rivers that interrupt this book as the poet ponders the impossible question of what it means to be home. Here the body is a shared condition. The body is language. It changes. It resists. It mourns. It reincarnates with the 'teeth of our dead around our neck.'" -Daniel Borzutzky
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.
Dream of the Divided Field by ISBN: 9780593230992Publication Date: 2022-03-01The poems in Yanyi's latest book suggest that we enter and exit our old selves like homes. We look through the windows and recognize some former aspect of our lives that is both ours and not ours. We long for what we had even as we recognize that we can no longer live there. Yanyi conjures the beloved both within and without us: the beloved we believe we know, the beloved who is never the person we imagine, and the beloved who threatens to erase us even as we stand before them. Informed by Yanyi's experiences of immigration, violent heartbreak, and a bodily transition, Dream of the Divided Field explores the contradictions that accompany shifts from one state of being to another. In tender, serene, and ethereal poems, Dream of the Divided Field examines a body breaking down and a body that rebuilds in limitless and boundary-shifting ways. These are homes in memory—homes of love and isolation, lust and alienation, tenderness and violence, suffering and wonder.
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.
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.
All the Gay Saints by ISBN: 9781947817128Publication Date: 2020-05-05Whiting Award winner Kayleb Rae Candrilli's second full-length book, All the Gay Saints, is a collection of trans joy and resilience. Focused on love, partnership, and cultivating the landscape of one's own body, All the Gay Saints seeks happiness in a world saturated with transphobia and marred by climate change. Though this world is finite, these poems want you to live forever. They will unbarb your body if you let them.
Dispatch by ISBN: 9780892555031Publication Date: 2019-12-10Set against the media environment that saturates even our most intimate spaces, Dispatch attends to, revises, and thinks adjacent to the news of racial/gendered violence in the US, from the nineteenth century to the present day. These poems ask: What kind of revisions will make this a world/a story that is concerned with my people's flourishing? How ought I pay attention, how to register perpetual bad news without letting it fatally intrude? Cameron Awkward-Rich is among the most bracing voices to emerge in recent years, a dazzling exemplar of poetry's (and humanity's) possibilities.
The Good Arabs by ISBN: 9781999058890Publication Date: 2021-09-21Swinging from post-explosion Beirut to a Montreal 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 geographical surroundings both expansive and precise, family both biological and chosen, and community.
Muster Points by ISBN: 9781773854533Publication Date: 2023-06-15In March 2020, Lucas Crawford was quarantined at the Banff Centre for the Arts, coughing like a good fat asthmatic at high altitude, in the middle of a breakup, not knowing when or how he would get home, or where home would be when he got home. What does a depressed professor do, stranded in a dorm room? Write poems. Muster Points is a frank discussion of pleasure, plain, nostalgia, desire, and health from a "fancy academic" who refuses to shy away from the blood and sweat of depression or the glorious fluids of queer sex. These poems bring us on a trans boy's trips through the sharp-shard runs of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into the love language of regret and persistent, inconvenient desire. As Crawford packs his two suitcases and bangs into past selves, tenuous futures, and a global emergency, he tracks his collisions toughly and tenderly, documenting every relic and clue. He travels to the core of his sexual politic, through the front door and to the back of his mind.
Articles
- Stepping Into the Boxing Ring as a Transgender Man (Thomas Page McBee, LitHub)
- The Masculine Mystique: A New Kind of Trans Memoir (Jordy Rosenberg, The New York Times)
- 'I Like My Values Better': An Interview with Daniel M. Lavery (with Chris Randle, Hazlitt)
- In a climate rife with hate, Elliot Page says 'the time felt right' to tell his story (with Tonya Mosley, NPR)
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For 'Gender', See 'Turtles': Experiments in Empathetic Biology (Callum Angus, The Puritan)
Books
Something That May Shock and Discredit You by ISBN: 9781982105235Publication Date: 2020-02-11Daniel M. Lavery is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybrids--from lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and laugh-out-loud funny accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith. From a thoughtful analysis of the beauty of William Shatner to a sinister reimagining of HGTV's House Hunters, and featuring figures as varied as Anne of Green Gables, Columbo, Nora Ephron, Apollo, and the cast of Mean Girls, Something That May Shock and Discredit You is a hilarious and emotionally exhilarating compendium that combines personal history with cultural history to make you see yourself and those around you entirely anew. It further establishes Lavery as one of the most innovative and engaging voices of his generation--and it may just change the way you think about Lord Byron forever.
Pass with Care by ISBN: 9781948340489Publication Date: 2020-07-07Pass with Care is a testament to trans resilience, queer joy, and the power of finding freedom and adventure within a community of your own creation. In this stunning debut memoir-in-essays, transgender writer, artist, and activist Cooper Lee Bombardier shifts effortlessly between lyrical essays, poetry, and narrative nonfiction as his own landscape changes over the course of two decades. From working-class New England to the queer punk scene of early '90s-San Francisco to New Mexico's deserts, Bombardier documents his experiences with compassion and reverence, offering us an expansive view of gender and sexuality, masculinity and tenderness, and the difference between surviving and thriving. Pass with Care: Memoirs is a necessary and important glimpse into a living trans history as Bombardier explores how much the world has changed and made room for trans people.
Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man by ISBN: 9780872866249Publication Date: 2014-09-09What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life&mash;one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past, and freed him to become the man he was meant to be. Man Alive engages an extraordinary personal story to tell a universal one--how we all struggle to create ourselves, and how this struggle often requires risks. Far from a transgender transition tell-all, Man Alive grapples with the larger questions of legacy and forgiveness, love and violence, agency and invisibility.
As Beautiful As Any Other: A memoir of my body by ISBN: 9781760984885Publication Date: 2021-04-21When Kaya Wilson came out to his parents as transgender, a year after a near-death surfing accident and just weeks before his father's death, he was met with a startling family history of concealed queerness and shame. This is a trans story. As Beautiful As Any Other weaves this legacy together with intimate examinations of the forces that have shaped Wilson's life, and his body: vulnerability and power, grief and trauma, science and narrative. This is also my story. In this powerful and lyrical memoir, Wilson makes a case for the strength we find when we confront the complexities of our identity with compassion. As Beautiful As Any Other is a trailblazing debut of remarkable beauty, insight and candour.
Gender Failure by ISBN: 9781551525365Publication Date: 2014-04-08Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all. Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across Canada and the US and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender self-acceptance. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.
Pageboy by ISBN: 9781250878373Publication Date: 2024-05-14Full of intimate stories, from chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and struggling with familial strife, Pageboy is a love letter to the power of being seen. With this evocative and lyrical debut, Oscar-nominated star Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world. It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he'd carried for so long. The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his story in a groundbreaking and inspiring memoir about love, family, fame—and stepping into who we truly are with strength, joy and connection.
Butch Is a Noun: Essays by ISBN: 9781551523699Publication Date: 2010-08-31Butch is a Noun, the first book by activist, gender-jammer, and performer S. Bear Bergman, won wide acclaim when published by Suspect Thoughts in 2006: a funny, insightful, and purposely unsettling manifesto on what it means to be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessible to those who are new to the concept, and makes gender outlaws of all stripes feel as though they have come home. From girls' clothes to men's haircuts, from walking with girls to hanging with young men, Butch is a Noun chronicles the perplexities, dangers, and pleasures of living life outside the gender binary.
In the Margins by ISBN: 9780802879486Publication Date: 2022-08-09Moving the conversation beyond transgender inclusion to demonstrate the unique and vital theological insights transgender Christians can provide the church. Father Shannon Kearns is familiar with liminal spaces. He's lived in them his whole life. And while his experience as a transgender man has often made it difficult for him to fit in--especially in the context of Christianity--it has also shaped his perspective in important ways on complicated, gender-transgressing aspects of theology and Scripture. In the Margins weaves stories from Shannon's life into reflections on well-known biblical narratives--such as Jacob wrestling with the divine, Rahab and the Israelite spies, Ezekiel and the dry bones, and the transfiguration of Jesus. In each chapter, Shannon shows how stories have helped him make sense of his own identity, and how those same stories can unlock the transformative power of faith for those willing to listen with an open mind and stand alongside him in the in-between.
A Trans Man Walks into a Gay Bar: A journey of self (and sexual) discovery by ISBN: 9781839971839Publication Date: 2023-05-18After his relationship with his girlfriend of 5 years ended, Harry realised he was a single adult for the first time - not only that, but a single, transmasculine and newly out gay man. Despite knowing it was the right decision, the reality of his new situation was terrifying. How could he be a gay man, when he was still learning what it was to be a man? Would the gay community embrace him or reject him? What would gay sex be like? And most importantly, would finding love again be possible? In this raw, intimate and unflinchingly honest book, we follow Harry as he navigates the sometimes fraught and contradictory worlds of contemporary gay culture as a trans gay man, from Grindr, dating and gay bars, to saunas, sex and ultimately, falling in love. Harry's brave and uplifting journey will show you there is joy in finding who you are.
Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, And Finding My Place: A Transgender Memoir by ISBN: 9781982130756Publication Date: 2019-09-24An unflinching and endearing memoir from LGBTQ+ advocate Jackson Bird about how he finally sorted things out and came out as a transgender man. When Jackson Bird was twenty-five, he came out as transgender to his friends, family, and anyone in the world with an internet connection. Assigned female at birth and raised as a girl, he often wondered if he should have been born a boy. Jackson didn't share this thought with anyone because he didn't think he could share it with anyone. Growing up in Texas in the 1990s, he had no transgender role models. He barely remembers meeting anyone who was openly gay, let alone being taught that transgender people existed outside of punchlines. In this "soulful and heartfelt coming-of-age story" (Jamia Wilson, director and publisher of the Feminist Press), Jackson chronicles the ups and downs of growing up gender-confused. Illuminated by journal entries spanning childhood to adolescence to today, he candidly recalls the challenges and loneliness he endured as he came to terms with both his gender and his bisexual identity. With warmth and wit, Jackson also recounts how he navigated the many obstacles and quirks of his transition--like figuring out how to have a chest binder delivered to his NYU dorm room and having an emotional breakdown at a Harry Potter fan convention. From his first shot of testosterone to his eventual top surgery, Jackson lets you in on every part of his journey--taking the time to explain trans terminology and little-known facts about gender and identity along the way.
The Natural Mother of the Child by ISBN: 9781640094383Publication Date: 2021-06-15Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood—conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson—eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Like a Boy but Not a Boy by ISBN: 1551528215Publication Date: 2020-10-20A revelatory book about gender, mental illness, parenting, mortality, bike mechanics, work, class, and the task of living in a body. Inquisitive and expansive, Like a Boy but Not a Boy explores author andrea bennett's experiences with gender expectations, being a non-binary parent, and the sometimes funny and sometimes difficult task of living in a body. The book's fourteen essays also delve incisively into the interconnected themes of mental illness, mortality, creative work, class, and bike mechanics (apparently you can learn a lot about yourself through trueing a wheel). With thoughtfulness and acute observation, andrea bennett reveals intimate truths about the human experience, whether one is outside the gender binary or not.
Voice of the Fish by ISBN: 9781644450895Publication Date: 2022-06-07Lars Horn's Voice of the Fish, the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn's adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. Horn reexamines the oft-presumed uniformity of bodily experience, breaking down the implied singularity of "the body" as cultural and scientific object. The essays instead privilege ways of seeing and being that resist binaries, ways that falter, fracture, mutate. A sui generis work of nonfiction, Voice of the Fish blends the aquatic, mystical, and physical to reach a place beyond them all.
Articles
- How Lou Sullivan’s Journals Enrich the History of Trans Literature (Callum Angus, LitHub)
- 12 Beautiful Portraits of Transmasculine People Across America (Elyssa Goodman with Soraya Zaman, them)
- Schuyler Bailar: A Transgender Athlete and Activist Telling His Story in Hopes That His Experiences May Help Transgender Youth Find Their Voice (Pulse Spikes)
Books
He/She/They: How we talk about gender and why it matters by ISBN: 9780306831874Publication Date: 2023-10-17Go-to expert on gender identity, Schuyler Bailar, offers an essential, urgent guide that changes the conversation. Anti-transgender legislation is being introduced in state governments around the United States in record-breaking numbers. Trans people are under attack in sports, healthcare, school curriculum, bathrooms, bars, and nearly every walk of life. He/She/They clearly and compassionately addresses fundamental topics, from why being transgender is not a choice and why pronouns are important, to more complex issues including how gender-affirming healthcare can be lifesaving and why allowing trans youth to play sports is good for all kids. He/She/They is more than a book on allyship; it also speaks to trans folks directly, answering the question, "does it get better? With a resounding yes, celebrating radical trans joy. Myth-busting, affirming, compassionate, and fierce, He/She/They is a crucial, urgent, and lifesaving book that forever changes the conversation about gender.
American Boys by ISBN: 9781942084686Publication Date: 2019-04-02American Boys is a book of portraits capturing the trans-masculine community across the United States. The young Americans featured in these pages are united through their proud embrace of gender identity. Both tender and exciting these portraits are evidence of the rapidly expanding conceptions of gender sweeping the country.
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan by ISBN: 9781643620176Publication Date: 2019-09-24The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan narrates the inner life of a gay man moving through the shifting social, political, and medical mores of the second half of the 20th century. Sullivan kept comprehensive journals from age 11 until his AIDS-related death at 39. Sensual, lascivious, challenging, quotidian and poetic, the diaries complicate and disrupt normative trans narratives. Entries from twenty-four diaries reveal Sullivan's self-articulation and the complexity of a fascinating and courageous figure.
care manual: dreaming care into being by ISBN: 9781737715528Publication Date: 2022-03-07From Activation Residency founder kamra sadia hakim comes their debut publication with Flower Press, Care Manual: Dreaming Care into Being. Part pedagogy and part archive of lived experience, Care Manual fuses praxis and theory into a blueprint for giving and receiving care in community.Organized into nine chapters, Care Manual meshes source references with theories lived, pulling up fixed notions of care, consent, pleasure, and harm from their roots. Care Manual uses its own friction to soften rigid language and ideas into malleable objects and tools through a Black Trans Creator subjectivity. Hakim's well-defined lexicon serves as source code for the text, realized on the page as culturally specific, accessible, and open source language meant to create shared context for readers and practitioners alike.
Mindful Masculinity Workbook by ISBN: 9781792333484Publication Date: 2020-02-26In the midst of the #MeToo era, toxic masculinity gets a lot of airtime, but rarely do we make the same space for finding solutions to this overwhelming social problem. Many men want to do and be better, but don’t know how. The Mindful Masculinity Workbook: A Practical Guide To Healthier Masculinity provides an intensive and immersive step-by-step self-guided, solution-oriented tool bag for all men. This workbook includes dozens of writing prompts, meditations and reflections written by Rocco Kayiatos (co-creator of Original Plumbing Magazine) and a list of heavy-hitting activists, writers and advocates. If you are a man or a masculine person looking to expand your view, unpack the patriarchy or just get a better handle on identifying your feelings, this workbook is for you!
Poetry
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.
Stories/Essays
Finding Masculinity by ISBN: 9781626011878Publication Date: 2015-05-13Masculinity is a collection of stories from a small cross section of the transgender male community that shares insight into the diversity of life experiences of transgender men, beyond the traditional narrative. This anthology examines the many facets of life that transition impacts; transitioning on the job, emotional and spiritual growth, family, navigating the medical community, as well as romantic relationships. The stories within come from scientists, teachers, fathers, veterans, and artists who share how being visible as the masculine humans they identify as has developed, changed, and evolved their sense of masculinity.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by ISBN: 9781580053082Publication Date: 2010-08-31Transgender narratives have made their way from the margins to the mainstream and back again, and today's trans and nonbinary people, genderqueers, and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. Edited by the original gender outlaw, Kate Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, Gender Outlaws collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers—new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected publications. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.
OP: Original Plumbing by ISBN: 9781936932597Publication Date: 2019-06-11A dynamic celebration of trans male culture, this essential collection makes visible a decade of FTM and transmasculine experiences. Independently published from 2009 to 2019, Original Plumbing grew from a Bay Area zine to a nationally acclaimed print quarterly dedicated to trans men. For nearly ten years, the magazine was the premier resource focused on their experiences, celebrations, and imaginations, featuring writing on both playful and political topics like selfies, bathrooms, and safer sex; interviews with queer icons such as Janet Mock, Silas Howard, and Ian Harvie; and visual art, photography, and short fiction. In celebration of the magazine's ten-year run, this essential collection compiles the best of all twenty issues. Selections are reprinted in full color, with an introduction by activist Tiq Milan and a new preface by the founding editors.
To Be a Trans Man: Our stories of transition, acceptance and joy by ISBN: 9781787759602Publication Date: 2022-10-21Men in all stages of transition have come and gone from my life, and each one has been entirely different. It's difficult to feel as if you fail at being a man when you know there isn't a singular 'right' way to be one. In this illuminating and radically honest book, Ezra Woodger interviews trans men and transmasculine people to interrogate what masculinity is and what it means to be a man. Covering a wide range of topics, from dealing with judgement and expectations - both external and internal - to the experience of gender euphoria, finding a community and the growth and openness that trans-inclusive spaces can provide, the stories in this book highlight the power of being true to who you are. With contributions from trans men from across the UK and US, including Fox Fisher, Ezra Michel and many more, their words offer comfort, guidance and an important reminder of the joy and strength of existing as a trans man, regardless of how you look.
Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity by ISBN: 9781626013049Publication Date: 2016-08-25Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity is an anthology of more than 50 stories, memories, poems, ideas, essays and letters--all examining what it looks like, feels like, and is like to inhabit masculinity outside of cisgendered manhood as people of color in the world. Read these passionate, complex autobiographical glimpses into the many layers of identity as the authors offer olive branches to old and new lovers. This anthology is designed to be uplifting, as it considers and explores our masculine identities as non cis-gendered males, or those traditionally born with the "XY" chromosome. It is a radical act of self-love and affirmation. Outside the XY is a labor of love.
Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by ISBN: 9781558618374Publication Date: 2013-09-17What 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.
Trans Men in the South by ISBN: 9781793600332Publication Date: 2020-01-23Through the voices of 51 trans men, Baker A. Rogers analyzes what it means to be a trans man in the southeastern United States. Rogers argues that the common themes that pervade trans men's experiences in the South are complicated by other intersecting identities, such as sexuality, religion, race, class, and place. This study explores the intersectionalities of a group of people who are often invisible, by choice or necessity, in broader culture. Rogers engages with debates about trans experiences of masculinity, 'passing,' and discrimination within LGTBQ spaces in order to provide a comprehensive study of trans men's experiences.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by ISBN: 9781452955865Publication Date: 2017-12-05The 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.
Female Husbands by ISBN: 9781108483803Publication Date: 2020-03-26Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by ISBN: 0814735851Publication Date: 2005-01-01The 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.
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond by ISBN: 0807079413Publication Date: 1997-06-30Transgender 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.
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.
Transgender: A Reference Handbook by ISBN: 9781440856914Publication Date: 2019-02-15This book provides a crucial resource for readers who are investigating trans issues. It takes a diverse and historic approach, focusing on more than one idea or one experience of trans identity or trans history. Transgender: A Reference Handbook is a go-to resource about the transgender experience. The book takes contemporary as well as historic aspects into consideration. It looks at ancient indigenous cultures that honored third, fourth, and fifth gender identities as well as more contemporary ideas of what "transgender" means. Notably, it focuses not only on Western medical ideas of gender affirmation but on cultural diversity surrounding the topic. This book will primarily serve as a reference guide and jumping off point for further research for those seeking information about what it means to be transgender.
Feature Films
Transfinite by Publication Date: 2019This film is available to rent on YouTube and Vimeo.
Transfinite 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.
Mutt by Publication Date: 2023A transgender man goes through an emotional roller-coaster over a 24-hour period in New York City. Available to stream on Netflix.
Adam by Publication Date: 2019Awkward teen Adam spends his last high school summer with his big sister, who throws herself into NYC's lesbian and trans activist scene. In this coming-of-age comedy, Adam and those around him encounter love, friendship and hard truths. Available to rent on Apple TV.
A Kid Like Jake by A Kid Like Jake is a 2018 American drama film directed by Silas Howard and written by Daniel Pearle, based on his own 2013 play of the same name. It stars Claire Danes, Jim Parsons, Priyanka Chopra, Amy Landecker, Ann Dowd, and Octavia Spencer. It follows a married couple struggling to navigate their roles as parents to a gender-nonconforming child. Available to rent on Amazon.
Documentary
Nel Mio Nome (Into My Name) by Publication Date: 2022The coming-of-age story of four young friends who share important turning points in their lives and in their gender transitions.
No Ordinary Man by Publication Date: 2020No Ordinary Man is an in-depth look at the life of musician and trans culture icon Billy Tipton. Complicated, beautiful and historically unrivaled, this groundbreaking film shows what is possible when a community collaborates to honor the legacy of an unlikely hero.
Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story by Publication Date: 2019Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a Black transgender musician, becomes a cult icon three decades after the release of his album Keyboard Fantasies.
Venus Boyz by Publication Date: 2002A film journey through a universe of female masculinity. A legendary Drag King Night in New York is the point of departure for an odyssey to transgendered worlds, where women become men - some for a night, others for their whole lives. What motivates them? What changes take place? What do they dream of? The drag kings of New York meet in clubs and change lustfully into their male alter egos, parodying them and exploring male eroticism and power strategies. In London we see women experiment with hormones to become new men and 'cyborgs'. Masculinity and transformation as performance, subversion or existential necessity.
Boy I Am: A documentary by Publication Date: 2006An important exploration of issues rarely touched upon by most films portraying trans male experiences, this feature-length documentary sets itself apart from other recent films on this topic. Tackling the resistance of some women in feminist and lesbian communities who view transitioning as at best a "trend" or at worst an anti-feminist act that taps into male privilege, this groundbreaking film opens up a dialog between the lesbian, feminist, and transgender communities while also promoting understanding of transgender issues for general audiences..jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=c789c7b1716478969110bf2596848987a15c8433360009799d840681524a3ef8&ipo=images)
Man Made by Publication Date: 2019MAN MADE takes us into the heart of transgender male (FTM) culture, revealing unexpected truths about gender, masculinity, humanity and love. Four trans men (who like the film's director were born and raised female), take a variety of life paths toward stepping on stage at Trans FitCon, the only all-transgender bodybuilding competition in the world (held in Atlanta, GA). MAN MADE is a character-driven, intimate, and riveting verité-style competition film, but also a unique social justice narrative. It speaks to the ways in which we all choose to define and reshape ourselves, both figuratively and literally.
Performing Girl by Publication Date: 2013This film is available to rent on Prime Video. A 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.
Passing by Publication Date: 2015"Passing" examines experiences of racism and sexism today, through the eyes of 3 transmen of colour. Free to watch on Vimeo.
Southern Comfort by Publication Date: 2003Robert Eads is a 52-year-old wise-cracking cowboy who was born female and transitioned into living as a man after bearing two sons. Fifteen years later, he has fallen in love with Lola Cola, a vivacious and magnetic woman who was born male. Together they are coping with Robert's terminal case of ovarian cancer.Strong Island by
Publication Date: 2017-01-23When filmmaker Yance Ford investigates the 1992 murder of a young black man, it becomes an achingly personal journey since the victim, 24-year-old William Ford Jr., was the filmmaker's brother. Available on Netflix.
TV & Shorts
These Thems by Publication Date: 2023A newly out lesbian making up for lost time. A nonbinary educator learning to train the straights. A transman navigating life in the corporate world. A gay guy looking for love and messing it up. 4 queer friends. Set in NYC.
Work in Progress by Publication Date: 2019-Abby is a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke whose misfortune and despair unexpectedly lead her to a vibrantly transformative relationship. Chicago improv mainstay Abby McEnany co-created and stars in this uniquely human comedy series. Available on Fubo.
Podcasts
- Dear Schuyler
Schuyler Bailar was the first transgender athlete to compete on an NCAA Division 1 men's team. As a renowned speaker, author, and thought leader, Schuyler's work includes answering questions from all sorts of people relating to gender, current events, mental health, civil-rights issues, and so much more. But there are always questions left unanswered -- until now. - Gender RevealThe Gender Reveal podcast explores the vast diversity of trans experiences through interviews with a wide array of trans, nonbinary and Two-Spirit people. But, like, in a fun way?? Created by Tuck Woodstock in 2017, Gender Reveal began as a deep dive into what the hell gender is. It has evolved into an excuse to chat with a bunch of smart, funny, hot people about everything from anarchism and abolition to reality TV, wrestling, drag, horror novels, linguistics, video games, and decades-old community gossip.
- Stealth: A Transmasculine Podcast (STP)
Stealth: A Transmasculine Podcast (STP) is a podcast that captures the stories of transmasculine elders who transitioned before (or around) the year 2000. Transitioning, for the purposes of our show, includes all forms of social and medical transitioning. We value the background and experiences of our transmasculine community, and want to provide a space for those of us who are often overlooked. The term “stealth” highlights the fact that our generation was often told to hide our past, and live an underground existence. Throughout our lives, each of us has had to navigate issues of disclosure which have impacted us in many ways. - Star Gays: The Queer Astrology Archives Podcast
Star Gays: The Queer Astrology Archives Podcast examines the lives and works of queer artists, activists, and thinkers through the lens of their astrological birth chart. Each episode focuses on one individual from the archives and overlays their natal chart on their biography to draw connections between their life experiences and astrological influences. Join astrologer Elly Higgins each month to develop a deeper relationship with astrology and with a long lineage of queers who are making sense of their worlds through creative and analytical practices. - NewberyTart Podcast: Kyle Lukoff on Book Bans and Letting Queer Books Just Be BooksIn this episode, Marcy and Jennie talk to Kyle Lukoff, author of Too Bright to See, a 2022 Newbery Honor Book and winner of the Stonewall Book Award.
- This Emboided Voice Podcast: Holden MadagameIn this episode, I talk with tenor and trans activist Holden Madagame about his story, from when he played Cherubino in college, to his vocal experience taking testosterone, to his ongoing definition of trans activism.
Substacks
- Callum AngusTraveling through the rhizome of story, plot, narrative and place.
- Daniel Lavery (The Chatner)The Chatner is a twice-weekly newsletter about literature, humor, folklore, religion, resentment, doing the dishes, the magical heist Now You See Me franchise, being misunderstood, and maladaptive transmasculine coping strategies by Daniel M. Lavery.
- Kyle Ranson-Walsh (Being Alive)I’m Kyle Ranson-Walsh, a writer, designer, filmmaker, producer, strategist, knitter, biker, etc. etc. etc. and dad. Welcome to my weekly newsletter—Being Alive—an exploration into transmasculine lives. (Mine, others’.) I was born and raised in the South, came of age in the Bay, and now live in Brooklyn with my kid.
Organizations
- The Intentional Man Project
We’re building a more connected future for trans men. Trans men need space to heal, connect, foster brotherhood, and redefine masculinity. Our programming creates brotherhood, self-love, joy, and compassion for our specific male experience. Join our virtual and in-person community gatherings to experience for yourself. - Trans & Allies Support Community (Bloomington PRIDE)
TASC is a Bloomington PRIDE program working to support and affirm transgender and nonbinary gender-diverse people in Central Indiana through support, advocacy, and social connection. The peer-facilitated group meets once per week. For more information, connect with TASC on Facebook or email tasc@bloomingtonpride.org. - Gender Affirming Closet (LGBTQ+ Culture Center)
The LGBTQ+ Culture Center offers a Gender Affirming Closet! People who are looking for clothing for everyday use or special occasions can browse the online inventory and/or request an appointment to select clothes. The closet provides free clothing for anyone who is interested. There are no requirements for gender identity/expresion, LGBTQ+ status, IU affiliation, or financial need. Clothes can be returned (washed and in good condition) if you don't need them, but you're also welcome to keep them. - TransIndyTransIndy is a peer-led social/support group for transgender and gender diverse people in central Indiana.
Archives
- FTM International recordsFTM International (FTMI) is the largest and oldest continuously running organization serving the transmasculine community and their allies. The records of FTM International document the organization’s history and its social, cultural and political work.
- GLBT Historical Societry: Primary Source Set: Lou SullivanLou Sullivan (1951-1991) was a gay and transgender historian, community organizer, and diarist. Sullivan’s diaries chronicle his social and medical transition – as well as his rich emotional and sexual life – from his teenage years in Milwaukee until his death.
- The Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria Libraries
Committed to the preservation of the history of pioneering activists, community leaders, and researchers who have contributed to the betterment of Trans+ people. They are accessible to everyone, free of charge. This archive is the largest transgender archive in the world and contains archival material from both large and small trans organizations, focusing on the contributions of activists and researchers working for the betterment of trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit people. - Digital Transgender Archive
The Digital Transgender Archive increases the accessibility of transgender history by providing an online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world. Based in Boston, Massachusetts at Northeastern University, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than sixty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, public libraries, and private collections. By digitally localizing a wide range of trans-related materials, the DTA expands access to trans history for academics and independent researchers alike to foster education concerning trans history. - New York City Trans Oral History Project
The New York City Trans Oral History Project is a community archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories, organized in collaboration with the New York Public Library. Our archive documents transgender resistance and resilience in New York City. We work to confront the erasure of trans lives and to record diverse histories of gender as intersecting with race and racism, poverty, dis/ability, aging, housing migration, sexism, and the AIDS crisis. Anyone who identifies as trans / gender non conforming and as a sometime resident of New York City is invited to contribute an interview. All interviews are accessible to the public and part of the Creative Commons license for free and open use. Most of our interviewers are transcribed. We use an expansive tagging system to identify keywords and terms. - Digital content: Transgender Archives
The Transgender Archives of the University of Victoria Libraries provides digital access to: Word of Mouth is a digital exhibit showcasing the Trans Activism Oral History collection, all 67 issues of The FTM Newsletter, all 111 issues of Transvestia, the first widely distributed magazine focused on the cross-dressing community, the Transgender Scrapbooks collection, and all issues of Tapestry Magazine. - Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)
The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was 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.
Featured | Fatness & Fat Liberation
This guide is a collection of resources related to the Fat Liberation movement. Like other marginalized groups, fat activists have reappropriated and reclaimed the word fat, a previously derogatory term used to pathologize people of larger sizes. As opposed to medical terms like obese or overweight (which are rooted in the flawed science of the BMI scale and racism), fat activists utilize the adjective fat as both a positive descriptor and identity category grounded in solidarity and community. The Fat Liberation movement is widespread and far-reaching. This guide offers an introduction in a variety of genres and mediums written by and about fatness and fat liberation. You will find introductory books about fat discrimination (and how it continues to worsen), fiction that celebrates fat bodies and lived experiences, and Substack blogs by fat activists and writers, among many other resources.
If you would like to begin to learn about Fat Liberation, explore some of the articles below:
- Unpacking What You Know About Fat People (Aubrey Gordon, excerpt from her book, You Just Need To Lose Weight” And 19 Other Myths About Fat People)
- ‘Fat’ Isn’t a Bad Word—It’s Just the Way I Describe My Body (Aubrey Gordon, SELF)
- The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity (Sabrina Strings, Ph.D & Lindo Bacon, Scientific American)
- The ‘perfect body’ is a lie. I believed it for a long time and let it shrink my life (Lindy West, author of Shrill)
- 51 Ways to Make the World Less Hostile to Fat People (Dani Beckett, Vice)
- Fat acceptance as social justice (Deborah McPhail, Ph.D & Michael Orsini, Ph.D., Canadian Medical Association Journal)
Video: Activism: Profiles In Fatness. Desiree Burch and Dr. Sabrina Strings (author of Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia). (2022).
Further Reading:
- Essential Reading: Fat Liberation, Body Positivity & Intuitive Eating (Sofie Hagen)
- A Fat Reading List (Aubrey Gordon, Your Fat Friend)
- Resources (Educate Yourself) (Fat Heffalump, Living With Fattitude)
- Fat Activism 101 Online Resources (Fat Heffalump, Living With Fattitude)
- Sizeism, Fatphobia & Fat Liberation (Molly Wolf, Widener University Library)
This tab contains selected articles and academic books in the field of Fat Studies. Articles are listed chronologically while books are listed by sub-discipline (Readers & Introductory texts, Intersectionality, and History).
Articles
Sourced from the following syllabi:
- WSDB 398R: Fat Studies and Feminism (Gregory Pablo Rodríguez-Arbolay Jr., Concordia University)
- SWP950: Fat Studies and Fat Activism (May Friedman, Ryerson School of Social Work)
- Fat Studies Syllabi (Friend of Marilyn)
- Disparate but Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability StudiesDisparate but Disabled: Fat Embodiment and Disability Studies. (2002). NWSA Journal, 14(3), 120–137.
- The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Marginalization of Fatness and Blackness in the Construction of Gender IdentityShaw, A. (2005). The Other Side of the Looking Glass: The Marginalization of Fatness and Blackness in the Construction of Gender Identity. Social Semiotics, 15(2), 143–152. https://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1080/10350330500154725
- Bear Bodies, Bear Masculinity: Recuperation, Resistance, or Retreat?Hennen, P. (2005). Bear Bodies, Bear Masculinity: Recuperation, Resistance, or Retreat? Gender and Society, 19(1), 25–43.
- Teaching the politics of obesity: insights into neoliberal embodiment and contemporary biopoliticsGuthman, J. (2009). Teaching the politics of obesity: insights into neoliberal embodiment and contemporary biopolitics. Antipode, 41(5), 1110–1133.
- Weight Science: Evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shiftBacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2011). Weight science: evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift. Nutrition Journal, 10, 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9
- The Birth of the Obesity Clinic: Confessions of the Flesh, Biopedagogies and Physical CultureRail, G. (2012). The Birth of the Obesity Clinic: Confessions of the Flesh, Biopedagogies and Physical Culture. Sociology of Sport Journal, 29(2), 227–253.
- Disrupting normal: Toward the 'ordinary and familiar' in fat politicsMeleo-Erwin, Z. (2012). Disrupting normal: Toward the “ordinary and familiar” in fat politics. Feminism and Psychology, 22(3), 388–402. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353512445358
- Living fat in a thin-centric world: Effects of spatial discrimination on fat bodies and selvesOwen, L. (2012). Living fat in a thin-centric world: Effects of spatial discrimination on fat bodies and selves. Feminism and Psychology, 22(3), 290–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353512445360
- After the after: The Biggest Loser and post-makeover narrative trajectories in digital mediaHass, M. (2017). After the after: The Biggest Loser and post-makeover narrative trajectories in digital media. Fat Studies, 6(2), 135–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1245084
- Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability StudiesMollow, A. (2017). Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies. African American Review, 50(2), 105–121.
- Sizeism is a health hazardChrisler, J. C., & Barney, A. (2017). Sizeism is a health hazard. Fat Studies, 6(1), 38–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2016.1213066
- Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male BodyBarry, B. (2019). Fabulous Masculinities: Refashioning the Fat and Disabled Male Body. Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 23(2), 275–307. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1567064
- The color of fat: racializing obesity, recuperating whiteness, and reproducing injusticeRachel Sanders (2019) The color of fat: racializing obesity, recuperating whiteness, and reproducing injustice, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 7:2, 287-304, DOI: 10.1080/21565503.2017.1354039
Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society.
Fat Studies is the first academic journal in the field of scholarship that critically examines theory, research, practices, and programs related to body weight and appearance. Content includes original research and overviews exploring the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, age, ability, and socioeconomic status. Articles critically examine representations of fat in health and medical sciences, the Health at Every Size model, the pharmaceutical industry, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, legal issues, literature, pedagogy, art, theater, popular culture, media studies, and activism.
Books: Introductions & Readers
The Fat Studies Reader by ISBN: 9780814776308Publication Date: 2009-11-04A milestone anthology of fifty-three voices on the burgeoning scholarly movement—fat studies. We have all seen the segments on television news shows: A fat person walking on the sidewalk, her face out of frame so she can't be identified, as some disconcerting findings about the "obesity epidemic" stalking the nation are read by a disembodied voice. And we have seen the movies--their obvious lack of large leading actors silently speaking volumes. From the government, health industry, diet industry, news media, and popular culture we hear that we should all be focused on our weight. But is this national obsession with weight and thinness good for us? Or is it just another form of prejudice--one with especially dire consequences for many already disenfranchised groups? From the historical construction of fatness to public health policy, from job discrimination to social class disparities, from chick-lit to airline seats, this collection covers it all.
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies by ISBN: 9781000891850Publication Date: 2023-06-27The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields. Comprising over 20 essays from a range of diverse and international contributors, the reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that "gender" and "fat" always exist in connection with multiple other structures, forms of oppression, and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexualities, age, nationalities, disabilities, religion, and class.
The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies by ISBN: 9780367502928Publication Date: 2021-04-19The Routledge International Handbook of Fat Studies brings together a diverse body of work from around the globe and across a wide range of Fat Studies topics and perspectives. The first major collection of its kind, it explores the epistemology, ontology, and methodology of fatness, with attention to issues such as gender and sexuality, disability and embodiment, health, race, media, discrimination, and pedagogy.
The Fat Pedagogy Reader: Challenging weight-based oppression through critical education by ISBN: 9781433125683Publication Date: 2016-03-30Over the past decade, concerns about a global obesity epidemic have flourished. Public health messages around physical activity, fitness, and nutrition permeate society despite significant evidence disputing the facts we have come to believe about obesity. We live in a culture that privileges thinness and enables weight-based oppression, often expressed as fat phobia and fat bullying. New interdisciplinary fields that problematize obesity have emerged, including critical obesity studies, critical weight studies, and fat studies. There also is a small but growing literature examining weight-based oppression in educational settings in what has come to be called «fat pedagogy». The very first book of its kind, The Fat Pedagogy Reader brings together an international, interdisciplinary roster of respected authors who share heartfelt stories of oppression, privilege, resistance, and action; fascinating descriptions of empirical research; confessional tales of pedagogical (mis)adventures; and diverse accounts of educational interventions that show promise.
Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture by ISBN: 9780814727683Publication Date: 2011-05-02To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Farrell draws on a wide array of sources, including political cartoons, popular literature, postcards, advertisements, and physicians' manuals, to explore the link between our historic denigration of fatness and our contemporary concern over obesity. Her work sheds particular light on feminisms' fraught relationship to fatness.
Fat Rights: Dilemmas of difference and personhood by ISBN: 9780814748138Publication Date: 2008-03-01Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of concern in the U.S. about people getting fatter. Plaintiffs are now filing lawsuits arguing that discrimination against fat people should be illegal. Fat Rights asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race, gender, and disability. Is body fat an indicator of a character flaw or of incompetence on the job? Does it pose risks or costs to employers they should be allowed to evade? Or is it simply a stigmatized difference that does not bear on the ability to perform most jobs? Could we imagine fatness as part of workplace diversity? Considering fat discrimination prompts us to rethink these basic questions that lawyers, judges, and ordinary citizens ask before a new trait begins to look suitable for antidiscrimination coverage.
Books: Intersectionality
Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice by ISBN: 9781138580022Publication Date: 2019-09-16Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality, and Social Justice seeks to explore the multiple, variable, and embodied experiences of fat oppression and fat activisms. Moving beyond an analysis of fat oppression as singular, this book will aim to unpack the volatility of fat--the mutability of fat embodiments as they correlate with other embodied subjectivities, and the threshold where fat begins to be reviled, celebrated, or amended. In addition, Thickening Fat explores the full range of intersectional and liminal analyses that push beyond the simple addition of two or more subjectivities, looking instead at the complex alchemy of layered and unstable markers of difference and privilege. Thickening Fat poses critical questions around how to render analysis of fatness intersectional and to thicken up intersectionality, where intersectionality is attenuated to the shifting and composite and material dimensions to identity, rather than reduced to an "add difference and stir" approach.
Belly of the Beast by ISBN: 9781623175979Publication Date: 2021-08-10To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma. Da'Shaun Harrison--a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer--offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness, foregrounding the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of "health" and "healthiness" for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness.
Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fat phobia by ISBN: 9781479819805Publication Date: 2019-05-07There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals--where fat bodies were once praised--showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn't about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice.
The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies by ISBN: 9780739114872Publication Date: 2006-07-28Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in "fat anxiety." The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.
Queering Fat Embodiment by ISBN: 9781409465430Publication Date: 2014-05-09Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities. It represents a paradigm shift within fat studies, challenging the field of study which has primarily reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses.
Fat Gay Men: Girth, mirth, and the politics of stigma by ISBN: 9780814708385Publication Date: 2014-07-25To be fat in a thin-obsessed gay culture can be difficult. Despite affectionate in-group monikers for big gay men-chubs, bears, cubs-the anti-fat stigma that persists in American culture at large still haunts these individuals who often exist at the margins of gay communities. In Fat Gay Men, Jason Whitesel delves into the world of Girth & Mirth, a nationally known social club dedicated to big gay men, illuminating the ways in which these men form identities and community in the face of adversity. This book documents performances at club events and examines how participants use allusion and campy-queer behavior to reconfigure and reclaim their sullied body images, focusing on the numerous tensions of marginalization and dignity that big gay men experience and how they negotiate these tensions via their membership to a size-positive group. Fat Gay Men provides a rare glimpse into an unexplored dimension of weight and body image in American culture.
Men and the War on Obesity by ISBN: 9780415407120Publication Date: 2008-05-14Is obesity really a public health problem and what does the construction of obesity as a health problem mean for men? According to official statistics, the majority of men in nations such as England and the USA are overweight or obese. Public health officials, researchers, governments and various agencies are alarmed and have issued dire warnings about a global 'obesity epidemic'. This perceived threat to public health seemingly legitimates declarations of war against what one US Surgeon General called 'the terror within'. Yet, little is known about weight-related issues among everyday men in this context of symbolic or communicated violence. Men and the War on Obesity is an original, timely and controversial study. Using observations from a mixed-sex slimming club, interviews with men whom medicine might label overweight or obese and other sources, this study urges a rethink of weight or fat as a public health issue and sometimes private trouble.
Books: History
Diet and the Disease of Civilization by ISBN: 9780813589657Publication Date: 2018-01-26Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don't just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it's not calories--but concepts--that should be counted? Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the "Fall of Man" as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet--the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet--as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health.
Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality by ISBN: 9780814795927Publication Date: 2010-11-23Navigates the divergent cultural meanings of health, and its entanglement with morality in current political discourse You see someone smoking a cigarette and say, "Smoking is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are a bad person because you smoke." You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, "Obesity is bad for your health," when what you mean is, "You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will." In these and countless other instances, the perception of your own health depends in part on your value judgments about others, and appealing to health allows for a set of moral assumptions to fly stealthily under the radar. Against Health argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good. To be clear, the book's stand against health is not a stand against the authenticity of people's attempts to ward off suffering. Against Health instead claims that individual strivings for health are, in some instances, rendered more difficult by the ways in which health is culturally configured and socially sustained.
Shameful Bodies: Religion and the culture of physical improvement by ISBN: 9781472594945Publication Date: 2017-01-12What happens when your body doesn't look how it's supposed to look, or feel how it's supposed to feel, or do what it's supposed to do? Who or what defines the ideals behind these expectations? How can we challenge them and live more peacefully in our bodies? Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Culture of Physical Improvement explores these questions by examining how traditional religious narratives and modern philosophical assumptions come together in the construction and pursuit of a better body in contemporary western societies. Drawing on examples from popular culture such as self-help books, magazines, and advertisements, Michelle Mary Lelwica shows how these narratives encourage us to go to war against our bodies. While Shameful Bodies critiques the religious and cultural norms and narratives that perpetuate external and internalized judgment and aggression toward "shameful" bodies, it also engages the resources of religions, especially feminist theologies and Buddhist thought/practice, to construct a more affirming approach to health and healing.
Fat Fashion: The thin ideal and the segregation of plus-size bodies by ISBN: 9781350126930Publication Date: 2021-09-09Average body mass in many Western cultures is getting larger and yet the fashion system seems mostly unchanged. Major fashion houses still limit their output to small sizes and the dominant ideal of the female body in fashion imagery is still thin - dangerously thin according to World Health Organization standards. Why is the industry forfeiting a considerable share of the market in the form of plus-size consumers, seemingly against its commercial interests? Why does the thin ideal reign supreme despite damning evidence of its harm to women? And is there a way out of this system of thin ideals and segregated fat bodies? In this original study, Paolo Volonté answers these questions and more, drawing on influential literature on the body, beauty standards and the roles of clothing in society. Volonté reveals why plus-size fashion is often characterised by 'low aesthetic commitment' and low quality marketing. He explores the nature of the segregation of fat bodies in fashion and considers what the future may hold for consumers, designers and marketers alike.
Fat Activism: A radical social movement by ISBN: 9781910849309Publication Date: 2021-07-28What is fat activism and why is it important? To answer this question, Charlotte Cooper presents an expansive grassroots study that traces the forty-year history of international fat activism and grounds its actions in their proper historical and geographical contexts. She details fat activist methods, analyzes existing literature in the field, challenges long-held assumptions that uphold systemic fatphobia, and makes clear how crucial feminism and queer theory are to the lifeblood of the movement. She also considers fat activism's proxy concerns, including body image, body positivity, the obesity epidemic, and fat stigma. Combining rigorous scholarship with personal, accessible writing, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement is not only an invaluable contribution to the burgeoning field of fat studies, but also a vehicle for much-needed social change.
What We Don't Talk about When We Talk about Fat by ISBN: 9780807041307Publication Date: 2020-11-17Anti-fatness is everywhere. In What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, Aubrey Gordon unearths the cultural attitudes and social systems that have led to people being denied basic needs because they are fat and calls for social justice movements to be inclusive of plus-sized people's experiences. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. Advancing fat justice and changing prejudicial structures and attitudes will require work from all people. What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat is a crucial tool to create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike.
"You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 other myths about fat people by ISBN: 9780807006474Publication Date: 2023-01-10The co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast and creator of Your Fat Friend equips you with the facts to debunk common anti-fat myths and with tools to take action for fat justice. The pushback that shows up in conversations about fat justice takes exceedingly predicable form. Losing weight is easy-calories in, calories out. Fat people are unhealthy. We're in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Fat acceptance "glorifies obesity." The BMI is an objective measure of size and health. Yet, these myths are as readily debunked as they are pervasive. In "You Just Need to Lose Weight," Aubrey Gordon equips readers with the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people.
Fat! So? by ISBN: 9780898159950Publication Date: 1998-12-01Fat? Chunky? Less than svelte? So what! In this hilarious and eye-opening book, fat and proud activist/zinester Marilyn Wann takes on Americas' biggest fear--worse than the fear of public speaking or nuclear weapons--our fear of fat.Statistics tell us that about a third of Americans are fat, and common sense adds that just about everyone, fat or thin, male or female, has worried about their appearance. FAT!SO? weighs in with a more attractive alternative- feeling good about yourself at any weight--and having the style and attitude to back it up. Internationally recognized as a fat-positive spokesperson, Wann has learned that you can be absolutely happy, healthy, and successful...and fat. With its hilarious and insightful blend of essays, quizzes, facts, and reporting, FAT!SO? proves that you can be out-and-out fabulous at any size.
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia by ISBN: 9780593593837Publication Date: 2024-01-09For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She's been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not. Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.
Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight -- And What We Can Do about It by ISBN: 9780738218823Publication Date: 2016-03-22Over the past twenty-five years, our quest for thinness has morphed into a relentless obsession with weight and body image. In our culture, "fat" has become a four-letter word. Or, as Lance Armstrong said to the wife of a former teammate, "I called you crazy. I called you a bitch. But I never called you fat." How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at someone is "fat"? Where women and girls (and increasingly men and boys) will diet, purge, overeat, undereat, and berate themselves and others, all in the name of being thin? As a science journalist, Harriet Brown has explored this collective longing and fixation from an objective perspective; as a mother, wife, and woman with "weight issues," she has struggled to understand it on a personal level. Now, in Body of Truth, Brown systematically unpacks what's been offered as "truth" about weight and health.Fat Girl Best Friend: 'Claiming Our Space': Plus Size Women in Film & Television by
ISBN: 9781913836214Publication Date: 2023-06-05While we live in an age of body positivity, we are not seeing that reflected in the media. In this book, Sarah Grant takes us on a voyage which encompasses Bridgerton, Bridget Jones Diary, Orange is the new black, Pride and Prejudice, Star wars, Stranger Things and The Vicar of Dibley, to name a few. It dives into the treatment of plus size women in film and television, and goes looking for the main character energy we know we deserve.
Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation by ISBN: 9780829800036Publication Date: 2022-04-15Whether your body is small or large, aged or young, disabled or abled, toned or soft, lithe or stiff-or somewhere in-between-anti-fatness affects us all. Fat Church critiques anti-fat prejudice and the Church's historic participation in it, calling for a reckoning with fatphobia for the sake of Gad's gospel of freedom.
Fat by ISBN: 9781501333286Publication Date: 2020-11-12Demonized in medicine and public policy, adored by chefs and nutritional faddists (and let's face it, most of us who eat), simultaneously desired and abhorred when it comes to sex, and continually courted by a multi-billion-dollar fitness and weight-loss industry, for so many people "fat" is ironically nothing more than an insult or a state of despair. In Hanne Blank's Fat we find fat as state, as possession, as metaphor, as symptom, as object of desire, intellectual and carnal. Here, "feeling fat" and literal fat merge, blurring the boundaries and infusing one another with richer, fattier meanings.
Fat Talk: Parenting in the age of diet culture by ISBN: 9781250892508Publication Date: 2024-12-10By the time they reach kindergarten, most kids believe that "fat" is bad. By middle school, more than a quarter of them have gone on a diet. What are parents supposed to do? Kids learn, as we've all learned, that thinness is a survival strategy in a world that equates body size and value. Parents worry if their kids care too much about being thin, but even more about the consequences if they aren't. And multibillion-dollar industries thrive on this fear of fatness. We've fought the "war on obesity" for over forty years and Americans aren't thinner or happier with their bodies. But it's not our kids--or their weight--who need fixing. In this illuminating narrative, journalist Virginia Sole-Smith exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face from school, sports, doctors, diet culture, and parents themselves--and offers strategies for how families can change the conversation around weight, health, and self-worth.
You Have the Right to Remain Fat by ISBN: 9781936932313Publication Date: 2018-08-14Growing up as a fat girl, Virgie Tovar believed that her body was something to be fixed. But after two decades of dieting and constant guilt, she was over it--and gave herself the freedom to trust her own body again. Ever since, she's been helping others to do the same. Tovar is hungry for a world where bodies are valued equally, food is free from moral judgment, and you can jiggle through life with respect. In concise and candid language, she delves into unlearning fatphobia, dismantling sexist notions of fashion, and how to reject diet culture's greatest lie: that fat people need to wait before beginning their best lives.
Fattily Ever After: A Black Fat Girl's Guide to Living Life Unapologetically by ISBN: 9781784883447Publication Date: 2020-09-01Twenty-nine year-old plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah has experienced racism and fat-phobia throughout her life. From being bullied at school to being objectified and humiliated in her dating life, Stephanie's response to discrimination has always been to change the narrative around body-image and what we see as beautiful. In her debut book, Fattily Ever After, Stephanie Yeboah speaks openly and courageously about her own experience on navigating life as a black, plus-sized woman - telling it how it really is - and how she has managed to find self-acceptance in a world where judgement and discrimination are rife. Peppered with insightful tips and honest advice and boldly illustrated throughout, this inspiring and powerful book is essential reading for a generation of black, plus-sized women, helping them to live their life openly, unapologetically and with confidence.
Lessons from the Fat-O-sphere: Quit dieting and declare a truce with your body by ISBN: 9780399534973Publication Date: 2009-05-05From the leading bloggers in the fat-acceptance movement comes an empowering guide to body image- no matter what the scales say. When it comes to body image, women can be their own worst enemies, aided and abetted by society and the media. But Harding and Kirby, the leading bloggers in the "fatosphere," the online community of the fat acceptance movement, have written a book to help readers achieve admiration for-or at least a truce with-their bodies. The authors believe in "health at every size"-the idea that weight does not necessarily determine well-being and that exercise and eating healthfully are beneficial, regardless of whether they cause weight loss. They point to errors in the media, misunderstood and ignored research, as well as stories from real women around the world to underscore their message.
Fat and Queer: An anthology of queer and trans bodies and lives by ISBN: 9781787755062Publication Date: 2021-05-21We're here. We're queer. We're fat. This one-of-a-kind collection of prose and poetry radically explores the intersection of fat and queer identities, showcasing new, emerging and established queer and trans writers from around the world. Celebrating fat and queer bodies and lives, this book challenges negative and damaging representations of queer and fat bodies and offers readers ways to reclaim their bodies, providing stories of support, inspiration and empowerment. In writing that is intimate, luminous and emotionally raw, this anthology is a testament to the diversity and power of fat queer voices and experiences, and they deserve to be heard.
Body Stories: in and Out and with and Through Fat by ISBN: 9781772582543Publication Date: 2020-12-25Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like.
Movement
Read the "Health at Every Size Principles" here.
Slow AF Run Club by ISBN: 9780593421727Publication Date: 2023-06-06Ten years ago, Martinus Evans got some stern advice from his doctor: 'Lose weight or die.' First defensive, but then defiant, Evans vowed that day to run a marathon, though his doctor thought he was crazy. Since then, Evans has run eight marathons and hundreds of other distances in his 300-something body, created his own devoted running community, and has been featured on the cover of Runner's World. This book is a blueprint for those who may not fit the image of a 'traditional' runner - that is, someone who is larger in size, less athletic, out of shape, or dealing with any kind of health issue that slows them down - to feel empowered to lace up their shoes and embrace the body they have right now. As Evans says, the incredible benefits of running - better sleep, strong muscles and bones, better cardiovascular and mental health, and a sense of community - can and should be available to all of us.
Every Body Yoga: Let go of fear, get on the mat, love your body by ISBN: 9780761193111Publication Date: 2017-04-04From the unforgettable teacher Jessamyn Stanley comes Every Body Yoga, a book that breaks all the stereotypes. It's a book of inspiration for beginners of all shapes and sizes: If Jessamyn could transcend these emotional and physical barriers, so can we. It's a book for readers already doing yoga, looking to refresh their practice or find new ways to stay motivated. It's a book that challenges the larger issues of body acceptance and the meaning of beauty. Jessamyn Stanley, a yogi who breaks all the stereotypes, has built a life as an internationally recognized yoga teacher and award-winning Instagram star by combining a deep understanding for yoga with a willingness to share her personal struggles in a way that touches everyone who comes to know her. Now she brings her body-positive, emotionally uplifting approach to yoga in a book that will help every reader discover the power of yoga and how to weave it seamlessly into his or her life.
Big Gal Yoga by ISBN: 9781580056595Publication Date: 2017-07-25Social media star Valerie Sagun is a powerful voice in the body positive movement. With more than 100,000 avid followers on Instagram and a constant stream of highly engaged traffic on her website, fans adore Valerie for her fearless acceptance of her beautiful body, her encouragement of self-love, and her phenomenal yoga skills. Valerie, her yoga practice, and her body positive campaign have celebrated for her exciting messages about self-acceptance-both on the mat and off. Now, in this complete guide, Valerie provides both inspiration and customized instructions for yogis of all sizes and shapes, along with passionate encouragement to help readers discover newfound confidence through the transformative power of yoga.
Fat Girls Hiking: An Inclusive Guide to Getting Outdoors at Any Size or Ability by ISBN: 9781643261195Publication Date: 2022-03-29From the founder of the Fat Girls Hiking community comes an inclusive, inspiring call to the outdoors for people of all body types, sizes, and backgrounds. In a book brimming with heartfelt stories, practical advice, personal profiles of Fat Girls Hiking community members, and helpful trail reviews, Summer Michaud-Skog creates space for marginalized bodies with an insistent conviction that outdoor recreation should welcome everyone. Whether you're an experienced or aspiring hiker, you'll be empowered to hit the trails and find yourself in nature. Trails not scales!
Heavy: An American Memoir by ISBN: 9781501125652Publication Date: 2018-10-16In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the brink of moral collapse. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we've been. In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son to a complicated and brilliant black mother in Jackson, Mississippi. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free. A personal narrative that illuminates national failures, Heavy is defiant yet vulnerable, an insightful, often comical exploration of weight, identity, art, friendship, and family that begins with a confusing childhood--and continues through twenty-five years of haunting implosions and long reverberations.
Thick: And other essays by ISBN: 9781620974360Publication Date: 2019-01-08In eight highly praised treatises on beauty, media, money, and more, Tressie McMillan Cottom—award-winning professor and acclaimed author of Lower Ed—is unapologetically "thick": deemed "thick where I should have been thin, more where I should have been less," McMillan Cottom refuses to shy away from blending the personal with the political, from bringing her full self and voice to the fore of her analytical work. This "transgressive, provocative, and brilliant" (Roxane Gay) collection cements McMillan Cottom's position as a public thinker capable of shedding new light on what the "personal essay" can do. She turns her chosen form into a showcase for her critical dexterity, investigating everything from Saturday Night Live, LinkedIn, and BBQ Becky to sexual violence, infant mortality, and Trump rallies. Collected in an indispensable volume that speaks to the everywoman and the erudite alike, these unforgettable essays never fail to be "painfully honest and gloriously affirming" and hold "a mirror to your soul and to that of America" (Dorothy Roberts).
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by ISBN: 9781101912195Publication Date: 2017-05-30Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making "adult" budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette (she's "35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something"); detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father's ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she's as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.
Bad Fat Black Girl by ISBN: 9780063111745Publication Date: 2022-09-13Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism, profiling game-changing artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monae. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop. Bad Fat Black Girl offers a new, inclusive feminism for the modern world. Weaving together searing personal essay and cultural commentary, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, and capitalism all within the context of race and hip-hop. In the process, she continues a Black feminist legacy of unmatched sheer determination and creative resilience.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by ISBN: 9780062362599Publication Date: 2017-06-13From Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger. Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as "wildly undisciplined," Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties--including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life--and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life. With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.
The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The power of radical self-love by ISBN: 9781523091003Publication Date: 2021-02-09The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world--for us all.
Shrill: Notes from a loud woman by ISBN: 9780316348409Publication Date: 2016-05-17Shrill is an uproarious memoir, a feminist rallying cry in a world that thinks gender politics are tedious and that women, especially feminists, can't be funny. Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible -- like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you -- writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.
Unashamed: Musings of a Fat, Black Muslim by ISBN: 9780807012628Publication Date: 2019-10-15Ever since she was little, Leah Vernon was told what to believe and how to act. There wasn't any room for imperfection. 'Good' Muslim girls listened more than they spoke. They didn't have a missing father or a mother with a mental disability. They didn't have fat bodies or grow up wishing they could be like the white characters they saw on TV. They didn't have husbands who abused and cheated on them. They certainly didn't have secret abortions. In Unashamed, Vernon takes to task the myth of the perfect Muslim woman with frank dispatches on her love-hate relationship with her hijab and her faith, race, weight, mental health, domestic violence, sexuality, the millennial world of dating, and the process of finding her voice.
My Life As a Goddess by ISBN: 9781501170232Publication Date: 2019-06-18From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in. From a stiflingly boring farm town, he couldn't relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay and overweight, he got used to diminishing himself. But little by little, he started learning from all the sad, strange, lonely outcasts in history who had come before him, and he started to feel hope. In this "singular, genuinely ballsy, and essential" (Billy Eichner) collection of personal essays, Guy talks about finding a sense of belonging at Berkeley--and stirring up controversy in a newspaper column that led to a run-in with the Secret Service. He recounts the pitfalls of being typecast as the "Sassy Gay Friend," and how, after taking a wrong turn in life (i.e. law school), he found stand‑up comedy and artistic freedom. He analyzes society's calculated deprivation of personhood from fat people, and how, though it's taken him a while to accept who he is, he has learned that with a little patience and a lot of humor, self-acceptance is possible.
Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society by ISBN: 9781849353670Publication Date: 2019-09-03Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old is a moving, funny, and startlingly frank collection of personal essays about what it means to look a certain way. Or rather, certain ways. Navigating Kimberly Dark's experience of being fat since childhood as well as queer, white-privileged, a gender-confirming 'girl with a pretty face,' active then disabled, and inevitably aging each piece blends storytelling and social analysis to deftly coax readers into a deeper understanding of how appearance privilege (and stigma) function in everyday life and how the architecture of this social world constrains us. At the same time, she provides a blueprint for how each of us can build a more just social world, one interaction at a time.
Fat off, Fat On by ISBN: 9781952177743Publication Date: 2023-03-07In this disarming and candid memoir, cultural critic Clarkisha Kent unpacks the kind of compounded problems you face when you're a fat, Black, queer woman in a society obsessed with heteronormativity. There was no easy way for Kent to navigate personal discovery and self-love. As a dark-skinned, first-generation American facing a myriad of mental health issues and intergenerational trauma, at times Kent's body felt like a cosmic punishment. In the face of body dysmorphia, homophobia, anti-Blackness, and respectability politics, the pursuit of "high self-esteem" seemed oxymoronic. Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto s a humorous, at times tragic, memoir that follows Kent on her journey to realizing that her body is a gift to be grown into, that sometimes family doesn't always mean home, and how even ill-fated bisexual romances could free her from gender essentialism.
Landwhale: On turning insults into nicknames, why body image is hard, and how diets can kiss my ass by ISBN: 9781580056816Publication Date: 2018-05-08Jes Baker burst onto the body positivity scene when she created her own ads mocking Abercrombie & Fitch for discriminating against all body types -- a move that landed her on the Today Show and garnered a loyal following for her raw, honest, and attitude-filled blog missives. Building on the manifesta power of Things, this memoir goes deeply into Jes's inner life, from growing up a fat girl to dating while fat. With material that will have readers laughing and crying along with Jes's experience, this new book is a natural fit with her irreverent, open-book style. A deeply personal take, Landwhale is a glimpse at life as a fat woman today, but it's also a reflection of the unforgiving ways our culture still treats fatness, all with Jes's biting voice as the guide.
One to Watch by ISBN: 9780525510444Publication Date: 2020-07-07Bea Schumacher is a devastatingly stylish plus-size fashion blogger who has amazing friends, a devoted family, legions of Insta followers--and a massively broken heart. Like the rest of America, Bea indulges in her weekly obsession: the hit reality show Main Squeeze. The fantasy dates! The kiss-off rejections! The surprising amount of guys named Chad! But Bea is sick and tired of the lack of body diversity on the show. Since when is being a size zero a prerequisite for getting engaged on television? Just when Bea has sworn off dating altogether, she gets an intriguing call: Main Squeeze wants her to be its next star, surrounded by men vying for her affections. Bea agrees, on one condition--under no circumstances will she actually fall in love. In this joyful, wickedly observant debut, Bea has to decide whether it might just be worth trusting these men--and herself--for a chance to live happily ever after.
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. 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.
The Fat Kid by ISBN: 9781948700085Publication Date: 2018-10-04Born unto a father steeped in violence, the fat kid grows up tortured for his ever-expanding girth. As a young man, the fat kid tends bar where his friends and coworkers muddle about the drinkers, including the fat kid's own daddy. They are all subject to the influence of a mysterious blond-haired and black-garbed stranger who comes and goes, known only as the Man. Unbeknownst to all save the fat kid's daddy--who migrated across the vast country with the Man, experiencing savage murder, near-starvation, and cannibalism--the fat kid and his friends' fates are sealed. In alternating narratives from the perspectives of the fat kid and his daddy, the story takes place in a vast country full of great plains and towering rocky mountains, dusty deserts and shimmering lakes, a landscape beautifully at odds with the horror in the lives of those who live upon it.
Dietland by ISBN: 9780544373433Publication Date: 2015-05-26The diet revolution is here. And it's armed. Plum Kettle does her best not to be noticed, because when you're fat, to be noticed is to be judged. With her job answering fan mail for a teen magazine, she is biding her time until her weight-loss surgery. But when a mysterious woman in colorful tights and combat boots begins following her, Plum falls down a rabbit hole into the world of Calliope House -- an underground community of women who reject society's rules -- and is forced to confront the real costs of becoming "beautiful." At the same time, a guerilla group begins terrorizing a world that mistreats women, and Plum becomes entangled in a sinister plot. The consequences are explosive.
The Breakaway by ISBN: 9781668033425Publication Date: 2023-08-29Thirty-three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place. True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she's lived since college still looks like she's just moved in. But she's got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia. She's at peace with her plus-size body--at least, most of the time--and she's on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend. Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she's always wanted. Yet Abby can't escape the feeling that something isn't right...or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously. Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways...and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.
Martha Moody by ISBN: 9781618731807Publication Date: 2020-12-01 (originally published 1995)At once a love story and a lush comic masterpiece, Martha Moody is a speculative western which embraces the ordinary and gritty details -- as well as the magic -- of women's lives in the old west.
The House in the Cerulean Sea by ISBN: 9781250217288Publication Date: 2020-03-17Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place--and realizing that family is yours.
Milk Fed by ISBN: 9781982142490Publication Date: 2021-02-02A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today. Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam--by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family--and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche--both sacred and profane.
Dumplin' by ISBN: 9780062327192Publication Date: 2017-03-14Self-proclaimed fat girl Willowdean Dickson (dubbed "Dumplin'" by her former beauty queen mom) has always been at home in her own skin. Her thoughts on having the ultimate bikini body? Put a bikini on your body. With her all-American beauty best friend, Ellen, by her side, things have always worked . . . until Will takes a job at Harpy's, the local fast-food joint. There she meets Private School Bo, a hot former jock. Will isn't surprised to find herself attracted to Bo. But she is surprised when he seems to like her back. Instead of finding new heights of self-assurance in her relationship with Bo, Will starts to doubt herself. So she sets out to take back her confidence by doing the most horrifying thing she can imagine: entering the Miss Clover City beauty pageant--along with several other unlikely candidates--to show the world that she deserves to be up there as much as any girl does. Along the way, she'll shock the hell out of Clover City--and maybe herself most of all.
I'll Be the One by ISBN: 9780062936929Publication Date: 2020-06-16Skye Shin has heard it all. Fat girls shouldn't dance. Wear bright colors. Shouldn't call attention to themselves. But Skye dreams of joining the glittering world of K-Pop, and to do that, she's about to break all the rules that society, the media, and even her own mother, have set for girls like her. When Skye nails her audition, she's immediately swept into a whirlwind of countless practices, shocking performances, and the drama that comes with reality TV. What she doesn't count on are the highly fat-phobic beauty standards of the Korean pop entertainment industry, her sudden media fame and scrutiny, or the sparks that soon fly with her fellow competitor, Henry Cho. But Skye has her sights on becoming the world's first plus-sized K-pop star, and that means winning the competition--without losing herself.
Fat Angie by ISBN: 9780763661199Publication Date: 2013-03-12Her sister was captured in Iraq, she's the resident laughingstock at school, and her therapist tells her to count instead of eat. Can a daring new girl in her life really change anything? Angie is broken -- by her can't-be-bothered mother, by her high-school tormenters, and by being the only one who thinks her varsity-athlete-turned-war-hero sister is still alive. Hiding under a mountain of junk food hasn't kept the pain (or the shouts of "crazy mad cow!") away. Having failed to kill herself -- in front of a gym full of kids -- she's back at high school just trying to make it through each day. That is, until the arrival of KC Romance, the kind of girl who doesn't exist in Dryfalls, Ohio. A girl who is one hundred and ninety-nine percent wow! A girl who never sees her as Fat Angie, and who knows too well that the package doesn't always match what's inside. With an offbeat sensibility, mean girls to rival a horror classic, and characters both outrageous and touching, this darkly comic anti-romantic romance will appeal to anyone who likes entertaining and meaningful fiction.
Feeble Wanderings (Wet Moon #1) by ISBN: 9781932664072Publication Date: 2005-01-04An unusually usual day-to-day story in the Deep South, set in the gothic, swampy southern town of Wet Moon, a place fraught with lousy love lives, teen angst, and shadowy rednecks. As Cleo Lovedrop heads off for college at the local art school, she's haunted by her melancholic past: a lost love, a lost child. Friends and enemies live their lives around her, as trouble and dissent brews amongst them: an unseen social assailant spreads slander about Cleo, she is forced to deal with her two brusque roommates, and discovers unsolved mysteries about the girl who lived in her room previously. As the moon grows full and lunar rays shine down, lunacy and moon-calves run free. Goths, friendship, romance, sex, betrayal, gossip, cats, murder, guilt, a squirrel monkey, and all the terrible and wonderful things people do to each other.
Poetry
The Fat Sonnets by ISBN: 9781938247309Publication Date: 2018-06-01Samantha Zighelboim's debut collection conducts a radical re-examination of what we mean by body. In these poems, body is noun, verb and adverb; body is dearly beloved and fiercely rejected; it is by turns a singularly beautiful process and a frightening object. Zighelboim takes the sonnet form as a loose premise, a la Bernadette Mayer, but then explodes, expands, defies and otherwise grows out of supposed formal limits, making language into a living embodiment of the refusal of (institutional, patriarchal, cultural) control. The poet's refusal of the social invisibility of fat bodies is essential. "I am a perfect fucking blossom," Zighelboim writes, and also "I am entitled to the loneliness of my interminable appetite." Offering felt registers as subtle as "The oblique / correspondence between / a soft body / and a thin / layer of / pulp," this is the writing of a sharp and observant world-eater: a cosmophage in the truest sense.
Fat Art, Thin Art by ISBN: 0822315122Publication Date: 1994-08-12Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick's writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places--including Victorian novels--where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick's poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.
Nothing Is Okay by ISBN: 9781943735303Publication Date: 2018-03-20Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley's work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.
Tesoro by ISBN: 9781945649233Publication Date: 2018-11-01Tesoro is a story of family, survival, and the formative power of the women in Salgado's life. It is a telling of the balance between love and perseverance. Tesoro is an unearthing of the sacred connections that make a person whole; the treasure we forever keep with us when we learn from those we love, when we mourn those we've lost, and what grows in between.
Mother Body by ISBN: 9781947817241Publication Date: 2021-03-15Mother Body is an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother. As Mother Body unfolds, it tasks its reader to understand the expected and unexpected manifestations of motherhood, through menstruation and womb work, but also generational, societal, and literary mothering. With a variety of forms and modes, these poems unpack the experiences of a fat, black woman's body while also manifesting joy, resistance, and celebration.
Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across by ISBN: 9781250195890Publication Date: 2018-10-23Beautiful and brutally honest, Mary Lambert's poetry is a beacon to anyone who's ever been knocked down--and picked themselves up again. In verse that deals with sexual assault, mental illness, and body acceptance, Ms. Lambert's Shame Is an Ocean I Swim Across emerges as an important new voice in poetry, providing strength and resilience even in the darkest of times.
Photography & Art
Further reading and lists:
- How a Stock Photography Project Is Confronting Fat Bias (Celeste Hamilton Dennis)
- Fatness & Feminism (Jenny Saville and Roxane Gay, Art in America)
- 10 Fat Visual Artists You Should Check Out (Weighty Things)
- A Big Fat Bevy of Art: Five illustrators who will bring more fat representation to your life (Pipe Wrench)
- This Instagram Account Proves That Fat People Have Always Been Here (Sadhbh O'Sullivan, Refinery29)
- Cheryl Frazier, Toward a Responsible Artistic Agency: Mindful Representation of Fat Communities in Popular Media, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2024;, kpad064, https://doi-org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/10.1093/jaac/kpad064
- Body Liberation PhotosLindley offers boudoir, portrait and small business photography sessions with Body Liberation Photos. She is also the creator of Body Liberation Stock, which provides body-positive stock photos for commercial use, and the Body Love Shop, a curated central resource for body-friendly artwork and products.
- AllGo: Plus Size Stock PhotosAllGo is an app where plus-size people rate the comfort and accessibility of public spaces so others can know what to expect. We recognized the need for more stock photos featuring plus-size people and decided to help fill this gap.
- Historical Fat People Instagram Account & ArchiveVintage photos featuring nice to not-so-nice fat people of yore. Occasional diet ephemera.
Morpho: Fat and Skin Folds by ISBN: 9781681985046Publication Date: 2019-05-27The must-have guide for all artists who draw the human figure! In Morpho: Fat and Skin Folds, artist and teacher Michel Lauricella presents a unique approach to learning to draw the human body. The typical approach to teaching anatomy and the sketching of the human form most often focuses on the skeleton and musculature. What often goes ignored is the skin itself--how it moves and the expressions it creates as the body moves and changes positions. This book presents a simplified and practical vision of the fat and skin folds of the human body to help you in your drawing studies, encouraging both accuracy and a rich, diverse representation of the human form.
- Artifats: Fat Art, Fat ArtistsDedicated to taking up space in the art world by exclusively featuring the work of
fat artists, prioritizing QTBIPoC, disabled, and superfat artists. - Obeillustration (Ash Obenstine)Ash is a designer and illustrator living in Pennsylvania! They currently sell Stickers, Magnets, Prints, Paintings, and Zines at South Street Art Mart, Archive Six and Etsy. They have a BFA in Illustration and have participated in many Philadelphia Art Markets, such as the Official LGBTQIA+ Pride Parade and Festival in Philadelphia for the past three years.
Podcasts
- Maintenance Phase
Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon debunk the junk science behind health fads, wellness scams and nonsensical nutrition advice. Maintenance Phase is a great place to start if you you are interested in learning about weight bias, the problems with BMI, and how American culture views fatness. If you like these episodes, check out Aubrey Gordon's books which are listed in the non-fiction tab.
Maintenance Phase: Selected Episodes
- Anti-Fat Bias To celebrate the release of her new book, Aubrey takes Mike on a tour through the statistics and debates surrounding weight bias. Anyone interested in body positivity, airline seats, 'skinny shaming' or the sugar content of melons is legally obligated to join us.
- The Body Mass Index The BMI is EVERYWHERE. But is it scientific or scientif-ish? While many Americans think of the body mass index as an objective measure of health, its history reveals a more complicated story.
- The Obesity Epidemic Over the last 30 years, fatness has been defined as a risk factor for disease, then a disease in itself, then a global epidemic. What caused this rapid shift?
- Is Being Fat Bad For You? For nearly four decades, Americans have heard a simple story about health, longevity and obesity. This week, we learn it's a little more complicated.
- Fat Camps How America's oldest fat camp — and the inspiration for Disney’s "Heavyweights" — became the symbol of a health intervention that enjoys worldwide popularity despite no evidence that it improves anyone's health.
And read this article about Maintenance Phase ("Breaking Down the ‘Wellness-Industrial Complex,’ an Episode at a Time") from the New York Times.
- Fat Joy
Each episode is a conversation between host Sophia Apostol and another fat person about how to flourish in our fatphobic world. We’re exploring the harms, biases, and oppressions we’ve experienced while living in a world that marginalizes plus-size & fat bodies and promotes the lies of Diet Culture. But most importantly, we’re sharing how we still dare to have the audacity and courage to reach towards joy and live our best lives while advocating for collective fat liberation & body positivity. - FatAF
Fat As Fuck is a podcast about fat and sex. Yes, fat people have sex. And we’re going to talk about fat sex, including fat pornography, fat sexual stigma, fat sexual mechanics (which makes me picture Glenn Marla in a mechanic’s overalls)…and much more! - Fat Girl Book Club
You know that bookclub you belong to? The one where the wine flows freely, the laughter is loud and the books are extremely interesting. That is this podcast, in your ears. My name is Jennifer Radke and I am your host and a body image coach. I get my guests to read a book in the Fat Acceptance/Body Positive/Health at Every Size space and I talk to them about it. - UnF*ck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help for EveryoneUnF*ck Your Brain: Feminist Self-Help for Everyone breaks down the centuries of sexist socialization that causes us to struggle with self-doubt, burnout, and anxiety. Hosted by Master Feminist Coach Kara Loewentheil, J.D., founder of The School of New Feminist Thought and author of Take Back Your Brain (Penguin 2024), each episode teaches you how to turn down the noise of societal expectations, turn up the volume on what YOU really want in life, and change your thinking to make sure you go get it.
- Secret Dinosaur Cult
A live comedy podcast by comedians Sofie Hagen and Jodie Mitchell, in which they explore identity in order to try and find out who they are - through the medium of dinosaurs. Hilarious, highly addictive and heavily dinosaur-based. - She's All FatWe created She's All Fat because we wanted a podcast like it. We noticed an increase in fat visibility (shout out to fat babes on IG!) but a lack of spaces for fat folks — the intersections of fat women, fat trans and queer folks, and fat people of color — to tell their own stories in a conversational setting — a place to literally hear our voices.
- The Body Grievers Club Podcast
My goal with this podcast is to not only help change the cultural conversation from diets & rules to acceptance & freedom — but furthermore, help you feel less alone in your body image excavations. Join me as we explore the ins and outs of body image, self-esteem, diet culture, self-love and finding peace as you come home to your body. - Matter of Fat
Matter of Fat, co-hosted by Cat Polivoda and Saraya Boghani, highlights community voices with a focus on body size, body positivity, & fat liberation. We hear guests' stories as a matter of fat - honoring and learning about their intersecting identities while grounding the conversation in body positivity & body politics. We also create and share resources, chat social justice, popular culture, & Midwest life - all as a matter of fat. - Living in this Queer Body
Living in this Queer Body is a project about exploring barriers to embodiment and how our collective body stories can bring us back to ourselves. - Fierce Fatty Podcast
Join Vinny Welsby (they/them), TEDx speaker, best-selling author, and certified Fierce Fatty as they teach you how to love your fat body without going on yet another ever again.Break down limiting negative self-beliefs and root out the reasons why you think your plus-size body is not ok. Episodes topics include - fatphobia, diet culture, intuitive eating, how to be confident, dating while plus-size, health at every size, overcoming stigma and shame, and taking over the world one fatty at a time!
Podcast Episodes
- Cat Polivoda shares how body positivity, fat liberation and our negative diet culture impact your balance (being BALANCED podcast with Ciji Townsend)
- Fat Liberation (Disability Visibility Project Podcast)
- Fat Liberation, Food & Pole Dance (The Evidence Based Pole Podcast)
- your "body positivity" is lacking fat liberation (Emotionally Online Podcast)
Blogs
- NotBlueAtAll "On this blog you’ll find me talking about a range of topics both personal and not. I write a lot about fat acceptance, self-acceptance, self-care, my own abuse survival, fatshion, activism, events and so very much more. This blog is a process, a journey. It helps me sort out my thoughts and share my story. Through this blog, I have met good friends, made connections with fellow abuse survivors and so many badasses."
- Fluffy Kitten Party "I started this blog as a personal project in 2018, as I quit Weight Watchers for the very last time and embarked on a journey to root diet culture out of my life. Since then, I’ve developed a following of people looking to do the exact same thing."
- Two Whole Cakes Lesley Kinzel has been engaging with body politics and social justice activism both as an academic and as an everyday upstart for over a decade
- Your Fat Friend In 2016, Aubrey Gordon began writing anonymously about the social realities of life as a very fat person, publishing under the name Your Fat Friend.
- Extra Inches - Male Plus Size Blog All about plus size fashion for men – enriched with some tips about grooming, beard care and lifestyle topics.
- Chubstr A style destination for big and tall or plus size men. We’re pushing back against the myth that bigger guys don’t care about style by creating compelling content that runs the spectrum of fashion, lifestyle, politics, travel, food, and relationships.
- The Fat Zine Blog
To share as many points of view as possible, The Fat Zine has added a blog to the site. If you would like to submit, read more on how to here. In the meantime, please enjoy the art, words and expressions of the people below.
Substacks
- Butt News (Lindy West)
Butt News will deliver a brand new original piece of writing, by me, to your e-mail inbox 1-2 times per month, or more, depending on how stressed out I am! Butt News is THE BEST WAY to stay in touch with me, hear my crappy thoughts, ask me questions, find out what lipstick shade that is/where I got my glasses, get mad about my bad takes, and laugh at my jokes! - Antiracist Dietitian (Anjali Prasertong)
Antiracist Dietitian is a newsletter about the intersection of nutrition and racial equity, covering history, food systems, land, water, politics—basically everything that lies beyond the individual choices you make about the food you eat. I write about what I wish I had learned as a nutrition student, and am creating a space that centers honesty, vulnerability, and the lived experiences of people of color. - Burnt Toast (Virginia Sole-Smith)Burnt Toast is an anti-diet, fat positive community about body liberation. It’s also a newsletter and a podcast about how we navigate diet culture and fatphobia, especially through parenting. (But non-parents like it too!)
- The Audacity (Roxane Gay)
People curate what they put from their lives into the public sphere but a good writer makes what they curate one hell of a story. That’s what I hope to do with this newsletter—tell one hell of a story about the world we’re living in, the culture we consume, the things that bring me joy, the things that infuriate me, the things I think we should talk about. - Cup of Stars (Carmen Maria Machado)
The newsletter of author Carmen Maria Machado. - Virgie Tovar's Newsletter
Ending weight discrimination, eating donuts, wearing cute glasses - Can I Have Another Snack? (Laura Thomas)
A newsletter, podcast and community exploring appetite, identity, and bodies, especially through the lens of parenting. Here we unpack the things that make us feel disrupted and disconnected from our bodies. And the things that make it difficult to feed ourselves and our kids (in all senses of the word). It’s an exploration of what it means to parent while unpacking diet-culture and anti-fatness, while supporting one another to end the tyranny of intergenerational body shame and disordered eating. - bitches gotta eat! (Samantha Irby)i’m gonna share with you, my friends:
music? books?? movies??? milf-on-milf romance???? recaps of the best show on television, judge mathis!!!!! - Fat Hell (Amanda Richards)A newsletter about being fat and getting dressed
- More To Hate (Kate Manne)Fatphobia, misogyny, and more
Video: Film & TV: Profiles In Fatness. Desiree Burch (2022). In this episode, Desiree is joined by an expert, Aubrey Gordon, to reflect on the harmful stereotypes of fatness found in film and TV, while also celebrating the overlooked heroes from the big screen.
To read more about fat representation in the media, click the links below:
- Why Can’t Hollywood Get Fat Representation Right? (Kitty Lloyd, Refinery29)
- The Cruel Spectacle of ‘The Whale’ (Roxane Gay, NYTimes)
- From "Fat Monica" to Fat Amy: How Hollywood Highlighted My Internalized Fatphobia (Grayson Gilcrease, PopSugar)
- Beyond Lazy Tropes: The Quest for Authenticity in Fat Representation (Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media)
- If He Dies He Dies”: A Timeline of Fat Sexuality in Contemporary Television (Marie Southard Ospina, Polyester Zine)
Television
My Mad Fat DiaryPublication Date: 2013-2015Sharon Rooney stars in this teenage drama series as a fictional version of writer Rae Earl, whose personal diaries and book `My Fat Mad Teenage Diary' serve as the basis of the show. Available to stream on Hulu
Shrill by Publication Date: 2019-2021A struggling young journalist (played by Aidy Bryant) is determined to change her life without changing her body. While dealing with an unreliable boyfriends, sick parents and a perfectionist boss, she begins to understand that she's just as good as everyone else. Available on Hulu.
Rutherford FallsPublication Date: 2021-2022Two lifelong best friends, Nathan Rutherford and Reagan Wells, find themselves at a crossroads -- quite literally -- when their sleepy town gets an unexpected wake-up call. Available to stream on Peacock.- Work in Progress by Publication Date: 2019-Abby is a 45-year-old self-identified fat, queer dyke whose misfortune and despair unexpectedly lead her to a vibrantly transformative relationship. Chicago improv mainstay Abby McEnany co-created and stars in this uniquely human comedy series. Available on Fubo.
Somebody Somewhere
Publication Date: 2022-Sam, a true Kansan on the surface, struggles to fit her hometown's mold; grappling with loss and acceptance, singing is her saving grace and leads her on a journey to discover herself and a community of outsiders who don't fit in and don't give up. Available on HBO.
Survival of the ThickestPublication Date: 2023Mavis Beaumont, a plus-sized Black woman, is newly single and finds herself having to rebuild her life as a struggling stylist. Available to stream on Netflix.
GLOWPublication Date: 2017-2019Alison Brie stars as Ruth Wilder, an out-of-work actress living in Los Angeles in the '80s. Wilder finds an unexpected chance at stardom: enter the glitter and spandex-laden world of women's wrestling, where she must work alongside 12 other Hollywood misfits. Marc Maron plays the role of Sam Sylvia, a washed-up director of "B" movies who tries to lead the group of women to fame.
Good GirlsPublication Date: 2018-2021Good Girls is an American crime comedy-drama television series that follows the lives of three suburban mothers who resort to robbing a supermarket and get involved with a crime boss and the FBI. Available on Netflix.
Films
The 40-Year-Old Version by
Publication Date: 2020-01-25A down-on-her-luck playwright thinks the only way she can salvage her voice as an artist is to become a rapper at 40. Available on Netflix.
Dumplin'Publication Date: 2018The plus-size, teenage daughter of a former beauty queen signs up for her mum's pageant as a protest that escalates when other contestants follow in her footsteps, revolutionising the pageant as well as their small Texas town. Available on Netflix.
Fat FrontPublication Date: 2019Four young women, two from Norway, one each from Denmark and Sweden, on being overweight and beautiful. How to be comfortable and proud of your body, even though it doesn't fit into the norms dictated by the media.
Thunder ForcePublication Date: 2021Two childhood best friends reunite as an unlikely crime-fighting superhero duo when one invents a formula that gives ordinary people superpowers. Available on Netflix.
Your Fat Friend by Popular anonymous blogger Aubrey Gordon spent five years writing about the realities of living as a self-described "very fat person", and now she is about to face the public for the first time. Currently unavailable to stream.
- Fat Liberation Archive
Curated by Max Airborne who writes, "This archive does not claim to, nor could it, represent the entirety of fat activist or fat liberation movement history. It starts with what I had in my filing cabinet – evidence of some self-identified fat-liberation-oriented lives, thoughts, conversations, creativity, activism, community – mostly from radicals, queers and feminists. The rest of what is here so far has come from people in my network. I recognize this as both an asset (I have connections to folks of multiple generations doing fat liberation work) and a limitation (my network is, by definition, limited. It skews white and US-based)."
Read the Fat Liberation Manifesto here. By Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran, November, 1973. Published by the Fat Underground.
Writers & Journalists
A list of writers who focus on fat liberation along with a selection of their publications.
- Marie Southard Ospina is Colombian-American writer, editor, and digital content creator based in rural England. She can often be found writing about body image, parenthood, entertainment, and plus-size fashion.
- Da'Shaun L. Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, GA. Through the lens of "Fat Black Studies," they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections.
Organizations
- Fat Rose
Fat Rose organizes fat radicals to embed fat politics on the left, contributing to building an intersectional fat liberation movement. We do this by developing and promoting radical and intersectional fat-centered political analysis, and offering incubation spaces for radical fat activists, thinkers, artists, and organizers to dream big about how to bring fat politics into social movements. - AllGo
AllGo is a review site where plus-size people rate the comfort & accessibility of public places, like restaurants and theaters. - NOLOSE
NOLOSE is a diverse, vibrant community of fat queer and trans folks and our allies, with a shared commitment to intersectional anti-oppression ideology and action, seeking to end the oppression of fat people! We started out as the National Organizations for Lesbians of SizE before expanding scope to a broader community of all genders, bound by a common queer fat-positive ideology. - Fat Girls Hiking
Fat Girls Hiking is fat activism, body liberation & outdoor community. We want to take the shame and stigma out of the word FAT and empower it. Our motto, Trails Not Scales focuses on Self Care in the outdoors. We want to create a space where fat and marginalized folks can come together in community to create safer spaces in the outdoors. - National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)
One-third of the world’s population is fat, yet fat people are discriminated against in all aspects of daily life. For over 50 years, NAAFA has worked to make the world a better place for fat people through education, advocacy, and support. We are a multigenerational, intersectional social justice organization creating opportunity for big bodied people and building community for fat people and our loved ones. - Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH)
ASDAH is a non-profit organization with an international membership started in 2003. Our members and leaders are committed to the Health At Every Size (HAES) principles. The Health At Every Size movement is a continuously evolving alternative to the weight-centered approach to treating clients and patients of all sizes. It is also a movement working to promote size acceptance, to end weight discrimination and stigma, and to lessen the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness.
New Titles in Gender Studies
The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood
How Black women's reproduction became integral to white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy--and remains key to their dismantling. In the United States, slavery relied on the reproduction and other labors of unfree Black women. Nearly four centuries later, Black reproductivity remains a vital technology for the creation, negotiation, and transformation of sexualized and gendered racial categories. Yet even as Black reproduction has been deployed to resolve the conflicting demands of white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Sara Clarke Kaplan argues that it also holds the potential to destabilize the oppressive systems it is supposed to maintain. The Black Reproductive convenes Black literary and cultural studies with feminist and queer theory to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and images alongside their pre-emancipation counterparts.
The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it's possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation? Building on the work of their game-changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other - and the rest of the world - alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honour songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
Abolition Feminisms
This groundbreaking anthology engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.
Black Boy Out of Time
An eloquent, restless, and enlightening memoir by one of the most thought-provoking journalists today about growing up Black and queer in America, reuniting with the past, and coming of age their own way. One of nineteen children in a blended family, Hari Ziyad was raised by a Hindu Hare Kṛṣṇa mother and a Muslim father. Through reframing their own coming-of-age story, Ziyad takes readers on a powerful journey of growing up queer and Black in Cleveland, Ohio, and of navigating the equally complex path toward finding their true self in New York City. Exploring childhood, gender, race, and the trust that is built, broken, and repaired through generations, Ziyad investigates what it means to live beyond the limited narratives Black children are given and challenges the irreconcilable binaries that restrict them. Heartwarming and heart-wrenching, radical and reflective, Hari Ziyad's vital memoir is for the outcast, the unheard, the unborn, and the dead.
Brown and Gay in LA
The stories of second-generation immigrant gay men coming of age in Los Angeles. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA could not have felt further removed from a world where queerness was accepted and celebrated. Instead, the men profiled here maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. For these men, the path to sexual freedom often involves chasing the dreams while resisting the expectations of their immigrant parents and finding community in each other. Ocampo also details his own story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American.
Divergent Women
A 'good woman' is hard to find. To be 'good', after all, women face expectations that are shifting, internally contradictory, emotionally extreme, and prospectively even deadly. To be divergent, on the other hand, is an expansive position, encompassing cackling witches, childfree women, struggling mothers, insecure teenagers, and persecuted innocents. Exploring divergent women from a variety of critical and creative perspectives, this edited collection puts forth a dialogic discussion of how non-conforming women are coded as 'evil', and asks, what happens when women choose to be divergent? Delving into reflective and auto-ethnographic perspectives which explore subjective responses to the influence of the representation and treatment of evil women, Divergent Women is ultimately a celebratory reclamation of the concept of feminine transgression. Encompassing global perspectives and bringing together artistic and academic work, the authors invite readers to explore the possibilities for divergence that exist under the label of womanhood.
Feminist African Philosophy
The book argues that women's perspectives and gender issues must be mainstreamed across African philosophy in order for the discipline to truly represent the thoughts of Africans across the continent. This book argues that African philosophy cannot claim to have liberated people of African descent from marginalization until the androcentric nature of African philosophy is addressed. Key concepts such as Ujamaa, Negritude, Ubuntu, Consciencism, and African Socialism are explored as they relate to African women's lives or as models of inclusion or exclusion from politics. In addition to offering a feminist critique of African philosophy, the book also discusses topics that have been consistently overlooked in African philosophy. These topics include sex, sexuality, rape, motherhood, prostitution, and the low participation of women in politics. By highlighting the work of women feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ifi Amadiume, Amina Mama, and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the book engages with African philosophy from an African feminist viewpoint.
Making Love with the Land
A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession. In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls "biostory"—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land. Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.
The Natural Mother of the Child
Krys Malcolm Belc's visual memoir-in-essays explores how the experience of gestational parenthood--conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding his son Samson--eventually clarified his gender identity. Krys Malcolm Belc has thought a lot about the interplay between parenthood and gender. As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified his gender identity. And yet, when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Belc as "the natural mother of the child." By considering how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully align with Belc's own experience, The Natural Mother of the Child journeys both toward and through common perceptions of what it means to have a body and how that body can influence the perception of a family. With this visual memoir in essays, Belc has created a new kind of life record, one that engages directly with the documentation often thought to constitute a record of one's life--childhood photos, birth certificates--and addresses his deep ambivalence about the "before" and "after" so prevalent in trans stories, which feels apart from his own experience. The Natural Mother of the Child is the story of a person moving past societal expectations to take control of his own narrative, with prose that delights in the intimate dailiness of family life and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.
Our Work Is Everywhere
A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities. In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose's startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders' words to visual life. Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.
Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights
The first out transgender judge to be appointed in the United States, the first attorney to obtain corrected birth certificates for transgender people who had not undergone gender confirmation surgery, a survivor of conversion therapy, and author of a law review article that helped thousands of employers adopt supportive policies for their workers, Phyllis Frye is truly a pioneer in the fight for transgender rights. Among her many accomplishments, Frye founded the first national organization devoted to shaping transgender law--the International Conference on Transgender Law and Employment Policy, which has since created a body of work that includes the International Bill of Gender Rights--trained a cadre of future trans activists, and built the first national movement for transgender legal and political rights. Based on interviews with Frye, Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights covers her early life, the discrimination she faced while struggling with her identity--including being discharged from the army and fired from a subsequent job at her alma mater, Texas A&M--her transition in 1976, her many years of activism, and her current position as an associate judge for the municipal courts of Houston. This gripping account of Frye's efforts to establish and protect the constitutional rights of transgender individuals not only fills a gap in existing histories of LGBTQ+ activism but will also inform and instruct contemporary trans activists.
Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource By and For Transgender Communities
There is no one way to be transgender.Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a revolutionary resource - a comprehensive, reader-friendly guide for transgender people, with each chapter written by transgender and gender expansive authors. Inspired by Our Bodies, Ourselves, the classic and powerful compendium written by and for cisgender women,Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is widely accessible to the transgender population, providing authoritative information in an inclusive and respectful way and representing the collective knowledge base of dozens of influential experts. Each chapter takes the reader through an important issue, such asrace, religion, employment, medical and surgical transition, mental health, relationships, sexuality, parenthood, arts and culture, and many more. Anonymous quotes, testimonials, art and poetry from transgender people are woven throughout, adding compelling, personal voices to every page. In thisunique way, hundreds of viewpoints from throughout the community have united to create this strong and pioneering book. It is a welcoming place for transgender and gender-questioning people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.
Convening Black Intimacy
An unprecedented study of how Christianity reshaped Black South Africans' ideas about gender, sexuality, marriage, and family during the first half of the twentieth century. This book demonstrates that the primary affective force in the construction of modern Black intimate life in early twentieth-century South Africa was not the commonly cited influx of migrant workers but rather the spread of Christianity. While the ways of understanding intimacy that Christianity informed enjoyed broad appeal because they partially aligned with traditional ways, other individuals were drawn to how the new ideas broke with tradition. In either case, Natasha Erlank argues that what Black South Africans regard today as tradition has been unequivocally altered by Christianity. In asserting the paramount influence of Christianity on unfolding ideas about family, gender, and marriage in Black South Africa, Erlank challenges social historians who have attributed the key factor to be the migrant labor system.
The Theory of Love
The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy
This encyclopedia reviews and interprets a broad array of social science and humanities research on LGBT people, politics, and public policy around the world. The articles are organized around six major themes of the study of identity politics, with a focus on movement politics, public attitudes, political institutions, elections, and the broader context of political theory. Under the editorial directorship of Donald P. Haider-Markel and associate editors Carlos Ball, Gary Mucciaroni, Bruno Perreau, Craig A. Rimmerman, and Jami K. Taylor, this publication brings together peer-reviewed contributions by leading researchers and offers the most comprehensive view of research on LGBT politics and policy to date. As a result, the Oxford Encyclopedia of LGBT Politics and Policy is a necessary resource for students and as well as both new and established scholars.
Why Gender?
Why is a focus on gender so important for interpreting the world in which we live? Sixteen world-famous scholars have been brought together to address this question from their respective fields: Political Theory, Philosophy, Medical Anthropology, Law, Geography, Islamic Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Science, Literature, Psychoanalysis, History of Art, Education and Economics. The resulting volume covers an extraordinary array of contexts, ranging from rethinking trans* bodies, to traumatized tribal communities, to sexualized violence, to assisted reproductive technologies, to the implications of epigenetics for understanding gender, and yet they are all connected by their focus on the importance of gender as a category of analysis. The publication of this volume celebrates the anniversary of the launch of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge, and features contributions from past and future Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professors to the University.