Queer Non-fiction reading list

Revised and Expanded EditionWait—what's wrong with rights? It is usually assumed that trans and gender nonconforming people should follow the civil rights and "equality" strategies of lesbian and gay rights organizations by agitating for legal reforms that would ostensibly guarantee nondiscrimination and equal protection under the law. This approach assumes that the best way to address the poverty and criminalization that plague trans populations is to gain legal recognition and inclusion in the state's institutions. But is this strategy effective? In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change, and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that is raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations, and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. In the new afterword to this revised and expanded edition, Spade notes the rapid mainstreaming of trans politics and finds that his predictions that gaining legal recognition will fail to benefit trans populations are coming to fruition. Spade examines recent efforts by the Obama administration and trans equality advocates to "pinkwash" state violence by articulating the US military and prison systems as sites for trans inclusion reforms. In the context of recent increased mainstream visibility of trans people and trans politics, Spade continues to advocate for the dismantling of systems of state violence that shorten the lives of trans people. Now more than ever, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require.

Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as creatures which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions of the nature/culture split. By providing an escape from rigid dualisms, the cyborg exists in a post-gender world, and as such holds immense possibilities for modern feminists. Haraway's recent book, Primate Visions, has been called outstanding, original, and brilliant, by leading scholars in the field. (First published in 1991.)

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992."Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." —Adrienne Rich"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." —Alice Walker"The forthrightness and ferocity with which Audre Lorde greeted every social injustice is in full force in this courageous exploration." —Amazon.com

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

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

By now we've all heard about the shocking redistribution of wealth that's occurred during the last thirty years, and particularly during the last decade. But economic changes like this don't occur in a vacuum; they're always linked to politics. The Twilight of Equality? searches out these links through an analysis of the politics of the 1990s, the decade when neoliberalism-free market economics-became gospel. After a brilliant historical examination of how racial and gender inequities were woven into the very theoretical underpinnings of the neoliberal model of the state, Duggan shows how these inequities play out today. In a series of political case studies, Duggan reveals how neoliberal goals have been pursued, demonstrating that progressive arguments that separate identity politics and economic policy, cultural politics and affairs of state, can only fail. Ultimately, The Twilight of Equality? not only reveals how the highly successful rhetorical maneuvers of neoliberalism have functioned but, more importantly, it shows a way to revitalize and unify progressive politics in the U.S. today.

Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern and fail to govern gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble. In this work, the critique of gender norms is clearly situated within the framework of human persistence and survival. And to "do" one's gender in certain ways sometimes implies "undoing" dominant notions of personhood. She writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory.

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays - a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

I think it is a great book. It achieves what it seeks. In this age of US versus Them, unfortunately, sane voices are curbed, ridiculed, and dubbed as naive across the globe. With thinkers like Butler, one can see what they are trying to do, and what truly motivates them. She tries to build things when most politicians want to erect walls by playing identity politics.A few days ago, I read Dr. Jordan Peterson. I wonder what kind of conversation he will have with Butler. I can imagine him talking to Trump, though. It is easy to convince when you start from the position of love, care, and concern. But who is listening to sane voices when bigotry has become the new norm.Reading Butler makes me think that it is not too difficult to figure out how to live, love and be responsible in the world at any given moment.

I've read a few reviews of this and a lot seem to bash Feinberg for not presenting a thoroughly academic history of transgender identity. I do think this kind of critique misses the point: quite spectacularly. It's definitely true that if you want a meticulous, detailed, jargony drudge through trans history then this is not the book: it neither has the style, content or length for that kinda project.But this book from the beginning opens as a personal story of discovering oneself *through* history, rather than the more boring (in my view!) task of discovering history per se (though this is important in other contexts of course).As someone who has always had an atypical gender expression, when you start discovering the possibility of gender variance the way the world neatly compartmentalizes into two - male and female - begins to smack you quite rudely in the face. And then you see it everywhere: in the way people talk, walk, their hairstyles, their mannerisms, their beliefs, their favourite colour, their partners, the way they have sex or who they want to have sex with. All neatly carved into a tidy dichotomy: male and female. Useful, as Feinberg argues, not for us as free people but for the ruling classes who need to mechanically restrict our gender expression for their own devices.Trans identity has a history of being invisible. Which is strange because trans people also have a history of being loved, celebrated and respected across the globe and across times.It's within this framework that "Transgender Warriors" operates: it attempts to find the invisible trans self in the rich and bountiful trans history that exists; bringing that self to light, through history. Hence, elucidating the history in the process.From Joan of Arc to Two-Spirit people or from Aphrodite to Brandon Teena: trans people - and gender variance more generally - has a deeply rich history. And perhaps unexpectedly a rich history in working class resistance. This book is about Feinberg discovering that history in tandem with discovering hirself. As someone who was repressed and oppressed on the basis of gender identity and exploited from the standpoint of class, Feinberg was attempting to locate hirself - through history - as part of a collective able to fight back and resist. Hir use of history is on the whole factual but as a result of hir form, somewhat biographical. This was supplemented by the picture gallery at the end which the author again used as a way of quite creatively melding history with the biographical stories of people's personal lives and struggles. Perhaps the downside was the only argument Feinberg offered for why trans oppression exists is because it's yet another way of reinventing and enforcing class hierarchy. and of course she's not wrong, but hir argument was crude in places.On the whole though, a fantastic book. Read it. If not, your loss.

'Epistemology of the Closet' is an exciting book. It looks into the very physiognomy of 'closet,' and assays the work of some great authors such as Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and Wilde. Even when one is familiar with these writers, it is fascinating to study their works with the perspective of 'Closet.''Closet' is not something that happens naturally. In countless personal gay narratives, one often hears, 'Oh I thought I were the only one,' 'this is only happening to me.' These are genuinely felt and lived experiences. It requires much effort to learn that this happens because everything is so profoundly heterosexual. So anything that lies outside the rigid normative binary is 'closeted.' What seems unique, abnormal, strange to queer people is not innocent; it is strategically constituted.In the book, the author explores the 'closet' by examining the homo/ heterosexual binaries, how one is constructed to reinforce the other. The more distinct these binaries are, the easier it is to assign people different identity markers. Prior to the end of 19th century, men were men, but since then, they have been transformed into homo and Heterosexual men, whereas no such distinction existed before. According to Eva Kosofsky, the construction of 'homosexual man' has been a presiding term of the 20th century, one that has the same, primary importance for all modern Western identity and social organization as do the more traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race. This new binary has affected western culture profoundly. Binaries such as secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, health/illness, art/kitsch, discipline/terrorism, come to mirror homo-hetero binary.As I read this book, I also thought that it was also in the modern/industrial phase when agrarian societies were losing their grip, and the progress in modern science was making it possible for Europe to imagine the world differently. As Europe became more advanced and progressed, we saw the mushrooming of cities and industrial units, the rise of democracy, decolonization and so forth. The changed world, at least in the west, recognized other identities, which were hidden for a long time. Also, modern cities, by their very nature, do not control human 'desire' in the way agrarian societies do. Therefore, even today, the developed world is far more evolved when it comes to the rights of minority sexualities, whereas the pre-industrial societies, the term 'closet' hardly makes any sense because the homosexual man has not yet arrived there. As I was reading the book, I was thinking about Marx. No matter how much one is tempted to denounce Marx; it is amazing to see how well his theories of base and super-structures are in explaining the world. On the one hand, the episteme of the 'closet,' gives the impression that humanity is evolving linearly. However, the more one reads, reflects, and looks at the discourse producing machinery; one sees how easy it is to produce new knowledge systems, new ways of being in the world. Any sense of righteousness and ethics does not necessarily motivate these 'changes' that look so humane; they are as much embedded in pragmaticism.Coming back to the book, I must add that the chapters on Proust and Wilde can still be enjoyed, even if one has not read them. On my second reading of these chapters, I tried to read them as if I knew nothing about their works; they are still accessible. The book, of course, demands patience. The content in it is, after all, the work of a lifetime.

The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hooks' new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexist oppression because the very foundation of women's liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience. In order to fulfill its revolutionary potential, feminist theory must begin by consciously transforming its own definition to encompass the lives and ideas of women on the margin. Hooks' work is a challenge to the women's movement and will have profound impact on all whose lives have been touched by feminism and its insights.

Patricia Williams is a lawyer and a professor of commercial law, the great-great-granddaughter of a slave and a white southern lawyer. The Alchemy of Race and Rights is an eloquent autobiographical essay in which the author reflects on the intersection of race, gender, and class. Using the tools of critical literary and legal theory, she sets out her views of contemporary popular culture and current events, from Howard Beach to homelessness, from Tawana Brawley to the law-school classroom, from civil rights to Oprah Winfrey, from Bernhard Goetz to Mary Beth Whitehead. She also traces the workings of "ordinary racism"--everyday occurrences, casual, unintended, banal perhaps, but mortifying. Taking up the metaphor of alchemy, Williams casts the law as a mythological text in which the powers of commerce and the Constitution, wealth and poverty, sanity and insanity, wage war across complex and overlapping boundaries of discourse. In deliberately transgressing such boundaries, she pursues a path toward racial justice that is, ultimately, transformative.Williams gets to the roots of racism not by finger-pointing but by much gentler methods. Her book is full of anecdote and witness, vivid characters known and observed, trenchant analysis of the law's shortcomings. Only by such an inquiry and such patient phenomenology can we understand racism. The book is deeply moving and not so, finally, just because racism is wrong--we all know that. What we don't know is how to unthink the process that allows racism to persist. This Williams enables us to see. The result is a testament of considerable beauty, a triumph of moral tactfulness. The result, as the title suggests, is magic.

This groundbreaking collection reflects an uncompromised definition of feminism by women of color. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing---and archiving---accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. Cvetkovich contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, she develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. An Archive of Feelings challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and AIDS activism and caretaking.An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act/up New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherrie Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how these cultural formations---activism, performance, and literature---give rise to public cultures that both work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma-one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.About the Author: Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism.

In this searing polemic, Lee Edelman outlines a radically uncompromising new ethics of queer theory. His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety-from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships-has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey's suburbs.Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany's critique reveals how Times Square is being "renovated" behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values." Unless we overcome our fears and claim our "community of contact," it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.