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The Quality of Home Runs
The Passion, Politics, and Language of Cuban Baseball
Thomas F. Carter
Duke University Press, 2008
In parks and cafes, homes and stadium stands, Cubans talk baseball. Thomas F. Carter contends that when they are analyzing and debating plays, games, teams, and athletes, Cubans are exchanging ideas not just about baseball but also about Cuba and cubanidad, or what it means to be Cuban. The Quality of Home Runs is Carter’s lively ethnographic exploration of the interconnections between baseball and Cuban identity. Suggesting that baseball is in many ways an apt metaphor for cubanidad, Carter points out aspects of the sport that resonate with Cuban social and political life: the perpetual tension between risk and security, the interplay between individual style and collective regulation, and the risky journeys undertaken with the intention, but not the guarantee, of returning home.

As an avid baseball fan, Carter draws on his experiences listening to and participating in discussions of baseball in Cuba (particularly in Havana) and among Cubans living abroad to describe how baseball provides the ground for negotiations of national, masculine, and class identities wherever Cubans gather. He considers the elaborate spectacle of Cuban baseball as well as the relationship between the socialist state and the enormously popular sport. Carter provides a detailed history of baseball in Cuba, analyzing players, policies, rivalries, and fans, and he describes how the sport has forged connections (or reinforced divisions) between Cuba and other nations. Drawing on insights from cultural studies, political theory, and anthropology, he maintains that sport and other forms of play should be taken seriously as crucibles of social and cultural experience.

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Quantum Anthropologies
Life at Large
Vicki Kirby
Duke University Press, 2011
In Quantum Anthropologies, the renowned feminist theorist Vicki Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction’s implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of textuality and representation are specific to the domain of culture. Revisiting Derrida’s claim that there is “no outside of text,” Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value. Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler, Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot access—much less be—nature, body, and materiality. She suggests ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics, biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment, materialism, and science.
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A Quarter Century of Common Knowledge
Eleven Conversations
Jeffrey M. Perl, special issue editor
Duke University Press
To commemorate the journal’s quarter-century, this double issue consists of foundational pieces arranged in conversation with one another. Common Knowledge has opened lines of communication among schools of thought in the academy, as well as between the academy and the community of thoughtful people outside its walls, and the pages of the journal challenge the ways we think about scholarship and its relevance to humanity. Contributors to the issue include former presidents, prime ministers, and archbishops, along with winners of the Nobel Prize, Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, MacArthur Fellowship, International Balzan Prize, and Holberg International Prize.

Contributors. M. H. Abrams, Edward Albee, Barry Allen, Wayne Andersen, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Marianna Birnbaum, Sir John Boardman, G. W. Bowersock, Aldo Buzzi, Caroline Walker Bynum, Anne Carson, William M. Chace, J. M. Coetzee, Cornelius Castoriadis, Stanley Cavell, Stuart Clark, Inga Clendinnen, Francis X. Clooney, Christopher Coker, Maria Conterno, Michael Cook, Lorraine Daston, Lydia Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Thibault De Meyer, Gunter Eich, Sir John H. Elliott, Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Epstein, Péter Esterházy, Roger Cardinal Etchegaray, Fang Lizhi, Paul Feyerabend, Michael Fried, Joseph Frank, Manfred Frank, Luis Garcia, Clifford Geertz, Carlo Ginzburg, Philip Gossett, Stephen Greenblatt, Thom Gunn, Jürgen Habermas, Ian Hacking, Václav Havel, Sir Edward Heath, Albert O. Hirschman, David Hollinger, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Miroslav Holub, Maya Jasanoff, Albert R. Jonsen, Stanley N. Katz, Hugh Kenner, Sir Anthony Kenny, Sir Frank Kermode, Jee Leong Koh, Joseph Leo Koerner, Yusef Komunyakaa, György Konrád, Bruce Krajewski, László Krasznahorkai, Anton O. Kris, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Ewa Lipska, Greil Marcus, Steven Marcus, Samuel Menashe, Adam Michnik, Jack Miles, Alexander Nehamas, Reviel Netz, Sari Nusseibeh, Jeffrey M. Perl, Marjorie Perloff, J. G. A. Pocock, W. V. Quine, Belle Randall, Nadja Reissland, Colin Richmond, Richard Rorty, Ingrid Rowland, Hanna Segal, Amartya Sen, Quentin Skinner, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, A. L. Snijders, Timothy Snyder, Susan Sontag, Isabelle Stengers, Wis?awa Szymborska, Miguel Tamen, G. Thomas Tanselle, Sir Keith Thomas, Stephen Toulmin, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Michiko Urita, Bas van Fraassen, Marina Vanzolini, Gianni Vattimo, Helen Vendler, Charlie Samua Veric, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Sir Bernard Williams, Lord (Rowan) Williams, H. R. Woudhuysen, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Santiago Zabala
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Queen for a Day
Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela
Marcia Ochoa
Duke University Press, 2014
Queen for a Day connects the logic of Venezuelan modernity with the production of a national femininity. In this ethnography, Marcia Ochoa considers how femininities are produced, performed, and consumed in the mass-media spectacles of international beauty pageants, on the runways of the Miss Venezuela contest, on the well-traveled Caracas avenue where transgender women (transformistas) project themselves into the urban imaginary, and on the bodies of both transformistas and beauty pageant contestants (misses). Placing transformistas and misses in the same analytic frame enables Ochoa to delve deeply into complex questions of media and spectacle, gender and sexuality, race and class, and self-fashioning and identity in Venezuela.

Beauty pageants play an outsized role in Venezuela. The country has won more international beauty contests than any other. The femininity performed by Venezuelan women in high-profile, widely viewed pageants defines a kind of national femininity. Ochoa argues that as transformistas and misses work to achieve the bodies, clothing and makeup styles, and postures and gestures of this national femininity, they come to embody Venezuelan modernity.

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The Queen of America Goes to Washington City
Essays on Sex and Citizenship
Lauren Berlant
Duke University Press, 1997
In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus.
As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy.
Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.
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Queequeg's Coffin
Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature
Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Duke University Press, 2012
The encounter between European and native peoples in the Americas is often portrayed as a conflict between literate civilization and illiterate savagery. That perception ignores the many indigenous forms of writing that were not alphabet-based, such as Mayan pictoglyphs, Iroquois wampum, Ojibwe birch-bark scrolls, and Incan quipus. Queequeg's Coffin offers a new definition of writing that comprehends the dazzling diversity of literature in the Americas before and after European arrivals. This groundbreaking study recovers previously overlooked moments of textual reciprocity in the colonial sphere, from a 1645 French-Haudenosaunee Peace Council to Herman Melville's youthful encounters with Polynesian hieroglyphics.

By recovering the literatures and textual practices that were indigenous to the Americas, Birgit Brander Rasmussen reimagines the colonial conflict as one organized by alternative but equally rich forms of literacy. From central Mexico to the northeastern shores of North America, in the Andes and across the American continents, indigenous peoples and European newcomers engaged each other in dialogues about ways of writing and recording knowledge. In Queequeg's Coffin, such exchanges become the foundation for a new kind of early American literary studies.

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Queer about Comics
Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
This special issue explores the intersection of queer theory and comics studies. The contributors provide new theories of how comics represent and reconceptualize queer sexuality, desire, intimacy, and eroticism, while also investigating how the comic strip, as a hand-drawn form, queers literary production and demands innovative methods of analysis from the fields of literary, visual, and cultural studies. 

Contributors examine the relationships among reader, creator, and community across a range of comics production, including mainstream superhero comics, independent LGBTQ comics, and avant-garde and experimental feminist narratives. They also address queer forms of identification elicited by the classic X-Men character Rogue, the lesbian grassroots publishing networks that helped shape Alison Bechdel’s oeuvre, and the production of black queer fantasy in the Black Panther comic book series, among other topics. 

Contributors andré carrington, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Yetta Howard, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Kate McCullough, Darieck Scott, Jessica Q. Stark, Shelley Streeby, Rebecca Wanzo
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Queer Activism in India
A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
Naisargi Dave
Duke University Press, 2012
In Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dave examines the formation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with activist organizations in Delhi, a body of letters written by lesbian women, and research with lesbian communities and queer activist groups across the country, Dave studies the everyday practices that constitute queer activism in India.

Dave argues that activism is an ethical practice comprised of critique, invention, and relational practice. Her analysis investigates the relationship between the ethics of activism and the existing social norms and conditions from which activism emerges. Through her study of different networks and institutions, Dave documents how activism oscillates between the potential for new social arrangements and the questions that arise once the activists' goals have been accomplished. Dave's book addresses a relevant and timely phenomenon and makes an important contribution to the anthropology of queer communities, social movements, affect, and ethics.
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Queer African Cinemas
Lindsey B. Green-Simms
Duke University Press, 2022
In Queer African Cinemas, Lindsey B. Green-Simms examines films produced by and about queer Africans in the first two decades of the twenty-first century in an environment of increasing antiqueer violence, efforts to criminalize homosexuality, and other state-sanctioned homophobia. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities. Examining globally circulating international art films as well as popular melodramas made for local audiences, Green-Simms emphasizes that in these films queer resistance—contrary to traditional narratives about resistance that center overt and heroic struggle—is often practiced from a position of vulnerability. By reading queer films alongside discussions about censorship and audiences, Green-Simms renders queer African cinema as a rich visual archive that documents the difficulty of queer existence as well as the potentials for queer life-building and survival.
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The Queer Art of Failure
Jack Halberstam
Duke University Press, 2011
The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.
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The Queer Art of History
Queer Kinship after Fascism
Jennifer V. Evans
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.
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Queer Bonds, Volume 17
Joshua Joanou Weiner
Duke University Press

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The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
Kathryn Bond Stockton
Duke University Press, 2009
Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children’s strangeness, even some children’s subliminal “gayness,” in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a “gay” child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labors, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it?

Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term “growing sideways” to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children’s queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy.

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Queer Cinema in the World
Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt
Duke University Press, 2016
Proposing a radical vision of cinema's queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.
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The Queer Commons
Gavin Butt and Nadja Millner-Larsen, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
The conventional idea of the commons—a resource managed by the community that uses it—might appear anachronistic as global capitalism attempts to privatize and commodify social life. Against these trends, contemporary queer energies have been directed toward commons-forming initiatives from activist provision of social services to the maintenance of networks around queer art, protest, public sex, and bar cultures that sustain queer lives otherwise marginalized by heteronormative society and mainstream LGBTQ politics. This issue forges a connection between the common and the queer, asking how the category “queer” might open up a discourse that has emerged as one of the most important challenges to contemporary neoliberalization at both the theoretical and practical level.

Contributors look to radical networks of care, sex, and activism present within diverse queer communities including HIV/AIDS organizing, the Wages for Housework movement, New York’s Clit Club community, and trans/queer collectives in San Francisco. The issue also includes a dossier of shorter contributions that offer speculative provocations about the radicalism of queer commonality across time and space, from Gezi Park uprisings in Turkey to future visions of collectivity outside of the internet.     

Contributors
Arlen Austin, Zach Blas, Gavin Butt, Beth Capper, Ashon Crawley, Amalle Dublon, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Christina Hanhardt, Diarmuid Hester, Nadja Millner-Larsen, José Esteban Muñoz, Cenk Ozbay, Evren Savci, Eric Stanley
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Queer Companions
Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan
Omar Kasmani
Duke University Press, 2022
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
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Queer Diasporas
Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-Eppler, eds.
Duke University Press, 2000
Queer Diasporas presents essays that explore how sexuality and sexual identity change when individuals, ideologies, and media move across literal and figurative boundaries. Speaking from a diverse range of ethnic, racial, and national sites, the contributors to this volume illustrate how queer identity in particular is affected in ways that are as varied and nuanced as the cultural, social, and physical environments themselves.
Incorporating literary analysis, ethnographic research, and theories of diaspora, migration, and transnationalism, the essays in this volume address an impressive range of topics, from the divergent medical and epidemiological understandings of the AIDS pandemic to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction. While one chapter focuses on the appropriation of religious ceremony by gay Filipino immigrants in New York City, another investigates the implicit connection between Jewishness and homosexuality in the work of Freud. The gendering of domestic roles in food preparation and consumption in Japanese society gives way to a discussion of Cuban and Jamaican homoeroticism as seen in the works of Reinaldo Arenas and Claude McKay. Chilean author D’Halmar’s orientalization of Spain as queer space and the hybrid nature of queer ‘zine culture in Quebec are the subject of others. The collection concludes with a monologue by “Walid,” a young gay Arab living in the occupied territory, whose sexual and national identities change according to his sexual and social needs.
Illuminating the complex nature of queerness in the postmodern world, Queer Diasporas contributes to the advancement of gay and lesbian studies. It will be important to those working in cultural, literary, and postcolonial studies.

Contributors
. Michele Aina Barale, Daniel Boyarin, Sandra Buckley, Rhonda Cobham, Amir Sumaka’i Fink, Marcie Frank, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Sylvia Molloy, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Jennifer Robertson, Benigno Sánchez-Eppler
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Queer Futures, Volume 2008
Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin, eds.
Duke University Press
In this special issue of Radical History Review, scholars and activists examine the rise of “homonormativity,” a lesbian and gay politics that embraces neoliberal values under the guise of queer sexual liberation. Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.

Distinguished by its historical approach, “Queer Futures” examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant’s antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the “endangered child.” Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and a history of how “safe streets” patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.

Contributors. Anna M. Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Aaron Belkin, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Maxime Cervulle, Vincent Doyle, Roderick A. Ferguson, Christina Hanhardt, Dan Irving, Regina Kunzel, Patrick McCreery, Kevin P. Murphy, Tavia Nyong’o, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin, Tamara L. Spira, Susan Stryker, Margot D. Weiss

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The Queer Games Avant-Garde
How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games
Bonnie Ruberg
Duke University Press, 2020
In The Queer Games Avant-Garde, Bonnie Ruberg presents twenty interviews with twenty-two queer video game developers whose radical, experimental, vibrant, and deeply queer work is driving a momentous shift in the medium of video games. Speaking with insight and candor about their creative practices as well as their politics and passions, these influential and innovative game makers tell stories about their lives and inspirations, the challenges they face, and the ways they understand their places within the wider terrain of video game culture. Their insights go beyond typical conversations about LGBTQ representation in video games or how to improve “diversity” in digital media. Instead, they explore queer game-making practices, the politics of queer independent video games, how queerness can be expressed as an aesthetic practice, the influence of feminist art on their work, and the future of queer video games and technology. These engaging conversations offer a portrait of an influential community that is subverting and redefining the medium of video games by placing queerness front and center.

Interviewees:
Ryan Rose Aceae, Avery Alder, Jimmy Andrews, Santo Aveiro-Ojeda, Aevee Bee, Tonia B******, Mattie Brice, Nicky Case, Naomi Clark, Mo Cohen, Heather Flowers, Nina Freeman, Jerome Hagen, Kat Jones, Jess Marcotte, Andi McClure, Llaura McGee, Seanna Musgrave, Liz Ryerson, Elizabeth Sampat, Loren Schmidt, Sarah Schoemann, Dietrich Squinkifer, Kara Stone, Emilia Yang, Robert Yang
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Queer Iberia
Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds.
Duke University Press, 1999
Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands.
To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings.
Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies.

Contributors. Josiah Blackmore, Linde M. Brocato, Catherine Brown, Israel Burshatin, Daniel Eisenberg, E. Michael Gerli, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvári, Barbara Weissberger

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Queer in Russia
A Story of Sex, Self, and the Other
Laurie Essig
Duke University Press, 1999
In Queer in Russia Laurie Essig examines the formation of gay identity and community in the former Soviet Union. As a sociological fieldworker, she began her research during the late 1980s, before any kind of a public queer identity existed in that country. After a decade of conducting interviews, as well as observing and analyzing plays, books, pop music, and graffiti, Essig presents the first sustained study of how and why there was no Soviet gay community or even gay identity before perestroika and the degree to which this situation has—or has not—changed.
While male homosexual acts were criminalized in Russia before 1993, women attracted to women were policed by the medical community, who saw them less as criminals than as diseased persons potentially cured by drug therapy or transsexual surgery. After describing accounts of pre-perestroika persecution, Essig examines the more recent state of sexual identities in Russia. Although the fall of communism brought new freedom to Russian queers, there are still no signs of a mass movement forming around the issue, and few identify themselves as lesbians or gay men, even when they are involved in same-sex relations. Essig does reveal, however, vibrant manifestations of gay life found at the local level—in restaurants, discos, clubs, and cruising strips, in newspapers, journals, literature, and the theater. Concluding with a powerful exploration of the surprising affinities between some of Russia’s most prominent nationalists and its queers, Queer in Russia fills a gap in both Russian and cultural studies.
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Queer in Translation
Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam
Evren Savci
Duke University Press, 2021
In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.
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Queer Inhumanisms
Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This issue features a group of leading theorists from multiple disciplines who decenter the human in queer theory, exploring what it means to treat “the human” as simply one of many elements in a queer critical assemblage. Contributors examine the queer dimensions of recent moves to think apart from or beyond the human in affect theory, disability studies, critical race theory, animal studies, science studies, ecocriticism, and other new materialisms. Essay topics include race, fabulation, and ecology; parasitology, humans, and mosquitoes; the racialization of advocacy for pit bulls; and queer kinship in Korean films when humans become indistinguishable from weapons. The contributors argue that a nonhuman critical turn in queer theory can and should refocus the field’s founding attention to social structures of dehumanization and oppression. They find new critical energies that allow considerations of justice to operate alongside and through their questioning of the human-nonhuman boundary.

Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, also published by Duke University Press. Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America and editor, with Ivy G. Wilson, of Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies.

Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Karen Barad, Jayna Brown, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra Hird, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Eileen Joy, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Uri McMillan, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, ​Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Stryker, Kimberly Tallbear, Jeanne Vaccaro, Harlan Weaver, Jami Weinstein
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Queer Kinship
Race, Sex, Belonging, Form
Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, editors
Duke University Press, 2022
The contributors to this volume assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary moment marked by the rising tides of neoliberalism, fascism, xenophobia, and homo- and cis-nationalism, they approach kinship as both a horizon and a source of violence and possibility. The contributors challenge dominant theories of kinship that ignore the devastating impacts of chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and racialized nationalism on the bonds of Black and Indigenous people and people of color. Among other topics, they examine the “blood tie” as the legal marker of kin relations, the everyday experiences and memories of trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul, the outsourcing of reproductive labor in postcolonial India, kinship as a model of governance beyond the liberal state, and the intergenerational effects of the adoption of Indigenous children as a technology of settler colonialism. Queer Kinship pushes the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of queer theory forward while opening up new paths for studying kinship.

Contributors. Aqdas Aftab, Leah Claire Allen, Tyler Bradway, Juliana Demartini Brito, Judith Butler, Dilara Çalışkan, Christopher Chamberlin, Aobo Dong, Brigitte Fielder, Elizabeth Freeman, John S. Garrison, Nat Hurley, Joseph M. Pierce, Mark Rifkin, Poulomi Saha, Kath Weston
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Queer Korea
Todd A. Henry, editor
Duke University Press, 2020
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” Koreans were ignored, minimized, and erased in narratives of their modern nation, East Asia, and the wider world. This interdisciplinary volume challenges such marginalization through critical analyses of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Considering both personal and collective forces, the contributors extend individualized notions of queer neoliberalism beyond those typically set in Western queer theory. Along the way, they recount a range of illuminating topics, from shamanic rituals during the colonial era and B-grade comedy films under Cold War dictatorship to female masculinity among today’s youth and transgender confrontations with the resident registration system. More broadly, Queer Korea offers readers new ways of understanding the limits and possibilities of human liberation under exclusionary conditions of modernity in Asia and beyond.

Contributors. Pei Jean Chen, John (Song Pae) Cho, Chung-kang Kim, Todd A. Henry, Merose Hwang, Ruin, Layoung Shin, Shin-ae Ha, John Whittier Treat
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Queer Marxism in Two Chinas
Petrus Liu
Duke University Press, 2015
In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu rethinks the relationship between Marxism and queer cultures in mainland China and Taiwan. Whereas many scholars assume the emergence of queer cultures in China signals the end of Marxism and demonstrates China's political and economic evolution, Liu finds the opposite to be true. He challenges the persistence of Cold War formulations of Marxism that position it as intellectually incompatible with queer theory, and shows how queer Marxism offers a nonliberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation. The work of queer Chinese artists and intellectuals not only provides an alternative to liberal ideologies of inclusion and diversity, but demonstrates how different conceptions of and attitudes toward queerness in China and Taiwan stem from geopolitical tensions. With Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Liu offers a revision to current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be.
 
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Queer Phenomenology
Orientations, Objects, Others
Sara Ahmed
Duke University Press, 2006
In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

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Queer Theory without Antinormativity
Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, special issue editors
Duke University Press
The tyrannies of sexual normativity have been widely denounced in queer theory. Heteronormativity, homonormativity, family values, marriage, and monogamy have all been objects of sustained queer critique, most often in purely oppositional form: as antinormativity. The contributors to this special issue ask a seemingly simple question of this critical code: can queer theory proceed without a primary allegiance to antinormativity? These essays offer an affirmative answer either by rethinking normativity or eschewing it altogether in order to redirect the intellectual and political energies of the field. 
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Queer Tourism
Geographies of Globalization, Volume 8
Jasbir K. Puar, ed.
Duke University Press
Over the last several decades, queer sexualities, tourism industry marketing, tourist practices, and consumption patterns have converged to produce burgeoning outlets for the mobility of queer subjects. In the first collection ever devoted to scholarly articles on queer tourism, this special double issue of GLQ highlights the connections between political economy and sexuality and contributes to an emgerging body of literature on queer sexualities and globalization.
Essays explore a range of geographical areas and cover topics that include an autoethnographic account of a queer traveler in Cuba, the development of gay and lesbian tourism in Madrid and Mexico, and gay and lesbian tourist events such as World Pride 2001 in Rome. The collection also includes an essay focusing on lesbian tourism—a study of the history of lesbian tourism on Eresos, Lesvos.

Contributors. Lionel Cantú, Gabriel Giorgi, Venetia Kantsa, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Michael Luongo, Kevin Markwell, Jasbir Kaur Puar, Dereka Rushbrook

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Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender, Volume 15
Anne McClintock, Phillip Brian Harper, José Esteban Muñoz and Trish Rosen, eds.
Duke University Press
Until now, queer theory has largely been silent about questions of race, especially when considered in an international context. Much postcolonial theory has been silent about questions regarding gender and sexuality. This special issue of Social Text explores the relations between race and queer sexuality by focusing on the politics of transgression in a transnational world.
In the first section of this issue, Race and Queer Sexuality, international authors address topics ranging from Asian American queer identity and its relation to transnational and diasporic concerns to homophobia and its relationship to black nationalism in South Africa. Other subjects include, sexuality, race, and public space; lesbian pedagogy and the nation in Latin America; and an analysis of cross-race and cross-gender drag in the work of L.A. drag queen Vaginal Creme Davis. In the second section, The Politics of Transgression, contributors focus on transgression and its relationship to power and history. One essay explores Irish immigration in the U.S. and the Irish female body as a figure of transnational contagion and blood panic, while another focuses on Oscar Wilde, race, and queer sexuality. Other pieces include a meditation on British filmmaker and writer Derek Jarman’s film, Blue.
Race and Queer Sexuality
confronts the limitations of prior work in queer theory while providing a starting point for discussion of race, queer sexuality, and the politics of transgression that will be part of queer theory of the future.

Contributors. Judith Butler, David Eng, Licia Fiol-Mata, Judith Halberstam, Phillip Brian Harper, Neville Hoad, Rachel Holmes, Don Kulick, Tim Lawrence, Rosalind Morris, José Esteban Muñoz, Ben Singer, David Valentine, Priscilla Wald, Riki Anne Wilchins

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Queer/Early/Modern
Carla Freccero
Duke University Press, 2006
In Queer/Early/Modern, Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term “queer,” in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of “fantasmatic historiography” that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labé, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin’s take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and Boccaccio’s Decameron; and France’s domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. Turning to French cleric Jean de Léry’s account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

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Queering Archives
Historical Unravelings
Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici, special issue editors
Duke University Press
“Queering Archives: Historical Unravelings” is the first of two themed issues from Radical History Review (numbers 120 and 122) that explore the ways in which the notion of the “queer archive” is increasingly crucial for scholars working at the intersection of history, sexuality, and gender. Efforts to record and preserve queer experiences determine how scholars account for the past and provide a framework for understanding contemporary queer life. Essays in these issues consider historical materials from queer archives around the world as well as the recent critical practice of “queering” the archive by looking at historical collections for queer content (and its absence).

This issue explores the evolution of grassroots LGBT archives, debates over queer migrations, nationalism and the institutionalization of LGBT memory, the archiving of transgender activism, digitization and the classificatory systems of the archive, performances of the colonial archive, museums as archives, and everyday objects as archivable texts.

Daniel Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne. Kevin P. Murphy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective. Zeb Tortorici is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University.

Contributors: Rustem Ertug Altinay, Anjali Arondekar, Elspeth H. Brown, Elise Chenier, Howard Chiang, Ben Cowan, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Davidmann, Leah DeVun, Peter Edelberg, Licia Fiol-Matta, Jack Jen Gieseking, Christina Hanhardt, Robb Hernandez, Kwame Holmes, Regina Kunzel, A. J. Lewis, Martin F. Manalansan IV, María Elena Martínez, Michael Jay McClure, Caitlin McKinney, Katherine Mohrman, Joan Nestle, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Tavia Nyong’o, Anthony M. Petro, K. J. Rawson, Barry Reay, Juana María Rodríguez, Don Romesburg, Rebecka Sheffield, Marc Stein, Margaret Stone, Susan Stryker, Robert Summers, Jeanne Vaccaro, Dale Washkansky, Melissa White
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Queering Archives
Intimate Tracings
Daniel Marshall, Kevin P. Murphy, and Zeb Tortorici, special issue editors
Duke University Press
“Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings” is the second of two themed issues from Radical History Review (numbers 120 and 122) that explore the ways in which the notion of the “queer archive” is increasingly crucial for scholars working at the intersection of history, sexuality, and gender. Efforts to record and preserve queer experiences determine how scholars account for the past and provide a framework for understanding contemporary queer life. Essays in these issues consider historical materials from queer archives around the world as well as the recent critical practice of “queering” the archive by looking at historical collections for queer content (and its absence).

This issue considers how archives allow historical traces of sexuality and gender to be sought, identified, recorded, and assembled into accumulations of meaning. Contributors explore conundrums in contemporary queer archival methods, probing some of them in essays on the Catholic Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This issue also includes a series of intergenerational interviews reflecting on histories of LGBT archives, a roundtable discussion about legacies of queer studies of the archive, and a closing reflection by Joan Nestle, a founding figure in the practice of international queer archiving.

Daniel Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne. Kevin P. Murphy is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and a member of the Radical History Review editorial collective. Zeb Tortorici is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University.

Contributors: Rustem Ertug Altinay, Anjali Arondekar, Elspeth H. Brown, Elise Chenier, Howard Chiang, Ben Cowan, Ann Cvetkovich, Sara Davidmann, Leah DeVun, Peter Edelberg, Licia Fiol-Matta, Jack Jen Gieseking, Christina Hanhardt, Robb Hernandez, Kwame Holmes, Regina Kunzel, A. J. Lewis, Martin F. Manalansan IV, María Elena Martínez, Michael Jay McClure, Caitlin McKinney, Katherine Mohrman, Joan Nestle, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Tavia Nyong’o, Anthony M. Petro, K. J. Rawson, Barry Reay, Juana María Rodríguez, Don Romesburg, Rebecka Sheffield, Marc Stein, Margaret Stone, Susan Stryker, Robert Summers, Jeanne Vaccaro, Dale Washkansky, Melissa White
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Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou
Roberto Strongman
Duke University Press, 2019
In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.
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Queering Reproduction
Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience
Laura Mamo
Duke University Press, 2007
Originally developed to help heterosexual couples, fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization and sperm donation have provided lesbians with new methods for achieving pregnancy during the past two decades. Queering Reproduction is an important sociological analysis of lesbians’ use of these medical fertility treatments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with lesbians who have been or are seeking to become pregnant, Laura Mamo describes how reproduction has become an intensely medicalized process for lesbians, who are transformed into fertility patients not (or not only) because of their physical conditions but because of their sexual identities. Mamo argues that this medicalization of reproduction has begun to shape queer subjectivities in both productive and troubling ways, destabilizing the assumed link between heterosexuality and parenthood while also reinforcing traditional, heteronormative ideals about motherhood and the imperative to reproduce.

Mamo provides an overview of a shift within some lesbian communities from low-tech methods of self-insemination to a reliance on outside medical intervention and fertility treatments. Reflecting on the issues facing lesbians who become parents through assisted reproductive technologies, Mamo explores questions about the legal rights of co-parents, concerns about the genetic risks of choosing an anonymous sperm donor, and the ways decisions to become parents affect sexual and political identities. In doing so, she investigates how lesbians navigate the medical system with its requisite range of fertility treatments, diagnostic categories, and treatment trajectories. Combining moving narratives and insightful analysis, Queering Reproduction reveals how medical technology reconfigures social formations, individual subjectivity, and notions of kinship.

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Queering the Color Line
Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture
Siobhan B. Somerville
Duke University Press, 2000
Queering the Color Line transforms previous understandings of how homosexuality was “invented” as a category of identity in the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a range of sources, including sexology texts, early cinema, and African American literature, Siobhan B. Somerville argues that the emerging understanding of homosexuality depended on the context of the black/white “color line,” the dominant system of racial distinction during this period. This book thus critiques and revises tendencies to treat race and sexuality as unrelated categories of analysis, showing instead that race has historically been central to the cultural production of homosexuality.
At about the same time that the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision hardened the racialized boundary between black and white, prominent trials were drawing the public’s attention to emerging categories of sexual identity. Somerville argues that these concurrent developments were not merely parallel but in fact inextricably interrelated and that the discourses of racial and sexual “deviance” were used to reinforce each other’s terms. She provides original readings of such texts as Havelock Ellis’s late nineteenth-century work on “sexual inversion,” the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, the novels of Pauline E. Hopkins, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, and Jean Toomer’s fiction and autobiographical writings, including Cane. Through her analyses of these texts and her archival research, Somerville contributes to the growing body of scholarship that focuses on discovering the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality.
Queering the Color Line will have broad appeal across disciplines including African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, cinema studies, and gender studies.
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Queering the Middle
Race, Region, and a Queer Midwest, Volume 20
Martin Manalansan, Chantal Nadeau, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Siobhan B. Somerville
Duke University Press
When imagined in relation to other regions of the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the norm, the uncontested site of white American middle-class heteronormativity. This characterization has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class culture suggests the need to understand the Midwest otherwise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for unraveling the idea of the heartland.

The introduction provides a discussion of the theoretical and critical motivations for understanding the middle as a queer vantage, while the six articles focus on social movements, queer community networks, Midwest-based expressive cultures, and local and diasporic rearticulations of racial, gender, and sexual politics.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Martin Manalansanis Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chantal Nadeau is Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Richard T. Rodríguez and Siobhan B. Somerville are Associate Professors in the Department of English.

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Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil
Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies
Rafael de la Dehesa
Duke University Press, 2010
Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a groundbreaking comparative analysis of the historical development and contemporary dynamics of LGBT activism in Latin America’s two largest democracies. Rafael de la Dehesa focuses on the ways that LGBT activists have engaged with the state, particularly in alliance with political parties and through government health agencies in the wake of the AIDS crisis. He examines this engagement against the backdrop of the broader political transitions to democracy, the neoliberal transformation of state–civil society relations, and the gradual consolidation of sexual rights at the international level. His comparison highlights similarities between sexual rights movements in Mexico and Brazil, including a convergence on legislative priorities such as antidiscrimination laws and the legal recognition of same-sex couples. At the same time, de la Dehesa points to notable differences in the tactics deployed by activists and the coalitions brought to bear on the state.

De la Dehesa studied the archives of activists, social-movement organizations, political parties, religious institutions, legislatures, and state agencies, and he interviewed hundreds of individuals, not only LGBT activists, but also feminists, AIDS and human-rights activists, party militants, journalists, academics, and state officials. He marshals his prodigious research to reveal the interplay between evolving representative institutions and LGBT activists’ entry into the political public sphere in Latin America, offering a critical analysis of the possibilities opened by emerging democratic arrangements, as well as their limitations. At the same time, exploring activists’ engagement with the international arena, he offers new insights into the diffusion and expression of transnational norms inscribing sexual rights within a broader project of liberal modernity. Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil is a landmark examination of LGBT political mobilization.

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Queering the Renaissance
Jonathan Goldberg, ed.
Duke University Press, 1994
Queering the Renaissance offers a major reassessment of the field of Renaissance studies. Gathering essays by sixteen critics working within the perspective of gay and lesbian studies, this collection redraws the map of sexuality and gender studies in the Renaissance. Taken together, these essays move beyond limiting notions of identity politics by locating historically forms of same-sex desire that are not organized in terms of modern definitions of homosexual and heterosexual.
The presence of contemporary history can be felt throughout the volume, beginning with an investigation of the uses of Renaissance precedents in the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, to a piece on the foundations of 'our' national imaginary, and an afterword that addresses how identity politics has shaped the work of early modern historians. The volume examines canonical and noncanonical texts, including highly coded poems of the fifteenth-century Italian poet Burchiello, a tale from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and Erasmus's letters to a young male acolyte. English texts provide a central focus, including works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Crashaw, and Dryden. Broad suveys of the complex terrains of friendship and sodomy are explored in one essay, while another offers a cross-cultural reading of the discursive sites of lesbian desire.

Contributors. Alan Bray, Marcie Frank, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Graham Hammill, Margaret Hunt, Donald N. Mager, Jeff Masten, Elizabeth Pittenger, Richard Rambuss, Alan K. Smith, Dorothy Stephens, Forrest Tyler Stevens, Valerie Traub, Michael Warner

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Queer/Migration, Volume 14
Eithne Luibhéid ,spec issue ed
Duke University Press
This special double issue of GLQ explores the interface between queerness and migration, challenging heterosexist and heteronormative assumptions that often underpin traditional migration scholarship. Refusing to treat queer migrants as a homogeneous group, the issue insists that sexuality scholarship must rethink the role of migration in constructing heterogeneous sexual identities, communities, politics, and practices. Considering queer migration to the United States, from the Philippines, and between Australia and Asia, Russia and Israel, and France and the Dominican Republic, contributors critically examine how sexuality shapes all migration processes and experiences.

The issue, featuring essays by both established and emerging scholars, situates queer migration within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, nationalism, and slavery. One contributor argues that a queer Atlantic history emerged during the Middle Passage experience of slavery, connecting this history to the contemporary movement of Haitian refugees and Dominican migrant laborers. Another contributor considers how the policing of queer migrant bodies and of “unnatural offenses” by colonial administrations in the Nicobar and Andaman islands ultimately reconfigured the ecology of the entire Indian Ocean archipelago. Still another contributor theorizes how gay couples composed of young Asian émigrés and considerably older white citizens negotiate Australian immigration policy to subvert dominant forms of nationalism and citizenship embedded in long histories of inequality between Australia and Asia. Other essays explore how transgender histories and theories transform queer migration scholarship; how “queer complicities” with contemporary neoliberal migration politics uphold regimes of violence and inequality; and how migration regimes and settlement policies in various parts of the world identify individuals as “queer,” “deviant,” or “abnormal” within racial, gender, class, cultural, and geopolitical hierarchies.

Contributors. Bobby Benedicto, Carlos Ulises Decena, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Maja Horn, Adi Kuntsman, Eithne Luibhéid, Clare Sears, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Kath Weston, Audrey Yue

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Queers Read This!
LGBTQ Literature Now
Ramzi Fawaz and Shante Pradigm Smalls, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2018
This special issue asks how LGBTQ literary production has evolved in response to the dramatic transformations in queer life that have taken place since the early 1990s. Taking inspiration from “QUEERS READ THIS!”—a leaflet distributed at the 1990 New York Pride March by activist group Queer Nation—the contributors to this issue theorize what such an impassioned command would look like today: in light of our current social and political realities, what should queers read now and how are they reading and writing texts? The contributors offer innovative and timely approaches to the place, function, and political possibilities of LGBTQ literature in the wake of AIDS, gay marriage, the rise of institutional queer theory, the ascendancy of transgender rights, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and the 2016 election. The authors reconsider camp aesthetics in the Trump era, uncover long-ignored histories of lesbian literary labor, reconceptualize contemporary black queer literary responses to institutional violence and racism, and query the methods by which we might forge a queer-of-color literary canon. This issue frames LGBTQ literature as not only a growing list of texts, but as a vast range of reading attitudes, affects, contexts, and archives that support queer ways of life. 

Contributors: Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Cynthia Barounis, Tyler Bradway, Ramzi Fawaz, Jennifer James, Martin Joseph Ponce, Natalie Prizel, Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Samuel Solomon.
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The Question of Embodiment, Volume 15
Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney, eds.
Duke University Press
This special issue of differences addresses the realization that "nature" and "nurture" are now seen to be inseparably and dynamically related in the determination of human cultural expression, rather than divided as previously thought. Contributors delve into this dynamic relationship, approaching it particularly from a feminist perspective.

Contributors. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Petra Kuppers, Jennifer Reardon, Gayle Salamon, Elizabeth A. Wilson

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The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
Tani E. Barlow
Duke University Press, 2004
The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism is a history of thinking about the subject of women in twentieth-century China. Tani E. Barlow illustrates the theories and conceptual categories that Enlightenment Chinese intellectuals have developed to describe the collectivity of women. Demonstrating how generations of these theorists have engaged with international debates over eugenics, gender, sexuality, and the psyche, Barlow argues that as an Enlightenment project, feminist debate in China is at once Chinese and international. She reads social theory, psychoanalytic thought, literary criticism, ethics, and revolutionary political ideologies to illustrate the range and scope of Chinese feminist theory’s preoccupation with the problem of gender inequality. She reveals how, throughout the cataclysms of colonial modernity, revolutionary modernization, and market socialism, prominent Chinese feminists have gathered up the remainders of the past and formed them into social and ethical arguments, categories, and political positions, ceaselessly reshaping progressive Enlightenment sexual liberation theory.
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Questioning the Super-Rich
Jennifer Smith Maguire and Paula Serafini, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue of Cultural Politics uses the super-rich as a lens for exploring the impact of wealth and power on class mentalities, identities, and cultures. Contributors from a range of disciplines including sociology, economic geography, and cultural studies examine topics such as the media representations and lived experiences of the super-rich, the spatial distribution and concentration of wealth, and the discourses of (de)legitimization surrounding wealth. Throughout these essays, contributors identify the infrastructures that perpetuate and exacerbate inequalities—from politics and policy to financial devices and systems—and analyze emerging tensions within and between the categories of on/off-shore wealth, new/old money, and public/private spheres of wealth. The collection will influence the sociocultural study of elites and the study of the cultural and global repercussions of financialized capitalism.

Contributors. Jonathan Beaverstock, Roger Burrows, Aeron Davis, Sarah Hall,  Caroline Knowles, Jo Littler, Joanne Roberts, Elisabeth Schimpföss, Paula Serafini, Jennifer Smith Maguire
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Questions of Travel
Postmodern Discourses of Displacement
Caren Kaplan
Duke University Press, 1996
Contemporary theory is replete with metaphors of travel—displacement, diaspora, borders, exile, migration, nomadism, homelessness, and tourism to name a few. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan explores the various metaphoric uses of travel and displacement in literary and feminist theory, traces the political implications of this “traveling theory,” and shows how various discourses of displacement link, rather than separate, modernism and postmodernism.
Addressing a wide range of writers, including Paul Fussell, Edward Said, James Clifford, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Chandra Mohanty, and Adrienne Rich, Kaplan demonstrates that symbols and metaphors of travel are used in ways that obscure key differences of power between nationalities, classes, races, and genders. Neither rejecting nor dismissing the powerful testimony of individual experiences of modern exile or displacement, Kaplan asks how mystified metaphors of travel might be avoided. With a focus on theory’s colonial discourses, she reveals how these metaphors continue to operate in the seemingly liberatory critical zones of poststructuralism and feminist theory. The book concludes with a critique of the politics of location as a form of essentialist identity politics and calls for new feminist geographies of place and displacement.
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