front cover of Bad Books
Bad Books
Rétif de la Bretonne, Sexuality, and Pornography
Amy S. Wyngaard
University of Delaware Press, 2013
Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif’s 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten: how the author actively worked to define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre; how he coined the psycho-sexual term “fetish” and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rétif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
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Barbarolexis
Medieval Writing and Sexuality
Alexandre Leupin
Harvard University Press, 1989

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Becoming Reinaldo Arenas
Family, Sexuality, and The Cuban Revolution
Jorge Olivares
Duke University Press, 2013
Becoming Reinaldo Arenas explores the life and work of the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990), who emerged on the Latin American cultural scene in the 1960s and quickly achieved literary fame. Yet as a political dissident and an openly gay man, Arenas also experienced discrimination and persecution; he produced much of his work amid political controversy and precarious living conditions. In 1980, having survived ostracism and incarceration in Cuba, he arrived in the United States during the Mariel boatlift. Ten years later, after struggling with poverty and AIDS in New York, Arenas committed suicide.

Through insightful close readings of a selection of Arenas's works, including unpublished manuscripts and correspondence, Olivares examines the writer's personal, political, and artistic trajectory, focusing on his portrayals of family, sexuality, exile, and nostalgia. He documents Arenas's critical engagement with cultural and political developments in revolutionary Cuba and investigates the ways in which Arenas challenged literary and national norms. Olivares's analysis shows how Arenas drew on his life experiences to offer revealing perspectives on the Cuban Revolution, the struggles of Cuban exiles, and the politics of sexuality.


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Beyond the Black Lady
Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class
Lisa B. Thompson
University of Illinois Press, 2012
In this book, Lisa B. Thompson explores the representation of black middle-class female sexuality by African American women authors in narrative literature, drama, film, and popular culture, showing how these depictions reclaim black female agency and illustrate the difficulties black women confront in asserting sexual agency in the public sphere. Thompson broadens the discourse around black female sexuality by offering an alternate reading of the overly determined racial and sexual script that casts the middle class "black lady" as the bastion of African American propriety. Drawing on the work of black feminist theorists, she examines symptomatic autobiographies, novels, plays, and key episodes in contemporary American popular culture, including works by Anita Hill, Judith Alexa Jackson, P. J. Gibson, Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons, Jill Nelson, Lorene Cary, and Andrea Lee.
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Bodies of Knowledge
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women's Health in the Second Wave
Wendy Kline
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women’s liberation.

As Kline shows, the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the women’s movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women’s health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women’s pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists, Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodies—that marked the lives—of feminism’s second wave.

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Bodies on the Front Lines
Performance, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean
Brenda Werth and Katherine Zien, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2024

Revolutionary feminism, queer, and trans activist movements are traversing Latin America and the Caribbean. Bodies on the Front Lines situates recent performances and protests within legacies of homegrown gender and sexual rights activism from the South. Performances—enacted in public spaces and intimate venues, across national borders, and through circulating hashtags and digital media—play crucial roles in the elaboration, auto-theorization, translation, and reception of feminist, queer, and trans activism. Movements such as Argentina's NiUnaMenos (Not One Less) have brought masses of protesters and “artivists” on the streets of major cities in Latin America and beyond to denounce gender violence and demand gender, sexual, and reproductive rights. 

The volume’s contributors draw from rich legacies of theater, performance, and activism in the region, as well as decolonial and intersectional theorizing, to demonstrate the ways that performance practices enable activists to sustain their movements. The chapters engage diverse perspectives from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, transnational Central America, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.
 
Rather than taking an approach that simplifies complexities among states, Bodies on the Front Lines takes seriously the geopolitical stakes of examining Latin America and the Caribbean as a heterogeneous site of nations and networks. In chapters covering this wide geographical area, leading scholars in the fields of theater and performance studies showcase the aesthetic, social, and political work of performance in generating and fortifying gender and sexual activism in the Americas.

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The Bohemian Body
Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture
Alfred Thomas
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007
     The Bohemian Body examines the modernist forces within nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe that helped shape both Czech nationalism and artistic interaction among ethnic and social groups—Czechs and Germans, men and women, gays and straights. 
     By re-examining the work of key Czech male and female writers and poets from the National Revival to the Velvet Revolution, Alfred Thomas exposes the tendency of Czech literary criticism to separate the political and the personal in modern Czech culture. He points instead to the complex interplay of the political and the personal across ethnic, cultural, and intellectual lines and within the works of such individual writers as Karel Hynek Mácha, Bozena Nemcová, and Rainer Maria Rilke, resulting in the emergence and evolution of a protean modern identity. The product is a seemingly paradoxical yet nuanced understanding of Czech culture (including literature, opera, and film), long overlooked or misunderstood by Western scholars.
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Brown on Brown
Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press, 2005

Common conceptions permeating U.S. ethnic queer theory tend to confuse aesthetics with real-world acts and politics. Often Chicano/a representations of gay and lesbian experiences in literature and film are analyzed simply as propaganda. The cognitive, emotional, and narrational ingredients (that is, the subject matter and the formal traits) of those representations are frequently reduced to a priori agendas that emphasize a politics of difference.

In this book, Frederick Luis Aldama follows an entirely different approach. He investigates the ways in which race and gay/lesbian sexuality intersect and operate in Chicano/a literature and film while taking into full account their imaginative nature and therefore the specific kind of work invested in them. Also, Aldama frames his analyses within today's larger (globalized) context of postcolonial literary and filmic canons that seek to normalize heterosexual identity and experience. Throughout the book, Aldama applies his innovative approach to throw new light on the work of authors Arturo Islas, Richard Rodriguez, John Rechy, Ana Castillo, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor, as well as that of film director Edward James Olmos. In doing so, Aldama aims to integrate and deepen Chicano literary and filmic studies within a comparative perspective. Aldama's unusual juxtapositions of narrative materials and cultural personae, and his premise that literature and film produce fictional examples of a social and historical reality concerned with ethnic and sexual issues largely unresolved, make this book relevant to a wide range of readers.

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Brown Trans Figurations
Rethinking Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx Studies
By Francisco J. Galarte
University of Texas Press, 2021

Honorable Mention for the National Women’s Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize
2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards
2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture Association
The Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, GL/Q Caucus, Modern Language Association (MLA)
2022 AAHHE Book of the Year Award, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education

Within queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances “brown trans figuration” as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences.

Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

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