LGBTQ people have strategies of resilience at their disposal to help them deal with the challenge that heteronormativity as a power structure poses to their affective lives. This book makes the concept of resilience available to queer literary and cultural studies, analysing these strategies in terms of narration, performance, bodies, and space. Resilience turns out to be a highly interactive mode of being in the world, which can set free creative energy as well as draw inspiration and energy from artistic work. Authors and artists discussed include Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jeanette Winterson, Michael Cunningham, and Ian McKellen.
In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.
This book examines the queer implications of memory and nationhood in transcultural U.S. literature and culture. Through an analysis of art and photography responding to the U.S. domestic response to 9/11, Iraq war fiction, representations of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and migrant fiction in the twenty-first century, Christopher W. Clark creates a queer archive of transcultural U.S. texts as a way of destabilizing heteronormativity and thinking about productive spaces of queer world-building. Drawing on the fields of transcultural memory, queer studies, and transculturalism, this book raises important questions of queer bodies and subjecthood. Clark traces their legacies through texts by Sinan Antoon, Mohamedou Ould Slahi among others, alongside film and photography that includes artists such as Nina Berman and Hasan Elahi. In all, the book queers forms of cultural memory and national identity to uncover the traces of injury but also spaces of regeneration.
After Queer Studies maps the literary influences that facilitated queer theory's academic emergence and charts the trajectories that continue to shape its continued evolution as a critical practice. It explores the interdisciplinary origins of queer studies and argues for the prominent role that literary studies has played in establishing the concepts, methods, and questions of contemporary queer theory. It shows how queer studies has had an impact on many trending concerns in literary studies, such as the affective turn, the question of the subject, and the significance of social categories like race, class, and sexual differences. Bridging between queer studies' legacies and its horizons, this collection initiates new discussion on the irreducible changes that queer studies has introduced in the concepts, methods, and modes of literary interpretation and cultural practices.
Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.
Exploring representations of queer aging in North American fiction, this book illuminates a rich yet previously unheeded intersection within American culture. At a time when older LGBTQ persons gradually gain visibility in gerontological studies and in the media, this work provides a critical perspective concerned with the ways in which the narratives and images we have at our disposal shape our realities. Each chapter shines a spotlight on a significant work of queer fiction, beginning with post-WWII novels and ending with filmic representations of the 2010s, exploring narratives as both reflections and agents of broader cultural negotiations concerning queer sexuality and aging. As a result, the book not only redresses queer aging’s history of invisibility, but also reveals narratives of queer aging to be particularly apt in casting new light on the ways in which growing older is perceived and conceptualized in North American culture.
"Drawing from Erin Rand's argument in Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance, I detail the resistant manner in which queer emerged in national and academic realms within the late twentieth century. This political and rhetorical resistance, I contend, forms much of the impetus of queer scholarly theory and application, and effectively made queer theory and queer culture resilient to the general normativity surrounding it. In other words, queer became a subject and field of study in postsecondary education simultaneous with the national social and cultural issues of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, that rhetorical resistance and resilience of the queer social movement became synonymous with academe's subject and field of study in its analysis, critique, and evolution. However, this resistance as it was originally conceived, and on which I argue queer theory is founded, does not account for the inclusivity the LGBT community has begun to experience within the twenty-first century. As queer individuals' lives continue to be validated, as queer individuals continue to live openly today, I offer--in Cheryl Glenn's terms--a "hopeful" outlook for the possibility of queer theory and culture in the twenty-first century through expanding the field to include more literary, cinematic, and other (newer) culturally significant texts produced by queers to move forward in analyzing, more deeply, what is queer. AND In this paper, I define assemblage and its territorializing forces. In this definition, I show how territorializing forces favor culturally-normative entities and how deterritorializing entities, such as queer, exist through the opposing nonnormative, even bizarre forces. This I apply to Augusten Burroughs's memoir, Running with Scissors in which I demonstrate how Burroughs--as author, narrator, and character--narratives his move from "normal" to "queer" ("re-" to "deterritorialized") during his own teenage years, and how it during this dissent that he is able to validate both his own queer/deterritorialized identity and the identity of his text. I ultimately hope to provide a discussion of queer identity construction through queer assemblage, a closer examination of queer content and form through narrative."--Abstract from author supplied metadata
Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments addresses a longstanding question in literary and cultural studies: how can a case be made for the ongoing value of the humanities without an articulation of that field's social effects? In response, this book examines how readers "befriend" works of literature, overtures that are based in a curiosity about the world that help those readers to appreciate the world anew. As an instance of this dynamic, it examines how the contemporary social interest in queerness can be contextualized through encounters with texts produced during an earlier era of queer flux: the U.S. nineteenth century. The book offers first-hand accounts of such meetings, weaving within its analysis reports on readers' engagements with literature and the consequences of those connections. It frames such dynamics as central to a new politics, or to finding a vocabulary for a familiar politics that has not received its due.
Ungoverning Dance examines recent contemporary dance in continental Europe. Placing this in the context of neoliberalism and austerity, it argues that dancers are developing an ethico-aesthetic approach that uses dance practices as sites of resistance against dominant ideologies. It attests to the persistence of alternative ways of thinking and living.
Surveys the online social habits of American teens and analyzes the role technology and social media plays in their lives, examining common misconceptions about such topics as identity, privacy, danger, and bullying.
