In The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024), editor Bodie Ashton compiles twelve essays exploring the impact of Pet Shop Boys across the past four decades. The Pet Shop Boys came of age at a time of deep socio-political tension. From the rise of sexual politics and awareness to Thatcherite neoliberalism and the Cold War, this book explores the cultural and political impact of the band and offers a fascinating window into the late 20th and early 21st centuries. An archetypal 'gay band', it shows how their overt queerness influenced generations of LGBTQIA+ music lovers and artists alike.  Covering the full oeuvre of The Pet Shop boys; their albums, films, stage productions and collaborations, chapters in this collection show how their work is suffused with political commentary on the past and present covering themes as broad as queer identity, the HIV/AIDs epidemic, globalization and Brexit. It also places them within the context of their times and considers them as activists, authors, social commentators, political actors and personalities to better understand what influenced them. Bringing together a range of perspectives and disciplines, The Pet Shop Boys and the Political provides a unique and untapped insight into a formative pop band of the modern era that has mirrored and shaped society over the past forty years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke UP, 2023), Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. Instead, Arondekar theorizes the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of the Gomantak Maratha Samaj—a caste-oppressed devadasi collective in South Asia—that are plentiful and quotidian, imaginative and ordinary. For Arondekar, abundance is inextricably linked to the histories of subordinated groups in ways that challenge narratives of their constant devaluation. Summoning abundance over loss upends settled genealogies of historical recuperation and representation and works against the imperative to fix sexuality within wider structures of vulnerability, damage, and precarity. Multigeneric and multilingual, transregional and historically supple, Abundance centers sexuality within area, post/colonial, and anti/caste histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany After 1970 (Cornell UP, 2024) tells the story of how, in the aftermath of gay liberation, race played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of queer, German politics. Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, Christopher Ewing charts both the entrenchment of racisms within white, queer scenes and the formation of new, antiracist movements that contested overlapping marginalizations. Far from being discrete political trajectories, racist and antiracist politics were closely connected, as activists worked across groups to develop their visions for queer politics. Ewing describes not only how AIDS workers, gay tourists, white lesbians, queer immigrants, and Black feminists were connected in unexpected ways but also how they developed contradictory concerns that comprised the full landscape of queer politics. Out of these connections, which often exceeded the bounds of the Federal Republic, arose new forms of queer fascism as well as their multiple, antiracist contestations. Both unsettled the appeals to national belonging, or "homonationalism," on which many white queer activists based their claims. Thus, the story of the making of homonationalism is also the story of its unmaking. The Color of Desire explains how the importance of racism to queer politics cannot—and should not—be understood without also attending to antiracism. Actors worked across different groups, making it difficult to chart separable political trajectories. At the same time, antiracist activists also used the fractures and openings in groups that were heavily invested in the logics of whiteness to formulate new, antiracist organizations and, albeit in constrained ways, shifted queer politics more generally. Christopher Ewing is Assistant Professor at Purdue University. His research focuses on the intersections of queer history and the history of race in modern Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr John Noel Viaña. Dr John Noel Viaña’s work is focused on the social and ethical aspects of neuroscience and biotechnology. He has interests in a range of bioethical issues and has engaged with researchers, clinicians and science communicators to explore justice, equity and diversity considerations in health research and promotion. They discuss the use of art to present research, how art can help to express identities and perspectives, and its resonances with Dr Viaña's work in justice and science. A transcript of this episode is available on the Concept : Art website (www.conceptart.fm). Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country, lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) provides a critical and nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power. It traces how the performance of Russian citizenship has been remolded according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. The book also demonstrates that while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity. Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism has been shortlisted for the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. It also helps us understand the way homosexual people faced "queer dilemmas" of the self and how they sought to reconcile their queer desire with being Soviet. Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kristin M. Franseen explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880 to 1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars--philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. All three were queer, all discussed music both as part of fiction and nonfiction writing, and all worked outside of the academy. Rather than finding a grand unifying theory of early queer musicology, Franseen has closely examined three idiosyncratic writers who struggled to stay true to their ideas of intellectual honesty while also writing about music, musical figures, and musical listening in quite different ways. By studying each scholar's individual approach to constructing and interpreting musical and sexual knowledge, the book draws attention to aspects of their work previously neglected or considered only in isolation. Franseen meditates on questions of what constitutes historical evidence, what role should gossip and rumor have in nonfiction writing, and what should count as musicology, as she discusses each person's work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a tradition of black queer and LGBTQ+-centered critique at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and religion through exploring the moral imagination of sexual and gender non-conformist communities in 1920's Harlem (their rent parties, blues environments, and Hamilton Lodge Ball); ethics and theology blackqueering the disciplines; and contemporary oral histories (including photographs of the subjects by the scholar-artist) of those doing ethics in their blackqueerness. These serve as integrative sites that signal blackqueer ethical counter-patterns of communal belonging, individual and collective becoming, goodness, embodied spirit/inspirited bodies, and shared thriving. Emphases on both personal and social right-relatedness mark a shift from Christian sexual ethics based on rules, toward a communal relations-based transreligious ethics of sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism.  In The Sexual Politics of the Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (University of Illinois Press, 2023), author Erin L. Durban shows two discourses dominate discussions of intervention. One maintains imperialist notions of a backward Haiti so riddled with cultural deficiencies that foreign supervision is necessary to overcome Haitians’ resistance to progress. The other sees Haiti as a modern but failed state that exists only through its capacity for violence, including homophobia. In the context of these competing claims, the book explores the creative ways that same-sex desiring and gender creative Haitians contend with anti-LGBTQI violence and ongoing foreign intervention. As the episode neared its conclusion, Erin took a moment to shine a spotlight on the vital efforts of various organizations operating within Haiti, emphasizing the significance of their work and expressing a keen interest in bringing their endeavors to the forefront. The aim was not only to acknowledge these organizations but also to explore avenues through which individuals could offer their support, be it through donations, volunteering, or simply by raising awareness about their commendable efforts. These entities represent just a fraction of the many groups making a difference in Haiti, and include: 1. The Haitian Studies Association: An organization dedicated to scholarly research and academic excellence concerning Haiti and its diaspora. 2. The Lambi Fund of Haiti: A group focused on supporting economic justice, democracy, and sustainable development in Haiti through grassroots initiatives. 3. Partners In Health (PIH) in Haiti: A healthcare organization committed to bringing high-quality health care to some of Haiti's most remote areas. 4. Association of Haitian Women in Boston: An organization aimed at empowering Haitian women by providing them with resources to achieve social and economic stability. Erin L. Durban is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, affiliated with American Studies; Gender, Women, Sexuality Studies; and the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their scholarship works at the intersections of interdisciplinary feminist and queer studies, transnational American studies, critical disability studies, and critical ecologies. Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 2022. It has been called “A timely collection that begins to fill the gap in literature focused mainly on the white male experience” by Ms. Magazine, and “A graceful exploration of identity, community, and contradictions,” by Scalawag. The book was named Best LGBTQ Memoir of 2022 by BookRiot, was one of the New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022, and was a finalist for the New England Book Award, the Weatherford Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. Neema lives in Boston with her partner, Laura, and her daughter, Kahani. Julia H. Lee is professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of three books: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011), Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (University of South Carolina Press, 2018), and The Racial Railroad (New York University Press, 2022). With Professor Josephine Lee, she is co-editor of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022. You can find her on Instagram @julia.x.lee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Kareem Khubchandani’s book Decolonize Drag (OR Books, 2024) explores the intricate interplay among gender, colonialism, and drag performance. It illustrates how gender serves as a tool of colonial governance, stifling diverse forms of expression, while also delving into how contemporary drag both mirrors and disrupts these entrenched institutional hierarchies. Through the lens of select performers, Khubchandani unveils how they use their art to satirize, deconstruct, and resist colonialism and the manifestations of white supremacy embedded within society. Central to the narrative is Khubchandani’s drag alter ego, LaWhore Vagistan, whose firsthand experiences shed light on encounters with depoliticized iterations of drag that fall short of its transformative potential, leaving her disheartened and bewildered. Decolonize Drag advocates for the proliferation of more inclusive and accessible avenues for gender expression while also contemplating how the meaning and impact of drag evolve across different social and geographical contexts. As an educator, scholar, and performer, Dr. Kareem Khubchandani channels his expertise and passion within feminist, queer, and trans aesthetics, with a focus on South Asia and its diaspora. Khubchandani is an associate professor in theatre, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing delve into various aspects of popular culture. She is particularly interested in exploring the public history of women's fiction and the portrayal of femme characters in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Until Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament of the marginalization this gender non-confirming community was subjected to under British colonial rule. This book is, therefore, important not only because of its efforts to humanize and situate this community amid the anxieties and hubristic ambitions of colonial rule, but also because it documents the ability many Hijras have to preserve in spite of systematic policing and criminalization. More importantly, perhaps, Jessica Hinchy reveals that the Hijras’ were not just surveilled or marginalized; British colonial authorities ultimately aimed to eradicate and eliminate the community entirely. Jessica Hinchy is Assistant Professor in History at the Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. Her research examines gender, sexuality and colonialism in India. In addition to studying the history of the transgender Hijra community under British colonial rule, Dr. Hinchy has also explored problems related to slavery, masculinity, and indirect colonial rule in India through several publications on Khwajasarai eunuch-slaves. She has also investigated the history of childhood, in particular in relation to sexuality and slavery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Holly A. Baggett's Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art. Imagism, Dada, surrealism, and Machine Age aesthetics were among the radical trends the Little Review promoted and introduced to US audiences. Anderson and Heap published the early work of the "men of 1914"―Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot―and promoted women writers such as Djuna Barnes, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and the inimitable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the mid-1920s Anderson and Heap became adherents of George I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic, and in 1929 ceased publication of the Little Review. Holly A. Baggett examines the roles of radical politics, sexuality, modernism, and spirituality and suggests that Anderson and Heap's interest in esoteric questions was evident from the early days of the Little Review. Making No Compromise tells the story of two women who played an important role in shaping modernism. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The City Aroused: Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr. Damon Scott is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Dr. Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organising among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement. Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen's hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Dr. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Today’s book is: Black and Queer on Campus (NYU Press, 2023) by Michael P. Jeffries, which offers an inside look at what life is like for LGBTQ college students on campuses across the United States. Dr. Jeffries shows that Black and queer college students often struggle to find safe spaces and a sense of belonging when they arrive on campus. Drawing on his interviews with students from over a dozen colleges, Dr. Jeffries provides a much-needed perspective on the specific challenges Black LGBTQ students face and the ways they overcome them. We learn through these intimate portraits that many of the most harmful stereotypes and threats to black queer safety continue to haunt this generation of students. We also learn how students build queer identities. Black and Queer on Campus sheds light on the oft-hidden lives of Black LGBTQ students, and how educational institutions can better serve them. It highlights the quiet beauty and joy of Black queer social life, and the bonds of friendship that sustain the students. Our guest is: Dr. Michael P. Jeffries, who is Dean of Academic Affairs, Class of 1949 Professor in Ethics, and Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. He is the author of Behind the Laughs: Community and Inequality in Comedy; Paint the White House Black: Barack Obama and the Meaning of Race in America; Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop; and Black and Queer on Campus. He has published dozens of essays and works of criticism in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe, and has been interviewed by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NPR. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may also be interested in: This discussion of the book Gay on God's Campus This discussion of the book Black Boy Out of Time This conversation about writing the book Brown and Gay in LA Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. The Academic Life podcast is currently listened to in more than 150 countries. You can help support the show’s mission of democratizing education and sharing the hidden curriculum by downloading episodes, and by telling a friend—because knowledge is for everybody. You’ll find all 190+ Academic Life episodes archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Thomas Baudinette's Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the contours of fandom, and in particular the mainstreaming of queer romance, not only in Thailand but in the Philippines and also Japan. Topics include the Japanese origins of the Boys Love trope, the Thai Boys Love series, the audiences the series has found in Thailand and elsewhere. This podcast is also hosted by the New Books Network, and will focus on the significance of this genre for our understanding of Thailand. Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of “Boys Love” (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture, leading to heterosexual female fans of male celebrities who perform homoeroticism becoming the main audience to whom Thai pop culture is geared. Through the case study of BL, this book thus also investigates how Thai media is responding to broader regional trends across Asia where the economic potentials of female and queer fans are becoming increasingly important. Baudinette ultimately argues that the center of queer cultural production in Asia has shifted from Japan to Thailand, investigating both the growing international fandom of Thailand's BL series as well as the influence of international investment into the development of these media. The book particularly focuses on specific case studies of the fandom for Thai BL celebrity couples in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how BL series have transformed each of these national contexts' queer consumer cultures. Professor Michele Ford is the Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, a university-wide multidisciplinary center at the University of Sydney, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina (University of Texas Press, 2024) places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Dr. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism (Duke UP, 2023), 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. Jennifer V. Evans is Professor of History at Carleton University and author of Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Selby Wynn Schwartz writes about gender, performance, and the politics of embodiment. Her articles have been published in Women & Performance, PAJ, Dance Research Journal, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Critical Correspondence, Ballet-Dance Magazine, In Dance, The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, and the forthcoming anthology (Re)Claiming Ballet. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in Comparative Literature and currently teaches writing at Stanford University. The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press, 2019) covers four decades of drag dances, exploring the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, the book delves into four decades of drag dances. It takes us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, dancers give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics. Isabel Machado is a cultural historian whose work often crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Focusing on the didactic nature of the work of Reinaldo Arenas, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas: Queering Literature, Politics, and the Activist Curriculum (U Florida Press, 2022) demonstrates the Cuban writer’s influence as public pedagogue, mentor, and social activist whose teaching on resistance to normative ideologies resonates in societies past, present, and future. Through a multidisciplinary approach bridging educational, historiographic, and literary perspectives, The Dissidence of Reinaldo Arenas illuminates how Arenas’s work remains a cutting-edge source of inspiration for today’s audiences, particularly LGBTQI readers. It shows how Arenas’s aesthetics contain powerful insights for exploring dissensus whether in the context of Cuba, broader Pan-American and Latinx-U.S. queer movements of social justice, or transnational citizenship politics. Carefully dissecting Arenas’s themes against the backdrop of his political activity, this book presents the writer’s poetry, novels, and plays as a curriculum of dissidence that provides models for socially engaged intellectual activism. Sandro R. Barros, assistant professor in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education program at Michigan State University, is the author of Competing Truths in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Narrating Otherness, Marginality, and the Politics of Representation.  Rafael Ocasio is Charles A. Dana Professor of Spanish at Agnes Scott College. He is the author of A Gay Cuban Activist in Exile: Reinaldo Arenas and Cuba’s Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas.  Angela L. Willis is professor of Hispanic studies and Latin American studies at Davidson College. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic research and a solid theoretical base, Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism in Postsocialist China (NIAS Press, 2018) explores queer identity, activism, and governmentality in China, where negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism play out. From a cultural studies perspective, Bao examines a variety of topics from queer spaces in urban centers such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou to conversion therapy diaries to queer film festivals. This book speaks to a wide variety of humanities and social science fields and will appeal to those interested in a fresh study of postsocialist China, gay identity formation, activism, and LGBT studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In this episode, Dr. Anthony Christian Ocampo takes us both inside and beyond his new book, Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons (NYU Press, 2022), to talk about the craft of writing nonfiction, the importance of writing communities and fellowships, and about putting your writing out into the world. Today’s book is: Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons, by Anthony Christian Ocampo. Growing up in the shadow of Hollywood, the gay sons of immigrants featured in Brown and Gay in LA maneuver through family and friendship circles where masculinity dominates, gay sexuality is unspoken, and heterosexuality is strictly enforced. Dr. Ocampo details his story of reconciling his queer Filipino American identity and those of men like him. He shows what it was like to grow up gay in an immigrant family, to be the one gay person in their school and ethnic community, and to be a person of color in predominantly White gay spaces. Brown and Gay in LA is an homage to second-generation gay men and their radical redefinition of what it means to be gay, to be a man, to be a person of color, and, ultimately, what it means to be an American. Our guest is: Dr. Anthony Christian Ocampo, who is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of Brown and Gay in LA, and The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. He is an Academic Director of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity, and co-host of the podcast Professor-ing. His writing has appeared in GQ, Catapult, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorlines, Gravy, Life & Thyme, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Tin House, and the VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation. He was recently featured in the Netflix documentary “White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” as he was one of the employees involved in suing the company for racial discriminatory hiring practices. He holds a BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University, and an MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. For more author-talks that consider the craft of writing, try: This conversation on Night of the Living Rez This conversation about A Calm and Normal Heart This conversation about Black Boy Out of Time This conversation about The Lost Journals of Sacajewea This conversation about The Names of All the Flowers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Glitter (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Nicole Seymour reveals the complexity of an object often dismissed as frivolous. Dr. Seymour describes how glitter's consumption and status have shifted across centuries-from ancient cosmetic to queer activist tool, environmental pollutant to biodegradable accessory-along with its composition, which has variously included insects, glass, rocks, salt, sugar, plastic, and cellulose. Through a variety of examples, from glitterbombing to glitter beer, Seymour shows how this substance reflects the entanglements of consumerism, emotion, environmentalism, and gender/sexual identity. Glitter is part of the Object Lessons series: short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The poems in the book  I Am Your Father (Pardes Press, 2019) were written during a period of great confusion and pain, culminating in the moment when the poet discovered that the person he had until then referred to as his daughter was actually his son, in other words, that he had a transgender son. This revelation was not a single moment but evolved through an ongoing process of listening, understanding, loving, and increasingly close father-son bonding. The poems in the book capture this discovery with sharp precision and heartfelt wisdom, and importantly, in real-time. The book began to be written about six months before the poet's son came out as transgender and continued to be written for about four more months thereafter. These are not poems written from a distance in time, but right in the eye of the storm, and through them, we learn to appreciate the depth and beauty of the father-son relationship, as only poetry can reflect. I Am Your Father is Adi Wolfson's sixth book of poetry. I Am Your Father includes the English language poems as translated by the American poet Michael R. Burch. Adi Wolfson is a poet, environmental activist, expert on sustainability and a professor of chemical engineering. His poems have been published in a number of Hebrew literary journals and anthologies, and have been translated into several languages. He has published six poetry books in Hebrew, a nonfiction book on sustainability in both Hebrew and English, and have won several awards, including the Levi Eshkol Prime Minister’s Prize for Creative Work in 2017, one of Israel’s most prestigious literature prizes. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In There's a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Unseen Flesh: Gynecology and Black Queer Worth-Making in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2023) Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice. Focusing on the trauma caused by interactions with gynecologists, Falu draws on in-depth ethnographic work among the Black lesbian community to reveal their profoundly negative affective experiences within Brazil’s deeply biased medical system. In the face of such entrenched, intersectional intimate violence, Falu’s informants actively pursue well-being in ways that channel their struggle for self-worth toward broader goals of social change, self care, and communal action. Demonstrating how the racist and heteronormative underpinnings of gynecology erase Black lesbian subjecthood through mental, emotional, and physical traumas, Falu explores the daily resistance and abolitionist practices of worth-making that claim and sustain Black queer identity and living. Falu rethinks the medicalization of race, sex, and gender in Brazil and elsewhere while offering a new perspective on Black queer life through well-being grounded in relationships, socioeconomic struggles, the erotic, and freedom strivings. Nessette Falu is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature (Penn State UP, 2023) is about the role literature can play in helping readers cope with our present-day crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the shift toward fascism in global politics. Using the lens of Mennonite literature and their own personal experience as a culturally Mennonite, queer, Latinx person, Daniel Shank Cruz investigates the age-old question of what literature’s role in society should be, and argues that when we read literature theapoetically, we can glean a relational ethic that teaches us how to act in our difficult times. In this book, Cruz theorizes theapoetics―a feminist reading strategy that reveals the Divine via literature based on lived experiences―and extends the concept to show how it is queer, decolonial, and equally applicable to secular and religious discourse. Cruz’s analysis focuses on Mennonite literature―including Sofia Samatar’s short story collection Tender and Miriam Toew’s novel Women Talking―but also examines a non-Mennonite text, Samuel R. Delany’s novel The Mad Man, alongside practices of haiku and tarot, to show how reading theapoetically is transferable to other literary traditions. Weaving together close reading and personal narrative, this pathbreaking book makes a significant and original contribution to the field of Mennonite literary studies. Cruz’s arguments will also be appreciated by literary scholars interested in queer theory and the role of literature in society. Daniel Shank Cruz (they/multitudes) is a queer, disabled boricua who grew up in New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Multitudes is the author of Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community, also published by Penn State University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The Everyday Lives of Gay Men in Hainan: Sociality, Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Dr. James Cummings explores the everyday lives of gay men in Hainan, an island province of the People’s Republic of China. Taking an ethnographic and phenomenological approach, it asks how these men construct and experience ways of ‘sexual being’ – as gay, homosexual, tongzhi and/or in the scene – and what these mean for the ways of living they see as possible within a socio-cultural, political and material context characterised by pervasive heteronormativity. It explores what it means for gay men in Hainan to ‘come into the scene’, how internet and mobile technologies figure in their everyday processes of sexual categorisation and how these men negotiate orientations and disorientations towards the future in relation to dominant heterosexual life scripts of marriage and reproduction. This book offers vital insights into the production and restriction of non-heterosexual lives in diverse settings, while addressing universal questions of how certain ways of living are enabled and curtailed in living together with others through powerful conditions of uncertainty and precarity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Women’s college basketball is big business—top teams bring in millions of dollars in revenue for their schools. Women’s NCAA games are broadcast regularly on sports networks, and many of the top players and coaches are household names. Yet these athletes face immense pressure to be more than successful at their sport. They must also conform to expectations about gender, sexuality, and race—expectations that are often in direct contrast to success in the game. They are not supposed to have muscles that are too big, they are not supposed to be too tough, they are not supposed to be too masculine or “look like men,” and they are not supposed to be queer. A former college athlete herself, Michelle J. Manno spent a full season with a highly competitive NCAA Division I women’s basketball program as one of the team’s managers. In vivid detail, she takes us on the court, on the team bus, into the locker room, and to championship games to show the intense dedication that these women give to the game. She found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that these extremely talented women were strictly policed around the presentation of their gender and sexuality, especially the athletes who were Black. They were routinely monitored, banned from engaging in certain activities, and often punished for behavior that put their queerness, Blackness, and masculinity on display. Convincingly conforming to conventional expectations of gender and sexuality—from the clothes they wore to the people they dated—was yet another challenge at which they needed to excel. Importantly, Manno also highlights several well-known contemporary professional athletes—Brittney Griner, Serena Williams, Gabby Douglas, and Caster Semenya, among others—to show that fame and performing at the highest levels in sport does not protect women athletes from having to navigate the conflicting and often contradictory expectations of identity. A riveting portrait of an elite basketball program, Denied: Women, Sports, and the Contradictions of Identity (NYU Press, 2023) will forever change our understanding of women athletes and the sports they play. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives.  In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive range of less well-known writers and popular fictions that captivated French readers during the period. Challenging the (Foucauldian) emphasis on the principle of a "true sex" that apparently preoccupied French doctors following the Napoleonic Code's regulation of sexual identification (within three days of birth), Linton looks at multiple instances in which the instability of sex, the uncertainties of bodies and their stories, came up again and again for medical and other observers. Revisiting the well-known case of Herculine Barbin, Linton situates Barbin's own account within the wider medical and literary worlds of nineteenth-century France. The book's earlier chapters lay a historical groundwork for subsequent closer readings of fictions that responded and contributed to a broader cultural fascination with sexual and gender identities, desires, and ambiguities.  While historically specific in its research and arguments, Unmaking Sex offers much to readers interested in the past and present politics of medical, legal, and cultural debates surrounding intersex people, with implications well beyond the French context. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Released in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today. Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, "Anders als die Andern" is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates "Anders als die Andern"’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle. Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives. Ervin Malakaj is associate professor of German studies at the University of British Columbia. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Ramona Dima's book Queer Culture in Romania, 1920–2018 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) is an in depth, extensive study of Romanian queer cultural products. It brings an essential contribution to the literature on Central and South Eastern European gender studies, post-communism studies, media, and cultural studies, as well as transnational queer studies. The book looks at Romanian queer culture ”from inside”, and from the acknowledgment that the research process is guided by the sensitivity of the approached topics, by the lack of archival footprints, and by a solid dose of media archaeology, especially when looking at the beginning of Romanian LGBT+ activism in the 90s.  The book starts from contemporary Romanian cultural products that are focusing on queer topics and/or produced by queer creators. It looks back at the memories of seminal queer and trans activists in extensive interviews conducted for this volume, and fragmented literary and media sources that cover the most part of the 20th century. Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

It has been decades since Michel Foucault urged us to rethink "the repressive hypothesis" and see new forms of sexual discourse as coming into being in the nineteenth century, yet the term "Victorian" still has largely negative connotations. LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for re-visiting the period's thinking about gender and sexual identity at a time when our queer alliances are fraying. We think of those whose primary self-definition is in terms of sexuality (lesbians, gay men, bisexuals) and those for whom it is gender identity (intersex and transgender people, genderqueers) as simultaneously in coalition and distinct from each other, on the assumption that gender and sexuality are independent aspects of self-identification. Re-examining how the Victorians considered such identity categories to have produced and shaped each other can ground a more durable basis for strengthening our present LGBTQ+ coalition. LGBT Victorians draws on scholarship reconsidering the significance of sexology and efforts to retrospectively discover transgender people in historical archives, particularly in the gap between what the nineteenth century termed the sodomite and the hermaphrodite. It highlights a broad range of individuals (including Anne Lister, and the defendants in the "Fanny and Stella" trial of the 1870s), key thinkers and activists (including Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter), and writers such as Walt Whitman and John Addington Symonds to map the complicated landscape of gender and sexuality in the Victorian period. In the process, it decenters Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment from our historical understanding of sexual and gender nonconformity. Simon Joyce is Professor of English, College of William and Mary. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Sussex and a PhD from the University of Buffalo. He is a Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he teaches Victorian and modernist literature from Britain and Ireland and LGBTQI+ Studies. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Queer theory has often been hesitant to align itself with a politics of the state, approaching it with a negative or pragmatic framework. A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023) expands an earlier online essay from The Point by historian Samuel Huneke to offer a more optimistic perspective. Rather than eschew political engagement with democratic theorizing, Huneke asks how queer theory can wed its critically anti-normative impulses to the empirical need for a state. In answering this question, Huneke shows how the state is an integral component of a politics that seeks to subvert and undo the oppression of queer lives. Lea Greenberg is an editor, translator, and scholar of German and Jewish studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

What is intersex and why does it matter? What is the power of law to disrupt dominant narratives? I had a fascinating conversation with authors Dr Fae Garland and Dr Mitchell Travis about their book, Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder (Bristol UP, 2023). We got into detail about these groundbreaking human rights issues. We spoke about the very real challenges faced in conducting legal research that has meaningful impact for social change. In research spanning many years, Garland and Travis worked directly with intersex people and their parents to produce this nuanced, sensitive and extensively researched book. Their's is a monograph that challenges dominant medical narratives, particularly with regard to the way that gender binaries are demarcated and identities are constructed. The book has power both beyond its subject matter and beyond the academy: it will bring pause for reflection as to the role of researchers and the work that lawyers can do in the pursuit of the acceptance and emergence of difference, and especially with regard to the enforcement of human rights.  Dr Fae Garland is a Senior Lecturer in Law at The University of Manchester  Dr Mitchell Travis is a Senior Lecturer in Law and Social Justice at The University of Leeds.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023) The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Transgender Refugees and the Imagined South Africa: Bodies Over Borders and Borders Over Bodies (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) tracks the conceptual journeying of the term ‘transgender’ from the Global North—where it originated—along with the physical embodied journeying of transgender asylum seekers from countries within Africa to South Africa and considers the interrelationships between the two. The term 'transgender' transforms as it travels, taking on meaning in relation to bodies, national homes, institutional frameworks and imaginaries. This study centres on the experiences and narratives of people that can be usefully termed 'gender refugees', gathered through a series of life story interviews. It is the argument of this book that the departures, border crossings, arrivals and perceptions of South Africa for gender refugees have been both enabled and constrained by the contested meanings and politics of this emergence of transgender. This book explores, through these narratives, the radical constitutional-legal possibilities for 'transgender' in South Africa, the dissonances between the possibilities of constitutional law, and the pervasive politics/logic of binary ‘sex/gender’ within South African society. In doing so, this book enriches the emergent field of Transgender Studies and challenges some of the current dominant theoretical and political perceptions of 'transgender'. It offers complex narratives from the African continent regarding sex, gender, sexuality and notions of home concerning particular geo-politically situated bodies. B Camminga (they/them) received a PhD from the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, in 2016. They have since held a postdoctoral fellowship at the African Centre for Migration & Society, Wits University, and several visiting fellowships, including at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. They work on issues relating to gender identity and expression on the African continent with a focus on transgender migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unravelled a family at an earlier moment in history. In Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (NYU Press, 2023), Dr. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger. Drawing on over 150 memoirs describing childhoods in the period between the aftermath of World War II and the 1960s, Dr. Nelson highlights the importance of history in creating family secrets and demonstrates the use of personal stories to understand how people make sense of themselves and their social worlds. Keeping Family Secrets uncovers hidden stories of same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies among teenage girls, the institutionalisation of children with mental and physical disabilities, participation in left-wing political activities, adoption, and Jewish ancestry. The members of ordinary families kept these issues secret to hide the disconnect between the reality of their own family and the prevailing ideals of what a family should be. Personal accounts reveal the costs associated with keeping family secrets, as family members lie, hurl epithets, inflict abuse, and even deny family membership to protect themselves from the shame and danger of public knowledge. Keeping Family Secrets sheds light not only on decades-old secrets but pushes us to confront what secrets our families keep today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Note: This episode contains a discussion of suicide. A list of resources is available below.  In Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide (Temple UP, 2023), Alexandre Baril argues that suicidal people are oppressed by what he calls structural suicidism, a hidden oppression that, until now, has been unnamed and under-theorized. Each year, suicidism and its preventionist script and strategies reproduce violence and cause additional harm and death among suicidal people through forms of criminalization, incarceration, discrimination, stigmatization, and pathologization. This is particularly true for marginalized groups experiencing multiple oppressions, including queer, trans, disabled, or Mad people. Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework. Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers. An open access edition of Undoing Suicidism, made available by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa, is available here. Alexandre Baril ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa. His work is situated at the crossroads of gender, queer, trans, disability/crip/Mad studies, critical gerontology and critical suicidology. His commitment to equity has earned him awards for his involvement in queer, trans and disabled communities, including the Canadian Disability Studies Association Tanis Doe Francophone Award, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion President’s Award at the University of Ottawa. A prolific author who won the Young Researcher Award from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa (2023), he has given over 200 presentations at the international level and has over 80 publications. Resources: SAFE HOTLINES and ONLINE SUPPORT GROUPS: Trans LifeLine (trans/non-binary): 1-877-330-6366 (Canada) and 1-877-565-8860 (USA) Autisme Soutien: Online support for autistic people (French Canada) BlackLine (BIPOC): 1-800-604-5841 (USA) REGULAR HOTLINES (might trace your call and contact emergency services): Talk Suicide Canada: 1-833-456-4566 Suicide.ca (Québec): 1-866-APPELLE The Hope for Wellness Helpline (Indigenous people in Canada): 1-855-242-3310 The Samaritains (USA): 1-212-673-3000 A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Edith Hamilton (1867-1963) didn't publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former headmistress would become the twentieth century's most famous interpreter of the classical world. Today, Hamilton's Mythology (1942) remains the standard version of ancient tales and sells tens of thousands of copies a year. During the Cold War, her influence even extended to politics, as she argued that postwar America could learn from the fate of Athens after its victory in the Persian Wars. In American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton (Princeton UP, 2023), Victoria Houseman tells the fascinating life story of a remarkable classicist whose ideas were shaped by--and aspired to shape--her times. Hamilton studied Latin and Greek from an early age, earned a BA and MA at Bryn Mawr College, and ran a girls' prep school for twenty-six years. After retiring, she turned to writing and began a relationship with the pianist and stockbroker Doris Fielding Reid. The two women were partners for more than forty years and entertained journalists, diplomats, and politicians in their Washington, D.C., house. Hamilton traveled extensively around the world, formed friendships with Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and was made an honorary citizen of Athens. While Hamilton believed that the ancient Greeks represented the peak of world civilization, Houseman shows that this suffragist, pacifist, and anti-imperialist was far from an apologist for Western triumphalism. An absorbing narrative of an eventful life, American Classicist reveals how Hamilton's Greek and Roman worlds held up a mirror to midcentury America even as she strived to convey a timeless beauty that continues to enthrall readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

From the overloaded courts with their constantly changing dates and appointments to the need to prove oneself the “right" kind of asylum seeker, the asylum system in the United States is an exacting and drawn-out immigration process that itself results in suffering. When anthropologist Rhoda Kanaaneh became a volunteer interpreter for Arab asylum seekers, she discovered how applicants learned to craft a specific narrative to satisfy the system's requirements. Kanaaneh tells the stories of four Arab asylum seekers who sought protection in the United States on the basis of their gender or sexuality: Saud, who relived painful memories of her circumcision and police harassment in Sudan and then learned to number and sequence these recollections; Fatima, who visited doctors and therapists in order to document years of spousal abuse without over-emphasizing her resulting mental illness; Fadi, who highlighted the homophobic motivations that provoked his arrest and torture in Jordan, all the while omitting connected issues of class and racism; and Marwa, who showcased her private hardships as a lesbian in a Shiite family in Lebanon and downplayed her environmental activism. The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality, and Arab Asylum Seekers in America (U Texas Press, 2023) is a compelling portrait of Arab asylum seekers whose success stories stand in contrast with those whom the system failed. Rhoda Kanaaneh has taught anthropology and gender and sexuality studies at Columbia University, American University, New York University, and Fordham University. She is the editor of Displaced at Home: Ethnicity and Gender Among Palestinians in Israel and author of Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military and Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Margaret Galvan talks about the queer politics of Visibility. In her work the activist practices of representation take concrete form in comic books, photographs, and even drawings on lecture slides! In the episode, she discusses the photography of Nan Goldin and queer comic books in the 1980s. She quotes Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” She also references This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. At the end of the episode she references the Lesbian Avengers, who have amazing images. Margaret Galvan is an assistant professor of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements of the 1970s-1990s. Her brand new book In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, is out this fall from University of Minnesota Press‘s Manifold Scholarship Series. You should go check it out! Because the amazing images Margaret talks about were drawn recently, they’re still in copyright. Our image this week is from Gladys Parker’s comic Mopsy which ran from 1937 to 1966. Parker was a successful female artist in a world of mainstream US comic books dominated by men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke UP, 2023), Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling cafés proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds “feeling” as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures. Zeynep K. Korkman is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Which stories are left out of the history books? What’s in the documents omitted from the “official” record? And what happens when we go in search of people’s hidden lives? Today’s book is  No Way, They Were Gay? Hidden Lives and Secret Loves (Zest Books, 2021), by Lee Wind, in which he reminds us that “history” was crafted by the people who recorded it. And sometimes, those historians were biased against, didn’t see, or couldn’t even imagine anyone different from themselves. That means that history has often left out the stories of LGBTQIA+ people: men who loved men, women who loved women, people who loved without regard to gender, and people who lived outside gender boundaries. Historians have even censored the lives and loves of some of the world’s most famous people, from William Shakespeare and Pharaoh Hatshepsut to Cary Grant and Eleanor Roosevelt. Throughout the text, Lee Wind shares primary sources—poetry, memoir, news clippings, and images of ancient artwork—and explores the hidden (and often surprising) Queer lives and loves of two dozen historical figures. No Way, They Were Gay was honored as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection, and was selected for the Chicago Public Library’s 2021 Best of the Best Books list. Our guest is: Lee Wind, who writes stories that center marginalized kids and teens and celebrate their power to change the world. Closeted until his 20s, Lee writes the books that would have changed his life as a young Gay kid. His Masters Degree from Harvard didn’t include blueprints for a time machine to go back and tell these stories to himself, so Lee pays it forward with a popular blog with over 3 million page views (I’m Here. I’m Queer. What The Hell Do I Read?) and books for kids and teens. He is the author of No Way, They Were Gay? His day-job is for the Independent Book Publishers Association (as their Chief Content Officer), and for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (as their official blogger). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. She is the producer and show-host of the Academic Life podcasts. Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Read These Banned Books: A Journal and 52-Week Reading Challenge, by the American Library Association Nonfiction Writers Dig Deep, edited by Melissa Stewart Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators This conversation with Dr. Anya Jabour about Sophonisba Breckinridge Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities, by Jonathan Coley Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey--and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 175+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment--the unfulfilled desire for change--into a basis for solidarity. Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities. Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world. Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcus's unique history of the twentieth century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillion, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny, Rutler traces a set of utopian themes and impulses that questioned and resisted heteronormativity and bourgeois family relations during this period. Interrogating gender, sexuality, and kinship in both the content and the form of their work, these authors challenged patriarchal power and relations as the foundations of state and society in France. At once intimate and political, the characters, scenes, and narratives these authors produced also posed questions about (the) Enlightenment more broadly. In readings informed by thinkers like Foucault and Rancière, as well as the work of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorists, Queering the Enlightenment is divided into three sections: Family Remains, Prodigal Sons, and Narrative Spinsters. Beginning with an analysis of eighteenth-century powerhouses Montesquieu and Voltaire on patriarchal decline and repair, Rutler goes on to consider literary representations of reproduction, masculinity, the public sphere, marriage, maternity, and same-sex community. The book will be of great interest to literary scholars and historians alike, particularly anyone interested the legacies of the Enlightenment and how historical struggles/debates over kinship, gender, and sexuality continue to resonate in the present. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies