This title traces the lives of individual lesbians against the background of the politics and history of the 20th century, and shows the infinite variety of ways in which lesbians made their lives in Britain. This history has relevance to contemporary life and politics within the lesbian community. British lesbians have a long tradition of diversity, of action, of success and of pride, which is documented here.

This book undertakes a critical analysis of international human rights law through the lens of queer theory. It pursues two main aims: first, to make use of queer theory to illustrate that the field of human rights law is underpinned by several assumptions that determine a conception of the subject that is gendered and sexual in specific ways. This gives rise to multiple legal and social consequences, some of which challenge the very idea of universality of human rights. Second, the book proposes that human rights law can actually benefit from a better understanding of queer critiques, since queer insights can help it to overcome heteronormative beliefs currently held. In order to achieve these main aims, the book focuses on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the leading legal authority in the field of international human rights law. The use of queer theory as the theoretical approach for these tasks serves to deconstruct several aspects of the Court's jurisprudence dealing with gender, sexuality, and kinship, to later suggest potential paths to reconstruct such features in a queer(er) and more universal manner.

'It's fascinating and moving to discover and identify those LGBT people in less happy times, who fought for the freedoms LGBT people now enjoy in the UK. This book will make you look back with gratitude and astonishment for what has been achieved.' Sir Ian McKellen LGBT activist and civil rights history from the 1960s to the 2000s has had a huge impact on our social and political landscape in the UK, yet much of this history remains hidden. Prejudice and Pride: LGBT Activist Stories from Manchester and Beyond explores aspects of LGBT activist history. It covers educational activism, youth work activism and the history of the LGBT Centre in Manchester. Through personal stories of activists, heard and recorded by young people from LGBT Youth North West, the book explores the 'wibbly wobbly' nature of people's histories. It reveals how they interlink in surprising and creative ways to form the current landscape of both prejudice and pride. Also contains exercises for interpreting and ideas for collecting activist histories within youth work.

Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame by Sarah Keller explores the career of experimental filmmaker and visual artist Barbara Hammer. Hammer first garnered attention in the early 1970s for a series of films representing lesbian subjects and subjectivity. Over the five decades that followed, she made almost a hundred films and solidified her position as a pioneer of queer experimental cinema and art. In the first chapter, Keller covers Hammer's late 1960s-1970s work and explores the tensions between the representation of women's bodies and contemporary feminist theory. In the second chapter, Keller charts the filmmaker's physical move from the Bay Area to New York City, resulting in shifts in her artistic mode. The third chapter turns to Hammer's primarily documentary work of the 1990s and how it engages with the places she travels, the people she meets, and the histories she explores. In the fourth chapter, Keller then considers Hammer's legacy, both through the final films of her career-which combine the methods and ideas of the earlier decades-and her efforts to solidify and shape the ways in which the work would be remembered. In the final chapter, excerpts from the author's interviews with Hammer during the last three years of her life offer intimate perspectives and reflections on her work from the filmmaker herself. Hammer's full body of work as a case study allows readers to see why a much broader notion of feminist production and artistic process is necessary to understand art made by women in the past half century. Hammer's work-classically queer and politically feminist-presses at the edges of each of those notions, pushing beyond the frames that would not contain her dynamic artistic endeavors. Keller's survey of Hammer's work is a vital text for students and scholars of film, queer studies, and art history.