Comics have been an important locus of queer female identity, community, and politics for generations. Whether taking the form of newspaper strips, comic books, or graphic novels and memoirs, the medium has a long history of featuring female same-sex attraction, relationships, and identity. This book explores the past place, current presence, and possible future status of lesbianism in comics. What role has the medium played in the cultural construction, social (and literal) visibility, and political advocacy of same-sex female attraction and identity? Likewise, how have these features changed over time? How have nonheteronormative female characters been raced, classed, and gendered? What is the relationship between lesbian comics and queer comics? What role has the medium played in establishing the distinction between lesbian and queer female identity as well as blurring, reinforcing, or policing it? What roles have queer female comics, characters, and cartoonists played in the origins, history, and evolution of sequential art as a genre? The essays in this book inspire an engagement with these and other questions as well as provide an exploration of possible answers. They provide a compelling examination of a variety of important titles, characters, creators, topics, themes, and issues. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

Some people have a gender which is neither male nor female and may identify as both male and female at one time, as different genders at different times, as no gender at all, or dispute the very idea of only two genders. The most often heard umbrella terms for such genders are 'non-binary' or 'genderqueer' genders. This book looks to bring together those currently exploring and researching this non-binary phenomenon. Gender identities outside of the binary of female and male are increasingly being recognized in social, legal, medical and psychological discourses together with the emerging presence and advocacy of people, who identify as non-binary or genderqueer. Population-based studies show a small percentage - but a sizable proportion in terms of numbers - of people who identify as non-binary. While such genders have always been in existence worldwide, they remain marginalized, and as such at risk of victimization and of minority stress as a result of social non-acceptance and discrimination. Non-binary and Genderqueer Genders explores these gender identities in relation to health, well-being, and/or other experiences in an effort to contribute to improving clinical standards and continued cultural change towards acceptance for this group of people. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Transgenderism (renamed International Journal of Transgender Health in 2020).

A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge-now in paperbackIn this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of "industrial music," founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck-stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis's final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists.Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis's life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II's fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life. In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.

In Feminism is Queer, Mimi Marinucci provides a valuable introduction to the intimately related disciplines of gender and queer theory, and develops the innovative concept of queer feminism, which treats queer theory as being continuous with feminist theory. While there were significant conceptual tensions between second-wave feminism and traditional lesbian and gay studies, queer feminism offers a paradigm for understanding gender, sex and sexuality that overcomes this conflict in order to foster solidarity between those campaigning for women's rights and those for LGBTQ rights. This updated and expanded edition engages with the latest developments in feminism and queer theory, including the new forms of both feminism and 'antifeminism' which have developed within online communities, the growing prominence of trans experiences in popular media, and the relevancy of queer feminism to a new generation of feminist activists. Feminism is Queer remains the indispensable guide for anyone with an interest in gender, sexuality, and the connections between feminism and queer issues.

What role did America's newspaper advice columnists play in shaping and forming societal attitudes toward LGBTQ people throughout the 20th century? They served the dual function of offering advice and satisfying the curious. They also often provided the first mention of homosexuality outside of newspaper crime blotters. More than 100 million readers regularly read the columns. This book chronicles some of the most popular and widely circulated newspaper columns between the 1930s and 2000, including Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Helen Help Us!, Dr. Joyce Brothers, The Worry Clinic, Dear Meg, Ask Beth, and Savage Love. It examines the function of these columns regarding the place of LGBTQ people in America and what role they played in forming a public opinion. From these columns, we learn not only the framework of how straight Americans understood their homosexual brethren, but also how attitudes and feelings continued to evolve.

This fully revised third edition explores the childhood and adolescent experiences of transgender persons, providing foundational knowledge for social workers and related professions about working with trans and gender expansive youth. Organized through the lens of four distinct forms of knowledge - knowledge of lived expertise, community-based knowledge, practice knowledge, and knowledge obtained through formal/traditional education - this text balances discussion of theory with a range of rich personal narratives and case studies. Updates and additions reflect recent changes to the WPATH guidelines and the NASW Code of Ethics, include brand new material examining the origins of gender identity and non-binary identities, explore intersectional identities, and offer expanded content considering trauma-informed interventions and ethical issues. Each featuring at least one trans or gender expansive author, chapters present concrete and practical recommendations to encourage competent and positive practice. With a focus on both macro and micro social work practice, this book will be a valuable resource to any social service practitioners working with children or adolescents.

Identity without Selfhood proposes a conception of identity and subjectivity in the context of recent post-structuralist and queer debates. The author argues that efforts to analyse and even 'deconstruct' identity and selfhood still rely on certain core Western techniques of identity such as individuality, boundedness, autonomy, self-realisation and narrative. In a detailed study of biographical, media and academic representations of Simone de Beauvoir, Dr Fraser illustrates that bisexuality, by contrast, is discursively produced as an identity which exceeds the confines of the self and especially the individuality ascribed to de Beauvoir. In the course of this analysis, she draws attention to the high costs incurred by processes of subjectification. it is in the light of these costs that, while drawing substantially on, and expanding, Foucault's notion of techniques of the self, the argument presented in the book also offers a critique of Foucault's work from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective.

The term "femme" originates from 1940s Western working-class lesbian bar culture, wherein femme referred to a feminine lesbian who was typically in a relationship with a butch lesbian. Expanding from this original meaning, femme has since emerged as a form of femininity reclaimed by queer and culturally marginalized folks. Importantly, femme has also evolved into a theoretical framework. Femme theory argues that "femme" constitutes a missing piece in queer and feminist discourses of femininity. Attending to this gap, femme theory centres queer femininities as a means of pushing against the deeply embedded masculinist orientation of queer and gender theory. Thus, femme theory offers tools to shift the way researchers and readers understand femininity as well as systems of gender and power more broadly. This book is an introduction to femme theory, showcasing how femme can be used as a theoretical framework across a variety of contexts and disciplines, such as Film & Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, or Critical Disability Studies; from countries, including Canada, China, Guyana and the USA. Femme theory asks readers to reconsider how femininity is conceptualized, revealing some of the many taken for granted assumptions that are embedded within cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, and power. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.

This international overview of how pornography--from softcore to hardcore, gay to straight, female to male, black to white--infiltrates and proliferates through various media. Porn is everywhere; from the suggestiveness of music videos to the explicit discussions of popular magazines; from the erotica of advertising to the refashioning of sex acts into art works; from a small garage industry to an internet empire. The media immerses us in the pornographic aesthetic. Now integral to popular culture, porn is part of our everyday lives. Sexual desire is commodified, pornified and the media leads the way. Exploring music videos, alt porn sites, Cosmogirls and Gaydar online forums, H&M's street advertising, retro pin-ups, film and educational sex videos alike, Pornification analyses the transformation of porn in today's media and its impact on our culture.

Dragging: Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life is an assemblage of fragments that collectively tell stories about a diverse group of artists and activists for whom drag serves as inspiration, method, object, and aim. Methodologically grounded in ethnography, Dragging incorporates auto-theoretical material that lays bare the intimacies of research, teaching, and loving, as well as their painful failures. Drag is more than gender impersonation, and it is more than resistance to norms. It is productively messy and ambivalent, and in these and other ways can serve to attune us to political and aesthetic alternatives to the increasingly widespread desire to be led. One of very few books about drag by an anthropologist, and using a uniquely personal approach, Dragging is an ethnography of artists and activists.

Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities demonstrates how late twentieth century postcolonial print cultures initiated a public discourse on sexual activism and contends that postcolonial feminist and queer archives offer alternative histories of sexual precarity, vulnerability, and resistance. The book's comparative focus on India, Jamaica, and South Africa extends the valences of postcolonial feminist and queer studies towards a historical examination of South-South interactions in the theory and praxis of sexual rights. Analyzing the circumstances of production and the contents of English-language and intermittently bilingual magazines and newsletters published between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, these sources offer a way to examine the convergences and divergences between postcolonial feminist, gay, and lesbian activism. It charts a set of concerns common to feminist, gay, and lesbian activist literature: retrogressive colonial-era legislation impacting the status of women and sexual minorities; a marked increase in sexual violence; piecemeal reproductive freedoms and sexual choice under neoliberalism; the emergence and management of the HIV/AIDS crisis; precariousness of lesbian and transgender concerns within feminist and LGBTQ+ movements; and Non-Governmental Organizations as major actors articulating sexual rights as human rights. This methodologically innovative work is based on archival historical research, analyses of national and international policy documents, close readings of activist publications, and conversations with activists and founding editors. This is an important intervention in the field of gender and sexuality studies and is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Futures, Subversive Histories prize in partnership with the NWSA. The book is key reading for scholars and students in gender, sexuality, comparative literature, and postcolonial studies.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy among political activists of the LGBTIQ movement and the traditionalist movement during the "anti-gender" campaign, this book provides a dynamic picture of their sustained interactions. Through an analysis of the contentious strategies, discourses, and performances of both the LGBTIQ and the traditionalist movements from a strategic interactionist perspective, it considers the key actors involved in this struggle over normative and social change, showing how activists on both sides are confronted with different dilemmas, influencing each other's choices, practices and identities at the individual and collective levels. Approaching social movements as interactive processes, the author deploys the concepts of social performance and gender performativity to illustrate the ways in which activists interact with and within gender norms, and how they reproduce or contest gender hierarchies as they protest, thus revealing the centrality of gender to the analysis of processes of recruitment and mobilization, strategies, frames and forms of organization. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and political science with interests in social movements and gender.

This Handbook is the key reference for contemporary historical and political approaches to gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Leading scholars examine the region's highly diverse politics, histories, cultures, ethnicities, and religions, and how these structures intersect with gender alongside class, sexuality, coloniality, and racism. Comprising 51 chapters, the Handbook is divided into six thematic parts: Part I Conceptual debates and methodological differences Part II Feminist and women's movements cooperating and colliding Part III Constructions of gender in different ideologies Part IV Lived experiences of individuals in different regimes Part V The ambiguous postcommunist transitions Part VI Postcommunist policy issues With a focus on defining debates, the collection considers how the shared experiences, especially communism, affect political forces' organization of gender through a broad variety of topics including feminisms, ideology, violence, independence, regime transition, and public policy. It is a foundational collection that will become invaluable to scholars and students across a range of disciplines including Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Central-Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

Gurba is an extraordinary performer with an enthusiastic spoken word fan base, and the Mean's voice-driven quality should appeal to them directly Rather than a memoir, this is a nonfiction novel, a la How Should a Person Be-Gurba's life provides the plot points, but a novelistic impulse provides the frame. Gurba turns what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy, differentiating between "classic" (stranger rape) and "avant garde" (molestation by a classmate) sexual assault in a way that's in your face and unforgettable. Race, class, gender, and sexuality all break open in unexpected ways in Gurba's hands. This is a confident, funny, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously.

Steven Seidman examines the implications for social theory and sexual politics of taking difference seriously. He explores the troubles difference can make for the social sciences and for the very people--feminists, queer theorists, postmodernists--who champion difference. This is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of contemporary social theory and sexual politics, focusing on difference, knowledge and power. It also argues persuasively for a pragmatic approach to questions of difference in theory and politics.

This is the first book to look at how lesbians and gays use history to define themselves as social, cultural, and political subjects. Bravmann shows how historical representations are dynamic conversations between past and present, creating individual and collective meanings. Exploring the theoretical and political ramifications of this project, he considers how historiography, ancient Greece, the Stonewall riots, and postmodern historical texts inform and reflect race, gender, class, and political differences in queer subjectivity.

Reframing Drag provides a critical survey of French and Anglo-American queer and feminist theorizations of drag performance, placing these approaches in a dialogue with contemporary drag practice and the representation of drag in three literary texts. Challenging pervasive assumptions circulating in existing queer and feminist analyses of drag performance, the author identifi es and questions three recurring ideas which have shaped the landscape of drag research: the argument that drag performances either uphold or subvert oppressive gender norms, the assumption that drag involves performing as the 'opposite sex', and the belief that drag can shed light on gender performativity. Informed by a range of gender and queer theory, this work contends that an intersectional, transfeminist approach to drag performance can provide richer, more nuanced understandings of drag and, unlike the 'opposite sex' narrative, acknowledges the gender diversity at work in current drag scenes.

Challenging persistent geopolitical asymmetries in feminist knowledge production, this collection depicts collisions between concepts and lived experiences, between academic feminism and political activism, between the West as generalizable and the East as the concrete Other. Borderlands in European Gender Studies narrows the gap between cultural analysis and social theory, addressing feminist theory's epistemological foundations and its capacity to confront the legacies of colonialism and socialism. The contributions demonstrate the enduring worth of feminist concepts for critical analysis, conceptualize resistance to multiple forms of oppression, and identify the implications of the decoupling of cultural and social feminist critique for the analysis of gender relations in a postsocialist space. This book will be of import to activists and researchers in women's and gender studies, comparative gender politics and policy, political science, sociology, contemporary history, and European studies. It is suitable for use as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in a range of fields.

This story of drag kings and queens at Cleveland, Ohio's most popular gay bar reveals that these genres have little in common and introduces interperformance, a framework for identity formation and coalition building that provides strategies for repairing longstanding rifts in the LGBT community. Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness is the first book centered on queer life in this growing midwestern hub and the first to focus simultaneously on kinging and queening. It shows that despite the shared heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions diverge in terms of audience, movement vocabulary, stage persona, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. Horowitz argues that the radical (in)difference between kings and queens provides a window into the perennial rift between lesbians and gay men and challenges the assumption that all identities subsumed under the queer umbrella ought to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise. Drawing on performer interviews about the purpose of drag, contestations over space, and the eventual shuttering of the bar they called home, Horowitz offers a new way of thinking about identity as a product of relations and argues that relationality is our best hope for building queer communities across lines of difference. The bookwill be key reading for students and faculty in the interdisciplinary fields of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; performance studies; American studies; cultural studies; ethnography; and rhetoric. It will be useful to graduate students and faculty interested in queer culture, gender performance, and transgender studies. At the same time, the clear and relatable writing style will make it accessible to undergraduates and well suited to upper-level courses in queer theory, LGBTQ identities, performance studies, and qualitative research methods.

This groundbreaking second edition of Human Sexuality continues its broad and interdisciplinary goal of providing readers with a comprehensive overview on sexuality as a core part of our individual identities and social lives. Edited by anthropological experts on the subject, this unique textbook integrates evolutionary and cultural aspects to provide a fully interdisciplinary approach to human sexuality that is rare in this area of scholarship. Fully updated throughout in line with developments in the field, this second edition includes fresh material exploring new sexual identities, sexual violence and consent, Internet pornography, conversion therapy, polyamory, and much more. In addition to providing a rich array of photographs, illustrations, tables, and a glossary of terms, this textbook explores: pregnancy and childbirth as a bio-cultural experience life-course issues related to gender identity, sexual orientations, behaviors, and lifestyles socioeconomic, political, historical, and ecological influences on sexual behavior early childhood sexuality, puberty, and adolescence birth control, fertility, conception, and sexual differentiation HIV infection, AIDS, AIDS globalization, and sex work. Utilizing viewpoints across cultural and national boundaries and taking into account the evolution of human anatomy, sexual behavior, attitudes, and beliefs across the globe, Human Sexuality, Second Edition, remains an essential text for educators and students who wish to understand human sexuality in all of its richness and complexity.

The history of sexuality is central to social history, the history of ideas, the realization or repression of human rights, and other areas of focus. This is also true about those who have had, or do have, what could be called minority sexualities. Same-sex attraction has generally been a minority sexuality; it has been the object of tremendous repression and vociferous complaint but also one of praise by talented poets and philosophers. The Historical Dictionary of Homosexuality provides a comprehensive survey of same-sex relations from ancient China and Greece to the contemporary world. It covers the gay rights movement from its origins in 19th century Europe to the nascent global network today. Philosophic treatments, such as natural law and queer theory, along with legal issues and court decisions are included. Global in its coverage of the variety of same-sex relations, their legal treatment, and social norms concerning same-sex attraction, this reference includes a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on specific countries and regions, influential historical figures, laws that criminalized same-sex sexuality, various historical terms that have been used to refer to aspects of same-sex love, and contemporary events and legal decisions.

* Provides a practical resource for both seasoned therapists and students which demonstrates how therapeutic practice can be informed, improved, and deepened by queer theory. * Explores conversational practices from narrative therapy that will help therapists to address issues of gender, sex, sexuality, relationships, and identity. * Each chapter includes a case vignette, bringing to life the application of queer theory through the practice of narrative therapy and serving as a teaching tool for the specific concepts and practices highlighted. * The book includes questions for reflection and discussion to deconstruct and make meaning of the chapter's material, as well as 'Q-tips', summarizing key points and practices. * Transcripts from therapy or supervision sessions are also integrated into the chapters.

Sexual Deviance in Health and Aging: Uncovering Later Life Intimacy explores life course health experiences and unmet care needs of populations perceived as sexually deviant in the United States. These groups include but are not limited to: gay, lesbian, and bisexual people; asexual and demisexual people; trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people; intersex people; nonmonogamous and polyamorous people; kink and fetishism practitioners; sex and adult entertainment workers; individuals labeled as sexual offenders and predators; people living with sexually transmitted infections; people identifying as neuroatypical and/or autistic; and people with chronic conditions and disabilities who lead active sexual lives. Lacey J. Ritter and Alexandra C.H. Nowakowski analyze the social, cultural, and political origins of perceptions of these groups as sexually deviant. In the process, they provide history and context for the health care experiences of people within each of these broad groups. Simultaneously, Sexual Deviance in Health and Aging highlights the complexity and individuality of different people's journeys through sexuality in health and aging.