How do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual
outlaw? In Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values
of 1970s movements for women's and gay liberation-including
consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the
closet-were translated into a range of American popular culture
forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought
social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly
explode definitions of so-called "normal" gender and sexuality. In
doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent
new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to,
non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women,
queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new
environments-from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco
to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York
City apartment to an all-female version of Earth-and finding new
ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by
articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be
imagined in the mind's eye and interpreted by diverse publics.
Surprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and
sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly
generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic
strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science
fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the
serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer
and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart
Crowley's The Boys in the Band (1970), Armistead Maupin's Tales of
the City (1976-1983), Lizzy Borden's Born in Flames (1983), and
Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1989-1991), Fawaz shows how
artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the
experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass
audiences in the modern United States. Against the ideal of
ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity and attachments to rigidly
defined identities, Queer Forms argues for the value of
shapeshifting as the imaginative transformation of genders and
sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual
divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and
be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility,
but to be better understood in all our dimensions.
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