Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the “undocuments” that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica’s experiments recall the insurgent sociality of “the motley crew” historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James’s and Oiticica’s projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker’s inability to find evidence of that sociality’s persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew’s multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James’s and Oiticica’s undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.

Femme seeks to redress the ways that femme identities have been omitted, idealized, or not fully historicized in a productive reconsideration of lesbian and butch-femme history, of feminism, and of queer thought. This collection argues that femmes have been causal to shifts within feminism, the creation of queer theory, and the shaping of butch-femme and lesbian history. Femme is divided into three sections: Histories, Generations, and Futures. Contributors write about femme in terms of: sexuality * gender * race and ethnic communities * class experience * national borders * bisexuality * body image * incest survival * ageing * bar culture * heterosexuality * activism * transgender and transsexual desire * feminism. The book portrays femmes as contestatory lesbian identities, radical feminist positions, and subversive queer models. As the authors focus on femme, they discuss the ways that they use femme for strategic passing across, translating, connecting, and complicating various boundaries of identity. Femme offers writing that is both personal and theoretical; provides histories of femmes in 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as well as contemporary representations of femme; and contains a diversity of femme identities and practices. Contributors: Leah Lilith Albrecht-Samarasinha, Barbara Cruikshank, Madeline Davis, Heather Findlay, Jewelle Gomez, Kelly Hankin, Leslie Henson, Amber Hollibaugh, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Mabel Maney, Katherine Millersdaughter, Joan Nestle, Lisa Ortiz, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebecca Ann Rugg, Gaby Sandoval, Marcy Sheiner, Alex Robertson Textor.

eBook available with sample pages: PB:041591874X

Seeks to redress the ways that femme identites have been elided, idealized, or not fully historicized in a productive reconsideration of lesbian and butch-femme history, of feminism, and of queer thought. As femme sexual politics provide a liberatory model, the text, as a feminist project offers an alliance between many communities of women previously passed over by feminism. This collection argues that femmes have been causal to shifts within feminism, the creation of queer theory, and the shaping of butch-femme and lesbian history. The text is divided into three sections: histories; generations; and futures. Contributors write about femme in terms of: sexuality, gender, race and ethnic communities, class experience, national borders, bisexuality, body image, incest survival, aging, bar culture, heterosexuality, activism, transgender and transsexual desire, and feminism. The book portrays femmes as contestatory lesbian identities, radical feminist positions, and subversive queer models.

Comparing the radical aesthetic and social experiments undertaken by two exile intellectuals, Experiments in Exile charts a desire in their work to formulate alternative theories of citizenship, wherein common reception of popular cultural forms is linked to a potentially expanded, non-exclusive polity. By carefully analyzing the materiality of the multiply-lined, multiply voiced writing of the "undocuments" that record these social experiments and relay their prophetic descriptions of and instructions for the new social worlds they wished to forge and inhabit, however, it argues that their projects ultimately challenge rather than seek to rehabilitate normative conceptions of citizens and polities as well as authors and artworks. James and Oiticica's experiments recall the insurgent sociality of "the motley crew" historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker describe in The Many-Headed Hydra, their study of the trans-Atlantic, cross-gendered, multi-racial working class of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading James's and Oiticica's projects against the grain of Linebaugh and Rediker's inability to find evidence of that sociality's persistence or futurity, it shows how James and Oiticica gravitate toward and seek to relay the ongoing renewal of dissident, dissonant social forms, which are for them always also aesthetic forms, in the barrack-yards of Port-of-Spain and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the assembly lines of Detroit and the streets of the New York. The formal openness and performative multiplicity that manifests itself at the place where writing and organizing converge invokes that sociality and provokes its ongoing re-invention. Their writing extends a radical, collective Afro-diasporic intellectuality, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, where blackness is understood not as the eclipse, but the ongoing transformative conservation of the motley crew's multi-raciality. Blackness is further instantiated in the interracial and queer sexual relations, and in a new sexual metaphorics of production and reproduction, whose disruption and reconfiguration of gender structures the collaborations from which James's and Oiticica's undocuments emerge, orienting them towards new forms of social, aesthetic and intellectual life.