Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged queer theory

When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty

In When Did Indians Become Straight?, Mark Rifkin takes on a monumental task, exploring the intersections between sexuality, race, colonization/imperialism, sovereignty and nationhood as they apply to Native American tribes and their struggles over the centuries. As someone who is both of Native descent and gay, I was intrigued.

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Historiography and corporeality have challenged queer theorists, or perhaps more accurately, have been fiercely challenged by queer theorists. From deconstructive viewpoints that question physicality as such, to radical disavowals of any belonging to historical legacies, the transcendental tendencies of queer thought have not come without their casualties. In her most recent addition to the burgeoning queer theory bookshelves, Elizabeth Freeman tackles both historiography and corporeality head on.

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire explores the intersections of queer studies and environmental studies and aims to trouble dominant discourses of nature and sexuality. The authors in this collection argue that we should adopt a queer ecological perspective, a “transgressive and historically relevant critique of dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.” Drawing on science studies, environmental history, queer geography, ecocriticism, critical race theory, cultural studies, landscape ecology, and LGBTQ theory, this interdisciplinary anthology presents the various possibilities for “queering ecology and greening queer politics.”

Gay, Straight and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation

I recently had the pleasure of participating, as a feminist blogger, in a survey about the Feminist Blogosphere. Name? Age? Sex (or "gender," as she put it)? These were not difficult questions (for me) to answer. But when she asked me to identify my sexual orientation, I paused... and then I stumbled. “I’m straight, right?” I asked myself. I’m a woman married to a man. If sexuality is either one of two, possibly three, things, then quite obviously I am a heterosexual. But as Gore Vidal sharply put it: “Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories—fag and straight.”

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia.

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory

Since the late 1970s, Kate Bush has been the original weirdchik in modern female pop music—press- and tour-shy, highly literate and culturally aware, witchy and Catholic, English and Eastern, masculine and high-femme. Above all, Kate has that voice, which she debuted at age nineteen with her song 'Wuthering Heights,' an eerie tale told from the point of view of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost. If there had been no Kate Bush, there would have been no Tori Amos, and most likely no PJ Harvey or Bjork either. Deborah M.

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women

Sapphistries is an epic journey through real and fictional love between women. It is so epic that the author, Leila J. Rupp, had to coin a new term to describe this type of book. It is not just a history; it is an interweaving of prehistoric musings, fictional accounts that draw on suppositions of what it must have been like in times when no evidence was left of when and where these kinds of love was forbidden, right up to the modern day.

Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality

Valerie Rohy’s exploration of the efforts to define both queer and Black identities and their subsequent intersections is as interesting as it is illuminating, as presented in Anachronism and Its Others, whether it is a discussion of the temporal implications of Frederick Douglass’ thought presented in his autobiography or demystifying the nebulous concepts of "queer time." _[Anachronism and Its Others](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1438428650?ie=UTF8&tag=f

The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

Gender, sex, and queer theory aren’t exactly what come to mind when I think of an easy read. I remember being duped into reading one of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s books, Sexing the Body, which begins with the story of a female athlete, Maria Patino, stripped of her medals when it was determined by doctors that she had been born with a condition known as androgen insensitivity.

Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

Pleasure Consuming Medicine is the deliciously (and ambiguously) titled new work by the Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Kane Race. His difficult but rewarding text joins a number of new works about the pleasures (not just punishments) of drug use.

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

Feeling Backward is a brilliant book that attempts the “impossible” and succeeds. Using Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick as theoretical touchstones, and incorporating Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” Heather Love “feels backward” to reimagine and connect with aspects of a queer past that had been rendered invisible.

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history.

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction. This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in.
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