Pride Month Reads

Happy Pride Month! To celebrate, we’ve curated some of our recent titles that focus on queer studies, trans studies, and LGBTQ+ histories.

In Feminism against Cisness, an essay collection edited by Emma Heaney, the contributors showcase the future of feminist historical, theoretical, and political thought freed from the conceptual strictures of cisness, a fallacy that assumes assigned sex determines sexed experience.

Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair interrogates queerness in Jamaica from the early colonial occupation period to the present, critically responding to Jamaica’s reputation for homophobia and anti-queer violence.

In Closures, Grace Lavery reconsiders the seven-decade history of the American sitcom to show how its reliance on crisis and resolution in each episode creates doubts and ambivalence that depicts heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse and reconstitution.

Unsettling Queer Anthropology, a field-defining volume edited by Margot Weiss, foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology.

Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet presents ten queer coming-of-age stories of young boys and men as they explore their sexuality and desires in contemporary China. The author, Cui Zi’en, is China’s most famous and controversial queer filmmaker, writer, scholar, and LGBTQ rights activist.

In Primitive Normativity, Elizabeth W. Williams traces the genealogy of a narrative about the primitive normativity of African sexuality that British colonial authorities in Kenya used to justify their control over African populations.

Katherine Brewer Ball’s The Only Way Out argues that escape is a key site for exploring American conceptions of freedom and constraint, showing how Black and queer escape are forms of radical practice.

Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Violent Intimacies by Asli Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence.

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, speaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story in which she reveals how the roots of her radical sexuality and career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship.

Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother in Archive of Tongues, recovering otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience and meaning-making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces.

In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality by theorizing the radical abundance of sexuality through the archives of a caste-oppressed Devadasi collective in South Asia.

Drawing on fieldwork in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s Together, Somehow shows that people get along and share the dancefloor by an intimacy and belonging rooted in affect.

In Nimrods, an edgy and unconventional memoir, author Kawika Guillermo reflects on being a newly minted professor, fatherhood, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation as well as his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms.

In Unseen Flesh, Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice within hostile gynecological spaces.

In The Bars Are Ours, Lucas Hilderbrand offers a panoramic history of gay bars in the United States, demonstrating the central roles that bars have played in queer public life across the country.

Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia who must navigate varied transnational reproductive markets and policies, Jaya Keaney demonstrates how queer family making fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship in Making Gaybies.

Intoxicated by Mel Y. Chen explores how the mutual entanglements of race, imperialism and disability take form as a racialized and marginalized intoxicated subject.

The contributors to Pakistan Desires offer a multidisciplinary view on figures and forms of queerness in Pakistan, inviting reflection on queer’s myriad meanings in Pakistan and explore how desire can serve as a mode of queer future-making.

Farewell to Elizabeth Freeman

We are deeply saddened to learn of the death of American studies scholar Elizabeth Freeman. She had been battling cancer and was 58 years old.

Freeman was Professor of English at University of California, Davis. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago and first taught at Sarah Lawrence College.

Freeman is the author of Beside You in Time (2019), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; Time Binds (2010); and The Wedding Complex (2002); and co-editor (with Teagan Bradway) of Queer Kinship (2022). She was also co-editor of our journal GLQ from 2011 to 2017. She co-edited two journal special issues: Queer Temporalities (GLQ 13:2-3, 2007) and Crip Temporalities (SAQ 120:2, 2021). Her article “Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood” received the 2014 Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature. She also published in many of our other journals and was a friend to the Press, serving as a peer reviewer countless times.

Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker says, “Beth was brilliant and kind and funny, a perfect friend, author, and colleague in every way. We met when we were both starting out. I hadn’t been an editor for long and she was the graduate student on an MLA panel that included Lauren Berlant and other big name queer theorists of the time. Over the years we shared ideas, gossip, and friendship, working on her books. This is a truly devastating loss. My heart goes out to all her friends, her partner Candace Moore, and her son, Felix.”

Director of Editing, Design, and Production Amy Ruth Buchanan adds, “Beth was an influential and generous scholar, a warm and loving friend, and a fiercely devoted parent. I was lucky first to work on her books, and then to call her a friend. Her passing, though expected, is devastating.”

As she was fighting cancer, Freeman took the time on Facebook to ask her friends to donate blood and to get their recommended colonoscopies. In the last few days, farewells and tributes have poured in from her colleagues, students, and friends, many of whom are also Duke University Press authors. Our thoughts are with her family and all those who cared about her.

Unspooled: An Annotated Playlist

Drawing on sources ranging from obscure music zines to transcripts of Congressional hearings, Rob Drew traces how a lowly, hissy format that began life in office dictation machines and cheap portable players came to be regarded as a token of intimate expression through music and a source of cultural capital in his new book Unspooled: How the Cassette Made Music Shareable. Below he offers an an annotated playlist of some of the music he discusses in his book. You can also listen to a longer playlist on Spotify. Save 30% on Unspooled with coupon E24RDREW.

R. Stevie Moore, “I Just Want to Feel You”

In the late 1960s, pop savant and multi-instrumentalist R. Stevie Moore began amassing an oeuvre of hundreds of songs by ping-ponging between tracks on a reel-to-reel deck in his basement studio in suburban Nashville. Moore made music in a subjunctive mood where bedroom troubadours turned out splashy power-pop classics, his reach always exceeding his grasp, his quixotic recordings forever gesturing toward the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and other giants. After a few modest vinyl pressings on independent labels, Moore began advertising his mail-order cassette club in the back pages of various zines, offering personalized, ninety-minute mix tapes of tunes from his vast repertoire. By the late 1980s, he had a catalogue of 180 homemade tapes. “It’s almost a kind of sickness,” he told critic Jon Pareles. “You know, I just did a whole instrumental album yesterday, on a whim. How else could an unknown have 180 releases in print?”

Bad Brains, “Pay to Cum”

A pioneer of the cassette release was Neil Cooper, founder of the early cassette-only label Reach Out International Records (ROIR). His triumph was releasing the debut cassette of Bad Brains, whom he met at one of their CBGB shows in the early 1980s. The famously mercurial, Rastafarian hardcore pioneers were not on the radar of even the edgiest independent vinyl labels in 1982, but Cooper took a chance on them. “He said he was going to put out these cool cassettes and he could give us not a whole lot, but just something that would make an album worthwhile,” recalls vocalist H.R. “And we said, ‘Yes.’ The rest is just a miracle of God, because we got our first album out.” The Bad Brains’ classic “yellow tape” went on to sell 150,000 copies over ten years and helped set the terms for D.C. hardcore, also establishing a crucial presence within that scene for bands with black members such as Scream, Void, and Red C.

The Cleaners from Venus, “Golden Lane”

Martin Newell was a wunderkind from the English home counties who hated studios and suffered panic attacks at the thought of touring. After a couple of unpleasant brushes with the record industry, Newell swore off vinyl and became an early U.K. entrant into the cassette underground. For the better part of a decade as Cleaners from Venus he recorded brilliant, post-Kinks pop on his four-track and released it on cassette while critics scratched their heads at his underachievement. As Newell explained to Richie Unterberger, “We said, ‘Look, the equation is this: we want to make music, and there’s people who want to listen to it. So how do we get our music out of our hearts, through our fingers, into people’s ears, without this plethora of parasites interfering with it?’” The cheapness and ease with which cassettes could be propagated perfectly complemented the creative largesse of musicians like Newell. “Writing songs is what we do,” he told another interviewer. “I’m getting quite good at it now and I’d happily do it for the rest of my life even if I don’t get paid.”

Eugene Chadbourne & Evan Johns, “Redneck Jazz”

As a solo artist and with assorted collaborators, guitarist Eugene Chadbourne tacked between experimental jazz, psychedelic folk, half-crazed political rants, electric rake solos, and much else. Around 1981, Chadbourne discovered the cassette scene and rigged up a stack of tape decks in his home that allowed him to record eight copies at a time from a master signal. He started putting out tapes at a ferocious clip and had nearly forty cassettes in print by the end of the decade. Chadbourne was thus well qualified to comment, as he often did, on the merits of different formats. While valuing vinyl’s polish, he admitted to feeling stifled by its preciousness. “Records are only telling a small part of the story, and the safest part in many cases,” Chadbourne asserted, reciting a checklist of common attitudes among artists and producers: “‘This is for a record – let’s make it sound really slick.’ ‘I like that but I don’t want to put it on a record.’ ‘This is my first LP, I really have to impress people.’” By contrast, Chadbourne noted, with cassettes “the most common point of view is: ‘Who gives a shit? If you don’t like it, dub over it.’ And after over a decade documenting my music that’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard.”

Beat Happening, “Don’t Mix the Colors”

In 1982, as a college radio DJ at Evergreen State, Calvin Johnson recorded a live set by the Olympia trio Supreme Cool Beings and saw the opportunity to release it as a cassette album. He bought 150 blank tapes from a religious music company outside Olympia and paid a friend to dub them on her rudimentary tape-to-tape equipment for $1.20 apiece. Johnson inserted xeroxed J-cards with an arcane capital K surrounded by a hastily scrawled shield and sent off copies to local record stores and zines. More limited-run cassettes by musician friends and other acts Johnson met around the Northwest followed, but the highlights of K’s cassette catalogue were the early releases of his own seminal lo-fi trio Beat Happening, including their debut EP Three Tea Breakfast. Johnson priced his tapes at three or four dollars apiece and branded them through a coordinated campaign touting the cassette’s potential to upend the music business; liner notes, newsletters, and point-of-sale displays all carried the trademark shield and the increasingly familiar slogan, “The K cassette revolution is exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre.”

Marine Girls, “Honey”

In early 1980, seventeen-year-old Tracey Thorn joined up with three school friends in Hertfordshire, England, to form the Marine Girls. The group borrowed a four-track deck and recorded twelve of Thorn’s compositions to a cassette they titled A Day by the Sea, despite the fact that they all still lived with their parents and had never played outside Thorn’s bedroom. “In other words,” Thorn later reflected, “we were RECORDING OUR FIRST ALBUM, some three months after forming. … God knows where this audacity came from, though perhaps, being girls, there was a sense of having something to prove. … It simply never occurred to us that there was any reason not to do these things, or anything that could stop us.” Pooling cash from after-school jobs, they had fifty copies dubbed for thirty-six pounds, dropped some off at local retailers, and placed a small ad in the New Musical Express for mail orders. The tape sold out and made its way to producer Pat Bermingham, who recorded more polished versions of the Marine Girls’ songs and released that cassette on his In Phaze label as Beach Party, garnering glowing reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bow Wow Wow, “C30 C60 C90 Go”

Former Sex Pistols manager and inveterate troublemaker Malcolm McLaren pulled the pop group Bow Wow Wow together in 1980 to record “C-30, C-60, C-90, Go!”, a paean to home taping that he’d penned as a technological call to arms to Britain’s youth and a thumb in the eye to his old record industry overlords. To drive the point home, McLaren convinced Britain’s oldest record label, EMI, who’d apparently learned nothing from its dealings with the Pistols, to release “C-30” as its first ever cassette single; it was followed later that year by Your Cassette Pet, Bow Wow Wow’s first full-length release, an eight-song cassette priced at £1.99 and packaged in a flip-top box that resembled a cheap candy carton. The early-1980s spike in home taping appeared to McLaren as a political gesture connecting technology to claims of power and pleasure he’d been toying with for years, reviving old Situationist dreams of the beach right under the pavement. Listening to fourteen-year-old singer Annabella Lwin’s defiant affirmation of stolen pleasures (“I don’t buy records in your shop, I tape ‘em all from ‘Top of the Pops’!”), one could be forgiven for believing that “free” music might offer access to larger vistas of freedom. As McLaren told Roger Trilling in New York Rocker, home tapers were “using technology in a way that the industry doesn’t want you to use it. You are therefore claiming part of that culture for free. There’s the possibility to control a lot of the cultural forces around you right now.”

Liz Phair, “Go West” (Girly-Sound version)

Limited-edition releases whose lifespans were confined to cassette took on a totemic status within the careers of some soon-to-be-legendary indie artists, as fans shared the burden of passing on their creative spirit. Your proximity to the performance documented by the cassette seemed inversely proportional to the number of generations separating your copy from the original. Because such releases were never not on cassette, their master recordings were subject to the same ravages of replaying and rewinding, time and the elements, as the copy on your shelf; their spontaneous virality among fans thus seemed necessary to assure their preservation as precious and perishable relics of the artists’ pre-fame personae. When Liz Phair became an indie sensation, the early bedroom cassettes she’d recorded as Girly-Sound and shared with friends Chris Brokaw and Tae Won Yu circulated via fans for nearly two decades before being granted a proper CD release: “Assuming Phair’s songs were originally never meant to be heard by anyone other than Brokaw and Yu,” notes Marlie Centawer, “they had the potential to be ‘lost’ to degradation in their original cassette form, if not for their preservation as dubbed copies [and] bootlegs.”

Sentridoh, “Subtle Holy Gift”

Lou Barlow began recording acoustic freak-folk tunes with his friend Eric Gaffney in the late 1980s during Barlow’s last days with the band Dinosaur Jr. The pair interspersed their tapes with snippets of noise, conversation, and media detritus and self-released them on cassette under the nonsense moniker Sebadoh; their first “pressing” amounted to 25 copies, dubbed at home and sold at a record store in their hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts. The tapes made their way to CD release on Homestead Records, and over the ensuing years Sebadoh evolved into a tight three-piece outfit, won a contract with Sub Pop, and were soon hailed in some quarters as “the new torch-bearers of the Nirvana flame.” Yet Barlow continued to channel his four-track energies into a trio of solo cassettes released on Shrimper under the alternate name Sentridoh. With self-deprecating titles like Losers and Wasted Pieces, the Sentridoh tapes showcased Barlow in all his unfiltered glory, belching forth dozens of half-formed song sketches that rarely ran more than two minutes. Barlow’s Sentridoh cassettes thus provided an outlet for an artist whose prolificity couldn’t be contained by a yearly release of a dozen or so songs, as well as a second stage for his lo-fi vibe even as his main band’s sound grew increasingly mid-fi.

The Mountain Goats, “Going to Maryland”

John Darnielle’s project the Mountain Goats released music almost exclusively on cassette for its first half-decade. In an encroaching digital music market, Darnielle found virtue precisely in the cassette’s limitations, its cheap offhandedness and unwieldy temporality. ‘They’ve been my entire career!” he told an interviewer in 1994. “You consider them differently … you can’t flip them around as freely, so you have to listen to the whole thing, get involved with it.” To prove the point, Darnielle one-upped most of his lo-fi brethren by recording to cassette, a seemingly perverse technical quirk that he was quick to defend. “I don’t like production that makes the fact that it’s a made thing disappear,” he averred. “You put almost anybody in front of a four-track and they’re going to put in two tracks too many.” Darnielle came to regard his trusty Panasonic boombox (whose designers had situated its oversensitive microphone too near its grinding gears) as a mischievous yet congenial collaborator; “an ornery little fellow who will have no sound without a second sound to obscure and pollute it,” as he joked in a eulogy to the failing machine that accompanied his last album produced with its aid.

Neutral Milk Hotel, “Tuesday Moon”

The albums that defined the legacy of core acts in the Elephant 6 collective were only the culminative traces of years of shifting, recombinant collaborations in which unreleased and semi-released cassettes passed between members in an ongoing musical brainstorm. When the collective’s studio whiz Robert Schneider began affixing a delicate, Art Nouveau “Elephant Six Recording Co.” logo to some of those tapes and selling them for a few dollars by mail order, it appeared as a natural outgrowth of their private tape-trading network, both in terms of the format of choice and the communal vibe. With their hand-drawn covers and handwritten liner notes, those early E6 releases looked a lot like mix tapes. “Hello and welcome to my first cassette release to actually exceed more than two copies,” Jeff Mangum wrote in the barely legible notes to his 1993 tape Hype-City Soundtrack, his first as Neutral Milk Hotel, as if shooting off a letter to a confidant. “Sorry the lyrics are so hard to read but ive got to mail this to robert in an hour so its a little scribbly.”

Daniel Johnston, “Living Life”

As a teenager in West Virginia, Daniel Johnston began recording his compositions on a mono cassette deck in his parents’ basement, delivered in a quavering tenor and accompanied by a feeble chord organ. He relocated to Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s and began handing out copies of his cassettes, dubbed over cheap tapes of mail-order sermons. Within a few years, Johnston’s songs were being covered by every band in town and hailed as lo-fi masterpieces, winning wider release on the local cassette label Stress and eventually on Homestead Records. But his recordings were too outré for a wider public, and his psychological fragility was exacerbated by excessive attention, so that even his admirers felt obliged to speak of him in hushed tones. As a result, Johnston was often heard through covers, like those of his friend and fellow Austinite Kathy McCarty. Not quite able to cope, as Johnston admitted in his heartbreakingly lovely “Living Life,” with “the emotionless mediocracy of day-to-day living,” he relied on interpreters like McCarty to mediate his relation to the music business and its attendant rigmarole so that his own spirit might forever reside on those homemade cassettes.

Rob Drew is Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University and author of Karaoke Nights: An Ethnographic Rhapsody. Save 30% on his new book Unspooled with coupon E24RDREW.

Q&A with Lucas Hilderbrand

Lucas Hilderbrand is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright and Paris Is Burning: A Queer Film Classic. In his new book The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America,1960 and After, he offers a panoramic history of gay bars, showing how they served as the medium for queer communities, politics, and cultures.

Your previous scholarship is situated solidly in the realm of film studies. Why did you decide to research the history of gay bars, and how do you see your previous work informing your approach here?

Although my research trajectory may not seem self-evident to anyone else, it always made intuitive sense to me! Like everyone else, I’m a multifaceted person, and I’m as shaped by nightlife as I am by watching films and television or listening to music. My training in cinema and media studies helps me to understand the importance of popular forms that shape our culture, that become pervasive, that define the zeitgeist, and that may be ephemeral or fashionably cyclical—but that may not be taken seriously enough for other scholars to research. My interest often starts with realizing no one else has written about something that seems, to me, innate and central to our culture. Or it starts from discovering something fascinating in the archive that has been overlooked or that overturns my understanding of history.

I am also interested in challenging myself to learn new fields with each project. I’m not a traditionally trained historian, nor am I a social scientist. I try to be self-aware of what I don’t know and of how the questions I might ask offer new ways to make sense of bars’ cultural significance. To focus on zoning or liquor laws without also listening for what songs are playing, to my mind, would be to misunderstand how and why bars work for their patrons.

The Bars are Ours argues that gay bars were at the center of gay political and cultural formations in the second half of the 20th century. Has this changed today?

What has changed in the past 50 years is that the range of outlets to explore one’s queer identity and find community has expanded beyond bars or nightclubs, which were once the only public options. But I contend that nothing has truly replaced what bars provide.

LGBTQ+ community centers, for instance, started emerging in the 1970s to provide services; these developed after bar scenes were established and as an alternative to them. In the 21st century, online forums, social media, and dating/hook-up apps provide ways for people to connect. But the internet cannot replicate the experience of being in a shared public space. Community centers usually do not, and the internet cannot replace the experience of being on a crowded dancefloor as a part of a social body—or of making out with another person.

It is important to have alternatives that are not predicated on consuming alcohol or feeling pressured to consent to strangers’ gazes and touch. But for those who want to experience these things or who feel them as a rite of passage, bars are still the primary way to access them.

It’s also possible to be openly LGBTQ+ and even, in some cases, to feel safe holding hands with one’s partner in spaces that are not differentiated or defined as LGBTQ+ spaces; that did not used to be the case. But it’s still experientially and affectively different to be surrounded by straight people—even if they’re liberal allies—than it is to feel like one is in community.

Gay bars often are stereotyped as being a primarily white space, but you also write about bars that specifically cater to Black and Latinx patrons. How does race play into the history your book covers?

In LGBTQ+ culture and spaces, just as in straight ones, whiteness often goes unacknowledged as a default or norm—and this has the effect of reproducing white supremacist conditions. By the 1970s, activists recognized and fought back against conspicuously exclusionary door policies—both sexist and racist—and these efforts continued and needs to continue. Bars became the site to make visible and respond to bias in the queer community at large.

In part in reaction to discrimination at white venues and in part through self-determination, bars catering to Black or Latinx patrons have also opened and sustained these communities. These bars may feature more or less the same elements as white gay bars, but they also often foster community-specific cultures, ranging from favored musical genres to social norms. In some cities there’s a sufficient population to have multiple Black or Latinx queer venues, but in many places, there might just be one or none at all. I don’t know of any city where ethnically defined gay bars have reached parity with white bars, relative to local population demographics; even majority-minority cities typically have more white bars than non-white bars.

For my book, it was essential to me that my survey history be inclusive—that I understand Black and Latinx gay bars as gay bars. But I also recognized that they often had community-specific histories and cultures, which I worked to document as best I could without claiming to speak for or exoticizing them. The Atlanta and Los Angeles chapters, which center Black and Latinx venues, effectively decenter the white venues that may be the most famous locally and that have dominated understandings of their respective local scenes—for instance, Backstreet in Atlanta and The Abbey in West Hollywood. Similarly, I don’t focus on my local LA bar where I’m a regular: Akbar.

I also look to key parties where the goal was to produce integrated venues, or where clubs sought to serve multiple segments of the LGBTQ+ community by creating targeted parties on different nights of the week.

Are there any distinct differences between gay bars of the past and gay bars of today, and do you view these differences as being for better or for worse?

Before and into the early days of gay liberation, bars were often viewed as exploitative of gay people. They were often owned by the mafia or homophobic straight people, and they treated clientele poorly. Venues and owners were also vulnerable to shakedowns and raids from local vice cops. Queer people endured these indignities for as long as they did because they had so few alternative public spaces to congregate. In these venues, the management often pushed patrons to keep buying drinks in exchange for the right to occupy space. This had a correlative effect of exacerbating alcoholism at a time when many people were already prone to self-medicating their shame about their sexuality. Although these were gay venues, many venues also policed patron’s behavior so that people couldn’t dance together or touch casually.

We’ve moved beyond these conditions, obviously. But I also believe to only see past venues as bleak sites of oppression is reductive and inaccurate. If people hadn’t had fun and found kindred spirits, gay bars would not have endured and evolved. And people continue to experience a full range of tensions and release in bars of the present.

One of the challenges I faced for this book was trying to convey not only the facts of the past but also how it was experienced. One strategy I devised for this was to infuse the book with music; another was to draw parallels or contrasts from my more recent lived experiences.

How does the history of gay bars you relate in your book speak to our present moment of homophobic and transphobic fearmongering exemplified by drag bans and “Don’t Say Gay” bills?

Until recently, it was easy to slip into complacency about gay bars, to take them for granted or dismiss them as passé. Likewise, gay bars may not seem relevant to younger generations who came out before drinking age and who grew up with alternatives to bars—or who may reject binary understandings of gender and sexual identities. (Gay bars operate on a binary logic, in distinction to straight bars.)

What the resurgent culture war reveals is that our lives, our rights, and our venues remain precarious—and possibly subject to erasure. My book looks back on worlds and cultures we built, political battles we fought, and the ways we self-invented through bars.

Read the introduction to The Bars are Ours for free and save 30% on the paperback with coupon E23BARS.

How Tristan Taormino Sashayed Out of the Closet

Today is National Coming Out Day. We are pleased to share an excerpt from sex educator Tristan Taormino’s new memoir A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, in which she writes about coming out while she was a student at Wesleyan in the 1990s. For another coming out perspective, read last year’s post, an excerpt from historian John D’Emilio’s memoir.

I directed my first one-act play in my sophomore year at Wesleyan: One Person by Robert Patrick, a story about an affair between two men. About his work, Patrick wrote, “Conformity to the enormity persists, and whereas the straight censors once scathed one for admitting that there were gay people, the political press now chastises one for writing about gay life as it is, instead of as they wish it were.”

I cast Jerran, a gay actor I knew who also happened to be one of the most attractive men on campus; opposite him, I picked Leo, a smart straight boy with deep-brown eyes who was ready to fully embrace the kissing scene. Leo’s uncle was one of the most famous movie critics in the world, so I thought we might get some name recognition on the poster. Minor star power couldn’t hurt. They did a beautiful job, and Leo dove into the intimacy with a quiet, sincere dedication. No one questioned, “Tristan’s doing a play about gay love? And there’s a straight guy in it?” It was Wesleyan, where everyone knew that sexuality was fluid.

I stopped smoking pot because I started to get awful headaches when I did, and I cut way back on drinking. I wasn’t interested in getting buzzed that much and decided that hangovers sucked—the
next morning, I felt like I’d been poisoned. It wasn’t a good-enough trade-off. My interest in sex with
men waned. After the play I reconnected with Jessie, the lesbian from my freshman dorm. Jessie and I had done some mild flirting when we saw each other around, and I finally told her that I was through flirting. I kissed her. I wanted to, so I did. I was intrigued once my lips were on hers and scared about what would happen next. What happens when two girls kiss? She became my first girlfriend. Jessie was lots of women’s first girlfriend, a one-woman recruiting agent, so genuine and unassuming no one suspected their daughters wouldn’t be safe around her. The space between coming to terms with my sexual identity for myself and acting on my feelings was short. I didn’t have tremendous self-doubt
because I had the luxury of being in a place where it was not just okay, but great, to be queer. Once Jessie and I became a couple, I was holding her hand around campus just like anyone else I dated.

The way I told my mom was not my finest moment. I was home on a school break, keeping to myself in my room, where I was color-coding some files and poring over the latest issue of the Advocate with Urvashi Vaid and Robert Mapplethorpe on the cover, who were named Woman and Man of the Year. I got on the phone with Jessie, and we had been talking for about an hour.

My mom knocked on my door. “Can you get off the phone? I need to make a call,” she said. I hung up and stormed into the living room with frustration.

“I don’t know who this Jessie is and why you have to be on the phone with her for so long,” she said snidely.

“She’s my girlfriend! And I’m bisexual!” I shouted angrily. Bisexual seemed to fit me best; I wasn’t exclusively drawn to any one gender.

“Okay. Can I have the phone back now?” Later, over dinner, she communicated that she worried that my life would be infinitely more difficult as a bisexual woman, but she loved me no matter what. It was a pretty typical parental response; they probably have a whole session on it at PFLAG.

The next time I spoke to my dad, I told him I was dating a woman at school. I thought he would be jumping for joy over me joining the team. Your daughter is queer. This is yet another way we are super alike. This is something else we can share, just the two of us.

“That’s good—whatever makes you happy.”

It was so uneventful. I thought about how it took him twenty-four years of pain and homophobia to come to terms with his sexuality, and several more years until he could fully live an out, proud life. I, on the other hand, just sashayed out of the closet like I was showing off a new dress to a welcoming band of queers.

Shortly afterward, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was so much like my dad, but it didn’t occur to me how that might affect my mother. It was probably an awful reminder to have a little version of her ex-husband running around the house. When I came out, she must have rolled her eyes so hard in private.
She never once said, “You’re just like your father,” or “That reminds me of your dad,” but once I became aware of just how similar we were, it was in the air. I thought my coming out might even feel cruel to her in some way, since his coming out had radically altered the course of her life. I was queer, dramatic, creative, organized, and, worst of all, emotional. God, I thought, I must annoy the crap out of her.

Tristan Taormino is a writer, speaker, sex educator, and host of the podcast Sex Out Loud. A former syndicated columnist for The Village Voice, she is the author of numerous books, including Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, Down and Dirty Sex Secrets, and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She is the founding editor of the annual Best Lesbian Erotica anthologies, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play, and the Erotic Edge, and coeditor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Save 30% on A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten with coupon code E23TRMNO.

New Books in September

Start off the semester strong by checking out some of the great new titles we have coming out this month!

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship.

The contributors to Citizens of Photography explore how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation.

In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. 

Many listeners first heard “Hound Dog” when Elvis Presley’s single topped the pop, country, and R&B charts in 1956. In Hound Dog, Eric Weisbard examines the racial, commercial, and cultural ramifications of Elvis’s appropriation of a Black woman’s anthem. 

 In a newly updated and revised paperback edition of The Dark Tree, Steven L. Isoardi draws on one hundred in-depth interviews with the Arkestra’s participants to tell the history of the important and largely overlooked community arts movement of Black Los Angeles.

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay by Maryam Kashani examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. 

In Unseen Flesh Nessette Falu explores how Black lesbians in Brazil define and sustain their well-being and self-worth against persistent racial, sexual, class, and gender-based prejudice.

In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. 

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in the state of Hawai‘i. 

In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct.

Alice Mah examines the changing nature of the petrochemical industry as it faces the existential threats of climate change and environmental activism in her new book, Petrochemical Planet . 

In Radical Play Rob Goldberg recovers a little-known history of American children’s culture in the 1960s and 1970s by showing how dolls, guns, action figures, and other toys galvanized and symbolized new visions of social, racial, and gender justice.

In Black Enlightenment Surya Parekh reimagines the Enlightenment from the position of the Black subject. Parekh prompts us to consider the timeliness of reading Black Enlightenment authors who become “free” in a society hostile to that freedom.

Elizabeth Dore reveals the decay of the Cuban political system through the lives of seven ordinary Cuban citizens in How Things Fall Apart.

Never miss a new book! Sign up for our e-mail newsletters, and get notifications of new titles in your preferred disciplines as well as discounts and other news.

New Books in August

Although summer is sadly drawing to a close, there is still time to get in a few more summer reads. Check out some of the great new titles we have coming out this month!

The Girl in the Yellow Poncho is journalist and scholar Kristal Brent Zook’s coming-of-age tale about what it means to be biracial in America where she grapples with in-betweenness, family trauma, and the profound power of atonement and faith to heal a broken family. You can catch Zook at two events this month: in Pasadena at Olivia’s Bookshelf on August 14 and in Miami at Books and Books on August 26.

Speechifying collects the most important speeches of Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole—noted Black feminist anthropologist, the first Black female president of Spelman College, former director of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African Art, and former chair and president of the National Council of Negro Women.

In The Other Side of Empathy, Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool, proposing mutual recognition as a way to create a more meaningful affective engagement with the world.

In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In Artifactual, Elizabeth Anne Davis explores how Cypriot researchers, scientists, activists, and artists process and reckon with civil and state violence that led to the enduring division of the island, using forensic and documentary materials to retell and recontextualize conflicts between and within the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities.

In At the Pivot of East and West, Michael M. J. Fischer examines documentary filmmaking and literature from Southeast Asia and Singapore for their para-ethnographic insights into politics, culture, and aesthetics.

In A Book of Waves, Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet.

In Genomics with Care, Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics.

In Terracene, Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction.

Revolutionary Feminists tells the story of the radical women’s liberation movement in Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of a founding member, Barbara Winslow. 

In The City after Property, Sara Safransky examines how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics.

In The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion.

Drawing on fieldwork at an NGO in rural Tanzania, in The Center Cannot Hold, Jenna N. Hanchey explores how the processes of ruination in Western institutions hold the potential for decolonial renewal. 

Contributors to Gaza on Screen, including scholars and Gazan filmmakers, explore the practice, production, and impact of film and videos from and about the Gaza Strip.

In Dreams in Double Time, Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. 

Drawing on fieldwork in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta in Together, Somehow shows that people get along and share the dancefloor by an intimacy and belonging rooted in affect. 

The Cunning of Gender Violence focuses on how a once visionary feminist project to combat gender-based violence and violence against women has folded itself into contemporary world affairs in ways that that harm the very people it seeks to protect.

In Abundance, Anjali Arondekar refuses the historical common sense that archival loss is foundational to a subaltern history of sexuality, and that the deficit of our minoritized pasts can be redeemed through acquisitions of lost pasts. 

In Brown Saviors and Their Others, Arjun Shankar draws from his ethnographic work with an educational NGO to investigate the practices of “brown saviors”—globally mobile, dominant-caste, liberal Indian and Indian diasporic technocrats who drive India’s help economy. 

In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother.

In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India.

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. 

In Violence of Democracy, Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. 

In Immeasurable Weather, Sara J. Grossman explores how environmental data collection has been central to the larger project of settler colonialism in the United States.

In The Pulse of the Earth, Adam Bobbette tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes.

 

Together, Somehow: A Playlist

Drawing on fieldwork in the minimal techno and house music sub-scenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin, in his new book Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta shows that people get along and share the dancefloor by an intimacy and belonging rooted in affect. Below he offers an an annotated playlist of some of the music he discusses in his book. You can also listen to a longer playlist on Spotify or YouTube. Save 30% on Together, Somehow with coupon E23TGTHR.

Heartthrob, Dear Painter, Paint Me (album mix)

• Heartthrob’s album, Dear Painter, Paint Me (2008) is emblematic of “the sound” of minimalist electronic music that dominated the years of my fieldwork for Together, Somehow (2006–2010). The album was released on the in/famous minimal techno record label, m_nus, founded by Richie Hawtin (a.k.a. Plastikman), a leading artist in the “Second Wave” of Detroit techno. That said, Heartthrob’s released were notable (sometimes controversially so) for challenging the very hetero-coded and masculinist austerity of techno with touches of queer lyricism. For example, his first breakout hit, “Baby Kate,” (2006) featured a slow melodic synth line—very much a rarity for releases on m_nus—and swiftly climbed DJ charts as a summertime anthem.
• The sounds of this album provided the sonic environment for the fieldwork vignette that opens my book, as Heartthrob was on tour to promote this album in the summer of 2008 and came to play a “live set” at Panorama Bar (Berlin). Much like in this recording, his live set featured “long, sustained, atmospheric washes across the high-frequency range, grounded by relatively slow, resonant, yet punctuating bass kicks” (pp. 2–3). In that moment on the dancefloor, I was struck by the similarities between sound and other sensory experiences: “shimmering washes of sound hung in the air like the omnipresent haze emanating from the smoke machines, while the loud bass-drum kicks thudded against my flesh like the crush of bodies on the dancefloor” (p. 3). And, out of that shimmering haze and pulsating flesh stepped a stranger… (For the rest of this story, download the introductory chapter for free!)

Mr Fingers, “Can You Feel It”

• “Can You Feel It” (1988) appears further into the introductory chapter, in a section where I am tracing a condensed history of queer dancefloor utopianism through a series of early disco, house, and techno tracks. As much a manifesto as a house music anthem, Mr Fingers’s (Larry Heard) track features a spoken-word performance by Robert Owens, delivering a dancefloor sermon steeped in the style and rhetoric of American Black Church traditions. He recounts a musical creation myth of house music while riffing on several biblical creation narratives, eventually uttering the much-sampled & re-cited phrase, “Let there be house!” However, it is the few lines of sermon immediately following that makes this track an explicitly utopian one. House music becomes a shared utopian world, one where “house is a feeling that no one can understand, unless you’re deep into the vibe of house.” As I put it in the book, the dancefloor becomes “a festive public sphere with open membership but requiring deep immersion and bodily surrender” (p. 9). His emphasis on belonging through music and affect (feeling) draws me back to the main thread of this book.

M.A.N.D.Y. x Booka Shade, “O Superman feat. Laurie Anderson (Reboot’s 20 Cubans Rework)”

• I briefly discuss this remarkable palimpsest of sampling and remixing in Chapter 2, where I develop the notion of “sonic tactility” to describe how electronic music engages our sense of touch through sound. Specifically, this track appears in the “Flesh” section of this chapter, where I’m thinking about how a lot of dance music—especially the minimalist “micro house” & “glitch” genres that were dominant in the 2000–2010s—used samples of the human body (such as clapping, breathing, slapping, rubbing, etc…) to convey texture. An important analytic concept here is timbre, that is, the quality of a sound that enables you to distinguish different instruments playing the exact same note—for example, a violin versus a saxophone. Ironically, timbre is very difficult to define “scientifically,” in a consistent and quantifiable way, but we know that it has to do with the mix of frequencies and how a sound evolves over time.
• “O Superman feat. Laurie Anderson” draws heavily from Anderson’s original “O Superman,” taking fragments of her vocoder-treated voice and applying a whole suite of studio effects to give an especially dreaming, floating quality. Reboot’s “20 Cubans Rework” of this track, however, adds a constantly repeating loop of layered hand claps—slightly out of phase and out of tune with each other, giving the impression of a group of clapping performers—which are recognizable through their timbre as acoustic samples, foregrounding the sound of skin hitting skin.

Oliver Hacke, “Millepieds (SLG Remix)”

• Oliver Hack’s “Millepieds (SLG Remix)” also appears in the chapter on sonic tactility, but in the “Grain” section, where I explore an even closer link between sound and touch. I borrow the notion of “sonic grain” from early 20th-century electronic music composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer, who likened the granular microstructure of textured surfaces (like sandpaper or woodgrain or asphalt) to the microstructure of sonic “attacks” in complex sounds. Think, for example, of the sound of a zipper as the teeth snap into place sequentially.
• Notably, Schaeffer’s theoretical link between sonic grain and texture can also be illustrated physically: through the sounds that surfaces make when you rub things across them, crush them, grind them, and so on. In fact, several musical instruments make use of this direct link between textured surfaces & sound, like the güiro: a type of rasp commonly found in much of the Afrodiasporic musics of Latin America, made from a hollow gourd that has been scored with parallel grooves. As you draw a stick across the grooves, you create a zipping sound that increases or decreases in granularity, depending on how quickly you move your hand.
• In this remix, the artist SLG fills the track’s texture with highly granular, textured sounds: “from the beginning of the track, one can hear a rhythmic, threefold back-and-forth scrubbing/rattling sound that evokes coarse sandpaper (on the third beat of every four-beat cycle), a zipper-like rasping sound (extending over the third and fourth beats, starting around 0:30)…and a wide array of other pops and crackles that mark longer metric cycles” (p. 86). Despite their spartan aesthetics, minimal techno tracks such as this one still provide an overall sonic texture that is complex and deeply engaging to our sense of touch.

DJ LeRoi feat. Roland Clark, “I Get Deep (Late Nite Tuff Guy Remix)”

• This mashup-adjacent “edit” of an early 2000s house track appears twice in this book, both in Chapter 4 (”Thickening Something”) and Chapter 5 (”The Sweetness of Coming Undone”). In Chapter 4, in a section where I am exploring the techniques that electronic dance music uses to shape affect (feeling, emotion) on the dancefloor, I note how Roland Clark’s spoken-word narrative tells a story of musical ecstasy based only on how the DJ manipulates the bass kick drum: “When he takes all the bass out the song / And all you hear is highs / And it’s like: oh . . . shit! / [moan] I get deep.” This technique, often called “dropping the kick” by artists and fans as well as “withholding the beat” by music theorist Mark J. Butler (in Unlocking the Groove, 2006), involves temporarily cutting out the bass frequency range of the track for a few metric cycles—usually multiples of 4 beats—and then bringing it back at the beginning of the next cycle, creating a satisfying and energising sense of arrival.
• In this remix prepared by the producer Late Nite Tuff Guy, the underlying track mirrors Clark’s narrative: “the bass-frequency range of the Rework loop is cut out in a gradual ‘filter sweep’ as Clark describes the self-same technique, losing most of the mid-frequency layer as well by the time he flips into falsetto; and then the bass gradually returns as he narrates ‘catching’ himself, filling out the full frequency spectrum as he repeats the word ‘sweet’ four times” (p. 137)

Underground Resistance, “Transition”

• This last track comes from the closing section of the book’s Epilogue, after a brief meditation on the queer public intimacy that prevailed in the wave of the Pulse Orlando Massacre of 2016. In retrospect, 2016 figured as a turning point—a “conjuncture” in the sense developed by “Birmingham School” Cultural Studies—for queer public life and nightlife. Just three months before the shooting, Andrew Ryce’s article in Resident Advisor, “America’s gay techno underground” (2016), reported on the flourishing of queer nightlife collectives throughout the first half of the 2010s. Two years earlier, I had written an article for the same online platform, “An alternate history of sexuality in club culture” (2014), where I closed the article with a brief survey of the networks of queer, sex-positive party crews that were gaining visibility in across various cities and towns. These two articles bookended a period “when various media outlets, bloggers, and artists sought to ‘reclaim’ dance music from a straight, white, middle-class mainstream and recenter it around burgeoning queer scenes by insisting on electronic dance music’s queer, Black and brown, working-class, inner-city roots” (p. 228). By early 2016, queer nightlife felt resurgent and vibrant again…and then Orlando happened…and the Brexit vote in the UK…and the Trump campaign and subsequent election.
• It’s always tricky to try and identify specific “turning points” or transitions in history—especially recent history—but the senses of reversal, crisis, and decline were palpable across queer nightlife communities from then on.

Pride Month Reads

Happy Pride Month! We’re proud to share some of our recent titles that focus on queer studies, trans studies, and LGBTQ+ histories.

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is John D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. 

In Kids on the Street Joseph Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin to explore the informal networks of economic and social support that enabled young people marginalized by gender and sexuality to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States.

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of southeast Texas, showing how their hard-luck stories render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism.

We Are Having This Conversation Now offers a history, present, and future of AIDS through thirteen short conversations between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr, two scholars deeply embedded in HIV responses. 

In Hidden Histories, Monique Moultrie collects oral histories of Black lesbian religious leaders in the United States to show how their authenticity, social justice awareness, spirituality, and collaborative leadership make them models of womanist ethical leadership. 

In Feels Right Kemi Adeyemi examines how Black queer women use the queer dance floor to articulate relationships to themselves, the Black queer community, and gentrifying neighborhoods in Chicago.

In Running, former college track athlete Lindsey A. Freeman presents a feminist and queer handbook of running in which she considers what it means to run as a visibly queer person while exploring how running puts us in contact with ourselves and others.

In Puta Life, focusing on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine sexual excess—Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena.

Drawing on memoir, creative writing, theoretical analysis, and ethnography in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit in Circuits of the Sacred.

In Between Banat Mejdulene Bernard Shomali examines homoeroticism and nonnormative sexualities between Arab women in transnational Arab literature, art, and film to show how women, femmes, and nonbinary people disrupt stereotypical and Orientalist representations of the “Arab woman.”

Attending to the centrality of indigeneity, race, and colonialism in kinship, the contributors to Queer Kinship, edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory.

Lee Edelman’s Bad Education offers a sweeping theorization of queerness as one of the many names for the void around and against which the social order takes shape.

In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity, showing how an analytic of kinship more fully illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference.

The contributors to Turning Archival, edited by Daniel Marshall and Zeb Tortorici, trace the rise of “the archive” as an object of historical desire and study within queer studies and examine how it fosters historical imagination and knowledge. 

In The Specter of Materialism Petrus Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. 

In Sexuality and the Rise of China Travis S. K. Kong examines the changing meanings of same-sex identities, communities, and cultures for young Chinese gay men in contemporary Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China.

In Surface Relations Vivian L. Huang traces how Asian and Asian American artists have strategically reworked the pernicious stereotype of inscrutability as a dynamic antiracist, feminist, and queer form of resistance.

In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay examines the prominence of breathing in responses to contemporary crises within literature, film, and performance cultures, showing how breathing has emerged as a medium through which biopolitical and necropolitical forces are increasingly exercised and experienced.

Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Cameron Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal in The Terrible We.

In Dragging Away Lex Morgan Lancaster traces the formal and material innovations of contemporary queer and feminist artists, showing how they use abstraction as a queering tactic for social and political ends.

In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender, showing that as a category, cisgender cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.

In Envisioning African Intersex Amanda Lock Swarr debunks the centuries old claim “hermaphroditism” and intersex are disproportionately common among black South Africans by interrogating how contemporary intersex medicine its indivisibility from colonial ideologies and scientific racism.

Contributors to The View from Graduate School, an issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (10:1) edited by Julian Gill-Peterson, propose trans studies from the perspective of PhD students and their faculty collaborators. The authors pull from the transformative experiences that they as teachers have had, where they learned from their students how to teach trans studies.

In Black and Queer, Music on Screen, editors James Tobias, stef torralba, and Ïxkári Noé Estelle assemble a group of articles, interviews, and conversations in response to the question: “How do black and queer cultures work through erotics of mediation such that these mediations may become determined under their own terms and conditions, and without giving away powers they don’t necessarily choose to?” (liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 7:1)

Authors included in Queer and Trans Dialectology: Exploring the Intersectionality of Regionality, a special issue of American Speech (98:1) edited by Bryce McCleary and Tyler Kibbey, examine how place, region, and community shape contemporary dialectology, and demonstrate how queer and trans people linguistically negotiate and attend to different locations and contexts.

In The Science of Sex Itself, a special issue of GLQ (29:1) edited by Benjamin Kahan and Greta LaFleur, contributors trace how sexual scientific thought circulated throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how that thought continues to shape sexuality.

Poem of the Week

Our third Poem of the Week this April is “anseo / here” by Emer Lyons from Four Poems from a Lesbian Diasporic Body, published in Feminist Mournings, a recent special issue of the journal Meridians.

a hoan / one

the cheapest preschool around was downstairs in the town hall

+ taught entirely in Irish

alongside a flimsy grasp of my native tongue, i learnt many

valuable skills

i learnt the skill of bartering

trading jam sandwiches for rice cakes coated in nutella

i learnt the skill of self-preservation

thumping a boy to tears in the bathroom after he stole my

miniature packet of smarties

i had bartered away a wagon wheel for those smarties

so i wasn’t about to be left folamh láimh

i learnt the skill of molding

somebody’s mother came w/pristine marla, a cheap version of

play-doh

we sat in a circle around her as she smoothed the strips of

marla into heads + bodies

she made a family, a mum, a dad + two children

she put this family into a boat that she had carved like a viking

foirfe she said

+ the boy started to cry again

+ then i started to cry

the family in the little boat didn’t look like our families

a dó / two

i grew up w/many marie’s

plagued, they were, by the weight of such a name

one marie in particular couldn’t keep her head above the sea of

bitterness,

of sorrow, of rebellion

she’d sink into rages, when we were only five, six at most

marie’s darkness would scream a siren of warning

the teacher would evacuate us, children + children first

marie would shred the classroom to ribbons

the teacher stayed in there w/her, asking her again + again to

count slowly to ten

we’d peek one at time through the square of glass in the door

lined like graph paper, dividing marie + the teacher into pieces

small enough to hold

the teacher held marie’s exhausted body as we crept back in

quietly righting the toppled chairs + desks

a trí / three

one day the virgin mary’s head cracked off her shoulders +

dropped to the floor

we crowded around her

she didn’t look half as pious w/out her hands clasped against

her chest in prayer

her head looked ordinary lying on the lino by itself

we’d been left alone for more than ten minutes

we filled the precious moments of freedom by pushing +

shoving each other

w/all the pent-up purposelessness of youth

the girl who’d slapped against the cupboard that dislodged

mary’s head

frantically called out for glue

it was primary school there was no sufficient glue

only the stuff we’d lather on our hands + peel off like skin

the girl put as much as she could on the statue w/out it being

noticeable

that afternoon we turned to mary as we did every afternoon to

pray

her head oozed off before we’d a chance to hail

a ceathair / four

right girls, ye are old enough now to start getting involved

w/the nastier side of the bible.

the days of loaves + fishes + tax collectors stuck up trees were

behind us

our teacher at the time was a wizened old nun, smaller than

some of us at ten

she glorified in her task as our tour guide into sin, damnation +

HELL

the girl i’d married at small break under a tree refused to look

at me

i got the sense that our first kiss was to be our last as she rolled

the daisy ring from her finger

my eyes darkened at the sounds of the fiery inferno escaping

the nun’s pinched lips

i was sure to be damned if i continued to love other girls + not

god

i wondered if his hands would be as small + soft

if he’d smell faintly like the morning’s milk spilt on a wool

jumper

if i’d find heart-shaped notes from him in my school bag

the small nun reprimanded me for staring into space, told me to

read the next line aloud—

thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire

a cúig / five

elbows out emer, elbows out

the nun built like a tank

whispered to me as i approached the starting line

she had overheard me call someone gay the week before

+ called me up to her desk to ask me if i knew what the word

meant

i said no then yes

she said, we’ll talk about this later

i was still waiting for this later to come as i lined up for the

sprinting race

she winked at me + smiled from the side lines

after i lost the race another teacher said i could’ve won if i

wasn’t so busy looking around me

ah, the big nun said, she’s better off w/a bit of curiosity

a sé / six

ciúineas cailíní

we press our fingers to our lips

in the pose of silence we’ve been taught

our bodies tell our minds to be quiet

Feminist Mournings, edited by Kimberly Juanita Brown and Jyoti Puri

Contributors to this special issue of Meridians explore feminist articulations of mourning that are anchored in slavery, settler occupation, colonialism, migration, and the violence of modern national states. The authors perceive mourning not as a process of individualized grief to be worked through or overcome but as a collective condition that encompasses historical consciousness and contemporary collective action.

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Ginetta E. B. Candelario, editor

Meridians, an interdisciplinary feminist journal, provides a forum for the finest scholarship and creative work by and about women of color in U.S. and international contexts. The journal engages the complexity of debates around feminism, race, and transnationalism in a dialogue across ethnic, national, and disciplinary boundaries. Meridians publishes work that makes scholarship, poetry, fiction, and memoir by and about women of color central to history, economics, politics, geography, class, sexuality, and culture. The journal provokes the critical interrogation of the terms used to shape activist agendas, theoretical paradigms, and political coalitions.