New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

In his own description of his book, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, & Inappropriate Jokes About Death, J Mase III writes, “Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to.” It is in this invitation that J Mase III takes on themes of the messiness of grief, Black trans spirituality, and what it means to be an independent artist. Written after the passing of both his grandmother and father within the span of three months, this book is honest, brave, and full of love.J Mase III is a Black trans queer poet and educator and is the founder of awQward, a talent agency exclusively for trans and queer people of color. You can check out his amazing work and purchase his book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed key developments in LGBT history, including the growth of the world's first homosexual organizations and gay and lesbian magazines, as well as an influential community of German sexologists and psychoanalysts. In his new book, Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945 (Harrington Park Press, 2016), Clayton Whisnant describes these events in detail, from vibrant gay social scenes to the Nazi persecution that sent many LGBT people to concentration camps. This study recounts the emergence of various queer identities in Germany from 1880 to 1945 and the political strategies pursued by early activists. Drawing on recent English and German-language scholarship, Whisnant enriches the debate over whether science contributed to social progress or persecution during this period, and he offers new information on the Nazis' preoccupation with homosexuality. The book's epilogue locates remnants of the pre-1945 era in Germany today.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Hard won transgender rights have been under attack by the Trump administration. Officials across government have sought to overturn decisions made by the Obama administration to expand rights to transgender people. Who fought those battles and continues to lobby to defend the transgender community is the topic of Anthony Nownes' new book Organizing for Transgender Rights: Collective Action, Group Development, and the Rise of a New Social Movement (SUNY Press, 2019). Nownes is professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.In the book, Nownes uncovers the rise of transgender rights interest groups in the United States. Based on extensive interviews with the founders and leaders of many of these groups. Organizing for Transgender Rights not only shows how these groups formed but also how they mobilized and survived. The book contributes to better understanding this social movement and also the ways that interest groups develop. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Since the late 1990s Thai cinema has come to global attention with movies like the famous ghost film, Nang Nak, and more recently the evocative films of director Aphichatpong Weerasethakul, who won a Palme D’Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. A perennially popular theme in Thai cinema is that of haunting by a female ghost. In this unique, unusual book, Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016), Arnika Fuhrmann hones in on this ghostly theme in contemporary Thai cinema to explore the subjects of female desire and queer sexuality. In doing so she raises questions about a central concept in Queer Theory: the nature of desire. Fuhrmann identifies a tension between Western liberal and everyday Thai Buddhist understandings of desire. Arguably, Buddhist teaching about desire is one factor that has contributed to Thailand’s reputation for being a “queer-friendly” country. Indeed, it is even marketed as a “gay paradise”. But the reality is not quite so simple, especially for women in same-sex relationships. Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires also addresses the issue of the subtle regulation of heteronormative sexuality, “Thai-style”.Listeners to this episode might also enjoy listening to:Justin Thomas McDaniel, The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand (Columbia University Press, 2011)Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012)Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

With transgender rights front and center in American politics, media, and culture, the pervasive myth still exists that today’s transgender children are a brand new generation—pioneers in a field of new obstacles and hurdles. Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shatters this myth, uncovering a previously unknown twentieth-century history when transgender children not only existed but preexisted the term transgender and its predecessors, playing a central role in the medicalization of trans people, and all sex and gender.Beginning with the early 1900s when children with “ambiguous” sex first sought medical attention, to the 1930s when transgender people began to seek out doctors involved in altering children’s sex, to the invention of the category gender, and finally the 1960s and ‘70s when, as the field institutionalized, transgender children began to take hormones, change their names, and even access gender confirmation, Julian Gill-Peterson reconstructs the medicalization and racialization of children’s bodies. Throughout, they foreground the racial history of medicine that excludes black and trans of color children through the concept of gender’s plasticity, placing race at the center of their analysis and at the center of transgender studies.Until now, little has been known about early transgender history and life and its relevance to children. Using a wealth of archival research from hospitals and clinics, including incredible personal letters from children to doctors, as well as scientific and medical literature, this book reaches back to the first half of the twentieth century—a time when the category transgender was not available but surely existed, in the lives of children and parents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Sometimes a book can take inspiration from a (not so) simple map. At the end of his previous book, Queer French: Globalization, Language, and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge, 2007), Denis Provencher discusses a map of “gay Paris” drawn by Samir, one of his French interlocutors of North African descent. Samir’s queer urban landscape left out most of the Marais, an area typically considered a center of gay life in the French capital. A follow-up to that 2007 study in some ways, Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations (Liverpool University Press, 2017) is also much more. This new book explores the biographies, experiences, cultural work, and activisms of men of Maghrebi origin, men who were either born in or immigrants to contemporary France. Exploring the workings of culture, religion, community, and kinship, the book engages and intervenes in the fields of queer theory, gender studies, ethnography, linguistics, and cultural studies.Combining analysis of a variety of cultural texts—including art, literature, photography, film, and performance—with ethnographic data drawn from multiple interviews, QMF interrogates diasporic identity, language, mobility, time, and space. Over the course of the book’s several chapters, Provencher considers the lives and work of the artist and photographer 2Fik; the queer activist, scholar, and imam Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed; the novelist Abdellah Taia; and the filmmaker and screenwriter Mehdi Ben Attia. The final chapter of the book focuses on three anonymous working and middle-class men Provencher interviewed over the course of the project. In addition to highlighting language, temporality, and transfiliation, the book is attentive throughout to the role of technology—its screens and networks—in enabling and shaping different forms of community and (self-)representation. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the book will be of great interest to readers across the fields of LGBTQ, Maghrebi French, and cultural studies.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the culture and politics of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca.*The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

How and why did public opinions about gay marriage shift? In his new book, The Gay Marriage Generation: How the LGBTQ Movement Transformed American Culture (New York University Press, 2018), Peter Hart-Brinson explores this question and more through public opinion data and interviews with two generations of Americans. By using these mixed methods of analysis, Hart-Brinson dissects generational change of attitudes toward gay marriage through interpretive, historical, and demographic analyses. This book contributes to the literature by building upon previous work and moving the discussion of generational change and attitudes forward. Concepts that are important for the book include differences between orientation and attraction, a difference in how the two generations Hart-Brinson interviewed speak about gay marriage. This book is accessible to a wide audience and will be of interest to family and public opinion scholars, as well as anyone interested in public attitudes or gay marriage specifically. This book would be a great addition to any graduate level course on families, as it gives a solid background of the history of the LGBTQ movement as well as attitudes shifts toward gay marriage.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Perhaps no form of popular art has appeared as poised to resist subversive sexual themes as the television situation comedy. But Tison Pugh writes that the sitcom’s historic dogmatic insistence on an earnest innocence was doomed to fail, and that the weight of this strain reveals itself under close scrutiny. In The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Pugh looks at six beloved sitcoms throughout television history in a way you have probably never viewed them before.“Sexuality and queerness can never be banished from family sitcoms but instead percolate throughout various story lines that attempt to quell their disruptive force," Pugh writes. “In brief, queerness as a critical concept fractures cultural constructions of gendered and erotic normativity, dismantling rigid binary codes of licit and illicit desires and identities. Queer refers to contested sexual and gender identities but extends further to include identities that challenge regimes of normativity. More so, queerness exposes how deeply heteronormative narrative frameworks, such as that of the family sitcom, are structurally incapable of suturing over their aporias and contradictions, such that their surface normativity cannot withstand the steady erosion of their symptomatic queerness.”Pugh is a professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and the author or co-author of several books on sexuality and literature, including Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon (Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2017), Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe gather artists and scholars whose work disrupts, challenges, and reimagines ways of being Asian and Asian American. Through nine original artist interviews and seven critical essays, the editors showcase contemporary artists who queer our conceptions of surveillance, affect, mixed race, and Asian America itself. In doing so, the editors remain interested in the queer disturbances within artworks that respond to racism and state violence, while also forming solidarities based on critical understandings of shared oppression. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In order to fully grasp the workings of racism, we cannot limit ourselves to examining it within majority cultures. Racism exists in minority cultures, such as the gay community, but the intersection of diverse minority identities can make the operation of racism difficult to see. This is the subject of Damien Riggs’ new anthology, The Psychic Life of Racism in Gay Men’s Communities (Lexington Books, 2018). The book brings together various authors who address topics such as islamophobia, orientalism, and the African diaspora within the gay community. And in our interview, Riggs and I discuss how heterogeneity within the gay community often gets overlooked; the unique ways racism manifests in the gay community compared to non-gay communities; and how desire among gay men becomes dangerously racialized. His book and this interview offer an opportunity for examining one’s unconscious and disavowed racist biases, even among those who claim other kinds of marginalized identities.Damien W. Riggs is Associate Professor in Social Work at Flinders University and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He is the author of over 150 publications in the fields of gender/sexuality studies and mental health. He also works in private practice as a Lacanian psychotherapist.Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City and Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (Routledge, 2018).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies