New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

Psychoanalysis is a queer theory. That’s what Tim Dean said, according to Eve Watson in the afterword to Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (Punctum Books, 2017), a new book that she co-edited with Noreen Giffney. In her interview for this podcast, Watson qualifies that declaration by saying that psychoanalysis isn’t always a queer theory, but it should be. “There are many psychoanalyses.”Queer theory challenges the conventional approach to sexuality that many clinicians absorbed from their training. These clinicians run the risk of imposing outdated and oppressive sexual norms upon their clients. Until the mid-70’s, homosexuality was officially a mental illness and many psychoanalysts continued to try to cure homosexuals of their sexual pathology long after the DSM corrected its culturally determined diagnostic judgment in 1973. Queer theorists argue that this error was not an isolated incident but rather a trend within institutionalized psychoanalysis that continues to limit the effectiveness of psychoanalytic practice today, and in the worst cases, to harm its consumers.In fact, the paragraphs above may give a distorted view of the book which does not pursue an argument but presents a stimulating conversation among queer theorists and clinicians about psychoanalysis, sexuality, gender, identity, and discourse. The conversation can fly high at times, especially for those who are new to this kind of literature, but the variety of contributors speak in many voices and every reader will find something valuable in this book for deepening their psychoanalytic vision.Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a private practice in Los Angeles. He is candidate at The Psychoanalytic Center of California. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Hongwei Bao’s book is a thoughtful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in China. This work stems from the term and identity tongzhi, which means “comrade” and in more recent decades has been a popular term to refer to gay people and sexual minorities more broadly. Based on ethnographic... 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 where do transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people find good mental healthcare? And how can psychotherapists and other mental health professionals become competent in this kind of care? Furthermore, what are the most important mental health issues faced by TGNC people? These are some of the questions with which TGNC people grapple regularly, and they motivated Dr. Eric Yarbrough to write his new book, Transgender Mental Health (2018, American Psychiatric Association). In our interview, we discuss what it means to be transgender and gender non-conforming, the importance of understanding the gender spectrum, and what gender-affirming mental health treatment looks like. We also address practical questions about how to find good care and what clinicians need to know in order to practice competently. This long-awaited book furthers our understanding about key issues for TGNC people and is a must-read for anyone, client or therapist, engaged with TGNC mental healthcare.Eric Yarbrough is Director of Psychiatry at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York and President of AGLP: The Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists. He graduated from University of Alabama School of Medicine and completed his psychiatry residency at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in New York City.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, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he also chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

How do students become LGBT activists at Christian Universities and Colleges? And what is the impact on the school but also on the activists themselves? In his new book, Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jonathan S. Coley uses interviews with LGBT activists on Christian campuses and other sources of data to answer these questions. LGBT activists in his study fall into three participant identities which tie to the “group ethos” he discovers. These typologies help to understand the ways in which students participate as activists but also how they come to know themselves. In addition, Coley situates his findings in the literature but also explains how his study differs and expands on previous findings. In general, he finds that “fit” is important to the activists and that only about a third of his participants fall into traditional definitions of activists. Coley also finds that denomination plays a key role in the development and reaction of activists groups on campus. Overall, this book gives a clear picture of LGBT activists on Christian university and college campuses.This book will be enjoyed by sociologists in general, but especially by those interested in social movements, religion, sexuality, and higher education. This book would be useful in a graduate level or higher level undergraduate social movements course given the clear organization of theory and examples used throughout the book and specifically in the tables.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

Many of us move to a new place at some point in our lives for a variety of reasons: for a job, to be with a partner, to attend school, for a change of scenery, to retire. When we have a choice, we consider a host of place characteristics to make a decision on where to go: its cost of living, crime rate, climate, array of “qualities” (life, schools, housing), amenities. And, we often assume that when we get there we will either always “be ourselves” or reinvent ourselves, and become a new person. Little do we know that our identities—how we think about and perform them—are more out of our control in new environments than we ever would have thought and could never have planned. In her provocative new book, How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities, sociologist Japonica Brown-Saracino challenges the idea that we always possess a “core self” wherever we go. By examining lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women in four cities around the U.S. (Ithaca, NY; San Luis Obispo, CA; Portland, ME; and Greenfield, MA), she strikingly finds homogeneity in terms of how people self-identify within places, but heterogeneity across places despite both the cities and people being similar. Brown-Saracino discovers that these women adopt distinct local “sexual identity cultures” that are shaped by elements in each place’s ecology, specifically how they perceive the abundance and acceptance there of others like them, the city’s narratives about itself, and the types of women like them that they meet. Most importantly, how they arrange and act out these identities are often very different from how they did so before they moved there. Featuring a rigorous analysis and compelling presentation, this book forces us to rethink what we know about the identities we hold, the communities we belong to, and the places where we live.Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City and Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

The Weimar Republic was home to the first gay rights movement, led by well-known sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. It also inspired many literary and cinematic representations of sexual liberation in legendary 1920s Berlin. In her ambitious book, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Laurie Marhoefer revises several assumptions about the sexual politics of Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. She examines how the sexual freedoms fought for by many reformers often came at the expense of a minority perceived as too non-conformist even by the left. Critically exploring explosive personalities, such as Hirschfeld and Ernst Roehm, and political turning points, such as the Venereal Disease Law of 1927 and the Vote on Repealing the Sodomy Law in 1929, this book demonstrates the profound ambiguities of the era. Marhoefer suggests that a Weimar Republic political settlement between diverse factions simultaneously saw emancipation of those who could claim a new respectability based on scientific reasoning and increased criminal control over the sexual lives of individuals who could not. Combining dynamic individual stories with several revisionist arguments, this book is one that will appeal to many listeners.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in August 2018.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In 2013, when the Russian State Duma passed a law banning the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships to minors, some rushed to boycott Russian vodka. In Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (Bloomsbury, 2017), Dan Healey provides historical context for the law and cautions against the easy application of recent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marriage dividing American Christians both politically and religiously. Moral Combat features pivotal figures including, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the fundamentalist radio preacher Billy James Hargis and the first gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. She demonstrates how pro and con positions were not always clearly defined and adherents could change sides in a matter of a decade, finding surprising allies. In the new millennium two distinct religious visions for society and human sexuality had taken root unraveling any hope of consensus.Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.This episode of New Books in Gender Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

J. Samaine Lockwood, Associate Professor in the English Department at George Mason University, specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and gender and sexuality studies. In an hour-long conversation, we discuss her new book Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).New England has long presented an idealized sense of its past. Restored colonial homes, antique shops, white picket fences around town greens—these are some features you may associate with a conservative, even blinkered view of the past. But the reality is otherwise. Lockwood shows how the story behind this burst of regionalist pride, much the product of the late nineteenth century, is queerer and more women-centered than you could possibly have imagined. In her book, Lockwood argues that nineteenth-century women writers, photographers, and colonial revivalists presented the queer, unmarried daughter of New England as a figure crucial to remembering and producing US history, crucial to that history itself. These women include Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Morse Earle, C. Alice Baker, as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, and many more. Their literary work, history writing, china collecting, and home restoration evinced a deep cosmopolitanism far exceeding the limits of any supposed provincialism of the New England spinster, both in their own time and in the past about which they wrote.We talk about how the late-nineteenth century New England regionalists aligned themselves with colonial forms of dissent against monarchical rule, but also rule by men. They followed the trails of colonial women who once manned garrisons in times of war, as well as women who, after capture, chose to stay living with Indians. Much of our conversation talks about how the later women regionalists found roots in the past for their own forms of living intimately with women in the present, including in romantic relationships. A large part of our discussion also focuses on how the knowledge they produced of that past was largely found through the use of their bodies as historical instruments in the care of objects and spaces of a home, the tending of gardens, the wearing of colonial dress. Their bodily sensorium revealed similarities of experiences across time, including feelings of intense sexual pleasure as well as gender-based oppression. Ultimately, this work attuned people to how affective ties and material forms of everyday life (which include nature, objects, the space of a town and its buildings) structure each other in dynamic relationship. The preservation of historic homes and other open to the public and welcoming visitors today owes much to these women. Throughout our conversation, Lockwood and I continue to return to the fact that new possibilities for the ongoing American democratic experiment were to be found in the past as much as the present. The same is true today—if you learn to open your senses to the world around you.Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Psychoanalysis is transitioning. Its history of pathologizing deviant sexuality is giving way to curiosity about the universal complexities and contradictions inherent in sex and gender. Yet it could use some pushing along, and Patricia Gherovici’s new book, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017), does just that. In it, she draws inspiration and courage from her clinical work with transgender patients in order to challenge long-standing essentialist notions about sex and gender. She also introduces readers to Jacque Lacan’s still-revolutionary ethics on sexual difference. In our interview, we talk about her involvement in the recent wave of attention to transgender experience, how she applies Lacan’s ideas to her own clinical work, and the importance of putting further pressure on psychoanalysis and Western society, at large to let go of antiquated, discriminatory notions and embrace the infinite complexity in all human sexuality.Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS). She is also Honorary Member at IPTAR, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City, and member at Apres-Coup Psychoanalytic Association New York. Her prior books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Other Press, 2003) and Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010). She has published two edited collections, both with Manya Steinkoler, entitled Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can’t (Routledge, 2015) and Lacan, Psychoanalysis and Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2016).Listen to our interview by clicking below. To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies