New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

The influential yet controversial psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan was pioneering in his treatment of schizophrenia however the way he lived privately did not always correspond to the theoretical ideas he espoused publicly. With meticulous research and access to clinical and historical records, historianNaoko Wake, examines the life and work of this pioneer of American Psychoanalysis from an unconventional perspective, quite different than the usual biographical approach. In this interview we discuss Sullivan’s sometimes contradictory life work, especially his time at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, his private practice in New York, and his wider, global ambitions later in life.Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers University Press, 2011), is compelling book and a welcome addition to the historical record of American Psychoanalysis.Find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Before Transgender actors entered popular culture, and before the “T” was included in LGBT, Transgender activism was a small and marginalized movement. However, though courage and perseverance, Transgender rights began to enter the public consciousness. Drawing on her own life story, Riki Wilchin’s newest book TRANS/gressive: How Transgender Activists took on Gay Rights, Feminism, the Media & Congress…and Won! (Riverdale Avenue Books, 2017) traces the origins of the Transgender movement. From the backwoods of rural Michigan to the nation’s capital, the movement challenged not only conservative politicians and worldviews but also challenged the boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality within more progressive movements. How do Trans issues and concerns intersect with notions of masculinity and femininity? What was the relationship between the Trans movement and the Gay movement? How do movements transcend the local and become national? Wilchins offers answers to these (and many more) questions within the pages of TRANS/gressive.In addition to TRANS/gressive, Wilchins is also author to three other books on topics of gender and sexuality: Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion & the End of Gender, Queer Theory/Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, and Voice from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Wilchins’ works has been featured in many periodicals, and Riki has held many trainings on gender norms and nonconformity for audiences that include the White House, Centers for Disease Control, and the office on Women’s Health. Continuing her activism as well as her authorship, Wilchins expects another forthcoming book in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Despite the prominence of LGBTQ issues in our current social consciousness, many people still know little about the LGBTQ community, which means that teaching about this community and its issues is an important job. It’s also a difficult one that’s been handled with varying degrees of effectiveness and sensitivity over the past few decades. Many of us can recall during our undergrad or graduate training having a single class day devoted to the topic, or our instructors trying to squeeze it in alongside other material. Fortunately, the teaching of LGBTQ issues has advanced dramatically, thanks to the work of psychologists such as Theodore Burnes and Jeanne Stanley. Their new edited book, entitled Teaching LGBTQ Psychology: Queering Innovative Pedagogy and Practice (American Psychological Association, 2017), covers pedagogical concepts as well as practical suggestions for bringing the material to life and helping students feel at home with it. In our interview, we have a frank discussion about the challenges of teaching LGBTQ psychology–such as fear, prejudice, and misinformation among students–and how to best rise to those challenges.Theodore Burnes is associate professor and director of the LGBT specialization of Antioch University’s clinical psychology masters program. He has 15 years of experience constructing, facilitating, and evaluating undergraduate and graduate coursework in psychology, Black studies, writing, LGBT studies, poetry, women’s studies, teacher education, and counseling in various university settings. He is a licensed psychologist and licensed professional clinical counselor in private practice in Los Angeles.Jeanne Stanley is Executive Director of Watershed Counseling and Consultation Services. She regularly conducts training around the country on best practices for supporting and affirming LGBTQ individuals and is a licensed psychologist in private practice in the Chestnut Hill are of Philadelphia. Listen to our interview by clicking below.To subscribe to the New Books in Psychology podcast, click here.Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

At once wonderfully clear and bursting with complexity, the title of Bruno Perreau‘s book, Queer Theory: The French Response (Stanford University Press, 2016) is one of my favorites of the past several years. An interrogation of the meanings of queer, theory, French, and response, the book is anchored around the anti-gay marriage demonstrations and activisms that proliferated in France during the lead-up to the passage of the 2013 Loi Taubira (a.k.a. “marriage pour tous”). The book focuses on a central claim of French opponents of gay marriage and adoption: the notion that (American) gender and queer theory is responsible for spreading homosexuality in France, and has thus contributed to the undoing of the French family and the nation as a whole.Throughout its four chapters, the book considers the French response to queer theory in terms of fantasy and echo. This is not a book about reception in a passive or uncomplicated sense. Rather it is the study of a set of reverberations back and forth across the Atlantic that is always already a matter of translation and interpretation. Indeed, the so-called American theory that anti-gay activists have presented as a foreign menace finds much of its own inspiration in the work of French thinkers and writers. Drawing in part on a series of interviews with French feminist and queer intellectuals and activists, the book also offers critical insight regarding the meanings and anxieties surrounding minority identities and communities in contemporary France. Queer Theory will be compelling reading to anyone interested in the history and politics of sexuality, and in the possibilities of thinking and enacting change into the future, in France, in the U.S., and beyond.Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of French culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation 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

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperialism. She focuses on the gay and lesbian left in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing the movement from 1968 through 1991. This community of struggle was separate from both separatist and liberal LGBTQ organizing. It grew out of late-1960s and early-1970s gay liberation, but solidified in the mid to late 1970s, usually seen as a period when gay activism turned to more reformist and single-issue frameworks. Geography, space and place are important to Hobson’s analysis. The Bay Area generated a lesbian and gay left partly because of newly politicized white queers proximity to Black liberationists, women of color feminists, socialist feminists, and Central American anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist refugees. These activists encountered each other in neighborhoods, activist offices, and at marches and rallies, where they learned form and sharpened each others politics as well as changed the trajectory of each others actions. As the New Right gained ascendancy, lesbian and gay activists found common cause with others under attack within and outside the Unites States. Over the decades, gay and lesbian leftists supported the Black Panther Party and political prisoners, challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, built links with lesbian and gay Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and brought their direct action skills to bear on the AIDS epidemic. Their coalitions were not without tensions, particularly ones of race; many gay and lesbian left groups were primarily white, and gay and lesbians of color challenged these gaps to create their own left-leaning formations and solidarities with other oppressed groups.Hobson analyzes these tensions and recovers varying forms of political critique, strategy, and community. Through drawing on oral histories and archival documents, including striking photographs, flyers, and political artwork, Lavender and Red lifts up a strain of gay and lesbian activism that had been all but lost to memory for most activists and scholars of today.Emily Hobson serves as Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Race and Identity at University of Nevada, Reno.Isabell Moore is a PhD Student in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social movements in the 20th century and she is involved in activism for racial, gender, economic and queer justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Timothy Stewart-Winter is an assistant professor of history and women and gender studies at Rutgers University. Newark. His book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) traces the rise of gay urban politics from the silence of the closet in the 1950s to the halls of power in the late 1980s. The city of Chicago, with its machine politics and Richard J. Daley’s breadwinner liberalism, reflects the national movement toward gay and lesbian rights. In post-war America, homosexuals flocked to urban centers seeking anonymity forming gay enclaves and creating a system of mutual aid. Regarded as deviants and associated with crime and political subversion they were under constant threat of harassment by police. Exposure meant the loss of jobs, family rejection, and vulnerability to extortion and blackmail. In the 1950s, a limited homophile movement formed to educate and advocate for the de-criminalization of same-sex intimacy. After Stonewall in 1969, gay pride parades and the process of coming out fueled gay liberation. An ethnic group strategy of a self-identified gay community found common cause with the black civil rights movement. Black politicians courted the gay vote in a progressive coalition. The passing of gay rights ordinances and the election of the first black mayor Harold Washington in 1983 cemented the inclusion of gays in Chicago politics. Yet the gay community suffered divisions of gender, class, and race. Lesbian women, emerging from the ranks of radical feminism, experienced greater job and pay discrimination due to traditional gender expectations. Blacks suffered multiple forms of discrimination escaped by white males. The devastation of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s accelerated the professionalization of gay advocacy and fund-raising. By the 1990s, gay politics resembled the politics of previous ethnic groups and white gay men became respected symbols of economic and social privilege.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In her fascinating new book Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2015), Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, explores shifting meanings of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. By brilliantly combining historical and ethnographic inquiry, Najmabadi highlights the complex ways in which biomedical, psychiatric, and Islamic jurisprudential discourses and institutions conjoin to generate particular notions of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality. Moreover, she also shows some of the paradoxical ways in which state regulation enables certain possibilities and spaces for nonheteronormative sexuality in Iran. In our conversation, we talked about problems of translation involved in using Western categories in Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Iranian context, the certification process for sex change applicants in Iran, shifting conceptualizations of transsexuality overtime, continuities and ruptures seen in nonheteronormative masculinities in Tehran before and after the 1979 revolution, and the category of the narrative self. This multilayered book is at once lyrically written and theoretically exhilarating. It will be of much interest to students of gender and sexuality, Islamic law, religion and science, and of contemporary Iranian society. It will also make a wonderful choice for graduate and upper lever undergraduate courses on the same subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Kerry Eleveld is the author of Don’t Tell Me to Wait: How the Fight for Gay Rights Changed America and Transformed Obama’s Presidency (Basic Books, 2015). Eleveld is a writer for DailyKos and a former reporter for The Advocate.We have all begun to write the histories of the Obama presidency, noting various accomplishments and failures. One of the most remarkable areas of accomplishment and change was the President’s transformation on gay rights. From a campaign that stumbled on the issue to a much bolder stance on don’t-ask-don’t-tell, DOMA, and other policies, the Obama White House was changed by gay rights and, in turn, changed America. According to Kerry Eleveld, he didn’t do this on his own. An assortment of advocates, activists, and bloggers pressured the White House to move gay rights issues from the edge his agenda. In Don’t Tell Me To Wait, Eleveld recounts this transformation as one of the reporters covering the President up-close. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Today’s guest discusses the history of sexuality in the workplace through the lens of male flight attendants. We speak with Phil Tiemeyer about the shifts and changes in the airline industry across the 20th century. Phil steers us through this history and reveals the importance and difficulty of braiding together race, gender, and sexuality in a study of the labor and capitalism. Phil Tiemeyer is Associate Professor of History at Philadelphia University. He is author of Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (University of California Press, 2013). You can read more about his work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Much of the scholarship on heavy metal has assumed that the primary audience is straight white males, who are likely sexist and homophobic. In her new book, Queerness in Heavy Metal Music: Metal Bent (Routledge, 2015), Amber Clifford-Napoleone challenges these assumptions through her ethnographic study of self-identified queer performers and fans of heavy metal. She also reveals some surprising links between queer and heavy metal communities.In this podcast, we discuss the history of heavy metal, its connection to the post-World War II leather scene, and how heavy metal’s embrace of non-normative lifestyles and cultures has allowed queer fans and performers an accepted space within heavy metal. In the interview, Clifford Napoleone explores why heavy metal has been a welcoming space for queer fans. We also talk about the role of particular musicians and acts, such as Judas Priest and Joan Jett.Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Nance Collections at the University of Central Missouri. In addition to her research on heavy metal, she studies gender in jazz in Kansas City and blogs  on heavy metal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies