New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

Donald P. Haider-Markel and Jami K. Taylor are the editors of Transgender Rights and Politics: Groups, Issue Framing and Policy Adoption (University of Michigan UP, 2014). Haider-Markel is professor of political science and chair at the University of Kansas, Taylor is associate professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo.Last week, Frank Baumgartner came on the podcast to talk about his newest book on policy process theory at the national level of US government. Haider-Markel and Taylor’s new edited volume draws on similar literature, but applies it to state and local politics. They also have collected up an array of excellent research on an understudied issue: transgender politics. Chapters by Anthony Nownes on transgender interest groups and Mitchell Sellers and Rod Colvin on how local governments have adopted transgender policies are particularly noteworthy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Academics don’t pay enough attention to class. And when we do, too often we only magnify the tendency for working class subjects to be defined according to middle class norms; and according to those norms, they, not surprisingly, fail in one way or another, justifying their position beneath the middle class. There are many unfortunate consequences of this dynamic. Among them, we seldom see what’s really happening in, say, the performance of a country song.Nadine Hubbs, Professor of Music Theory and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, is an exception to this rule. In Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (University of California Press, 2014), she discusses subjects that range from a Foo Fighters tour-promotion video, the role of taste in class distinction, and the blinders that members of the middle class seem to wear when they notice working-class culture. Then she removes the blinders and takes a look at some country, noticing an artistic richness and political agenda that academics and critics seldom see. Along the way, she investigates a few of the prominent assumptions about country–its bigotry and political conservatism, for example. She discusses research that undermines these assumptions, noting the work they do to maintain class distinctions and privilege. And finally she makes the case for paying more attention to class, working-class culture, suggesting the potential for real political collaboration between the working and the middle classes.Here are some of the videos mentioned in the interview:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsrqw0oElHQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e5hRLbCaCshttp://www.gretchenwilson.com/media/videos/41683/56793 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Singapore has a well-deserved reputation as a state that stifles dissent and polices activism. But as Lynette Chua shows in Mobilizing Gay Singapore: Rights and Resistance in an Authoritarian State (National University of Singapore Press, 2014), repressive government nowhere goes unchallenged, even if the forms that resistance takes are not manifest. Turning away from social movement theory that tends to valorize public protest and other forms of highly visible contentious politics, Chua tells another story: a story of contingent, incremental gains through strategic adaptation; a story of “pragmatic resistance” to authoritarianism.Mobilizing Gay Singapore is a highly readable and finely researched account of how a contemporary political movement has emerged and grown in a small Asian state, yet it is a book with a bigger story to tell about the beginnings and progress of social movements in difficult circumstances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Rather than focusing on race and nation as main categories of analysis, Ponce uses a queer diasporic reading to consider the multiple audiences for Filipino literature. In doing so, he explores alternatives to the nation as the basis for an imagined community, and focuses instead on sexual politics and the transpacific tactics of reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

With Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2013), Cymene Howe offers an ethnography of activism. Woven into Nicaragua’s political history of revolution and U.S. intervention, the struggle for sexual rights there takes place on three stages: in intimate settings of lesbian discussion groups, in the public sphere marked by demonstrations, press conferences and celebrations, and in visual and print media. Howe’s informants (activists, advocates, students, educators, television actors, members of Nicaragua’s queer community) illustrate the transformations and continuities in the culture of sexuality in Nicaragua. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Karma Chavez is the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois University Press, 2013). Dr. Chavez is assistant professor of Communication Arts and Chicano and Latina Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network and co-editor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices Feminist Practices in Communications Studies.Queer Migration Politics focuses on the intersection of political interest between immigration activists and LGBT activists. Chavez shows some of the inclusionary approaches taken by mainstream groups to advocate for a small handful of common policy objectives. The campaign to change US law to permit gay and lesbian citizens to sponsor foreign partners was prominent on the agenda. But Chavez’s approach challenges conventional politics by offering a “differential vision” of what coalitional politics might mean. The book has a lot for political scientists and sociologists, as well as scholars in queer studies and immigration policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Nature or nurture? Inborn or learned? Genetic or extra-genetic? Humans are so complicated that in many cases we can’t really know what is “in us” from the beginning and what is “acquired” as we learn. And even when we find something that is “in us,” we can often find a way to modulate or mask it. Given all this, sometimes the best–and certainly most convincing–evidence that some trait is inborn rather than acquired is simple, honest testimony.Such is the case, I think, with homosexuality. In Jonathan Rauch‘s remarkable and moving memoir Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul (The Atlantic Books, 2013) the author explores exactly what it was like to deny his own sexual orientation for over two decades. Actually, “deny” is not really the right word, at least for what Rauch did in his early years. To “deny” is to realize the possibility of something and reject it. For much of his early life, Rauch never even entertained the idea he was gay, so he couldn’t very well deny it. It just wasn’t possible. He thought he was just weird.But as he matured, it did dawn on him that maybe, just maybe, he might be gay. Not surprisingly given the prejudice against homosexuality at the time he was growing up, the very possibility frightened him. He did not want to be gay. Who would want to be gay? Why would you put yourself through that? So he denied it. Until there came a time when he met kind, loving people who told him that he really should and could be who he was. They would help him. And they did. Jonathan Rauch then became what he had never really been–Jonathan Rauch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

What does it mean to be gay? According to many people, gayness is simply homosexuality – a sexual orientation. However, as David M. Halperin argues in his new book How to be Gay (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), being gay is about more than just sex. In fact, gay men learn how to develop a gay cultural subjectivity through other gay men. Gay culture is phenomenon that is as often denied as it is accepted, as is evidenced by the many stereotypes often associated with gay people, played out in movies and TV shows on a regular basis. Halperin argues that there is a “queer way of feeling,” and that gay subjectivity should be discussed and studied, not dismissed and denied. Despite the catchy title, How to be Gay is a thoroughly academic and detailed book, which seriously dives into the research of gay subjectivity and style. In this interview, he explains how modern day gay identity has been promoted at the expense of gay subjectivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratization of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), Patricia Gherovici unpacks the ways in which hysteria, Lacanian-style, functions. Approaching her topic, transgenderism, from many angles, she takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the transgender turn is changing clinical thinking and practice. The person who comes into the consulting room with questions about “being in the right body” sheds light on the culture and perhaps especially the culture of psychoanalysis. Arguing against a more traditional Lacanian view that the refusal to accept sexual difference is indicative of a psychotic structure, Gherovici details why she thinks otherwise. She is passionate and informed and true to her training all at once. NBiP senses that she is an unusual psychoanalytic scholar who is exhaustive in her cross-disciplinary research and so brings to us many challenging and provocative questions. Her thinking has strong foundations and her intellectual scaffolding is made of only the finest material. To analysts, anthropologists, activists, queer and feminist theorists, philosophers and historians, Patricia Gherovici has something to say. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Here’s a study-guide prepared to accompany the interview.For as much as recent decades have witnessed a patriarchal backlash against the growing visibility of LGBTQ people in North American society, there is another, increasingly popular narrative embodied by Dan Savage’s ubiquitous internet promise: “It gets better.” As barriers to equal treatment under the law are removed and the state incorporates gender and sexual diversity under its protective umbrella — marriage rights extended, prohibitions to military service lifted, etc — queer politics get folded into the progressive march of the West toward equity and tolerance.But what about for queer people whose land is violently occupied by the very body politic going about all this incorporating? As Scott Lauria Morgensen powerfully articulates in his new book, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Indigenous Two-Spirit activists work for both decolonization and sexual freedom within their homelands, resisting state incorporation, cultural appropriation, and narratives of their “disappearance.”Brilliantly extending (and intervening) on the work of earlier theorists, Morgensen traces how modern sexual identities are built upon the replacement of indigenous sexuality and the development of settler colonialism in what is now the United States and Canada. “Native and queer studies must regard settler colonialism as a key condition of modern sexuality on stolen land,” Morgensen argues, “and use this analysis to explain the power of settler colonialism among Native and non-Native People.”This is not simply an indictment. Morgensen shows how conversations between Natives and non-Natives can open up new frameworks for political activism and scholarly research, so long as they remain accountable to the ongoing colonization of Native lands. As mainstream LGBTQ organizations abandon their social movement pasts, Morgensen work is a clarion call for a new wave of decolonial queer organizing.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies