New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

As the title suggests, Jerry T. Watkins III’s Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism (University Press of Florida, 2018) re-queers this North Florida tourist destination showing how people who defied gender and sexual normalcy found their space in the “Sunshine State” after the Second World War. Despite concerted efforts to police and control what was perceived as...

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. In her new book Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions origin...

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 th...

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...

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...

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...

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 childr...

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 o...

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 cha...

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), Pug...

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...

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 Boo...

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....

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...

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...

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 wh...

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 a...

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/adchoices Suppor...

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...

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 se...

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 c...

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 unc...

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 & Cong...

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 tr...

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...