In Post-Queer Politics, Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics. He offers a radical and intersectional new way of thinking about class, race, sex, gender, sexuality and ability that extends beyond queer studies to be truly transdisciplinary in its focus and political implications. It will appeal to readers across a range of subjects, including gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and education.

In Post-Queer Politics, Ruffolo looks at the work of Foucault, Butler, Bakhtin, Deleuze, Guattari and others in his creative refocus on the queer/heteronormative dyad that has largely consumed queer studies and contemporary politics. He offers a radical and intersectional new way of thinking about class, race, sex, gender, sexuality and ability that extends beyond queer studies to be truly transdisciplinary in its focus and political implications. It will appeal to readers across a range of subjects, including gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and education.

Makes the provocative claim that queer theory has run its course, made obsolete by the elaboration of its own logic within capitalism.

Queer Studies is designed as an advanced undergraduate textbook in queer studies for this rapidly growing field. It is also appropriate as a required or recommended graduate textbook. The author uses the overarching concept of queering as a way of looking at the lives of queer people across a range of disciplines.

Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of ReparativeReturn examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking; specifically the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term “Queer Retrosexuality” marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness—to illustrate not only how to “queer” retrospection, but also how retrospection, in some senses can be thought of as always already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven, Sarah Schulman’s Shimmer, and Mark Merlis’s American Studies—all texts that return to a traumatic past marked by shame, exile, and persecution. Queer Retrosexualities inquires into what motivates the return in these texts to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; but more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backwards could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production. Even while it seems counterproductive to return to a historical moment that is marked by the persecution of sexual and racial minorities, the book examines how a shared feeling of relationality and community produced by the exile of shame shapes the political value of queer retrosexualities. The retrospective return to the 1950s allows queer thinking to move away from the commodification of queer culture in the present that masquerades as progress. Thus, the book theorizes how traumatic history becomes a valuable resource for the political project of assembling collective memory as the base materials for imagining a different—and more queer—future.

Sounding Like a No-No traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's innovative readings of performers including Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, Stevie Wonder, Eartha Kitt, and Meshell Ndegeocello demonstrate how embodied sound and performance became a means for creativity, transgression, and social critique, a way to reclaim imaginative and corporeal freedom from the social death of slavery and its legacy of racism, to engender new sexualities and desires, to escape the sometimes constrictive codes of respectability and uplift from within the black community, and to make space for new futures for their listeners. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

"Stephen Vider considers how the meanings of domesticity shifted for gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s to early 1980s, from a site of supposed isolation or deviance, to a source of identity, community, and pleasure. His manuscript reveals the multiple uses, appeals, and limits of domesticity for LGBTQ people in the post-World War II period, in their efforts to make social and sexual connections, and to appeal for expanded rights and freedoms. For example, the 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of gay communal households that proved to be seedbeds for alternative modes of domesticity, using the privacy of domestic space to achieve broader social and political changes. Vider brings a novel perspective to gay identity and culture, examining domesticity as a meeting point between practices and discourse, the local and national, the private and the public"--

The belief of many in the early sexual liberation movements was that capitalism's investment in the norms of the heterosexual family meant that any challenge to them was invariably anti-capitalist. In recent years, however, lesbian and gay subcultures have become increasingly mainstream and commercialized - as seen, for example, in corporate backing for pride events - while the initial radicalism of sexual liberation has given way to relatively conservative goals over marriage and adoption rights. Meanwhile, queer theory has critiqued this 'homonormativity', or assimilation, as if some act of betrayal had occurred. In Sex, Needs and Queer Culture, David Alderson seeks to account for these shifts in both queer movements and the wider society, and argues powerfully for a distinctive theoretical framework. Through a critical reassessment of the work of Herbert Marcuse, as well as the cultural theorists Raymond Williams and Alan Sinfield, Alderson asks whether capitalism is progressive for queers, evaluates the distinctive radicalism of the counterculture as it has mutated into queer, and distinguishes between avant-garde protest and subcultural development. In doing so, the book offers new directions for thinking about sexuality and its relations to the broader project of human liberation.

Between 2009 and 2014, an anti-homosexuality law circulating in the Ugandan parliament came to be the focus of a global conversation about queer rights. The law attracted attention for the draconian nature of its provisions and for the involvement of US evangelical Christian activists who were said to have lobbied for its passage. Focusing on the Ugandan case, this book seeks to understand the encounters and entanglements across geopolitical divides that produce and contest contemporary queerphobias. It investigates the impact and memory of the colonial encounter on the politics of sexuality, the politics of religiosity of different Christian denominations, and the political economy of contemporary homophobic moral panics. In addition, Out of Time places the Ugandan experience in conversation with contemporaneous developments in India and Britain--three locations that are yoked together by the experience of British imperialism and its afterlives. Intervening in a queer theoretical literature on temporality, Rahul Rao argues that time and space matter differently in the queer politics of postcolonial countries. By employing an intersectional analysis and drawing on a range of sources, Rao offers an original interpretation of why queerness mutates to become a metonym for categories such as nationality, religiosity, race, class, and caste. The book argues that these mutations reveal the deep grammars forged in the violence that founds and reproduces the social institutions in which queer difference struggles to make space for itself.

Following debates surrounding the anti-social turn in queer theory in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the role of activism, the limits of the political, and the question of normativity and ethics. Queer Futures engages with these concerns, exploring issues of complicity and agency with a central focus on the material and economic as well as philosophical dimensions of sexual politics. Presenting some of the latest research in queer theory, this book draws together diverse perspectives to shed light on possible ’queer futures’ when different affective, temporal, and local contexts are brought into play. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural, political, literary, and social theory, as well as those with interests in gender and sexuality, activism, and queer theory.