Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class focuses on the crossover of queer and class, examining a range of texts across languages and genres and spanning nearly a century. This collection of chapters considers the intersection of queer and class in relation to literary aesthetics, a locus in which the interaction between sexuality and class is rendered with lucidity. Each chapter puts forward class and its manifestations as central to queer analysis of literary and cultural texts in historical and contemporary contexts. The readings adopt Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional paradigm by pointing to its activist as well as literary precedents and elaborations. These chapters emerged from a long-standing collaboration among three Central European universities whose faculty and graduate students established a joint queer literature and theory research seminar. They are supplemented by a roundtable discussion in which the contributing authors and their colleagues discuss how the concepts of queer and class in theory and (academic) practice have informed their current and previous work. Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class is intended for scholars in gender and queer studies.

Since the 1960s American and Western European gays have set the agenda for sexual liberation and defined its emergence. Western models of homosexuality often provide the only globally recognizable frameworks for discussing gay and lesbian cultures around the world, and thus Western interpretive schemes are imposed on non-Western societies. At the same time, gay and lesbian lifestyles in emerging countries do not always neatly fit Western paradigms, and data from those countries often clash with dominant Western models. So too, the literature of emerging countries often depicts homosexuality in ways which challenge the existing tools of Western literary critics. The thirteen contributors to this book examine the implied imposition of a heavily capitalistic, white, and generally male model of homosexuality on the emerging world. By combining postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches, this volume suggests alternative frameworks for describing sexuality around the world and for exploring non-Western literary representations of gay and lesbian lifestyles. The volume concludes with a chapter assessing new questions in both postcolonial and queer theorizing that suggest common concerns and many avenues for future research.

The Routledge Queer Studies Reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of Queer Studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The collection is edited by two of the leading scholars in the field and presents: individual introductory notes that situate each work within its historical, disciplinary and theoretical contexts essays grouped by key subject areas including Genealogies, Sex, Temporalities, Kinship, Affect, Bodies, and Borders writings by major figures including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David M. Halperin, José Esteban Muñoz, Elizabeth Grosz, David Eng, Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed. The Routledge Queer Studies Reader is a field-defining volume and presents an illuminating guide for established scholars and also those new to Queer Studies.

Emblematic of change and transgression, the trickster has inappropriately become the methodological tool for conservative cultural studies analysis, Mutha' is Half a Word strives to break that convention.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

According to David Halperin, sexuality in our time is typified by a "crisis in contemporary sexual definition". What is sexuality? What does it mean to have a sexual identity or orientation? What is the relationship between sexuality as a knowledge construct, on one hand, and the often messy flows of desire and practices of love, on the other? How and why are some sexual, erotic, and intimate practices normalized and others marginalized? Queer Theory has emerged in the West as one of the most provocative analytical tools in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes identity and social structures that take heteronormativity for granted – that do not question the social construction of heterosexuality as normative in relation to its oppositional binary, homosexuality. At the same time, bisexuality is a practice, identity, and orientation that challenges the binary logic around which cultural notions of sexuality are organized. It is a portal to the imagination of a world of amorous expression beyond that divide. This provocative collection presents bisexuality and queer theory as two parallel thought collectives that have made significant contributions to cultural discourses about sexual and amorous practices since the onset of the AIDS era, and explores the ideas that circulate in these thought collectives today. We learn much about the construction and experience of sexuality, and the power it still holds throughout the contemporary Western world to shape identities and practices. This volume challenges our understanding of what it means to be sexual, to have a sexual identity, and to practise the arts of loving. This book was orginally published as a special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality.

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention An unprecedented contemporary account of the online and offline lives of rural LGBT youth From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker’s Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today’s rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important book shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age.