This collection of thoughtful, courageous, and honest essays explores the intersections of class background, social status, and "queerness," challenging the often narrow and rigid definition of gay and lesbian community. Queerly Classed highlights the voices of those whose experiences of class-combined with race, ethnicity, gender, ability, and age to explode stereotypes of queers aspiring to assimilate into the mainstream of the American middle class.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture is a vibrant and rapidly evolving segment of the American mosaic. This book gives students and general readers a current guide to the people and issues at the forefront of contemporary LGBTQ America. Included are more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries on literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual issues, and numerous other topics. Entries are written by distinguished authorities and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students in social studies, history, and literature classes will welcome this book's illumination of American cultural diversity. LGBTQ Americans have endured many struggles, and during the last decade in particular they have made tremendous contributions to our multicultural society. Drawing on the expertise of numerous expert contributors, this book gives students and general readers a current overview of contemporary LGBTQ American culture. Sweeping in scope, the encyclopedia looks at literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual practices, and various other areas. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. While extensive biographical entries give readers a sense of the lives of prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans, the many topical entries provide full coverage of the challenges and contributions for which these people are known. The encyclopedia supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about cultural diversity, and it supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn about LGBTQ writers and their works.

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.

Employing feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, Global Justice and Desire addresses economy as a key ingredient in the dynamic interplay between modes of subjectivity, signification and governance. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book proposes that both analyzing justice through the lens of desire, and considering desire through the lens of justice, are vital for exploring economic processes. A variety of approaches for capturing the complex and dynamic interplay of justice and desire in socioeconomic processes are taken up. But, acknowledging a complexity of forces and relations of power, domination, and violence – sometimes cohering and sometimes contradictory – it is the relationship between hierarchical gender arrangements, relations of exploitation, and their colonial histories that is stressed. Therefore, queer, feminist, and postcolonial perspectives intersect as Global Justice and Desire explores their capacity to contribute to more just, and more desirable, economies.

This is an original study of women self-identified as working-class and lesbian, showing the significance of class and sexuality in their biographies, everyday lives and identities. It provides insight, a critique of queer theory and an empirical interrogation of the embodied, spatial and material intersection of class and sexuality.

In Transformations of Gender and Race, you'll discover superb contemporary thinking in cultural studies, post-colonial theory, gender theory, queer theory, and clinical and research work with numerous populations who have been overlooked and undertheorized. You'll gain a wealth of knowledge and expertise from its contributors who have been immersed in the issues they address.

Transformations of Gender and Race will help you become a better therapist by arming you with new theories and practices that concern inclusiveness of identity, psyche, and culture in the therapy room. This book radically shifts current thinking in systemic theory and practice with individuals, children, couples, and families, giving you a fresh perspective on working with your clients of all cultural backgrounds and both genders. In Transformations of Gender and Race: Family and Developmental Perspectives, you’ll discover superb contemporary thinking in cultural studies, post-colonial theory, gender theory, queer theory, and clinical and research work with numerous populations who have been overlooked and undertheorized. You’ll gain a wealth of knowledge and expertise from its contributors who have been immersed in the issues they address. The chapters in Transformations of Gender and Race provide a superb, state-of-the-art bibliography of contemporary thinking in cultural studies, post-colonial theory, and clinical and research work with numerous populations who have been “overlooked and undertheorized.” The new paradigms dicussed and practiced in Transformations in Gender and Race encourage cultural multiplicity, inclusiveness, and understanding. A pallete of contemporary thinking, this insightful book will guide you in: how to bring diversity into the lived experience of young children numerous theoretical paradigms couples therapy men’s work and children addressing the intersections of gender, race, class, and culture in the therapy room transformations regarding race and gender the inclusiveness of feminism A wealth of expertise and sharp observation that reaches out to enrich and humanize therapy practices, Transformations of Gender and Race addresses the interactions between gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and age. Creative and in-depth, this volume articulates a perspective that connects all of these contexts of potential oppression and privilege. You will gain a deeper understanding of numerous theoretical paradigms for working with couples, individuals, and children that will improve your practice.

How well does social policy serve this understudied population? Although public policy and social programs responding to the AIDS and hate crime epidemics of the past decades are supposed to be designed for the working-class gay man, in actuality they have been based more on socioeconomic bias, stereotype, and anecdote than on social science. What do these men actually want and need? How well do programs work for them? The answers are found in Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men, the landmark international study that is among the first to empirically examine the lives, attitudes, needs, and concerns of this hidden population. Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men reports on research conducted throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand using a broad-based sample of working-class men. Using ethnographic techniques, researchers systematically captured and analyzed the social themes of their lives. The impressively detailed and consistent results should compel policymakers to rethink their assumptions about working-class gay men. This carefully conducted scientific research project also provides a forum where the men's own voices can be heard. Topics include: What gives them the strength to cope with violence, homophobia, AIDS, and discrimination? How can they come out to their families, friends, and coworkers? How do rural gay and bisexual men handle their isolation? What kinds of social support networks do they have? How do Latino gay men handle the double discrimination of gay and minority status? What kinds of social services would reach these men? What are the risk factors and protective factors in their lives? How do socioeconomic factors affect them? Working-Class Gay and Bisexual Men is a powerfully persuasive work of scholarship with broad-ranging implications. Social workers, policymakers, AIDS activists, and anyone else concerned with the lives of gay and bisexual men will find this informative study an essential tool for designing effective programs.

Once only a topic among women in the private sphere, motherhood and mothering have become important intellectual topics across academic disciplines. Even so, no book has yet devoted a sustained look at how exploring mothering rhetorics – the rhetorics of reproduction (rhetorics about the reproductive function of women/mothers) and reproducing rhetorics (the rhetorical reproduction of ideological systems and logics of contemporary culture) expand our understanding of mothering, motherhood, communication, and gender. Mothering Rhetorics begins to fill this gap for scholars and teachers interested in the study of mothering rhetorics in their historical and contemporary permutations. The contributions explore the racialized rhetorical contexts of maternity; how fixing food is thought to fix families, while also regulating maternal activities and identity; how Black female breastfeeding activists resisted the exploitation of African-American mothers in Detroit; how women in pink-collar occupations both adhere to and challenge maternity leave discourses by rhetorically positioning their leaves as time off and (dis)ability; identifying verbal and nonverbal shaming practices related to unwed motherhood during the mid-twentieth century; and redefining alternative postpartum placenta practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Studies in Communication.

This work challenges the field of British cultural studies to return to the question of social class as a primary focus of study. The chapters examine contemporary working-class life and its depiction in the media through a number of case studies on topics such as popular cinema, football, romance magazines and club culture. The essays pose methodologies for understanding working-class responses to dominant culture, and explore the contradictions and limitations of the traditional Marxist model. The book's contributors conclude that it is time for cultural theorists to revisit issues of working-class cultural formations and to renew the original radical intentions of the discipline by reintegrating class analysis into social templates of race, sexuality and gender.