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Image one: E-book titled Understanding James Baldwin (2019) - synopsis: The Harlem-born son of a storefront preacher, James Baldwin died almost thirty years ago, but his spirit lives on in the eloquent and still-relevant musings of his novels, short stories, essays, and poems. What concerned him most—as a black man, as a gay man, as an American—were notions of isolation and disconnection at both the individual and communal level and a conviction that only in the transformative power of love could humanity find any hope of healing its spiritual and social wounds. In Understanding James Baldwin, Marc K. Dudley reveals Baldwin's career spanning the civil rights movement and beyond, writing about race, sexual identity, and gendered politics, while traveling the world to promote dialogue on those issues.
Image two: E-book titled S/he: Sex and Gender in Hispanic Cultures (2017) - synopsis: The main title, S/HE, is a nod to the arguably-gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun from the 1960s inclusive English-language movement in the United States, which was concurrent with equal rights movements in terms of race, ethnicity, sex and gender. This book focuses on sex and gender issues in the Hispanic worlds, paying homage to all who do not fit within the strict parameters of previous definitions by including broadened descriptions of identity, both biological and social, and by highlighting aspects of traditional and non-traditional lifestyles as portrayed in art and literature.
Image one: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements (2013) - synopsis: The Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements covers the history of this movement through a cross-referenced dictionary with entries on specific countries and regions, influential historical figures, laws that criminalized same-sex sexuality, various historical terms that have been used to refer to aspects of same-sex love, and contemporary events and legal decisions.
Image two: E-book titled Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality makes an intervention into the fields of clinical psychoanalysis and sexuality studies, in an effort to think about a range of issues relating to sexuality from a clinical psychoanalytic perspective. This book concentrates on a number of concepts, such as identity, desire, pleasure, and more. The editors, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, have chosen queer theory, a sub-field of sexuality studies, as an interlocutor for the clinical contributors, because it is at the forefront of theoretical considerations of sexuality, as well as being both reliant upon and suspicious of psychoanalysis as a clinical practice and discourse.
Image one: E-book titled The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018) - synopsis: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom explores how the fantasies of genre, marketing, and children can never fully cloak the queerness lurking within the plucky families designed for American viewers' comic delight. Queer readings of family sitcoms demolish myths of yesteryear, demonstrating the illusion of American sexual innocence in television's early programs and its lasting consequences in the nation's self-construction, as they also allow fresh insights into the ways in which more recent programs negotiate new visions of sexuality while indebted to previous narrative traditions.
Image two: E-book titled After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics (2014) - synopsis: Through its increasing entanglement with capitalism, James Penney, controversially argues that queer theory has run its course. However, the 'end of queer' should not signal the death of liberatory sexual politics; rather, it presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics. The book makes a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis, via Freud and Lacan, and conducts a critical examination of queer theory's most famous proponents, including Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Image one: E-book titled Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (2014) - synopsis: Alan Turing is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Best known as the genius who broke Germany's most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also a gay man and the father of the modern computer. Here, B. Jack Copeland provides an account of Turing's life and work, exploring the key elements of his life-story in tandem with his leading ideas and contributions.
Image two: E-book titled Inscrutable Belongings: Queer Asian North American Fiction (2018) - synopsis: Despite many antagonistic forces, the examined texts' protagonists achieve a revolutionary form of narrative centrality through the defiant act of speaking out, recounting their 'survival plots,' and enduring to the very last page. These feats are made possible through their construction of alternative social structures Stephen Hong Sohn calls 'inscrutable belongings.' Collectively, the texts that Sohn examines bring to mind foundational struggles for queer Asian North Americans (and other socially marginalized groups) and confront a broad range of issues, including interracial desire, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, transnational mobility, and postcolonial trauma.
Image one: E-book titled Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History (2018) - synopsis: Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities.
Image two: E-book titled Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices (2015) - synopsis: Meet Katie, Hayden, Dean, Brooke, David, Julia, and Natasha. Each is transgender, and in this book, they share their personal stories. Through their narratives, you'll get to know and love each person for their humor, intelligence, perseverance, and passion. You'll learn how they each came to better understand, accept, and express their gender identities, and you'll follow them through the sorrows and successes of their personal journeys. Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be transgender in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process.
Image one: E-book titled Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (2011) - synopsis: Odd Couples is the first comprehensive history of registered partnership and gay marriage in Scandinavia. It traces the origins of laws which initially were extremely controversial-inside and outside the gay community-but have now gained broad popular and political support, as well as the positive effects and risks involved in state recognition of lesbian and gay couples. Through a comparison of how these laws have been received and practiced in all of the Scandinavian countries, including Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the author presents a nuanced study of a fascinating political process that began in the 1960s and continues to change the way we understand family, sexuality and nation.
Image two: E-book titled Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance, and Hope (2018) - synopsis: Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights: (Neo)colonialism, Neoliberalism, Resistance and Hope is an outcome of a five-year international collaboration among partners that share a common legacy of British colonial laws that criminalize same-sex intimacy and gender identity/expression. The project sought to facilitate learning from each other and to create outcomes that would advance knowledge and social justice. The project was unique, combining research and writing with participatory documentary filmmaking. This visionary politics infuses the pages of the anthology.
Image one: E-book titled Derrida and Queer Theory (2017) - synopsis: This long-awaited volume of essays are compelling as they exuberantly take readers of Derrida to new, queerer heights and depths of understanding. Superbly edited and presented by Christian Hite, this book belongs in every collection of works on Derrida, deconstruction, or queer theory.
Image two: E-book titled Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth: Gender, Shamanism, and the Third Sex (2018) - synopsis: Ujarak, Iqallijuq, and Kupaaq were elders from the Inuit community on Igloolik Island in Nunavut. The three elders, among others, shared with Bernard Saladin d'Anglure the narratives which make up the heart of Inuit Stories of Being and Rebirth. Through their words, and historical sources recorded by Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, Saladin d'Anglure examines the Inuit notion of personhood and its relationship to cosmology and mythology. Central to these stories are womb memories, narratives of birth and reincarnation, and the concept of the third sex—an intermediate identity between male and female.
Image one: LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Image two: E-book titled Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe (2018) - synopsis: At queer festivals, activists, artists and participants come together to build new forms of sociability and practice their ideals through anti-binary and inclusive idioms of gender and sexuality. These ideals are moreover channeled through a series of organizational and cultural practices that aim at the emergence of queer as a collective identity. Through the study of festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, and Oslo, Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe thoughtfully analyses the role of activist practices in the building of collective identities for social movement studies.
Image three: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016) - synopsis: Author Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at more than 400 American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
