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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 Queer Festivals: Challenging Collective Identities in a Transnational Europe (2018) - synopsis: 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 as well as the role of festivals as significant repertoires of collective action and sites of identitarian explorations in contemporary Europe.
Image one: E-book titled Queer between the Covers: Histories of Queer Publishing and Publishing Queer Voices (2021) - synopsis: Queer Between the Covers presents a history of radical queer publishing and literature from 1880 to the modern day. Chronicling the gay struggle for acceptance and liberation, this book demonstrates how the fight for representation was often waged secretly between the covers of books at a time when public spaces for queer identities were limited. The chapters provide an array of voices and histories – from the famous, Derek Jarman and Oscar Wilde, to the lesser-known and underappreciated John Wieners and Valerie Taylor. It includes first-hand accounts of seminal moments in queer history, including the birth of Hazard Press and the Defend Gay’s the Word Bookshop campaign in the 1980s.
Image two: 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, author 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 one: E-book titled Queer Korea (2020) - synopsis: Since the end of the 19th century, the Korean people have faced successive waves of foreign domination, authoritarian regimes, forced dispersal, and divided development. Throughout these turbulent times, “queer” Koreans were ignored, minimized, and erased in narratives of their modern nation, East Asia, and the wider world. This interdisciplinary volume challenges such marginalization through critical analyses of non-normative sexuality and gender variance. Considering both personal and collective forces, the contributors recount a range of illuminating topics, from shamanic rituals during the colonial era and B-grade comedy films under Cold War dictatorship to female masculinity among today’s youth and transgender confrontations with the resident registration system.
Image two: E-book titled Everyday Revolutions: Remaking Gender, Sexuality, and Culture in 1970s Australia (2019) - synopsis: Everyday Revolutions brings together new research on the cultural and social impact of the feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1970s in Australia. Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation movements erupted, challenging almost every aspect of Australian life. Everyday Revolutions is unique in its focus on the women’s and gay and lesbian movements’ cultural and social dimensions. It is a diverse and rich collection of essays that reminds us that women’s and gay liberation were revolutionary movements.
Image one: E-book titled Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (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.
Image two: E-book titled Man-Made Woman: The Dialectics of Cross-Dressing (2017) - synopsis: On July 27th, 2015, Colin Cremin overcame a lifetime of fear and repression and came to work dressed as a woman called Ciara. This book charts her personal journey as a male-to-female cross-dresser in the ever-changing world of gender politics. Interweaving the personal and the political, through discussions of fetishism, aesthetics and popular culture, Man-Made Woman explores gender, identity and pleasure through the lenses of feminism, Marxism and psychoanalytic theory.
Image one: E-book titled The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies (2021) - synopsis: This encyclopedia takes an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to trans studies. Entries address a wide range of topics, from broad concepts, to specific subjects, to key historical figures, events, and organizations. Entries focus on diverse lives, identities, and contexts, including the experiences of trans people in different racial, religious, and sexual communities in the United States and the variety of ways that gender is expressed in other countries.
Image two: E-book titled Envisioning Global LGBT 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 chapters are bursting with invaluable first hand insights from leading activists at the forefront of some of the most fiercely fought battlegrounds of contemporary sexual politics in India, the Caribbean, and Africa. As well, authors from Canada, Botswana, and Kenya examine key turning points in the advancement of SOGI issues at the United Nations, and provide critical insights on LGBT asylum in Canada. Authors also speak to a need to reorient and decolonize queer studies, and turn a critical gaze northwards from the Global South.
Image one: E-book titled Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement (2013) - synopsis: Covers the history of lesbian and gay 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 Gender in Focus: Identities, Codes, Stereotypes, and Politics (2018) - synopsis: This book deals with the interplay between identities, codes, stereotypes and politics governing the various constructions and deconstructions of gender in several Western and non-Western societies (Germany, Italy, Serbia, Romania, Cameroon, Indonesia, Vietnam, and others). Readers are invited to discover the realm of gender studies and to reflect upon the transformative potentialities of globalization and inter-culturality.
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 James Baldwin: Living in Fire (2019) - synopsis: In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-American writer who changed the face of Western politics and culture. As a lifelong anti-imperialist, black queer advocate, and feminist, Baldwin (1924-1987) was a passionate chronicler of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. war against Vietnam, Palestinian liberation struggle, and the rise of LGBTQ rights. Mullen explores how Baldwin's life and work channel the long history of African-American freedom struggles, and explains how Baldwin both predicted and has become a symbol of the global Black Lives Matter movement.
Image one: E-book titled Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration (2018) - synopsis: In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang’s work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that has been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity.
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. As explained through first-person accounts and traditional legends, myths, and folk tales, the presence of transgender individuals informs Inuit relationships to one another and to the world at large, transcending the dualities of male and female, human and animal, human and spirit.
Image one: LGBTQ+ Pride Month
Image two: E-book titled The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom (2018) - synopsis: The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition.
Image three: E-book titled Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (2019) - synopsis: While LGBTQ history dates to ancient civilizations such as Ancient Egypt and Greece, LGBTQ studies remains a relatively new field. It covers constantly evolving developments as laws are challenged, activism expands, and LGBTQ topics grab headlines. Students and researchers need the most current information available to make sense of both contemporary and historical discussions.
