To celebrate Pride Month throughout June, check out these five books that discuss important figures in the LGBTQ+ community and the issues surrounding the fight for gay rights.
Lana and Lily Wachowski
Cael M. Keegan
Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis’ films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn “to sense beyond the limits of the given world.” Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Forthcoming in November 2018
Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground
Yetta Howard
In Ugly Differences, Yetta Howard uses underground contexts to theorize queer difference by locating ugliness at the intersection of the physical, experiential, and textual. From that nexus, Howard contends that ugliness—as a mode of pejorative identification—is fundamental to the cultural formations of queer female sexuality. Ugly Differences offers eye-opening ways to approach queerness and its myriad underground representations. Forthcoming in July 2018
Vita Sexualis: Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science
Ralph M. Leck
Ralph M. Leck returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. Leck’s analysis situates sexual science in a context that includes politics, aesthetics, the languages of science, and the ethics of gender. Original and audacious, Vita Sexualis uses a bedrock figure’s scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.
The Battle over Marriage: Gay Rights Activism through the Media
Leigh Moscowitz
In this thorough analysis, Leigh Moscowitz examines how prominent news outlets presented this issue from 2003 to 2012, a time when intense news coverage focused unprecedented attention on gay and lesbian life. During this time, LGBT rights leaders sought to harness the power of media to advocate for marriage equality and to reform their community’s public image.
Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities
Karma R. Chavez
The battles for LGBTQ rights and immigrant rights have captured significant attention in the U.S. public sphere throughout the twenty-first century. Both movements, which are largely understood to be separate, have advocated a politics of inclusion in and assimilation to mainstream national values. Advocating a politics of the present and drawing from women of color and queer of color theory, this book contends that coalition enables a vital understanding of how queerness and immigration, citizenship and belonging, and inclusion and exclusion are linked.
