New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press 2022) is a new addition to a list of publications by Sabine Fruhstuck, one of the leading scholars in the world on the topic. Written for both academics and the general public alike, this book introduces and discusses debates about sex, gender, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Japan, spanning from the 1860s to the 2020s. In Fruhstuck’s own words, this book aims to “balance descriptions of individual experience; institutional mechanisms based in law, pedagogy, and statecraft; and the socioculturally inflected politics within which those mechanisms have been embedded and which they have in turn shaped over an extended period that began with the nation- and empire-building of the late nineteenth century.”The book is divided into seven chapters, each tracing the movements of individuals, ideas, and things between and beyond the nation, empire, and cyberspace. At the end of each chapter, readers can find a handful of recommendations for pairing the text with literary works, documentaries, and other films.As Fruhstuck explains, the chapters share three analytical sensibilities. First, deriving from research in several nations’ archives and bodies of knowledge in Japanese, German, and English, the book is a transnational historical study in which “’Japan’ is configured as a malleable entity, as both a subject and object of global modernity, and a mediator between a global and a regional East Asian modernity.” Second, this book draws from History, Anthropology, Sociology, and Visual Studies, via a wide variety of sources ranging from print media and government documents to biographical accounts, from political pamphlets to pulp comics and contemporary art. Third, this book adopts a sensibility of “flexible intersectionality,” which aims to “invite readers to think at the varying levels of structures, dynamics, and subjectivities.”Sabine Frühstück is Professor and the Koichi Takashima Chair in Japanese Cultural Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Daigengna Duoer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke UP, 2022), Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationships among trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development.The Terrible We is the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipientCameron Awkward-Rich is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Dispatch and Sympathetic Little Monster.Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and women’s liberation, the gay liberation movement, feminist and queer theory, and iconic popular culture artifacts in order to understand gendered and sexual forms in context of gender and sexual fluidity. This is a brilliant book, interdisciplinary in scope and approach, taking the reader on a journey through theoretical frameworks and interpretive understandings of where we often see queer forms, and what we think about those forms. Fawaz notes that he is working to tell a story, interpreting cultural artifacts to forefront the ideas from feminist and queer theory, knitting these approaches together to guide us through a fascinating understanding of what we see when we watch films, or television, or read comics, or enjoy Broadway performances. These interpretations provide us with ways of seeing identity and shape within narrative forms and creative storytelling. But Fawaz is also pushing against an excess of thinking that all identities and forms are fluid—instead, Queer Forms (NYU Press, 2022) examines the capacity of identity and forms to, essentially, shapeshift, which is not the same as being fluid, since shapeshifting is an adaption, and thus is not without form itself. Form has little meaning until or unless they are/it is interpreted by others.The thrust of the work that Fawaz is doing in Queer Forms ultimately is about freedom and how we can each exist as free individuals, especially when there are often social and legal rules that constrain us as individuals with distinct identities that traverse a host of markers and qualities. Popular culture artifacts can provide the room and opportunity to imagine identities in different forms and contexts. Queer Forms provides the reader with an archive of culture forms as a kind of gift, helping us to see and understand how we might interpret or reinterpret the queer and feminist past so that we approach our daily contemporary life with that understanding. Fawaz explains the variegated theories that frame these interpretations and gets at this historical foundation—especially of the liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s—in order to engage in a valuable consideration of freedom.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In this episode of the Queer Voices podcast, John Marszalek interviews author John D’Emilio, one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history, about his memoir, Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties (Duke UP, 2022)At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word divorce was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City?Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement.This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.Listeners can receive a 30% discount on the cost of the book by ordering through Duke University Press here using the following discount code: E22DEMIL.A pioneer in the field of LGBTQ studies and the history of sexuality, John D’Emilio is Emeritus Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. John Marszalek III is a co-host of the Queer Voices podcast and author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. On Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Beyond simplistic binaries of the dark continent or Africa Rising, Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra (UNC Press, 2021) examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Shinjuku Ni-chome is a nightlife district in central Tokyo filled with bars and clubs targeting the city's gay male community. Typically understood as a "safe space" where same-sex attracted men and women from across Japan's largest city can gather to find support from a relentlessly heteronormative society, Thomas Baudinette's Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo (U Michigan Press, 2021) reveals that the neighborhood may not be as welcoming as previously depicted in prior literature. Through fieldwork observation and interviews with young men who regularly frequent the neighborhood's many bars, the book reveals that the district is instead a space where only certain performances of gay identity are considered desirable. In fact, the district is highly stratified, with Shinjuku Ni-chome's bar culture privileging "hard" masculine identities as the only legitimate expression of gay desire and thus excluding all those men who supposedly "fail" to live up to these hegemonic gendered ideals. Through careful analysis of media such as pornographic videos, manga comics, lifestyle magazines and online dating services, this book argues that the commercial imperatives of the Japanese gay media landscape and the bar culture of Shinjuku Ni-chome act together to limit the agency of young gay men so as to better exploit them economically. Exploring the direct impacts of media consumption on the lives of four key informants who frequent the district's gay bars in search of community, fun and romance, Regimes of Desire reveals the complexity of Tokyo's most popular "gay town" and intervenes in debates over the changing nature of masculinity in contemporary Japan.Alexandra Hambleton is an assistant professor at Tsuda University in Tokyo, Japan. I write on media, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Japan with a particular interest in pornography and sex-positive feminism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Suicide has been on the rise in recent years, most frighteningly among young people. Suicide is second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34. Gay, lesbian, and transgender youth are at particular risk.Every year in the U.S., more people die by suicide than in car accidents, and more suicide deaths occur than homicide and AIDS deaths combined.In this episode Renee Garfinkel and Hannah Rothstein discuss the myths and facts about suicide, its warning signs, and how friends and family, teachers and others can help.Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project.If you’re thinking about suicide or you’re in crisis right now,In U.S. call or text 988 or contact 988lifeline.org to talk with someone online.In Israel: call suicide hotline *1201 (press 3 for languages, then select English).Hannah Rothstein, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York, Crisis Counselor for the Trevor Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan), Merrick D. Pilling urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental illness beyond the diagnoses that specifically target gender and sexual dissidence. In this first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to queer and trans experiences of mental distress, Pilling advances a broad critique of the biomedical model of mental illness as it pertains to 2SLGBTQ people, arguing that Mad Studies is especially amenable to making sense of queer and trans madness. Based on empirical data from two qualitative research studies, this book includes analyses of inpatient chart documentation from a psychiatric hospital and interviews with those who have experienced distress. Using an intersectional lens, Pilling critically examines what constitutes mental health treatment and the impacts of medical strategies on mad queer and trans people. Ultimately, Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice explores the emancipatory promise of queer and trans madness, advocating for more resources to respond to crisis and distress in ways that are non-coercive, non-carceral, and honour autonomy as well as interdependence within 2SLGBTQ communities.Clayton Jarrard works at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives that bridge research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of cultural anthropology, queer studies, disability studies, mad studies, and religious studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

In Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Duke UP, 2021), Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies

Why isn’t there a queer subfield in philosophy? How has institutionalized philosophy continued to develop without a recognized specialization in queer philosophy? What would it mean to care queerly for philosophy? And how might that change not only the field, but the possibilities for living? These are just some of the questions raised by Kim Q. Hall in Queering Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). Hall diagnoses philosophy’s straight habits and shows how an intersectional approach to queering philosophy can allow us to practice philosophy otherwise. By building a promiscuous archive to think along with many questioners of dominate norms, Hall argues for a pursuit of wisdom that is relational, experimental, and attuned to other ways of life.Sarah Tyson is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/lgbtq-studies