The books here are a selected representation of what is available. Search the library catalog to discover more!
Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture
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The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival
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Tinsley engages 2017–2020 Black femme cultural production that colorfully and provocatively imagines freedom in the stark white face of its impossibility. Looking to the music of Janelle Monáe and Kelsey Lu, Janet Mock's writing for the television show Pose, the fashion of Indya Moore and (F)empower, and the films of Tourmaline and Juliana Huxtable, as well as poetry and novels, The Color Pynk conceptualizes Black femme as a set of consciously, continually rescripted cultural and aesthetic practices that disrupts conventional meanings of race, gender, and sexuality. There is an exuberant defiance in queer Black femininity, Tinsley finds—so that Black femmes continue to love themselves wildly in a world that resists their joy.
Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life
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Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture
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Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire
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In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence.
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within U.S. Slave Culture
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The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century.
Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
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Analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. Neal argues that black men and boys are bound, in profound ways, to and by their legibility. The most "legible" black male bodies are often rendered as criminal, bodies in need of policing and containment. Ironically, Neal argues, this sort of legibility brings welcome relief to white America, providing easily identifiable images of black men in an era defined by shifts in racial, sexual, and gender.
Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
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Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy's signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world.
Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men From the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis
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This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times—from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism—helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
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An exploration of the lives of young black women in the early twentieth century. Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, cohabitation outside of wedlock, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
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The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects.
No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies
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The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.
Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology
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While over the past decade a number of scholars have done significant work on questions of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered identities, this volume is the first to collect this work and make black queer studies visible as a developing field of study in the United States. Bringing together essays by established and emergent scholars, this collection assesses the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality and highlights the theoretical and political issues at stake in the field of black queer studies.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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Notes from a trip to Russia -- Poetry is not a luxury -- The transformation of silence into language and action -- Scratching the surface : some notes on barriers to women and loving -- Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power -- Sexism : an American disease in blackface -- An open letter to Mary Daly -- Man child : a black lesbian feminist's response -- An interview : Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich -- The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house -- Age, race, class, and sex : women redefining difference
Black Gay Man: Essays
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t turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man will spoil our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity.
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
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Essayist June Jordan presents this collection that follows the more than 40-year span of her writing career, which includes political essays about the incomplete legacy of the civil rights movement as well as more personal essays about her experience as a single mother, and also as a black feminist bisexual.
Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders
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From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. Drawing on her background as a literary critic Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili.
Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low
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Snorton traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in contemporary media and popular culture to show how these portrayals reinforce troubling perceptions of black sexuality. Reworking Eve Sedgwick's notion of the 'glass closet, ' Snorton advances a new theory of such representations in which black sexuality is marked by hypervisibility and confinement, spectacle, and speculation.
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism
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I. African Americans and the new racism -- Why black sexual politics? -- The past is ever present: recognizing the new racism -- Prisons for our bodies, closets for our minds: racism, heterosexism, and black sexuality --
Black Sexualities
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Why does society have difficulty discussing sexualities? Where does fear of Black sexualities emerge and how is it manifested? How can varied experiences of Black females and males who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), or straight help inform dialogue and academic inquiry?From questioning forces that have constrained sexual choices to examining how Blacks have forged healthy sexual identities in an oppressive environment, Black Sexualities acknowledges the diversity of the Black experience and the shared legacy of racism.
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism
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Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. She proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain.
Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South
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Sweet Tea collects more than sixty life stories from black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. E. Patrick Johnson challenges stereotypes of the South as'backward' or 'repressive' and offers a window into the ways black gay men negotiate their identities, build community, maintain friendship networks, and find sexual and life partners--often in spaces and activities that appear to be antigay.
¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba
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Promoting the revolutionary socialist project of equality and dignity for all, the slogan ¡Venceremos! appears throughout Cuba, everywhere from newspapers to school murals to nightclubs. Yet the accomplishments of the Cuban state are belied by the marginalization of blacks, the prejudice against sexual minorities, and gender inequities. ¡Venceremos? is a groundbreaking ethnography on race, desire, and belonging among blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba.
Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy
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Darnell Pritchard provides a theoretical framework for studying the literacy work of Black LGBTQ people, who do not fit into the traditional categories imposed on their language practices and identities. Examining the myriad ways literacy is used to inflict harm, Pritchard discusses how these harmful events prompt Black LGBTQ people to ensure their own survival by repurposing literacy through literacy performances fueled by accountability to self and communal love towards social and political change, a process the author calls “restorative literacies.”
Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities
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In Buller Men and Batty Bwoys, Wesley Crichlow focuses primarily on the lives of nineteen Black gay and bisexual men in Toronto and Halifax, seeks to give voice to those who have been displaced, and explores the process of self-definition in the context of racial, ethnic, and sexual conformity. Crichlow's perceptive study brings to the foreground several concepts, including the role of homophobia in Black identity, and the problematics of Black'heteronormativity,'in relation to Black men who engage in same-sex practices.
Structural Intimacies: Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic
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These stories render such inequalities as racism, poverty, gender power disparities, sexual stigma, and discrimination as central not just to the dramatic, disproportionate spread of HIV in Black communities in the United States, but to the formation of Black sexualities.Sonja Mackenzie elegantly argues that structural vulnerability is felt—quite literally—in the blood, in the possibilities and constraints on sexual lives, and in the rhetorics of their telling.
Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS
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Meticulously researched and evocatively told, Two Lives, Two Deaths is historian Martin Duberman's poignant memorial to those lost to AIDS and to two of the great unsung heroes of the early years of the epidemic. Callen, a white gay Midwesterner who moved to New York, became a leading figure in the movement to increase awareness of AIDS in the face of willful neglect; Hemphill, an African American gay man, contributed to the black gay and lesbian flowering in Washington, D.C., with poetry of searing intensity and introspection.
North Carolina and the Problem of AIDS
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Thirty years after AIDS was first recognized, the American South constitutes the epicenter of the United States'epidemic. Southern states claim the highest rates of new infections, the most AIDS-related deaths, and the largest number of adults and adolescents living with the virus. Moreover, the epidemic disproportionately affects African American communities across the region.
Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men From the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis
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This compelling book recounts the history of black gay men from the 1950s to the 1990s, tracing how the major movements of the times—from civil rights to black power to gay liberation to AIDS activism—helped shape the cultural stigmas that surrounded race and homosexuality.
Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.
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In 1998, the horrific murders of Matthew Shepard- a gay man living in Laramie, Wyoming- and James Byrd Jr.- an African American man dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas- provoked a passionate public outrage. The intense media coverage of the murders made moments of violence based in racism and homophobia highly visible and which eventually led to the passage of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.
Trauma, Stress, and Resilience Among Sexual Minority Women: Rising Like a Phoenix
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This book will increase your knowledge of: developmental issues facing lesbian and bisexual youths the impact of sexual abuse history on the coming out process ethnic/racial differences in trauma among lesbian and bisexual women the prevalence and impact of traumatic experience among HIV+ lesbian and bisexual women the unique stressors facing African-American lesbiansand how they cope organized religion's approaches to homosexuality and how this impacts lesbian and bisexual women.