Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Aging by
The graying of the U.S. population draws increasing focus to historically unattended segments of society, including sexual and gender minorities. In this first comprehensive volume to address the challenges of aging in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex populations, this text presents what is currently known about aging GLBT individuals and what services are needed to support them. The editors first provide an introductory overview comparing caregiving in GLBT and normative aging communities. In chapters devoted to the issues of each alternative sexuality and gender identity community, top experts in the field discuss biomedical, psychological, social/sexual, spiritual, socioeconomic, and service topics related to that community's aging needs. GLBT populations face unique challenges as they age. Despite the often severe difficulties they encounter, many live out their final years with the dignity and grace that all of us deserve. With a combination of the latest biological and social science research, moving case studies and first-person accounts, practical advice for health professionals, and research literature citations, this book represents a major step forward in addressing concerns of aging GLBT populations. Integrating research, practice, and policy, this text is for students and professionals in gerontology, medicine, social work, psychology, nursing, public health, and related fields who wish to learn more about the life experiences and concerns of sexual- and gender-minority-identified older patients.
Lesbian Widows by
The unseen issues of grief and discrimination--lesbians becoming widows The death of a life partner poses unique challenges for lesbians. Lesbian Widows: Invisible Grief reveals the touching and very personal stories of twenty-five women, including the author, who were widowed at a young age and forced to create a new life without their life partners. The book follows the widows from the time the couple met, to the time when one of the partners died, and beyond, to show how the surviving partner coped with her loss. Many lesbians feel that the intimacy felt between two women in love goes deeper than what can be experienced by heterosexual partners. Lesbian Widows: Invisible Grief reveals themes common to all these women's experiences while offering practical advice about coping techniques and resources for support. The widows discuss their efforts to create funerals and memorial services, give their accounts of the overwhelming grief throughout the first two years, and explain the legal and financial discrimination they encountered. The author provides a chapter specifically for caring family and friends, another chapter for professionals working with this sensitive population, and a bibliography of helpful coping resources. Lesbian Widows: Invisible Grief explores the topics of: caregivers/caretaking death and dying grief journeys the similarities and differences between lesbian and married widows the lack of support services for lesbian widows the legal and financial discrimination against lesbian widows the effect of being "in" or "out" on grief recovery the issues faced by widows in starting new relationships spirituality gay marriage Lesbian Widows: Invisible Grief provides an insightful look into the grieving and recovery process, inspiring hope with the knowledge that others have survived this tragedy. This moving book is an essential resource for lesbians, friends and family of lesbians, mental health professionals, medical professionals, psychiatrists, LGBT health providers, feminist and lesbian organizations, and anyone involved with grief training programs such as hospice.
Looking Queer by
Looking Queer: Body Image in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities contains research, firsthand accounts, poetry, theory, and journalistic essays that address and outline the special needs of sexual minorities when dealing with eating disorders and appearance obsession. Looking Queer will give members of these communities hope, insight, and information into body image issues, helping you to accept and to love your body. In addition, scholars, health care professionals, and body image activists will not only learn about queer experiences and identity and how they affect individuals, but will also understand how some of the issues involved affect society as a whole. Dismantling the myth that body image issues affect only heterosexual women, Looking Queer explores body issues based on gender, race, class, age, and disability. Furthermore, this groundbreaking book attests to the struggles, pain, and triumph of queer people in an open and comprehensive manner. More than 60 contributors provide their knowledge and personal experiences in dealing with body image issues exclusive to the gay and transgender communities, including: exploring and breaking down the categories of gender and sexuality that are found in many body image issues finding ways to heal yourself and your community discovering what it means to "look like a dyke" or to "look gay" fearing fat as a sign of femininity determining what race has to do with the gay ideal discussing the stereotyped "double negative"--being a fat lesbian learning strategies of resistance to societal ideals critiquing "the culture of desire" within gay men's communities that emphasizes looks above everything else Revealing new and complex dimensions to body image issues, Looking Queer not only discusses the struggles and hardships of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, but looks at the processes that can lead to acceptance of oneself. Written by both men and women, the topics and research in Looking Queer offer insight into the lives of people you can relate to, enabling you to learn from their experiences so you, too, can find joy and happiness in accepting your body. Visit Dawn Atkin's website at: http://home.earthlink.net/~dawn_atkins/
Out in Psychology by
There has been a recent explosion of interest in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Perspective Psychology amongst students and academics, and this interest is predicted to continue to rise. Recent media debates on subjects such as same-sex marriage have fuelled interest in LGBTQ perspectives. This edited collection showcases the latest thinking in LGBTQ psychology. The book has 21 chapters covering subjects such as same sex parenting, outing, young LGBTQ people, sport, learning disabilities, lesbian and gay identities etc. The book has an international focus, with contributors from UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand
Untimely Interventions by
As atrocity has become characteristic of modern history, testimonial writing has become a major twentieth-century genre. Untimely Interventions relates testimonial writing, or witnessing, to the cultural situation of aftermath, exploring ways in which a culture can be haunted by its own history. Ross Chambers argues that culture produces itself as civilized by denying the forms of collective violence and other traumatic experience that it cannot control. In the context of such denial, personal accounts of collective disaster can function as a form of counter-denial. By investigating a range of writing on AIDS, the First World War, and the Holocaust, Chambers shows how such writing produces a rhetorical effect of haunting, as it seeks to describe the reality of those experiences culture renders unspeakable. Ross Chambers is Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan. His other books includeFacing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author.
Baby, You Are My Religion by
Baby, You Are My Religion argues that American butch-femme bar culture of the mid-20th Century should be interpreted as a sacred space for its community. Before Stonewall--when homosexuals were still deemed mentally ill--these bars were the only place where many could have any community at all. Baby, You are My Religion explores this community as a site of a lived corporeal theology and political space. It reveals that religious institutions such as the Metropolitan Community Church were founded in such bars, that traditional and non-traditional religious activities took place there, and that religious ceremonies such as marriage were often conducted within the bars by staff. Baby, You are My Religion examines how these bars became not only ecclesiastical sites but also provided the fertile ground for the birth of the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights before Stonewall.
Criminal Intimacy by
Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers--as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries--along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and the HIV epidemic--Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves--as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture--Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.
New Perspectives on Environmental Justice by
Women make up the vast majority of activists and organizers of grassroots movements fighting against environmental ills that threaten poor and people of color communities. New Perspectives on Environmental Justice is the first collection of essays that pays tribute to the enormous contributions women have made in these endeavors. The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. The contributors represent a wide variety of activist and scholarly perspectives including law, environmental studies, sociology, political science, history, medical anthropology, American studies, English, African and African American studies, women's studies, and gay and lesbian studies, offering multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism. Feminist/womanist impulses shape and sustain environmental justice movements around the world, making an understanding of gender roles and differences crucial for the success of these efforts.
Safe Space by
Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.
Space, Place, and Sex by
This accessible and engaging book explores the ways that "space, place, and sex" are inextricably linked from the micro to the macro level, from the individual body to the globe. Drawing on queer, feminist, gender, social, and cultural studies, Lynda Johnston and Robyn Longhurst highlight the complex nature of sex and sexuality and how they are connected to both virtual and physical spaces and places. Their aim is to enrich our understanding of sexual identities and practices--whether they be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, queer, or heterosexual. They show that bodies are defined and connected through media such as television, movies, ads, and the Internet, as well as through "real" places such as homes, churches, sports arenas, city streets, beaches, and wilderness. Drawing on a diverse array of historical and contemporary examples, the authors argue convincingly that sexual politics permeate all places and spaces at every level of geographical scale. Thus, they illustrate, sexuality affects the way people live in and interact with space and place, as space and place in turn affect people's sexuality.
Gay Suburban Narratives in American and British Culture by
Martin Dines explores the relationship between the physical and metaphorical spaces of suburbia and the evolution of modern gay identities across a range of British and American film and fiction, looking at the work of Dennis Cooper, Quentin Crisp, Todd Haynes, Christopher Isherwood, Kevin Killian, David Leavitt, Oscar Moore and Edmund White.
Homophobias by
What is it about "the homosexual" that incites vitriolic rhetoric and violence around the world? How and why do some people hate queers? Does homophobia operate differently across social, political, and economic terrains? What are the ambivalences in homophobic discourses that can be exploited to undermine its hegemonic privilege? This volume addresses these questions through critical interrogations of sites where homophobic discourses are produced. It provides innovative analytical insights that expose the complex and intersecting cultural, political, and economic forces contributing to the development of new forms of homophobia. And it is a call to action for anthropologists and other social scientists to examine more carefully the politics, histories, and contexts of places and people who profess hatred for queerness. The contributors to this volume open up the scope of inquiry into processes of homophobia, moving the analysis of a particular form of "hate" into new, wider sociocultural and political fields. The ongoing production of homophobic discourses is carefully analyzed in diverse sites including New York City, Australia, the Caribbean, Greece, India, and Indonesia, as well as American Christian churches, in order to uncover the complex operational processes of homophobias and their intimate relationships to nationalism, sexism, racism, class, and colonialism. The contributors also critically inquire into the limitations of the term homophobia and interrogate its utility as a cross-cultural designation. Contributors. Steven Angelides, Tom Boellstorff, Lawrence Cohen, Don Kulick, Suzanne LaFont, Martin F. Manalansan IV, David A. B. Murray, Brian Riedel, Constance R. Sullivan-Blum
Just Queer Folks by
Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were just beginning to take shape. Eschewing the notion that identity is always the best measure of what can be known about gender and sexuality, Colin R. Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, "mannish" farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbors were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces, including the notion that queer history is always urban history.
Out in the Country by
Winner of the 2009 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists Winner of the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association, Sociology of Sexualities Section Winner of the 2010 Congress Inaugural Qualitative Inquiry Book Award Honorable Mention From Wal-Mart drag parties to renegade Homemaker's Clubs, Out in the Country offers an unprecedented contemporary account of the lives of today's rural queer youth. Mary L. Gray maps out the experiences of young people living in small towns across rural Kentucky and along its desolate Appalachian borders, providing a fascinating and often surprising look at the contours of gay life beyond the big city. Gray illustrates that, against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America, LGBT youth and their allies visibly--and often vibrantly--work the boundaries of the public spaces available to them, whether in their high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, or through websites. This important book shows that, in addition to the spaces of Main Street, rural LGBT youth explore and carve out online spaces to fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term 'queer visibility' and its political stakes. Gray combines ethnographic insight with incisive cultural critique, engaging with some of the biggest issues facing both queer studies and media scholarship. Out in the Country is a timely and groundbreaking study of sexuality and gender, new media, youth culture, and the meaning of identity and social movements in a digital age.
You're Not from Around Here, Are You? by
This is a funny, moving story about life in a small town, from the point of view of a pregnant lesbian. Louise A. Blum, author of the critically acclaimed novel Amnesty, now tells the story of her own life and her decision to be out, loud, and pregnant. Mixing humor with memorable prose, Blum recounts how a quiet, conservative town in an impoverished stretch of Appalachia reacts as she and a local woman, Connie, fall in love, move in together, and determine to live their life together openly and truthfully. The town responds in radically different ways to the couple's presence, from prayer vigils on the village green to a feature article in the family section of the local newspaper. This is a cautionary, wise, and celebratory tale about what it's like to be different in America--both the good and the bad. A depiction of small town life with all its comforts and its terrors, this memoir speaks to anyone who has ever felt like an outsider in America. Blum tells her story with a razor wit and deft precision, a story about two "girls with grit," and the child they decide to raise, right where they are, in small town America.