Are bodies sexy? How? In what sorts of ways? Sexy Bodies investigates the production of sexual bodies and sexual practices, of sexualities which are dyke, bi, transracial, and even hetero. It celebrates lesbian and queer sexualities but also explores what runs underneath and within all sexualities, discovering what is fundamentally weird and strange about all bodies, all carnalities. Looking at a pleasurable variety of cultural forms and texts, the... more...

This edited volume brings together perspectives on embodied queerness within the complicated parameters of hegemonic normativities, biopolitics and social-religious governmentalities. Queering Paradigms VI offers queer interventions, explores value-production in socio-corporeal normative frameworks, and exemplifies and highlights the complexity of queering in the global-local continuum. Queer maintains its revolutionary subversive... more...

"Martin Duberman is a national treasure." —Masha Gessen, The New Yorker The past fifty years have seen significant shifts in attitudes toward LGBTQ people and wider acceptance of them in the United States and the West. Yet the extent of this progress, argues Martin Duberman, has been more broad and conservative than deep and transformative. One of the most renowned historians of the American left and the LGBTQ movement, as... more...

Since the onset of the HIV epidemic, the behaviour of men who have sex with men has been subject to intense scrutiny on the part of the behavioural and sociomedical sciences. What happens when we consider the work of these sciences to be not merely descriptive, but also constitutive of the realities it describes? The Gay Science pays attention to lived experiences of sex, drugs and the scientific practices that make these experiences... more...

What do we mean by ‘the gay community’? What is the state of ‘gay and lesbian politics’ in contemporary Britain? Have ‘communitarian’ ideas provided a framework for change? And what is the view from outside the capital? Recent years have seen both significant legal and social reform benefiting lesbian and gay people under a government whose communitarian political credo has stressed the importance of ‘community’ and ‘rights and... more...

Explore the dark subculture of 1950s tattoos! In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, an erudite professor of English--a friend of Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and Thornton Wilder--abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey). Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos tells the story of his years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago’s tough State Street. During that time... more...

Lesbians and gays have gone from "coming out," to "acting up," to "outing," meanwhile radically redefining society's views on sexuality and gender. The essays in Inside/Out employ a variety of approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and discourse theory) to investigate representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, and photography. Engaging the figures of divas, dykes, vampires and queens, the... more...

On the battlefields of World War II, with their fellow soldiers as the only shield between life and death, a generation of American men found themselves connecting with each other in new and profound ways. Back home after the war, however, these intimacies faced both scorn and vicious homophobia. The Mourning After makes sense of this cruel irony, telling the story of the unmeasured toll exacted upon generations of male friendships.... more...

The Well of Loneliness―the Radclyffe Hall novel at times referred to as "the bible of lesbianism"―was released in Britain in 1928 and was immediately controversial. Pronounced obscene following a sensational trial, the book has become a cultural icon as well as a source of considerable debate, especially among feminists, lesbians, and transgendered persons. Palatable Poison gathers together classic essays on Radclyffe Hall's book―beginning with... more...

Gender studies of Spain has thus far focused almost exclusively on women, leaving the social and political history of male homosexuality virtually untouched. 'Los Invisibles' fills this significant gap in the study of Spanish culture by analyzing the effects of medical and legal regulation on male homosexuals. Drawing from the discourse of medical history, Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García... more...