Queer Theory

Critical Bottoming: Repositioning Male Effeminacy and its Racialization

By John Paul Stadler

Nguyen Tan Hoang. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Duke University Press, 2014. 287 pp.

The figure of the gay, Asian bottom is often misunderstood. His racial, gender, and sexual identities are typically conflated and maligned for being too submissive and effeminate. This, at least, is the opening contention of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation.
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Queering Animal Acts

By Miranda Niittynen

Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, eds. Animal Acts: Performing Species Today. University of Michigan Press, 2014. 246 pp.

“Animal Acts” writes Una Chaudhuri, “are a powerful way to change the world” (1). Performance arts, in particular, create room for political discussion, as well as forging alternative spaces, places, time, and creatures.
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A Queer Time for Television

By R. Gabriel Dor

Amy Villarejo, Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire.  Duke University Press, 2014. 203 pp.

In Ethereal Queer, Amy Villarejo confronts the visibility of LGBT characters featured in recent programming, and the scholarship around these representations, by rejecting the notion that today’s television operates in a particularly queer time. 
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Queering the Politics of Life and Death

By Christine Quinan

Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco, eds. Queer Necropolitics. Routledge, 2014. 216 pp.

In the opening to his celebrated essay “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe invokes a series of questions that offer a corrective to Michel Foucault’s established notion of biopower:

But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?
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Regarding Feelings and Forms

By Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

Eugenie Brinkema. The Forms of the Affects. Duke University Press, 2014. 347 pp.

Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu, eds. Feeling Photography. Duke University Press, 2014. 397 pp.

As a psychoanalytic cultural theorist, thinking about these books together ensnares me in my familiar oscillating trap: between the visceral imagery of Freud and the hygienic schemas of Lacan. Reading Freud is to vicariously feel his theories of psyche; I am seduced by this provocation of idiosyncratic feeling.
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Orgasm Without Bodies

By Ela Przybylo

Annamarie Jagose. Orgasmology. Duke University Press, 2013. 251 pp.

Annamarie Jagose’s Orgasmology is a glistening tome of a book. Speaking to the critical figure of the orgasm, Orgasmology – wittily masquerading as an encyclopedic-type entity – has something to offer to every sexuality and queer studies scholar, student, and practitioner.
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Intersectionality Matters

By Melissa Haynes

Mel Y. Chen. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke University Press, 2012. 312 pp.

The title of Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect immediately announces to readers that this is not a book that can be easily disciplined. “Animacies,” for readers who are unfamiliar with the term, might sound like a portmanteau of “animal” and “intimacies.” The rest of the title evokes a compendium of areas of inquiry, namely biopolitics, critical race theory, new materialism, queer studies, and affect theory.
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The Trouble With Going Gaga

By Derritt Mason

J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon Press, 2012. 178 pp.

“Who is Lady Gaga?” asks J. Jack Halberstam in the preface to Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal; “What do her performances mean? And more importantly, what do her gender theatrics have to say to young people about identity, politics, and celebrity?” (xii).
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At Last, A Handbook!/?

By Andrew Buzny

David Halperin. How to be Gay. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. 549 pp.

David Halperin’s gargantuan tome, How to be Gay, comes upon the heels of the controversy surrounding his undergraduate course of the same title. Although Halperin is an eminent scholar in queer studies, this text, which comes in at 457 pages, with an additional 68 pages of endnotes, is not the how-to guide one might anticipate given its title.
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Critical Practice as Desire

By  Elizabeth Groeneveld

Robyn Wiegman. Object Lessons. Duke University Press, 2012. 398 pp.

Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons is an extended meditation on the disciplinary frameworks, concepts, and narratives that have shaped the field imaginaries of identity-based studies, focusing primarily on how these have developed within the context of the U.S.
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Authorship: A Queer Death

By David A. Gerstner

Jane Gallop. The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time. Duke University Press, 2011. 184 pp.

The moment one reads Jane Gallop’s book, The Deaths of the Author, is the moment one becomes an author. Such banal description about engagement and creative exchange between work and reader has become something of a truism since Roland Barthes penned what Peter Wollen once described as his “squib-like” essay, “The Death of the Author.” Although Barthes took up similar theoretical terrain in his article, “From Work to Text,” it is “The Death of the Author” that resonates–if not for its critical concept, then certainly for its “militant, elegant slogan” (Gallop also refers to the “slogan” as “world-renowned,” a “postructuralist catchphrase,” “theoretical,” “familiar”).
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Queering Anarchism

By Michael Truscello

Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, eds. Anarchism and Sexuality: Ethics, Relationships and Power. Routledge, 2011. 232 pp.

It may surprise some people outside of the study of anarchism that, alongside race, sexuality is perhaps the least studied subject within anarchist scholarship. This absence in the scholarly literature is often mirrored in practice, and as such the recent publication of Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson’s Anarchism and Sexuality provides a necessary intervention.
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The Politics and Erotics of Time

By Amber Jamilla Musser

Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010. 256 pp.

What does it mean to take pleasure in or to have fantasies about “rubbing up against the past” (xii)? Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories weaves together affect studies, critical historiography and politics to nuance our understanding of queer time.
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Undoing the Ties that Bind and Finding New Bonds

By Lily Cho

David L. Eng. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Duke University Press, 2010. 268 pp.

In The Feeling of Kinship, David Eng asks, “[w]e have moved beyond structuralist accounts of language, but have we moved beyond structuralist accounts of kinship?” (16). Not only do his investigations reveal the persistence of structuralism in how we think about family and intimate relationships, he also presents an urgent and sophisticated case for the necessity of a poststructuralist account of kinship.
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Queering the Problem

By Terry Goldie

Jasbir K. Puar. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. 368 pp.

The intention of this book is obvious and quite simple. Terrorist Assemblages confronts the American tendency post-9/11 to see terrorists under every bed and often in every bed. Jasbir Puar attacks the racist underpinnings of counter-terrorism, the heteronormativity of American “ethnic” groups who try to assert that they are not terrorists, and the homonormativity of gay and lesbian groups who try to assert that they are just as proudly American as anyone else who hates terrorists.
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