In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and explores issues of transsexuality among transgender dykes--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of lesbian a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.

Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.

An incisive case for trans justice from a powerful new voice

In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle for social justice.

So often, Faye argues, trans people are understood as a side issue, the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized debate which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

With skill, rigor, and heart, Faye uncovers the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In this compellingly readable study, she explores issues of class, family, housing, healthcare, sex work, the prison system, and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities. What she finds, ultimately, is that when we fight for trans liberation, we fight for a better world for us all.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words butch or femme.

Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today's ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.

Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.

Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Third Edition, is a truly interdisciplinary and intersectional text featuring global examples for women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Its student-centered rhetorical approach and pedagogical features--including an engaging image program, prompts for activism, a comprehensive glossary, appendices of key terms, annotated bibliographies for additional reading, and Feminisms in Brief--aid students in assimilating fundamental women's and gender studies terms and concepts.

While it is a textbook and not an anthology, Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies adopts the best facets of the anthology approach: it includes discussions of frequently anthologized writers and writing that is more engaging and narrative in style than traditional textbooks. The book systematically covers core interdisciplinary concepts so that students are prepared for women's and gender studies courses in a variety of disciplines.

There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. Jos Esteban Mu oz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture--not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Mu oz calls this process disidentification, and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.Disidentifications is also something of a performance in its own right, an attempt to fashion a queer world by working on, with, and against dominant ideology. By examining the process of identification in the work of filmmakers, performance artists, ethnographers, Cuban choteo, forms of gay male mass culture (such as pornography), museums, art photography, camp and drag, and television, Mu oz persistently points to the intersecting and short-circuiting of identities and desires that result from misalignments with the cultural and ideological mainstream in contemporary urban America.Mu oz calls attention to the world-making properties found in performances by queers of color--in Carmelita Tropicana's Camp/Choteo style politics, Marga Gomez's performances of queer childhood, Vaginal Creme Davis's Terrorist Drag, Isaac Julien's critical melancholia, Jean-Michel Basquiat's disidentification with Andy Warhol and pop art, Felix Gonzalez-Torres's performances of disidentity, and the political performance of Pedro Zamora, a person with AIDS, within the otherwise artificial environment of the MTV serialThe Real World.

The new buzzword in female sexuality is sexual fluidity--the idea that for many women, sexual identity can shift over time, often in the direction of same-sex relationships. Examples abound in popular culture, from actress Cynthia Nixon, who left her male partner of 15 years to be with a woman, to writer and comedienne Carol Leifer, who divorced her husband for the same reason.

In a culture increasingly open to accepting this fluidity, Dear John, I Love Jane is a timely, fiercely candid exploration of female sexuality and personal choice. The book is comprised of essays written by a broad spectrum of women, including a number of well-known writers and personalities. Their stories are sometimes funny, sometimes painful--but always achingly honest--accounts of leaving a man for a woman, and the consequences of making such a choice.

Arousing, inspiring, bawdy, bold, and heartfelt, Dear John, I Love Jane is an engrossing reflection of a new era of female sexuality.

E. Patrick Johnson's Honeypot opens with the fictional trickster character Miss B. barging into the home of Dr. EPJ, informing him that he has been chosen to collect and share the stories of her people. With little explanation, she whisks the reluctant Dr. EPJ away to the women-only world of Hymen, where she serves as his tour guide as he bears witness to the real-life stories of queer Black women throughout the American South. The women he meets come from all walks of life and recount their experiences on topics ranging from coming out and falling in love to mother/daughter relationships, religion, and political activism. As Dr. EPJ hears these stories, he must grapple with his privilege as a man and as an academic, and in the process he gains insights into patriarchy, class, sex, gender, and the challenges these women face. Combining oral history with magical realism and poetry, Honeypot is an engaging and moving book that reveals the complexity of identity while offering a creative method for scholarship to represent the lives of other people in a rich and dynamic way.

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.

Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.

An essential text documenting the foundation and rise of queer theory.

The David R. Kessler Lectures, established in 1992 by CLAGS: Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY, represent the cutting edge of queer studies in the United States. Years before LGBTQ studies had found a foothold in American academia, the Kessler Lectures celebrated dynamic and diverse inquiries into queer thought, community, and politics.

Twenty years after its initial publication, Queer Ideas collects the first ten historic Kessler Lectures by influential scholars, writers, and activists including Cherríe Moraga, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith, with a new foreword by CLAGS Executive Director Matt Brim and Board Co-Chairs James Harris and Laura Westengard. Alongside the second volume, Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020, this revised edition of Queer Ideas traces the early foundations of the field and provides a new opportunity to revisit an essential collection of queer and trans thought.

A lyrical and meticulously researched mapping of the ways in which diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and geograhy

From the ancient poet Sappho to tombois in contemporary Indonesia, women throughout history and around the globe have desired, loved, and had sex with other women. In beautiful prose, Sapphistries tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place.

Leila J. Rupp reveals how, from the time of the very earliest societies, the possibility of love between women has been known, even when it is feared, ignored, or denied. We hear women in the sex-segregated spaces of convents and harems whispering words of love. We see women beginning to find each other on the streets of London and Amsterdam, in the aristocratic circles of Paris, in the factories of Shanghai. We find women's desire and love for women meeting the light of day as Japanese schoolgirls fall in love, and lesbian bars and clubs spread from 1920s Berlin to 1950s Buffalo. And we encounter a world of difference in the twenty-first century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.

Giving voice to words from the mouths and pens of women, and from men's prohibitions, reports, literature, art, imaginings, pornography, and court cases, Rupp also creatively employs fiction to imagine possibilities when there is no historical evidence. Sapphistries combines lyrical narrative with meticulous historical research, providing an eminently readable and uniquely sweeping story of desire, love, and sex between women around the globe from the beginning of time to the present.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humor and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's spaces to the old boys' network, from gay male bathhouses to lesbian potlucks, from being a child to preparing to have one. Throughout, S. Bear Bergman shows us there are things you learn when you're visibly different from those around you--whether it's being transgressively gendered or readably queer. As a transmasculine person, Bergman keeps readers breathless and rapt in the freakshow tent long after the midway has gone dark, when the good hooch gets passed around and the best stories get told. Ze offers unique perspectives on issues that challenge, complicate, and confound the official stories about how gender and sexuality work.

S. Bear Bergman's first book was Butch is a Noun (Suspect Thoughts Press). Ze is an activist, gender-jammer, and author of two books and three award-winning solo stage shows. Bergman recently relocated to Burlington, Ontario, from New England.

Here's the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all.

Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you're kissing, where it's leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton's memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure.

Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly--an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books--specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.

Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.

In BULLISH, ancient mythology meets modern gender negotiation. Inspired by Ovid's Minotaur, a gender fierce ensemble of hopers and renegades try to pass, pack and blag their way out of the labyrinth.

JOAN: An earthy story of courage, conviction and hope, this is Joan of Arc. Performed by drag king champion Lucy Jane Parkinson, history's greatest gender-warrior takes to the stage, dragging up as the men she defies in this smash-hit show.

A fearless solo play with uproarious songs about what it means to stand out, stand up and stand alone.

This groundbreaking study, among the earliest syntheses on female homosexuality throughout Antiquity, explores the topic with careful reference to ancient concepts and views, drawing fully on the existing visual and written record including literary, philosophical, and scientific documents.

Even today, ancient female homosexuals are still too often seen in terms of a mythical, ethereal Sapphic love, or stereotyped as Amazons or courtesans. Boehringer's scholarly book replaces these clichés with rigorous, precise analysis of iconography and texts by Sappho, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, and many other lyric poets, satirists, and astrological writers, in search of the prevailing norms, constraints, and possibilities for erotic desire. The portrait emerges of an ancient society to which today's sexual categories do not apply--a society before sexuality--where female homosexuality looks very different, but is nonetheless very real.

Now available in English for the first time, Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome includes a preface by David Halperin. This book will be of value to students and scholars of ancient sexuality and gender, and to anyone interested in histories and theories of sexuality.

In the Anglophone Caribbean, international queer human rights activists strategically located within and outside of the region have dominated interventions seeking to address issues affecting people across the region; a trend that is premised on an idea that the Caribbean is extremely homophobic and transphobic, resulting in violence and death for people who defy dominant sexual and gender boundaries. Human rights activists continue to utilize international financial and political resources to influence these interventions and the region's engagement on issues of homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This focus, however, elides the deeply complex nature of queerness across different spaces and places, and fails to fully account for the nuances of queer sexual and gender politics and community making across the Caribbean. Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean problematizes the neocolonial and homoimperial nature of queer human rights activism in in four Anglophone Caribbean nations -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- and thinks critically about the limits of human rights as a tool for seeking queer liberation. It also offers critical insight into the ways that queer people negotiate, resist, and disrupt homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination by mobilizing on the ground and creating transgressive communities within the region.

In this prequel you get to learn how Kylie Jay Anderson became the leader of The Priders and how they all became the proud LGBTA+ group.

Focusing on a variety of representations, from the boundary-shattering work of queer performances to the daring conjunction of childhood sexual abuse and desire in the work of Dorothy Allison, Between the Body and the Flesh stimulates discussions of s/m through the exploration of censorship in the arts, the fetishization of sexual paraphernalia, recombinations of class, race and sexuality, and the politics of psychoanalysis.

S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer who travels regularly across North America to speak on trans issues. Bear's first two books, Butch Is a Noun and The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, are considered seminal texts on the subject of trans life. In his third essay collection, Bear enters, describes, and rearranges our ideas about family as a daughter, husband, father, and friend. In Bear's extended family orchard, drag sisters, sperm-donor's parents, Sparkles and other relations provide more branches of love, support, and sustenance than a simple family tree. Defiantly queer yet full of tenderness and hilarity, Blood, Marriage, Wine & Glitter is a beautifully thought-provoking book that redefines the notion of what family is and can be.

The 1950s queer-life groundbreaker by a literary pioneer . . . who] forever changed perceptions of same-sex love and desire (Advocate.com).

Ann Aldrich flung a provocative assertion at her readers in 1955 when she opened her landmark account of lesbian life in New York City by saying this book was the result of fifteen years of participation in society as a female homosexual.

After the release of We Walk Alone, Aldrich became both a heroine and a scapegoat in some of the period's most contentious public debates over what exactly lesbian culture was. Her non-fiction pulp literally transformed the landscape overnight, and the effect on women was electric. From every corner of creation, they wrote wrenching letters of relief and gratitude (Ann Bannon, author of The Beebo Brinker Chronicles).

Part Kinsey-esque portraits of real people, part you-are-there reports on the scene in bars and offices and at clubs and house parties, We Walk Alone is revealing and compelling composite of an alienated yet amazingly self-aware community--one that Aldrich would revisit three years later in We, Too, Must Love. Today, these essential cultural artifacts (UTNE Magazine), as Stephanie Foote explains in her afterword, are as rich and conflicted a look at the formation of lesbian urban culture as that of any contemporary queer historian.