Scott Herring: Another Country

Queer Anti-Urbanism. USA/UK 2010, 235 pp. with illustrations + photographs, brochure, € 31.30
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
New York University Press
The metropolis has been the near exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, the author draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines - art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies - he develops an extended critique of how metronormativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater. The book expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond their city limits.

Gregg Drinkwater (ed.): Torah Queeries

Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. USA 2010, 337 pp., hardbound, € 27.59
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
New York University Press
In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. These weekly portion, read aloud in synagogues around the world, have been subject to interpretation and commentary for centuries. Following on this ancient tradition, this book brings together some of the world's leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a »bent lens«. This collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in the contemporary Jewish world. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life.

Leila J. Rupp: Sapphistries

A Global History of Love Between Women. USA 2010, 303 pp., hardbound, € 26.89
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
New York University Press
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. This book tells their stories, capturing the multitude of ways that diverse societies have shaped female same-sex sexuality across time and place. The author reveals how, from the time of the 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 lesbian desire and love 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 21st century, as transnational concepts and lesbian identities meet local understandings of how two women might love each other.

José Esteban Munoz: Cruising Utopia

The Then and There of Queer Futurity. USA 2009, 223 pp., brochure, € 24.95
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
New York University Press
The LGBT agenda has for too long been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist. But gay liberation's activist past and pragmatic present are merely prologue to a queer cultural future, the author of »Cruising Utopia« suggests in this condemnation of the political status quo. Casting his vision of a radical gay aesthetic through the prisms of literature, photography and performance, the author dismisses commonplace concerns like same-sex marriage as desires for »mere inclusion« into a »corrupt« mainstream. He seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, Munoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. »We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality, an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.«