Queer and Bookish: Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick as Book Artist represents the first book-length study to explore the intersections of Sedgwick's critical writing, poetry, and, most importantly, book art, making the case that her art criticism, especially her meditations on domestic and nineteenth-century photography, and "artist's book" projects are as formally complex and brilliant, conceptually significant and life-changing, as her literary criticism and theory. In addition, the book represents a significant intervention into recent debates about reparative reading, surface reading, and the descriptive turn across the humanities, because of its sustained, positive accounts on Sedgwick's books as visual, textural, and material objects. The book ranges across Sedgwick's published output, from The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1980) to the posthumously published The Weather in Proust (2011), and features her meditations on a wide variety of art-historical topoi, including Judith Scott's queer/crip fiber art; the anality of Polykleitos's Doryphorus; queer Modernist typography; Piranesi's punitive space; Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's queer holy family; Manet's frontality and thalassic aesthetics; fat and thin aesthetics of various stripes; and the queer photography of Anna Atkins, Clementina Hawarden, and Julia Margaret Cameron; Baron De Mayer, Eugene Atget, and P.H. Emerson; as well as David Hockney, Ken Brown, and her own father, a NASA lunar photographer. The book climaxes with two chapter-length explorations of Sedgwick's own late-life book-art practice: her panda Valentine alphabet cards (c. 1996) and her Last Days of Pompeii/Cavafy unique artist's book (c. 2007). Jason Edwards is a Professor of Art History at the University of York, where he works at the intersections of queer and vegan theory, and on British art history in its global contexts in the period from c.1760-1940. He is the author of the Routledge Critical Thinkers volume on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Routledge, 2009) as well as the editor of Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick As a Poet (punctum books, 2017), which includes Sedgwick's uncollected poems. In addition, Jason is also the author of Alfred Gilbert's Aestheticism (Ashgate 2006), and the co-editor of special issues of journals and edited collections on Grinling Gibbons, Joseph Cornell, the British School of Sculpture c.1760-1832, Victorian sculpture in its global contexts, the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic interiors, and homoeroticism, art and aestheticism in Victorian Britain. Jason has also co-curated exhibitions on Turner's whaling imagery, Alfred Gilbert, and Victorian sculpture more broadly, at Tate Britain, the Yale Center for British Art, Hull Maritime Museum, Lotherton Hall, and the Henry Moore Institute for the Study of Sculpture, in Leeds. Jason's forthcoming book Queer Craft deals with Sedgwick's work as a fiber artist.

Finalist in the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards for the LGBTQ Anthology category The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays for the Stage is the first play anthology to offer eight new plays by trans playwrights featuring trans characters. This edited collection establishes a canon of contemporary American trans theatre which represents a variety of performance modes and genres. From groundbreaking new work from across America's stages to unpublished work by new voices, these plays address themes such as gender identity and expression to racial and religious attitudes toward love and sex. Edited by Lindsey Mantoan, Angela Farr Schiller and Leanna Keyes, the plays selected explicitly call for trans characters as central protagonists in order to promote opportunities for trans performers, making this an original and necessary publication for both practical use and academic study. Sagittarius Ponderosa by MJ Kaufman The Betterment Society by Mashuq Mushtaq Deen how to clean your room by j. chavez She He Me by Raphaël Amahl Khouri The Devils Between Us by Sharifa Yasmin Doctor Voynich and Her Children by Leanna Keyes Firebird Tattoo by Ty Defoe Crooked Parts by Azure Osborne-Lee

This interdisciplinary volume of thirty original essays engages with four key concerns of queer theoretical work - identity, discourse, normativity and relationality. The terms ’queer’ and ’theory’ are put under interrogation by a combination of distinguished and emerging scholars from a wide range of international locations, in an effort to map the relations and disjunctions between them. These contributors are especially attendant to the many theoretical discourses intersecting with queer theory, including feminist theory, LGBT studies, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, disability studies, Marxism, poststructuralism, critical race studies and posthumanism, to name a few. This Companion provides an up to the minute snapshot of queer scholarship from the past two decades and identifies many current directions queer theorizing is taking, while also signposting several fruitful avenues for future research. This book is both an invaluable and authoritative resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom.

How did the buying and collecting of books figure in the lives and works of the Romantics, those supposed apostles of spiritualized poetic genius? Why was book collecting controversial during the Romantic period, and what role has book collecting played in the history of homophobia? The Queer Bookishness of Romanticism: Ornamental Community addresses these and more questions about the suppressed bookish dimension of Romanticism, as well as Romanticism’s historical forebears and Victorian inheritors. The analysis ranges widely, addressing the bookish proclivities of the "romantic friends" the Ladies of Llangollen, the camp works about book collecting produced by a subculture calling themselves “ornamental gentlemen,” narratives of prototypically punk collecting and flâneuring by the essayist and collector Charles Lamb, and rare-book forgeries by Thomas J. Wise and Harry Forman, queer bibliographer-scholars responsible for canonizing some of the Romantic poets during the Victorian period. In the process, this book uncovers surprising connections between conceptions of literature and sexuality; literary materiality and queerness; and forgery, sexuality, and authorship.

Is the Christian mystical tradition a relic of another time, shaped by celibates for celibates, unable to engage meaningfully with people of our time who embrace their corporeality and sexuality as crucial aspects of their journey towards union with God? This book reflects in serious theological depth and detail on the spiritual and sexual journeys of gay men of mature and committed Christian faith, employing the Christian mystical tradition as the lens and the interlocutor in this process. This study examines the major themes and stages of the mystical tradition as outlined by Evelyn Underhill, but also including more recent work by Ruth Burrows, Thomas Merton and Constance Fitzgerald. Using methods of qualitative research, it then considers the texts of in-depth interviews conducted with men, most of whom are theologians or spiritual leaders with a deep Catholic faith, and all of whom are openly, self-affirmingly gay. Finally, it employs Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory to engage in a creative theological conversation between the traditional mystical stages and themes and these men’s lives, as described in their interviews. This is a unique study that brings together ancient spirituality with contemporary lived religion. As such, it will be of interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, Christian mysticism and spirituality, and queer studies. It will be of particular interest to those teach spiritual direction and to all who seek new ways to engage with the spiritual lives of LGBTIQ+ people.

Uses postcolonial theory to critique the globalization of gay culture.

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives. Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.