ABSTRACT

Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women’s, and non-binary people’s experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways.

Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people’s experiences. Through 25 newly commissioned chapters, a diverse range of authors, from early career researchers to established scholars, stage conversations at the cutting edge of sexuality studies. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities.

This innovative interdisciplinary collection is an excellent resource for scholars, undergraduate, and postgraduate students interested in gender, sexuality, and identity across a range of fields, such as queer studies, feminist theory, anthropology, media studies, sociology, psychology, history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

section Section 1|84 pages

(In)Visibility and the Queer Gaze

chapter 1|9 pages

Queer Old Movie Star

chapter 2|13 pages

Staging Our Desires

Drag Kings and the Pleasures of Community Building

chapter 3|12 pages

‘In Their Loving Gaze I Saw Who I Could Be’

Revisiting the Butch/Femme Couple as Joint Subject through Esther Newton's My Butch Career

chapter 4|18 pages

Transcripts, TransTape™, Transience

Locating the Bisexual Butch

chapter 5|16 pages

The Punchline Isn't Everything

Feminist and Queer Stand-Up Dramedy

section Section 2|90 pages

Lineage and Generational Shifts

chapter 7|15 pages

Femme Frontiers

Tracing and Troubling the Lineage of Fore-Femmes through to Contemporary Identities and Femme Theory

chapter 8|14 pages

Book Banning in the United States

A Call for Multigenerational Activism

chapter 9|16 pages

From Butch and Femme to Non-Binary and Queer

Intergenerational Shifts from In-Person Places to Digital Spaces

chapter 10|13 pages

Carabiners and Violet Tattoos

The Desire for Nostalgia in Online Lesbian Space

chapter 11|16 pages

Increased Lesbian Visibility and Its Discontents

Comparing the Coming-Out Stories of Women and Nonbinary People across Generations

chapter 12|14 pages

Queer Lineage

On Generational Sexualities, LGBTQ Identity, and Visibility

section Section 3|68 pages

Queer Embodiment

chapter 13|12 pages

Against Pathology

Exploring the Desire for Femininity

chapter 14|13 pages

Complicating Queer Desires

Identity Politics of the Lesbian and Bisexual Communities in South Africa

chapter 16|12 pages

‘Aren't You Ashamed?’

Explicit Representation and Shame in the Work of Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, and Melissa Febos

chapter 17|6 pages

Trans History and Politics

An Interview with Susan Stryker

chapter 18|12 pages

Midlife Lesbian

Alison Bechdel and Me

section Section 4|108 pages

Queer Longings

chapter 19|17 pages

Desiring Technologies

Digital Pathways towards Black Queer Sociality

chapter 20|11 pages

The Butch on the Ferry

The Affect and Effect of Butch Longing

chapter 21|14 pages

Desire on the Inside

Incarcerated Women, Bisexual Identity, and Human Connection

chapter 22|14 pages

Queering Romance

Expressions of Love and Intimacy in Late-Twentieth-Century Lesbian Relationships

chapter 23|16 pages

Intimacy or Intimacies?

Queering Jewish Women's Desires and Intimate Lives

chapter 24|15 pages

Naming Desire

Information Seeking and Breaking the Silence around Queer Female Desire in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

chapter 25|19 pages

Beloved

Crafting Lesbian Desire and Femme Intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen