Emerson College Library: Pride Month: Theory and Literature

Queer Theory

Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers—including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde—Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries.
Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity by Judith Butler
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
No Tea, No Shade by E. Patrick Johnson (Editor)
The follow-up to the groundbreaking Black Queer Studies, the edited collection No Tea, No Shade brings together nineteen essays from the next generation of scholars, activists, and community leaders doing work on black gender and sexuality. Building on the foundations laid by the earlier volume, this collection's contributors speak new truths about the black queer experience while exemplifying the codification of black queer studies as a rigorous and important field of study.
Queer Studies: a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender anthology by Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason (Editors)
Despite the recent queer publishing explosion, few texts cover a broad range of topics around sexual and gender identities. Most existing works are high-level theory books, texts focused upon specific disciplines or topics, or practical guides aimed primarily at a heterosexual audience or people just beginning to come out. In this collection, contributors assess the conflict between postmodernism and identity, the concept which typically serves as a linchpin for social and political organizing. Others address queer theory, looking specifically at how we define it, how it informs political activism, and how we can theorize such aspects of sexual performance/behaviors as s/m or butch-femme relationships.
The Routledge Queer Studies Reader by Donald E. Hall (Editor)
This reader provides a comprehensive resource for students and scholars working in this vibrant and interdisciplinary field. The book traces the emergence and development of queer studies as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions.

The B Word: bisexuality in contemporary film and television
Often disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism.
Bisexual Characters in Film
A lively, entertaining, and informative commentary, this book examines the treatment of bisexual film characters and shows you how that treatment has been affected by societal forces such as censorship, politics, religious prejudices, homophobia, and sexual stereotypes.
Coming Out to the Mainstream
Coming Out to the Mainstream is a collection of essays written from a range of perspectives, from scholars to film producers, who seek to contextualize and reframe New Queer Cinema from a 21st century perspective—decades after Stonewall, the emergence of the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the initial years of the gay marriage movement.
Gaming Representation
Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.
Out at the Movies
Over the decades, gay cinema has reflected the community's journey from persecution to emancipation to acceptance. Gay films have undergone a major shift from the fringe to the mainstream--2005's Academy Awards were dubbed "the gay Oscars" with statues going to Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Transamerica. The book also covers gay filmmakers and actors and their influence within the industry, the most iconic scenes from gay cinema, and the most memorable dialogue from key films.
Queer Images
Queer Images chronicles representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer sexualities over one hundred years of American film. The most up-to-date and comprehensive book of its kind, it explores the ever-changing images of queer characters onscreen as well as the work of queer filmmakers and the cultural histories of queer audiences--from the works of discreetly homosexual filmmakers during Hollywood''s Golden Age and classical Hollywood''s attempt to purge sex perversion from films, to queer exploitation and physique films, cinematic responses to AIDS, and how contemporary Hollywood deals with queer issues.
Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race in American Film and Television
This book traces the uneven history of queer media visibility through crucial turning points including the Hollywood Production Code era, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the so-called explosion of gay visibility on television during the1990s, and the re-imagination of queer representations on TV after the events of 9/11. Across all chapters, narratives and arguments emerge that demonstrate how queer visibility shapes and reflects not only media representations, but the real and imagined geographies, histories, and people of the American nation.

Further off the straight and narrow : new gay visibility on television, 1998-2006 / producer, director, and editor, Katherine Sender.
Surveys network dramas, sitcoms, reality shows, and premium cable programming to show how the portrayal of GLBT characters is often marked by ambivalence and tension. The film cautions that although GLBT characters and plotlines have become more prevalent and complex in recent years, the images and stories portrayed continue to be shaped by narrow commercial imperatives.

The Queerness of Native American Literature
With a new and more inclusive perspective for the growing field of queer Native studies, Lisa Tatonetti provides a genealogy of queer Native writing after Stonewall. Throughout, she argues that queerness has been central to Native American literature for decades, showing how queer Native literature and Two-Spirit critiques challenge understandings of both Indigeneity and sexuality.
Eminent Outlaws
In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
Chaucer's Queer Poetics by Susan Schibanoff
This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.
Shakesqueer by Madhavi Menon (Editor)
Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory.
Queer Between the Covers by Leila Kassir and Richard Espley (Editors)
Queer Between the Covers presents a history of radical queer publishing and literature from 1880 to the modern day. Chronicling the gay struggle for acceptance and liberation, this book demonstrates how the fight for representation was often waged secretly between the covers of books at a time when public spaces for queer identities were limited. The chapters provide an array of voices and histories from the famous, Derek Jarman and Oscar Wilde, to the lesser-known and underappreciated John Wieners and Valerie Taylor. It includes first-hand accounts of seminal moments in queer history, including the birth of Hazard Press and the Defend Gay's the Word Bookshop campaign in the 1980s.