A personal, critical guide to seeing queer art’s wounds and possibilitiesDamage asks how to look at images marked by queer pain without turning that pain into shock or pretending it isn’t there. Writer and critic Jonathan Alexander answers by pairing close looking with lived experience. The result is intimate and analytic at once, a book that stays with hard feelings while still making room for possibility.Damage blends personal story with...

Scholars in the field of children's literature studies began taking an interest in the concept of “liminal spaces” around the turn of the 21st century. For the first time, Liminal Spaces in Children's and Young Adult Literature: Stories from the In Between brings together in one volume a collection of original essays on this topic by leading children's literature scholars. The contributors in this collection take a wide variety of approaches to their explorations of liminal spaces...

Expanding the scope of religious rhetoricOver the past twenty-five years, the intersection of rhetoric and religion has become one of the most dynamic areas of inquiry in rhetoric and writing studies. One of few volumes to include multiple traditions in one conversation, Rhetoric and Religion in the Twenty-First Century engages with religious discourses and issues that continue to shape public life in the United States.This collection of essays cen...

Writing and Desire is a sustained, multimovement exploration of how writers, particularly queer writers, think and feel through desire as central to their writing practice. In a time of political, social, global, and ecological unrest, how might we understand desire—the desire for things to be different, the desire for a better world—as a crucial dimension of contemporary human experience? What might such a recentering of desire offer us, personally and politically? And how is wri...

From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian—and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the threat of terrorism, and omnipresent corporate control. At the same time, many of these shows attempt to visualize alternatives, using dystopian extrapolations to spotlight the possibility of building a better world.Programming the F...

From 9/11 to COVID-19, the twenty-first century looks increasingly dystopian—and so do its television shows. Long-form science fiction narratives take one step further the fears of today: liberal democracy in crisis, growing economic precarity, the threat of terrorism, and omnipresent corporate control. At the same time, many of these shows attempt to visualize alternatives, using dystopian extrapolations to spotlight the possibility of building a better world.Programming the F...

An unvarnished accounting of one man’s struggle toward sexual and emotional maturity.In this unconventional memoir, Jonathan Alexander addresses wry and affecting missives to a conflicted younger self. Focusing on three years—1989, 1993, and 1996—Dear Queer Self follows the author through the homophobic heights of the AIDS epidemic, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Bill Clinton, and the steady advancements in gay rights that followed. With humo...

An archive of personal trauma that addresses how a culture still toxic to queer people can reshape a bodyIn the summer of 2019, Jonathan Alexander had a minor stroke, what his doctors called an “eye stroke.” A small bit of cholesterol came loose from a vein in his neck and instead of shooting into his brain and causing damage, it lodged itself in a branch artery of his retina, resulting in a permanent blindspot in his right eye. In Stroke Book

The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field.The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality. More important, chapters also atten...

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation?Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse c...

This handbook brings together scholars from around the globe who here contribute to our understanding of how digital rhetoric is changing the landscape of writing. Increasingly, all of us must navigate networks of information, compose not just with computers but an array ofmobile devices, increase our technological literacy, and understand the changing dynamics of authoring, writing, reading, and publishing in a world of rich and complex texts. Given such changes, and given the dive...

According to David Halperin, sexuality in our time is typified by a "crisis in contemporary sexual definition". What is sexuality? What does it mean to have a sexual identity or orientation? What is the relationship between sexuality as a knowledge construct, on one hand, and the often messy flows of desire and practices of love, on the other? How and why are some sexual, erotic, and intimate practices normalized and others marginalized?Queer Theory has emerged in the West as one o...