Develops the sustained, relational, dynamic, and reflective attention demanded by Gertrude Stein's novel into a theory of reading and critical analysis.Arguing that Gertrude Stein's monumental novel The Making of Americans models a radically aesthetic relation to the world, E. L. McCallum demonstrates how the novel teaches us to read differently, unmaking our habits of reading. Each of the chapters works through close readings of Stein's text and a philoso...

After Queer Studies maps the literary influences that facilitated queer theory's academic emergence and charts the trajectories that continue to shape its continued evolution as a critical practice. It explores the interdisciplinary origins of queer studies and argues for the prominent role that literary studies has played in establishing the concepts, methods, and questions of contemporary queer theory. It shows how queer studies has had an impact on many trending concerns in literary stu...

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies. Covering subjects from Sappho and the Greeks to queer modernism, diasporic literatures, and responses to the AIDS crisis, this volume is grounded in current scholarship. It presents...

Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein’s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whethe...

Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance.If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-ce...

After ten years of talking about children, two years of trying (and failing) to conceive, and one shot of donor sperm for her partner, Amie Miller was about to become a mother. Or something like that.Over the next nine months, as her partner became the biological mom-to-be, Miller became . . . what? Mommy's little helper? A faux dad?As a midwestern, station wagon-driving, stay-at-home mom—and as a nonbiological lesbian mother—Miller both defines and defies the norm. Like ne...

One of the few books to explore lesbian parenting, these “hilarious, heart-wrenching, painfully honest tales of mommyhood” celebrate the ups and downs of being an LGBTQIA+ parent in the 21st century (Joey Solloway, creator of Transparent).After author Harlyn Aizley gave birth to her daughter, she watched in unanticipated horror as her partner scooped up the baby and said, “I'm your new mommy!” While they both had worked to find the perfect sperm donor, Aiz...

When Kelly Cogswell plunged into New York’s East Village in 1992, she had just come out. An ex–Southern Baptist born in Kentucky, she was camping in an Avenue B loft, scribbling poems, and playing in an underground band, trying to figure out her next move. A couple of months later she was consumed by the Lesbian Avengers, instigating direct action campaigns, battling cops on Fifth Avenue, mobilizing 20,000 dykes for a march on Washington, D.C., and eating fire—literally—in front of the Whi...

Anna Camilleri is a Toronto-based writer, and performer. . She co-edited the anthology Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity, a Lambda Award nominee, as well as co-authored Boys Like Her as a member of the Taste This collective. In 2004, she published her memoir, I Am a Red Dress.

The first collection of plays from Booker Prize and Orange Prize finalist and author of international bestseller Room, Emma Donoghue.Contains the plays Kissing the Witch, Don’t Die Wondering, Trespasses, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I Know My Own HeartKISSING THE WITCHAdapted from her book of thirteen revisionist fairy tales of the same name, this play interweaves four classic plots – Beauty and the Beast, Donkeyskin, the Goose Girl, the Little Mermaid – with an invented...

The persecution of people in Africa on the basis of their assumed or perceived homosexual orientation has received considerable coverage in the popular media in recent years. Gay-bashing by political and religious figures in Zimbabwe and Gambia; draconian new laws against lesbians and gays and their supporters in Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda; and the imprisonment and extortion of gay men in Senegal and Cameroon have all rightly sparked international condemnation. However, much of the analysi...

The 1950s queer-life groundbreaker by "a literary pioneer . . . [who] forever changed perceptions of same-sex love and desire" (Advocate.com).Ann Aldrich flung a provocative assertion at her readers in 1955 when she opened her landmark account of lesbian life in New York City by saying this book was the "result of fifteen years of participation in society as a female homosexual."After the release of We Walk Alone, Aldrich became both a heroine and ...