...Teresa de Lauretis This essay advances a series of critical points in queer theory. First, a text is queer, regardless of the queerness of its authorial persona, if it carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex. This is argued in relation to Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936...

...Ruth Vanita Duke University Press 2005 BORN OF TWO VAGINAS Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts Ruth Vanita Fourteenth-century devotional texts from Bengal recount different versions of the story of the hero Bhagiratha’s birth to two queens who...

...Jessica Stacey Abstract This article suggests that we might find a new way to address two stubborn questions regarding Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions through a single shift in perspective. These two questions are: What can we make of the antipathy that readers often feel toward this text...

... of transoceanic dislocations between Africa and the Caribbean? This article examines canonical African diaspora and queer theoretical texts in dialogue with recently published creative texts that imagine queer relationships between African kidnapees in slave ships' holds. These creative texts, I argue, more...

... literature that allows for its reclamation for lesbian use. Furthermore, the essay demands a return to the terminology associated with lesbianism, rather than queerness, because of the woman-centeredness of the texts at hand, structural elements drawn from lesbian sexual and relational practices...

..., the present article takes up the subtitle to Rechy's sixth novel, The Sexual Outlaw (“a prose documentary”), as a way to analyze the novel's generic and formal choices. While tracing the continuities between this text from 1977 and his earlier best-selling novels, the article locates this genre-bending novel...

...Cynthia G. Franklin; Laura E. Lyons This essay analyzes legal and cultural texts that pertain to the 2002 murder of Gwen Araujo, to argue for the political possibilities that can be mobilized through familial grief over a human rights violation against a trans person. As family members speak from...

...Sarah Dowling In this essay I read the long poem Tokinish by the Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens. Stevens borrows passages of prose description from Roger Williams's 1643 Narragansett lexicon, A Key into the Language of America , as well as the earlier text's structure of facing columns of English...

... (or, more broadly, a politics of embodiment), it reads “Thinking Sex” alongside another 1984 text, Deborah A. Stone's book The Disabled State , arguing that Stone's text, like Rubin's, is concerned with how capitalism sorts bodies and behaviors into dominant and subordinated categories. The Disabled State...

... recent works of queer medievalism explore and apply these methodologies: Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Queering the Middle Ages , and Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn't . The contributors to Burger and Kruger's volume examine both medieval visual and verbal texts...

.... They rivaling voices from the LGBTQIA community beautifully convey all of the salient, ironic, painful, political and humorous positions as is. I have added my own positioning on key issues along the way. These are in the footnotes rather than the main text. This is not a strategy to perform the impossible act...

... many television texts feature gay men as fathers. These texts usually present gay parenthood as a positive phenomenon and sometimes even as more successful than heteronormative parenthood. The recasting of gay parenthood as positive is achieved through various devices, some of which are familiar from...

.... My reading illuminates how the textual strategies of metaphorical substitution and narrative replacement used to imagine postwar lesbian romance consequently render lesbian motherhood and queer desire as seemingly incommensurable. In the core narrative present in both texts, the arc of lesbian...

..., and biopolitics. Identifying Diane DiMassa’s comic series Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1999) and Robert Eggers’s Puritan horror film, The Witch (2015), as emblematic of this approach, the essay argues that both texts champion a reparative approach to paranoid sensibilities that takes seriously...

...Corey McEleney Since its publication in 2004, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive has sparked some of the most heated debates in literary and cultural studies. Yet most engagements with Edelman’s text—whether positive, negative, or neutral—tend to resort to paraphrasing...

... Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness —now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans...

... and the encroachment of the Nazis on Vienna. Against this murderous imposition, the memoir embraces a temporality defined by brevity and contingency—we might call it momentary time or ephemeral time. As such, this queer text speaks to queer theory's oppositions between normative and nonnormative time...

... dirty; how black sexuality is posited as toxic, non-productive, and nonreproductive; and how black sexuality is imagined as wasteful. In turning attention to this understudied and overdetermining space — the black anus — “Black Anality” considers the racial meanings produced in pornographic texts...