Decolonizing Queer Experience

In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, LGBT+ individuals face repression by state forces and non-state actors who attempt to reinforce their vision of traditional social values. Decolonizing Queer Experience moves beyond discourses of oppression and repression to explore the resistance and resilience of LGBT+ communities who are remaking the post-socialist world; they refuse domination from local heteronormative expectations and from global LGBT+ movements that create and suggest limitations on possible LGBT+ futures. The chapters in this collection feature a multiplicity of LGBT+ voices, suggesting that no single narrative of LGBT+ experience in post-socialism is more representative or informative than another. This collection highlights the globally flexible, infinitely malleable notion of LGBT+ that counters Western hegemony in queer activism and communities.

ÒThis book is an imagining.Ó So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogueÑa Òwriting in conversationÓÑamong a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people Òexperience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,Ó this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.

ÒThis book is an imagining.Ó So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogueÑa Òwriting in conversationÓÑamong a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people Òexperience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival,Ó this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.

Explores the intimate relationship of non-Native and Native sexual politics in the United States

Popular narratives cite religion as the driving force behind homophobia in Africa, portraying Christianity and LGBT expression as incompatible. Without denying Christianity’s contribution to the stigma, discrimination, and exclusion of same-sex-attracted and gender-variant people on the continent, Adriaan van Klinken presents an alternative narrative, foregrounding the ways in which religion also appears as a critical site of LGBT activism. Taking up the notion of “arts of resistance,” Kenyan, Christian, Queer presents four case studies of grassroots LGBT activism through artistic and creative expressions—including the literary and cultural work of Binyavanga Wainaina, the “Same Love” music video produced by gay gospel musician George Barasa, the Stories of Our Lives anthology project, and the LGBT-affirming Cosmopolitan Affirming Church. Through these case studies, Van Klinken demonstrates how Kenyan traditions, black African identities, and Christian beliefs and practices are being navigated, appropriated, and transformed in order to allow for queer Kenyan Christian imaginations. Transdisciplinary in scope and poignantly intimate in tone, Kenyan, Christian, Queer opens up critical avenues for rethinking the nature and future of the relationship between Christianity and queer activism in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education is a substantial addition to the discussion of queer masculinities, of the interplay between queer masculinities and education, and to the political gender discourse as a whole. Enriching the discourse of masculinity politics, the cross-section of scholarly interrogations of the complexities and contradictions of queer masculinities in education demonstrates that any serious study of masculinity—hegemonic or otherwise—must consider the theoretical and political contributions that the concept of queer masculinity makes to a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of masculinity itself. The essays adopt a range of approaches from empirical studies to reflective theorizing, and address themselves to three separate educational realms: the K-12 level, the collegiate level, and the level in popular culture, which could be called ‘cultural pedagogy’. The wealth of detailed analysis includes, for example, the notion that normative expectations and projections on the part of teachers and administrators unnecessarily reinforce the values and behaviors of heteronormative masculinity, creating an institutionalized loop that disciplines masculinity. At the same time, and for this very reason, schools represent an opportunity to ‘provide a setting where a broader menu can be introduced and gender/sexual meanings, expressions, and experiences boys encounter can create new possibilities of what it can mean to be male’. At the collegiate level chapters include analysis of what the authors call ‘homosexualization of heterosexual men’ on the university dance floor, while the chapters of the third section, on popular culture, include a fascinating analysis of the construction of queer ‘counternarratives’ that can be constructed watching TV shows of apparently hegemonic bent. In all, this volume’s breadth and detail make it a landmark publication in the study of queer masculinities, and thus in critical masculinity studies as a whole.

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical. In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.