Pregnant Butch

First pregnancy can be a fraught, uncomfortable experience for any woman, but for resolutely butch lesbian Teek Thomasson, it is exceptionally challenging. Teek identifies as a masculine woman in a world bent on associating pregnancy with a cult of uber-femininity. Teek wonders, “Can butches even get pregnant?” Of course, as she and her pragmatic femme girlfriend Vee discover, they can. But what happens when they do? Written and illustrated by A.K. Summers, and based on her own pregnancy, Pregnant Butch strives to depict this increasingly common, but still underrepresented experience of queer pregnancy with humor and complexity—from the question of whether suspenders count as legitimate maternity wear to the strains created by different views of pregnancy within a couple and finally to a culturally critical and compassionate interrogation of gender in pregnancy. Offering smart, ambitious art, this graphic memoir is a must-read for would-be pregnant butches and anyone interested in the intersection of birth and gender, as well as a perfect queer baby shower gift and conversation starter for those who always assumed they “got” being pregnant.

An autobiography of Chicana lesbian Karleen Pendleton Jimenez with a focus on her attempts to have a child.

In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ ... This is [Waite’s] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...” “In this arresting collection, Stacey Waite is a pathfinder, charting with disarming honesty, humor, pathos and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of her craft and deft language, that open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise.” — Kwame Dawes

Natal Signs: Cultural Representations of Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting explores some of the ways in which reproductive experiences are taken up in the rich arena of cultural production. The chapters in this collection pose questions, unsettle assumptions, and generate broad imaginative spaces for thinking about representation of pregnancy, birth, and parenting. They demonstrate the ways in which practices of consuming and using representations carry within them the productive forces of creation. Bringing together an eclectic and vibrant range of perspectives, this collection offers readers the possibility to rethink and reimagine the diverse meanings and practices of representations of these significant life events. Engaging theoretical reflection and creative image making, the contributors explore a broad range of cultural signs with a focus on challenging authoritative representations in a manner that seeks to reveal rather than conceal the insistently problematic and contestable nature of image culture. Natal Signs gathers an exciting set of critically engaged voices to reflect on some of life’s most meaningful moments in ways that affirm natality as the renewed promise of possibility.

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

Some people can't wait to have babies. They're ready for it--with their perfect lives and their pregnancy glow... Poppy Adams doesn't have a perfect life, and she wasn't ready for the positive test. An unexpected baby--Poppy's unexpected baby--won't exactly have her family doing cartwheels. But she's making the right choice. Right? Poppy's totally got this. She just needs a little encouragement, and a knitting group is the perfect place to start. Baby blankets, booties, tiny little hats--small steps toward her new life. But she feels like she's already dropped a stitch when she discovers the knitting group is led by the charismatic Rhiannon. It's not exactly a great time to meet the woman who might just be the love of her life. While the group easily shuffles around to make room for Poppy, it's not so easy fitting her life and Rhiannon's together. With the weeks counting down until her baby arrives, Poppy's going to have to decide for herself what truly makes a family. A new Carina Adores title is available each month: The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover The Girl Next Door by Chelsea M. Cameron Just Like That by Cole McCade Hairpin Curves by Elia Winters The Love Study by Kris Ripper The Secret Ingredient by KD Fisher Just Like This by Cole McCade Teddy Spenser Isn't Looking for Love by Kim Fielding The Beautiful Things Shoppe by Philip William Stover Our Level Best by Roan Parrish J-Curve by Hudson Lin The Hate Project by Kris Ripper

This comics anthology delves deeply into the messy and often taboo subject of human reproduction. Featuring work by luminaries such as Carol Tyler, Alison Bechdel, and Joyce Farmer, Graphic Reproduction is an illustrated challenge to dominant cultural narratives about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth. The comics here expose the contradictions, complexities, and confluences around diverse individual experiences of the entire reproductive process, from trying to conceive to child loss and childbirth. Jenell Johnson’s introduction situates comics about reproduction within the growing field of graphic medicine and reveals how they provide a discursive forum in which concepts can be explored and presented as uncertainties rather than as part of a prescribed or expected narrative. Through comics such as Lyn Chevley’s groundbreaking “Abortion Eve,” Bethany Doane’s “Pushing Back: A Home Birth Story,” Leah Hayes’s “Not Funny Ha-Ha,” and “Losing Thomas & Ella: A Father’s Story,” by Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower, the collection explores a myriad of reproductive experiences and perspectives. The result is a provocative, multifaceted portrait of one of the most basic and complicated of all human experiences, one that can be hilarious and heartbreaking. Featuring work by well-known comics artists as well as exciting new voices, this incisive collection is an important and timely resource for understanding how reproduction intersects with sociocultural issues. The afterword and a section of discussion exercises and questions make it a perfect teaching tool.

No Straight Lines showcases major names such as Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, and Ralf Koenig (one of Europe’s most popular cartoonists), as well as high-profile, crossover creators who have dabbled in LGBT cartooning, like legendary NYC artist David Wojnarowicz and media darling and advice columnist Dan Savage. No Straight Lines also spotlights many talented creators who never made it out of the queer comics ghetto, but produced amazing work that deserves wider attention. Queer cartooning encompasses some of the best and most interesting comics of the last four decades, with creators tackling complex issues of identity and a changing society with intelligence, humor, and imagination. This book celebrates this vibrant artistic underground by gathering together a collection of excellent stories that can be enjoyed by all. Until recently, queer cartooning existed in a parallel universe to the rest of comics, appearing only in gay newspapers and gay bookstores and not in comic book stores, mainstream bookstores or newspapers. The insular nature of the world of queer cartooning, however, created a fascinating artistic scene. LGBT comics have been an uncensored, internal conversation within the queer community, and thus provide a unique window into the hopes, fears, and fantasies of queer people for the last four decades. These comics have forged their aesthetics from the influences of underground comix, gay erotic art, punk zines, and the biting commentaries of drag queens, bull dykes, and other marginalized queers. They have analyzed their own communities, and their relationship with the broader society. They are smart, funny, and profound. No Straight Lines has been heralded by people interested in comics history, and people invested in LGBT culture will embrace it as a unique and invaluable collection.