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I've noticed a couple people mentioning a desire to getting into more reading. I have some recommendations (and am always open to discussing books) that focus primarily on trans/intersex and queergender theory. I also think feministgender theory (absent specifically queer lenses) is an important backbone to queer gender theory, as early feminist writers describing the gender-class distinction paved the way for understanding queerness’s place in the gender-class distinction, but this list would be way too long then. Hit me up if you want some recommendations though. Some of these ethnographs rather than theory, or historical, or a bit more personal.
Let's start with the trans classics
Julia Serrano - Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which can be followed up with Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, and Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back, and Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism
Emi Koyama - The Transfeminist Manifesto and Transfeminism: A Collection
Leslie Feinberg - Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink Or Blue, and Lavender and Red, and Transgender Warriors: Making History From Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (a great read and interesting for its time, but be wary of accepting Feinberg's premise that contemporary concepts of identity can be broadly applied to cultural contexts across space and time)
Kate Bornstein - Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and Gender Outlaws: the Next Generation
Riki Wilchins - Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender
Susan Stryker - My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (which is a fantastic essay) and Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution
Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (editors) - The Transgender Studies Reader and The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (this one is edited with Aren Aizura rather than Whittle)
Viviane K. Namaste - Invisible Lives : The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People and Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism
Esther Newton - Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America and Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas and Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town
And this one isn't so much a classic as it is essential reading for trans studies for Marxists:
Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke (editors) - Transgender Marxism (I also recommend Gleeson’s essay Transition and Abolition: Notes on Marxism and Trans Politics)
And now for some less well-known trans theory:
Jay Prosser - Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Joanne Meyerowitz - How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
Angela Pattatuchi Aragón - Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives
Rita Santos - Beyond Gender Binaries: The History of Trans, Intersex, and Third-Gender Individuals
Marjorie Garber - Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Larry Nuttbrock (ed.) - Transgender Sex Work and Society
Andrea Abi-Karam, Kay Gabriel - We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (this is poems, more than theory, but so worth it)
Mark Thompson, Dorothy Allison, Guy Baldwin, Joseph W. Bean, Michael Bronski, Pat Califia, Jack Fritscher, Geoff Mains, Gayle Rubin – Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice
Hil Malatino - Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad
Merrick Daniel Pilling - Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice
Morty Diamond, Julia Serano, Shawna Virago, Sassafras Lowrey, Silas Howard, Cooper Lee Bombardier – Trans/Love: Radical Sex, Love & Relationships Beyond the Gender Binary
And this is for intersex theory:
Hilary Malatino - Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience
Alice Domurat Dreger - Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex
Anne Fausto-Sterling - Myths Of Gender: Biological Theories About Women And Men and Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Catherine Harper - Intersex
Morgan Holmes - Critical Intersex
Nikoletta Pikramenou - Intersex Rights: Living Between Sexes
Julia Epstein, Kristina Straub - Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity
David A. Rubin - Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism
Georgiann Davis - Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis
Katrina Karkazis - Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
Brandy L. Simula, J.E. Sumerau, Andrea Miller (editors) - Expanding the Rainbow: Exploring the Relationships of Bi+, Polyamorous, Kinky, Ace, Intersex, and Trans People
Elizabeth Reis - Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex
Hida Vilori, Maria Nieto - The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex
Stefan Horlacher (eds.) - Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives
And this is queer theory more broadly:
Hilary Manette Klein - The Problematics of Heterosexuality: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature
Holly Lewis - The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection
Gayle S. Rubin – Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader
Sara Ahmed - Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Judith Butler - Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” and Undoing Gender
Andrew Parker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Performativity and Performance
Also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies
Carla Freccero, Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - Queer/Early/Modern
Monique Wittig - The Straight Mind And Other Essays
Mary McAuliffe (editor) - Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Merl Storr - Deleuze and Queer Theory
Suzanne J. Kessler, Wendy McKenna – Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach
Thomas Walter Laqueur - Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
And this is examining abolition from a trans perspective:
Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock - Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
Dean Spade - Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law
Eric A. Stanley - Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Jasbir Puar - Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times
And this is for reading about queerness in non-American/English cultural contexts
Adnan Hossain - Beyond Emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the Making of hijra in Bangladesh and Badhai: Hijra-Khwaja Sira-Trans Performance Across Borders in South Asia (with Claire Pamment)
Xianyong Bai, Hans Tao-Ming Huang- Queer Politics and Sexual Modernity in Taiwan
Denise Tse-Shang Tang - Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life
Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder, Hongwei Bao (editors) - Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures
Eli Coleman, Chou Wah-Shan – Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies
Howard Chiang (eds.) - Transgender China
Hongwei Bao - Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism
Francisca Yuenki Lai - Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires
Don Kulick – Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes
Gloria Anzaldua - Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Eunjung Kim - Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea
Hwasook Nam - Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea
Fintan Walsh - Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation
Páraic Kerrigan - LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland
Patrick R. Mullen - The Poor Bugger's Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History
Gul Ozyegin (ed.) - Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature
Saed Atshan - Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique
Sarah Schulman - Israel/Palestine and the Queer International
Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe (editors) - Boy-wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities
Will Roscoe - Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America
Saved, this fucks. Thank you!
Saved!
Tá fáilte romhat! Hope you find something in there that you enjoy, or that resonates. Whipping Girl is one that I bought after reading because after so many years of Stoller's sex/gender distinction permeating queer theory to the point that it's often uncritically presented as fact, it was so amazing to read Serrano's theory of intrinsic inclinations (which she fleshed out further in subsequent writings) which jives much more with my own experiences and works better to apply across different experiences and cultural manifestations of gender
Mods! Mods plz pin!
Mods!
Thank you for the list
Go raibh míle maith agat!