Queering Desire

This book explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women's and non-binary people's experiences of identity and desire.

Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women's, and non-binary people's experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways.

Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people's experiences. Through 25 newly commissioned chapters, a diverse range of authors, from early career researchers to established scholars, stage conversations at the cutting edge of sexuality studies. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities.

This innovative interdisciplinary collection is an excellent resource for scholars, undergraduate, and postgraduate students interested in gender, sexuality, and identity across a range of fields, such as queer studies, feminist theory, anthropology, media studies, sociology, psychology, history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention.

Autorentext

Róisín Ryan-Flood is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests encompass gender, sexuality, kinship, digital intimacies, and feminist epistemology. Her books include Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship (2009), Difficult Conversations: A Feminist Dialogue (2023) and Consent: Gender, Power and Subjectivity (2023). She is co-editor of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society.

Amy Tooth Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research interests include butch/femme identities and culture, and queer oral history theory and method. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption and is a Trustee of the Oral History Society.

Inhalt

Foreword

Introduction

SECTION 1: (IN)VISIBILITY AND THE QUEER GAZE

1. Queer old movie star

2. Staging our desires: Drag kings and the pleasures of community building

3. 'In their loving gaze I saw who I could be': Revisiting the butch/femme couple as joint subject through Esther Newton's My Butch Career

4. Transcripts, TransTape™, Transience: Locating the bisexual butch **

5. The punchline isn't everything: Feminist and queer stand-up dramedy

6. Gender, sexuality and visual culture an interview with Rosalind Gill

SECTION 2: LINEAGE AND GENERATIONAL SHIFTS

7. Femme frontiers: Tracing the lineage of fore-femmes through to contemporary identities and femme theory **

8. Book Banning in the U.S.: A call for multi-generational activism

9. From Butch and Femme Lesbians to Non-binary and Queer Women: Intergenerational Shifts from In-person Places to Digital Spaces

10. Carabiners and Violet Tattoos: the desire for nostalgia in online lesbian space

11. Increased Lesbian Visibility and its Discontents: Comparing the coming out stories of women and nonbinary people across generations

12. Queer lineage: On generational sexualities, LGBTQ identity and visibility

SECTION 3: QUEER EMBODIMENT

13. Against Pathology: Exploring the Desire for Femininity

14. Complicating queer desires: Identity politics of the lesbian and bisexual communities in South Africa

15. My own private non-binary body

16. 'Aren't you ashamed?': Explicit representation and shame in the work of Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson and Melissa Febos

17. Trans history and politics an interview with Susan Stryker

18. Midlife lesbian: Alison Bechdel and Me

SECTION 4: QUEER LONGINGS

19. Desiring Technologies: Digital Pathways toward Black Queer Sociality

20. The butch on the ferry: The affect and effect of butch longing

21. Desire on the Inside: Incarcerated Women, Bisexual Identity, and Human Connection

22. Queering romance: Expressions of love and intimacy in late-twentieth-century lesbian relationships

23. Intimacy or intimacies? Queering Jewish women's desires and intimate lives

24. Naming desire: Information seeking and breaking the silence around queer female desire in mid-twentieth-century Britain

25. Beloved: Crafting lesbian desire and femme intimacies with the Ladies of Llangollen