Lesbianism figures into María Irene Fornés’s writing in every decade of her career but bears significantly on only a quarter of her more than forty published plays and manuscripts. Through close readings of four plays (Tango Palace, Fefu and Her Friends, Enter THE NIGHT, The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus), Nicole Stodard evinces the the evocative stylistic ways that Fornés’s embodied queerness becomes visible in her body of work through characters’ gender and sexual embodiment, romantic triangulation, shapeshifting categorization, and queer suffering and joy. Stodard argues that Fornés’s work embodied a sexual philosophy that was more expansive and connected with a larger life quest. From depicting couples, queer and straight, to queering coupling through the representation of triangular affection, her legacy ultimately advances an abundant love that is plural, communal, uninhibited, transcendent, and joyful.

Chapter 7, Be Careful about the Publisher, examines how the diverse sources, distribution networks, and audiences associated with sexology undermined Havelock Ellis’s attempts to frame his book on homosexuality with John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897), as a serious medical work, and led to its appearance in the obscenity trial R. v. Bedborough (1898). Authorities charged Bedborough aiming to break up a radical group, but sexologists and their allies framed the trial as an ignorant attack on scientific progress. Elaborating on strategies pioneered by birth-controllers, they argued that the censorship of “naturalistic” sexual expression had mired society in sexual ignorance, fostering “abnormal” sexual behaviour and an appetite for pornography, the rightful target of obscenity laws. In positioning their own work as vital to society and pornography as a product of sexual science’s suppression, they obfuscated ways in which early sexologists relied on pornographers and their products. By examining sexologists’ attempts to navigate these issues, this chapter further demonstrates how arguments about obscenity were used tactically to sanitize sexual knowledge and its producers.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

This chapter focuses on the question of resistance in D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988). Love argues that, although Miller’s approach anticipated many aspects of queer modernist reading practice, it is ideologically distinct in evincing skepticism about the liberatory potential of expressions of sexuality, including non-normative sexuality. Miller’s understanding of sexuality as present and licit rather than taboo and unspeakable thoroughly absorbs Michel Foucault’s critique of what he called the “repressive hypothesis.” In this sense, Love argues, Miller offers not only a queer reading of realist fiction but also realist queer criticism, which emphasizes existing realities over political potential.

This chapter argues that scholars of sex, sexuality, and gender have begun to engage with global histories, but in a selective manner and often characterised by ideas of one-way dissemination from Europe to locations beyond its borders. It suggests some entry points for a richer, multidirectional historiography, including the movements of indigenous and colonised peoples, economies of trading sex, the regulation of reproduction, and new histories of feminisms. Non-binary forms of gender and queer sexualities are prominent within such literatures and help to complicate established narratives. The chapter also highlights historiographical contributions that diversify our histories away from ‘great power’ geopolitics and draw out the specificity of regions such as eastern and central Europe and the experiences of ‘non-aligned’ states and of non-state actors such as religious organizations and racialized historical actors.

This chapter offers an intersectional feminist reading of West Side Story that shows how women of color and the gender non-conforming character Anybodys are central to the (partial) redemptive arc of the musical. The narrative and characterizations—as expressed through songs, dances, and score—suggest a path to a better “Somewhere” that requires us to step outside the confines of normative masculinity and femininity which reinforce the boundaries of race and class. Throughout the musical, Anita and Maria must navigate the tensions within the concepts of assimilation and multiculturalism, as well as a social landscape dominated by an anxious and often violent masculinity. Careful attention to performances of these roles, and the character Anybodys, make clear that the belonging they (and we the audience) seek might be found somewhere beyond the reductive and destructive strictures of the gender binary.

This chapter provides an overview of the longue durée of Russian literature’s engagement with non-heteronormative sexuality and non-normative genders as well as a more extended focus on the Modernist period as a time when queerness operated as a particularly generative cultural mechanism, stimulating new modes of literary production. While queer literary expression can be observed since the beginning of literature in Russia, the chapter argues that the early twentieth century saw the development of specific forms of literary poetics that were at once expressive of queerness and associated with it. The chapter also considers the history and philosophical connections of the most significant of these forms: the existential prosaic fragment.

Ideas of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity were in flux throughout the eighteenth century. This chapter places Goldsmith’s comedies She Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natur’d Man at the heart of contemporary gender debates. The theatre was a significant site for the negotiation of gender where women’s sensitivity, modesty, and gentility were touted as positive social forces capable of reforming men and improving manners by conditioning women to please others. Goldsmith’s plays can be seen as part of the ‘feminization debate’ – British discourse which trumpeted the progressive effects of women on modern society while seeking to condemn perceived transgressions of an increasingly binary gender order.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, the English-language essay engages with colonialism and postcolonial reality to embody forms of life writing that grapple with the provocative confluences of English education, local context, and migrant desire. While conflicts between colonial legacy, postcolonial liberation, and creative imagination assume urgency with pioneers such as V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, linguistic limits on ethical and political values emerge as defining concerns for apartheid-riven writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Zoë Wicomb, while the scope and constraints of postcolonial representation energise the essays of Shashi Deshpande and Amit Chaudhuri. The fluid and constantly changeable identity of the postcolonial subject that drives the aspirations of the postcolonial essay finds language in its promiscuous texture and heterogeneous structure, its dalliance with analysis, narrative, and image, and its perpetually wandering and unfinished form.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.

The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

Attending to the tropological imagination of Progressive Era U.S. immigration, this chapter maps what Michel Foucault calls “the organization of ‘erotic zones’ in the social body” to narrate a queer history of the social body itself. In so doing, the chapter animates a variety of period figurations of mass immigration—including racial indigestion and race suicide—to trace a new genealogy of the literary erotics of Asian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, the ethnic groups that most threatened the whiteness of the social body. Reading across representations of immigration in the works of Henry James, Israel Zangwill, Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi, Sui Sin Far, Jennie June, Emanuel Carnevali, and Emma Lazarus, this chapter shifts the history of sexuality from one located in individual bodies to theorize a sexuality of the population.