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Cover of Time Binds - Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Duke University Press

Time Binds - Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Elizabeth Freeman

€22.00

Time Binds is a powerful argument that temporal and sexual dissonance are intertwined, and that the writing of history can be both embodied and erotic. Challenging queer theory’s recent emphasis on loss and trauma, Elizabeth Freeman foregrounds bodily pleasure in the experience and representation of time as she interprets an eclectic archive of queer literature, film, video, and art. She examines work by visual artists who emerged in a commodified, “postfeminist,” and “postgay” world. Yet they do not fully accept the dissipation of political and critical power implied by the idea that various political and social battles have been won and are now consigned to the past. By privileging temporal gaps and narrative detours in their work, these artists suggest ways of putting the past into meaningful, transformative relation with the present. Such “queer asynchronies” provide opportunities for rethinking historical consciousness in erotic terms, thereby countering the methods of traditional and Marxist historiography. Central to Freeman’s argument are the concepts of chrononormativity, the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity; temporal drag, the visceral pull of the past on the supposedly revolutionary present; and erotohistoriography, the conscious use of the body as a channel for and means of understanding the past. Time Binds emphasizes the critique of temporality and history as crucial to queer politics.

Elizabeth Freeman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, also published by Duke University Press.

Language: English

recommendations

Cover of The Minor Gesture

Duke University Press

The Minor Gesture

Erin Manning

Essays €25.00

In this wide-ranging and probing book Erin Manning extends her previous inquiries into the politics of movement to the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception." Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis and Whitehead's speculative pragmatism, Manning's far-reaching analyses range from fashion to depression to the writings of autistics, in each case affirming the neurodiversity of the minor and the alternative politics it gestures toward.

I have been enthralled and held by this book! Erin Manning has given us a new theory of bearing, as well as a new elaboration of gesture, going beyond Balzac’s theory and Agamben’s interpretation of it. She doesn’t lament the loss of gesture but celebrates gesture's minoritization.
- Fred Moten

Cover of The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader

Duke University Press

The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader

Gloria Anzaldua, AnaLouise Keating

A collection of published and unpublished writings of the groundbreaking Chicana writer and self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer and cultural theorist" Gloria Anzaldua.

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was a visionary writer whose work was recognized with many honors, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, a Lambda literary award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, and the Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies. Her book Borderlands/La frontera was selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by Hungry Mind Review and the Utne Reader. AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women's Studies at Texas Woman's University, is the author of Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde; editor of Anzaldúa's Interviews/Entrevistas and EntreMundos/AmongWorlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa; and co-editor, with Anzaldúa, of this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation.

Cover of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Duke University Press

The Essential Jill Johnston Reader

Jill Johnston, Clare Croft

Non-fiction €28.00

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

Cover of Otherwise Worlds

Duke University Press

Otherwise Worlds

Andrea Smith, Jenell Navarro and 1 more

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

Cover of The Sense of Brown

Duke University Press

The Sense of Brown

José Esteban Muñoz

LGBTQI+ €24.00

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad.

This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Cover of Nova Scotia House

Nightboat Books

Nova Scotia House

Charlie Porter

LGBTQI+ €18.00

Nova Scotia House takes us to the heart of a relationship, a community and an era, both a love story and a lament. 

In this profound meditation on grief, Johnny looks back at his relationship with his life partner, Jerry, after his AIDS-related death. When they met, nearly thirty years ago, Johnny was 19, Jerry was 45. They made a life on their own terms in Jerry’s flat: 1, Nova Scotia House. Johnny is still there today—but Jerry is gone, and so is the world they knew. 

Intimate, visionary, and profoundly original—as well as raw, hot, and hilarious—Nova Scotia House marks the debut of a vibrant new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cover of touxs mes queers sont des poéte·sses

Self-Published

touxs mes queers sont des poéte·sses

saël teukam tamo

Poetry €8.00

Car archiver nos écrits et nos paroles n'a jamais été aussi important, car il faut rendre compte de nos existences, de ce moment, pour nous et pour les futurs queers en recherche de repères oui, nous avons écrit, donc oui vous pourrez écrire aussi ! oui, nous avons existé, donc oui, vous existerez aussi ! car oui, nous sommes toustes poéte·sses ! car nos vies sont des poèmes et être queer est de la poésie car touxs mes queers sont des poéte·sses! 

Because preserving our writings and our words has never been more important, because we must bear witness to our lives, to this moment, for ourselves and for future queers in search of guidance yes, we have written, so yes, you can write too! yes, we have existed, so yes, you will exist too! because yes, we are all poets! because our lives are poems and being queer is poetry because all my queers are poets!

Cover of Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities

Ugly Duckling Presse

Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities

Scott Burton, Eduardo Costa and 2 more

LGBTQI+ €24.00

Their relationship is forged in charismatic, darting, and deep correspondence: dishy gossip, shop talk, and the auditioning of ideas and shaping of artistic practices." 
—Nate Lippens

When Scott Burton (1939–1989) and Eduardo Costa (b. 1940) met in New York City in 1968, they developed a close friendship that lasted until Burton’s death. In letters from the 1970s, they gossiped and shared thoughts about the rapid changes taking place in the art world, queer life, and their work as writers and artists. Burton and Costa’s letters show a vibrant transnational queer artistic friendship and offer a new perspective on the struggle to establish conceptual, critical artistic practices in the Americas. As Costa moved from New York to Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, he and Burton discussed the art communities of North and South America, including Costa’s friend Hélio Oiticica and the lasting influence of Marcel Duchamp. Both artists found the letters to be a source of emotional and intellectual nourishment—as will their readers.