Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies: Recommended Books and Media

Explores the history of transgender and gender nonconforming people, with a focus on those who identified in other than a straightforward binary fashion; on communities in West Africa, Asia, and among Native Americans; and on cross-dressing in World War I prison camps and in entertainment--From the Publisher

From the Publisher, "Sexuality involves anatomical, physiological, psychological, developmental, cultural, and relational factors. These may vary from individual to individual depending upon gender identity, orientation, intention, desire, arousal, orgasm, and emotional satisfaction. The sexual response cycle involves different phases, including excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. These phases may not be the same or follow the same order in different people. This book deals with the origins of human sexuality, sex development, gender, sexual health, sexuality, and disability. The book also gives a bird's eye view of how the COVID-19 pandemic affected human sexuality."

Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life. - From the Publisher

KJ Cerankowski's Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming stitches together an embodied history of trauma and its ongoing impacts on the lived realities of trans, queer, and other marginalized subjects. Suture is a conjuration, a patchwork knitting of ghost stories attending to the wound as its own archive. It is a journey through many “transitions”: of gender; through illness and chronic pain; from childhood to adulthood and back again; of psyche and form in the wake of abuse and through the work of healing; and of the self, becoming in and through the ongoingness of settler colonial violence and its attendant subjugations of diverse forms of life. Refusing a traditional binary-based gender transition narrative, as well as dominant psychoanalytic narratives of trauma that center an individual process of symptom, diagnosis, and cure, Suture explores the refractive nature of trauma’s dispersed roots and lingering effects. If the wounds of trauma are disquiet apparitions—repetitions within the cut—these stories tend the seams through which the simultaneous loneliness of mourning and togetherness of queer intersubjective relations converge. Across these essays, healing, and indeed living, is a state of perpetual becoming, surviving, and loving, in the nonlinearities of trauma time, body-time, and queer time."

When Monsters Speak showcases the work of Susan Stryker, a foundational figures in trans studies, from the 1990s to the present.

From Wikipedia, "Paris Is Burning is a 1990 American documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston.[2] Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it.[3]

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 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 twenty-five 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, and history. history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention"-- Provided by publisher.