This chapter explores William Burroughs’ fraught engagement with queerness, colonialism, and nationalism across such key texts as Queer, The Yage Letters, Naked Lunch, and The Wild Boys. Drawing on Oliver Harris’ and Alex Wermer-Colan’s insights into Burroughs’ overidentification with imperial tropes, Carmody argues that Burroughs simultaneously critiques and reappropriates colonial discourse through a queer lens. Through grotesque, parodic routines, Burroughs exposes the libidinal underpinnings of American exceptionalism and neocolonialism. Carmody situates Burroughs’ postwar expatriate writing – especially in 1950s Tangier – as emblematic of a nostalgic yet radical vision for a postnational community, rooted in aesthetic freedom and sexual plurality. Highlighting the transformation from colonial critique to postcolonial fantasy, Carmody demonstrates how Burroughs reimagines the colony as a site of anarchic potential, rather than nationalist redemption. The chapter ultimately suggests that Burroughs’ literary project is less a political blueprint than an unstable, generative terrain where queer desire and imperial critique intersect.

This chapter describes the foundations for and the possibilities of implementing a Queer AZN CRT framework in social work practice. Queer AZN CRT is rooted in critical, feminist, queer, Indigenist and Pasifika theories, and explores the impacts of colonization, imperialism, and indigeneity within intersectional Asian experiences. Six proposed tenets for Queer AZN CRT are listed along with core considerations for social work practice: (1) Queer, brown Asianization; (2) challenging mainstream ideologies about Asians, Pacific Islanders, and QTPI/QTAAm; (3) global, decolonial perspectives; (4) reconstructive histories; (5) multidisciplinary story, practice, praxis, and voice; and (6) social justice perspective. Two narratives depict the application of Queer AZN CRT in social work practice, first in a clinical social work scenario, and then within a macro practice framework. Additional reflections regarding the implications for Queer AZN CRT in social work practice and education are discussed.

This chapter explores the rich history of LGBTQ+ writing in Los Angeles – and demonstrates how that literary history is inextricably bound up in a history of political activism. Edgar presents the history of queer LA literature as one that begins with the landmark ONE Inc. v. Olesen case of 1958. In this watershed struggle for free speech, the LA-based gay magazine ONE struck a blow of free speech and against the suppression of queer culture. The chapter positions ONE Inc. v. Olesen as the origin point in the story of queer literary LA, an arc that then stretches through such writers invested of such varying formal, stylistic, and political inclinations as John Rechy, Gore Vidal, Brett Easton Ellis, Eloise Klein Healy, Nina Revoyr, Gil Cuadros, and Michael Nava.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, artists of color began to gain prominence and squarely address the burden of recognition and the politics of representation over race and Britishness. Chapter 3 focuses on Maud Sulter and David Dabydeen, who highlight the Black presence in European and British art through the poetic genre of ekphrasis, or poems on visual art. In Sulter’s case, the Scottish Ghanaian lesbian artist conducts a series of “queer reframings” through her career-long preoccupation with Jeanne Duval, the common-law wife, “Black Venus,” and muse to Charles Baudelaire. In contrast, David Dabydeen takes on one of the most revered English artists in his long poem, Turner (Peepal Tree, 1995), which enters into conversation with Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On, commonly known as The Slave Ship (1840). Their ekphrastic experimentations pattern forms of Blackness and racialized being whose radical alterity become “beyond recognition,” to the point of becoming nearly inscrutable and unknown in aesthetic form.

Before 1970, media rarely addressed LGBTQ+ identity and only as a curiosity, disease, or deviation from heteronormativity, making visibility the biggest issue. The few 1960s films addressing queerness still displayed society’s intolerance. 1970s–1990s Hollywood occasionally produced queer-identified characters through straight viewpoints. There were alternatives: camp operated in gay subculture, and lesbian subculture flourished in feminist bars and events. A pivotal moment occurred when comedian Ellen DeGeneres’s 1997 sitcom Ellen depicted her coming out. However, after that media event, the show’s storytelling about her life as a lesbian led to its swift cancellation. DeGeneres then began a talk show dependent on her personal style of warmth, humor, likeability – basically, a non-threatening lesbian. Since Ellen, television regularly incorporates LGBTQ+ characters/plots due to television’s more fragmented, narrowly defined audience programming in cable channel proliferation and streaming services. Movies and cyberculture likewise more frequently adopt queer sensibilities.

This chapter argues that throughout his prose works, Wilde demonstrates ambivalence regarding the significance of fashion in relation to flesh, and this chapter traces that ambivalence through texts including The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, and “The Birthday of the Infanta.” Treating ugliness and beauty, monstrosity and martyrdom, this chapter demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s continued fascination with beautiful flesh that is betrayed as such flesh decays, rots, and becomes loose and baggy, like an ill-fitting garment. Wilde writes against the backdrop of eugenicist discourse, which proves a foil to his aesthetic project while simultaneously animating his response to criminal charges against him for gross indecency. But Wilde also looks to an earlier precedent to work out questions of flesh and fashion, particularly that of baroque painting and sculpture by artists such as Guido Reni and Gianlorenzo Bernini in their representations of the flesh of martyrs. The world remains unsure whether Wilde was a monster or a martyr; this chapter shows that Wilde himself shared those concerns.

This chapter examines representations of wedding attire in a popular, though now defunct, feminist wedding blog, A Practical Wedding. The analysis compares two genres: posts sponsored by apparel brands and posts contributed by people about their own weddings. I argue that the two genres underline two forms of feminist personhood. On one hand, we find the rhetoric of neoliberal individuation, whereby the role of clothing is to help wearers present their best selves, wholly unfettered by others and their expectations. On the contrary, wedding accounts authored by readers-turned-contributors outline a model of clothing that is networked and connects the wearer to others alive and dead. I argue that the cleavage between these two models of dressed selfhood maps on to divergent impulses – toward individualism and being-in-relation – in contemporary feminism. Ultimately, the model of “haunting” by others that is implied by first-person accounts of dressing for the wedding provides a model for thinking about the ghosting of neoliberal feminism by relational ethics.

Harlem’s sensuous poetics refers to an aesthetic sensibility that turned toward the possibilities of feeling, sense, and perception – the realm of the sensuous – to imagine new experiences of Black bodies and pleasure. Its poets drew from the maelstrom of urban life (nightlife in particular) to conjure new ways of inhabiting the body, new desires, and new ways of moving individually and collectively. They provided a new way to understand the role of Harlem as a space of illicit sexuality and self-expression in poetry. This chapter surveys this tradition, situating Harlem’s sensuous poetics in the context of representational challenges to the politics of respectability that shaped Black middle-class cultural norms in the era. It looks first to recurrent poetic tropes (such as the “dancing girl” and the “laughing boy”) that contested such politics. It then turns to the enunciation of a sensuous poetics within normative middle-class institutions such as women’s civic clubs and literary salons. In doing so, it argues that this tradition is less a set of formal principles than a way of being in the world that begins from the body’s sense perception and its felt response.

This chapter concentrates on the ways that writers improvised with the discourse of what Amy Kaplan first described as “manifest domesticity”—a discourse pressing domestic life in the US into the service of empire-building. Their improvisations are a courageous attempt to do nothing less than insert queer lives into the national narrative. Beginning with Walt Whitman’s antebellum fiction, the chapter takes readers all the way into the twentieth century, collating a wide range of writers (some canonical, others now obscure) who shared an interest in queer lives avant la lettre—before, that is, same-sex desire was codified and transformed into an identity rather than a behavior. What emerges astonishes the twenty-first–century’s commonsense of nineteenth-century America: a culture surprisingly open-minded about non-normative desires that is, in many ways, less restrictive than our own; models of domesticity that challenge, rather than reinforce, the rapacious elements of empire; gay sex published and, in some cases, canonized.

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

The 1810s offer decadent examples of Regency queerness including Anne Lister’s diaries, the publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s queer gothic ‘Christabel,’ and Byron’s queer heroes in his Oriental tales. Not singular oddities, these figures speak to queer communities at varying levels of British society. Though Lister documents a series of queer lovers, her writing likewise amasses a queer community, particularly within triadic flirtation and polyamory. ‘Christabel’ and Lister’s diaries both showcase queerness and class-crossings as intertwined and multiple, also apparent in Lister’s own gender movements, identifying as ‘a gent’ and frequently traveling. These connections recur within newspaper stories of gender-crossing patriotic sailors and Byronic queer naval spaces, particularly the sailor-heroes in Lara and The Corsair whose conflicts become symptomatic of queerness in search of community.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In conversations with sex workers and members of VAMP, this chapter engages in the reading of activist texts published by VAMP. The reading and conversations about the texts are located at VAMP’s collective organisational site in Sangli, Maharashtra. Like DMSC, VAMP also emerged through a specific set of conversations between sex workers and others. These conversations were held amongst sex workers, a non–sex worker women’s organisation called Sangram, Dalit and non-Dalit feminist groups in Maharashtra, and Dalit and non-Dalit men’s groups in Sangli. The conversations consolidated women’s collectivisation in Sangli as businesswomen, or dhandhewali, which was achieved through the formation of mutual relations between sex workers’ lives and law. Thus, the sex workers formed VAMP as a registered NGO under state-authorised rules. Through the process of registration, the women shaped their role and responsibility in public life as dhandhewali, and reorganised their specific hierarchical relations of gender, class and caste in Sangli. Simultaneously, sex workers’ relationship with the state, mediated by the reorganisation of hierarchies in their community, attained a form that was distinct from their state-authorised criminal status and conditions.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.

This chapter considers the emergence of gay and lesbian voices in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to political activism and forums such as small press culture, the visual arts and performances. It discusses how some of these were associated with the women’s movement. It notes how an early coalitionist approach transformed into separatism between the lesbian and gay communities, followed by a return to coalitionist approaches in light of the AIDS crisis. The chapter analyses the print culture supporting gay and lesbian writing during these decades. It tracks the emergence of queer poetries that rejected identity categories, including queer Aboriginal poetry. It discusses the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ writing, including the film adaptation of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. Lastly, the chapter considers the proliferation of publications by gay, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary poets from 2010 onwards, contextualising them in light of public debates around the Australian Marriage Law postal survey, the Safe Schools Coalition, and protests around police participation in and corporate sponsorship of the Mardi Gras Parade.

Mughal India had a long history of mistress–maid homoeroticism, ambiguously gendered domestic laborers, and slave–servant–concubine continuum. European men in India initially mimicked Mughal elites and maintained harems with Indian bibis (concubines). British colonialism in India, however, led to the domestic transition from bibis to memsahibs (white women). Chapter 1 situates the creation of a new desexualized colonial caregiver, the ayah, in the growing British shame about interracial sex, concubinage, domestic slavery, and mixed-race children from the 1780s. The ayah, Chapter 1 argues, distinguished the respectable, racially pure British imperial home from hypersexualized Mughal households and from mixed-race slave-holding European Catholic households. The brown ayah was crucial for the production and reproduction of British imperial whiteness at a time of heightened racial and sexual anxiety. The desexualized racialized ayah thus erased the embarrassing prevalence of sexual and reproductive labors provided by South Asian women to British men. The final section of this chapter explores the lived experiences of colonial ayahs as they upheld the racial and sexual hierarchies of the British Empire.