New Directions in Queer Oral History

New Directions in Queer Oral History
Author: Clare Summerskill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2022-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000569268

This comprehensive international collection reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer studies. Expanding and extending the existing canon, this book offers up key observations about queer oral history as a methodology, and how it might be advanced through cutting edge approaches. The collection contains a mix of contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, archivists, and activists, ensuring its accessibility and wide appeal. The go-to reference for queer oral history for scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and community-engaged practitioners, New Directions in Queer Oral History advances rigorous methodological and theoretical debates and constitutes a significant intervention in the world of oral history.

Bodies of Evidence

Bodies of Evidence
Author: Nan Alamilla Boyd
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2012-02-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199742731

When written sources are scarce, historians often turn to oral histories for evidence. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History is the first book to provide serious scholarly insight into the methodological practices that shape lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer oral histories. The volume opens up a critical dialogue on the challenges of creating an archive of queer lives. Highlighting the work of fourteen authors who focus their research on queer community history, culture, and politics, each chapter pairs an oral history excerpt with an original essay in which the oral historian addresses his or her methods and practices. With an afterword by the preeminent scholar in the field, John D'Emilio, this collection enables readers to examine both a series of oral histories and analysis of the role memory, desire, sexuality, and gender play in documenting LGBTQ communities and cultures. The historical themes addressed within include lesbian bar history in San Francisco (c. 1940s, 1950s); early homophile organizing and social activism in Los Angeles (c. 1950s and 1960s); Third World Liberation and feminist antiwar activism in the U.S. and Canada (c. 1960s, 1970s); electoral politics and the career of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco (1970s); Latino AIDS memory and activism in San Francisco (1980s, 1990s); and the war in Iraq (2000s). The methodological themes addressed in this book that are relevant to the practice of oral history include questions of sexual self-disclosure and voyeurism in the uses of oral history methods by queer studies scholars; the intimacy between researcher and narrator negotiated through multiple oral history interviews and on-going casual conversations; the production of comparative racial and sexual identities within the context of oral history interviews; the production of in-group mythology by same-sexuality interviewing--and the possible benefits of cross-sexuality and cross-ideology interviewing; what heterosexually-identified narrators can tell us about LGBTQ life and death; the silences imposed by repressive U.S. government policy about sexual self-disclosure and the limits of permissible speech in highly politicized discourses such as "gays in the military." These themes provide new and insightful structures for thinking about oral history methods--both in general and in relation to the production of LGBTQ history.

Oral History

Oral History
Author: Columbia University. Oral History Research Office
Publisher:
Total Pages: 16
Release: 1983
Genre:
ISBN:

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality
Author: Anna Clark
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2024-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040103480

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality outlines some of the challenges of retracing sexual acts, identities, and desires in the past, and shows how historians have responded to these methodological challenges with ingenuity and creativity. The volume acknowledges that the history of sexuality poses particularly interesting challenges in relation to sources due the peculiar nature of sexuality. On one hand, sexuality is frequently hidden and private, its practices often unknown, denied, and evaded, its desires fleeting or obsessive, its reality confused or illuminated by fantasy; yet on the other, sexuality consistently breaks into the public sphere through moral panics, waves of persecution, taxonomizing projects, and medical/juridical interventions. With vivid case studies from renowned contributors, the chapters provide different theoretical approaches along with more practical examples of how to study the history of sexuality. The volume has a broad chronology from the ancient world to the present, an extensive geography covering not only Europe and the Americas but also Latin America and Africa, and also includes a variety of gender and sexual expressions. The book also privileges texts that offer an intersectional approach, asking how sex and sexualities were constructed alongside/against other categories of difference. With accessible writing, this volume encourages the reader to think creatively about how to find evidence of sex/sexuality in the past and will be of value to students as well as scholars interested in the history of sexuality.

Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life

Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life
Author: Rebecca Jennings
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350358886

Focusing on patterns of intimacy, this book traces the historical roots of parenting practices and familial patterns constructed by lesbians and same-sex attracted women living in Britain and Australia between 1945 and 2000. It foregrounds women's unique lived experiences, as they expressed desire, fell in love, and created families against the backdrop of changing cultural, legal, and medical attitudes to female same-sex desire in the late 20th century. Including almost 100 original oral history interviews conducted by the author, Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life reveals the subjective histories of lesbian intimacy during the period, both highlighting the huge variety in women's experiences, and tracing shifting patterns of relationship and family formation. Combined with analysis of representations of lesbian intimacy in literature, press articles, medical texts, and archival material, the book demonstrates the ways in which changing political and cultural concepts of sexuality impacted on individual and collective attitudes. With a unique transnational perspective, Jennings uncovers how feminist and lesbian networks between Britain and Australia promoted knowledge sharing and helped foster change in the familial practices of each country – such as through the adoption of reproductive technologies and alternate routes into motherhood. Through considering the rise of divorce and challenges to traditional marriage practices in the period, this book highlights how lesbian relationships provided alternative models of interpersonal relations, impacting on broader patterns of sexuality, and helping redefine notions of the family in the modern era.

Queering Desire

Queering Desire
Author: Róisín Ryan-Flood
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2024-04-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100385804X

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.

The Unexpected in Oral History

The Unexpected in Oral History
Author: Ricardo Santhiago
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2023-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031177495

How is an oral historian to react when the unexpected emerges, whether in field research or interview analysis? Answers tend to be scattered throughout the scholarly literature or confined to backstage conversations. This book brings the unexpected to the center of the scene and promotes a collective reflection about ways of dealing with uneasy encounters, surprises, and interviews that seem to have gone off the rails. The contributors come from a dozen countries, especially Brazil, where a classic piece about a “great liar” paved the way for this discussion. Rather than eccentric descriptions of unusual situations, these chapters evoke a dense web of reflections about dialogue, the production of oral sources, and the complexities of personal narratives. Theoretically informed but written in an engaging language, the book presents readers with fascinating case studies of the eruptions of the unexpected that occur in oral history research.

Queering the Countryside

Queering the Countryside
Author: Mary L. Gray
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479895253

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews

The Cambridge World History of Sexualities: Volume 1, General Overviews
Author: Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 645
Release: 2024-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 110890128X

Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, family and marriage, the intersections of sexuality with race and class, male and female homoerotic relations, trans and gender variant sexuality, the sale of sex, sexual violence, sexual science, sexuality and emotion, erotic art and literature, and the material culture of sexuality.

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine
Author: Gianna Bouchard
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1003858333

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine addresses the proliferation of practices that bridge performance and medicine in the contemporary moment. The scope of this book's broad range of chapters includes medicine and illness as the subject of drama and plays; the performativity of illness and the medical encounter; the roles and choreographies of the clinic; the use of theatrical techniques, such as simulation and role-play, in medical training; and modes of performance engaged in public health campaigns, health education projects and health-related activism. The book encompasses some of these diverse practices and discourses that emerge at the interface between medicine and performance, with a particular emphasis on practices of performance. This collection is a vital reference resource for scholars of contemporary performance; medical humanities; and the variety of interdisciplinary fields and debates around performance, medicine, health and their overlapping collaborations. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.