‘A Queer and Pleasant Danger’ by Kate Bornstein
Posted on May 13, 2012 by Sassafras Lowrey in Nonfiction, Reviews
Transgender icon Kate Bornstein’s long awaited memoir A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today (Beacon Press) gifts readers with a brutally beautiful intimate look into the life of one of our communities most brilliant and canonical writers. Going deeper than Gender Outlaws, Bornstein drops the theory and tells the stories that led to her becoming the performer, activist, and leader so many of us have come to know today. Bornstein brings her readers through the childhood of a boy who desperately wanted to be daddy’s little girl who struggled to fit into his family, community, and body into Scientology, and later her decision to transition and her journey into an S/M Dyke. Bornstein has truly outdone herself with this long awaited memoir. (more…)
‘Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships, and Motherhood Among Black Women’ by Mignon R. Moore
Posted on May 13, 2012 by Rachel Wexelbaum in Nonfiction, Reviews
There are approximately 39 million people who check “Black or African-American” on their Census forms. Nearly sixty percent of those individuals identify as female. If Census numbers provide an accurate reflection of a population, then one could imagine that Black or African-American women would be highly visible in their own communities, as well as others. The Census does not do as well as job when it comes to counting unmarried partner households by race. While women were more likely than men to note that they lived in a household with a female partner, data on unmarried partner households is organized by region rather than race. For this reason, the true count of lesbian-headed households—as well as lesbian couples with children—remains an unknown. (more…)
‘Ninety Days’ by Bill Clegg
Posted on May 8, 2012 by Michael Klein in Nonfiction, Reviews
When I first got sober 27 years ago, the furthest thing from my mind was to write a book about it – particularly a book that faced those first 90 days which were such a maelstrom of anxiety and inability to focus that I thought I would go out of my mind even before the chance of relapse could occur. I also thought, for a blessedly short minute, that I might even be straight. Bill Clegg, on the other hand, never experienced that particular form of writer’s block and has managed to write not just a memoir about his first 90 days (which took two and a half years to complete) but, also a prequel to it (The Portrait of the Artist as a Crack Addict). (more…)
‘Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois’ by The Brown Boi Project
Posted on May 2, 2012 by TT Jax in Nonfiction, Reviews
The Brown Boi Project’s Freeing Ourselves: A Guide to Health and Self-Love for Brown Bois is a beautifully constructed, deeply thoughtful, and powerfully political health guide by and for masculine of center/transgender/gender non-conforming people of color. Intentionally slender, the book is full of poetry; exquisite photography; safer sex information; adaptive device how-tos; nutritional, herbal and exercise advice; poignant personal stories; healthcare histories that centralize the experiences of people of color; exposures of class and racial injustices in healthcare and/or prison systems; and thorough analysis of the impact of oppressions as lived trauma experiences. (more…)
‘Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs,1959-1974′ by William S. Burroughs
Posted on April 22, 2012 by Tom Eubanks in Nonfiction, Reviews
In a 1959 letter to his parents, William S. Burroughs confessed: “I give as much attention to a letter as I do to anything I write, and I work at least six and sometimes sixteen hours a day.” Five years later, he scolded his friend and collaborator, Brion Gysin, for correspondence that left him “confused,” then took “the liberty of quoting from” an article he had written, “The Lost Art of Letter Writing”: “The letters you write are your messengers . . . You a writer? A painter? Any letter you write is or should be your best work . . . ” In Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1959-1974, editor Bill Morgan displays some of the author’s best work. (more…)
‘The Weather in Proust’ By Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Posted on April 15, 2012 by Chase Dimock in Nonfiction, Reviews
With his seminal novel, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust created modern literature’s most famous and poignant symbol of remembrance: the madeleine, a cookie whose taste and texture suddenly unlocked long-forgotten memories of his childhood and granted him the inspiration to write his epic coming of age story in turn-of-the-century France. The Weather in Proust (Duke University Press) is the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s madeleine—a remembrance of queer theories past. The deeper I delved into the book, the more I became reacquainted with Sedgwick’s indispensable contributions to queer studies and was reminded of what a loss the discipline had suffered with her passing in 2009. (more…)
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Posted on April 8, 2012 by Rachel Wexelbaum in Nonfiction, Reviews
In American prisons today, the exact number of incarcerated transpeople remains unknown. The Prison Industrial Complex of the United States is the last bastion of unforgiving gender segregation—one’s natural genitalia determines their prison destination. For this reason, those who maintain databases containing information about the prisoners housed in different facilities do not bother to record inmate sex or gender. Lack of awareness on the part of prison officials and staff also leads to trans invisibility in the prison system, as most corrections personnel cannot distinguish between transpeople and queer cisgendered people. As the use of aliases by prison inmates is considered a violation of security, prison guards will refuse to call transpeople by their desired names or appropriate forms of address. And, as queer people traditionally receive the worst treatment in prison, a certain percentage of transpeople may keep quiet about their true identities. All of these reasons have contributed to the lack of trans visibility among the prison population, which has led to their continued abuse. (more…)
‘America Divine: Travels in the Hidden South’ by Dallas Angguish
Posted on March 30, 2012 by Ben Mason in Nonfiction, Reviews
That Dallas Angguish is an impressively skilled writer is apparent after just the first page of his collection of short travel writing, America Divine (Phosphor Books). By the end of the first piece, “Shallow Water, Oh Mamma,” it is evident that he is not only a skilled writer but something of a strange genius. One wonders why we haven’t heard of him before now. No doubt, he is another of those very gifted persons who, in the age of Twilight and Eat, Drink, Pray, Love is overlooked for lesser writers. His gift for description is unusual in its clarity, his impeccable ear for dialogue is even rarer and his sentences are delectably well-wrought. And he’s also funny and easy to read. (more…)
‘Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality’ By Hanne Blank
Posted on March 25, 2012 by Thomas Doorhy in Nonfiction, Reviews
Hanne Blank’s Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality sounds as if it is an examination of the 150-year period since the coining of “heterosexual” to identify the biologically male-female relationship. Blank’s work reaches further and deeper into the history of heterosexuality. This period is merely the starting point from which she expounds on her exhaustive research.
This research explores, considers, and questions heterosexuality’s array of meanings, references and significances. Blank describes part of the problem:
‘Heterosexual’ does not have a single standard scientific definition. Different disciplines, and indeed even different researchers within single disciplines, use the word to mean different things. This is more than merely incidental sloppiness. Scientific method and scientific authority depend in part on clear and consistent definitions that are supported by careful observation. Yet when heterosexuality is the subject scientists all to often behave like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty.
An historian, writer, and speaker, Blank’s approach in Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality is highly accessible. Blank provides an elementary introduction to the scholarly methodology of her research. She blends an informal tone with a construct of rules found in scientific studies, in papers and academic presentations. This balance seems to bespeak a keen sense of judgment she has for her work and readers.
To be clear, Blank’s goal is not to question the arguable existence of heterosexuality (prior to its being identified and given a name in 1868), but to trace its origins and examine its effects. In the beginning chapters, Blank presents a concept she will use throughout, doxa. Doxa is the Greek word for “common knowledge.” She explains, “Doxa is, quite literally in most cases, the stuff that ‘goes without saying.’” That is, ”common sense” ideas absorbed from one’s culture. Doxa applies to other areas as well, not strictly sexuality but cultural “norms” each of us participates in maintaining, “knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly.”
It is doxa, then, that has hindered further research into heterosexuality, as well as homosexuality. She also describes the anthropic principle, a philosophy about science’s approach to heterosexuality and sexuality. The anthropic principle argues that the unifying purpose of everything is life.
It is evident that Blank is foremost a historian, leaping with ease across centuries, leading readers on a tour of the attitudes, traditions, and norms regarding male-female relationships. Conclusions and assertions Blank makes would perhaps be more likely questioned without her science-oriented background and deft talent for writing.
She joins the paucity of academics and scholars who write for mainstream readers. Adapting to a vastly different audience requires a savvy artisan, skilled in communicating using an entirely different lexicon. Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky wrote similarly for mainstream media. Like Pinker and Chomsky, Blank successfully avoids the common dilemma of positioning an argument, and then offering evidence too dense for the lay reader.
Language is largely and the center of Blank’s theories. Giving heterosexuality a name in the 19th century sparked a chain of change in how sexuality is treated; namely homosexuality, now that there was something to say it deviated from.
Ms. Blank has stated that during research as she has gone to look something up, there was no source, and the obvious solution was to write the book she needed. Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality was also framed (in the Introduction) through Blank’s partner, who, as a result of a chromosome anomaly, prompted Blank to look further into the “grand and vexing ambiguities” that are sex and gender.
For me, as a reader, it is refreshing when a nonfiction publication is written by a professor or scholar that can easily be enjoyed by a layperson. I look forward to more Hanne Blank. And more questions about the nature of sexuality, its linguistic and literary origins and how it lead us to our attitudes today.
Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality
By Hanne Blank
Beacon Press
Hardcover, 9780807044498, 264pp.
January2012
‘Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography’ by Kate Culkin.
Posted on March 18, 2012 by Marie J. Kuda in Nonfiction, Reviews
Since the second wave of feminism swept the US in the 1960s, lesbian feminist academicians and writers have turned their research into scrutinizing the female enclaves buried under patriarchal scholarship. In the tell-all 1970s, the remains of the “Bloomsberries” and Parisian ex-pats were picked clean in dozens of biographies. By the 1980s, interest turned to the painterly arts and photography, under the scalpels of such adroit clinicians as Tee Corinne, Linda Nochlin and Deborah Bright. The decade also turned spotlights on 19th century academia and the socio-political foremothers surrounding Jane Addams and Eleanor Roosevelt. More recently the kliegs illuminated the girls in the celluloid closets and on stage.
In the 19th century it was de rigueur as part of the Grand Tour to traipse back to Greece and Rome and soak up the classic art and architecture of antiquity. Americans wishing to blunt their pioneer edges and do just honor to their growing pantheon of heroes developed a taste for neo-classic sculpture and monuments. The growing capitalist class sought out statuary to embellish its homes and gardens. Now as we jump into the 21st century the scholarly appetite has turned to examining the lives of those Anglo/American expatriate women artists in Italy who filled that demand for statuary.
Henry James, Henry Blake Fuller, and a generation of effete novelists made pilgrimages to, and wrote nostalgically of, Italy as the fountainhead of art and culture. James in 1902 decried the “strange sisterhood of American lady sculptors who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white marmorean flock.” That dismissive epithet moved into the language of a generation of art criticism, as did “scribbling ladies” for literature.
Since Dolly Sherwood published her excellent, copiously researched 1991 biography of Harriet Hosmer and the lesbian colony of artists around her, articles and books on members of the “flock” have burst the dam of patriarchal scholarship. Julia Markus’ book Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time (Knopf, 2000) wove her work around thespian Charlotte Cushman, her lover Emma Stebbins, and their circle to which an enthralled Hosmer was admitted as a teenager.
Now Kate Culkin has stepped into the circle of those scholars examining the “flock” expanding our understanding not only of the phenomenon of Hosmer’s success but the underlying social and personal alliances that made it possible. Culkin concentrates on Hosmer’s cultural milieu, her “ladies bountiful” and lovers (rich patrons, widows and daughters of tycoons) in Italy, Boston, Paris and London. Even as psychology began to influence the law, intense relationships between women were still regarded with a benign indifference. There were no laws affecting lesbianism in France under the Code Napoleon or England under Queen Victoria. Even Rome, at the heart of Catholicism, couldn’t be bothered in the time of Hosmer because it was embroiled in the revolutionary and political incursions of Mazzini and Garibaldi.
Culkin looks at the influences of spiritualism, the new feminism, the decline of Romanticism and the rise of Modernism, on Hosmer and her work. Considered the foremost woman sculptor of her time, Hosmer portrayed the image of strong women, unbowed, even when crushed under patriarchal power. Culkin examines the iconography of such works as her most popular “Xenobia in Chains” and the “African Sybil.” She tells us that Hosmer, even while manicuring her public profile, grew wary of her identification as a sculptor and dabbled unsuccessfully in other pursuits such as the construction of a perpetual motion machine, but did patent a useful process for an artificial marble.
In the 1890s Hosmer was at the center of a heated controversy on the position of women at the World’s Columbian Exhibition. The “Isabellas,” a society urging the integration of women’s work into every facet of the Exhibition, opposed the minions of doyenne Bertha Palmer, who wanted all to be showcased collectively at her Women’s Building. Hosmer succumbed to the influence of Susan B. Anthony and withheld her commissioned statue of Isabella of Castille (giving her jewels to Columbus to finance his voyage). It was later the centerpiece of an 1894 Exhibition in San Francisco. Culkin has added a highly readable, well annotated study to the increasing pantheon of creative lesbians supported by networks of friends and lovers.
Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography
By Kate Culkin
University of Massachusetts Press
Paperback,9781558498396, 219pp.
November 2010
