Happy Pride! We’re joining in the celebration by sharing a list of new and notable books that reflect the richness of queer and trans scholarship and storytelling—works that celebrate both joy and resistance.
Braving All Borders: TransLatina Testimonios and Decolonial Defiance
by Karla M. Padrón
This powerful, collaboratively researched account demonstrates how transgender Latina immigrants confront the overlapping borders that shape their lives—“written with a beautiful blend of plain language and theoretical sophistication” (Karma R. Chávez, author of The Borders of AIDS). Padrón charts how migrant trans women of color forge rhetorical, political, and embodied strategies to claim life, love, and futurity—even when “nothing is made” for them.
Acing Science: Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual Possibilities
by Kristina Gupta
The newest book in our Feminist Technosciences series, Acing Science critiques scientific discourses of sexuality, which are not based on objective biological facts but are sustained by broader systems of power—sexism, racism, ableism, and settler colonialism. By rereading hegemonic science, Gupta opens space for reimagining how desires, pleasures, and relationships might be understood beyond narrow sexual frames.
Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art
by Andrew Gayed
Art historian Gayed offers an abundantly illustrated look at how queerness is performed within contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern artists’ practices. “By foregrounding individual artists who explore sexuality and gender, and tracing the impact of colonialism on SWANA cultures, Gayed’s book is a much-needed step toward visibility” (Hyperallergic).
Dancer Dawkins and the California Kid
by Willyce Kim
This “much-needed queer classic” (Alexander Chee) was the only novel by pioneering Asian American lesbian poet Willyce Kim, recently republished through our Classics of Asian American Literature series. A campy, women-centered Western, the slim book is a wild ride about the uncanny adventures of Dancer Dawkins, a swift-footed, weed-smoking football stud, who sets out to rescue her lover, Jessica, from a Napa Valley cult.
Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo
by Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield
Gay rodeo comes out of the closet in this rich history of the US West. Drawing on oral interviews, Ford and Scofield trace the beginnings and growth of gay rodeo over the decades, demonstrating how queer cowfolx have fought to build a community where LGBTQ+ people can escape discrimination in both mainstream rodeos and broader society.
Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles
by Eric C. Wat
A community memoir, Love Your Asian Body connects the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political in telling the stories of more than thirty Asian American AIDS activists in 1980s and ’90s Los Angeles. For many, the AIDS epidemic sparked the beginning of their continued work to build multiracial coalitions and confront broader systemic inequities. Wat details the intertwined realities of race and sexuality in AIDS activism and offers a vital portrait of a movement founded on joy.
The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
by Karma R. Chávez
“Immediately urgent and immensely creative,” (Peitho Journal), Chávez’s monograph demonstrates how the US government’s failure to impose a quarantine for HIV-positive citizens morphed into the successful enactment of a complete ban on the regularization of HIV-positive migrants—which lasted more than twenty years. Combing through news reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveals how queer groups and migrant communities built fragile coalitions to fight against the alienation of themselves and others, asserting their capacity for resistance and resiliency.
Queer Data Studies
edited by Patrick Keilty
Gathering wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversations into one rich volume, Queer Data Studies challenges readers to rethink how the extraction, circulation, modeling, governance, and use of data affects queer subjects and, at the same time, to consider how the power of data might be harnessed in the service of queer ethics. “Whether newcomers or seasoned researchers, readers will discover alternative insights and fresh perspectives, fostering a more profound comprehension of queer issues and methodological debates in critical data studies” (Journal of Gender Studies).
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice
by Cleo Wölfle Hazard
In this “exciting and thought-provoking study,” (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), Wölfle Hazard innovatively connects river sciences to queer and trans theory through collaborative restoration work. Drawing on the idea of underflows—the parts of a river’s flow that can’t be seen, the underground currents that seep through soil or rise from aquifers through cracks in bedrock—the book elucidates the underflows in river cultures, sciences, and politics where Native nations and marginalized communities fight to protect rivers.
Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader
edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin and Angela Willey
Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, this collection of essays take a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to the cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS)—“a brilliant pedagogical resource and a handbook for world-making in the key of social justice” (Jennifer Terry, author of Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-first-century America)
