The University of Washington Press is honored to publish books that shed light on the unique history, experiences, and advocacy of the LGBTQ+ community. In celebration of Pride Month, we’ve collected some of our recent books on queer and trans studies and LGBTQ+ histories to inspire your next read.
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Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West
In this nuanced study, Rebecca Scofield shares how rodeoers at the margins of society courted authenticity as they put their lives on the line to connect with an imagined American West. Learn about these outsider communities, from female bronc-riders in the 1910s and 1920s and convict cowboys in Texas in the mid-twentieth century to all-black rodeos in the 1960s and 1970s and gay rodeoers in the late twentieth century. These rodeo riders not only widened the definition of the real American cowboy but also, at times, reinforced the persistent and exclusionary myth of an idealized western identity.
Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico
Throughout the twentieth century, New Mexico’s LGBTQ+ residents inhabited a wide spectrum of spaces, from Santa Fe’s nascent bohemian art scene to the secretive military developments at Los Alamos. Shifting focus away from the urban gay meccas that many out queer people called home, Wide-Open Desert brings to life a vibrant milieu of two-spirit, Chicana lesbian, and white queer cultural producers in the heart of the US Southwest. Historian Jordan Biro Walters draws on oral histories, documentaries, poetry, and archival sources to demonstrate how geographic migration and creative expression enabled LGBTQ+ people to resist marginalization and forge spaces of belonging.
Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice
At the intersection of river sciences, queer and trans theory, and environmental justice, Underflows explores river cultures and politics at five sites of water conflict and restoration in California, Oregon, and Washington. Cleo Wölfle Hazard weaves narratives about innovative field research practices with an affectively oriented queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish. The result is a deeply moving account of why rivers matter for queer and trans life, offering critical insights that point to innovative ways of doing science that disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.
Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles
“A mix of illuminating organizational lore and vibrant personal reflections” (Kirkus Reviews), this community memoir by Eric C. Wat connects the deeply personal with the uncompromisingly political through the stories of more than thirty Asian American AIDS activists in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 1990s. For many, the AIDS epidemic sparked the beginning of their continued work to build multiracial coalitions and confront broader systemic inequities. Detailing the intertwined realities of race and sexuality in AIDS activism, Love Your Asian Body offers a vital portrait of a movement founded on joy.
Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala
The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures—particularly the sex worker and the lesbian—are produced in the public imagination, offering a “provocative and theoretically rich account of the uneven terrain of contemporary sexual politics” (Gender & Society).
The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance
In this “immediately urgent and immensely creative monograph” (Peitho Journal), Karma Chávez offers a fresh examination of the early years of the ongoing AIDS crisis by repositioning themes of race and immigration. News reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveal 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. Building on existing histories of HIV/AIDS, public health, citizenship, and immigration, Chávez establishes how politicians and public health officials treated different communities with HIV/AIDS and highlights the work these communities did to resist alienation.
Racial Erotics: Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire
Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, C. Winter Han shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within larger social structures that define whiteness as desirable and normative while othering men of color. With vivid examples from interviews, media representations, and online dating sites, Han highlights the creative means through which gay men of color, cordoned off in spaces both gay and straight, produce alternative frameworks to combat dominant narratives.
Queering Contemporary Asian American Art
Edited by Laura Kina and Jan Christian Bernabe, this volume brings together artists and scholars to challenge normative assumptions, essentialisms, and methodologies within Asian American art and visual culture. Taken together, these nine original artist interviews, cutting-edge visual artworks, and seven critical essays explore contemporary currents and experiences within Asian American art, including the multiple axes of race and identity, queer bodies and forms, kinship and affect, and digital identities and performances.