Charlotte Charke, the estranged daughter of British poet laureate Colley Cibber, was an 18th century actress, playwright, novelist and noted transvestite. In this scandalous memoir, Charke recounts her extraordinary double life as “Charles Brown,” her career on stage in “breeches roles,” and her misadventures as a doctor, shopkeeper, sausage merchant, valet, groom, puppeteer, pastry cook,…
In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes’s idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault’s notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. Steinbock applies…
Within Native American and Indigenous studies, the rise of Indigenous masculinities has engendered both productive conversations and critiques. Lisa Tatonetti intervenes in this conversation with Written by the Body by centering how female, queer, and/or Two-Spirit Indigenous people take up or refute masculinity, and, in the process, offer more expansive understandings of gender. Written by…
This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproduction – the urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materials – offers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships.…
On Our Backs was the first women-run erotica magazine and the first magazine to feature lesbian erotica for a lesbian audience in the United States. It ran from 1984 to 2006. Interview with Leslie Feinberg.
The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the…
So what is it that we offer? What should be the locus of a radical imagination today? We affirm that queer communism is primarily an ethics— or a certain tvpe of intersubjective relationship among people. Imageries of the future should turn from the techno logical imagination toward envisioning new types of relations defined by ethical…
Now available for the first time–more than 50 years after it was written–is the memoir of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka (1915-62), the British doctor and Buddhist monastic novice chiefly known to scholars of sex, gender, and sexuality for his pioneering transition from female to male between 1939 and 1949, and for his groundbreaking 1946 book Self:…
This article reads sexological case studies of the fin-de siècle that contain accounts of trans women’s lives in the period. It argues that these sources contradict the diagnostic criteria that doctors determine as the factors that define trans feminine identity in the period: desire for men, social isolation, and tortured bodily dissatisfaction. Chief among these…
A short story describing early transition in 1902. Trans man Theodore H Hoffman wrote the op-ed for the San Francisco Examiner following his public arrest.