History Nonfiction Theory

Foreword: When Gender Can’t Be Seen amid the Symbols: Women and the Mexican Revolution

Sex in Revolution challenges the prevailing narratives of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary state formation by placing women at center stage. Bringing to bear decades of feminist scholarship and cultural approaches to Mexican history, the essays in this book demonstrate how women seized opportunities created by modernization efforts and revolutionary upheaval to challenge conventions of…

Archive History Nonfiction Photography Theory

Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s (Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution

One can almost see it: a smile of satisfaction spreading across Amelio Robles’s face as he looks at the studio portrait in which he poses like a dandy: dark suit, white shirt, tie, wide-brimmed black hat, leather shoes, and a white handkerchief peeking out of the breast pocket.¹ Standing with a cigarette in one hand…

Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

Managing Gender Care in Precarity: Trans Communities Respond to COVID-19

Transgender (trans) people always already live with health care precarity, particularly concerning gender transition. During a pandemic, this precarity is heightened. Trans people find themselves without access to necessary cross-sex hormones or isolated with unaccepting or hostile family members. As a result, some engage in tactical technical communication, using the Internet to source knowledge and…

Archive History Nonfiction Theory

Lorenza Böttner: From Chilean Exceptionalism to Queer Inclusion

Although critical efforts since the end of Chile’s dictatorship have successfully deployed narratives of dissident gender comportment to disrupt the country’s neoliberal discourse of economic exceptionalism, some queer narratives of the postdictatorship period that are not contingent on Chile’s dictatorial, violent past have been excluded from this debate. The story of Lorenza Böttner, a transgender…

Archive Biography Nonfiction Theory

Passing to América Antonio (Née María) Yta’s Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire

In 1803 in the colonial South American city of La Plata, Doña Martina Vilvado y Balverde presented herself to church and crown officials to denounce her husband of more than four years, Don Antonio Yta, as a “woman in disguise.” Forced to submit to a medical inspection that revealed a woman’s body, Don Antonio confessed…

Essay History Humanities Nonfiction Other Social Sciences Theory

Homo Economics Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life

Homo Economics is the first honest account of the tense relationship between gay people and the economy. This groundbreaking collection brings together a variety of voices from the worlds of journalism, activism, academia, the arts, and public policy to address issues including the recent economic history of the gay community, the community’s response to its…

History Social Sciences Theory

Trans Feminist Epistemologies in the US Second Wave

Why do “second wave” and “trans feminism” rarely get considered together? Challenging the idea that trans feminism is antagonistic to, or arrived after, second wave feminism, Emily Cousens re-orients trans epistemologies as crucial sites of second wave feminist theorising. By revisiting the contributions of trans individuals writing in underground print publications, as well as the…

Biography Critique History Humanities Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

“Indescribable Being”: Theological Performances of Genderlessness in the Society of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776–1819

In October 1776 Jemima Wilkinson of Cumberland, Rhode Island, claimed to have died and been resurrected by the Spirit of the Lord as a genderless spirit, renamed the ‘‘Publick Universal Friend.’’ As a resurrected spirit, the Friend defied the line between living and dead, body and spirit, divine and human, and male and female. The…