In 1823 one of the most scandalous trials of the nineteenth century took place in Santiago de Cuba. A year earlier a housekeeper named Rosa Suarez walked into the bedroom of her master – a well-known and respected Swiss doctor – in order to help him undress and get into bed because she feared he…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Black Cat Tavern Raid of 1967 has long been relegated to the footnotes of history, and, when it is remembered, it is portrayed as a riot similar to the one that occurred at the Stonewall Inn two years later. Using archival and contemporary sources, this article explores the events surrounding the raid and subsequent…
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…
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…
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…
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…