The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940

Title: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940 Author: Julian Carter
ISBN: 978-0822339489
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: Duke University Press
Price: £17.95

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

Title: Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction
Author: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
ISBN: 978-0822320401
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 516
Price: £ 20.99

Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses.Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels—including major canonical novels, best-sellers, children’s fiction, and science fiction—these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality.

Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H. White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make the significance of Novel Gazing extend beyond the scope of queer studies to literary criticism in general.

Contributors. Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Tyler Curtain, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, Barry Weller

“This is brilliant. . . and it represents some brilliant critics at their best. These essays illustrate a different and immensely attractive discursive mode. I know of no work more resonant or anywhere near as generous. Beyond that, it marks Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s first move into reparative criticism—and that is a momentous event. ”—James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California

The Assault - Reinaldo Arenas

Title: The Assault
Author: Reinaldo Arenas
ISBN: 978-0140157185
Binding: Paper
Date: 1995
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages:
Price: $8.99

This is the final volume of what the author called his agony in five parts, or pentagony, which begins with Singing in the Well (LJ 7/87). Boatlifted from Cuba in 1980, Arenas settled in New York, where he felt frustrated by America's diehard Castro supporters, contracted AIDS, and committed suicide. Here he takes deadly aim at Cuba's glorious "represident," in whose service the narrator rounds up dissidents and deviants to be juiced for patriotic irrigation. People are nameless insects who aspire to "disacquaintance" with their neighbors. The narrator is obsessed by his mother, whom he must annihilate before he assumes her shape, and in the climactic scene he nukes her in a smoky blast of shrapnel and unspeakable substances. Not for traditional readers, this book will delight fans of 1984, Kafka, and magic realism as well as Castro countdowners.

Homosexual Desire

Title: Homosexual Desire
Author: Guy Hocquenghem
ISBN: 978-0-8223-1384-7
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006

Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 160
Price: £16.99

Originally published in 1972 in France, Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire has become a classic in gay theory. Translated into English for the first time in 1978 and out of print since the early 1980s, this new edition, with an introduction by Michael Moon, will make available this vital and still relevant work to contemporary audiences. Integrating psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, this book describes the social and psychic dynamics of what has come to be called homophobia and on how the "homosexual" as social being has come to be constituted in capitalist society.Significant as one of the earliest products of the international gay liberation movement, Hocquenghem's work was influenced by the extraordinary energies unleashed by the political upheavals of both the Paris "May Days" of 1968 and the gay and lesbian political rebellions that occurred in cities around the world in the wake of New York's Stonewall riots of June 1969.Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and on the shattering effects of innumerable gay "comings-out," Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of anal desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.Two decades after its appearance, Homosexual Desire remains an exhilarating analysis of capitalist societies' pervasive fascination with, and violent fear of, same-sex desire and addresses issues that continue to be highly charged and productive ones for queer politics.

"Written over two decades ago, in the aftermath of May '68 and Stonewall, Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire may well be the first example of what we now call queer theory. But its significance is more than historical: it remains an indispensable analysis of, and polemic against, institutionalized homophobia."--Douglas Crimp

"Homosexual Desire represents the best of left social theory of sexual politics, a tradition that has never had an adequate reception in the United States. Reprinting this book now is a step toward recovering that tradition, and could therefore open debates about the significance of sexuality."--Michael Warner

Guy Hocquenghem (1944-1988) taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes, Paris. He was the author of numerous novels, works of theory, and was a staff writer for the French publication Libération. He was a founding member of le Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (F.H.A.R.). Hocquenghem died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988.

Radical history review 100/ winter 2008 - Queer Futures

Title: Queer Futures (Radical History Review (Duke University Press)) (Paperback)
Contributors: Regina Kunzel, Dan Irving, Christina Hanhardt, Margot D.Weiss, Anna M.Agathangelou, Daniel Bassichis, Tamara L.Spira, Susan Stryker, Maxime Cervulle, Aaron Belkin, Patrick McCreery, Vincent Doyle, Nan AlamillaBoyd
ISBN: 978-0822366867
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 257
Price: £ 10.99

In this special issue of Radical History Review, scholars and activists examine the rise of "homonormativity," a lesbian and gay politics that embraces neoliberal values under the guise of queer sexual liberation. Contributors look at the historical forces through which lesbian and gay rights organizations and community advocates align with social conservatives and endorse family-oriented formations associated with domestic partnership, adoption, military service, and gender-normative social roles.

Distinguished by its historical approach, "Queer Futures" examines homonormativity as a phenomenon that emerged in the United States after World War II and gained traction in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay compares Anita Bryant's antigay campaigns in the late 1970s with those of current same-sex marriage proponents to show how both focus on the abstract figure of the "endangered child." Another essay explores how the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's organizational amnesia has shaped its often conservative agenda. Other essays include a Marxist reading of the transsexual body, an examination of reactionary politics at the core of the movement to repeal the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and a history of how "safe streets" patrols in the 1970s and 1980s became opportunities for urban gentrification and community exploitation.

WHISTLING IN THE DARK: Twenty-one Queer Interviews

Title: WHISTLING IN THE DARK: Twenty-one Queer Interviews
Author: R RAJ RAO, DIBYAJYOTI SARMA
ISBN: 9788178299211
Binding: Paper
Date: December 2008
Publisher: Sage India
Number of Pages: 300


Price: INR 375/-

Whistling in the Dark: Twenty-one Queer Interviews focuses on issues like sexuality, sexual identity, marriage, gay marriage, heteronormativity, gay utopia, gay activism, gay bashing, police atrocities and the laws vis-à-vis these. The interviewees represent a cross section of society ranging from university professors, gay rights activists and students, on the one hand, to working class men such as office boys, auto-rickshaw drivers and even undertrials who have served prison sentences, on the other.
The thought-provoking narratives in this book are the outcome of probing and incisive questions put to the respondents by the editors R. Raj Rao and Dibyajyoti Sarma. Appealing to a wide readership, the narratives go beyond the conventional and provide a rare insight into the private lives of the respondents. Besides being a must read for gay activists and organisations, the book will also be a useful resource for post-graduate students and academics working in the fields of sexuality studies, feminism and alternative literature.

Fearless Speech- Michel Foucault

Title: Fearless Speech
Author: Michel Foucault
ISBN 10:1-58435-011-3 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-011-8
Binding: Paper
Date: 2001
Publisher: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Number of Pages: 183
Price: $12.95

I would like to distinguish between the 'history of ideas' and the 'history of thought.' The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas, which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience becomes a problem, raises discussions and debate, incites new reactions, and induces crisis in the previously silent behaviors, practices, and institutions. It is the history of the way people become anxious, for example, about madness, about crime, about themselves, or about truth.

Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault's project as a philosopher.

A Very nice blog on Foucault

Trying to Grow

Title: Trying to Grow
Author: Firdaus Kanga
ISBN: 9780143100782
Binding: Paper Back
Date: November 2008
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 280 pp
Price: 250 Rs

Description

Brit Kotwal breaks his legs eleven times before he is five years old. His teeth crumble and chip if he tries to bite into anything. It was his sister Dolly’s idea to call him Brit, short for brittle, because of his bones. Besides, Parsees don’t really like long first-names, and it pleased his mother Sera because it sounded so English.It was fun sometimes, being different. None of the other children drank powdered pearls in their milk, or had almond oil rubbed into their legs until it gleamed like Bangalore silk. And Brit knew he could always get his own way with Dolly—even if it took a little blackmail. But when you reach eighteen and are still the size of an eight year old, it is not much fun, and Brit has to begin to try and grow in his own way…Trying to Grow is a many-splendoured work built around the experiences of a physically handicapped boy turning into manhood, a deeply moving story told with a remarkable blend of directness, humour and irreverence.

Broken bones and a broken heart : An Article by Firdaus Kanga

History of sexuality: Volume 1 for 195 Rupees

Title:The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: Popular Penguins

Author:  Michel Foucault

ISBN13: 9780141037646
Binding: Paperback
Date:  1 September 2008
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Number of Pages:  180

Price:  195/-

Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge is the first part of his influential trilogy of books on 
the history of sexuality. He argues that the recent explosion of discussion about sex in the West means that, far from being liberated, we are in the process of making a science of sexuality that is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure. This is a brilliant polemic from a groundbreaking radical intellectual.

Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History Edited by Saleem Kidwai, Ruth Vanita

Title: Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History
Author: Saleem Kidwai, Ruth Vanita
ISBN13: 9780143102069
Binding: Paper back
Date: October 2008
Publisher: Penguin Books India
Number of Pages:
Price: Rs 450.00

About the book

Same-Sex Love in India offers an eloquent range of writings spanning more than two thousand years of Indian literature. Drawn from Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and contemporary fictional sources these writings convincingly demonstrate that same-sex love has flourished, evolved and been embraced in various forms since ancient times. From the Mahabharata to modern writers and artists such as Ismat Chughtai and Bhupen Khakhar, the eclectic and expressive selections in this anthology include excerpts from devotional books, legal and erotic treatises, story cycles, medieval histories and biographies to modern novels, short stories, letters, memoirs, plays and poems. This pioneering book is invaluable for gender studies, for Indian history, and for all readers interested in the fascinating development of homoerotic traditions and writings.

More on the book

Same-Sex Love: In Conversation with Dr Ruth Vanita

Interview with Saleem Kidwai

Interview with Ruth Vanita

Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male-Male Desire

Chocolate, and Other Writings on Male-Male Desire

by Ruth Vanita

 Hardcover - 103 Pages (Year: 2006) 

Oxford University Press ~ ISBN: 0195674863

Our Price : Rs  375/-