New Books in LGBTQ+ Studies

Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contrib

The Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its lead

In Nature's Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2021), Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas mor

Imagining Musical Pasts: the Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023) by Kristin M. Franseen explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880 to 1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-c

In A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark, 2024), Elyse Ambrose looks to an archive of blackqueerness as an authoritative source for religious ethical reflection. This approach counters the disintegrative norms of anti-black and anti-body traditionalism in Christian sexual ethics, even those that strive to be liberative. It builds upon a

Evangelical Christians and members of the global LGBTQI human rights movement have vied for influence in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. Each side accuses the other of serving foreign interests. Yet each proposes future foreign interventions on behalf of their respective causes despite the country’s traumatic past with European colonialism and American imperialism. In The Sexual

Neema Avashia is the daughter of Indian immigrants and was born and raised in southern West Virginia. She has been an educator and activist in the Boston Public Schools since 2003 and was named a City of Boston Educator of the Year in 2013. Her first book, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place, was published by West Virginia University Press in March 20

Kareem Khubchandani’s book Decolonize Drag (OR Books, 2024) explores the intricate interplay among gender, colonialism, and drag performance. It illustrates how gender serves as a tool of colonial governance, stifling diverse forms of expression, while also delving into how contemporary drag both mirrors and disrupts these entrenched institutional hierarchies. Through the lens of

Until Jessica Hinchy’s latest book, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), there was no single monograph dedicated to the history of the Hijra community. Perhaps this silence can bear the loudest testament of the marginalization this gender non-confirming community was subjected to under British colonial rule.

Holly A. Baggett's Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be ic