New and Noteworthy Books
BY Claire Potter ON October 23, 2014
Audre Lorde wants you to read these books.
OutHistory.org would like to congratulate the winners of this year’s American Historical Association book and article prizes. You can see the full list here. Of special interest to our readers are:
- Afsaneh Najmabadi of Harvard University, whose Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same Sex-Desire in Contemporary Iran (Duke University Press, 2013), winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize for women’s history and/or feminist theory;
- Mary Louise Roberts, of the University of Wisconsin, has been awarded to the George Louis Beer Prize in European international history since 1895 for What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Other books that have come to our attention this week are:
- Walter Frank, Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy (Rutgers University Press, 2014). Read Scott Jaschik’s review at Inside Higher Ed (October 22 2014).
- Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality and Women’s Experience of Modern War (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014).
And online:
- Janet R. Jakobsen and Catherine Sameh, “Activism and the Academy,” The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 12.1-12.2 | Fall 2013/Spring 2014, featuring Roderick Ferguson, Dean Spade, Andy Smith and others.
- Although you will have to download it article by article, the current number of Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary,” is currently free online. If you like it (and why wouldn’t you like it?) consider supporting this new journal by either paying for a subscription or, if you are an academic, asking your library to make sure it is included in the electronic journals package to which your institution subscribes.
Sick of reading books? Ready to put on your traveling shoes? Melanie Barker of Curve Magazine (October 22 2014) notes that Oscar Wilde Tours will take you through “Oscar Wilde’s Dublin, London and Paris” to put you in touch with queer history by co-ordinating a high end trip. “The tour takes its guests on a journey through the capitals of Ireland, England and France to explore places of importance to gay history and illustrate the relationship between the cultural movements of the time and the birth of modern ideas of sexuality,” Barker reports. “Also covered will be gay history throughout the ages: ancient Greece, imperial Rome, Renaissance Italy, Weimar Berlin and more.”
As Andrew Lear, a visiting professor of Classics at New York University and the company’s founder, points out: “Until now, gays who wanted to discover their history had to do so through books. Finding the places where key things happened hasn’t been easy—and even if you could find them, you couldn’t always get in,” said Professor Lear. “Now we’re giving the gay community a chance to see the places where gay history took place. And we’re surrounding the experience with a high level of elegance and luxury.”
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