Queer Summer Reading List!

I'll expect a full report

I teach a class for our majors called Literary Theory and Criticism where we explore various theoretical lens you can apply to understanding literature, or art more broadly. We ask questions about the importance of the author, how much historical and biographical context matters, whether the reader determines the meaning of the work or if it is inherent in the work itself. One of my most favorite weeks is when we engage with queer theory, which asks questions about the representation of sexual identities in literature.

This class overlaps with my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies course (teaching it this fall at PC, current students!), especially in the ways we talk about how gender and sexuality are, to a large degree, culturally constructed and determined. This can be an unsettling proposition for the students, because our gendered and sexual identities are so often essentialized as natural. While these things are certainly related to the body, how we understand sex and desire is impossible to separate from the way we write about and represent them.

How art reflects our identities, and also constructs them, is one of my most favorite things to think about. There are of course the mechanics of sex, and the embodied experience of it, but how humans then record it or celebrate it or condemn it changes over time and across cultures.

Think about how sexual identities are expressed in classical texts for example. It’s fascinating that white evangelicals at places like Hillsdale are so eager to return to “classical (read: white) education” while at the same time espousing such puritanical notions of acceptable sexual identities. The Greeks were super dirty—sex jokes and phalluses EVERYWHERE. Clearly the expression of sexual desire had really different rules then, as compared to, say, early America (tyrannical Puritanism in effect).

When we read desire and sex in literature, we can think about how the representation of sex and sexual identities tells us something about the structure of society and who has power, and who doesn’t. My student Emma Kate Bradley (you’ll remember her post on growing up queer in the South a few months back) wrote a fabulous honors project on contemporary Southern lesbian writers, and she found that novels written since 2015 (when the Supreme Court decision ensured marriage equality) have ironically become more heteronormative in the representation of lesbian relationships in the South.

So this week, to celebrate Pride Month and take a break from all the bummer news about white men trying to take away our rights to bodily autonomy, I wanted to send out a Queer Summer Reading list. Because here’s the thing: total liberation is only possible with queer liberation (another version of we’re not free until all of us are free). We don’t always talk about it in these terms, but the gay rights movement of the last century has meant not just rights for LGBTQ+ people but has meant expanded rights and benefits for all of us, including frameworks that have been liberating for straight people as well. Queer approaches to sex and sexuality can dismantle systems of shame, foreground consent and liberate sex from the heteronormative expectations that centers male desire and turns women into objects. It also allows us to see that the gay/straight binary isn’t true at all in actual fact, and that most people’s sexual identities exist on a spectrum of desire that includes homoerotic relations (see locker rooms or back massages by best friends) and homosocial pleasure. When we are free from forced expressions of gender identity that require adherence to formulaic hetero sex acts, we can decide what we really want (if anything) in the bedroom.

So read all these great books by queer writers, and let us celebrate these representations that unlock the gender prisons that condemn us to bad sex. This era of celebrating erotic desire is a cornucopia, let us feast:

Some of my favorite Caribbean queer writers: Dionne Brand, especially her novel In Another Place, Not Here (I have a whole dissertation chapter about it if you really want to read my early research), Kei Miller, his poetry is some of my fav and I love his novel Augustown, Rajiv Mohabir’s memoir about growing up gay in Central Florida in a Guyanese immigrant family: Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, about Bob Marley and Jamaica in the 1970s, Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night—one of the most beautiful narratives of grounding identity in the natural world… it crawls with life, you’ll love it.

I have LOTS more in this category, but want to also send out more suggestions from Hot Feminism readers (aka my friends and colleagues who replied to my Facebook and Twitter queries).

From Robert Stutts, our intrepid director of Creative Writing:

Sacrament by Clive Barker, One for Sorrow by Christopher Barzak, Vintage by Steve Berman, Drawing Blood by Poppy Z. Brite, Romancing the Werewolf by Gail Carriger, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, What the Dead Remember by Harlan Greene, The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy, Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima, Lust by Geoff Ryman, The Porcelain Dove by Delia Sherman, Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Passion by Jeanette Winterson (also Art Objects), In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado, The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays by Julia Koets, and Emily Carroll’s Through the Woods (a must for horror fans).

Carmen María Machado came up a lot, so I’ll just put her down and say read everything.

A PC alum Jahnnie Conner recommends Boys and Oil by Taylor Brorby (memoir) and my colleague and fellow WGST instructor (and professor of religion) Julie Meadows recommends Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy.

Our brilliant local poet Sarah Cooper recommends Hijab Butch Blues (Lamya) and I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself (Marisa Crane), and my favorite literary translator Jamie Richards suggests Anne Garréta's Sphinx and Eva Baltasar, The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

Y’all, librarians are really the best, and my friend Rachel Newton Inabinet is holding it down in our Greenville County library system. She recommends TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea and  Casey McQuiston (and specifically Red, White & Royal Blue). Of course the library staff also has this list of LGBTQIA+ fiction that you can check out from the library (despite what some of our Library board members would prefer).

Another colleague from grad school who teaches in Washington State (let me just miss the PNW for a minute, sigh) Tamara Holloway suggests The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

A colleague now retired from PC’s education department, Anita Dutrow, says read anything by Donna Leon.

My good friend and perinatal therapist and all-around life coach (seriously, if you need a therapist, she’s virtual and amazing) Lindsay Howerton-Hastings tells us to read anything by Alexis Hall and Casey McQuiston (so good, current, relevant), and you should always do what Lindsay tells you, seriously.

A friend from high school (Bellevue West class of 1997, we are amazing): Quietly Hostile - Samantha Irby, It’s About Damn Time - Arlan Hamilton, Zami - Audre Lorde, Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin, Hunger - Roxanne Gay, The Gilda Stories - Jewelle Gomez.

Another friend, and life partner of our dearly beloved late colleague Jerry Alexander, Marc Fiori, recommends any of the Tales of the City books by Armistead Maupin. (Jerry and I talked a lot about co-teaching a Sexuality and Literature course together, and I’m so sad we never had the chance. We miss him.)

One of my most favorite Reverends, Racquel Gill (go see her at Duke if you can), prescribes Honey Pot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women by E. Patrick Johnson.

My colega in Oregon, who helped me learn how to teach Spanish, Heather Quarles, nos recomienda Nombres y animales by Rita Indiana.

My colleague, friend and fellow Substacker

Terry Barr

always has great book suggestions: Tranny by Lara Jane Grace and The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels. Also, Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks.

On Twitter, my solicitation probably got suppressed by Elon Musk, but Ashlyn Preaux, co-founder of the Palmetto State Abortion Fund (please please please donate) says reading Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much got her some looks at her kid’s soccer games… I love reading as resistance!

And a former student from PC, Erika Gotfredson, who is about to defend her dissertation and join the ranks of the English professoriate, recommends Jessi Hempel’s memoir The Family Outing and Brian Broome’s memoir Punch Me Up to the Gods. Thanks for joining us in the trenches, Erika!

I could literally go on and on, but this should get you all started. I’ll look forward to your essay drafts in the coming weeks, lol. Let’s also keep the list going—drop more recs in the comments. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions, and Happy Pride Month!!!