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Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games investigates the potential of queer conceptions of time to unbind forms of understanding identities. In doing so, it recognizes the power of time to determine us but chooses to queer time and turn it into an ally of unbound forms of understanding identities. Through the analysis of different media—literature, cinema, and video games—the chapters revolve around three key ideas: that there are inherently queer styles of using and dealing with time and temporality in culture; that the critical rediscovery of canonical texts and the analysis of largely ignored queer texts and authors allow for a better understanding of queer identities; and, finally, that normative conceptions of time can—and should—be challenged through critical tools that reconceptualize notions of the self around time. This volume will be of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working close to areas such as queer and gender studies, media and cinema studies, cultural studies, literary theory, comparative literature, game studies, and art history.

A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive explores the architectural production of nawabs Asaf-ud-Daula and Wajid Ali Shah and reveals the colonial bias against queer expression. It offers methods of using queer strategies to read archival evidence against the grain and rewrite erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories. The book provides its readers a unique queer postcolonial architectural history of Lucknow from 1775–1857. It highlights the nawabs’ non-normative expressions, which not only offered a fierce resistance to the colonial enterprise but also were instrumental in furthering Lucknow as a cultural center. It simultaneously extracts parameters from queer studies and redefines them to illustrate ways in which queer architecture can be characterized. It reconstructs the footprint of nawabi architecture erased by the colonial enterprise and places it back on map—an exercise not undertaken meticulously until now. A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive is intended for scholars and students of queer studies, postcolonial studies, architectural history, and the global south, as well as the citizens of Lucknow.

Bodies and Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces is an exploration of the spaces of the UK’s Bear community – and the people who are in them. The book details a wealth of existing writing and scholarship on Bears – both historical and contemporary – and uses new empirical research to demonstrate and explain the complexity of ‘Bear’ in the present-day UK. Moving beyond a focus on masculine attitudes, it emphasises the importance of bodily appearance for Bear communities while also demonstrating the variety of bodies in Bear spaces, and the variety amongst Bear spaces themselves. Resisting universalist accounts, the book calls for greater engagement with the conceptual instability and geographic variation of ‘Bear’. Written for both academic and non-academic readers, the book combines an engaging conversational style with excerpts from a rich qualitative dataset to help explain new ways of looking at Bears or ‘Bear/y’ men. Bodies & Boundaries of UK Bear Spaces is of value to anyone interested in Bears and/or LGBTQ spaces – particularly in the UK context. It also offers much for scholars of men and masculinities, bodies and fatness, gender studies, and sexuality and queer studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

This open access book explores the disciplinary, disciplined, and recent interdisciplinary sites and productions of ethnomusicology and queerness, arguing that both academic realms are founded upon a destructive masculinity—indissolubly linked to coloniality and epistemic hegemony—and marked by a monologic, ethnocentric silencing of embodied, same-sex desire. Ethnomusicology’s fetishization of masculinizing fieldwork; queerness’s functioning as Anglophone master category; and both domains’ devaluation of sensuality and experience, concomitant with an adherence to provincial, Western conceptions of knowledge production, are revealed as precluding the possibilities for equitable, dialogic pluriversality. Enlisting the sonic as theoretical intervention, the disciplined/disciplining ethno and queer are reimagined in relation to negative emotions and intractable affect, ultimately vanquished, and replaced by explorations of sound, sex/uality, and experiential somaticity within a protean, postdisciplinary space of material/epistemic equity. This uncompromising, long-overdue critique will be of interest to researchers and students from numerous theoretical backgrounds, including music, sound, gender, queer, and postcolonial/decolonial studies.

With a focus on nine different national contexts, this book explores contemporary family diversity. With attention to the different welfare states and cultures of care in each setting, it problematizes the pre-eminence of research and policy centered on heteronormative families, showing the extent to which family diversity exists cross-nationally in relation to different gendered and ""family-friendly"" policies. Considering variations in family forms, including differences in the number and marital status of parents, their gender, sexual orientation and biological relationship to the children (adoption), multicultural families, and families created by technological assistance or surrogacy, it presents demographic information, alongside quantitative and qualitative research, across a number of advanced countries. A contribution to our understanding of the diversity of family forms, how diversity is lived in families, and what family diversity means in various international policy contexts. The Changing Faces of Families will appeal to scholars with interests in the sociology of the family. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Violent Affections uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Based on analysis of over 300 criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of ‘gay propaganda’ law, the book shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials. It then utilises an original methodology of studying ‘legal memes’ and argues that these individual affective states are directly connected to the political violence aimed at queer lives more generally. The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon. The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

"What happens when the defining moment of your life might be a figment of your imagination? How do you understand — and live with — definitive feelings of having been abused when the origin of those feelings won’t adhere to a singular event but are rather diffused across years of experience? In Bullied: The Story of an Abuse, Jonathan Alexander meditates on how, as a young man, he struggled with the realization that the story he’d been telling himself about being abused by a favorite uncle as a child might actually just have been a “story” — a story he told himself and others to justify both his lifelong struggle with anxiety and to explain his attraction to other men. Story though it was, Alexander maintains that some form of abuse did occur. In writing that is at turns reflective, analytic, and hallucinatory, Alexander traces what it means to suffer homophobic abuse when such is diffused across multiple actors and locales, implicating a family, a school, a culture, and a politics — as opposed to a singular individual who just happened to be the only openly gay man in young Alexander’s life. Along the way, Alexander reflects on Jussie Smollett, drug abuse, MAGA-capped boys, sadomasochism, Catholic priests, cruising, teaching young adult fiction about rape, and a host of other oddly but intimately related topics."

Lesbiennes, pédés, arrêtons de raser les murs renouvelle les approches du militantisme lesbien et homo­sexuel des années 1970 à 1990 et éclaire des dimensions méconnues de cette histoire. L’ouvrage étudie comment ces luttes ont émergé, quels débats et tensions les ont traversées, et quels sont les bouleversements politiques et épistémologiques qu’elles ont entraînés. Le livre s’articule autour de quatre axes novateurs. Il rompt d’abord avec le tropisme parisien en mettant en lumière des expériences militantes déployées dans toute la France. Il replace les mobilisations lesbiennes, longtemps marginalisées, au centre de cette histoire. Il interroge les catégories forgées au cours de ces luttes en s’intéressant aux identités qu’elles incluent mais aussi qu’elles relèguent à la marge. Enfin, il montre comment la formation de communautés s’ancre dans des pratiques culturelles et artistiques qui invitent à élargir la conception du politique. Dirigé par Hugo Bouvard, Ilana Eloit et Mathias Quéré, cet ouvrage collectif, porté par une nouvelle génération de chercheurs et chercheuses issues de disciplines variées (histoire, sociologie, science politique, philosophie, études théâtrales) est destiné à devenir l’ouvrage de référence sur l’histoire des mouvements lesbiens et homosexuels en France des années 1970 à 1990.