Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives

Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives

by Angela Pattatucci-Aragon
Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives

Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives

by Angela Pattatucci-Aragon

Paperback

$62.95 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Temporarily Out of Stock Online
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

What constitutes lesbian identity?

The term homonormativity describes current prevailing idealized assumptions about lesbian identity. This concept, however, marginalizes subgroups within the greater lesbian population. Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives dynamically confronts homonormativity in lesbian communities by presenting expert multidisciplinary discussion about what is a definable lesbian identity. This text sensitively explores difficult issues about gender policing and the viewpoints in lesbian communities that hold that transgender, intersectional, and queer individuals are considered to have 'false consciousness.' Consequences of lesbian normativity, both for lesbian communities and for marginalized groups are examined through literary criticism, lesbian, feminist, and queer theories, corporeal philosophy, film, television, cultural criticism, personal narratives, public health, and field research.

The issue of the authenticity of lesbian identity causes rifts between some lesbian communities and the groups that strive to be included, yet are still marginalized. Challenging Lesbian Norms directly exposes practices and beliefs within lesbian communities that lead to the assumption of the prototypical lesbian. The book courageously reveals the similarities of lesbian normative stances with other views such as Christian conservative rhetoric, and reviews the health consequences of being marginalized within the lesbian communities. This text actively challenges the foundational notion within lesbian communities that a stable, immutable lesbian sex exists.

Topics in Challenging Lesbian Norms include:
  • human physiology, the flexibility of sexuality, and biologic determinism
  • marginalization within lesbian communities
  • transexualism and Lesbian Theory
  • gender and sexual identity construction, partnering practices, and issues involving queer-identified youth
  • demystification of the gay vibe from a femme queer woman’s perspective
  • lesbian feminism, gender policing, and casting butch, FTM, and transgendered subjectivities as "false conciousness"
  • representations of lesbians in television movies
  • Native-American "two-spirit" women
  • teaching transgender, and its transformative effect
  • identity modeling
  • inclusion of transgender and intersex individuals within the lesbian communities
  • transgender characters in film
  • Latina lesbians and mental health

Challenging Lesbian Norms is stimulating, eye-opening reading that is perfect for activists, educators and students in LGBT and women’s studies, and public health professionals.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781560236450
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Publication date: 11/09/2006
Series: Published Simultaneously As the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, Vol. 12, Nos. 2/3 Series
Pages: 278
Product dimensions: 5.81(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Read an Excerpt

It was 3:07 a.m. by Joey's Pop Halo watch and a bank of sweat and stale disco smoke was rolling across the dance floor of Klub Galaxy like skanky fog. Joey tried blinking but he could barely see past the end of his arm.

One glance up, though, and he knew exactly where he was. Beneath the spinning lantern, dead center of the dance floor of San Francisco's biggest queer night klub. This was his spot, where he danced every weekend, surrounded by hundreds of glistening male bodies sliding against each other like sausages in a meat factory while the deep house mixes of dj Marcus Barker made the air vibrate in front of his eyes.

Or was that because he was rolling? No, because he was hardly rolling at all. Marcus B had just spun out his favorite song—Madonna's "Music" (albeit, a tragically flawed mix by Rumblesnatch)-and he should be flying but he wasn't. Manny and his damn Little Buddhas. They should call them Little Putas, just like him.

Then Joey heard the unmistakable opening beats of "Dive in the Pool," a song he detested with every fiber of his being.

That's it, he decided, I'm dropping again.

Drop ... Dead: The DJ Murders is a must read not just for fans of murder mysteries and detective stories, but for anyone who enjoys comedy and satire as well. The book also appeals to anyone interested in queer cultural politics, the social policies of the war on drugs, and the world of today's gay circuit parties and dance clubs.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction: Challenging Lesbian Normativity (Angela Pattatucci-Aragón)
  • Fleshy Specificity: (Re)considering Transsexual Subjects in Lesbian Communities (Kelly Coogan)
  • The Invisible Body of Queer Youth: Identity and Health in the Margins of Lesbian and Trans Communities (Dorinda L. Welle, Sebastian S. Fuller, Daniel Mauk, and Michael C. Clatts)
  • "Gee, I Didn’t Get That Vibe from You" Articulating My Own Version of a Femme Lesbian Existence (Robbin VanNewkirk)
  • Gender Please, Without the Gender Police: Rethinking Pain in Archetypical Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity (Madelyn Detloff)
  • Household Remedies: New Narratives of Queer Containment in the Television Movie (Cait Keegan)
  • "My Spirit in My Heart": Identity Experiences and Challenges Among American Indian Two-Spirit Women (Karina L. Walters, Teresa Evans-Campbell, Jane M. Simoni, Theresa Ronquillo, and Rupaleem Bhuyan)
  • Teaching Transgender in Women’s Studies: Snarls and Strategies (Sara E. Cooper and Connor James Treba)
  • Developing an Identity Model for Transgender and Intersex Inclusion in Lesbian Communities (Christopher Robinson)
  • An Other Space: Between and Beyond Lesbian-Normativity and Trans-Normativity (Myfanwy McDonald)
  • In Another Bracket: Trans Acceptance in Lesbian Utopia (Jamie Stuart)
  • Debating Trans Inclusion in the Feminist Movement: A Trans-Positive Analysis (Eli R. Green)
  • I Don’t Know Who I Am: Severely Mentally Ill Latina WSW Navigating Differentness (Sana Loue and Nancy Méndez)
  • Index
  • Reference Notes Included

What People are Saying About This

Mary Wings

Jump down this exciting rabbit-hole with Joey, a young Filipino klub boy, and a metrosexual cast of characters in this new murder mystery DROP DEAD. Visit the clubs, take the drugs, fly past the circuit boys, pod boyz, and sticky Azians whose glow stick offenses light up a murder, right at Joey's feet. There are lots of tragedies caused by all kinds of things, and author Tonne Serah is determined from the bottom of his k-hole to the top of his rolling peak to keep us guessing. When DEA agents start defecting under the influence and San Francisco's first transgendered police officer turns out to have something on the Mayor, things heat up for real—but is Joey too tweaked out to handle the details before it's too late? Or will Sketcherella give him just the opportunity he needs? Put DROP DEAD next to your bed, or your stash box, and find out. (Mary Wings, author of She Came Too Late and the Emma Victor Mysteries)

Stephen O. Murray

More important than answering the "whodunit?" question, is the wry new voice of Tonne Serah observing the lifeways of Asian-Americans in the club and circuit party scene. Drop...Dead is VERY funny while delivering a clear political message on the indifference to harm reduction measures.

The sociological interest of Drop...Dead should not blind readers to the pleasures of the queenly sardonic voice of the narrator and of the characters or of the black comedy of the intersection of ecstasy and murder in the clubs. Along with showing a scene from today's gay world rarely depicted with accuracy or subtley, Tonne Serah's novel provides many LOL pleasures of the text. (Stephen O. Murray, author of Angkor Life and Pacific Homosexualities)

Sister Kitty Catalyst

Tonne Serah will flip your triggers on a bumpy ride of campy and dirty fun trolling through the club scenes and the pits of politics in search of answers and better living through chemistry. (Sister Kitty Catalyst OCP, über-nun and homo-propagandist, co-founder of the SF Queer Klub and Party Outreach Project)

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews