Award Winners LibGuide: Studies Winners

LGBTQ Studies Winner in 30th Annual
From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV, mostly stigmatized minorities, began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punishing Disease looks at how HIV was transformed from sickness to badness under criminal law and investigates the consequences of inflicting penalties on people living with the disease. Now that the door to criminalizing sickness is open, what other ailments will follow? With moves in state legislatures to extend HIV-specific criminal laws to include diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis, the question is more than academic.
This book is an exemplar in the study of punishment and social control. Focusing on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS in the form of mandatory reporting laws, Hoppe’s book is an important contribution to an understudied context that should be of great interest for adoption in courses on punishment and society and deviance. Punishing Disease is divided into two sections, “Punitive Disease Control” and the “Criminalization of Sickness.” The three opening chapters provide a genealogy of the rise of punitive HIV/AIDS mandatory reporting laws. In doing so, the book makes a useful, contribution to enduring debates on the cultural logic of crime and social control. Hoppe accomplishes this with thorough attention to both complex social and political dimensions of the epidemic.

LGBT Studies Winner 25th Annual
Performing Queer Latinidad highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population were increasing alongside growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performances from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs, served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other non-normative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. At a time when latinidad ascended to the national public sphere in mainstream commercial and political venues and Latina/o public space was increasingly threatened by the redevelopment of urban centers and a revived anti-immigrant campaign, queer Latinas/os in places such as the Bronx, San Antonio, Austin, Phoenix, and Rochester, NY, returned to performance to claim spaces and ways of being that allowed their queerness and latinidad to coexist. These social events of performance and their attendant aesthetic communication strategies served as critical sites and tactics for creating and sustaining queer latinidad.

LGBT Studies Winner 23rd Annual
The metropolis has been the near-exclusive focus of queer scholars and queer cultures in America. Asking us to look beyond the cities on the coasts, Scott Herring draws a new map, tracking how rural queers have responded to this myopic mindset. Interweaving a wide range of disciplines, art, media, literature, performance, and fashion studies, he develops an extended critique of how metro-normativity saturates LGBTQ politics, artwork, and criticism. To counter this ideal, he offers a vibrant theory of queer anti-urbanism that refuses to dismiss the rural as a cultural backwater. Impassioned and provocative, Another Country, expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond its city limits. Herring leads his readers from faeries in the rural Midwest to photographs of white supremacists in the deep South, from Roland Barthes's obsession with Parisian fashion to a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel set in the Appalachian Mountains, and from cubist paintings in Lancaster County to lesbian separatist communes on the northern California coast. The result is an entirely original account of how queer studies can, and should, get to another country.

LGBT Studies Winner 20th Annual
Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law. Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

LGBT Studies Winner 18th Annual
Susan Ackerman offers close, original readings of the homoerotic imagery and language found in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Ackerman focuses on the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu and David and Jonathan. Ackerman cautions against applying modern conceptions of homosexuality in understanding the nature of these relationships; instead, she analyzes the stories of David and Gilgamesh in terms of the sexual relations and gender roles prevalent at the time. Ackerman shows that the texts' language and erotic imagery suggest more than just an intense male bonding. She argues that, though ambiguous, the erotic imagery and language have a critical function in the texts and serve the political, religious, and aesthetic aims of the narrators. More precisely, the erotic language in the story of David seeks to feminize Jonathan and thus invalidate his claim to Israel's throne in favor of David. In the case of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, whose egalitarian relationship is paradoxically described using the hierarchically dependent language of sexual relationships, the ambiguous erotic language reinforces their status as liminal figures and heroes in the epic tradition.

Lesbian Studies Winner 12th Annual
From the author of the acclaimed Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, a landmark work of lesbian history that both "sets the record straight (or unstraight)" for all Americans and "provides a usable past" for lesbians. "This is a book about how millions of American women became what they are now: full citizens, educated, and capable of earning a decent living for themselves. But it departs from other such histories because it focuses on how certain late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women whose lives can be described as 'lesbian' were in the forefront of the battle to procure the rights and privileges that large numbers of Americans enjoy today." A groundbreaking reappraisal of those women known by history but whose histories are incomplete, To Believe in Women examines how their lesbianism may in fact have facilitated their accomplishments. Lillian Faderman, twice winner of the Lambda Award, persuasively argues that even before a "lesbian identity" was defined, many early female leaders had what would now be called lesbian relationships, free from the constraints of traditional heterosexual arrangements that might otherwise have impeded their pursuits in education, politics, and culture. A book of impeccable research and compelling readability, To Believe in Women will be a source of enlightenment for all, and for many a singular source of pride.

Lesbian Studies Winner 9th Annual
Love Between Women examines female homoeroticism and the role of women in the ancient Roman world. Employing an unparalleled range of cultural sources, Brooten finds evidence of marriages between women and establishes that condemnations of female homoerotic practices were based on widespread awareness of love between women. The book is divided into two parts. The first part of the book focuses primarily on texts revealing the existence of female homoerotic relationships and the attitudes towards them. Brooten uses a variety of sources to demonstrate that from "classical Greece through the Roman period (there was) an increasing awareness of sexual love between women, nearly always combined with a rejection of such love." Few scholars have provided as much evidence of female same-sex relationships in antiquity and early Christian culture as has Brooten in Love Between Women. Brooten particularly acknowledges the work of John Boswell in bringing to light a number of sources on female homoeroticism. It is Boswell's work to which Brooten's is most similar, in that both scholars have sought to demonstrate the existence of same-sex relationships in ancient and early Christian societies.

Gay Men's Studies Winner 11th Annual
The only study of gay male history covering the United States since World War I. Based on hundreds of interviews, new and classic texts, and little-known archival sources, an award-winning writer offers the first narrative history to consider signal moments, general TRS, and the multiple meanings of "gay identity" in the whole United States from World War I to the AIDS era and "queer" activism. The most readable, authoritative, and comprehensive investigation ever, The Other Side of Silence combines history and anecdote, politics, and theory to reveal the personalities and textures of a largely unknown culture. A dramatic chronicle of seventy-five years of persecution and accomplishment, the book addresses both in equal detail: which hunts in schools and the military, crusades of psychiatrists, the resistance long before Stonewall, the inspiring pioneers, and activists. From Newport and the private-party networks of Nebraska and Florida's Emma Jones Society to gay rodeos, athletes, and support groups, here are first-hand accounts of what it has meant (and might mean in the future) to be a sexual outsider in the United States.

Gay Men's Studies Winner 7th Annual
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (New York Times), Gay New York forever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.

Transgender Winner 19th Annual
Transgender studies are the latest area of academic inquiry to grow out of the exciting nexus of queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality. Because transpeople challenge our most fundamental assumptions about the relationship between bodies, desire, and identity, the field is both fascinating and contentious. The Transgender Studies Reader puts between two covers fifty influential texts with new introductions by the editors that, taken together, document the evolution of transgender studies in the English-speaking world. By bringing together the voices and experience of transgender individuals, doctors, psychologists, and academically-based theorists, this volume will be a foundational text for the transgender community, transgender studies, and related queer theory.