New Directions In Queer Oral History

This comprehensive international collection reflects on the practice, purpose, and functionality of queer oral history, and in doing so demonstrates the vibrancy and innovation of this rapidly evolving field. Drawing on the roots of oral history’s original commitment to "history from below" queer oral history has become an indispensable methodology at the heart of queer studies. Expanding and extending the existing canon, this book offers up key observations about queer oral history as a methodology, and how it might be advanced through cutting edge approaches. The collection contains a mix of contributions from established scholars, early career researchers, postgraduate students, archivists, and activists, ensuring its accessibility and wide appeal. The go-to reference for queer oral history for scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and community-engaged practitioners, New Directions in Queer Oral History advances rigorous methodological and theoretical debates and constitutes a significant intervention in the world of oral history.

When written sources are scarce, historians often turn to oral histories for evidence. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History is the first book to provide serious scholarly insight into the methodological practices that shape lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer oral histories. The volume opens up a critical dialogue on the challenges of creating an archive of queer lives. Highlighting the work of fourteen authors who focus their research on queer community history, culture, and politics, each chapter pairs an oral history excerpt with an original essay in which the oral historian addresses his or her methods and practices. With an afterword by the preeminent scholar in the field, John D'Emilio, this collection enables readers to examine both a series of oral histories and analysis of the role memory, desire, sexuality, and gender play in documenting LGBTQ communities and cultures. The historical themes addressed within include lesbian bar history in San Francisco (c. 1940s, 1950s); early homophile organizing and social activism in Los Angeles (c. 1950s and 1960s); Third World Liberation and feminist antiwar activism in the U.S. and Canada (c. 1960s, 1970s); electoral politics and the career of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco (1970s); Latino AIDS memory and activism in San Francisco (1980s, 1990s); and the war in Iraq (2000s). The methodological themes addressed in this book that are relevant to the practice of oral history include questions of sexual self-disclosure and voyeurism in the uses of oral history methods by queer studies scholars; the intimacy between researcher and narrator negotiated through multiple oral history interviews and on-going casual conversations; the production of comparative racial and sexual identities within the context of oral history interviews; the production of in-group mythology by same-sexuality interviewing--and the possible benefits of cross-sexuality and cross-ideology interviewing; what heterosexually-identified narrators can tell us about LGBTQ life and death; the silences imposed by repressive U.S. government policy about sexual self-disclosure and the limits of permissible speech in highly politicized discourses such as "gays in the military." These themes provide new and insightful structures for thinking about oral history methods--both in general and in relation to the production of LGBTQ history.

Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality outlines some of the challenges of retracing sexual acts, identities, and desires in the past, and shows how historians have responded to these methodological challenges with ingenuity and creativity. The volume acknowledges that the history of sexuality poses particularly interesting challenges in relation to sources due the peculiar nature of sexuality. On one hand, sexuality is frequently hidden and private, its practices often unknown, denied, and evaded, its desires fleeting or obsessive, its reality confused or illuminated by fantasy; yet on the other, sexuality consistently breaks into the public sphere through moral panics, waves of persecution, taxonomizing projects, and medical/juridical interventions. With vivid case studies from renowned contributors, the chapters provide different theoretical approaches along with more practical examples of how to study the history of sexuality. The volume has a broad chronology from the ancient world to the present, an extensive geography covering not only Europe and the Americas but also Latin America and Africa, and also includes a variety of gender and sexual expressions. The book also privileges texts that offer an intersectional approach, asking how sex and sexualities were constructed alongside/against other categories of difference. With accessible writing, this volume encourages the reader to think creatively about how to find evidence of sex/sexuality in the past and will be of value to students as well as scholars interested in the history of sexuality.

Focusing on patterns of intimacy, this book traces the historical roots of parenting practices and familial patterns constructed by lesbians and same-sex attracted women living in Britain and Australia between 1945 and 2000. It foregrounds women's unique lived experiences, as they expressed desire, fell in love, and created families against the backdrop of changing cultural, legal, and medical attitudes to female same-sex desire in the late 20th century. Including almost 100 original oral history interviews conducted by the author, Lesbian Intimacies and Family Life reveals the subjective histories of lesbian intimacy during the period, both highlighting the huge variety in women's experiences, and tracing shifting patterns of relationship and family formation. Combined with analysis of representations of lesbian intimacy in literature, press articles, medical texts, and archival material, the book demonstrates the ways in which changing political and cultural concepts of sexuality impacted on individual and collective attitudes. With a unique transnational perspective, Jennings uncovers how feminist and lesbian networks between Britain and Australia promoted knowledge sharing and helped foster change in the familial practices of each country – such as through the adoption of reproductive technologies and alternate routes into motherhood. Through considering the rise of divorce and challenges to traditional marriage practices in the period, this book highlights how lesbian relationships provided alternative models of interpersonal relations, impacting on broader patterns of sexuality, and helping redefine notions of the family in the modern era.

Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women’s, and non-binary people’s experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways. Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people’s experiences. Through 25 newly commissioned chapters, a diverse range of authors, from early career researchers to established scholars, stage conversations at the cutting edge of sexuality studies. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities. This innovative interdisciplinary collection is an excellent resource for scholars, undergraduate, and postgraduate students interested in gender, sexuality, and identity across a range of fields, such as queer studies, feminist theory, anthropology, media studies, sociology, psychology, history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention.

How is an oral historian to react when the unexpected emerges, whether in field research or interview analysis? Answers tend to be scattered throughout the scholarly literature or confined to backstage conversations. This book brings the unexpected to the center of the scene and promotes a collective reflection about ways of dealing with uneasy encounters, surprises, and interviews that seem to have gone off the rails. The contributors come from a dozen countries, especially Brazil, where a classic piece about a “great liar” paved the way for this discussion. Rather than eccentric descriptions of unusual situations, these chapters evoke a dense web of reflections about dialogue, the production of oral sources, and the complexities of personal narratives. Theoretically informed but written in an engaging language, the book presents readers with fascinating case studies of the eruptions of the unexpected that occur in oral history research.

Volume I offers historiographical surveys and general overviews of central topics in the history of world sexualities. Split across twenty-two chapters, this volume places the history of sexuality in dialogue with anthropology, women's history, LGBTQ+ history, queer theory, and public history, as well as examining the impact Freud and Foucault have had on the history of sexuality. The volume continues by providing overviews on the sexual body, family and marriage, the intersections of sexuality with race and class, male and female homoerotic relations, trans and gender variant sexuality, the sale of sex, sexual violence, sexual science, sexuality and emotion, erotic art and literature, and the material culture of sexuality.

The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine addresses the proliferation of practices that bridge performance and medicine in the contemporary moment. The scope of this book's broad range of chapters includes medicine and illness as the subject of drama and plays; the performativity of illness and the medical encounter; the roles and choreographies of the clinic; the use of theatrical techniques, such as simulation and role-play, in medical training; and modes of performance engaged in public health campaigns, health education projects and health-related activism. The book encompasses some of these diverse practices and discourses that emerge at the interface between medicine and performance, with a particular emphasis on practices of performance. This collection is a vital reference resource for scholars of contemporary performance; medical humanities; and the variety of interdisciplinary fields and debates around performance, medicine, health and their overlapping collaborations. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.

Feminist Theatre Then & Now – Celebrating 50 Years of women theatre makers in the UK and Ireland and their battle to make their voices heard, have their work produced professionally, and promote social justice. Here, the pioneers and leading lights of the newly energised feminist theatre movement continue to fight for an equitable, diverse and inclusive theatre which speaks for all. In 30+ essays, covering three generations, the interviews and essays in this book give important insight into the lived experience of women working in theatre and what it takes to rise in an industry where race, gender, class and parenthood can be serious obstacles to success. Interviews and essays by playwrights, directors, producers and actors including: Asian Women’s Theatre in Britain by Rukhsana Ahmad Derby Theatre by Sarah Brigham Interview with Moira Buffini Intersectional Feminism at Work by Kelly Burke The Personal was very Political by Clair Chapwell Behind The Lines by Alison Child How Feminism has Influenced my Playwriting by April de Angelis Interview with Suzanne Gorman Clean Break by Anna Herrmann Interview with Hannah Khalil The Women in Theatre Lab by Polly Kemp and Jennifer Tuckett Persistence, Expression and Evolution by Peta Lily Interview with Roberta Livingston Ecofeminism by Bibi Lucille The Third World of Irish Women by Jaki McCarrick Monstrous Regiment by Mary McCusker Open Clasp Theatre by Catrina McHugh Interview with Suzie Miller Interview with Ann Mitchell Interview with Rebecca Mordan Interview with Amy Ng Untold Stories by Maeve O’Neill Girls’ Night Out by Rachel O’Regan Interview with Kaite O’Reilly Sphinx by Sue Parrish and Susan McGoun Interview with Julia Pascal Out of the Attic – WTW by Cheryl Robson and Anna Birch Scylla’s Bite by Rebekah Smith and Abbie Lowe Interview with Dame Rosemary Squire Women in their own Words by Lucy Stevens Stella Quines & After by Gerda Stevenson Differences Matter by SuAndi Theatre from a Lesbian Perspective by Clare Summerskill Interview with Imy Wyatt Corner Index Reviews “On the 50th anniversary of the first Women’s Theatre festival and the explosion of work by women that has built in quantity, wealth and diversity since then this is an important new book celebrating and giving voice to many of the key contributors to that rich history and exciting present. “ – Susan Croft, Director – Unfinished Histories “Fascinating histories and perspectives from a selection of feminist theatre practitioners fighting to achieve equality over half a century of patriarchy.” – Lisa Goldman, Writer & Director “A necessary read for drama students and anyone interested in our cultural history. Highly recommended.” – Beatie Edney, Actor & Director “The interview and essay structure of the book makes its near 300 pages easily digestible and the editor has quite carefully avoided a chronological structure. The intermingled ‘then’ and ‘now’ approach works remarkably well, a continual reminder of how past, present and future are feeding into one another all the time. While the book is strong on the impacts of earlier feminist theatremakers, the very similar or partially evolved restrictions that today’s women are still facing are given equivalent weight. It becomes a meaningful arrangement in which a wide range of voices are heard without singling out or forgetting eras or areas of the industry, making room for everything from clowning to lesbian theatre, exploring how all forms of feminist theatre from West End platforms to grassroots activism always blends the political and the personal onstage and off.” – Maryam Philpott, The Reviews Hub