During June, also known as Pride month, we are focusing on LGBTQIA+. Our Librarian Victoria has picked out books specifically for this. All books are to be found either at our RWI library or online. Find part one of ‘Bookphoria with Victoria – LGBTQIA+ here.
Protecting and promoting human rights is essential to advancing rights and achieving equality for all people regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQIA+ individuals also often experience other human rights abuses such as violence, intimidation, and harassment and are subject to laws and policies that criminalize same-sex relationships, gender identity, and expression. Read more on LGBTQIA+ rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights here.
Suggested Reading
Queer phenomenology : orientations, objects, others / Sara Ahmed.(2006)
ISBN 9780822339144
On the RWI Shelf: 69:2
From the publisher: In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.
Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear–and those that do not–as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas . In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts–by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon–with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.
Development, sexual rights and global governance / edited by Amy Lind.(2010)
ISBN 9780415776073
On the RWI Shelf: 69:2 DEV
From the publisher: This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance.
The underlying premise of this volume is that the global development industry plays a central role in constructing people’s sexual lives, access to citizenship, and struggles for livelihood. Despite the industry’s persistent insistence on viewing sexuality as basically outside the realm of economic modernization and anti-poverty programs, this volume brings to the fore heterosexual bias within macroeconomic and human rights development frameworks. The work fills an important gap in understanding how people’s intimate lives are governed through heteronormative policies which typically assume that the family is based on blood or property ties rather than on alternative forms of kinship. By placing heteronormativity at the center of analysis, this anthology thus provides a much-needed discussion about the development industry’s role in pathologizing sexual deviance yet also, more recently, in helping make visible a sexual rights agenda.
Providing insights valuable to a range of disciplines, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations. It will also be highly relevant to development practitioners and international human rights advocates.
Queer comrades : gay identity and Tongzhi activism in postsocialist China / Hongwei Bao.(2018)
ISBN: 9788776942366
On the RWI Shelf: 64 BAO
From the publisher: This very timely, well-written and insightful exploration of gay identity and queer activism in the People’s Republic of China today is more than a study of ‘queer China’ through the lens of male homosexuality; it also examines identity, power and governmentality in contemporary China, as shaped by China’s historical conditions and contemporary situations. This book offers in-depth analysis of recent queer history and contemporary cultural texts, including the processes by which queer theory and activism was introduced and received in the PRC, the transformation of Shanghai’s queer spaces, leading queer filmmaker Cui Zi’en life and works, and personal diaries written by gay men receiving conversion therapies. It also presents rich ethnographic data gained from fieldwork conducted in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou’s urban gay communities and documents queer public cultural events such as the Shanghai LGBTQIA+ Pride, the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the China Queer Film Festival Tour, as well as a clash between cruising gay men and the police over the use of public space in the People’s Park, Guangzhou.
This book offers a queer Marxist analysis of sexual identity and social movements in contemporary China, where ideological negotiations between socialism and neoliberalism are constantly played out in the formation of public cultures and intimate spheres. In doing so, it critically assesses the role of Marxism and China’s socialist legacies in shaping sexual identity, queer popular culture and political activism. Although the first of its kind from a cultural studies perspective, this interdisciplinary study speaks to scholars working in disparate fields including anthropology, sociology, media studies, film studies, political theory, and Asian Studies.
Understanding global sexualities : new frontiers / edited by Peter Aggleton.(2012)
ISBN 9780415523028
On the RWI Shelf: 69:2 UND
From the publisher: Over the course of the past thirty years, there has been an explosion of work on sexuality, both conceptually and methodologically. From a relatively limited, specialist field, the study of sexuality has expanded across a wide range of social sciences. Yet as the field has grown, it has become apparent that a number of leading edge critical issues remain.
This theory-building book explores some of the areas in which there is major and continuing debate, for example, about the relationship between sexuality and gender; about the nature and status of heterosexuality; about hetero- and homo-normativity; about the influence and intersection of class, race, age and other factors in sexual trajectories, identities and lifestyles; and about how best to understand the new forms of sexuality that are emerging in both rich world and developing world contexts.
With contributions from leading and new scholars and activists from across the globe, this book highlights tensions or ‘flash-points’ in contemporary debate, and offers some innovative ways forward in terms of thinking about sexuality – both theoretically and with respect to policy and programme development. An extended essay by Henrietta Moore introduces the volume, and an afterword by Jeffrey Weeks offers pointers for the future.
The contributors bring together a range of experiences and a variety of disciplinary perspectives in engaging with three key themes of sexual subjectivity and global transformations, sexualities in practice, and advancing new thinking on sexuality in policy and programmatic contexts. It is of interest to students, researchers and activists in sexuality, sexual health and gender studies, especially those working from public health, sociological and anthropological perspectives.
Exercising human rights : gender, agency and practice / Robin Redhead.(2014)
ISBN: 9780415833011
On the RWI shelf: 69:1 RED
From the Publisher: Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights.
Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights.
This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.
Sexuality and transsexuality under the European Convention on Human Rights : a queer reading of human rights law / Damian A Gonzalez-Salzberg.(2019)
ISBN: 9781509914937
On the RWI shelf: 57:1 GON
From the publisher: This book undertakes a critical analysis of international human rights law through the lens of queer theory. It pursues two main aims: first, to make use of queer theory to illustrate that the field of human rights law is underpinned by several assumptions that determine a conception of the subject that is gendered and sexual in specific ways. This gives rise to multiple legal and social consequences, some of which challenge the very idea of universality of human rights. Second, the book proposes that human rights law can actually benefit from a better understanding of queer critiques, since queer insights can help it to overcome heteronormative beliefs currently held. In order to achieve these main aims, the book focuses on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the leading legal authority in the field of international human rights law. The use of queer theory as the theoretical approach for these tasks serves to deconstruct several aspects of the Court’s jurisprudence dealing with gender, sexuality, and kinship, to later suggest potential paths to reconstruct such features in a queer(er) and more universal manner.
If you’d like to read more about LGBTQIA+, you can find it here:
LGBTQIA+ Lawyers in a conservative field
Listen to our latest podcast “Trans Rights are Human Rights”
How well do you know your LGBTQIA+ Pride flags?