Duke University Press Log

Jimmy Creech Celebrates Marriage Equality in NC

Former Methodist minister Jimmy Creech wrote about his experience fighting for marriage equality for same-sex couples in his book Adam's Gift: A Memoir of a Pastor’s Calling to Defy the Church’s Persecution of Lesbians and Gays in 2011. The book is new in paperback this fall. In this post he writes about his joy after a judge overturned North Carolina's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on Friday afternoon, October 10. 

Like everyone, I didn’t expect and wasn’t prepared for the US Supreme Court’s history-making announcement on Monday, October 6, that opened the door to marriage equality in North Carolina. I expected the court to make a positive ruling, but not before June 2015.

In May, Joni and Gina invited me to officiate at a wedding ceremony for them on October 18. Their plan was to be legally married in the District of Columbia on the 17^th, and have a wedding ceremony the next day with their families and friends. While they badly wanted to be legally married in their home state, waiting until June 2015 was just too long a wait. When the US Supreme Court’s decision made their legal marriage in North Carolina a possibility, the three of us were excited that they might not have to wait. However, because The United Methodist Church had taken my credentials of ordination in 1999 because I violated church law by conducting a wedding for two men, someone else would have to conduct the ceremony on the 18^th for it to be legal.

On Wednesday, I returned home from an errand to find a message on our answering machine. Ken and Steve, and Michael and Mike, had called to ask if I would conduct a double wedding for them on November 15, should a federal judge declare North Carolina’s ban on same-gender marriage unconstitutional. I’ve known both couples for more than twenty years.  Ken and Steve have been together for twenty-eight years and Michael and Mike, for more than twelve. I couldn’t say no to them, and I really wanted to officiate at Joni and Gina’s wedding. But, I didn’t have the credentials.

It was deeply painful to me for many reasons when my credentials were taken away in 1999. Losing the ability to celebrate weddings with loving couples was an especially painful one. Without credentials, I could no longer pronounce a couple married or sign a marriage license. I agonized about what to do now that marriage equality was about to become a reality in North Carolina. I knew I could not regain my credentials from The United Methodist Church; so, I began to search for another way to get the credentials I needed. I discovered the American Marriage Ministries, a non-denominational interfaith church based in Washington State, and was able to obtain from it the necessary credentials to legally officiate weddings.

Friday evening, Chris and I were dressed to go to Durham for a production of The Phantom of the Opera, with our daughter, Natalia. It was late afternoon. We’d waited all day, anticipating an announcement regarding marriage equality in North Carolina. We’d been waiting all week for the announcement, which now seemed wouldn’t come until the following week.  Then the news broke a little before 6:00 PM that US District Court Judge Max Cogburn had declared that the North Carolina constitutional marriage amendment, denying same-gender couples the right to marry, was unconstitutional. When the amendment passed in 2012, the pain was excruciating. With the news of Judge Cogburn’s decision, the joy was extravagant! Dressed for the opera, we went down to the Wake County Justice Center where marriage licenses were being issued to same-gender couples. Phantom would have to wait.

As we approached the Justice Center entrance, we were surprised to find Ken and Steve walking just ahead of us. They were preparing to grill hamburgers when they heard the news. Even though they planned a November wedding and had plenty of time to get their license, they couldn’t wait. The day was too historic not to be part of. They left the hamburgers and hurried to the Justice Center. When Ken and Steve saw us, they immediately asked if I’d officiate their wedding as soon as they got their license instead of waiting so it would be legal right away. I enthusiastically agreed. And, so it happened: on the steps of the Wake County Justice Center, with Chris and Lewie Wells as witnesses, Ken and Steve spoke vows of love and fidelity to each other and I pronounced them married! This was the first legal marriage I’ve been able to do since 1999. Ken and Steve still plan to have their ceremony on November 15 for their families and friends, along with Michael and Mike. Now, I look forward to officiating at the marriage of Joni and Gina on October 18.

Chris and I went to the Justice Center to witness history and to be with the same-gender loving couples who had waited so long to enjoy the rights and protections – and respect – that marriage provides. It was an extraordinary scene, filled with laughter, smiles and tears! Ms. Laura Riddick, the Wake County Register of Deeds, graciously extended the hours of her office from its usual closing time of 5:15 to 9:00 PM to accommodate the couples. Her staff was fantastic, greeting the couples with smiles and patiently guiding them through the application process with sincere kindness. One staff person left her station to bring me a tissue so I could dry the tears from my eyes as I watched Ken and Steve fill out the marriage license application.

I’ve never doubted marriage equality would come to North Carolina, as it will come eventually to all fifty states. I just didn’t expect it to come so swiftly and in such a dramatically surprising way. It was ironic, with all the religion-based arguments in support of the NC marriage amendment, that the case upon which Judge Cogburn’s decision was based was a lawsuit brought by the United Church of Christ and other clergy from around the state. They argued that the marriage amendment denied them the free exercise of religion because it denied them the ability to conduct marriage ceremonies for same-gender couples. Not only did the amendment deny the right of same-gender couples to marry in North Carolina and legal recognition to couples married in other states, the amendment made conducting same-gender marriages a punishable illegal act for clergy.

Beyond being history-making, the advent of marriage equality in North Carolina inaugurates a reality of stability, security and protection for same-gender couples heretofore unknown on a personal level. Last night, I saw same-gender couples leaving the Justice Center, walking toward the heart of Raleigh holding hands with a newfound sense of freedom, equality and dignity. Bigotry dies hard and much more work is necessary to achieve full legal equality and social acceptance for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. A big step was taken in North Carolina toward its ultimate demise on Friday, October 10, 2014. We can celebrate!

 

Call for Papers: Archives and Archiving, a special issue of TSQ

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.”

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts?

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:

• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists.

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor (ahdevor[at]uvic[dot]ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson[at]holycross[dot]edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces.

To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, click here. For information about subscriptions, click here.

Celebrating TSQ at the Berkshire Conference, Toronto, May 2014

We were so excited to welcome TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly with an official launch at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in Toronto last week. The inaugural double issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a 21st Century Transgender Studies," features nearly ninety keyword contributions that "showcase the breadth and complexity of the field." You can subscribe to the journal here.

Editors Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, along with editorial board membors A. Finn Enke and Frank Galarte, participated in a roundtable on TSQ that included information about the initial conception of the journal, current calls for papers, ideas for special issues in the future, the necessity (and difficulty) of the book review section, and how fashion would be an exciting part of the journal with Frank Gallarte acting as the Fashion Editor. It was thrilling to have an engaged audience participating in the conversation surrounding the bright future of the journal.

Following the roundtable, we had an official launch reception for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly in the beautiful Croft Chapter House. We were happy to toast the journal with so many interested scholars, contributors, fans of the field, and conference organizers!The temporary tattoos we gave away with the TSQ asterisk were a big hit and it was fun to see so many attendees rocking the tattoos for the rest of the conference.

Check out the photos below for some highlights from the official launch. We hope that everyone will continue to contribute to the conversation on social media using the #TSQjournal hashtag.

Congratulations, TSQ!

From left to right: Book Review Editor A. Finn Enke, co-Editor Paisley Currah, co-Editor Susan Stryker, moderator Elspeth Brown, and (joining the roundtable via Skype) Fashion Editor Frank Galarte

Much of the roundtable was facilitated by enthusiastic questions from attendees. It was also enjoyable to follow the thoughts of those who were live-tweeting.

The recption, held in Croft Chapter House, included food, drinks, temporary tattoos, and a lot of great conversation (all the necessary items to make a good party!).

 

 

 

 

 

Co-editors Susan Stryker (L) and Paisley Currah (R) address the reception attendees.

"Archives and Archiving," a CFP for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

The latest call for papers for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly volume 2 and issue 4, "Archives and Archiving", edited by Aaron Devor and K.J. Rawson, has just been released.

This issue of TSQ will investigate practical and theoretical dimensions of archiving transgender phenomena and will ask what constitutes “trans* archives” or “trans* archival practices.” 

While transgender-related experiences have long been captured by archives to some extent, the last few decades have witnessed an increased commitment to collecting trans* materials. Consequently, sizable trans* collections can now be found in a range of institutional contexts including grassroots archives, nonprofit organizations, and university-based collections.

Given this trend, myriad practical considerations that trans* materials present for archiving warrant further attention. What should or should not be included in trans* archives? What are the best practices for acquiring, processing, preserving, and making transgender materials accessible? Given practical limitations of space and money, how do we decide what to prioritize? And who decides? What are the implications for history when archivists make such decisions? How should archives negotiate ethical concerns specific to trans* archives? What relationship—if any—do trans* materials have to broader LGBTQ collections? What cataloguing tools are available and how do they obscure, distort, or make meaning of the lived experiences of trans* people? What are the benefits and limitations of using “transgender” or “trans*” as umbrella terms in an archival context? How are archivists and archival practices changed by the challenges of dealing with trans* materials? What role can digital technologies play in collecting and accessing trans* materials, particularly born-digital materials?

These practical considerations would be incomplete without a closely related theoretical exploration of trans* archiving. How, for example, are bodies representable (or unrepresentable) through archival documents? How can embodiment itself be considered an archive of memory and feeling, a sedimentation of social practices, a living medium for the transmission of cultural forms? What power do archives have in shaping popular understandings of transgender phenomena? How are researchers affected by their encounters with archival materials? How do archives steer researchers in particular ways with metadata, organizational systems, and finding aids? Can archives help construct community and personal identity? Does digitization inherently change trans* historical artifacts? 

We welcome submissions of full-length academic articles on a wide range of topics related to trans* archives and archiving. Such topics might include:
• practical and philosophical considerations for developing transgender collections independently or within broader archives
• how transgender archival materials intersect with and depart from LGBQ archival materials
• critical reflections on working in trans* archives and/or with trans* archival materials
• sex, desire, and pornographic collections
• considerations of the body within and as represented by archives
• understandings of embodiment itself as an archive of affects, memory, practices, and social forms
• capturing lived experiences with archival artifacts and ephemera
• recontextualizing historical materials within the context of the archive
• affective encounters 
• ethics of historical representation
• archival temporality and considerations of time and timeliness
• the role of archivists
• institutionality of government, state, academic, non-profit, and grassroots collections
• processing and interpreting trans*-related materials
• hidden collections
• archival language practices, cataloguing, and classification
• digital technologies within archives, digital archiving, and archiving born-digital materials
• intersectional identities
• access and accessibility
• archival activism

We will also consider for publication shorter essays, opinion pieces, first-person accounts, practical advice, how-to guides, or interesting archival documents. We encourage contributions from a wide range of authors including academics, independent researchers, archivists, and activists. 

Please send a complete manuscript by October 15, 2014 to tsqjournal[at]gmail.com along with a brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 5,000 to 7,000 words, and 1,000 to 2,000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed by e-mail to both guest editors for the issue: Aaron Devor(ahdevor[at]uvic.ca) and K.J. Rawson (kjrawson{at]holycross.edu). We plan to respond to submissions by early January 2015. Final revisions will be due by March 1, 2015.

About the journal
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/tsq.

Celebrate Mardi Gras with our Journals

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival" by Richard Rambuss in boundary 2 (27:2)

Read an excerpt:

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.

 

"Mardi Gras Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City" by Kevin Markwell in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (8:1-2)

Read an excerpt:

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)

For more of "Mardi Gras Tourism," click here.

 

Don't forget to check out Matt Sakakeeny's new book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans while you're on your Mardi Gras kick!

 

*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.

The Cultural Impact of the Olympics

Over the years, several Duke University Press journal articles have addressed the cultural impact of the Olympics. Take a break from watching the 2014 Winter Games to sample these articles.

Erica Rand, "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity," in "The Athletic Issue," a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, volume 19 and issue 4, 2013.

Read an excerpt from the article:

At a press conference he initiated to address the gender-test incident, Weir called the terms masculine and feminine "very old fashioned," adding, "There's a whole generation of people that aren't defined by their sex or their race or by who they like to sleep with." My own paradise would not involve throwing out masculinity and femininity or sex and race all together. They can serve as sources of pleasure, strength, community, and solidarity, inside and outside the sport, in ways that do not require policing them. If people of all genders could express, present, or perform in sport in whatever gendered ways they wanted to--which might or might not match up with the way they present themselves in other contexts--that would make for a more joyous sport. But Weir's distaste for having people define others by those terms gestures to effects of gender policing beyond fitting people into categories. As he states in Welcome to My World, being called "flamboyant" instead of "athlete" is another.

To read more from "Court and Sparkle," click here. 

 

Sally Anne Duncan, "Souls Grown Deep and the Cultural Politics of the Atlanta Olympics" in "Performance, Politics, and History," a special issue of Radical History Review, number 98, Spring 2007.

Read an excerpt from the article at the African American performance group Souls Grown Deep:

Unprecedented as it was, Souls Grown Deep was forced to the periphery of the Olympic stage. A vital opportunity was missed to give international visibility to the South’s unique community of African American self-taught artists. This essay examines the social and cultural processes that exalted a banal global art show while suppressing a landmark African American visual performance. This is a case study of the cultural politics of Atlanta, the vested interests of the fine art and folk art worlds, and, most of all, of the performative power of art exhibitions themselves. In Atlanta, the experiential knowledge embedded in the African American artists’ modes of creation and communication in Souls Grown Deep provided a potent social counterpoint to a falsely transcendent Olympic vision embodied in Rings.

To read more from "Souls Grown Deep," click here.

Amy Bass, "Objectivity Be Damned, or Why I Go to the Olympic Games: A Hands-On Lesson in Performative Nationalism," in "The Pleasure Principle: Sport for the Sake of Pleasure," a special issue of SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly, volume 105 and issue 2, 2006.

Read an excerpt from the article:

My relationship with the Olympics continued after my dissertation was complete and I began my life as a professor at Plattsburgh State University. Within months of arriving in Plattsburgh, I audaciously asked if I could leave the following fall semester to go with NBC in a supervisor role to the Sydney Games. I was indoctrinated: I was part of a small group of highly specialized people who drop everything for several weeks during an Olympic year and gather together, working for whatever network is broadcasting the Games. It is a unique group, knowledgeable in multiple languages, geography, world politics, and specific random sports (from gymnastics to curling to judo, in which it is legal, by the way, to break your opponent's arm as a means to win). Plattsburgh graciously worked out a way for me to go, which included teaching an honors seminar--The Black Athlete--online from Sydney. I returned with more life-altering experiences: watching Marion Jones run, sitting in the bleachers as the United States beat Cuba for the baseball gold medal and listening to rumors that Castro was in the house, and again witnessing a spectacular Closing Ceremony. I reworked the dissertation after returning from Sydney, and by the time Salt Lake City rolled around I was in the final editing phases of my book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, more confident than ever of the viability of sports, especially the Olympics, as a fruitful site to examine how the world works, whether in terms of my own focus on exploring how ideas of race and nation are culturally manufactured, or the broader goals of determining where in the world politics exists.

To read more from "Objectivity Be Damned," click here.

Five Olympic Rings and One Blonde Halo, a Guest Post by Erica Rand

The Sochi Olympics get underway tonight. Erica Rand, author of Red Nails, Black Skates, loves figure skating but hates the way atheletes are expected to conform to race and gender norms in our Olympic narratives. She offers us this guest post.

On Sunday, January 11^th, I watched on the Jumbotron at the U.S. Figure Skating (USFS) championships as the organization’s president announced the selection of fourth-place Ashley Wagner over third-place Japanese American Mirai Nagasu to the 2014 U.S. Olympic team, making the “Ladies” contingent a contested trio of white blonds.  Ever since, I’ve been raging and sad about the sedimented and raced histories of privilege that contribute to the obfuscating image of the Olympics as an extravaganza of sports transcending politics.  I’ve forced the topic onto every polite or captive audience I could find— students, colleagues, friends, strangers on a bathroom line—complete with details can only be told long-windedly to people who don’t follow figure skating (i.e. virtually everyone I’ve mentioned): how USFS made unprecedented use of its selection policy to elevate someone who had competed badly there; how strict use of the policy might have instead booted silver medalist Polina Edmunds, an unexpected stand-out but new to the highest level of skating, or altered the men’s or pairs teams; how Wagner’s decisively lower score for a program leaden by her own account (and I saw it live!) seemed inflated besides; how even people defending the decision knew that “this never would have happened if Mirai hadn’t shown up without a coach,” suggesting insider knowledge of insider influence; and, finally, although I could go on and on (ask me for 1000 more words about that coaching situation), how USFS and NBC had an obvious predicament when Wagner blew it because they had already been promoting her as an Olympic contender—and, implicitly, as a contestant for an unofficial title that, as the cover of the latest TV Guide indicates, now has a new frontrunner in the Ladies gold medalist.  Atop one of the assembled photographs of promising (white) U.S. Olympic athletes, the caption reads “Gracie Gold: Will She be America’s Next Sweetheart?” 

For that title—sometimes known as “Darling of the Olympics” and lucrative for athletes, their sport, and the media alike—Wagner, Edmunds, and Gold have a key credential that Nagasu lacks:  the glorious glow of flowing blond hair that signals, if not always accurately, the highest echelons of whiteness and proper heterosexual femininity. That’s why the “darling” or “sweetheart” usually comes from figure skating, a sport where heterosexual-looking femininity wins medals as well as public affection.  (Stop here for a moment and ask yourself whether every single high-level female figure skater in history could possibly have been heterosexual. Ask yourself whether everyone skating as female, queer or straight, could possibly prefer to move and dress in ways that signal straight, especially when people read sexuality, badly, off gender.  Then ask yourself why all the murmuring and exposé about the figure skating “closet” is almost exclusively focused on harm to men.) At Vancouver in 2010, where NBC virtually ignored Nagasu until she came in an impressive fourth against formidable opponents and where her U.S. teammate Rachel Flatt had the pale skin but not the pizzazz, that role went to skier Lindsay Vonn.  Meanwhile, NBC upped its flowing-white-straight-girl-hair quotient through glamor shots of the female snowboarders that preceded the sight of them about to begin their half-pipe runs in baggy grunge-esque team uniforms and helmets.

I would hardly argue that USFS dumped Nagasu in order to get three shots at the Olympics’ big blond halo. Nor, clearly, does Nagasu’s situation remotely approach the Olympics’ biggest injustice.  As David Zirin well itemized in October on the 45^th anniversary of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising theirs fists on the Olympic medal stands, we need an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), like the one that they participated in, now as much as ever. “Host” nations displace urban poor people, compete on stolen indigenous land, harm the environment, and initiate or continue bigoted, violent, and repressive policies and practices.  The International Olympic Committee (IOC) still forces “sex-verification testing,” which, like Smith and Carlos, made its Olympic debut in 1968, on athletes in female-tagged events accused of not looking or competing female enough; tests based on bad science are thrown at racialized gender-norm policing and foul linkings of supreme athleticism with maleness.  The IOC also maintains backward criteria for the participation of transgender athletes (in a system always excluding athletes who can’t conform to gender binarism). It requires “sex-reassignment” surgeries unrelated to athletic performance and the so-called level playing field, which, of course, is largely mythical anyway when you factor in training advantages linked to money, influence, opportunity, connections, status, bias, and privilege that affect who can become a contender in the first place. I could go on and on about that, too.  But for now, I’ll stick with Mirai. 

Parties and Awards at the 2014 MLA

We had a great time selling books, meeting authors, and congratulating award-winners at the 2014 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago last week.

Congratulations to the authors and journals who won awards at this year's MLA! Nicole Guidotti-Hernández won the tenth biennial MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. Here she is with her book Unspeakable Violence.

Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins won the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize for an outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures for their book Beyond the Lettered City. Congrats to them! 

 

 

 

 

 

We're also excited that Mel Y. Chen's Animacies won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize given by the GL/Q Caucus of the MLA. Here she is accepting her award. 

 

 

 

Three of our journals also won Council of Editors of Learned Journals awards. See our post on those awards here.

In addition to these great awards, we were excited to launch the new series Theory Q at this year's MLA. Theory Q is the successor series to Series Q, which we closed upon the death of founding editor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The new series is edited by Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, who launched it with their own book Sex, or the Unbearable. Here they are posing with their book. Can we start a trend of posing with this fabulous cover? 

The above photo is of Tim Campbell, co-editor of the new collection Biopolitics. Here he is with his own book. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all the authors and editors who stopped by the booth. Check out more photos on our Facebook page!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mourning the Death of José Esteban Muñoz

Duke University Press is deeply saddened to learn of the sudden and untimely death of José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz, Professor of Performance Studies at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, was a co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996) and Everynight Life (1997), books that helped build our list in queer theory and perfomance studies. Muñoz was also a contributor to the collections Holy Terrors (2003) and Gay Latino Studies (2011). His new book Feeling Brown, under contract with Duke University Press, was to be published in 2015. He also served on the editorial boards of our journals GLQ and Social Text and regularly published in our journals, including editing the Social Text special issue What's Queer About Queer Studies Now.

Muñoz has been an important part of the Duke University and Duke University Press community for over two decades. He received his doctorate from Duke under the guidance of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and over the years has been a trusted friend and advisor to our editors. Editorial Director Ken Wissoker met him early in his tenure here, and remembers,"When I arrived in Durham to be an editor at the Press, Jose was at the center of a vibrant group of grad students studying with Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon, who became my colleagues and friends.  Brave, brilliant, charismatic and funny, Jose stood out from the first.  I’ve watched with love and admiration as he worked to reshape queer theory, queer of color critique, performance studies and American studies over the subsequent years."

Wissoker adds, "His death is shocking and half a lifetime too soon.  It’s more than the loss of a major scholar, but of someone who rethought and reconfigured fields, supported countless other scholars, and made so much work possible by influence and by example.  He cannot be replaced."

We send our sympathy to Muñoz's family, friends, and colleagues. His loss will be deeply felt, but his influence on the fields of performance studies, queer studies, and critical ethnic studies will continue for many years to come.

Launch "Legendary," 2012 winner of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography

 

Duke University Press is proud to join the Center for Documentary Studies in celebrating Gerard H. Gaskin and his forthcoming book Legendary: Inside the House Ballroom Scene, the 2012 winner of the CDS/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography. The book's color and black-and-white photographs document the world of house balls, underground pageants where gay and transgender men and women, mostly African American and Latino, celebrate their most vibrant, spectacular selves as they “walk,” competing for trophies based on costume, attitude, dance moves, and “realness.”

Join us this Thursday, November 7^th, for Gerard H. Gaskin's artist talk at the Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, North Carolina. The event kicks off at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30 with an introduction by Deborah Willis, the renowned curator and photographer who chose Gaskin’s longtime project for the prestigious biennial prize. The event is free and open to the public. For directions and additional information, see the event page. 

 

New York City will host several upcoming Legendary events. On Thursday, November 14^th, Gaskin is speaking as part of The Camera Club of New York's 2013/2014 Lecture Series. Location and ticketing information for this event can be found here.

The Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts is hosting Gaskin for a book signing and discussion the evening of November 19^th. Joining Gaskin for the discussion are Frank Roberts, whose essay "The Queer Undercommons" appears in Legendary, and Deborah Willis, chair of the department. See the event page for information on tickets and location.

December 1-31^st, W Hotel presents Legends, a month-long photographic exhibition and philanthropic initiative celebrating New York House Ballroom Legends and style culture. Curated by Gaskin, the exhibit will be open to both guests and locals and will feature photos from Legendary. Legends will kick off with a talk, book signing, and reception on November 20, 2013. More details on the event are still to come. Follow us on Facebook to catch all the latest details.

Remember to check out these and more great Duke Press events on our events calendar.