Not that long ago, an eager reader could have read in a single summer all the books on LGBTQ+ history that had been written. Now, more and more books are being published all the time. “Book Shelf” is an attempt to introduce you to some of those books and encourage you to read them and learn more about their subjects. We provide short summaries of the book and a link to the publisher's website. The Book Shelf highlights the most recent five books added and then features all of our books in alphabetical order. If you are an author and want us to add your book to the Book Shelf, please contact us at marcs@sfsu.edu.
Freewheeling sexuality and gender experimentation defined the social and moral landscape of 1890s San Francisco. Middle class whites crafting titillating narratives on topics such as high divorce rates, mannish women, and extramarital sex centered Chinese and Japanese immigrants in particular.
Amy Sueyoshi draws on everything from newspapers to felony case files to oral histories in order to examine how whites' pursuit of gender and sexual fulfillment gave rise to racial caricatures. As she reveals, white reporters, writers, artists, and others conflated Chinese and Japanese, previously seen as two races, into one. There emerged the Oriental—a single pan-Asian American stereotype weighted with sexual and gender meaning. Sueyoshi bridges feminist, queer, and ethnic studies to show how the white quest to forge new frontiers in gender and sexual freedom reinforced—and spawned—racial inequality through the ever evolving Oriental.
Informed and fascinating, Discriminating Sex reconsiders the origins and expression of racial stereotyping in an American city.
During World War II, Mom Chung's was the place to be in San Francisco. Soldiers, movie stars, and politicians gathered at her home to socialize, to show their dedication to the Allied cause, and to express their affection for Dr. Margaret Chung (1889-1959). The first known American-born Chinese female physician, Chung established one of the first Western medical clinics in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1920s. She also became a prominent celebrity and behind-the-scenes political broker during World War II. Chung gained national fame when she began "adopting" thousands of soldiers, sailors, and flyboys, including Ronald Reagan, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. A pioneer in both professional and political realms, Chung experimented in her personal life as well. She adopted masculine dress and had romantic relationships with other women, such as writer Elsa Gidlow and entertainer Sophie Tucker.
This is the first biography to explore Margaret Chung's remarkable and complex life. It brings alive the bohemian and queer social milieus of Hollywood and San Francisco as well as the wartime celebrity community Chung cultivated. Her life affords a rare glimpse into the possibilities of traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.
Coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the trailblazing restaurant Mother Courage of New York City, Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses is the first history of the more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses that existed in the United States from 1972 to the present. As key sites of cultural and political significance, this volume shows the essential role these institutions served for multiple social justice movements including women’s liberation, LGBTQ equality, and food justice, as well as for training women workers and entrepreneurs.
This systematic study outlines the crucial steps it took to establish these businesses during eras when sexism was so institutionalized it was difficult for unmarried women to obtain a bank loan, while also showing the continuities and influences of past businesses on contemporary places. Through an examination of important establishments across America, Alex D. Ketchum first examines the foundational principles behind these businesses, noting key differences between cooperative, for-profit, and non-profit models. She then looks to issues of financing, labour, pay, food sourcing, and cultural programming to understand how these organizations reconciled feminist beliefs with capitalism and how they strove for more equitable and sustainable business practices.
Brimming with illuminating archival research, interviews with influential restaurateurs, and illustrated with photographs, menus, posters, and calendars, Ingredients for Revolution is a fundamental work of women’s history, food history, and cultural history.
After World War II, Atlanta and Charlotte emerged as leading urban centers in the South, redefining the region through their competing metropolitan identities. Both cities also served as home to queer communities who defined themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings and profited to varying degrees from the emphasis on economic growth. Uniting southern women's history with urban history, La Shonda Mims considers an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to explore the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.
Mims's work reveals significant differences between gay men's and lesbian women's lived experiences, with lesbians often missing out on the promises of prosperity that benefitted some members of gay communities. Money, class, and race were significant variables in shaping the divergent life experiences for the lesbian communities of Atlanta and Charlotte; whiteness especially bestowed certain privileges. In Atlanta, an inclusive corporate culture bolstered the city's queer community. In Charlotte, tenacious lesbian collectives persevered, as many queer Charlotteans leaned on Atlanta's enormous Pride celebrations for sanctuary when similar institutional community supports were lacking at home.
Stranger Intimacy explores cross-racial intimacy and everyday life of migrants in cities and rural regions in the Western United States and the Canadian and Mexican borderlands. Tracing the labor, sexual and domestic experiences of South Asian migrants in the early 20th century, Shah examines more than a hundred cases of illicit sexual contact between South Asian, white, European immigrant, Chinese, and Native American males.
Connecting capitalism, policing practices, racialization, and the regulation of domesticity and sexuality, Nayan Shah scours court records, immigration bureaucracies, and news accounts for rich and vibrant stories of non-normative sociality among multi-racial transient migrants in the early twentieth century. Building a social tapestry, Stranger Intimacy depicts a diverse public world of belonging and the ways that ethics care, sensations and cultural frames create the grounds for both alliances and conflicts.
The book reveals how intimate acts and relationships are policed, surveilled and punished and the how local, national and international government operate together to create racial and sexual prohibitions that erupted in the breaking of tenancy contracts, destroy housing arrangements, and lead to forfeiture of lands and property,
Shah unsettles official attempts to pin down migrants, to fix them in place in nuclear family households, within proper heterosexual constraints. Charting the contested terrains of western North America a century ago, with their complex border crossings, couplings, and collectives, this book radically enhances understandings of estrangement and belonging today.
Most America’s know the story of Senator Joseph McCarthy and how he set off a “red scare” when he famously charged in 1950 that the US State Department and other government agencies had been infiltrated by communist agents. But few Americans know that McCarthy also charged that the government had…
The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History presents a broad overview and more than 200 primary sources on the LGBT rebellion that erupted when New York City police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar in 1969. The book explores the developments in the 1960s that culminated in the uprising, the…
Recent victories for LGBT rights, especially the spread of same-sex marriage, have gone faster than most people imagined possible. Yet the accompanying rise of gay 'normality' has been disconcerting for activists with radical sympathies. Global in scope and drawing on a wide range of feminist,…
Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capó Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has…
Models are everywhere. From the couture runway to the catalogue shoot, models sell things by soliciting our attention, sparking our desires. Whether performing live or in front of the camera, models produce sales through the affective labor of posing. Models do the work of representation in…