My Butch Career: A Memoir

The contributors to Otherwise Worlds investigate the complex relationships between settler colonialism and anti-Blackness to explore the political possibilities that emerge from such inquiries. Pointing out that presumptions of solidarity, antagonism, or incommensurability between Black and Native communities are insufficient to understand the relationships between the groups, the volume's scholars, artists, and activists look to articulate new modes of living and organizing in the service of creating new futures. Among other topics, they examine the ontological status of Blackness and Indigeneity, possible forms of relationality between Black and Native communities, perspectives on Black and Indigenous sociality, and freeing the flesh from the constraints of violence and settler colonialism.

Throughout the volume's essays, art, and interviews, the contributors carefully attend to alternative kinds of relationships between Black and Native communities that can lead toward liberation. In so doing, they critically point to the importance of Black and Indigenous conversations for formulating otherwise worlds.

Contributors. Maile Arvin, Marcus Briggs-Cloud, J. Kameron Carter, Ashon Crawley, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Chris Finley, Hotvlkuce Harjo, Sandra Harvey, Chad B. Infante, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Lindsay Nixon, Kimberly Robertson, Jared Sexton, Andrea Smith, Cedric Sunray, Se’mana Thompson, Frank B. Wilderson

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity.

In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

In Juggling , Stewart Lawrence Sinclair explores the four-thousand-year history and practice of juggling as seen through his life as a juggler. Sinclair—who learned to juggle as a child and paid his way through college by busking—shares his experiences of taking up juggling after an episode of suicidal ideation, his time juggling on the streets, and ultimately finding comfort in juggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many ways, this is a book about loss and recovery. From his own juggling story to clowns braving military checkpoints in Bosnia and Rwanda to perform in refugee camps to contemporary avant-garde performances, Sinclair shows how the universal language of juggling provides joy as well as a respite from difficulties during hard times.

The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad.

This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale.

Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

In this genre- and gender-breaking work of theory-fiction, legendary writer and cofounder of the 1970s French feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body—lesbian, literary and defiantly political—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature. 

First published in French in 1973, The Lesbian Body mines the relationship between a lover and a beloved—also a writer and a text—to explore the ideological and historical constructions of the female subject. Organized according to the principle of montage, poetic passages are juxtaposed with anatomic lists that mark lesbian eros. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado.

“The Lesbian Body is a fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness.” — Sarah Schulman

“In this stunning new rendering of The Lesbian Body by the French author, theorist, activist and teacher, the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time.” — Esther Newton

“To read the book is to be forced by Wittig into another grammar and happily contaminated by its strange forms. You will never think straight again.” — Jack Halberstam

“For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart.” — Judith Butler

“Together with Ursula Le Guin and Samuel R. Delany, Wittig is the first to design a nonbinary utopia, a world in which the binary categorization of sexes and genders will have ceased to exist.” — Paul B. Preciado

Introduction by Paul B. Preciado
Translated by David Le Vay

Les Diaboliques Parlures rassemble trois textes qui nous font découvrir une voix contemporaine majeure de la poésie et du théâtre queer. Ces œuvres, à la croisée du poétique, du politique et de l’intime, explorent le désir, la vulnérabilité, la marginalité et l’identité masculine et queer. 

L’Ardeur déploie une langue brûlante pour interroger le désir, la passion et la communauté des outsiders, transformant l’ardeur en force vitale et émancipatrice. 

One Night at the Golden Bar offre une écriture intimiste où le romantisme kitsch devient vecteur de poésie et de réflexion sur la vulnérabilité, l’amour et la monstruosité de l’humain.

Analphabet, quant à lui, questionne le langage, l’expression et les limites de la communication, confrontant le lecteur à la puissance de la langue et à sa capacité à révéler l’identité.

Slide into spring with our mega-stimulating 38th issue. 

Hop in the jacuzzi with Italiano chart-topper Mahmood. Read the hustling tell-all with Ashland Mines aka deejay Bobby Beethovan. Zip to queer futures with internet-doll sensation @StarAmerasu. Go behind-the-scenes of some of the biggest French content creators with photographer @RaphaelChatelain. There’s hairy art from China, trans love affairs, cottaging evidence for court, d*ck arrangements, ladyboy activism, and so much more. 

Plus, a back section of smutty poetry submitted to us by our talented readers, and a visit to our favorite local cruise bar on BUTT’s 25th anniversary. At 152 pages, it’s sure to satisfy size queens all around the world. 

In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and explores issues of transsexuality among “transgender dykes”—lesbians who pass as men—and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of “lesbian” a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.

Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.

Wet is an anthology of queer and trans writing about water. 

Our contributors swim pools, lakes and oceans, visit islands, coasts and hottubs. The water they describe is soft and hard, it erodes old rocks and old gender, it is a place to fall in wet love, it hides witches.

Contributors: Arlo Kean, Clara Davis, Eliot Walloschek, Finn Brown, Isabella Redmayne, Lizzie Rose, Lucie Arnoux, So Mayer, Tadhg Haran, Tallulah Griffith, Troy Cabida

"We didn’t have anything & we hadn’t seen much. So, naturally we understood less & felt owed something. We weren’t entirely wrong, though. It was 2011."

Part archival remix, part recruitment manual, this pamphlet’s cast of BAD HORSEY GIRLS will teach you how to neigh, dance and flirt until the vampires come home. A Series of Attempts #3 opens with Jordan/_Hell’s new manifesto ☆ LOVING WOMEN ★, that takes the Nomadic Sisters 1976 publication by the same name as a departure point. From here, ★ LE PONEY ☆ then follows a string of lesbian ponies through a dimensional split. A dimensional split that looks suspiciously like the L.A./Parisian+ queer scene… (͠≖~≖ ͡ )

About the author:
Jordan/_ Hell is a Black trans(2s) artist, writer, & scholar. Hell is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2021) & AUTOLINGO DIDACTICA (Monitor Press, 2023), amount others. Hell’s writing has been internationally published in multiple languages in press, interdisciplinary projects, & exhibitions by Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (DE), Arcadia Missa Gallery & Publishing (UK), Monitor Books (UK), Real Review (UK), Soft Opening (UK), Mousse Magazine (DE), 032c (DE), Rosie’s Disobedient Press (UK), Sticky Fingers Publishing (UK), The Bittersweet Review (UK), Pratt Institute’s The Felt (US), & others. Hell studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule (DE) & Cooper Union School of Art (US). Currently, Hell is a doctoral candidate in the School of the Arts at Queen Mary University of London.