The Virosexuals

Charlie Prodger works across moving image, writing, sculpture, drawing and printmaking. Through the prism of queer subjectivity, her work explores intertwined relations between the body, landscape, language, technology and time. To accompany her exhibition and the presentation of the complete film trilogy—Stoneymollan Trail, BRIDGIT, and SaF05—a book with a substantial essay by Sarah Hayden is released in Secession’s publication series.

The London-based author and associate professor of literature and visual culture analyzes the significance of voice and voiceover in Prodger’s video works. For the book, the artist has created a series of image pairings of production photos and video stills from the final part of the trilogy, SaF05.

Textdemic | A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments” Ed. by A.L. Steiner and GenderFail, a publication based on A.L. Steiner + Friends on Jenny Holzer at Dia Chelsea. This book is based on the Artists on Artists Lecture Series when the Dia Art Foundation invited Steiner to curate a public program based on a work of the artist's choice.

Steiner chose Jenny Holzer’s Laments and invited Morgan Bassichis, Riel Bellow, Gregg Bordowitz, Alexander Chee, Malik Gaines, Guadalupe Maravilla + Alexa Mishell Guillen, Lucas Michael, Eileen Myles and Pamela Sneed to present in Dia’s first in-person program after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2021. This publication features records of the poems, lectures, and performances during this memorial program. The book's design plays homage to the 1990 Laments publication by the Dia Art Foundation.

For this publication, Steiner and GenderFail invited Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, Associate Curator at Dia Art Foundation and the organizer of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series, to write an afterword for the book. In this, she states: "Dispensing altogether with the monographic formula that characterizes the institution, for her Lecture A.L. Steiner convened a group of artists, writers, and activists to join her in responding to Jenny Holzer’s 1989 text-based installation, Laments. Holzer identified the thirteen texts that comprise Laments as 'voices of the dead,' a visual choir in response to the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic and government inaction. Over the protracted COVID-19 lockdown, Steiner developed the idea to organize an evening for the voices of the living to lament today's crises.”

Joan of Arkansas is an election-season closet drama about climate catastrophe, divine gender expression, the instructions of angels, and heavenly revelation relayed via viral video. Fifteen-year-old Joan has been tasked by God (They/Them) to ensure that Charles VII (R–Arkansas) adopts radical climate policy and wins his bid as the Lord’s candidate to become the president of the United States. Arkansas is flooding, the West is burning, and borders are closed: “Heaven or / internet—it’s / hard to be / good.”

Winner of the 2023 Whiting Award for Drama.

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.

An epistolary sequence about sex, exchange and social space set along the Northeast Corridor. 

In A Queen in Bucks County, our protagonist Turner, who both is and is not the writer, makes his pleasurable way through miserable space. Men "buy him things," lovers drive across state lines, users down volatile cocktails to see what happens, landlords turn tenants out, and Turner writes poetic tracts to friends about it. Part pornography, part novel, all love letter, A Queen in Bucks County is an experiment in turning language upside down to see what falls out.

2023 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST