When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader

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.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives.

Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance.

Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

Throughout this book-length poem, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist.

In Or, on being the other woman, Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.

In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  

An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

The first issue of the magazine made by artists, founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal. Contributions by Mathias Augustyniak, Naomi Campbell, Théo Casciani, Michael Chow, Pan Daijing, Es Devlin, Claire Fontaine, Edwin Frank, Theaster Gates, Nicolas Godin, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Hedi El Kholti, Michèle Lamy, Paul McCarthy, Ian McEwan, Eileen Myles, Marc Newson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Diana Widmaier Picasso, Ariana Reines, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Julian Schnabel & Jason Momoa, Hanna Schygulla, Juergen Teller, Iké Udé, McKenzie Wark, Robert Wilson, Yohji Yamamoto.

Alphabet is the artists' magazine. Here, they run the show. They write, they make images, they select their own works, they interview the figures they admire, they tell us what we did not know about them nor could have ever fathomed about life. This magazine is conceived entirely to put them in the driver's seat, and to enable readers to become part of the unique vision of some of today's greatest luminaries.

It is a manifestation of the creative community, coming together from all fields, from all generations and threads of culture. Writers, musicians, designers, painters, sculptors, poets—artistic figures of every kind converse all the time in their lives, but they did not have a shared space for their editorial projects. This is it.

Everyone who finds their way into Alphabet has made a mark on life, art, and culture, in a way that signals their importance to the present. Some of the contributors may be world famous, others well respected, others on the way to becoming the legends they already are. Their relevance to culture is the same, and that is why they all belong here, in the endeavor of the creative community. There is no hierarchy of status, or domain, or apparent impact. Some of the greatest revolutions happen undercover. Some of the most established voices are still breaking ground. The magazine's premise is simple: the old opposition between pop and underground does not make sense anymore. There are many creative communities, each following its own rules, each inventing its own space. Here, wherever they come from, whatever their community, artists can exist together, with the same intention of changing, and improving, what life is; with the same belief that art matters more than anything else.

None of the contributors is here randomly. They keep life thrilling and exhilarating, challenge the perception of everything and anything. Their role in shaping every aspect of life can hardly be overstated. That is why they needed a place to elaborate their own alphabet, their way of ordering and structuring language, the world, and the fabric of life—a place of freedom, where everything would be done to highlight their visions, where the very design would be a shrine to their magic. Even the distribution of the magazine was conceived with artists—each contributor suggesting sites of their liking.

Alphabet is also the magazine of magazines. Here, readers find essays, fictions, poetry, visual projects, DIY methods, recommendations from those who know, even games and astrology—and an artist's alphabet, articulating an entire universe. Anything that has ever formed a section of a magazine could find its way here. Even the cover is conceived by an artist: it was conceived especially by the legendary Robert Wilson. Artists will rejuvenate what magazines are, and magazines will be kept forever young by and with them.

Founded by Donatien Grau and Thomas Lenthal, Alphabet is a bi-yearly art magazine. Not a magazine about art. It's a magazine made by artists. Each contribution like an œuvre, making it the ultimate collector piece. Each cover is designed, with the word Alphabet, by a different artist, initiating a cult series.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph