Chapter 14 examines significant moments in the Brazilian novel through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality, all framed by postcolonial theory. This perspective exposes deep-seated blind spots around abusive behaviors and hidden biases in the texts, showing just how these attitudes have been normalized by enduring colonial power structures. The chapter reveals how Blackness and Indigeneity have long been overshadowed by dominant white, masculine literary viewpoints. At the same time, it highlights counter-hegemonic works that actively challenge and resist patriarchal ideas. A standout example is the analysis of Coelho Neto’s Esfinge (1908), a lesser-known neo-Gothic “Frankensteinian” story about a character surgically fused from a man’s body and a woman’s head. The chapter covers a diverse range of authors – from José de Alencar to Conceição Evaristo – and works – from Bernardo Guimarães’ A escrava Isaura (1875) to Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan (1985).

Chapter 5 focuses entirely on Naturalism. It challenges the common elite opinion that sees the naturalist novel as a low-quality or failed form of literature. Instead, it looks at the topic from a fresh and insightful angle by examining the nineteenth-century publishing market. A key part of this study is sexuality, which helped naturalist fiction sell well but also made it a target for criticism. The chapter uses sexuality to explore popular naturalist types like the “hysterical girl” and the “spent man,” while also showing how Naturalism included queer characters. It also discusses the criticism of slavery, featuring characters like Bertoleza from Aluísio Azevedo’s O cortiço and Amaro from Bom-crioulo. Bertoleza and Amaro are two complex, self-aware Black characters, something not seen before Naturalism.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ self-imposed exile across the Americas, North Africa, and Europe, arguing that the geographic settings where he lived were integral to the conceptual structure of his work. Rather than treating setting as backdrop or exotic inspiration, Burroughs reimagines place as a set – simultaneously stage, fiction, and experiential filter – through which he explores identity, language, and systems of control. From his ironic travel ethnographies in Junky and The Yage Letters, to the colonial parody of Queer, and the fractured landscapes of Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs engages in a layered literary expatriation that aligns him with, but ultimately distinguishes him from, figures like Bowles, Baldwin, Stein, and Beckett. Focusing on Tangier and Paris as creative epicenters, the chapter argues that Burroughs’ spatial displacements catalyze formal and thematic experimentation. His work reveals a persistent tension between immersive estrangement and mediated construction, exposing alterity not only in foreign cultures, but within language and self.

This chapter explores the importance of Ginsberg’s sexuality in the context of his life and work. Aware of his nonnormative sexual desires from an early age, Ginsberg’s lifelong quest for self-understanding was necessarily shaped and informed by poetic explorations into his sexuality, his relationship with which was sometimes fraught. His work bears the imprint of his enduring preoccupation with the variable experiences of queer minds and bodies (often his own) in both straight and queer spaces. The chapter examines selected canonical poems including “A Supermarket in California,” “My Sad Self,” “Howl,” “City Midnight Junk Strains,” and “The Green Automobile,” in order to highlight their generative provocations in the context of a period of prevailing queer invisibility and to emphasize Ginsberg’s legacy as a queer poet in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the relationship between Ginsberg’s status as a queer pioneer and some of the more troubling aspects of his in some areas limited and limiting visions and modes of sexuality.

The TV series Orange Is the New Black(2013–2019), created by Jenji Kohan, became a site through which to contest and explore Black gender nonconformity in ways rarely seen on popular television. In its first season, the show’s depictions of Black gender-nonconforming characters – Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) and Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox) – produce variable results. This chapter argues that the middle-class back story of Burset as a firefighter produces a plea for relatability, distancing her from the common experiences of transwomen of color who might typically be imprisoned in the US. By contrast, the character of Warren is depicted as anti-assimilationist and threatening to the prison system, even as her characterization draws on racial and gender prison stereotypes. The exploration of Black gender nonconformity complicates historical tropes of Black women in prison with varied results, providing insight into ideologies of criminal behavior, queerness, and blackness.

This chapter examines Michael Field’s queer aestheticism by focusing on their complicated relationship to Walter Pater. It explores how Bradley and Cooper, as women writers and same-sex lovers, adapted Pater’s notably queer aesthetic philosophy to craft their own distinctively modern poetics. They shared Pater’s vision of aesthetic modernity, characterised by an emphasis on personal sensation, sexual dissidence, and intellectual rebellion. However, they also critiqued his masculinist biases and his shift towards respectability later in life. Through their poetic works, diary, and intimate correspondence, they creatively revised Pater’s ideas, positioning themselves as both heirs and innovators within the queer aesthetic tradition and building upon his insights to realise a broader and more inclusive artistic legacy.

Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

Founding members of the award-winning theater and media company Fake Friends, Michael Breslin and Catherine María “Cat” Rodríguez are multifaceted artist-scholars who met while studying dramaturgy at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. Breslin and Rodríguez quickly connected over their respectively galvanizing encounters with the plays of María Irene Fornés and the provocations of Fornésian dramaturgy. Here, in both their short play Truffle Pigs and the short author’s note that precedes it, Breslin and Rodríguez deploy the tools of dramatic writing (and the incisiveness of their signature wit) to animate the multivocal mix of fervent disagreement, enthusiastic curiosity, and stubborn uncertainty that typically collide in scholarly and artistic investigations of the ways feminism does – and does not – define the dramaturgy of María Irene Fornés.

This chapter explores the impact of José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia on both the creative production and critical reception of queer Latinx literary work in the following decade-plus. While Latinx literature and its study were already “queered” and “queering” before Cruising Utopia, the chapter argues that Muñoz’s work prompted a greater focus on futurity, potentiality, and the speculative, thanks especially to the unique generativity of his (queer, ethnic) performance studies methodology (especially his inquiries into affectivity, ephemera, and brownness) for literary studies. The discussion engages critical work from the 2010s to gauge both the scope of Muñoz’s contributions to salient critical debates over that period and the scope of some skeptical responses to those contributions. It then turns in closing to a targeted close reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s literary production from the late 2010s and early 2020s as a “representative” archive of queer Latinx literature “after” the utopian “turn.”

This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. This chapter wrestles with the philosophical inheritances that scholars in this field must navigate as both an intellectual exercise on the matter of Black existence, and as an ethical problem with regard to how to account for both the experience of domination and the manifold examples of Black religious innovation which sit at the crux of the study of Black religions. Thus, it effectively argues that scholars cannot sidestep attention to the Black body and its interdependence on the fraught category of religion.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

While scholars have often acknowledged the relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein by focusing on their Jewish immigrant backgrounds, shared love for the musical theatre, modernist approach to music, and socio-political goals, there is little discussion on how their sexual orientation might have shaped this friendship and their work. Yet, attempting to understand the bond between the two composers, both married yet unequivocally gay, without considering their queer identities leaves a major component out of the picture. In this chapter, I consider the queer intimacies that are at the core of their bond and how works that they dedicated to each other – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, an opera about gender alienation; and Blitzstein’s Six Elizabethan Songs, a set of pieces concealing possible homoerotic meanings – can uncover new perspectives on their friendship and compositional approaches.

This chapter offers an analysis of Private Romeo, director Alan Brown’s 2012 film production of the play. Set in a boys’ military high school, Private Romeo appropriates Romeo and Juliet to tell the story of two young men falling in love with one another. But, where Romeo and Juliet is a tale of tragedy, Private Romeo is very much a tale of male same-sex love’s triumph. Indeed, the happy ending of Private Romeo can be considered the film’s queerest aspect of all. Hence, as far as queer is understood in its most ‘simplistic’ sense as a challenge to all things heteronormative, Private Romeo shows how Romeo and Juliet can be thoroughly queered as opposed to merely incorporating ‘gay’ elements into otherwise ‘straight’ productions. At the same time, some critics might be troubled by Private Romeo’s representation of queerness because that queerness is wholly inflected by assimilationist capitulations. Its depiction of same-sex marriage as an ideal, inevitable outcome can be interpreted as an imposition of the kind of conformity that merely apes heteronormative conventions. Hence the need to both queer and unqueer Private Romeo.

In N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction short story “The Effluent Engine” (2011), Jessaline, a Haitian spy and “natural” daughter of Toussaint Louverture, arrives in New Orleans in the early years of Haitian independence. Her world is both like and unlike our own: in the tale, Haitians have learned to convert gases from sugarcane distilleries into fuel for airships. Turning “our torment to our advantage,” as Jessaline puts it, Haiti effectively bombed French ships to win the Revolution; became the world’s leading manufacturer of dirigibles; and secured diplomatic standing in the United States, even constructing an embassy in New Orleans.1 And yet, despite Haiti’s steampunkesque political and technological power, there is much in “The Effluent Engine” that recalls a less optimistic history. The French are still “hell-bent upon re-enslaving” the nascent republic; although the United States begrudgingly recognizes Haiti, it remains “the stuff of American nightmare”; and Jessaline confronts white supremacist terrorism and the threat of racial-sexual violence in the US South, where she fights the Order of the White Camellia.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.