{"product_id":"queer-forms-9781479820733","title":"Queer Forms","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHow do we represent the experience of being a gender and sexual outlaw? \u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eQueer Forms\u003c\/i\u003e, Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women's and gay liberation--including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet--were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called \"normal\" gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments--from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth--and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind's eye and interpreted by diverse publics. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSurprisingly, such creative attempts to represent queer gender and sexuality often appeared in a range of traditional, or seemingly generic, popular forms, including the sequential format of comic strip serials, the stock figures or character-types of science fiction genre, the narrative conventions of film melodrama, and the serialized rhythm of installment fiction. Through studies of queer and feminist film, literature, and visual culture including Mart Crowley's \u003ci\u003eThe Boys in the Band\u003c\/i\u003e (1970), Armistead Maupin's \u003ci\u003eTales of the City\u003c\/i\u003e (1976-1983), Lizzy Borden's \u003ci\u003eBorn in Flames\u003c\/i\u003e (1983), and Tony Kushner's \u003ci\u003eAngels in America\u003c\/i\u003e (1989-1991), Fawaz shows how artists innovated in many popular mediums and genres to make the experience of gender and sexual non-conformity recognizable to mass audiences in the modern United States. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAgainst the ideal of ceaseless gender and sexual fluidity \u003ci\u003eand\u003c\/i\u003e attachments to rigidly defined identities, \u003ci\u003eQueer Forms\u003c\/i\u003e argues for the value of \u003ci\u003eshapeshifting\u003c\/i\u003e as the imaginative transformation of genders and sexualities across time. By taking many shapes of gender and sexual divergence we can grant one another the opportunity to appear and be perceived as an evolving form, not only to claim our visibility, but to be better understood in all our dimensions.​​\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e​​\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eRamzi Fawaz\u003c\/b\u003e is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics\u003c\/i\u003e and co-editor of \u003ci\u003eKeywords for Comics Studies\u003c\/i\u003e. With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Literature\u003c\/i\u003e, \"Queer About Comics,\" which won the 2019 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"New York University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50486345957650,"sku":"9781479820733","price":35.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_8ab8d212-1893-49be-a410-4030c0bb481b.jpg?v=1730426058","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/queer-forms-9781479820733","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}