books tagged “bisexuality”

Bisexual People Speak out [via]

This anthology presents a vivid collection of essays that explore the history, strategies, philosophy, and diversity of bisexual politics and theory in the United States.

The 33 contributors develop a multifaceted approach to defining bisexual politics. Through these voices, the book seeks to understand the contexts in which the bisexual movement has evolved. The authors analyze different organizing strategies, formulate new bisexual political theory, provide a vision of future directions for redefining sexuality and gender, and educate activists and allies about current issues pertinent to the bisexual community.

This book is the first of its kind. To date, it is the only book that documents and analyzes bisexual politics and theory. While existing literature on bisexuality has focused on identity, coming out, and forming communities, Bisexual Politics takes the vital next step into bisexual political theory and activism.

The many subjects and subthemes addressed in Bisexual Politics appeal to a multitude of readers from activists to academics, from friends and family of bisexuals, to those who have struggled with bisexuality. It is a sourcebook for those seeking to locate bisexuality in the schema of other social justice movements. It is a tool to build alliances with other progressive groups, and build coalitions with both lesbian/gay and heterosexual communities. It is a primer for anyone interested in bisexual activism and theory. [via]

Bisexuality: A Critical Reader presents the essential primary texts on bisexuality from the last 100 years in an easy-to-read format. Exploring this often controversial concept from a range of perspectives, this book places bisexuality in its historical and cultural context and explores its many meanings and uses. Merl Storr's introductions give a straightforward overview of the texts included and sets them clearly in the context of debates on bisexuality.
This collection includes pieces by:
* Henry Havelock Ellis
* Sigmund Freud
* Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin
* and Hélèn Cixous. [via]

The subject of bisexuality continues to divide the lesbian and gay community. At pride marches, in films such as Go Fish, at academic conferences, the role and status of bisexuals is hotly contested.

Within lesbian communities, formed to support lesbians in a patriarchal and heterosexist society, bisexual women are often perceived as a threat or as a political weakness. Bisexual women feel that they are regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not openly scorned. Drawing on her research with over 400 bisexual and lesbian women, surveying the treatment of bisexuality in the lesbian and gay press, and examining the recent growth of a self-consciously political bisexual movement, Paula Rust addresses a range of questions pertaining to the political and social relationships between lesbians and bisexual women.

By tracing the roots of the controversy over bisexuality among lesbians back to the early lesbian feminist debates of the 1970s, Rust argues that those debates created the circumstances in which bisexuality became an inevitable challenge to lesbian politics. She also traces it forward, predicting the future of sexual politics.

"Bisexuality is about three centuries overdue . . . nevertheless, here it is: a learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to get everything wrong about sex."
-Gore Vidal
[via]

A history of bisexuality in the classical age. Eva Cantarella draws on a full range of sources - from legal texts, inscriptions and medical documents to poetry and philosophical literature - to reconstruct and compare the bisexual cultures of Athens and Rome. This second edition includes a preface which considers work published since the text first appeared. [via]

In this dynamic anthology of 22 essays by and about women who are bisexual, the unifying element is its focus on the crucial intersections between ideology and reality. Deeply reasoned and passionately felt, the essays speak to many who wonder where they fit in today's society and its sexual politics. [via]

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. [via]

Nicola Lancaster is spending the summer at the Siegel Institute Summer Program for Gifted Youth-a hothouse of smart, articulate, intense teenagers, living like college students for eight weeks. Nic's had theater friends and orchestra friends, but never just friend friends. And she's certainly never had a relationship. But on the very first day, she falls in with Katrina the Computer Girl, Isaac the West Coast Nice-Guy-Despite-Himself, Kevin the Inarticulate Composer...and Battle. Battle Hall Davies is a beautiful blonde dancer from North Carolina. She's everything Nic isn't. Soon the two are friends-and then, startlingly, more than friends. What do you do when you think you're attracted to guys, and then you meet a girl who steals your heart? [via]

Never HIGHLIGHT a Book Again!  Virtually all testable terms, concepts, persons, places, and events are included. Cram101 Textbook Outlines gives all of the outlines, highlights, notes for your textbook with optional online practice tests. Only Cram101 Outlines are Textbook Specific. Cram101 is NOT the Textbook. Accompanys: 9780415924993 [via]

Russel Middlebrook is convinced he's the only gay kid at Goodkind High School. Then his online gay-chat buddy turns out to be none other than Kevin, the popular but closeted star of the school's baseball team. Soon Russel meets other gay students too. There's his best friend, Min, who reveals that she's bisexual, and her soccer-playing girlfriend, Terese. And there's Terese's politically active friend, Ike.

But how can kids this diverse get together without drawing attention to themselves?

"We just choose a club that's so boring, nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years join it. We could call it Geography Club!"

Brent Hartinger's debut novel is a fastpaced, funny, and trenchant portrait of contemporary teenagers who may not learn any actual geography in their latest school club, but who learn plenty about the treacherous social terrain of a typical American high school and the even more dangerous landscape of the human heart.

Henry and June is in essence a record of Nin's erotic awakening...At onec effusive and measured, lyrical and taut, this voluem is the record of a woman struggling for clarity in dialogue with herself. [via]

Drawn from journals, this book is an account of a woman's sexual awakening, covering a single momentous year - 1931-32, in Paris, when June fell in love with Henry Miller, undermining her own idealized marriage. The question of the outcome of June Miller's return to Paris dominates her thoughts. [via]

In her second revealing memoir of literary Paris, Leduc shares her insights into a post-War Parisian scene dominated by the likes of Camus, Genet, Sartre, Cocteau, and Simone de Beauvoir, who became her mentor for a time. Original. [via]

In his quest for a truly native idiom, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incarnated the American geography and its people in a new and transcendent poetic form. His monumental work, Leaves of Grass, celebrates sexuality, gender equality, and the astonishing beauty of the everyday. For Whitman, "The true use for the imaginative faculty of modern times is to give ultimate vivification to facts, to science and to common lives, endowing them with glows and glories and final illustriousness which belong to real things, and to real things only."

This complete edition of Leaves of Grass, which includes "Sands at Seventy" (from November Boughs) and "Good-bye My Fancy," contains those poems that have become part of the great American literature, including "Song of Myself," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "O Captain, My Captain." [via]

When she was a kid, Carol Queen was called "Queen the Queer." "Queer" was still very much an insult at the time, not the term of power and pride it has recently become. Similarly, sex was called a bad thing, a nasty thing, even for, perhaps especially for, good girl feminists. Like other sex-positive folks of her generation, Carol Queen is re-evaluating the range and possibilities of sexual experience and identity. This book gathers previously published essays on topics ranging from pelvic exams, pornography law, the men's movement, sex as art, Madonna, and sacred whoredom. Queen is an intelligent, funny writer. [via]

Dust jacket notes: "Travel to the most secret corners of the human psyche...to a perverse world of dark passion...twisted seduction, amourous betrayal and blood lust. this modern classic, from the mysterious woman writer whose name will forever be remembered for sexual humiliation mixed with love, is 'a total, authentic literary experience' (The New York Times). First published in France in 1954, Story of O is a tale of a woman willing to subject her mind and her body to the strange torments and tortures conceived by her lover. O's erotic journey begins when her lover brings her to a small chateau in the country...a place where any man can have her...a place where she learns total obedience. This is a shocking and disturbing erotic masterpiece." [via]

Despite the flood of sexuality theory and queer cultural studies in 20th-century academia, bisexuality--and the many questions and problems surrounding it--has been little considered. In Vice Versa, Marjorie Garber, director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University, takes on this enormous project with refreshing academic rigor and compelling enthusiasm. Covering cultural influences from antiquity through early psychoanalysis to such recent provocateurs as Geraldo Rivera and Susie Bright, Garber calls into question the basic underpinnings of even the most radical views of human sexuality. She suggests that bisexuality is "not just another sexual orientation but rather a sexuality that undoes sexual orientation as a category," and leads us through the ensuing ruckus with wit and grace.

Vice Versa offers personal accounts, clinical studies, and analysis from every possible camp to demonstrate Garber's thesis that bisexuality as an idea and an experience "disappears" or is erased from our discussions of sexuality at every turn through the normalizing (not to mention limiting) influence of the terms of the discussion itself. Her call to recognize bisexuality as not only valid but deeply transgressive--and therefore useful--in our culture is urgent and marked by a great affection for her subjects, from Freud to Madonna. "One of the key purposes of studying bisexuality is not to get people to 'admit' they 'are' bisexual," she says, "but rather to restore to them and the people they have loved the full, complex, and often contradictory stories of their lives." --Jessica Peterson [via]

1897. Volume Three of Three. Whitman is considered by many to be the greatest of all American poets. In his work, he celebrates the freedom and dignity of the individual and sings the praises of democracy and the brotherhood of man. Leaves of Grass is unconventional in both content and technique and is probably the most influential volume of poems in the history of American literature. Other volumes in this set are ISBN(s): 0766194353, 141917665X. [via]