For June 2023, we are featuring four amazing 2SLGBTQI+ centred books for you to read at your leisure this pride month: 1) Disabilities Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward and Eco-Crip Theory featuring Eli Clare’s Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure, 2) Merrick Pilling’s Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice, 3) Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean, and 4) Jeannie Gainsburg's newly released second edition of The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate.
About the Authors and their Books
About the Author
Andil Gosine is a visual artist, activist, and academic whose work focuses on environmental arts and justice as well as Caribbean sexualities.
About the Book (write-up from Amazon)
In Nature's Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide. Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like.
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
About the Author
Eli Clare is a compassionate storyteller whose work centres on queerness and disability.
About the Book (write-up from Blackwell's) Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.
Eli Clare has a phenomenal contribution entitled Notes on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure. Watch the video above to learn more!
About the Author
Merrick Pilling is an academic whose work centres on disability, madness, race, sexuality, and gender.
About the Book (write-up from Amazon)
This book urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental illness beyond the diagnoses that specifically target gender and sexual dissidence. In this first comprehensive application of Mad Studies to queer and trans experiences of mental distress, Pilling advances a broad critique of the biomedical model of mental illness as it pertains to 2SLGBTQ people, arguing that Mad Studies is especially amenable to making sense of queer and trans madness. Based on empirical data from two qualitative research studies, this book includes analyses of inpatient chart documentation from a psychiatric hospital and interviews with those who have experienced distress. Using an intersectional lens, Pilling critically examines what constitutes mental health treatment and the impacts of medical strategies on mad queer and trans people. Ultimately, Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice explores the emancipatory promise of queer and trans madness, advocating for more resources to respond to crisis and distress in ways that are non-coercive, non-carceral, and honour autonomy as well as interdependence within 2SLGBTQ communities.
About the Author
Jeannie Gainsburg's work promotes LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion. In 2018, she founded Savvy Ally Action, a small business that offers fun, accessible, and encouraging workshops and videos on how to be an ally to the LGBTQ+ communities. In 2020 her book, The Savvy Ally: A Guide for Becoming a Skilled LGBTQ+ Advocate, was published by Rowman & Littlefield. The newly revised second edition of The Savvy Ally was published in March 2023.
About the Book (write-up from SavvyAllyAction.com) Bursting with passion and humor, The Savvy Ally is a treasure trove for allies to the LGBTQ+ communities. This fully revised second edition includes:
The most current information on identities and LGBTQ+ language
Tips for respectfully sharing, gathering, and using pronouns
LGBTQ+ etiquette, including common language bloopers to avoid
Tools for navigating difficult conversations
Best practices for creating LGBTQ+ inclusive spaces
Appropriate actions to take after messing up
Techniques for self-care and sustainable allyship
The Savvy Ally is a vital resource for teachers, mental health professionals, healthcare providers, college professors, faith leaders, family members, and friends who want to support and advocate for the LGBTQ+ people in their lives and help make the world a safer, more inclusive place. This informative, encouraging, and easy-to-understand guidebook will jump-start even the most tentative ally.
Check out our wonderful interview with Jeannie!
