PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573440744 ISBN 13: 9781573440745

Publisher: Cleis Press, 1997

Synopsis

PoMo: short for PostModern; in th earts, a movement following after and in direct reaction to Modernism; culturally, an outlook that acknowledges diverse and complex points of view. PoMoSexual: the queer erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Queen is the author of The Leatherdaddy and the Femme (Cleis Press, 1998), Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture (Cleis Press) and Exhibitionism for the Shy (Down There Press). A second novel, a collection of short stories, and more sex education material are in the works. Her erotic stories have appeared in Best Gay Erotica 1996, Best American Erotica 1993 and 1994, Doing It For Daddy, Looking for Mr. Preston, Herotica 2, 3, and 4, Virgin Territory, Leatherwomen, Noirotica, Coming Up: The World's Best Erotic Writing, and Once Upon a Time: Lesbian Erotic Fairy Tales. Her essays about sex and culture have appeared in The Erotic Impulse, Madonnarama, Women of The Light, Dagger, Bi Any Other Name, The Second Coming, and Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries and Visions. She has contributed to such 'zines and journals as Taste of Latex, Frighten the Horses, Libido, Slippery When Wet, Black Sheets, The Realist, P-Form, The Advocate, Girljock, The Insurgent Sociologist, and The San Francisco Bay Guardian, and a monthly column in the Bay Area sex newspaper Spectator. She lives in San Francisco, is a worker/owner at Good Vibrations, and is recently received a doctorate in sexology.

From the Back Cover

PoMo: short for PostModern: in the arts, a movement following after and in direct reaction to Modernism; culturally, an outlook that acknowledges diverse and complex points of view. PoMoSexual: the queer erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation. "How about you? Ever wonder if you're the only one who doesn't quite fit in one of the sanctioned queer worlds? Like, are you really a lesbian? Are you really a gay man? Maybe you fall outside the 'permitted' labels, and maybe you're the only one who knows you do, and so you feel a bit guilty? Well, I've got news for you. You're not guilty, you're simply postmodern. Isn't that neat? If you don't believe me, all you need to do is pick up this book and start reading anywhere. Really. I keep a copy in my bathroom because that's where I do a lot of my wondering. From revelation to analysis, from XX to XY and back again, PoMoSexuals is the literary amusement park we've all been hoping exists someplace. Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel have found Oz" - KATE BORNSTEIN By the editors of Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica

Reviews

As the gay and lesbian movement heads toward the mainstream, the trans movement is left behind at the margins, virtually alone in challenging the way society constructs and defines gender and sexuality. The executive director of GenderPac, Wilchins combines personal narrative, essay, photojournalism, history, and a critique of the feminist and queer movements to present a unified rage against gender-based oppression. In her enlightening and moving book, she challenges us to break out of our boxes and view gender, eroticism, oppression, and persecution through the eyes of a strident member of the trans community. Covering much of the same territory, PoMoSexuals gives voice to 15 people living in the gray areas of gender and sexuality who struggle with what it means to have "nonstandard" erotic desires and identities in America. They represent people on the margins of gender and sexuality, ranging from a man who becomes a lesbian woman to a heterosexual woman exploring her attraction to gay men and a lesbian who writes gay male porn. These eye-opening stories carry us into the lives of people we don't usually encounter. The collection varies in quality, but pieces by well-known authors, such as Dorothy Allison and Pat Califia, help to carry the rest of the work. Wilchins also offers a powerful autobiographical essay. Academic libraries with gay/lesbian and feminist collections should include both books in their collections.?Jerilyn Veldof, Univ. of Arizona Lib., Tucson
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Queer Theory and Shopping: Dichotomy or Symbionts? Kate Bornstein Don't you just love irony? Especially when the irony involves you as its subject? This preface is a case in point. Here I am writing for this incredibly innovative, challenging, and queerly entertaining transgressive anthology at a point in my life where I seem to be leaving off being queer at all. Uh huh, I'm finally approaching the full stride of my life's girly-girl phase. Never mind I'm scant months away from turning fifty, fact is I'm much more interested in fashion than I am in politics, or even ::gasp:: queer theory. I'd rather have a femme buddy than a butch lover-what's that about? Maybe it's queerly appropriate after all that I'm writing for this book. I should tell you now: This is my first ever preface, so it may tend to wander. But that's gotta be appropriate for a book about the deconstruction of previously deconstructed sexual and gendered identities, no? I really like this book, by the way. Honest. I'm not just saying that cuz someone's paying me to say things like that or anything. I like it because it's filled with stories and ideas written by people who are doing the unexpected, even above and beyond the quotient of unexpected acts required for one's queer membership card. But enough about this book for the moment; let's get back to me and why it's me who gets to write this preface. So, okay, here we go. In a nutshell, I used to be a het guy who did the gender-change thing and became a grrl, a lesbian grrl at that. Then, after my female lover became a guy, I stopped calling myself a lesbian. Being a lesbian had become too complicated. Calling myself a lesbian managed to offend just about everyone, so I began to call myself a dyke. I thought I was really hot stuff because I wrote books about this kind of thing and coming out in all sorts of big-time media, but my recent nationally-televised confessed crush on megastar David Duchovny signaled the beginning of the end of any status claims I had on high queerdom. (No, he hasn't called yet; I'm still waiting by the phone. I figure it's because he just got married and doesn't know how to call me without upsetting his wife.) This girly-girl stuff is new to me. It's almost embarrassing. I wanna go shopping, but I'm not. I'm sitting here at my computer trying to preface (is that a verb?) this book that brilliantly exemplifies queer theory, when queer is one of the farthest things from my mind. A good scarf, that's what I'm looking for. My crush on David Duchovny has made me feel somewhat traitorous to the queer movementthat is, until I read some of what the people in this book were going through. I mean, wow! Now I don't feel so weird. I feel downright normal. How about you? Ever wonder if you're the only one who doesn't quite fit in one of the sanctioned queer worlds? Like, are you really a lesbian? Are you really a gay man? Maybe you fall outside the "permitted" labels, and maybe you're the only one who knows you do, and so you feel a bit guilty? Well, I've got news for you. You're not guilty, you're simply postmodern. Isn't that neat? If you don't believe me, all you need to do is pick up this book and start reading anywhere. Really. I keep a copy in my bathroom because that's where I do a lot of my wondering. From revelation to analysis, from XX to XY and back again, PoMoSexuals is the literary amusement park we've all been hoping exists someplace. Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel have found Oz, and they've asked some of Oz's leading citizens to tell us what it's like in the Emerald Kingdom. (Carol Queendom?) Wait, wait, a preface isn't supposed to be an ad for the book, is it? And even if it is, then what if the book is about how to avoid all the "supposed-to's" in life? Would a silly preface fit in? I don't know. Anyway, this book isn't going to need any advertising. My bet is it's going to be on reading lists of queer studies courses all over the world, because it says in plain language and great stories what the heavy-hitting theorists have for years been trying to say in knee-deep academese. Yeah, this book can take care of itself, so let's get back to me. Growing up in the 1950s, my role models started out with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn. As a boy, that made me queer. Sure, I went through a period of wanting to be James Dean and even Leonard Nimoy, but I justified those times as my baby butch dyke phase-still pretty queer for a boy. Then when I went through my gender change, I looked for all the strong grrl types like Jodie Foster's Agent Starling and Michelle Forbes' Ensign Ro; that was considered queer by most cultural standards, but quite politically correct within the lesbian community (unless ya took into account that fact that I used to be a guy). Then I recently went trash bleach blonde, and I've come around to modeling myself on characters played by the likes of Mira Sorvino, Lisa Kudrow, Geena Davis, and Patricia Arquette. So now I sort of pass for normal. What a strange feeling that is! But no matter who my role models have been, no matter how I've done my hair, no matter what particular twist I've gotten my genitals into, there's one thing I've always been a sucker for: ideas, concepts, and situations that fry my brain until all I can do is laugh. Like the concept of gender: All my life, I've been taught that gender is something essential, something we're born with. Well, for the last decade or so, I've become increasingly convinced that gender is some sort of social construct. That fries my brain, because it flies into the teeth of nearly everything the dominant culture has to offer on the subject. Maybe when I die, someone's going to dissect my brain or some other organ and they'll find out it really was organic. I dunno. I don't care. I'm still looking for a good scarf. Pink. With repeating patterns of gold tubes of red lipstick. I can't be bothered with plowing through heavy theory. If I'm going to look at queer or postmodern theory, I need stories and pretty pictures. I need to be seduced into thinking about this stuff, because frankly it's too scary to look at without some promise of laughter at the end of the read, some playfulness as a reward to all the painful self-inquisition. Well, playfulness is what this book is filled with, thank goodness. It's got great stories with a lot of brain-frying laughter. Here's one: Let's say you're a nice lesbian separatist who becomes a professional dominatrix and then falls in love with a male-to-female transsexual grrl and then you decide to go through a gender change of your own, become a guy, and realize you're a gay man. Well, how do you go about setting up your sexual liaisons? Believe it or not, the answer's in this book. Or, let's say you're a nice Kinsey-Six gay man. You never had sex with a woman. But you wanna try, just because. How do you go about doing that? Uh huh, the answer's in this book. Here's another one: You're a woman, born with all the medically-sanctioned grrl equipment, and you wanna jerk off with your own dick, but you don't want any kind of chemical or surgical intervention, you just wanna stroke your own cock and feel it. Yeah, that's in this book too: several times! Too prurient for you? Okay, how about word games? How's this: Is it possible, do you think, to be queer when you haven't had sex in years? Or how about this one: Are words themselves a danger in the defining of community? Can we solve the problem of suffocating identity politics by allowing anyone at all to define the identities being politicized? Or would a better solution be the abandonment of politicized identities in favor of the politics of values? This book has all that stuff and more. Then again, maybe that's too heady, huh? Okay, back to sex and gender. Say you're a woman, at least everyone sez you are; and you don't wanna be a guy, right? But your biggest turn-on is gay men. And you figure a way to completely satisfy yerself and your gay male partner as well. How could that be? Read on, cuz that nifty little conundrum is in here too. Me, I think that situations like those are exactly what we need to stretch our brains beyond the banal. I think that if we want to grow at all, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, individually or even as a race, however we want to grow, we need situations like these to tease our reluctant, recalcitrant, and (let's face it) lazy little selves into some growth. That's the way I've lived my life: I've followed the parts of myself that have made my brain fry every time I've thought about them. It's also how I shop. I mean, sometimes I buy something for myself that's really wild. Something I'd never dream of wearing, but for a split second once I've got it on in the store, I think to myself, "Wow, am I ever cute!" But it's a dangerous kind of cute, right? I mean, I'm not about to wear whatever it is right out of the shop and into the street, but it's something I know I can kind of grow into. So, I go ahead and spend my rent money or max out my cards to get whatever it is, and I take it home, and there sits my fashion purchase for sometimes months, while day after day I think about wearing it. I think to myself: Who would I need to be in order to wear that? And, am I ready to stretch myself into being that just for the sake of being really really cute? And once I get to that particular question, the answer is well, duh, obvious: Of course! And that's what reading this book is like. It's sort of a Rodeo Drive for the soul. In fact, I dare you to read any one of the pieces in here and remain exactly the same person as you were before. At the very least, you'll know you're not the only one who's weird. So, okay. That's all I have to say. Omigosh, I've written a preface. It's the first one I've written, and it's been kind of like literary foreplay. If it was as good for you as it was for me, then by all means keep on reading! I did, I enjoyed the heck out of it, and now I'm going shopping. COPYRIGHT 1997 by Kate Bornstein. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573440744
• ISBN 13: 9781573440745
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 199
• Editor: Queen Carol, Schimel Lawrence