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This book reveals how visual representations of racialized motherhood shape and reflect national citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes’s suturing of race, death, and the maternal in Camera Lucida, the book contends that the contradictory essence of the photograph is both a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection. The book explores the implications of this argument for racialized productions of death and the maternal in the context of specific cultural moments: the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison’s and Hollywood’s Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California’s Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the “Widows of 9/11” in print and televisual journalism. Taken together, these various visual media texts function in American Pietàs as cultural artifacts and as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized productions of maternal bodies in contexts of national death and remembering. To engage this network is to ask how and toward what end the racial project of the nation imbues some maternal bodies with resurrecting power and leaves others for dead. In the spaces between these different maternities, states this book, U.S. citizen-subjects are born—and reborn.

In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

Women’s agency: Is it a matter of an individual’s capacity for autonomy? Or of the social conditions that facilitate freedom? Combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book investigates what exactly makes an agent and how that agency influences the ways women make inherently sensitive and difficult choices—specifically in instances of domestic violence, assisted reproduction, and sex work. In this book’s analysis, women’s agency emerges as an individual and social construct, rooted in concrete experience, complex and changing over time. It traces the development and deployment of agency, illustrating how it plays out in the messy workings of imperfect lives. In a series of case studies, it considers women within situations of intimate partner violence, reproductive decision making, and sex work such as prostitution and pornography. Each narrative offers insight into how women articulate their self-understanding and political needs in relation to the pressures they confront.

The AIDS epidemic soured the memory of the sexual revolution and gay liberation of the 1970s, and prominent politicians, commentators, and academics instructed gay men to forget the sexual cultures of the 1970s in order to ensure a healthy future. But without memory there can be no future, argues this exploration of the struggle over gay memory that marked the decades following the onset of AIDS. Challenging many of the assumptions behind first-wave queer theory, this book offers a new perspective on the emergence of contemporary queer culture from the suppression and repression of gay memory. Drawing on an archive of videos, films, television shows, novels, monuments, paintings, and sculptures created in the wake of the epidemic, the book reveals a resistance among critics to valuing—even recognizing—the inscription of gay memory in art, literature, popular culture, and the built environment. This book explores such topics as the unacknowledged ways in which the popular sitcom Will and Grace circulated gay subcultural references to awaken a desire for belonging among young viewers; the post-traumatic (un)rememberings of queer theory; and the generation of “ideality politics” in the art of Félix González-Torres, the film Chuck & Buck, and the independent video Video Remains.

The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of “sexual orientation” are not merely reflections of human nature, but emerged through a process of social negotiation involving opposing social movements, professionals seeking jurisdiction, and historical context. Following the demedicalization of homosexuality, relegating reparative therapies, “ex-gay” ministries, and reorientation research to the scientific fringe has required scientists to enforce key boundaries around scientific expertise and research methods. The book traces reorientation debates in the United States from the 1950s to the present, following homosexuality therapies from the mainstream to the margins. As the ex-gay movement has become increasingly transnational in recent years, the last chapter turns to Uganda, where understandings of the scientific nature of homosexuality played important roles in the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. The book brings together sexuality studies, science studies, and sociology of social movements to examine dynamics when opposing social movements target knowledge producing institutions. Waidzunas develops a theory of “intellectual opportunity structure” as features of knowledge producing institutions that enable and constrain movements when trying to shape the content of scientific facts. While most literature on the ex-gay movement treats it as a religious phenomenon, this book takes seriously the engagements of this movement with scientific institutions, and its attempts to use research to establish the legitimacy and ethics of reorientation therapies, with important consequences for public policy.