This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities--a sob in the body or the body itself--has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."

This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities--a sob in the body or the body itself--has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."

The relationship between black queer subjects and debasement as portrayed within popular culture texts and films.

Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in "Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame," has often been a meeting place for the signs "black" and "queer" and for black and queer people--overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been "embraced" by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?

Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory,...

A special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Futurity, innocence, and childish subversion--as concepts, as frameworks--have yet to catch up to where the child has moved in the present century. The contributors to this issue explore topics that are both vital and challenging for current queer studies, including paradoxical exportations of the U.S. "innocent" child abroad, the queer child under same-sex marriage law, child revolutionaries' actions in Egypt, and the colonial afterlife of the boarding school for indigenous children. Following the twists and turns of...