While Latina literature cannot be understood as an absolute phenomenon but rather as a heterogeneous cultural practice drawing from the diverse genealogies of women’s specific ethnic backgrounds, the attempt to challenge gender norms, heteronormativity, and power relations must be considered paramount. As demonstrated in the influential writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, the act of writing is a powerful tool of liberation that embraces the potentiality of collective creativity and oppositional consciousness, what this essay terms the insubordination of Latina literature. This approach foregrounds texts that formulate discursive acts in which literary and political categories propose radical social and cultural transformations. I begin by examining the works of Anzaldúa and Moraga, whom I consider prominent contributors to a U.S. Latina literary renaissance emerging after the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements. In the essay’s second half, I trace the development of U.S. Latina literature in the 20th century’s last two decades and the 21st century, reading Latina literature in the context of queer, lesbian, and feminist epistemologies.

This chapter considers queer relations of identification and desire in nineteenth-century sentimental American literature, especially as they relate to the (re)production of the increasingly privatized, middle class, white, family. It considers how texts queer the substitutions of others for mothers (and fathers, and brothers, and sisters) in order to maintain and queer the normative family. The chapter moves from paradigmatic examples to ones that appear to revel in queer visions of identificatory erotics. It then draws upon queer of color critique to examine how white supremacy defines the human and/as normative gender and sexuality, such that Black and other people of color are placed as queer others in order to preserve a fantasy of white gender and sexual purity. This racialized version of queer as non-normative complicates any ideal of a solely celebratory or even neutral taxonomizing of identifications, desires, and their accompanying kinship structures.

This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

This essay traces the histories of sexual, gender, and racial queerness in works from and about the South, and it insists that anything we might see as uniquely “southern” is still profoundly entangled with the literatures and cultures of the United States and beyond. While there are unequivocally southern works of queer literature, it is crucial to recognize that so many queer southerners are the authors, not the others of the wider queer canon, including works that would seem to have nothing to do with the South at all. But this essay does not stop at simply mapping the complex terrain of queer literature by White, Black, and Native American writers associated with the South. The second half turns to the “dirty south”—a term that is rooted especially in hip hop culture and is always already queer, even when texts do not claim queerness as their center. The dirty south has a long and rich cultural history that unearths complex relations among, bodies, pleasures, and the elements they divulge, making it a new source of aesthetic inspiration for reevaluating the multiracial, multigendered south(s) of the past and building a diverse and insurgent southern culture for the future.

At the turn of the century as the western frontier came to a close, America expanded its reach across the Pacific and in so doing solidified a burgeoning modern gay identity steeped in imaginations of the “Orient.” Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants themselves in fact played a crucial role by illustrating a different way of being to western writers such as Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard, even as they were appropriated in bohemians’ explorations of their own same-sex sexuality.

This chapter decouples queerness from whiteness, and modernism from its period origins, arguing that queer-of-color modernists like Nella Larsen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Matthew Lopez transform the coordinates of queerness and modernism through their misfit intersections of identity, also extending the timeframe for modernist aesthetics through a queer genealogy that extends backwards (as in Lopez’s The Inheritance, which features E.M. Forster) and forwards (as in Larsen’s Passing and its intersectional queer subtext, cinematically adapted by Rebecca Hall in 2021).

This essay examines the work of several poets (including Langston Hughes, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Christopher Leland, Julie Gard, Heiu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, and Rane Arroyo) who engage the Midwest as a resonant source for writing about a host of topics pertaining to queer self-awareness, belonging, and memory. Not unlike the work of recent scholars aiming to dislodge the rural in particular and the Midwest more broadly as a site of unbridled anti-LGBT sentiment and politics, the essay illustrates how these poets refuse essentialist beliefs about the Midwest to instead register the myriad queer histories, cultures, and experiences stemming from America’s heartland. Furthermore, as it considers the inextricable bond between “the Midwest” and “the rural,” the essay illustrates how the urban Midwest additionally requires consideration for the way that cities like Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago are indeed part and parcel of the heartland yet frequently eclipsed by the customary association of gay liberation with major metropolitan coastal cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

Comics that represent nonheteronormative sexualities and diverse genders make up part but not the whole of the vital history of queerness in the medium. The emergence and uptake of comics in feminist and LGBTQA spaces tell important, divergent stories about the politics of cultural production and interpretation. A queer account of comics history recalls the development of the medium as a staging ground for fantasies and for challenges to prevailing mores; controversies over the availability of sexually provocative material in print and digital formats; the changing significance of longstanding icons amid generational shifts in youth cultures.

Throughout the history of European colonization of the American continent, which continues today, European visitors and settlers have produced records of their encounters with Indigenous Peoples they regarded as nonheteronormative or queer. Native people have decried the ways such documentation lends itself to cultural misrepresentation and appropriation. In 1990, a group of LGBTIQ+ identified Native American and First Nations people coined the autonym Two-Spirit to insist on Indigenous Peoples’ sovereign rights of self-determination, self-definition, and self-naming. Contemporary Native communities use Two-Spirit as an umbrella term that references gender-expansive Indigenous traditions and identities that exceed colonial logics. This chapter focuses on Two-Spirit/queer Native authors who create literature by and for Two-Spirit people, thus representing the past, present, and imagined future of queer Indigeneity. Proposing that decolonization movements to reclaim queer(ed) Indigenous “gender” traditions and revitalize Indigenous languages are interrelated, this essay reads works by Two-Spirit authors who incorporate Indigenous languages into their writing.