This chapter offers a theoretical examination of the relationship between the Black body and religion in African American religious studies, paying particular attention to enslavement and the construction of the slave body and “the flesh” as a complex fulcrum for religious embodiment and self-fashioning in modernity and also for intracommunal bodily violation in Black religious contexts. This chapter wrestles with the philosophical inheritances that scholars in this field must navigate as both an intellectual exercise on the matter of Black existence, and as an ethical problem with regard to how to account for both the experience of domination and the manifold examples of Black religious innovation which sit at the crux of the study of Black religions. Thus, it effectively argues that scholars cannot sidestep attention to the Black body and its interdependence on the fraught category of religion.

Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation of Nella Larsen’s famed Harlem Renaissance novel, Passing (1929), indexes the relevance of interracial passing today. We explore Hall’s film to explain the contemporary appeal of Larsen’s narrative. Larsen’s Passing licenses interpretive possibilities that transcend its immediate moment, even as it seeks to criticize specific historical realities of modern intersectional identity. Hall’s neo-passing narrative of 1920s Black femininity employs cinema to highlight the enduring immobility of the color line and the erotic and social risk of crossing it.

We assess Hall’s adaptation of the two-protagonist structure as it personalizes Larsen’s depiction of racial liminality; consider Hall’s use of cinematography to adapt Larsen’s rhetorical sleight of hand regarding US racial discourses; and discuss the homoerotics of passing in both works. We then contemplate Hall’s casting choices. The final section takes up the conclusion of the two works. Hall resolves some of Larsen’s famous ambiguity, but poignantly showcases the essential instability of the gendered, racialized body in US literature and culture across a century.

While scholars have often acknowledged the relationship between Bernstein and Blitzstein by focusing on their Jewish immigrant backgrounds, shared love for the musical theatre, modernist approach to music, and socio-political goals, there is little discussion on how their sexual orientation might have shaped this friendship and their work. Yet, attempting to understand the bond between the two composers, both married yet unequivocally gay, without considering their queer identities leaves a major component out of the picture. In this chapter, I consider the queer intimacies that are at the core of their bond and how works that they dedicated to each other – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, an opera about gender alienation; and Blitzstein’s Six Elizabethan Songs, a set of pieces concealing possible homoerotic meanings – can uncover new perspectives on their friendship and compositional approaches.

This chapter offers an analysis of Private Romeo, director Alan Brown’s 2012 film production of the play. Set in a boys’ military high school, Private Romeo appropriates Romeo and Juliet to tell the story of two young men falling in love with one another. But, where Romeo and Juliet is a tale of tragedy, Private Romeo is very much a tale of male same-sex love’s triumph. Indeed, the happy ending of Private Romeo can be considered the film’s queerest aspect of all. Hence, as far as queer is understood in its most ‘simplistic’ sense as a challenge to all things heteronormative, Private Romeo shows how Romeo and Juliet can be thoroughly queered as opposed to merely incorporating ‘gay’ elements into otherwise ‘straight’ productions. At the same time, some critics might be troubled by Private Romeo’s representation of queerness because that queerness is wholly inflected by assimilationist capitulations. Its depiction of same-sex marriage as an ideal, inevitable outcome can be interpreted as an imposition of the kind of conformity that merely apes heteronormative conventions. Hence the need to both queer and unqueer Private Romeo.

In N. K. Jemisin’s science fiction short story “The Effluent Engine” (2011), Jessaline, a Haitian spy and “natural” daughter of Toussaint Louverture, arrives in New Orleans in the early years of Haitian independence. Her world is both like and unlike our own: in the tale, Haitians have learned to convert gases from sugarcane distilleries into fuel for airships. Turning “our torment to our advantage,” as Jessaline puts it, Haiti effectively bombed French ships to win the Revolution; became the world’s leading manufacturer of dirigibles; and secured diplomatic standing in the United States, even constructing an embassy in New Orleans.1 And yet, despite Haiti’s steampunkesque political and technological power, there is much in “The Effluent Engine” that recalls a less optimistic history. The French are still “hell-bent upon re-enslaving” the nascent republic; although the United States begrudgingly recognizes Haiti, it remains “the stuff of American nightmare”; and Jessaline confronts white supremacist terrorism and the threat of racial-sexual violence in the US South, where she fights the Order of the White Camellia.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

That David Foster Wallace designed his fiction to serve a therapeutic function for readers is, at this point, axiomatic. Timothy Aubry (Reading as Therapy) has effectively demonstrated how it serves this function, as well as how his fiction’s contingent relation to addiction and recovery stories enabled Wallace to reinject what he saw as a dispassionate and exhausted postmodern form with moral and affective urgency. Rob Short (Big Books) has thoroughly documented how Wallace’s own adherence to the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) shapes the aesthetic practice of his novels. Wallace also frequently used the text to stage “the production and elision of intimacy between the (male) author and the (male) reader.” In conversation with this sections other chapters on gender and sexuality, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace’s writing occupies queer spaces in its representation of the fractured contingency of the addicted self in recovery. Specifically, the chapter draws a comparison with Whitman, through his first and only novel Franklin Evans or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times (1842), by far his largest commercial success during his lifetime despite being generally forgotten and, like Wallace, a first novel he would often disavow. For Whitman, masking his exact intention to connect with the reader in his poetry, as well as through this addiction and recovery novel, was the very mechanism by which he could construct the queer intimacies socially and politically foreclosed during his lifetime. As scholars like Michael Warner (“Whitman Drunk”) and Michael Moon (Disseminating Whitman) have documented, Whitman too attended alcohol recovery meetings in part to listen to “dirty” stories about same-sex encounters. Through this connection, I hope to accomplish two goals: first, to recontextualize the fantasy of pre-postmodern and even pre-realist novels imagined to be better suited to the aesthetic project of therapy and recovery in a post-postmodern America, and second, to bring Wallace’s aesthetic practice in closer contact with issues of sexuality that the universalizing gesture of fiction-as-therapy can too often elide. While the chapter does not argue that Wallace was a queer writer, it elucidates the disruptive potential of queer readings within the context of late postmodernist constructions of self.

In this concluding chapter, the analysis throughout this book reveals that both Disney and Pixar have a problem with their representation of women, primarily with underrepresentation of women both in speech and total number of characters. Other key points are that female characters are “disproportionately polite”: even though they speak less, they use more of the various markers that highlight a concern with maintaining the social fabric. This chapter also examines the “progress” that Disney and Pixar have made in terms of gender representation. The authors see some promising changes in representation and in talking time. The split between male and female speech in the New Age era is almost exactly 50-50% and some films even have female majority speech (Brave, Frozen II). Unfortunately, most of the other linguistic patterns tracked have not changed at all. Female characters continue to mitigate and apologize while male characters continue to insult and order people around, both in Disney and Pixar films. Finally, this chapter ends with where the authors hope both the future of Disney and Pixar will go, including: a wider range of characters (major and minor) who represent different ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, a wider range of gender identity, more diverse linguistic styles associated with masculinity, and other progressive movements.

This chapter focuses on the discussion of queerness in Disney. Despite the overwhelming propagation of a heteronormative ideal in these films, queerness does exist, at a variety of levels. This chapter qualitatively examines the different ways that queerness is coded linguistically in Disney. This chapter identifies a source of queerness in Disney in many of its queer coded villians (quillians), linked by five key linguistic elements in their speech: playing with register or style, sarcasm and other humorous verbal aggression, wordplay or metalinguistic focus, invocation of femininity (pragmatic), and invocation of femininity (syntactic or lexical). The observed style bears a resemblance to styles documented among cis gay men and drag queens. The implications of the use of ‘Quillian Language Style’ to characterize both male and female quillains is explored, and broader implications are discussed.

Raúl’s decline and disappearance constitute the sadistic climax of the posthumous stories. Storytellers linger with relish over their accounts of his descent, after 1930, into poverty, illness, homelessness, alcoholism, police detention, and finally madness, institutionalization, and death. So enthusiastic are they about ushering Raúl to his end that they begin to declare him dying or dead decades before his actual demise in 1955. His death was permanently useful to tell and retell as part of a tragicomedy about the foolishness of persisting in being a Black person in a country that had outgrown them (or, in its great wisdom, had arranged never to have any). In this sense, storytellers merely conscripted Raúl into the broader narratives of always-impending (but never quite complete) Black disappearance that had circulated since his grandparents’ day. “Deaths” shows how the defamatory stories about Raúl’s decline and death, circulating since the 1930s in the press and popular culture, sped him to the sad ends storytellers envisioned for him. Between 1930 and 1955, Raúl’s trajectory as revealed by the archival record converges, in many important details, with the denigrating tales that took shape around him. But this chapter tells that story very differently. In part, Raúl’s difficulties in these years had to do with extensive transformations in Argentine society – economic depression, a military coup, intensified police repression, and the renewed vigor of eugenics and scientific racism. In part, too, his struggles reflected the fact that the journalists, photographers, police officers, physicians and psychologists who encountered Raúl during the last decades of his life were themselves informed by preexisting narratives about class, citizenship, and Blackness in Argentina. Using press coverage of Raúl, photographs, his police record, and his medical records from a hospital and two psychiatric institutions, I reconstruct these last decades of his life and demonstrate how they were deformed at every turn by narratives of Afro-Argentine death that were only strengthened, in storytellers’ eyes, by what they saw as Raúl’s sorry state. Finally, building on highly suggestive clues in his psychiatric file, the chapter closes with an alternative, or rather intersecting, re-reading of his life through the lens of queerness and same-sex sexuality.

Queer art and literature demonstrate an awareness of how a permanent war culture constitutes the nation’s social fabric, thus defining the unavoidable contingencies informing LGBTQ+ persons’ desires and subjectivities as citizen-subjects. Along with race, gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship status, war culture operates intersectionally. This essay introduces four new approaches to LGBTQ+ art and literatures’ representation of queer subjectivities’ relationship to war culture: the desire for national inclusion and queer fetishizations of the war-state (Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal); activist-poets’ resistances to war culture as heteronormative and white supremacist (William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg); the perceived “terrorism” of queer activist arts’ militancy (Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker); and addresses of globalized queer vulnerability after 9/11 and vis-à-vis the climate crisis (Gloria Anzaldúa, Kazim Ali, Ocean Vuong).

After touching on his own experiences, Barrie Kosky points out that operetta lost the continuity of its tradition in World War II. He calls for a radical investigation into operetta performance practice. He describes operetta as a Jewish art form not only because most of the composers, librettists and performers were Jewish but also because operetta itself is about assimilation, irony and disconnectedness. This tradition was interrupted because many Jewish artists went into exile or died in the war. After the war, everything subversive, erotic, ironic and contemporary became harmless, nostalgic, and arianized. But over the last ten years, new understanding has grown, and a new young audience is discovering operetta. Kosky maintains an operetta needs a fabulous score and must work on different levels as a combination of ‘serious but ironic’. Operetta needs characters, scenes and situations that can reveal performers’ virtuosity in mixing singing, dancing, speaking and acting. Kosky sees subversiveness and campy queerness as inherent in operetta. It appears in Offenbach’s political awareness as well as in the new definition of gender in the Weimar operetta. Kosky says new operetta requires composers and librettists familiar with the tradition but who should avoid copying operetta of the past.