Bøker utgitt av Fordham University Press

An incendiary literary work more relevant now than ever. "if anger were an ax/it would split me open/and if this is a sermon/let it be my granddaddy's sermon/my grandmother's foottapping/steady rocking/choir singing" -from "It Is Not a New Age"First published in 1998, Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery is the debut collection by acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed. Provocative and potent, it tackles the political and personal issues of enslavement, sexuality, emotional trauma, and abuse. These poems chart the journey of an artist trying to escape cycles of dependency and reclaim lost self and identity. Drawing parallels to Harriet Tubman's journey on the Underground Railroad, Sneed's explorations of the woods are a metaphor and emotional path one must explore to attain self-ownership. Sneed's poems are bound by the search for love, freedom, and justice-from images of lesbian love to Emmet Till's bloated body, they offer a raging cry and a roadmap for those interested in transforming the personal into social justice and abolitionist practices.

"A passionate exhortation to expand the ways we talk about human sex, sexuality, and gender Twenty-five years ago, Mark D. Jordan published his landmark book on the invention and early history of the category "sodomy", one that helped to decriminalize certain sexual acts in the United States and to remove the word "sodomy" from the updated version of a standard English translation of the Christian Bible. In Queer Callings, Jordan extends the same kind of illuminating critical analysis to present uses of "identity" with regard to sexual difference. While the stakes might not seem as high, he acknowledges, his newest history of sexuality is just as vital to a better present and future. Shaking up current conversations that focus on "identity language", this essential new book seeks to restore queer languages of desire by inviting readers to consider how understandings of "sexual identity" have shifted-and continue to shift-over time. Queer Callings re-reads texts in various genres-literary and political, religious and autobiographical-that have been preoccupied with naming sex/gender diversity beyond a scheme of LGBTQ+ identities. Engaging a wide range of literary and critical works concerned with sex/gender self-understanding in relation to "spirituality", Jordan takes up the writings of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Djuna Barnes, Samuel R. Delany, Audre Lorde, Geoff Mains, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gloria Anzaldâua, Maggie Nelson, and others. Before it's possible to perceive sexual identities differently, Jordan argues, current habits for classifying them have to be disrupted. In this way, Queer Callings asks us to reach beyond identity language and invites us to re-perform a selection of alternate languages-some from before the invention of phrases like "sexual identity," others more recent. Tracing a partial genealogy for "sexual identity" and allied phrases, Jordan reveals that the terms are newer than we might imagine. Many queer folk now counted as literary or political ancestors didn't claim a sexual or gender identity: they didn't know they were supposed to have one. Finally, Queer Callings joins the writers it has evoked to resist any remaining confidence that it's possible to give neatly contained accounts of human desire. Reaching into the past to open our eyes to extraordinary opportunities in our present and future, Queer Callings is a generatively destabilizing and essential read"--

"Winner, The David R. Coffin Publication Grant. A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, NY Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, NY, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York's most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through over two hundred contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States. Drawn from over a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough's built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home. Newcomers have had to confront discrimination, White racial hostility, legal challenges, and language barriers. They have had to struggle to find adequate housing, places to worship, and jobs that pay enough to survive. And they have done all of this in the borough's jumbled collection of neighborhoods, housing types, civic and religious institutions, factories and warehouses, commercial streets, and strip malls. Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief. He also draws on demographic data, archival sources, planning documents, news stories, and reports. The result is a visual meditation on Queens that provides clues about an urban future where notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference, but where a sense of "getting along"-however roughly textured and unfinished-has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets"--