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.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

The introduction provides an overview of Romeo and Juliet on screen, outlining the landmark adaptations as well as lesser-known adaptations and demonstrating the global, cross-cultural phenomenon of the play’s screen afterlives. It sets out the issues for adaptation that the Romeo and Juliet films have engaged with, such as: the intersections of love and violence that have proved continually relevant to the contemporary world, whether dealing with racial, ethnic, familial or gender violence in different cultural contexts; the challenges of translating Shakespeare’s language for the screen and across different linguistic and cultural contexts; how conventions of genre, gender and sexuality have been challenged and played with; what works can be classified as an adaptation or appropriation of Romeo and Juliet; and interfilmic dialogues. The introduction thus provides a framework within which to place the subsequent chapters and illuminate the central relevance of Romeo and Juliet on screen both for Shakespeare studies and for contemporary screen culture.

In this chapter, guided by an intersectional feminist theoretical approach, we examine gender and sexuality as ubiquitous ideas in personal identity, intimate relationships, family systems, and social institutions. We critique heteronormativity in relational and family science in order to examine the plethora of relationships formed in the context of gender, identity, and sexuality. We examine how social structures at the macro level and social constructions at the microlevel influence selected issues regarding relationship initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution. We review selected trends in the literature concerning diverse romantic relationships and how they adhere to or critique heteronormative ideologies, thereby, examining ways in which relational partners are both queering and challenging taken for granted assumptions about doing gender and sexuality in relationships.

The postmodern moment was both important and turbulent in both anthropology and gender studies. This chapter focuses on how postmodern thought, which is described as being ant-foundational, engaged with thinking about gender and sexuality in gender studies and in anthropology, both in conjunction with each other as disciplines and in conjunction with feminist (and gay and lesbian) movements, which were influential during the same period. As an intellectual trend, the postmodern moment never attracted sufficient advocates to become a majority approach, and its time in the limelight was quickly over; nevertheless, the authors argue that the moment had lasting effects, particularly in terms of thinking about gender and sexuality. More specifically, they suggest that the introduction of postmodern thought affected the politicization of thought about gender and sexuality in the academy. In gender studies, it coincided with the founding of the discipline; in anthropology, it initially most notably came through the route of feminist-inspired kinship studies, and later through the influence of queer on studies of sexuality and embodiment.

Performative inquiry – studies of doing and its consequences for being – is a prominent feature of research projects in exploring gender and sexuality, especially when gender and sexuality are closely tied to linguistic practices. Moreover, because performativity of doing unfolds in specific social and temporal contexts, performative inquiry shows how gender and sexuality become inflected variously in relation to intersectionalities and inequalities, and how language use connected to gender and sexuality becomes inflected in similar terms, as well. Performative inquiry is also concerned with assumptions about normative (or ideological) assumptions that regulate “commonsense” distinctions between valued and not-so-valued practices of doing and being. This chapter’s case studies and discussion show how gender and sexuality are shaped by performative practices and how language use is entailed within these gendered and sexual performative formations.

The fertility journey for Black lesbian couples can be both challenging and rewarding. Clinicians must be able to assist their clients therapeutically while they are going through the procedures as well as managing the biological, psychological, social, and emotional aspects of the process. This chapter seeks to help therapists acquire an understanding of the process of conceiving a child within a Black lesbian relationship. It will help clinicians understand how women reconcile being labeled infertile or having issues of infertility when there may be nothing physically wrong. It will explain how gender expression could impact the decision of who should carry the child in Black lesbian relationships. The chapter discusses the process of intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), and adoption within the lesbian community and specifically the Black lesbian community. Clinicians will learn how the journey to conceive a child impacts the Black lesbian relationship and what helping professionals need to do in order to effectively help their clients weather the storm.

Drawing on examples from real life as well as fictional representations in literature, cinema, theatre, television and radio, this chapter interrogates the relationship of queerness to the British nation from the Great War to the present. Beginning with Rose Allatini’s 1918 novel Despised and Rejected, the first part documents how and why queers were framed as a suspect minority, a danger to the nation. The second part largely draws on the deliberations of the Wolfenden Committee in the 1950s in explaining why a shift towards a limited tolerance for discreet, respectable, ‘genuine’ homosexuals began to take place. The final part traces the proliferation of queer-themed representations in recent decades alongside the rise of gay liberation and the battle over gay civil liberties. It concludes that queers in Britain have made undeniable progress, but at the cost of co-option for a homonational consensus.

This chapter considers the entanglements between queerness and diaspora. It asks how the vital matter of desire – who we love and how – is roused by the traversing of borders. In particular, it considers the gestures of compliance and knowing, an aesthetic knowledge no less, that queer asylees must evince to be found credible enough to receive political shelter and hospitality in the West. The border regime’s regulations of refugee passage on the basis of ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ ultimately reveals a host of tendencies, definitions and differentiations that cleave our efforts to truly understand queerness as a thwarting of sexual rigidities and an embrace of play. The chapter ultimately makes the case that the genre of queer diasporic literature – a genre specifically concerned with sexual and national border crossings – attends to the caprice of non-normative desire.

This chapter begins by claiming that in comparison to its British and French contemporaries, American modernism does not contain a lot of obviously queer texts. That is, American modernism does not represent homosexuality explicitly very often. There are exceptions, of course – Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D., Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” and Charles Henri Ford and Park Tyler’s The Young and the Evil offer three such examples, but same-sex relations are not central subjects in the way that they are in contemporaneous texts such as Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah, André Gide’s Miracle of the Rose, or Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. This chapter aims to explain this peculiarity and thus to provide a theory of queer American modernism itself by examining two key sites of its production: namely, the Provincetown Theater and the Harlem Renaissance.

Against the longstanding force of charges that certain sexualities are ‘unnatural’, Anne Lister grounds her astonishing confidence squarely in an argument about nature. For her, nature serves as a rationale rather than a general prohibition or quasi-juridical bar against a sexual expression she had reason to consider fairly unique. Indeed, Lister’s interpretation of nature provided not only a lens, or even a kind of permission, but a profound authorisation of who or what she saw herself to be, of what she called ‘my ways’. Rather than seeing herself as turning away from nature or somehow violating its laws, she was doing the opposite: she was following natural prescriptions. ’Odd’, surely, and ’queer’ in the broadest sense - but not ‘deviant’. How, then, did Lister understand nature, itself one of the richest concepts in the history of ideas? What intellectual, scientific and theological resources made this reading of nature available to her, and what innovations did she add to the repertoire? The chapter elucidates Lister’s brilliant synthesis of theology, Latin poetry and natural history to naturalise her ‘ways’ - indeed, to the point where she could assert ‘When we leave nature, we leave our only steady guide, and, from that moment, become inconsistent with ourselves’ as a queer motto for erotic persuasion.

In this chapter, I consider how translation pertains to the body on stage as a site of multiplicity and propose the term ‘transembodiment’ in my analysis of Weronika Szczawińska and Bartosz Frąckowiak’s Komornicka. Biografia pozorna (Komornicka. Ostensible biography, 2011). My intention in considering transembodiment is to analyse the effects and limitations of physical and fictional bodies as they appear within the mimetic, representational and concrete frame of the theatre space. Ultimately, I argue that the body is itself a paradigmatic site of translation, which can neither be reduced to nor fully dislodged from language, and which is both submitted to and escapes processes of mimetic representation. In this way, I do not offer transembodiment as a methodology but rather as a structure and a consequence of the process of transmission in the theatre that invites new subjects to emerge and come into being.

This chapter serves as an introduction to the polemical dismissal of Epicurean teachings as sub-masculine and morally suspect. Epicureans are shown to figured as sexually receptive and effeminate by their ideological opponents. I argue that Lucretius accepts these criticisms and turns them around to show that Roman men are equally effeminate and penetrable. Objective, empirical observation of nature and physics proves that everyone, regardless of biological sex and sociological gender, is rendered penetrable and vulnerable by the constant issue and reception of atoms.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

Anglophone Caribbean literature written by Black women writers across the diaspora in the 1980s emerges as a transformative, genre-bending, and defiant force. This period of Caribbean literature marks a period of transition that reflects the contradictory experiences of postcolonial island nations grappling with governance, migration, failed and uneven development, and the unfinished (failed) project of decolonization. Caribbean women writers during this period addressed this project through multiple genres and paid careful attention to the lives of women who countered the male-dominated Caribbean literary canon of the 1920s–1970s. The evolution of Black women’s writing across the diaspora from the 1980s and into the 1990s reflects a clear shift and response to the interlocking systems of oppression affecting the lives of Black women. For Caribbean migrant and Caribbean American Black women, these intersections and complexities are layered with the traumatic experiences of migration and coloniality while grappling with place and space, subjectivity and sexuality, identity and self-worth.

This chapter critiques a tendency by masculine critics and writers in the 1980s toward binary framing that led to a misassignment of responsibility and misreading of Black women’s literary production. The framework reduces our capacity to read Black literature of this era through its intelligence about gender, to appreciate that Black literature in the 1980s might be read for its attention to and expansion of gender as a category for racial analysis. This chapter animates the gender-thinking in Black male writers’ representations of masculinity by collating the work of Essex Hemphill with that of Ernest J. Gaines. By pairing these two writers, the chapter exemplifies a gender study that refuses the simplistic rejection of Black women’s writing, and instead amplifies the legacy of Black feminist intersectional thought. This comparative reading moves away from pitting Black men against Black women, since to do so is to marginalize writers and their work. Furthermore, it rectifies the general exclusion of queer writers from the category “Black male writers,” akin to the canonical categorization of Black women’s writing that often includes queer women and scenes of queerness.

While debates may rage around issues of sexuality, sexual identity and sexuality-based rights, if we are to believe what we hear from some of our political leaders and sections of the media, concerns over sexuality itself should be settled outside of schools. Sexuality, they would argue, is too mature, too controversial and quite simply a biological fact that has no relevance to schooling. However, disturbing stories and statistics point to the significant challenges faced by students, and these surely warrant attention.

With this in mind, this chapter examines some of the questions that often arise when talking about sexualities: Are gender and sexuality the same thing? Is sexuality ‘all about sex’? And what does school have to do with any of this? By unpacking some of the emergent literature in the field, the chapter will suggest that dominant discourses around sexualities ߝ in this case, heteronormativity ߝ are up for challenge.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which topics and methodological approaches from LGBTI/Queer Studies have influenced LGBTI/Queer biblical interpretation.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.