In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Sexual Cultures)

This major new series reproduces an authoritative selection of the most significant articles in different areas of psychology. It focuses in particular on influential articles which are not found in other similar colelctions.

Many of these articles are only available in specialized journals and therfore are not accessible in every library. This landmark series will make a contribution to scholarship and teaching in psychology. It will imorove access to important areas of literature which are difficult to locate, even in the archives of many libraries throughout the world.

Important features in each book make the series an essential research and reference tool, including introductions written by the individual editors providing a lucid survey of difference branches of psychology. The pagination of the original articles has been deliberately retained to facilitate ease of reference. A comprehensive author and subject index guides the reader instantly to major and minor topics within the literature.

This major new series reproduces an authoritative selection of the most significant articles in different areas of psychology. It focuses in particular on influential articles which are not found in other similar collections.

Many of these articles are only available in specialized journals and therfore are not accessible in every library. This landmark series will make a contribution to scholarship and teaching in psychology. It will imorove access to important areas of literature which are difficult to locate, even in the archives of many libraries throughout the world.

Important features in each book make the series an essential research and reference tool, including introductions written by the individual editors providing a lucid survey of difference branches of psychology. The pagination of the original articles has been deliberately retained to facilitate ease of reference. A comprehensive author and subject index guides the reader instantly to major and minor topics within the literature.

In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative formsespecially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.

In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Dont Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the “transgender gaze,” as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.

Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.

Judith Halberstam is professor of literature at UC San Diego. She is the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity and co-author with Del LaGrace Volcano of The Drag King Book.