Celebrate Pride with UM Press

By: Lauren Stachew | Date: June 23, 2016
Celebrate Pride with UM Press

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This month is the 47th annual LGBT Pride Month, which began in June 1969 to commemorate the Stonewall riots in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. This commemorative month not only celebrates sexual diversity and gender variance, but also increases visibility and emphasizes positivity and self-love in the LGBT community. Parades, marches, rallies, and commemorations are held across the world annually during this month.

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Performing Queer Latinidad by Ramón H. Rivera-Servera highlights the critical role that performance played in the development of Latina/o queer public culture in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when the size and influence of the Latina/o population was increasing alongside a growing scrutiny of the public spaces where latinidad could circulate. Performances—from concert dance and street protest to the choreographic strategies deployed by dancers at nightclubs—served as critical meeting points and practices through which LGBT and other nonnormative sex practitioners of Latin American descent (individuals with greatly differing cultures, histories of migration or annexation to the United States, and contemporary living conditions) encountered each other and forged social, cultural, and political bonds. This book was a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, 2013, a winner of the Latino Studies Section of Latin American Studies Association Award for Best Book 2013, and a winner of the Congress of Research in Dance (CORD) Outstanding Publication Award, 2013.

On June 17, The Atlantic published an interview with Rivera-Servera discussing the aftermath of the Orlando shooting at Pulse nightclub.

 

Acts of Gaiety by Sara Warner highlights the importance of pleasure, humor, and frivolity in shaping LGBT lives and activism. The book explores antics such as camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap actions, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades alongside more familiar forms of "legitimate theater." Against queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a national agenda that urges homosexuals to renounce pleasure if they want to be taken seriously by mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political value for LGBT activism.

 

 

 

Sounding Like a No-No by Francesca T. Royster traces a rebellious spirit in post–civil rights black music by focusing on a range of offbeat, eccentric, queer, or slippery performances by leading musicians influenced by the cultural changes brought about by the civil rights, black nationalist, feminist, and LGBTQ movements, who through reinvention created a repertoire of performances that have left a lasting mark on popular music. The book's perspective on music as a form of black corporeality and identity, creativity, and political engagement will appeal to those in African American studies, popular music studies, queer theory, and black performance studies; general readers will welcome its engaging, accessible, and sometimes playful writing style, including elements of memoir.

 

 

Over the Rainbow , edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, is the first collection of essays dedicated to LGBTQ issues in children's literature. Bringing together significant essays and introducing new work, Over the Rainbow is intended to serve both as a scholarly reference and as a textbook for students of children's studies; gender/queer studies; and related disciplines such as English, history, sociology, and education. The editors showcase important essays on the subject of LGBTQ children's and young adult literature—including Harriet the Spy, Rainbow Boys, Little Women, the Harry Potter series , and A Separate Peace —while providing a provisional history of both the literature and the scholarship and examining the field's origins, current status, and possible future orientations.

 

To make sure anyone who is interested can learn more about the significance of LGBT issues, and to celebrate LGBT Pride Month, we have created a discount code on our LGBT titles . Check them out the online, and save 30% during checkout by using the code UMCELEBRATE16 at press.umich.edu .