Reading list

Anti-capitalist Queer Liberation: A Reading List

The revolutions of the queer future beckon!

Verso Books20 June 2023

Marchers holding a banner that reads "Queer Liberation Not Rainbow Capitalism" during Dublin Pride 2016

As corporations pull their Pride merch and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation mounts, it is more clear than ever that we need anticapitalist queer liberation over rainbow capitalism!

Featuring a brilliant introduction to trans politics, a conversation with a black trans revolutionary, and an alternative history of homosexuality, our hope is that these books can help us bring Pride Month back to its radical roots.

Plus, on the fourth episode of The Verso Podcast, Ben Miller and Amardeep Singh Dhillon join Eleanor Penny for a deep dive on the historical construction and ordering of sexualities into the categories we are familiar with today — listen here!

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Further Reading:

Queer as Folk, The New Labour project, and Sexual Modernity

Queer Nation Manifesto: Queers Read This (1990)

Miss Major Speaks
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...
Bad Gays
Too many popular histories seek to establish heroes, pioneers and martyrs but as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and/or dastardly deeds have ...
The Transgender Issue
In this brilliant introduction to trans politics, journalist Shon Faye gives an incisive overview of systemic transphobia and argues that the struggle for trans rights is necessary to any struggle ...
Bodies Under Siege
Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? Wrong: today's anti-abortion movements is largely financed and planned by far-right extr...
Democracy in the Political Present
‘Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.’I...
Deadly and Slick
If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded ...
Glitch Feminism
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...
Females
“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...
Burn It Down!
Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to acti...
Trans

Trans

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to ...
Revolting Prostitutes
How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...
Edward Carpenter
The gay socialist writer Edward Carpenter had an extraordinary impact on the cultural and political landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mystic advocate of, among other...
American Homo
American Homo offers a sweeping interpretation of the political, cultural and economic struggles of lesbian, gay and bisexual people to reveal how sexual minorities have challenged and changed Amer...
Come Together
Come Together tells the incredible story of the emerging radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front, providing a vivid history of the movement, as well as the new ideas and practices it gave rise to ac...
Pink Triangles
Though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, between the personal and the political, vary across this spectacularly wide ranging collection, each essay shares two fund...
Homosexuality
After the leading organizations of radical sexual politics – the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Marxist Group – imploded or dissolved, the Gay Left Collective formed a research group to make sens...
Sexuality and Class Struggle
This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the au...
Straight Sex
Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of femi...
Pink Triangles
Though the interpretations of the interplay between sexism and capitalism, between the personal and the political, vary across this spectacularly wide ranging collection, each essay shares two fund...
Sexuality and Class Struggle
This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the au...
The Pope Is Not Gay!

The Pope Is Not Gay!

The Pope is Not Gay! is an irreverent history of homophobic and sexist obscurantism in the Holy Roman Church and an endoscopic examination of its greatest contemporary advocate, Pope Benedict XVI. ...

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