Queer: A Graphic History

Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel.From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.Along the way we look at key landmarks which shift our perspective of what's 'normal' - Alfred Kinsey's view of sexuality as a spectrum, Judith Butler's view of gendered behaviour as a performance, the play Wicked, or moments in Casino Royale when we're invited to view James Bond with the kind of desiring gaze usually directed at female bodies in mainstream media.Presented in a brilliantly which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage.-Transgender evangelist Jemima Wilkinson, in the early 1800s, changed her name to ''Publick Universal Friend,'' refused to use pronouns, fought for gender equality, and led her own congregation in upstate New York.- In the mid-19th century, internationally famous Shakespearean actor Charlotte Cushman led an openly lesbian life, including a well-publicized ''female marriage.''- in the late 1920s, Augustus Granville Dill was fired by W. E. B. Du Bois from the NAACP's magazine the Crisis after being arrested for a homosexual encounter.Informative and empowering, this engrossing and revelatory treatise emphasizes that there is no American history without queer history.