# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In Pearson’s recent Plotting Ahead series, Deputy Headteacher, author and coach, Bennie Kara discussed the term “usualising”, a concept that was coined by the prominent LGBT+ activist Dr Sue Sanders – founder of Schools OUT and LGBT+ History Month – as a replacement for the word “normalising.” After all, to normalise something implies that any alternatives to this are somehow abnormal – sustaining a sense of irreconcilable difference, otherness and exclusivity.

In this blog, we take a look at how diversity can be usualised in the teaching of English specifically, to help create inclusive learning environments that feel relatable to all learners. These tips have been brought together from expert speakers in Pearson’s Plotting Ahead series, which was first broadcast in December 2021. Watch the events and discover more on our YouTube channel.

1. Consider what language is being used in the classroom, as well as within literature

Words – and the way they are used – can carry a great deal of weight and power. When referring to authors and characters, pay attention to how you, learners, and others, are describing them. Do you talk about “a disabled person,” for example, or “a person with a disability”? While one label pigeonholes, the other recognises that someone’s ability level is not the whole picture. When it comes to studying set texts, take a look at how writers describe themselves and others, consider what the impact of this is, and encourage further linguistic-based discussions within your classroom.

2. Start conversations with learners around WHY set texts have been chosen

In her talk around helping senior leadership teams embed diversity, Bennie emphasises the importance of including learners on a practical level. Take time with your students to consider how and why your school’s curriculum choices have been made, who might be missing, and how this might impact on their view of the world outside school. Together you can explore the mechanisms behind the mainstream.

3. Experiment with parallel and paired stories

You don’t need to throw out the texts you have been teaching in order to better usualise diversity. Bennie champions the use of parallel and paired stories, which can counterbalance the more traditional canon you might be working with. For example, alongside teaching Of Mice and Men you might introduce the poetry of Langston Hughes, thus counteracting negative portrayals of people of colour, and making space for multicultural perspectives.

4. Don't miss the margins

In the words of Plotting Ahead speaker James Galpin, a chartered Developmental Psychologist and Education Officer at leading charity, nasen (National Association for Sepcial Educational Needs), it’s crucial to keep in mind that designing for the average, when preparing a curriculum, is in fact “designing for nobody.” Alternatively, as James puts it, “if we design for the margins, we're going to capture everybody within that.” Consider which groups and people are in the margins – both within the texts you teach, and in your classroom – and how you can find ways to bring them on to the page.

5. Reflect your local community, and the community in your school

34.4% of UK students today are not white British – a proportion that is higher in the school population than the UK population as a whole. Yet, as described by Velda Elliott in Pearson’s Plotting Ahead: Lit in Colour discussion, fewer than 1% of English literature candidates in 2019 answered a question on a novel by a writer of colour. Expose your learners to multiple texts from diverse authors and backgrounds, away from the “dead white male” canon; and find texts that represent the community in which your students learn and live. At the same time…

6. Be mindful of creating hierarchies around certain works and representations

Ask yourself: which work am I teaching as core texts? Which am I recommending for further reading? Am I placing greater importance on one form of learning than the other? Bennie recommends reflecting on what you communicate to your learners as having value. The process may well be subconscious, and yet can speak volumes about how you usualise certain people and cultures in your lessons.

7. Avoid tokenism

In discussing the bigger picture of diversity, Daniel Tomlinson-Gray – Director and Co-founder of LGBTed – emphasises the importance of avoiding tokenistic approaches to literature. In the teaching of Carol Ann Duffy’s work, for instance, are you mentioning that the writer is a lesbian (tokenism), or are you exploring the context of her wider work, of diverse relationships, of her experience (usualisation)?

8. Use the power of your lived experience – and spot the gaps

Your own background will naturally influence how you teach the English curriculum, and what you convey, so take time to focus on your own biases and experiences, as well as influencing those of your learners. Are there gaps in your knowledge? Do you feel discomfort in approaching certain topics? How can you better serve your learners to better understand the wide world around them?

9. Make the most of existing school structures to make an impact

While teachers all have responsibilities as individual adults, it’s important to recognise that you are not alone, or working in a vacuum – after all, that is a lot of weight to carry. As Bennie puts it, “If you are thinking of adapting your curriculum to include more diverse content, it's really important that the discussion takes place at school level… If the school, or the multi-academy trusts that you're in, have an agenda around diversity, that's the most effective way to meaningfully make change happen.”

10. Never forget the bigger picture

Teaching diversity through English literature takes students well beyond their exams. By properly usualising diversity, you set them up to be better connected as adults; more engaged, aware, community-focused members of their society. Zahara Chowdhury, a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) lead, puts it this way: “DEI is looking at diverse texts, whether that be non-fiction, fiction… [and] can really help subliminally sometimes increase a sense of empathy for students and staff, which then prepares them for the diverse workplace, inclusive, professional cultures and the global context, which every student (and teacher) is now a part of.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 tips on how to usualise diversity in the English curriculum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this blog, we take a look at how diversity can be usualised in the teaching of English specifically, to help create inclusive learning environments that feel relatable to all learners.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It is undeniably a time for change. The coronavirus pandemic has - rather than being the "great leveller" it was first hailed to be - highlighted racial inequality in our society.

The death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots and marches worldwide have underlined the extent of racial oppression and disparity that prevails in the developed world.

So, what can we, as educators, do from our classrooms?

For one, we can no longer sit back in the UK thinking that we are doing enough to combat discrimination. It is our moral duty to continually fight against pervasive, implicit discrimination, regardless of our own backgrounds.

We must make sure that, whatever hateful views and fake news our students may be confronted with outside the walls of school, we give them the tools to talk about and challenge discrimination. That is why I am calling on myself, and you, to redouble and recentre these efforts. Here's how.

1. Sign, share and speak out

The GCSE English Literature text list reads like a cemetery for old white men.

Signing petitions - such as this one started by Molly Crossley, to bring two challenging and engaging texts explicitly about race into the English curriculum - is a start. (And sign these history petitions too, on teaching Black British history and British colonialism.)

Further this work by writing to your local MP and education secretary Gavin Williamson about the need for change in our curriculum. Share on your social media and speak out against a whitewashed curriculum.

2. Interrogate your sources

Be conscious of the writers you share with your students. Do any of them have problematic pasts, or does their writing extend harmful stereotypes? How can you invite discussion about this with students, without falling back to the lazy response of "It was like that in the olden days"?

How, for example, can you use the depiction of Bertha Mason in GCSE text Jane Eyre to engage students in thinking about colonialism, not just for AO3, but as a springboard for discussions of racism's intersection with fear, gender and imperialism?

3. Talk explicitly about diversity

Look at writers' disparate backgrounds with students to explore individual experience in a way that isn't just ticking the "context" box of the mark scheme.

How might their experience mirror or differ from your own? What cultures have formed their writing? What power dynamics were at play?

Chances to talk about Windrush, the British Raj and 20th-century immigration mean chances to talk about nuanced experiences and foster a spirit of compassion, empathy and justice in the next generation.

4. Put in the work to unearth buried voices

We need to bring diverse voices to the fore and redress the balance. If we only ever feed our students one type of voice, then of course some will come to believe those are the only legitimate voices.

We must model diversity of reading not just to ensure all students, regardless of gender or race, are encouraged to speak up and write, but also to show that it is essential in our modern world to listen to and engage with people of all backgrounds to become a rounded global citizen.

I'm currently writing a Year 9 non-fiction unit to prepare students for GCSE English language and attempting to look for other voices than those of white male writers, which are not always easy to source due to historic bias - especially finding diverse writers to fulfil the 19th-century/early 20th-century requirement. But we must do the work. We must show our students that those voices have always been there, they have just been covered up for a long, long time.

5. Educate yourself

Read widely, find and engage with diverse voices outside your normal sphere, and thus model curiosity over prejudice.

It is our moral obligation to educate against hate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 ways to tackle English Literature's lack of diversity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is undeniably a time for change. The coronavirus pandemic has - rather than being the "great leveller" it was first hailed to be - highlighted racial inequality in our society. The death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots and marches worldwide have underlined the extent of racial oppression and disparity that prevails in the developed world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lit in Colour | Supporting inclusive reading in schools

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's vital that the books we read in our formative years reflect the rich diversity of the society we live in. That's why we at Penguin have joined forces with The Runnymede Trust to explore how to support schools to make the teaching and learning of English literature more inclusive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mapping a more diverse English curriculum - Collins | Freedom to Teach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Quite rightly, schools are taking steps to ensure that their English curriculums are more representative of the diverse country that … Continued

# data[].attributes.headline
The Reading List Project - Jennifer Webb

# data[].attributes.subject
The Reading List Project - Jennifer Webb

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
English lessons for Key Stage 3 students - Oak National Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Free online English lessons for Key Stage 3 students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SHILPA DARBAR, HEAD OF HISTORY, ST ALBANS HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, UK

ALEXANDRA GREENFIELD, HEAD OF ENGLISH, ST ALBANS HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, UK

The selection of texts in English and case studies in history is crucial both in terms of how students respond to and engage with these subjects, and in creating what Victoria Elliott defines as ‘disciplinary powerful knowledge’ (2021, p. 8): the texts, sources and voices that we choose to include in our curriculums create a culture that can elevate certain values and belief systems, often at the expense of others. In their study of students aged 12 to 14, Harris and Reynolds found that ‘although many students enjoy history, they fail to fully understand its value… [Some children,] especially those from minority ethnic backgrounds, feel a lack of personal connection to the past, as they do not see themselves in the history they are taught.’ (2014, p. 46) Similarly, Barton and Levstik (2004) argue that identification is integral to the rationale for studying history; they illustrate that students need to identify with the past, at a personal, family or national level. Yet in our experience, history in UK schools has been more about identifying with a national story of progress and achievements. Likewise, in September 2020, Teach First surveyed to what extent black literature was being incorporated into the GCSE English curriculum. Their report found that ‘the biggest exam board, accounting for almost 80% of GCSE English literature entries, does not feature a single book by a Black author, and just two books by ethnic minority authors’ (2020, p. 6). Furthermore, a 2018 report by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education found that only four per cent of children’s books published in 2017 featured a minority ethnic character and, additionally, only one per cent of those characters could be considered the main character (2018). Such findings suggest the potential for many English curriculums, like history, to exclude or entirely ignore the experiences of those students studying that very curriculum.

In order to achieve and, crucially, sustain any meaningful change when creating a diverse curriculum, it is important to have a clear pathway – one that is coherent, joined up and embedded in the culture of the department and school. Creating a diverse, challenging curriculum is important for introducing all students to a wealth of perspectives, experiences and cultures as well as in terms of representation. It was clear to us that our curriculums were no longer reflecting the students in our classrooms, which was confirmed by the data acquired from our school admissions department. Our school is an all-girls, independent secondary school with a diverse student body. We have a slightly higher than average proportion of students from minority ethnic backgrounds when comparing to the Independent Schools Council’s 2019 census, which found that 33.8 per cent of pupils who attended independent schools in the UK came from minority ethnic backgrounds.

The steps outlined below demonstrate how we approached a curriculum review in history and English; however, the process is transferable across subjects.

Step 1: Audit the current offer

Before implementing any new change, it is essential to thoroughly audit what is already in place. This not only ensures that positive elements are retained, but also enables an open and hopefully honest conversation with the whole department about why we teach what we do. Having established an accurate understanding of the demographic of our students, we used this to ensure that our new curriculum achieved the personal connections we desired. Given that we have most freedom in curriculum design at Key Stage 3, we began by critically evaluating what topics, case studies and texts we currently taught and what cumulative narrative was created through the teaching of those. Using Paul Washington-Miller’s definition of an inclusive curriculum as one ‘which provides all students regardless of background and immutable characteristics with an equal opportunity to achieve the learning outcomes of their programme’ (Washington-Miller and Maharasingam, 2020), we questioned to what extent our Key Stage 3 curriculum achieved this. We were mindful of the potential danger of making changes as a tokenistic gesture; our route to avoid this was to create a multidirectional narrative that embedded diversity The recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ... More rather than ‘tacked it on’ (Dennis, 2016).

Step 2: Establish shared goals

In both departments, we knew that a clear rationale and set of outcomes was essential from the outset. As such, open discussion and agreeing shared goals and a vision for the curriculum with our departments formed the bedrock of our path to change; in our departments, we created lists of non-negotiables, desirables and absolute nots, cross-referencing this list with the findings of the audit to identify the gaps. This gave us a structure for what was needed next. We knew that we wanted to create what Bennie Kara calls a ‘culturally connected curriculum’ as ‘a far better way to promote diversity’ than just including content relating to minority ethnic experiences ‘with no other purpose than to pay lip service to representation’ (2021, pp. 46–47). Therefore, we knew that a tokenistic inclusion An approach where a school aims to ensure that all children ... More of diversity was not only misplaced in terms of its pedagogical value but it actually had the potential to further the ‘othering’ of these narratives and, by extension, the students in our classrooms.

Step 3: Design alternatives

Based on these discussions, we moved to design alternative curriculum models. It was essential that the whole department in both subjects were a part of this and, as such, models were discussed and refined before reaching a consensus.

In English we were driven by a desire to ensure that our curriculum was led by an aggregation of skills and knowledge, rather than text choice; in our minds, the texts needed to remain the vehicle rather than the driver. Our three principles when choosing high-quality texts were that: 1) they were the best placed to enable students to learn and practise the chosen core skill, 2) they were accessible to the class and year group, and 3) students heard and saw themselves in the literature. Putting these principles into practice, our Year 9 Term 1 unit teaches Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet concurrently with Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses, enabling students to appreciate the structure of tragedy across genres. This exemplifies the development of a multidirectional narrative in English through which students can appreciate the ways in which texts ‘talk’ to one another, creating a tapestry of global literary heritage.

In history, we wanted the Key Stage 3 offer to be a coherent global history across the three years and for students to clearly see the importance of chronology and themes over time, as well as keeping an enquiry question-based approach. Figure 1 shows how we implement this. The guiding principle was to establish a multidirectional memory of history, using diverse examples and case studies to enrich what is taught consistently throughout the three years. For example, in our study of the medieval world, we take the students on a journey of experiences and practices in Britain, Europe and then the wider world. With the topics established, we turned to plan our assessments. We ensured that all narratives were assessed like for like, so that the diverse stories did not become an appendage and were given the same level of importance and gravitas throughout the year (The Black Curriculum, 2020).

Figure 1: History Key Stage 3 curriculum structure

| Term 1: Power, authority and people (with a GB focus) | Term 2: Ideas and influences that shaped the world | Term 3: Depth studies and individual exploration

Year 7:
Medieval and early modern –

c1000–1600

Why have people made Britain their home?

How did wider influences from around the world shape modern Europe?

How did empires develop around the world?

Year 8:
Early modern

c1600–1900

How was power challenged in this period in Great Britain?

What was the experience and impact of expansion and exploitation around the world?

How have women shaped the world we live in today?

Year 9:
Modern world

1900–2020

How did imperial rivalries for global power and influence develop in the modern world?

How and why did dictatorships emerge across the world in the 20th century?

How has the fight for freedom and equality progressed in the 21st century?

Step 4: Implement with regular review

The success of any new change implementation requires regular and honest reviewing with all stakeholders. For us, this meant gathering feedback from both staff and students. Firstly, through regular meetings with staff, we were able to assess whether the new structure was working practically in the classroom. Exclusively, the feedback was positive, largely due to the collaborative approach adopted throughout the process. Teachers were receptive to and fully engaged in the shaping of the schemes of work and specific lesson resources, which encouraged ownership of the changes.

Likewise, we invited the students to feed back on their experience of the content; this allowed us to check that we had truly embedded the multidirectional approach we set out to. Pupil voice is invaluable as part an ongoing review of our Key Stage 3 offers. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure personal connection to their learning, so an annual survey will allow us to gauge the extent to which this has been achieved. Pupils and parents commented on how much they were enjoying the reformed curriculum; indeed, in history, Year 7s and 8s talked with excitement about looking forward to the upcoming new diverse content in Year 9.

Conclusion

Rather than becoming static, the curriculum should acknowledge and respond to the realities of the world in which our students live. This is particularly important for the subjects of history and English, which invite us, as both teachers and students, to question what exactly has made us who and what we are. However, the possibilities for embedding meaningful multidirectional narratives across all subjects present an exciting opportunity. Based on our experience, middle leaders should lead such change with confidence that their departments will be supportive of this need to make bold and necessary changes.

Alexandra is currently exploring the impact of diversifying the English curriculum as part of her CTeach accreditation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Multidirectional narratives: Diversifying the English and history curriculums : My College

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SHILPA DARBAR, HEAD OF HISTORY, ST ALBANS HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, UK ALEXANDRA GREENFIELD, HEAD OF ENGLISH, ST ALBANS HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, UK The selection of texts in English and case studies in history is crucial both in terms of how students respond to and engage with these subjects, and in cre…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the fourth Reflecting Realities report and it was published in November 2021.

The Reflecting Realities report, identifies and evaluates representation within picture books, fiction and non-fiction for ages 3-11 and provides a benchmark to track and understand progress and a toolkit to support both producers and consumers of children's literature to be more critically reflective in the move towards a more inclusive future. This report looks at the children's literature published in the UK in the 2020 calendar year.

The report's key points:

CLPE have received funding from Paul Hamlyn Foundation to deliver a 3 year project (which started in October 2021) working with 10 schools, 300 children and charting their progress - bringing quality representative literature into the classroom. Schools were recruited via the Wandle Hub. Creative partners for this year: Ken Wilson-Max, Valerie Bloom and Joseph Coelho;

Read our blog Reflecting Realities, the methodology behind the report by Farrah Serroukh and Louise Johns-Shepherd
Read our other blogs on Reflecting Realities
Illustrations © and reproduced with his kind permission.

Booklet design: Ben Cotterill

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CLPE Reflecting Realities - Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children's Literature (November 2021) | Centre for Literacy in Primary Education

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the fourth Reflecting Realities report and it was published in November 2021. The Reflecting Realities report, identifies and evaluates representation within picture books, fiction and non-fiction for ages 3-11 and provides a benchmark to track and understand progress and a toolkit to support both producers and consumers of children's literature to be more critically reflective in the move towards a more inclusive future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Decolonising and Diversifying English Literature

# data[].attributes.headline
Decolonising and diversifying English Literature 

# data[].attributes.subject
Decolonising and diversifying English Literature 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To begin, I must emphasise the difference between diversity and decolonisation. That diversity without decolonisation cannot bring about real equality and inclusion in a university.

Diversifying the English Literature course would mean having a range of texts on reading lists, from writers of various cultures, religions, genders, sexualities, socio-economic backgrounds and having a range of academic teaching staff.
The decolonisation of English Literature has many meanings:

Firstly, it means to understand, as Edward Said highlights, that literature is intertwined with politics and culture , even actively pursuing inherent political ideologies and policies within its works.

It means to interrogate the relationship between the location and identity of the writer, what they write and how they write about it.

It means to unmask the colonial context and influence of many canonical works and literary theories.

Once acknowledging this relationship between the identity and location of a writer and their work, it means then to engage with more perspectives of that work, not just taking sources from the West and establishing a Eurocentric view of that work but diversifying the sources we engage with in our scholarship i.e. listening to marginalised voices.

It also demands that texts written by and about minorities should not be treated as peripheral , as an aside.

As is demonstrated in the definition of decolonising, diversity is essential to decolonise the curriculum in English Literature. However, the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (SALC) in the University of Manchester holds a dominantly white body of academic staff. As a student of English Literature with Creative Writing, I am yet to be taught by someone of colour. Many students go through the total three years of their degree in SALC without encountering an academic staff of colour. What this means is that, when Course Directors are putting courses together, comprising modules and reading lists, they are doing so without the voices of Black and Minority Ethnic scholars.

A common defence against decolonising and diversifying English Literature is that it is supposed to be "English" Literature i.e. it is supposedto be the works of white and English writers and theorists. However, as Priyamvada Gopal, a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, points out, 'Black and Asian people have a history in Britain that stretches back nearly 500 years, and these communities contributed significantly to its wealth and heritage.' She goes on to say, 'the very idea of what it meant to be "white" or "English" relied on the presence of those... who could be marked as neither.' So, by not decolonising the curriculum, and by not heeding Black and Asian voices, students do not receive a holistic understanding of English Literature and how it came to be; decolonising the curriculum is simply 'to expand the imagination of students of literature' as Arundhati Roy writes.

But what exactly is "English" Literature? As the British Empire expanded and its syllabus was implemented in countries across the world, many formally colonised countries became dominantly English-speaking. Toni Morrison writes that in the literature produced in the colonising country, However, the Empire started writing back. The colonised and enslaved wrote back, revealing truths of Empire and imperialism that cannot be accessed in European works. And so, to not listen to these voices is to 'one could write about them [minority, African, 'Other' cultures] but there was never any danger of their "writing back". Just as one could speak to them without fear of their "talking back". One could even observe them, hold them in prolonged gaze, without encountering the risk of being observed, viewed or judged in return.' literature, to 'put it under house arrest' as Morrison argues. 'lobotomise'

If English as a subject has any value, it is because it puts into question the very notion of "English" itself. Is it really possible, in this post-colonial era to say who and what is or is not English? There is no one, clear standard definition of what English Literature is.

If it is too difficult, too broad to capture what English Literature is in a single definition, because its value transcends the borders of a single country and a single people, how is it then that in universities and institutions it is boxed up, its wealth and richness tightly sealed and limited to the works of a few?

How is it that defenders of this Euro-centric boxed-up version of English Literature are given the weapons they need to subdue its true richness, mask its shortcomings?

Everything comes back to the people at heart of it, to the fact that a dominantly white body of academic staff co-ordinate the English Literature course without the voices of black and brown scholars. The fundamental action that must take place to both decolonise and diversify English Literature is to eradicate the unjustified and baseless resistance towards allowing black and brown scholars to participate in the decisions of delivering an English Literature course and to teach it .

The only way to move forward, to diversify and decolonise the curriculum, is to open the door for black and brown writers and scholars to sit in the judging panels, in the meetings where the canon is quickly defended, in the meetings where reading lists and English Literature courses are construed, in positions and posts where black and brown scholars are able to pursue research.

And this is not to be done out of pity, or to be politically correct, butto acknowledge that it is necessary to do so to gain a greater, fuller and broader understanding of English Literature. To accept that the voices and works of formally colonised cultures are necessary to understand how English Literature has developed and evolved. To understand that that these same assumptions informed and justified the expansion of colonial rule in Asia, Africa and the Middle East were also advocated quietly over hundreds of years of literature, were responded to by the colonised through literature. 'assumptions regarding racial and civilizational hierarchy informed a lot of thinking of how the world worked, what was worth studying and how it should be studied' -

By not decolonising the curriculum, the university is perpetuating a culture of ignorance and ensuring the next academics inherit this ignorance.

Only recently have black and brown and minority ethnic writers begun to receive prestigious writing awards and this is because judging panels are largely white; the canon is comprised of the works of white men; notions of quality by which a written piece of work is criticised are the Euro-centric notions of quality of critics who crown these canonical white works; this notion of quality seeps into universities, into lectures and seminars, maintaining the high pedestal upon which this canon is revered.

How then, can we expect such literary scholars who hold the works of minority cultures and marginalised voices with such little regard to diversify and decolonise literature, to strip down the reverence of "traditional" texts?

Actions for SALC

End the ethnicity pay gap.

Create and establish programmes and initiatives to encourage and employ more academic staff that are Black, Asian, from ethnic minorities.

Diversify reading lists - diversify the texts that are studied on a module and diversify the secondary critical material that is used in teaching to ensure a complete perspective on a course - not just a Euro-centric perspective.

In lectures, seminars and tutorials, academic staff must unmask any colonial context and influence on what is being studied.

Establish training programmes to train academic staff on how to approach and teach colonial contexts in a way that does not lead to further exclusion or alienation of black and brown students and students from minority ethnic backgrounds.
Written by Saaleha Iqbal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decolonising and Diversifying English Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What is taught cannot truly be diversified or decolonised if those teaching are not diversified To begin, I must emphasise the difference between diversity and decolonisation. That diversity without decolonisation cannot bring about real equality and inclusion in a university. Diversifying the English Literature course would mean having a range of texts on reading lists,...

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Decolonising the Canon of English Literature -

# data[].attributes.headline
Examining the Canon - Year 12 perspective 

# data[].attributes.subject
Examining the Canon - Year 12 perspective 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If the purpose of literature is to represent the culture and tradition of a language or a people, can we really profess ourselves to be true students of literature when seemingly only focusing on a single culture and its peoples?

Such has been the question of a group of students from Cambridge University these past few weeks; there has been a cry from undergraduates to "decolonise" their English Literature syllabus by taking in more black and minority ethnic writers, and bringing more expansive post-colonial thought into the curriculum.

A kindred instance occurred at Yale University in May of last year, where there was widespread criticism of the requirements to graduate as a Yale English major. As it stands, a student is able to fulfil the requirements of the revered course without studying the literature of a single woman or minority writer.

However, as always after a plea for diversity, there comes the inevitable "But...(insert the name of any women/minority)!".

And whilst this may be true - and the likes of Austen and the Brontës have themselves a fairly fixed place within the Canon of English Literature - it is simply not good enough; not only are women and minorities few and far between, but they tend to offer what I consider 'one-step diversity'. This being white women, or gay men, or anyone who represents only one shift away from the 'norm' of the straight, white cis-gender men. Where are the black female trans writers, and why aren't they a key part of our education?

There is an urgent need to address the homogeny of the curriculum within many universities and schools, along with the canon itself. The reason for this is not just diversity for diversity's sake (though this has many benefits in itself), but because we are narrowing and constricting our understanding of literature and context by ignoring writers simply because they don't have a place in the literary canon.

This does not mean refusing to study Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Frost etc. but simply broadening our conceptualisation of what English Literature is.

As Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a teaching fellow at Churchill College (Cambridge) puts it:
"It is not just about adding texts but about rethinking the whole question of Britishness, Englishness and what they mean in relation to the empire and the post-imperial world... questions of race, gender, sexuality and so on."
We are hampering and inhibiting our own knowledge under the colonial guise of the canon. Surely it should be impossible to study Othello or Jane Eyre without considering the post-colonial context? Or Twelfth Night without a wider multidisciplinary study of gender and sex?

Though it is against the nature of universities to want to politicise their curriculum, this happens by default when the syllabus simply reflects the age-old and continuing social, literary (and political) repression of anyone classified as "other". Hence, cries from Twitter trolls about this being a 'patrolling' of the curriculum to suit and accord to the views of particular women and minority groups are intrinsically hypocritical.

The canon of literature has forever accorded to the politics of the majority, and appeals to change this are no more political than the sexist, racist and colonialist nature of the canon in the first place.

The need to change this system of subtle repression of writers within education must come from both professors/teachers and students alike. Though there are concrete changes which need to be made in terms of legislation of the actual syllabus, as students we have a large part to play.

Read widely and read critically; consider racial and gender context; rewrite and reclaim what you consider "classic". Most importantly, investigate the hidden under-belly of the canon of English literature - the texts that are excluded have just as big a part to play in the shaping of our society as the texts which sit smugly on the exclusive list.
"Let's make our bookshelves reflect the diversity of our streets." - Phil Earle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Decolonising the Canon of English Literature -

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Ava Vakil, Year 12. If the purpose of literature is to represent the culture and tradition of a language or a people, can we really profess ourselves to be true students of literature when seemingly only focusing on a single culture and its peoples?

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Teaching world literature and decolonising the curriculum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How does world literature contribute to the debate on decolonising the curriculum? World literature can put a new spin on the meaning of "decolonising" because of its dual critique of monolingualism and class blindness in contemporary academia. Indeed, world literature means linking the teaching of non-canonical works, including texts in translation, to an incessant critique of global unevenness, class privilege and economic exploitation. Accordingly, world literature can offer precious tools to resist the undervaluing of the humanities today. Without renouncing its oppositional vocation, it can make literary pedagogy inclusive, relevant and empowering.

The idea that literary studies, and the arts and humanities in general, are threatened by chronic underfunding and systematic undervaluing in our currently political and economic climate is by now well versed. World literature, as field of study and theoretical paradigm, has recently been brought into discussions around the validity and purpose of English studies in a world that is supposedly fully globalised and in an academic and political environment that, with its emphasis on profitability and value-for-money above all else, is increasingly hostile to the arts and humanities. In our view, a world literature rooted in cultural materialist theory offers a valuable and timely contribution to the current need and desire for global perspectives in literary and cultural studies, and has the potential to do so without compromising on the needed critique of our current political and social order, including the important task of decolonising the curriculum.

In this post we will focus on the challenges and possibilities of teaching world literature as part of an English studies programme. These reflections are based on our experience of teaching world literature at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). Our third-year 'World Literature' module aims to reframe the study of English by drawing on a concept of world literature developed by literary critics such as Franco Moretti, and the Warwick Research Collective. This particular concept of world literature should not be seen as a new canon: rather, world literature is a system, a way of embedding the study of literature in the complex economic realities of the twenty-first century. The questions we raise in the module can be aligned with the general aim of decolonising the curriculum, as we propose international authors from minority and non-privileged backgrounds. However, world literature can put a new spin on the debate and help reimagine what we mean when we talk about "decolonising" the study of literature.
Translation: avoidable or necessary?
In our experience, there is a deep suspicion within English studies around teaching texts in translation, underpinned by an assumption that something will always be lost in translation. As multilingual academics, we, of course, appreciate the satisfaction of working with literature across several different languages. However, this is not always an option available to our primarily monolingual students. In fact, one of the problems with debates discouraging the use of literary texts in translation, is that they often fail to adequately account for the complex politics of language in spaces where majority languages are not spoken. Certainly, in the Nordic region, which is the focus of the research of one of us, translation is unavoidable in the production and circulation of literature because the national literary canons are, quite simply, smaller, and often spill over national borders. This blurring of national canonical boundaries is itself a reflection of the region's colonial history, including, for instance, the fact that Danish was the official language of the Faroe Islands until 1948 and Greenland until 2009. In both countries the revival of national languages was central to national independence movements, which necessarily involved translating foreign works of literature into Faroese and Greenlandic.

It is, then, a reflection of continued cultural hegemony of English, which is itself, of course, the result first of British and now American imperialism, that translated texts play such a small part in our literary culture. When teaching world literature to our students at LJMU, we found that exposing students to texts in translation invited them to reflect on the parameters of their subject by encouraging debate about what is included and excluded in the broad category of English Literature, and that discussions about the importance of decolonising the curriculum followed. If we want a curriculum that is truly decolonised and global in scope, reading in translation is therefore necessary, but we need to teach students how to approach translated texts, for they often lack the confidence to read and write about texts that deal with non-Anglophone cultures.
Decolonisation: ideology or critique?
Teaching translated works is a most productive and valuable starting point for linking world literature to the politics of decolonising the curriculum. It shows that ideas and narratives expressed in other languages can be highly translatable and relevant to students in the UK. Furthermore, our experience of teaching non-canonical texts, including works in translation, in a non-Russell Group, ex-polytechnic university can suggest many issues that headlines about decolonising English at Oxbridge have so far dramatically overshadowed. Indeed, the momentum of decolonising the curriculum should not be exhausted by the agenda of cultural diversity. Rather, it should challenge systemic inequality, shifting the focus from the individual and singular towards a more sustained engagement with the structural and the social. In contrast to other ways of studying English, world literature emphasises how texts are entangled in a global supply chain that enables the circulation of capital and commodities. It reveals the dark backstage of oppression of workers, communities and environments that makes our consumer economy possible. Against facile celebrations of multicultural tolerance or success stories of elite migrants, world literature involves an unrelenting focus on the exploitation, injustice and unevenness at the heart of our globalising world. Most centrally, teaching world literature in an ex-polytechnic can illuminate how the question of social class cannot be overlooked in attempts at contesting privilege and hierarchy. Thus, our current syllabus includes a study of NourbeSe Philip's Zong! (2008). In our module, we propose this text within a wider reflection on Liverpool and its place in a global shipping industry, linking it to pressing concerns about slavery and finance capital. In a 'World Literature' module, teaching about the legacy of the 1781 Zong massacre can be a way of discussing the politics of representation in relation to the commodification of human bodies and the exploitation of workers. It is also a way to remap the North-West of England in the wider frame of global capitalism and to find resonances across generations of workers from around the globe.

Teaching world literature to students from diverse and non-privileged backgrounds has taught us to make our curriculum relevant and empowering, mirroring the civic mission and the values of equality and inclusivity of our institution. In much the same way in which the fight for gender equality needs to contest the rise of neoliberal, corporate feminisms, so world literature needs to expand our consciousness about privilege. In an era of student debt, anxieties about job security and the growth of an academic precariat, world literature is the best way to reintroduce questions about cultural production, institutional critique, and social unevenness.

World literature can give the idea of "decolonising the curriculum" a new, revitalising tone: instead of mere politics of recognition and admittance, entry into the mainstream or diversification, decolonising should equal an incessant work of critique and the unlearning of academic race and class privilege. Decolonising should involve putting economic inequality and class domination back into the agenda. In an era of planned undermining of the humanities, world literature prepares us for strategies of resistance and opposition that are urgently needed to protect the future of our discipline and of our communities.

[Christinna Hazzard is sessional lecturer in the Humanities at Liverpool John Moores University. She has recently had a chapter on "Nordic Noir and the Postcolonial North" published in Noir in the North (2020) and is preparing a monograph proposal for her doctoral thesis titled Semi-Periphery Realism: Nation and Form on the Borders of Europe.]

[Filippo Menozzi is lecturer in world literature at Liverpool John Moores University, where he is also director of the MA English Literature. He is the author of Postcolonial Custodianship (2014) and World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (2020), and editor of a special issue of New Formations on Rosa Luxemburg.]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching world literature and decolonising the curriculum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How does world literature contribute to the debate on decolonising the curriculum? World literature can put a new spin on the meaning of "decolonising" because of its dual critique of monolingualism and class blindness in contemporary academia. Indeed, world literature means linking the teaching of non-canonical works, including texts in translation, to an incessant critique of global unevenness, class privilege and economic exploitation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Important Milestones in LGBTQ Literature | Hachette Book Group | Hachette Book Group

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Important Milestones in LGBTQ Literature | Hachette Book Group | Hachette Book Group

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this piece, we explore the important milestones that have marked the progress of LGBTQ literature. Learn what accomplished authors think about the progress we’ve made here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Top 10 landmarks in gay and lesbian literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Show caption
One of the most beautiful love letters ever written ... Tilda Swinton as Orlando in Sally Potter's 1992 film version

Ask me on another day and it would be other books: Shakespeare's sonnets, Gilgamesh, the Greek Anthology, Sappho, Katherine Philips, Plato, Jean Genet, Ronald Firbank ... So these 10 items are mere suggestions, not commandments.

My favourite working definition is that a gay text is one that is amenable to a gay reading. As simple as that. These categories exist not for their own sake, or for critics', but in the service of the reader - the gay or lesbian reader first of all, but others too.

In books like these, you hope not only to see how people once lived out their same-sex desires and relationships, but to learn from them how we might live differently, today, to our own advantage. Such works open our eyes to fresh possibilities. That's why my new book Homintern is subtitled How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World.

1. The diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1841)
A great treasure of lesbian social history. Lister is a wonderful character, pleased to be thought "gentlemanly" but insulted when someone calls her a mere "fellow". Her courtships of women are all the more fascinating when you reflect that they're from Jane Austen's time. But here people get stomach upsets and venereal diseases. Not to mention hot lesbian action: Lister uses "kiss" to mean a great deal more than kissing. I like to imagine Lister herself striding into one of Austen's balls and distracting the heroine's attention from all the complacent Darcys and Bingleys in the room.

2. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855-1892)
This is the American epic poem its author wanted it to be, befitting the landmass and political system it celebrates. But it also delivers intensely personal lyric poetry about comradeship between men. Its poems about Whitman's nursing of injured soldiers in the American civil war are tremulous with pity and warm affection. Yet even the focused intensity of a love poem like When I heard at the close of the day, clearly speaking of a particular individual, relates outwards to the grander theme of democratic comradeship. Each handclasp represents all handclasps. Eye contact with a stranger, accepted and maintained, represents the warmth of equality. The lanky, relaxed verse, with its long lines and self-perpetuating lists, creates the impression of a society of endless possibilities, where the pursuit of happiness is taken as seriously as life and liberty themselves.

3. Poems by Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)
Cavafy's poetry is about desire and loss. Everything is subject to time, but art can stave off oblivion for a while - for a few centuries, say - until the loving epitaph on a tombstone finally crumbles to dust. Time is not wasted, as long as it has its moments of beauty, moments to be recollected and experienced again through the medium of art. After a brief sexual encounter, lovers part. But later, even many years later, one of them writes a poem fixing their moment in amber. The body may perish but the sculpture remains. The love poem provides a future for the past.

4. Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann(1927)
Lehmann's first novel was enthusiastically received for capturing the mood of the inter-war generation. Judith, its central character, gets involved with her neighbours, a group of young cousins of both sexes. While she is trying to decide which of the boys to fall in love with - without noticing that one of them is having an affair with a male fellow-student at Cambridge - she herself goes up to university, where she has an intense affair with Jennifer. When the dance of relationships eventually peters out, Judith ends up a little older and a lot wiser. She is stronger on her own. Published a year before The Well of Loneliness, this is a far more relaxed account of relationships among a group of privileged young people before and after the first world war. With no axe to grind, it barely distinguishes between hetero and homo.

5. The Well of Loneliness by This was a daring experiment in stretching the remit of the realist novel to include the lives of "inverts", female and male. Hall did not intend it to be dull, of course, but the sheer weight of detail does at times have that effect. This is all to the good: it roots lesbianism as solidly in English country life as a fox hunt or a mansion. But the central character must move abroad to Paris for any sense of a viable place for lesbians in society. What most outraged the readers who eventually managed to get the book banned was its portrayal of women ambulance drivers on the western front as lesbians. An anguished and depressive book, it is still held in high esteem and great warmth by many lesbian women. Justly so.
From gay conspiracy to queer chic: the artists and writers who changed the world
6. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
One of the most beautiful love letters ever written. Addressed to Vita Sackville-West, it originally included photographs of her in both feminine and masculine clothes. Vita is Orlando, a dashing young man in Tudor times, who buckles a few swashes at home and abroad before changing sex and living on to the 1920s. As a man, Orlando courts women, as a woman men - so far so conventional - but as a wo/man, s/he is swaggeringly queer. The book is a jeu d'esprit that Woolf clearly wrote when intoxicated with love. While waiting for the trial of The Well of Loneliness, Una Troubridge helped her lover Radclyffe Hall endure the stress by reading Orlando to her.
Top 10s
7. The Pure and the Impure by Colette (1932)
Colette thought that this would eventually be recognised as her best book. It is a subtle and amiable ramble through the varied ecologies of desire. After an opening scene in an opium parlour, apparently full of same-sex couples of both sexes, its successive topics include: a modern Don Juan, masculine women and their liking for horses, the lesbian poet Renée Vivien, the domestic happiness of the Ladies of Llangollen, Proust's dubious portrayals of lesbians, the social habits of man-loving men ... Eccentric to the point of queerness, it is a book unlike any other, neither memoir nor fiction, neither dissertation nor tract. It deserves a helpful edition with footnotes to keep the reader abreast of the details of Colette's life in Paris.

8. Hemlock and After by A serious comic novel about the limits of liberalism. Its central character Bernard Sands is a married, middle-aged writer who has come to accept that he is gay. Writing in a Dickensian tradition of moral satire, Wilson plunges Sands into one of the most troubling dilemmas of modern liberalism: how to reconcile a social conscience with personal comfort and desire. The book is unusual in not portraying camp gay men negatively. Bernard is standoffish with them, but that is seen as his moral weakness, not theirs.

9. Another Country by One of the greatest American novels of the postwar period, full of passionate rhetoric and fury at social injustice. Reading it is not a comfortable experience. The reader is wrong-footed by what happens at the end of the first section, and indeed never fully recovers from it. At the book's heart is one of the happiest portrayals of a gay male couple that you'll find in any novel before the gay liberation period. Significantly, Baldwin locates their idyll not in the US but in France. Even the apparently happy ending is undercut by a nervousness about US society's capacity to offer the pursuit of happiness - let alone its capture - to everyone.

10. The Twyborn Affair by Eddie Twyborn is born a boy. As Eudoxia, she marries an elderly Greek man. As Eddie, he fights heroically in the first world war before working as an increasingly masculine jackaroo in the remote outback. As Eadith, she runs a brothel in London. As Eddie, at the start of the blitz, he walks out on his previous life ... White's great meditation on gender fluidity and the contingency of desire is both lushly camp and awkward in its campness, as if the author could not quite come to terms with the inflexions of his own gendered vocal chords. Often rather brash, White is paradoxically also a master of the tentative. He sees social manners from the inside of the outsider. Fathers tend to be silent, mothers silencing. Lovemaking is fumbled when it comes to the words, but snatched or worse from the body.

From Walt Whitman to Colette and even Virginia Woolf, these books offer readers a vision of how we might live differently, and better

Passionate rhetoric ... James Baldwin in 1979. Photograph: Ralph Gatti/AFP/Getty Images

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 landmarks in gay and lesbian literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ask me on another day and it would be other books: Shakespeare's sonnets, Gilgamesh, the Greek Anthology, Sappho, Katherine Philips, Plato, Jean Genet, Ronald Firbank ... So these 10 items are mere suggestions, not commandments. My favourite working definition is that a gay text is one that is amenable to a gay reading.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT-Themed Literature: What Queer Literature Can Offer Young Adult Readers - Mollie V. Blackburn, Caroline T. Clark, Emily A. Nemeth, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

This paper retrospectively examines a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT)-themed books discussed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) and ally students and teachers across 3 years of an out-of-school reading group. Through a textual content analysis of a sub-set of these books, we examine what queer literature looks like, identifying qualities it shares, and considering particular resources and possibilities it offers readers that are distinct from the broader category of LGBT-themed literature.

Introduction

For several years, we have argued for making literature with lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning1 (LGBTQQ) characters and themes available to young people in schools. Recognizing that most schools do not yet support these opportunities, we initiated an out-of-school reading group with LGBTQQ and allied youth and their teachers to make this literature accessible to young people and to understand how such discussions might happen and what they might afford readers. Participating in and analyzing the talk that occurred in this book discussion group allowed us to identify and distinguish between LGBT-inclusive and queer discourses and to understand potentially oppressive and liberatory dimensions of each ( Blackburn & Clark, 2011). LGBT-inclusive discourses often reinforce heteronormativity and binary constructions of sex and gender: that is, the social understanding that there are two distinct genders, women and men, that are synonymous with two distinct sexes, female and male, and that the expectation of being a woman (female) is to desire men (males), both emotionally and sexually, and vice versa. Because of this, LGBT-inclusive discourses may provide only a "sentimental education" ( Britzman, 1995, p. 158) to readers, one that insists that gay and lesbian people are just like straight people and thus erases significant differences among people. Alternatively, a queer approach strives to suspend sexual and gender identities rather than underscore them ( Jagose, 1996), interrogating heteronormativity by acknowledging a variety of genders, sexes, and desires, as well as foregrounding the sexual, thereby challenging the notion of what counts as normal among them ( Blackburn & Clark, 2011). Given the understandings of LGBT-inclusive and queer discourses we gleaned in this prior analysis, we determined to look more closely at the texts that were selected and read in this book discussion group to explore what ideological and literary elements ( Galda & Beach, 2001; Stephens, 1992) might further distinguish types of LGBT-themed literature.

The book discussion group, then, provides background for the focus of this analysis of the texts that were read in that group. That group, which included the first two authors, met at a local center serving LGBTQQ youth. Teacher participants came from a local teacher inquiry group committed to combating homophobia in schools through literature ( Blackburn, Clark, Kenney, & Smith, 2010). Youth participants were initially invited by these teachers and often came from their schools' gay-straight alliances (GSAs). Over time, youths directly invited peers, and some participants came from other schools beyond those of the initially invited teachers; moreover, some youths unaffiliated with schools but affiliated with the center also came to the group. Over 3 years of meeting, from October 2006 to July 2009, 32 people participated in the group, 22 youths and 10 adults. Across the 3 years, we met 20 times to discuss 24 texts, most of which were novels. Focal texts were always selected collaboratively. Both youths and adults brought recommendations for readings to the groups. Frequently, someone in the group-youth, adult, or both-had already read a text and thought others might enjoy it. In all cases, however, adults deferred to youth book selections.

It was after the group stopped meeting that we made a deliberate turn away from the voices of the group to look explicitly at texts. More specifically, we conducted a textual content analysis of a subset of the books read in the group. The subset comprised books we now understand to be queer. Through this analysis, we strive to answer the following research questions:

Research Question 1: What does queer literature look like? That is, what qualities do queer books share?

Research Question 2: What particular resources do queer books offer that are distinct from the broader category of literature with LGBT themes?

Analyzing these texts allowed us to understand and name the ideological and textual features of queer literature so that when such texts are read in schools, educators are better equipped to use them to model uses of language and other literary tools to critique and counter beliefs and ideologies ( Galda & Beach, 2001), especially existing invisible ideologies of heterosexism, misogyny, and homophobia ( Martino, 2009; Pascoe, 2007).

Conceptual Framework

To focus our analysis, we first had to identify which of the 24 texts that were read across the 3 years of this book discussion group were queer, a task that was more complicated than we initially imagined. Cart and Jenkins (2006) are, to our knowledge, the only scholars to date who have developed a heuristic of young adult (YA) literature with gay/lesbian/queer content. In their foundational work with respect to gay, lesbian, and queer YA literature, Cart and Jenkins relied on Bishop's (1982) work in which she categorized African American children's literature into social conscience books, melting pot books, and culturally conscious books. Using this as a model, Cart and Jenkins strove to "create a model specific to GLBTQ content in YA fiction using category descriptors that reflect post-Stonewall GLBTE history and experience to describe the evolution of YA literature with GLBTQ content from 1969 through 2004" (p. xix). Thus, they arrived at the following categories: homosexual visibility (HV), gay assimilation (GA), and queer consciousness/community (QC). It is this last category that seemed most likely to inform our effort to identify queer literature. It might even seem that we could just find the books that we had read that were, according to Cart and Jenkins, QC.

Their review, however, did not include all of the texts we shared because some of our texts are outside of the time period they reviewed (1969-2004) and other of our texts are outside of the parameters of what is conventionally considered "young adult." That is, even though our books were selected, read, and discussed by young adults, they were not marketed to young adults. Moreover, upon a closer analysis of the Cart and Jenkins model, we came to understand that they were using queer as an umbrella term to reference LGBTQQ people in the early 21st century. As such, what they categorize as QC is not necessarily what we would categorize as queer, which is, as we say above, less of an underscoring of classifications based on sexual identities and gender expressions, like LGBTQQ, and more of a suspension of such classifications and an interrogation of norms associated with them. Therefore, where a QC book requires that there be more than one or two LGBTQQ character(s) and that those characters support one another in some way, it does not require that a character experiences his or her sexual identity fluidly or that he or she expresses her or his gender in multiple and variable ways, as examples. If a book does the former whether or not it does the latter, Cart and Jenkins would categorize it as QC; and we would agree with this categorization. If, however, a book does the latter whether or not it does the former, we would categorize it as Q. We understand all of these categories as ideological, as we discuss next.

Ideology

From our study of Cart and Jenkins (2006), we learned a significant distinction among their three categories mentioned above: HV, GA, and QC. The three suggest a loose chronology, with HV being of the 1970s and 1980s, GA being of the 1990s, and QC being of the early 21st century. More reliable, though, is what distinguishes the categories conceptually. In HV literature, a character comes out or is outed as gay or lesbian and this outing is the "dramatic substance" of the story (p. xx). GA literature includes "people who 'just happen to be gay' in the same way that someone 'just happens' to be left-handed or have red hair" (p. xx). QC literature, however, represents "GLBTQ characters in the context of their communities of GLBTQ people and their families of choice" (p. xx). As such, each of these categories is distinguished by ideologies, or "way[s] of viewing the world" ( McCallum, 1999, p. 263) and, in this case, LGBTQQ people in it. Therefore, consider a book in which the only character to come out or be outed as gay lives a lonely life until he or she is killed or kills himself or herself, a storyline not atypical in the early HV literature. Such a book conveys an ideology, or way of viewing the world, in which being gay and out (or outed) is a pretty miserable existence. Even if the author's intent is to conjure pity among straight people rather than fear among gay people, readers understand that being gay in this world comes with dire consequences. According to Stephens (1992), ideologies are inevitably communicated through texts, both explicitly and implicitly. Therefore, for example, literature in the QC category allows readers to view LGBTQQ people in worlds where their identities matter, but rather than these people being isolated, they are connected with others who share these important identities. We recognize these ideological distinctions both within and among texts as significant in coming to understand ways of selecting, reading, and discussing queer texts, which include QC texts. Therefore, next we needed to understand what might ideologically distinguish queer texts. For this, we turned to queer theory.

Queer Concepts

As we state above, queer is not the lumping together of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, although it does pay particular attention to sexual and gender identities such as these ( Jagose, 1996). Rather, it is the suspension of these classifications ( Pinar, 1998). Queer theorists recognize sexual and gender identities as social, multiple, variable, shifting, and fluid; and while they allow for movement among such identity categories ( Britzman, 1997), they advocate for movement outside of these categories as well. By rejecting categories of identity, queer theorists interrogate and disrupt notions of normal, with particular respect to sexuality and gender ( Tierney & Dilley, 1998), but not limited to these identities. It is these two key ideas-that is, understanding sexual and gender identities in complicated ways and valuing disruptions of norms-which we discuss next and focus on throughout this article.

Foundational to understanding sexual and gender identities in complicated ways is the belief that these identities are not essential or even developmental but instead are poststructural. Essentialism "ascribes a fundamental nature or a biological determinism to humans" ( Leistyna, Woodrum, & Sherblom, 1996, p. 336), a view that Leistyna et al. characterize as "monolithic and homogenizing" (pp. 336-337). Still, this view is, according to Sears (1998), the "most common view of sexuality . . . [that is] sexuality as a universal human trait" (p. 83). From an essentialist perspective, identity is understood in singular and stable terms and as essential to one's being. It may take some time for one to recognize and claim it, but an individual's identity is there all along, and it will continue to be there throughout one's life. A developmental perspective is not really a break from an essentialist one as much as it is a complication of it. In both essential and developmental approaches, it is understood that one develops one's identity over time in a mostly linear fashion toward a true identity. What distinguishes the essentialist model from the developmental model is emphasis. When one embraces an essentialist notion of identity, one emphasizes the true, core, inherent identity and glosses over the process of getting to it. When one embraces a developmental model of identity, the reverse is true; that is, one focuses on the processes of coming to an identity, which is assumed but not discussed as fixed. According to Lesko (2001), the "developmental framework [is] often discussed as stages of cognitive, psychosocial, or pubertal growth" (p. 7). The poststructural approach, however, is more complex than either the essentialist or developmental approaches, and, indeed, a rejection of both. Lesko argues, "poststructural interpretations aim to provide alternative understandings and ideas . . . beyond the hierarchical and oppositional" (p. 17). With this notion of identity, there is no assumed true identity. Rather, a person, or here a character, experiences emotional and sexual desires, engages in sexual acts, and performs gender, but these cannot be captured with a single, stable sexual or gender identity. Instead, sexual and gender identities are understood as multiple, variable, and even, at times, conflicting.

The disruption of norms is a key tenet of queer theory. By norms, we mean social norms, which, according to Merriam-Webster, are "standards of proper or acceptable behavior." In the context of queer theory, such standards are at least interrogated and more likely disrupted, focusing specifically on the disruption of sexual and gender norms, such as the binary between heterosexual and homosexual or that between man and woman. This goal and focus are grounded in the understanding of sexual and gender identities as social, multiple, variable, shifting, and fluid and the expectation of movement among and beyond such identity categories ( Britzman, 1997). Queer theorists' disruptions of norms are not limited to sexuality and gender, though. For example, in this study, the disruption of normative notions of families, homes, and time, stood out to us as characteristic of these queer novels.

Understanding queer in this way challenged us to consider whether, in queer literature, characters' sexual and gender identities were represented as stable and essential or as something more complex. It also provoked us to examine whether norms, including those defined by sexual and gender binaries, notions of families, conceptions of homes, and even time, were disrupted.

Literary Elements

Just as queer theory guided our analysis, so too did scholarship on children's and YA literature. We turned to this scholarship not because all of the literature we studied is marketed for children or young adults-it is not, as we mention above-but because it was selected, read, and discussed by yougn adults. The decision to select, read, and discuss literature marketed to adults with young adults and then use scholarship focused on literature marketed for children and young adults to guide our analysis of literature marketed to adults may seem misguided, but it is solidly grounded in Lesko's (2001) conceptualization of adolescence. Lesko rejects the notion that adolescents are "deficient, a little crazy, controlled by hormones," immature, and in transition (p. 189), and therefore incompetent to read books marketed for those older than they are. Instead, she proposes that "growth and change" are not limited to adolescents, instead they are " recursive . . . occurring over and over as we move into new situations" (p. 196). She also asserts that people, including adolescents, can hold "opposing identities simultaneously " (p. 197) so that they might be "simultaneously mature and immature, old and young, traditional and innovative" (p. 196). Accordingly, she argues for "concrete practices in which youth demand and exercise adultlike responsibilities" (p. 199). We assert that working with youth to select, read, and discuss books marketed to people older than they are is one such concrete practice. Furthermore, analyzing those books with insights we have gleaned from work with youth is one way of "work[ing] to improve youths' life conditions without the hierarchy of adult over youth" (p. 13). With this in mind, we turned to scholarship on children's and YA literature, which guided and informed our attention to literary elements.

In some cases, scholars pointed us directly to particular literary elements. Cadden (2000), for example, directs us to pay attention to mode and naïve narrators, and McCallum (1999) emphasizes the importance of focalization. It was our interest in sexuality and gender, though, that brought us to Stephens, with McCallum ( McCallum & Stephens, 2010) and Romören ( Romören & Stephens, 2002), who, helped us understand the significance of metonymic configurations. Similarly, it was our interest in time ( Blackburn & Clark, 2014) that provoked us to consider flashback and foreshadowing. It is worth noting that we did not consider every instance of these or any other literary elements. Rather, we focused, in particular, on literary elements that served to convey the experiences of characters being and becoming queer. Next, we discuss each of the focal literary elements.

Mode

Mode is typically understood as a circle or compass, divided into quadrants including irony, comedy, romance, and tragedy, with comedy opposite tragedy and romance opposite irony ( Cadden, 2010). Cadden (2000) asserts that most children's literature is romantic and/or comedic with little movement beyond or between these. The problem with this, he claims, is that these modes do not provide much room for change by either the protagonists or the readers. Alternatively, he argues, irony and tragedy are more likely to produce change as a result of provoking cognitive dissonance and discomfort-unsettled by those feelings, the reader is pushed to engage the dialectic tensions posed by the competing values, ideas, and beliefs. Because Cadden's interest in dissonance and discomfort aligns with queer theory's tenet of disrupting norms, we, too attended to ironic and tragic modes, in particular, in our analysis of literature.

Focalization

Focalization is when some part of the story, perhaps a scene, event, or character, is described through the point of view of a character, who has unique beliefs and values which shape his or her interpretation and thus representation of the story. A character might be focalizing, that is, representing the scene, event, or character; or a character might be focalized, that is, represented through the eyes of a different character ( McCallum, 1999). McCallum (1999) asserts that characters make their beliefs and values explicit through focalization, constructing themselves as ideologues and providing a range of ideologies from which readers can choose. There may be few or many focalizers in any novel. The more focalizers there are, the more polyphonic, or mulitvoiced, it is. A consequence of such a text is that it invites readers to align themselves with any number of ideologies ( Cadden, 2000). Cadden (2000) argues that texts with multiple focalizers are the most ethical because they refrain from arguing for one clearly defined ideology. Building from Cadden's argument, we assert that such texts are also the most queer because they avoid a single, static ideology and, instead, offer multiple and, at times, conflicting ideologies.

Naïve and unreliable narrators

Of course, some ideologies are meant to be resisted or suspect. Consider focalizations offered by naively unreliable characters or narrators. A naïve narrator ( Cadden, 2000) is one who is "believable and challengeable," often less "sophisticated" or "confident," and thus, offers the reader, through her or his naïve discourse, a contestable view of the world (pp. 149-150). The contestability of naïve narrators contributes to the multivoicedness of the narration ( Cadden, 2000) and, we assert, to the ideological diversity and queerness of a text.

Metonymic configurations

We also looked at metonymic configurations ( McCallum & Stephens, 2010; Romören & Stephens, 2002); that is, the way in which patterns of behaviors, which are marked by gender, sexuality, and other normalized constructions, are "built up through the simple fictive practice of developing conflict and/or thematic implication through interactions amongst diverse and contrasting characters (often character stereotypes)" (p. 220). As Romören and Stephens (2002) describe, for example, a character's behavior may be "marked by attributes which prompt readers to instantiate a schema for hegemonic masculinity" (p. 220), or other generalized practices. In the case of such a male character, he not only fulfills a story function but also is "apt to function as a metonym for hegemonic masculinity" in relation to other characters "performing different kinds of masculinity" as they "enter the novel's configuration of gendered behaviors" (p. 220). Romören and Stephens note that both masculine and feminine metonymic configurations are possible as are other relational patterns, including father/son, mother/son, school situations, sports, and so on.

Flashbacks and foreshadowing

Finally, we examined flashbacks and foreshadowing, as temporal disruptions ( Genette, 1980), particularly when those temporal disruptions mattered in the experiences of a character being or becoming queer. Bae and Young (2008) define a flashback as that which "tells (or shows) what has happened in the past with respect to the present" and foreshadowing as that which "presents what will happen in the future with respect to 'now' in the story" (p. 156). Such literary devices have a heterochronous effect; that is, they effectively disrupt time ( Lemke, 2008). Heterochrony is when there is a change or distortion in processes aligned with time, or in Lemke's (2008) words, it is the "intersection of processes and practices which have radically different inherent timescales" (pp. 25-26), with timescales meaning how long any given process takes. The notion of chronotope is foundational to the idea, and chronotope references both time and space, or, in Bakhtin's (1981) words, chronotope is the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (p. 84). Multiple chronotopes can exist within one novel and are "mutually inclusive" and "dialogical" ( Bakhtin, 1981, p. 252) with one another. With this in mind, we are conceptualizing heterochrony as a time-space ( McCallum, 1999) in literature that is artistically distorted. Such an artistic distortion might carry throughout a novel or be captured in a particular scene. These literary elements that effectively disrupt normative notions of time in ways that inform readers' understandings of queer characters play a significant role in queer texts.

Methods of Analysis

The critical literature on LGBT content in books for young adults ( Cart & Jenkins, 2006) provided a starting point for this textual content analysis. Through our analysis, we came to agree with Cart and Jenkins (2006) that queer texts hold great promise, and that this promise lies in understanding these books both in terms of content as well as literary artfulness (p. 166). To start, we categorized our initial 24 books using Cart and Jenkins's three categories of LGBT fiction: HV, GA, and QC. As we mention above, some of the books among our 24 were already categorized by Cart and Jenkins; in these cases, we used the categories that were assigned by them. Other books, however, were not; in those cases, we applied Cart and Jenkins's heuristic to those books. In doing so, we came to understand a difference between what they call QC and what we were identifying as Queer (Q), as we discuss above. Thus, we narrowed the list to the five remaining texts: Alison Bechdel's (2006)Fun home: A family tragicomic, Truman Capote's (1994)Other Voices, Other Rooms, David Levithan's (2005)Boy Meets Boy, Alice Walker's (1982)The Color Purple, and Jeanette Winterson's (1994)Written on the Body. Table 1 lists all 24 books read, Cart and Jenkins's (2006) categorizations of seven of the texts, our characterizations of the remaining 17 texts, and annotations of the 5 focal texts.

Texts and Characterizations.

This initial, rough analysis lead us to categorize broadly these five remaining books as Queer-that is, as books in which characters experience sexual identity fluidly or express gender in multiple ways, or in which norms are disrupted. Like Cart and Jenkins (2006), however, we sought more nuanced understandings of what this meant in terms of these specific texts. Therefore, we engaged in several iterations of independently reading and rereading these five focal texts using our Book Analysis Tool (see Figure 1).

In our first iteration, we read each book to develop an initial Book Description, including constructing a plot summary and noting the literary mode(s) ( Cadden, 2010) in each text. This allowed us to gauge our shared understandings of the texts and how they moved across literary mode, which connected to our interest in the disruption of norms. Next, we engaged in a Character Analysis of each book, noting the qualities of the narrator (e.g., naïve, unreliable; Cadden, 2000) and focalized and focalizing characters ( McCallum, 1999). Given queer theory's focus on fluidity in sexual identity and gender expression and the disruption of norms, we read with a focus on disruptions of sexual and gender norms as experienced by LGBTQQ characters in the contexts of families and homes. This left us with a thorough, shared understanding of all of the focalizing and focalized characters in each book, particularly in terms of normative and nonnormative constructions of sexuality, gender, families, and homes. Finally, to address our interest in time as a potential queer feature, we engaged in a third iteration of reading, this time with a focus on scenes and, in the case of Fun Home, panels. We noted shifts in time relative to the chronology of the narrative, as well as uses of flashback and foreshadowing. In the case of Fun Home, we paid special attention to shifts in how characters were rendered at different points in time, elements of time that were drawn into a panel (i.e., dates on photographs), and the ways that sequencing of panels either compressed long periods of time or drew out key moments over several panels. As we read, we noted the page numbers of specific lines, paragraphs, and panels for further analysis.

After iteratively applying the Book Analysis Tool to each text, we looked through all of our data (i.e., book descriptions, character analyses, and scene/panel analyses) to identify the specific ideologies that supported and contradicted our naming these books as queer. To do this, we created Cross Book Analysis tables in which we pulled together data related to specific concepts as they were manifested across each of the books. For example, Table 2 shows a sample excerpt from a Cross Book Analysis Table focused on conceptions of identities.

Sample Excerpt From Cross Book Analysis Table.

When data from across the books were viewed, side-by-side, we were able to note different ideologies related to characters' sexual and gender identities (i.e., essential, developmental, and poststructural) by looking both within each text and across texts. Moreover, we were able to note the role that literary elements played in support of these queer concepts. Therefore, for example, we noted the role of a naïve narrator and a single focalizer in Boy Meets Boy, which contributed to our understanding of the identities of some characters in this text as essential. We found every element, in varying degrees, in each of these books. Our analysis of the queer concepts and literary elements in these books allowed us to understand better what makes these books queer, and what identifying these elements might afford in terms of reading and interpreting this literature, as we discuss next, in our findings.

Findings

Our analysis revealed that queer literature, as a category, is an important extension of Cart and Jenkins's (2006) work, and that it is distinctive among and from LGBT-themed literature in the way that it offers multiple and conflicting ideologies related to sexuality and gender. These ideologies manifest themselves in queer elements, such as poststructural rather than essential or developmental identity construction of characters, and disruptions of norms as they pertain to sexuality, gender, families, homes, and time. This queering happens through literary elements, but the literary elements alone are not enough, for these are evident in all literary work. Instead, the literary elements on which we focus are working in service of queering, and in our analysis are limited to those that support complex understandings of sexual and gender identities and normative disruptions of families ( Bernstein & Reimann, 2001), homes ( Kentlyn, 2008), and time ( Bakhtin, 1981; McCallum, 1999). We discuss these queer elements as they take shape in the books of focus, as well as the literary elements that work in conjunction with them, next.

Conceptions of Identities

Sexual and gender identities are often understood as essential, developmental, or poststructural. Even though queer theory is clearly aligned with poststructural understandings of identities, it is worth exploring each of these three conceptualizations of identities because each of the books includes at least one character who brings to life each of these three notions of identities. As such, none of these books is purely essential, developmental, or poststructural. The lack of purity is arguably more aligned with queering than pure poststructuralism in that it offers multiple, variable, and conflicting ideologies. That said, essential identities are more pronounced in some of the books, particularly Boy Meets Boy, whereas developmental identities are more pronounced in other books, like Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Color Purple, and poststructural identities are more pronounced in others, such as Fun Home and Written on the Body, as we discuss next.

Essential

Boy Meets Boy is a YA novel about a network of high school students, some linked by friendship, others by romance, and still others by tension. Narrated by Paul, and foregrounding the lives of his friends, Noah, Tony, Joni, Infinite Darlene and Kyle, the YA novel captures a somewhat ordinary series of high school days (e.g., hallway interactions, breakups and makeups, school dance), while also offering a slightly less ordinary setting in that most of Paul's town is accepting and affirming of the sexual and gender diversity in the school, in contrast to the neighboring town where Tony lives with his homophobic parents. Essential conceptualizations of identities are evident in this book when Paul's kindergarten teacher asserts, "PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY" (p. 8). Paul did not know he was gay before that, but the understanding is that he was gay, is gay, and always will be gay. Being a gay young man is essential to the identity of the character Paul. This notion of identity development holds true across characters. Take, for example, Noah, Paul's love interest. Noah's sexual and gender identities are even more stable than Paul's, as he is already out as a young gay man when readers (and Paul) meet him, and this identity never waivers.

Perhaps most contestable is Infinite Darlene's sexual identity. The gender identity of Infinite Darlene, a male-to-female transsexual character, has developed and is now fixed. That is to say, as a transsexual character, Infinite Darlene's "gender identity is different from [her] assigned sex at birth" ( National Center for Transgender Equality, 2009), which was male. It is made very clear that she is a much happier and stronger person since rejecting her identity as a young man in favor of that as a woman when Paul states,

I don't know when Infinite Darlene and I first became friends. Perhaps it was back when she was still Daryl Heisenberg, but that's not very likely; few of us can remember what Daryl Heisenberg was like, since Infinite Darlene consumed him so completely. He was a decent football player, but nowhere near as good as when he started wearing false eyelashes. (pp. 15-16)

Still, Infinite Darlene's sexual identity allows for more interpretation. During most of the book, when desire is revealed related to Infinite Darlene, it is a straight boy who is attracted to her. All we know about her desire is that she rejects him on the grounds that "he wasn't her type" (p. 16). At the end of the book, there is a suggestion that Infinite Darlene is attracted to girls. Amber, a lesbian in the novel, considers this possibility with Paul, and a hint of confirmation is offered in the final scene when Infinite Darlene and Amber dance together: "I see Infinite Darlene whooping for joy as Amber attempts to dip her to the ground" (p. 185). A superficial read would be that Infinite Darlene's desires shifted, but a closer read suggests that it is not that her desire shifts but that her peers' understandings of her desire shifts. In other words, several characters in the book adhere closely to an essentialist model of identity development and thus may convey a monolithic ideology with little room for contestation or complication. The idea is we are who we are, even if we don't know it yet.

The only possible exception to this appears in Kyle, Paul's former boyfriend and emerging friend. Kyle explicitly states, "I still like girls. . . . And I also like guys" (p. 85), which may be understood as an essentially bisexual identity, which Paul suggests and then Kyle rejects saying, "Do we really have to find a word for it? . . . Can't it just be what it is?" (p. 85). Paul says, "Of course" to Kyle, but wonders to himself whether this is true as, "The world loves stupid labels" (p. 85). This is the only character that presents a possible poststructural conception of identity. However, the representation is fleeting and less developed than the characters discussed above, which seems to eliminate it as a real possibility.

This understanding of identities as essential is maintained by Paul's role as a naïve narrator ( Cadden, 2000). Because the novel is told in the first-person and by Paul, everything we know is filtered through him. As an out, gay, young man, Paul knows a great deal about recognizing and negotiating homophobia. As readers, we believe him and trust him, especially in his recounting of his relationship with Noah, another out, gay, young man. He is questionable, however, because his filter is entirely that-gay and male. In focalizing the experiences of other characters, such as Infinite Darlene and Kyle, he fails to allow for their desires that do not resemble his own, that is, for Infinite Darlene's possible attraction to Amber and Kyle's fluid sexuality. While we see hints of the complexities of such relationships and desires, because the people in these relationships and experiencing these desires are focalized by Paul, Infinite Darlene, for example, gets inaccurately characterized as a "drag queen" and expected to be a feminine acting "girl"-one who is attracted to boys. The fact that Chuck isn't Infinite Darlene's "type" is understood by Paul as a simple "girl" rejecting "boy" dynamic, with no attention to the possibility that Infinite Darlene is a young trans woman who is attracted to girls, not boys. Similarly, Kyle gets described simply as "bisexual" (p. 85). A different narrator, perhaps a less naïve one, might have characterized both of these characters more accurately.

Developmental

The Color Purple and Other Voices, Other Rooms both suggest a developmental notion of identity. Although there is a relationship between essential and developmental conceptions of identity, the latter allows for complication, particularly the complication of ideologies conveyed by characters' identities.

The Color Purple tells the story of a Black woman, Celie, living in the segregated south in the early part of the 20th century. In the opening of the novel, Celie is promised to Mr. _____, by her father, a substitution for the woman Mr._____ desires, her prettier sister, Nettie. The novel focuses on the unstable, abusive, and dysfunctional life that becomes Celie's reality with Mr. _____, which heightens the importance of Celie's relationships with individuals beyond her home (e.g., her correspondence with her sister living abroad, her relationship with God, her admiration for strong women like Sofia). Celie finds refuge in these relationships. Other Voices, Other Rooms is about a 13-year-old boy, Joel Knox, who at the opening of the novel has recently lost his mother and is en route to live with his father, who left his family when Joel was young. Joel's new life at Skully's Landing is spent forming relationships with his stepmother, Miss Amy, his cousin Randolph, and nearby twins, Idabel and Florabel, with most of his time spent with Idabel as they explore Noon City and venture into surreal time-spaces, like the local town fair.

Although identity as developmental is present in both novels, it is most explicit in Other Voices, Other Rooms. Over the course of this book, Joel develops a queer identity. It is worth noting that queer is a word that is used repeatedly throughout the book, but it means something different than how we are conceptualizing it in most of this article. In most of this article, we are using queer as it is conceptualized in queer theory; that is, the suspension of classification of gender and sexual identities and disruption of norms related to these identities. Such a conception of queer, though, was articulated first by de Lauretis in the early 1990s ( de Lauretis, 1991), and this novel was published in 1948. During the time that the book was written, queer was used to mean odd or different with a decidedly negative connotation. Moreover, it had, by this time, been applied to homosexual men. It is this queer identity that Joel develops over the course of the book.

Early in the novel, Joel is described as "too pretty, too delicate . . . and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes" (p. 4). In other words, he is introduced as effeminate, but he explicitly conveys his repulsion to that which is not straight. Therefore, for example, when he meets the twins Idabel and Florabel, he initially rejects Idabel, who is decidedly masculine in favor of feminine Florabel:

Joel looked from one to the other, and concluded he liked Florabel the best; she was so pretty, at least he imagined her to be, though he could not see her face well enough to judge fairly. Anyway, her sister was a tomboy, and he'd had a special hatred of tomboys. (p. 33)

Therefore, not surprisingly, Joel finds "Holding hands with Randolph," his gender nonconforming cousin, "obscurely disagreeable" (p. 85).

There is a shift, though, or a development in Joel's desire. Later in the novel, Joel finds Idabel and her masculinity attractive. They are getting ready to swim and Joel conveys his reluctance to take his clothes off in front of Idabel because, in his words, "you're a girl" (p. 131), to which Idabel responds,

Son . . . what you've got in your britches is no news to me, and no concern of mine: hell, I've fooled around with nobody but boys since first grade. I never think like I'm a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can never be friends. (p. 132)

With that, Joel undresses, and they swim. Afterwards, they are sitting out to dry when Joel "wanted to touch [Idabel], to put his arms around her, for this seemed suddenly the only means of expressing all he felt. Pressing closer, he reached and, with breathtaking delicacy, kissed her cheek" (p. 134). Here, Joel experiences and acts on his desire for Idabel. Perhaps he is attracted to Idabel because of her masculinity but acts on this attraction because he understands her to be a girl, thus making the attraction allowable, at least in his mind. It is not in hers as evident by her reaction: "She grabbed hold of his hair and started to pull," which provoked a fight that ended in Idabel "astride" Joel, "her strong hands locked his wrists to the ground. She brought her red, angry face close to his: 'Give up?'" (p. 135). Toward the end of the novel, Joel gives up his attraction to Idabel and connects with Randolph. He shouts to him, "I am Joel, we are the same people" (p. 227). Then Joel "took hold of [Randolph's] coat-tail and steered him" down a path described as "Long, like a cathedral aisle" (p. 228), suggesting a sort of wedding between the two. Thus, readers get the impression that Joel was essentially queer but had to go through a process of development to come to terms with and claim that identity. The developmental model of characters' identity development, then, does not allow for contestation regarding the identity, but it does allow for some complications along the way.

Poststructural

The other two books, Fun Home and Written on the Body, suggest a poststructural notion of character identity. Written on the Body details the love affairs of the narrator, who remains nameless and elusive of categorization in terms of gender throughout the novel. The narrator's concealed gender is juxtaposed with intimate details of lovers-Jacqueline, Frank, Catherine, Inge, Bathsheba, Carlo, Judith, Estelle-all who came and went-all except, Louise. A beautiful love story between the narrator and the married Louise, unfolds and reveals the sometimes-turbulent nature of desire and the difficulties of loving someone who is terminally ill. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, captures the author's life over time, particularly her childhood and college years, as well as the early years of her parents' marriage. Alison's sexuality, gender and gratifying sexual experiences are juxtaposed with her father's, who to the best of Alison's knowledge, refrained from any public display of his sexuality and instead lived outwardly as a heterosexual husband. Situated in the "fun home," or the family-owned funeral home, Bechdel's memoir offers her reflections on, and analyses of, the marriage of her parents, her mother and father's yearnings to have known love, desire, and companionship differently, and her own exciting journey to explore, experience and understand her sex, gender and sexuality.

Again, while the poststructural understanding of identity is evident in both novels, it is most clearly embodied in the narrator of Written on the Body, the primary focalizer in the novel. Through focalization, narrators invite readers to take up particular positions or roles to make the most sense of the text ( Reimer, 2010). In this book, the narrator's gender is unclear, it is not that the narrator is genderless. The author constructs the narrator in ways that suggest gender throughout the novel, just inconsistently, or perhaps, intentionally, consistently oppositional. The author constructed the narrator as a man by having the narrator engage in behaviors associated with men, like "pee[ing] behind a bush" (p. 186) and reading women's magazines from an outsider's point of view (p. 74). Other characters in the novel reference the narrator in masculine terms, like having Louise gaze at the narrator, "the way God gazed at Adam" (p. 18), not Eve, and having a friend advise the narrator to "play the sailor and run a wife in every port" (p. 40). Even the narrator compares himself or herself to famous males, such as Mercutio (p. 81) and Sir Launcelot (p. 159). Though none of these behaviors, references, or comparisons are limited to men, they conjure images of men in relation to the narrator. However, the author constructed the narrator as a woman as well. For example, the narrator describes himself or herself as "quiver[ing] like a school girl" (p. 82) and feeling like a "convent virgin" (p. 94). She or he also describes staring at a phone after Louise has hung up "the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart" (p. 41), thus aligning the narrator with Lauren rather than Humphrey. Moreover, the implicit ambiguity of the narrator's gender is made explicit when Louise says to the narrator, "When I saw you two years ago I thought you were the most beautiful creature male or female I had ever seen" (p. 84).

Moreover, there is the ambiguity of sexuality. Although the narrator is in a relationship with Louise, a married woman, for most of the novel, he or she references relationships with women, such as Jacqueline and Catherine, and men, like Crazy Frank and Brutus. Therefore, we cannot identify the narrator as either male- or female-attracted. There is even a time when the narrator describes dancing with Louise in this way: "We are dancing together tightly sealed like a pair of 50s homosexuals" (p. 73). The use of the word homosexuals suggests they are not gay, as this is a term that gay people generally reject on the grounds of its diagnostic history. And being "like" gay people rather than being gay people also suggests they are not gay. But this is not clear. Perhaps they are like gay people in the 50s but actually gay people in the contemporary setting of the novel.

The ambiguity of the narrator's gender and sexual identities continually asks readers to shift their understanding of the focalizer to make the most sense of the novel, which contributes to the multiple ideologies and queerness of the book. In other words, Winterson, the author, crafted the narrator in ways that do not allow a single, stable understanding of him or her in terms of gender and sexual desire and behaviors. As such, there is no essential sexual or gender identity, but neither is there any development toward some true identity. Rather, there is a poststructural conception of sexual and gender identities. This conception offers the most interpretive space for multiple, variable, and conflicting ideologies.

Disruptions of Norms

In the books we analyzed, the disruption of norms was particularly pertinent in characters' sexual and gender identities, authors' characterizations of families and homes, and conceptualizations of time ( Bakhtin, 1981; McCallum, 1999). These normative disruptions typically occurred in conjunction with particular literary elements, such as mode, focalization, naïve narrators, metonymic configurations, and flashback and foreshadowing as temporal elements that disrupt time. We discuss all of these, in relationship to these disruptions and to our focal novels, next.

Sexuality and gender

We understand the social norms related to sexuality to be heterosexuality and the norms related to gender to be cisgender, or the experience of one's assigned sex at birth being the same as one's lived gender identity. This understanding is aligned with our own life experiences and, generally speaking, the settings of the focal novels. In these books, the disruption of the sexual binary, that is, heterosexual versus homosexual, is often achieved through the disruption of the gender binary, that is, man versus woman. This is certainly the case in Written on the Body, as our above discussion of the narrator's poststructural identities reveals. Because the author prevents readers from identifying the narrator as consistently man or woman, we, as readers, cannot label the narrator in sexual identity terms either. In other words, the disruption of the narrator's gender is explicit while the disruption of the narrator's sexuality is implicit.

Sexual norms are disrupted more explicitly in the other four books, although in different ways, depending on when and where they were set. The two novels that are set in the early 20th century in the U.S. south, Other Voices, Other Rooms, and The Color Purple, disrupt sexual norms through characters' desires and/or actions rather than identifications. This is not surprising because identifications such as gay and lesbian are 20th-century constructs that increased in usage throughout the century and therefore were not very commonly used in the time periods during which these novels were set. Still, it is worth exploring the different ways we see sexual norms getting disrupted in queer literature.

In Other Voices, Other Rooms, sexual norms are disrupted almost exclusively through characters' desire. Joel, for example, early in the novel, desires masculinity, in Idabel, who explains to Joel, "I never think like a girl; you've got to remember that, or we can never be friends" (p. 132). Then, later in the novel, Joel desires being with a man, as distinct from masculinity, in Randolph, when he imagines the wedding-like scenes that we described earlier. Similarly, Randolph disrupts sexual norms through desire rather than behavior when his lover Dolores and he meet Pepe Alvarez, the prizefighter, and both fall in love with him. Dolores and Pepe become lovers, ultimately, leave Randolph altogether, and Randolph's love for Pepe is never embodied. Still, Randolph said, "It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier" (p. 147). Therefore, he is not jealous of Pepe for being a lover of Dolores, but neither is he jealous of Dolores for being a lover of Pepe. Instead, Randolph is jealous of Pepe because he is able to be attracted to Dolores with an intensity Randolph could never muster for her or any other woman.

Like Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Color Purple disrupts sexual norms through desire, but it also disrupts these norms through action. For example, although Celie is married to a man, she only seems to desire and share a relationship that is both sexual and romantic with women, really one woman: Shug Avery. Shug is not only Celie's lover, but also the lover of Celie's husband, Mr._____, who Shug calls Albert Johnson.2 Shug, as distinct from Celie, desires and has sexual relationships with both men, including a much younger man, and women, or at least Celie if not other women. Thus, both Celie and Shug effectively and explicitly disrupt norms associated with sexuality, that is, that they would, as women, each desire and share a sexual relationship with a man, more specifically, a husband.

Boy Meets Boy and Fun Home, both of which are set in closer to contemporary times, explicitly disrupt sexual norms through desire and action, but they also disrupt these norms through explicit identifications. Therefore, for example, Paul is the narrator and primary focalizer in Boy Meets Boy. He identifies as gay, and his desire for Noah and their behaviors align with this identification. The complicated part about recognizing the work this couple does with respect to disrupting sexual norms is that the norms of the book are quite different than the norms of even the norms of today. That is, there is no Boy Scouts of America surveying their membership to determine whether gay adults should be permitted to work alongside young people. Instead, in this novel, the Boy Scouts are disbanded in favor of the Joy Scouts, which welcome everyone. Still, when read in our current society, Paul and others in Boy Meets Boy disrupt the heteronormative expectation of young men identifying as straight, and being desirous of and sexually active with young women.

Similarly, Alison, in Fun Home, both claims and embodies a lesbian identity. In the memoir, Bechdel recognizes and articulates her desires for women, particularly Joan, her girlfriend in college. Interestingly, in this graphic novel, Alison's father, Bruce, disrupts sexual norms more like Celie does in The Color Purple: that is, through desire and action, rather than through explicit identification as gay, even though he experienced desires for and engaged in sexual behaviors with men much later in the century, in the 1970s. Of course, there was still rampant homophobia during this time, but the significant distinction between the era of Bruce's relationships with young men and that of Celie and Shug's relationship is the possibility, even, of claiming a gay or lesbian identity. For Bruce, such a claiming was possible but he rejected that possibility. For Celie, such a claiming was not even an option.

Just as sexual norms were disrupted in all of these five books, so too were gender norms. In fact, the disruption of sexual norms was often underscored by the disruption of gender norms. And, in the case of The Color Purple, this disruption is underscored by layered focalization, that is, by the fact that characters, in this case Shug and Sofia, are focalized by Celie and Mr. _______, who have quite distinct understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman. Celie, as the writer of most of the letters in this epistolary novel, might be expected to be the only focalizer. But as evidenced below, Celie writes in her letter about what Mr. __________ said. In this way, he serves as another focalizer of Shug and Sofia:

Mr.  ast me the other day what it is I love so much about Shug. He say he love her style. He say to tell the truth, Shug act more manly than most men. I mean she upright, honest, speak her mind and the devil take the hindmost, he say. You know Shug will fight, he say. Just like Sofia. She bound to live her life and be herself not matter what.

Mr. think all this stuff is stuff men do. But Harpo not like this. What Shug got is womanly it seem like to me. Specially since she and Sofia the ones got it.

Sofia and Shug not like men, he say, but they not like women either.

You mean they not like you or me.

They hold they own, he say. And it's different. (p. 269)

Here, what it means to be masculine or feminine is disrupted by Mr._____ and Celie's focalization of the characters Shug and Sofia. The defining features or behaviors are about character, such as honesty and forthrightness, as well as physicality, such as the willingness to engage in sexual relationships and physical fights.

Mr. _____ associates such character and physicality with men, an association that Celie troubles. Mr. ______ says that he loves these qualities that he considers masculine, raising an implicit question about Mr. ______'s adherence to sexual norms. This question is raised, too, when Shug focalizes him. Shug is talking to Celie, encouraging her to wear pants instead of a dress:

She [Shug] say, Times like this, lulls, us ought do something different.

Like what? I ast.

Wells, she says, looking me up and down, let's make you some pants.

What I need pants for? I say. I ain't no man. (p. 146)

Here, Celie conveys that she thinks only men can wear pants, and then she goes on to suggest that even if she wanted to wear pants, her husband would not allow it: "Mr. _____ not going to let his wife wear pants" (p. 146). In response, Shug tells Celie, "I used to put on Albert's pants when he was courting. And he one time put on my dress . . . But he loved to see me in pants. It was like a red flag to a bull" (p. 147). In this account, Albert not only disrupts sexual norms by being impassioned by that which he understands as masculine, but he also disrupts gender norms by wearing a dress.

Perhaps more interestingly, the use of a metonymic configuration underscores the disruption of sexuality and gender. Early in the novel, both Celie and Mr. _____ are metonyms with Celie representing the expected patterns of behavior of women and Mr. performing hegemonic masculinity. She is modest, discreet, timid, compliant, and obedient; he is physically and verbally bullying and abusive, misogynistic, neglectful in relation to his wife and children, and so forth. As she comes to know Shug and Sofia, though, both of whom perform different ways of being a woman, Celie's understandings of women and the associated behaviors gets disrupted, as do Mr. _____'s conceptions of masculinity through his interactions with Shug. In this way, gender norms are disrupted through metonymic configurations.

Fun Home; Other Voices, Other Rooms; and Boy Meets Boy disrupt gender norms in more decisive ways than the Color Purple and in more explicit ways than Written on the Body. That is, rather than women assuming some of the positive traits associated with men, or completely evading gender identification, some of the people in these books are men who actively perform womanhood, and vice versa, and other people in these books have been assigned the gender of man, for example, and reject this assignment to assume the gender of woman. It is not that there are not women who assume traits typically associated with men, and vice versa. There are. But there are also these more decisive gender disruptions. Therefore, for example, in Fun Home, there is a six-panel sequence in which Alison recounts her first time seeing a woman performing masculinity, if not manhood (see Figure 2).

In the first two panels, we see Alison and her father, in profile, in a booth at a diner in Philadelphia, a city bigger than the town in which they live. Alison stares intensely into the distance, and her father studies the menu. The next panel offers Alison's view: the doorway to the diner as a delivery is made. Bechdel recalls, "In the city, in a luncheonette . . . we saw a most unsettling sight." The "unsettling sight" is the delivery person, a woman, dressed in jeans, plaid shirt, short hair, key ring on her belt loop-that is, a woman performing masculinity and thus disrupting normalized constructions of gender. In the third panel, Alison continues to study the delivery woman as, again, Bechdel recalls,

I didn't know there were women who wore men's clothes and had men's haircuts. But like a traveler in a foreign country who runs into someone from home-someone they've never spoken to, but know by sight-I recognized her with a surge of joy.

In other words, seeing this woman disrupting gender norms invites Alison, too, to disrupt gender norms, an invitation which she receives enthusiastically. Her enthusiasm, though, is met with disdain in the next panel where she and her father are shown up close, in profile, looking across the table at one another, as Bechdel recalls, "Dad recognized her too," and her father leans in, asking Alison, "Is that what you want to look like?" The next panel focuses tightly on the face of the delivery woman, as Alison peers, wide-eyed, over the back of the booth. Bechdel reflects, "What else could I say?" as the young Alison says to her father, "No." The final panel shows Alison and her Father, hand in hand, leaving the diner, her Father looking ahead, but Alison looking back. And, although Alison does not explicitly claim masculinity in that moment, the impact of witnessing gender disruption on her younger self is clear, as Bechdel notes, "But the vision of the truck-driving bulldyke sustained me through the years . . . " Similarly, there is a sequence of panels later in the book when Alison cross dresses in her father's clothes and describes it as feeling "too good to actually be good" (p. 182). Therefore, while there is no reason to believe that Alison identifies as a man, it is clear that she is drawn to performing masculinity if not manhood.

These five queer novels, then, disrupt sexuality and gender norms in a variety of ways. One does this work by evading gender identification and thus calling into question sexual identification. Others disrupt norms associated with sexuality by representing same-sex desire and behavior and by having characters who explicitly claim nonheterosexual identities. These others also disrupt norms associated with gender with characters who assume some traits typically associated with the gender "opposite" theirs, characters who perform as the gender "opposite" theirs, and characters who reject their assigned gender in favor of their actual gender. Although they accomplish these disruptions in a variety of ways, all of them do this work, and it is imperative in literature if it is to be understood as queer.

Families and homes

We understand the social norms related to families and homes to be grounded in the fictional notion that all families comprise a father, mother, and their biological children and that such fictional families live together, but without anyone else, in a home, usually a house that they are working to own. All of the focal books disrupt such normative notions of families and homes, although in several different ways. Two of the books explicitly reject traditional notions of family, three of them celebrate alternative configurations of family, and two of them embrace a reconciliation of traditional and alternative families. (This totals seven rather than five books because we included two of the books in two categories.) Among these, there is much overlap between the disruption of families and the disruption of homes. Indeed, they are often intricately intertwined, as we present them here.

Both Fun Home and Written on the Body reject traditional notions of family. Here, we focus on Written on the Body because we discuss family in Fun Home in the reconciliation piece of this section. In Written on the Body, the narrator repeatedly rejects traditional families by rejecting the institution of marriage in both words and actions. The narrator asserts that marriage is the "flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python" (p. 78). And, he or she confesses that he or she "used to think of marriage as a plate-glass window just begging for a brick" (p. 13), a brick she or he threw with some frequency: "I've been through a lot of marriages. Not down the aisle but always up the stairs" (p. 13). In fact, the entire book is focused on an intensely passionate relationship between the narrator and Louise, a married woman, who leaves the home she shares with her husband Elgin to be with the narrator. The narrator's apparent disregard for families calls her trustworthiness into question. This is evident when he or she is focalized by a friend who says, in response to learning of the narrator's relationship with Louise, "You bloody idiot . . . Another married woman" (p. 32). Here, families are constructed by marriage, but not at the exclusion of other constructions of family. Likewise, in this novel, normalized conceptions of family are disrupted through the use of metonymic configurations of heterosexual marriage, as represented through Louise's husband, Elgin, in contrast to the relationship between Louise and the narrator. While their marriage is marked by all of the "normal" conventions, including "a wedding held in the Registry Office in Cambridge" (p. 34) and wedding rings, it is both sexless and loveless, leading Louise to reject Elgin for her lover, the narrator. And, while the narrator dismisses the institution of marriage, as we describe above, it is just this institution that forces Louise and the narrator apart due to Louise's cancer and the fact that she can only gain access to the specialized medical treatment she needs if she stays with Elgin, who is a cancer researcher: "She would go with him to Switzerland and have access to the very latest medico-technology. As a patient, no matter how rich, she would not be able to do that. As Elgin's wife she would" (p. 102). The narrator chooses to acquiesce to Elgin's demands to leave to save Louise's life. And, while marriage is the trump card that is used by Elgin, the narrator leaves, not out of respect for the institution of marriage or recognition of Elgin as Louise's family, but out of love for Louise, reflecting a contrastive construction of family. These representations of family in combination with the shifting sexual and gender identities of the focalizing character challenge readers to grapple with which ideologies are meant to be resisted or suspect and which are to be embraced ( Cadden, 2000), thus supporting the ideological openness and overall queerness of the novel.

Boy Meets Boy, The Color Purple, and Other Voices, Other Rooms all celebrate alternative configurations of family to various degrees. This is most developed and explicit in Other Voices, Other Rooms, as it is a prominent theme in the novel. As noted above, the book begins with the premise that Joel's mother has died, and because just the two of them had lived together, and he is a minor (12 years old), he is now living with his aunt in New Orleans. So, from the beginning, Joel's family is not a traditional one, but his aunt is his mother's sister, and her children are his cousins. They are, in short, family, even if an extended one. Almost immediately, Joel's aunt receives a letter from Joel's estranged father asking Joel to come live with him. Still, this is family, even if farther from traditional.

But when he arrives at the place named in the letter, Skully's Landing, Joel sees no evidence of his father in the decrepit mansion in an isolated Alabama community. He is greeted by Amy, who introduces herself as Joel's father's wife and therefore Joel's stepmother, and Randolph, Amy's first cousin and owner of Skully's Landing. In other words, he is greeted by and comes to share a home with people who are only family by marriage to someone who Joel has never met before and meets only fleetingly in the novel. This feeling of being in the absence of family at Skully's Landing is initially underscored by Randolph's flamboyance, which Joel finds quite off-putting. Eventually, though, this flamboyance, an evolving understanding of Randolph's homosexuality and cross-dressing, and Randolph's declaration that

any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person's nature; only hypocrites would hold a man responsible for what he loves, emotional illiterates and those of righteous envy, who, in their agitated concern, mistake so frequently the arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell [are the things that allow Joel to accept his own homosexuality and accept Randolph as his alternative, queer family]. (p. 147)

His acceptance of a queer family is suggested in several scenes. For example, after Joel attempts to flee Skully's Landing, he becomes ill and is returned to Skully's Landing, where Randolph nurses him back to health. As he is recovering, he notices Randolph "blessedly near" (p. 206) and asks him whether he hates him for running away. In response, Randolph calls Joel, "baby" (p. 207), takes him in his arms and kisses his forehead, just as a parent might do. Once Joel recovers, he studies his maturing face in the mirror, and "All that displeased him was the brown straightness of his hair. He wished it were curly gold like Randolph's" (p. 207). This might be understood as Joel wishing for a physical similarity that would suggest a biological or familial relation.

By the end of the novel, Joel rejects his dreams of straightness, as indicated by his refusal to reconnect with Idabel, the one person with whom he could imagine sharing a heterosexual relationship, but he never rejects his family of origin; rather, he is rejected by them. This is suggested when he is remembering his deaf cousin and how he used to taunt her,

But when he saw her again, why, he'd be so kind; he'd talk real loud so that she could hear every word, and he'd play those card games with her . . . But Ellen [his aunt] had never answered his letters. His own bloodkin. And she'd made so many promises. And she'd said she loved him. But she forgot. (p. 230)

In other words, Joel neither has an opportunity to reject his traditional family nor reconcile with it.

He does, however, have an opportunity to celebrate his alternative family, which he does when he reflects on what it is that makes a home a home. He learns what a home is from Little Sunshine, a local hermit and charm-maker, and Randolph, Joel's uncle. Little Sunshine lives in a place Joel describes as old, slimy, evil-colored, wild, decaying, terrible, and strange, but, "it was his rightful home, [Little Sunshine] said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams" (p. 100). Here, Little Sunshine teaches Joel that home, no matter how unappealing the house, is where one feels at peace. Later, Randolph teaches Joel that home is where people love you consistently as you are. It is after these lessons from Little Sunshine and Randolph that Joel comes to accept Skully's Landing as his home, a place where he is at peace and surrounded by people who love him for who he is rather than a place provided for by his "bloodkin" (p. 230). Thus, Other Voices, Other Rooms disrupts typical notions of what counts as home.

Unlike Joel, Alison in Fun Home and Paul in Boy Meets Boy do not have to choose between their families of origin and families of choice. Here we focus on Fun Home because the focus on reconciliation with families of origin is much more pronounced than in Boy Meets Boy. As in Written on the Body, traditional families are rejected in Fun Home in that it centers on the ways that Alison's traditional family causes the death of her Dad, Bruce. Bruce cannot be satisfied without "sex with teenage boys" (p. 17), which defies their traditional family, but neither can he escape his traditional family to create an alternative one. That he wishes for such an alternative family is evident in the several panels where Alison is "rooting through a box of family photos" (p. 100). In the box was an envelope "labeled 'family' in Dad's handwriting" (p. 101). The photo was of the "yardwork assistant/babysitter, Roy" (p. 100) on vacation with the family, minus Alison's mom, when Alison was 8, and Alison recalls that the children slept in one room while her Dad and Roy slept in an adjoining one. The image shows Roy stretched out on a bed, bathed in sunlight, dressed in only his underwear. The year, indicating Roy's age of 17, has been ineffectively blotted out.

In this scene, the significance of a naïve narrator, as a literary element, stands out. We experience the narrator, drawn in her younger form, as Alison, to be more naïve than the narrator, in her older form (Bechdel), and thus, less reliable. Leading up to the aforementioned scene, on pages 94 to 95, for example, the older Bechdel, in narration around the panels, recounts Alison's experience of meeting Roy, the young man who was a babysitter and household helper to the family. The younger Alison is represented, in the panels, gazing at Roy and being drawn to his masculine gender and wanting to present herself in a similarly masculine way. At the same time, her father is also shown gazing at Roy, but his interest is focused on Roy's male sexuality and his interest in Roy as a possible lover, something to which the younger Alison seems fully unaware. Then, in the scene described above, we see the younger Alison, after her father's death, finding and examining the photo of Roy. Here, the older Bechdel analyzes this series of panels, narrating how she, as an adult, now understands her father in terms of his sexual identity, as well as her younger self, in terms of her own sexual identity as a lesbian, and her "family," as her father experienced these relationships. Because of the layered focalization coupled with the intersections of the naïve Alison and the mature Bechdel, we experience not a singular narrative point of view, but multiple and shifting perspectives and, hence, multiple ideologies.

That Roy was included on a family vacation, and that his photo appears in the box of family photos in an envelope that the Dad has labeled "family," reveals Bruce's desire to create an alternative family. Nothing actually comes of this desire, though, and the resulting tension only breaks when Alison's Dad walks in front of a truck, killing himself. Although alternative families are not constructed within the book, that Alison might one day create her own alternative family is suggested when her girlfriend Joan "came home with [her] for a visit" (p. 225). In other words, there is promise that alternative families are possibilities, even though they were not possible for Bruce.

It is the reconciliation of family, though, that holds the most promise in Fun Home. Whether Alison creates an alternative family or not, the book suggests that she, as a lesbian, remains connected to her family of origin. To her, even if not to Bruce, her family "really [was] a family" (p. 17). And even her father, who caused the "chink in [her] family's armor" (p. 95), she experienced as having provided "spiritual . . . paternity" when she "leapt . . . into the sea" of queerness (p. 232). That is to say, Alison's relationship with her father, particularly in their shared queerness, facilitated the reconciliation of Alison, as a lesbian, to her family of origin. Even though once she comes out to her family and then returns to their home, she realizes, "Home, as I had known it, was gone" (p. 215), it is also clear that a different kind of home with her family of origin still exists.

Time

Just as normative notions of sexuality and gender and families and homes are disrupted, so too are normative notions of time. This is not a quality unique to queer texts, but it does seem to enhance the queer nature of already queer texts. We were particularly interested in scenes in which the chronotope ( Bakhtin, 1981) or the time-space ( McCallum, 1999) of the text is artistically distorted. Through these distortions, "normal" conceptions of time-space are suspended offering nonnormative renderings of time and space, which make these texts queer, as distinct from LGBT-inclusive texts. These queer conceptions of time are often rendered through literary elements, such as flashback and foreshadowing, as well as mode. As Cadden notes, "the romance or hero novel . . . is much more likely to offer the reader a multistranded narrative, or any sort of rearrangement of narrative time," in contrast to the comedic mode (p. 305). Moreover, he asserts that "comedy and romance are at the heart of a conservative world view of returning to a previous order-things 'go back to normal,'" whereas, "irony and tragedy are more upsetting" in that they are "modes of change-either random and absurd in the ironic or as the rebirth of a new order as in tragedy" (p. 306). The coupling of distortions of "normal" conceptions of time with the tragic or ironic mode reflects a confluence of queer and literary elements that mark the ideologies of these novels as queer.

This is most apparent in Other Voices, Other Rooms and Written on the Body and less so in The Color Purple. These books have generally linear storylines interrupted with surreal scenes that markedly disrupt the otherwise normative flow of time. Written on the Body, for example, follows a generally linear timeline, beginning in the spring of 1 year into the autumn of the following year. During these approximately 18 months, the narrator and Louise fall in love, which results in the narrator's girlfriend leaving the narrator, and Louise leaving her husband, who is an oncologist. After the narrator and Louise enjoy some time together, the narrator learns, from Louise's husband, that Louise has chronic lymphocytic leukemia. As described earlier, the narrator comes to believe that Louise's chances of fighting the cancer will be improved if she goes back to her oncologist husband. Consequently, the narrator leaves Louise so she will go back to her husband. This is where the dramatic disruption in time occurs. Up until this point, there have been typical text breaks of a line throughout, but not anything more substantial. At this point, though, there is a blank page, followed by a chapter titled, "The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body." Even this chapter is broken into three sections. Then there is another chapter, "The Skin," and then another, "The Skeleton," which has two sections, and a fourth: "The Special Senses," which has four sections. In this portion of the novel, the narrator explores Louise's body both as a host of cancer, like when he or she says, "In the secret places of her thymus gland Louise is making too much of herself. Her faithful biology depends on regulation but the white T-cells have turned bandit" (p. 115), but also as her lover, so when he or she says, "Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you?" (p. 115). This portion of the novel invites readers fully into the narrator's struggle to come to terms with understanding his or her lover in mortal, if not fatal, terms. In doing so, though, it propels us from the storyline. It is as if time and space are suspended. Then, though, after these chapters of suspension, readers are pushed back into the linear storyline, with the first word of the next page: "March" (p. 141). This word references the month and thus brings the reader right back into the timeline that composes most of the book. In this way, time is artistically distorted and then reinstated in Written on the Body.

Although all of the books use the ironic mode to disrupt expectations, to various degrees, Boy Meets Boy provides a clear illustration of this in relation to time and space. The book is romantic, no doubt. It is set in an almost hyperbolically gay-friendly town, and the storyline centers on Paul and Noah falling in love with each other. It is comedic as well, although less overtly so. But so too is it ironic in that there is incongruity between what is expected and what actually happens. Therefore, for example, the town is quite different than one might expect. Early on, it is described in this way:

There isn't really a gay scene or a straight scene in our town. They got all mixed up a while back, which I think is for the best. Back when I was in second grade, the older gay kids who didn't flee to the city for entertainment would have to make their own fun. Now it's all good. Most of the straight guys try to sneak into the Queer Beer bar. Boys who love boys flirt with girls who love girls. And whether your heart is strictly ballroom or bluegrass punk, the dance floors are open to whatever you have to offer. (pp. 1-2)

Moreover, in this town, "P-FLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) is as big a draw as the PTA" (p. 115). This gay-friendliness plays out in Paul's school life as well. For example, early in the book, we learn that Paul has "always known [he] was gay, but it wasn't confirmed until [he] was in kindergarten" (p. 8), when, according to Paul, "It was my teacher who said so," as we mention above. When Paul asked his teacher about her comment on his report card, she explained, finally saying, "What you feel is absolutely right for you. Always remember that" (p. 9). Then, later, when Paul is in sixth grade, he collaborates with several students to form their elementary school's first GSA. They do so not as a way to help gay students unify with straight allies in the face of the school's homophobia, as one might expect, but to help the straight kids. In Paul's words, "Quite honestly, we took one look around and figured the straight kids needed our help. For one thing, they were all wearing the same clothes. Also (and this was critical), they couldn't dance to save their lives" (p. 12). Given such characterizations, one might conclude that we are, in reading this book, in some post-homophobic future, or in a sort of magical realism space where homophobia is absent.

If it were such a time-space, there would be nothing ironic about this book. But, it turns out that we, as readers, cannot ignore the expectations of homophobia. There are small things that signal this, like the mentioning of how it was worse back when Paul was in second grade and then remembering that the teacher's comment was made before that and the GSA a couple of years after that. But there are also larger things. There is a time when Paul is tackled and called, "queer, faggot, the usual" when leaving a screening of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (p. 13). It is important to note that such homophobic language is named as usual, not exceptional, thus debunking any notion that this is a world of magical realism in which there is no homophobia. Such a debunking is underscored by Tony, who says to Paul: "The first time I met you . . . I honestly couldn't believe that someone like you could exist, or even a town like yours could entirely exist" (p. 150). His disbelief is grounded in the expected homophobia embodied most prominently by his parents who before they "discovered he was gay, they wouldn't let him shake hands with a girl" (p. 95), but now that they know he is gay, "they practically pimp him out the door . . . if he mentions he's doing something with a girl-any girl" (p. 95). In other words, his parents would rather him be promiscuous, something they used to consider shameful, than homosexual. But such homophobia is not limited to people or places just beyond the town, where Tony's parents live. Therefore, for example, Paul's ex-boyfriend Kyle publically accuses Paul of making him gay. This would have no impact in a post-homophobia time-space or a magical one devoid of homophobia.

It is the mostly but not entirely not-homophobic nature of the town that puts this novel in the ironic mode. We, as readers, come into the book expecting homophobia, and we encounter something different than we expected, thanks to Paul's description of the town, Paul's kindergarten teacher, and Paul's motivation for starting a GSA. Then, we come to expect an absence of homophobia in this time-space, but our expectations are disrupted, by verbal assaults outside a movie theater, Tony's parents, and Kyle's fear, as examples. In this way, Boy Meets Boy 's use of the ironic mode creates a jarring sense of time and space and thus offers multiple and conflicting ideologies around the conceptualization, embodiment, and enaction of homophobia.

Fun Home and Other Voices, Other Rooms disrupt normative flows of time with foreshadowing and flashback. Fun Home is a memoir, and, as such, the narrator/author, Alison/Bechdel, is often remembering and re-rendering events from her childhood as experienced, and focalized, by her younger self, but narrating these through her adult perspective. In addition, because of the multiple semiotic systems, images from the far past and the more recent past can be layered and then juxtaposed with narration in the present. This is vividly displayed in two panels on page 120 of the graphic novel, where Alison's hands are shown holding more of the photos from the box marked "Family," described earlier. In the first panel, Alison's hand holds a single photo of her father when he was about the same age as Roy had been when he was both Bruce's lover and Alison's babysitter. In the photo, Bruce is seen posing in a women's swimsuit, a towel wrapping his head and covering his hair. Bechdel, as narrator in the present, writes, "He's wearing a women's bathing suit. A fraternity prank? But the pose he strikes is not silly at all. He's lissome, elegant" (p. 120). In the next frame, Alison's hands are shown holding two photos, side-by-side. One show's her father lounging in a men's swimsuit, shirtless, wearing sunglasses, and smiling fully into the camera. The other shows the younger Alison, likewise smiling toward the camera. Here, Bechdel writes of the former image, "In another picture, he's sunbathing on the tarpaper roof of his frat house just after he turned twenty-two. Was the boy who took it his lover?" (p. 120) and then of the latter, "As the girl who took this Polaroid of me on a fire escape on my twenty-first birthday was mine?" (p. 120). In this series of images, past and present come together, allowing the older Bechdel to look at images of the young Bruce and her younger self and recognize, through the layering of time, her father's sexual identity relative to her own. The images and text provide both a flashback to Bechdel's younger self, just coming out as lesbian, as well as a foreshadowing of that self, embodied in the younger Bruce, whom she is now able to recognize as gay. She draws the photos together, summarizing, "The exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces-it's about as close as a translation can get" (p. 120). Hence, Fun Home uses foreshadowing and flashback to show multiple ideologies through the layering of timescales through juxtaposition of text and images.

Discussion

Our analysis of Boy Meets Boy; The Color Purple; Fun Home; Other Voices, Other Rooms; and Written on the Body helped us to understand what distinguishes queer literature. The distinction is an ideological one; that is, queer literature offers multiple and conflicting ideologies around sexuality and gender through poststructural conceptions of identities and disruptions of norms that may be enhanced through the use of particular literary devices.

It is not, however, just about being LGBT-inclusive. In fact, one might argue that The Color Purple and Other Voices, Other Rooms are not LGBT-inclusive in that no one in The Color Purple or Other Voices, Other Rooms ever names themselves in such terms. For us to insist on such a criterion would demand that the books be anachronistic, as such identity markers were not claimed in the time periods in which the books are set. Furthermore, such an insistence would be in conflict with queer theory, as this theoretical disposition values a suspension rather than imposition of classification. In other words, it would be inappropriate to insist that for a book to be categorized as queer, it must first be categorized as LGBT-inclusive ( Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013; Smith, 2007).

It is tempting, though, to say that queer literature must offer poststructural conceptions of sexual and gender identities in one of the main characters. Or, more explicitly, it must include a significant character, if not main character, whose sexual and gender identities are represented as multiple, variable, and fluid. The book Written on the Body does this exquisitely in that readers cannot know the sexuality of the narrator and Louise because we never know the gender of the narrator. We, as readers, know that he or she has shared sexual relationships with both men and women, and we know that Louise married a man, but that those bits of information indicate the narrator is bisexual and Louise straight is interrogated throughout the novel. Moreover, Written on the Body is truly exceptional in this way. To require such suspension of sexual and gender classifications of queer literature would leave so few texts for consideration, particularly if we focus on literature marketed to young adults, that it would completely hinder the work we are trying to accomplish. That said, it was important to us that in each of these five books, there is a character, even if not a significant one, who we understood as experiencing and embodying sexuality and gender with some degree, albeit varying degrees, of multiplicity, variability, and fluidity. Our insistence on paying attention to the presence of such characters, no matter how fleeting, relates to the foundational work of Cart and Jenkins (2006). In their documenting of YA literature with gay/lesbian/queer content, they attend to the importance of the presence of gay characters in such fiction, even if such early depictions were flawed by "stereotypical characters and predictable plots centered on the inherent misery of gay people's lives" (p. 17) and, in many cases, continue to be premised on "agonizing over whether to come out and suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous homophobia" (p. 134). Their work shows the evolution of such depictions over time and the increasing positive presence of LGBTQQ characters in LGBT-inclusive literature. Attending to the presence of poststructural conceptions of sexual and gender identities in characters, whether they are major or peripheral, positions our work to serve as an extension of Cart and Jenkins's foundational work such that we might, together, support future examinations of queer literature as it continues to evolve.

Other significant features of this collection of queer literature, and we argue queer literature more broadly, is the disruption of norms related to sexuality and gender as well as those related to families and homes. These books disrupt norms related to sexuality and gender by evading gender identification and thus calling into question sexual identification, as in Written on the Body. They do it with particular respect to sexuality by representing same-sex desire and action, as in The Color Purple and Other Voices, Other Rooms, and having characters that explicitly claim nonheterosexual identities, as in Boy Meets Boy and Fun Home. With respect to gender, they disrupt norms with characters who assume some traits typically associated with the gender "opposite" theirs, as in Other Voices, Other Rooms and The Color Purple; with characters who perform as the gender "opposite" theirs, as in Fun Home; and characters who reject their assigned gender in favor of their actual gender, as in Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Boy Meets Boy. They disrupt norms related to families by explicitly rejecting traditional notions of family, as in Fun Home and Written on the Body; by celebrating alternative configurations of family, as in Boy Meets Boy, The Color Purple, and Other Voices, Other Rooms; and by embracing a reconciliation of traditional and alternative families, as in Boy Meets Boy and Fun Home. Intertwined with these disruptions of families are disruptions in homes. Thus, all of these books, again to varying degrees, and in various ways, disrupt norms defined by sexuality, gender, families, and homes. We understand this as imperative in literature if it is to be understood as queer.

In looking for other sorts of disruptions of norms, we were compelled by disruptions of time across the queer literature we studied. As we say above, we do not understand this to be a quality unique to queer literature, but we were impressed with how artistic distortions of time enriched the already queer nature of the books. These disruptions happened with surreal scenes inserted among otherwise linear stories, as in The Color Purple; Other Voice, Other Rooms; and Written on the Body. They also happened through the use of the ironic mode, as in Boy Meets Boy, and the use of foreshadowing and flashback in Fun Home and Other Voices, Other Rooms. We understand this feature not to be imperative in but rather enhancing of queer literature.

What is most important, though, is that these conceptualizations of identities and disruptions of norms have the effect of offering multiple and conflicting ideologies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender. Sometimes, such ideologies are made available or at least made more visible through the use of literary devices, as is evident in the above discussion of time. In addition to mode, flashback, and foreshadowing, the use of focalization, the inclusion of naïve narrators, and the use of metonymic configurations can heighten readers' attention to the queer and to the experience of characters being and becoming queer. Such heightened attention makes these ideologies more overtly visible and available to readers, which has implications especially for young adult readers, as we discuss below.

Therefore, what does queer literature look like? It offers multiple, variable, and conflicting conceptions of sexual and gender identities, including poststructural ones. It disrupts normative notions of sexuality, gender, families, and homes; and it disrupts other norms, too, in the case of these books, norms associated with time. Moreover, it uses a wide array of literary devices to accentuate the already queer nature of the text. Having identified what queer literature looks like, we now turn to what resources queer books might offer that are distinct from literature with LGBT themes, especially to young adult readers.

Implications

As we note in the opening of this article, making space for LGBTQQ literature in schools is still a challenge. Given these challenges, we initiated and facilitated an out-of-school book discussion group where we could privilege the reading and discussion of such literature with young people ( Blackburn & Clark, 2011). That work allowed us to identify LGBT-inclusive and queer discourses evident in our talk and set the stage for our analysis, here, focused on the queer books that were read in that group and the specific ideological and literary elements in these books. While our earlier focus was on understanding types of discussions, our focus, here, is specifically on books, namely, queer literature.

This analysis allowed us to understand and name the multiple and conflicting ideologies that are manifest in queer literature, at least the five novels read by our group, and to characterize the key elements that make a book queer. Although these may not be evident in all queer literature, our analysis provides a framework for further analysis of contemporary, LGBT-themed YA literature ( Clark & Blackburn, in press). And, while these particular books are not all sanctioned in schools, this analysis demonstrates that engaging with queer literature may provide critical resources to young adult readers by countering the invisible ideologies of heterosexism, misogyny, and homophobia that circulate in their daily lives ( Martino, 2009; Pascoe, 2007). Understanding and naming the multiple and conflicting ideologies that are manifest in queer literature is one way to counter these forces. As McCallum and Stephens (2010) note, "literary discourse serves to produce, reproduce, and challenge ideologies" (p. 370). By reading such texts, even if not these particular texts, young people will at least experience narratives or characters who counter or critique these pervasive, normative ideologies.

While we recognize that reading and discussing queer texts in schools is not yet the norm, we know that scholars and educators are increasingly calling for and using queer and LGBT-themed texts in classrooms (see, for example, Carey-Webb, 2001; Hamilton, 1998; Schall & Kauffmann, 2003; Smith, 2007). Our hope is that this analysis will provide guidance, techniques, and even impetus for more teachers to do this work without unintentionally reinforcing heteronormativity. If teachers understand the ideological dimensions of queer literature, they can make ideologies of sexuality and gender explicit, inviting productive discussions of key issues such as "what ideologies are being depicted as the contemporary status quo, what are the problems with or limitations of those ideologies, and what are imagined as possible social or individual transformations of behaviors in opposition to them" ( McCallum & Stephens, 2010, p. 370).

Examining texts for different conceptualizations of sexual and gender identities might invite students and teachers to interrogate assumed notions of identities as essential or even developmental. This might free a student who has been tagged as a fag or a dyke, even for years, of the burden of homophobia, even if only in his or her English language arts class. It might also liberate a student who has always understood himself or herself, and has always been understood by others, as straight, but who is struggling with a confusing attraction to a same-gender peer. In other words, exploring possibilities of sexual and gender identities that are multiple, variable, and fluid might alleviate some of the pressure of being or becoming someone who is socially acceptable and soothe the anxieties associated with being or becoming someone who is not. One could argue such an examination is supported by the Common Core Standards ( National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), which challenge students to analyze "how complex characters (e.g., those with multiple or conflicting motivations) develop over the course of a text, interact with other characters, and advance the plot or develop the theme" (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.3).

Studying texts for disruptions of sexuality and gender norms provides students with a wider array of ways of being in the world. This might mean reflecting on the options of being a girl who engages in some behaviors typically associated with boys, like playing football; being a girl who sometimes performs boyhood, perhaps through her dress; or being a boy who was assigned the sex of female when he was born. This full range of options calls into question the notion of there being any particular, right, gendered way of being in the world. Analyzing texts that complicate notions of families and homes also has something to offer students. For any of the many students who come from families that are anything other than a mother and father raising their biological children or homes that house such families, complicating notions of families and homes can be a relief. Literature can, in this way, serve as a mirror ( Bishop, 1992), not because any family or home looks just like any particular student's family or home, but because something other than that which is falsely understood as traditional, normal, or even ideal is made visible in the literature when teachers help students see it. Even students who are part of families who look very much like traditional nuclear families have something to gain by studying queer literature that offers alternative families and homes. For them, the literature serves as a window, rather than a mirror ( Bishop, 1992), and they are educated by such a view. They come to know there are families and homes quite different than their own, providing them opportunities to value and respect alternative families, but also opening up options for possibilities of what their families might be as they come to shape their own. Of course, interrogations of other norms, like time, but also any number of things, serves a similar purpose, that is to inform students to a wide array of ideologies, or ways of viewing the world that may support, complicate, or even contradict their own, thus better preparing them for the diverse world in which they live. Again, one might argue that such analysis is aligned with the new Common Core Standards ( National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), which require that students analyze "author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it . . . and manipulate time" (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.5).

Paying attention to literary elements, too, aligns this approach with more mainstream notions of what gets taken up in English language arts classrooms, providing impetus for the inclusion of queer literature in classrooms. Of course doing this work will require that more teachers, especially English language arts teachers, become familiar with and knowledgeable of queer conceptual frameworks. However, several resources already exist that invite English teachers to take up different literary theoretical lenses in the classroom ( Appleman, 2000; Soter, Faust, & Rogers, 2007), including queer theory ( Smith, 2007). This analysis adds to and extends these prior works. Teachers of literature are expected, indeed required, to guide students in analyzing literary elements in texts, and tying queer concepts to literary elements may provide a sanctioned way into studying queer concepts and ideologies. For teachers, the requirement of literary analysis may give queer texts a way into the classroom when teachers know how to analyze queer texts. For students in such classrooms, the inverse might also be true. Perhaps LGBTQQ and ally students might find themselves drawn to literary studies when they are connected to queer concepts. Finally, for teachers and students, engaging with queer literature provides opportunities to exist and thrive in the realm of the queer, a space where multiple ideologies and conflicting ideologies around sexuality and gender can circulate and be considered, examined, embraced, or rejected by the reader, rendering the text more open and less settled, and the space of the classroom, as a whole, more queer.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1.
We use a variety of acronyms throughout this article with the overall intention of inclusivity and precision. Here, we use lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) to describe people, and include the additional Q to capture the agency people have to question their identity status. We use LGBT or LGBTQQ to describe themes or books, omitting the additional Q as these objects do not have the agency of people. Finally, we use the term trans* to capture the broad diversity of noncisgender people, or people whose gender identities do not match the sex they were assigned at birth, who make up trans* communities.

2.
We use Mr._____ when talking about him in the context of Celie and Albert when talking about him in the context of Shug. When necessary, we choose Mr. _____ above Albert as the novel is told more from Celie's point-of-view than Shug's.

References

Clark, C. T., Blackburn, M. V. (in press). Scenes of violence and sex in recent award-winning LGBT-themed young adult novels and the ideologies they offer their readers. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. |
Google Scholar ISI

Galda, L., Beach, R. (2001). Response to literature as a cultural activity. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 64-73. |
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

Kentlyn, S. (2008). The radically subversive space of the queer home: "Safety House" and "Neighbourhood Watch" [Special Issue: Geographies of Sexuality and Gender Down Under]. Australian Geographer, 39, 327-337. |
Google Scholar Crossref | ISI

National Center for Transgender Equality . (2009). Transgender terminology. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from http://transequality.org/Resources/NCTE_TransTerminology.pdf
Google Scholar

Ryan, C. L., Hermann-Wilmarth, J. M. (2013). Already on the shelf: Queer readings of award-winning children's literature. Journal of Literacy Research, 45, 142-172. |
Google Scholar SAGE Journals | ISI

Winterson, J. (1994). Written on the body. New York, NY: Vintage.
Google Scholar

Author Biographies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Examining Queer Elements and Ideologies in LGBT-Themed Literature: What Queer Literature Can Offer Young Adult Readers - Mollie V. Blackburn, Caroline T. Clark, Emily A. Nemeth, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Abstract This paper retrospectively examines a collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* (LGBT)-themed books discussed by lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer, and questioning (LGBTQQ) and ally students and teachers across 3 years of an out-of-school reading group.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
LGBTQ themes in the British Library collections | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy.

LGBTQ themes in the British Library collections

Hannah Gabrielle takes a look at how LGBTQ people, narratives and interpretations cut through the British Library's vast collections.

Sexuality, a primeval aspect of human identity, has long been the subject of artistic expression and - some might argue - is an underlying motivation for most of human endeavour. It is therefore an important place to start when interpreting our collections, both from an individual and societal perspective.

It is clear from browsing our most expansive online resource Discovering Literature that LGBTQ perspectives, themes, influences and contributions cut through all sections of the literary canon. This is true whether it is in documenting bohemian haunts such as Soho's The Colony Room Club, approaching sexuality for context by challenging Victorian attitudes to sex, or exploring how David Bowie anticipated a future in which gender and sexuality became fluid, rather than fixed, entities.

Similarly, sexuality may be used as a critical approach, as in this this queer reading of William Shakespeare's gender farce Twelfth Night. We may also explore the treatment of same-sex love by Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe in Martin Wiggins' reading of the play Edward II. A modern take on this is explored in film-maker, artist and gay rights campaigner Derek Jarman's queer sketchbook, a preparatory piece for his 1991 film Edward II.

Derek Jarman's 'Queer' sketchbook

In his 1991 film of Edward II, Derek Jarman drew connections between the homophobia of the past and the late 20th century. He used extras from an Outrage! gay rights protest to play Edward's army, and saved their stickers in his sketchbook.

Usage terms © Courtesy of Keith Collins

Beyond our resources exploring literature, we also view gender and sexuality in a social context. For example, in our online exhibition Sisterhood we discuss queer and trans feminism - gender-sexual liberation movements which emerged in the 1990s, drawing on longstanding solidarities between gay and lesbian liberation groups. These movements have provided different ways of building alliances between women and men who feel alienated by stereotypical roles based on their sex. In this area we also feature Mary Kelly discussing the impact of the transexual rights movement in relation to feminism.

Mary Kelly talks about the importance of the transsexual rights movement in the USA and the UK. She comments that it is more than a civil rights issue. In much the same way as some elements of the early Women's Liberation Movement, it brings to the table fundamental questions about gender as a social process and psychic as well as physical construction. At the same time, Kelly is very clear that many feminists of her generation have not fully grasped the significance of the transsexual and transgender movements and claims, and suggests that there is more bridge-building and learning to be done by an older generation of activists.

What do you know about transsexual and transgender political struggles?

How are gender relationships complicated and liberated by the trans movement?

In our online resource featuring the digitisation of feminist publication Spare Rib a contemporary social reaction to Section 28 (also known as Clause 28) of the Local Government Act is given:

Spare Rib magazine issue 173

Article about changes in the law around sex education in schools in 1986.

Usage terms Issue 173, p 10, Sex Education Who Decides? By Wendy Cobb; photograph of a school lesson by Maggie Murray.
Usage terms: We have been unable to locate the copyright holder for these items. Please contact copyright@bl.uk with any information you have regarding these items.

Cultural icons such as Oscar Wilde or W H Auden gave a voice to non-heteronormative identities at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and, in the case of Oscar Wilde, faced prosecution. Comedian and TV personality Stephen Fry has spoken of how important Oscar Wilde was in helping him to confront his sexuality.

Photographs of Oscar Wilde, 1877-1905

Photograph of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.

Furthermore, Wilde's works such as De Profundis give an insight to his reflections on his sexual identity, being written while he served a sentence for homosexuality.

Manuscript of 'De Profundis' by Oscar Wilde

A long, harrowing letter Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas.

Our newspaper archive also gives a brief glimpse of the dominant social attitudes and discourses towards homosexuals and homosexual behaviour in its depiction of his trial.

'Closing scene at the Old Bailey': newspaper coverage of the Oscar Wilde trial

Newspaper coverage of the trial of Oscar Wilde for 'acts of gross indecency' with another man, from the Illustrated Police News, 4 May 1895.

Wilde's sexuality has been used as a way to interpret his literary works, with Roger Luckhurst perceiving coded gay sensibilities in A Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Elsewhere in our collections we encounter progressive bohemians who defied dominant social archetypes of sexuality. Take, for instance W H Auden, arguably the greatest English lyric poet of the 20th century. In our article An introduction to WH Austen's Lullaby, Roz Kaveney emphasises Auden's progressive and bold attitude to his sexual identity: 'Auden was not merely a homosexual in a time when in his native country this was both illegal and by most people considered disgraceful; he was openly gay and at times evangelically so'.

Auden's Lullaby blurs the lines of distinct sexual preferences and while Kaveney claims it is 'not an openly gay poem', she agrees it is 'distinctly queer'.

W H Auden and Erika Mann pictured in the year of their marriage by Alec Bangham

Auden married Erika Mann, the daughter of Thomas Mann in 1935. Both Erika and Auden were gay; theirs was a marriage of convenience to enable her to obtain a British passport.

More recently, popular culture has helped increase recognition of Auden's sexual identity. The 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral includes a reading of Auden's poem Stop all the Clocks at the funeral of a gay man, by his lover. Thus the poet's celebrity as a gay icon was reignited for a new generation.

Another Time by W H Auden

Substantially modified version of the song later appeared in Auden's collection Another Time in 1940.

Usage terms 'Lullaby': Copyright © 1937 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 'Musée des Beaux Arts': Copyright © 1939 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 'Funeral Blues': Copyright © 1940 by W.H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

There are several articles about W H Auden you can explore further in our Discovering Twentieth Century Literature resource.

Another celebrated literary luminary who wrote about homosexual themes is author E M Forster. His gay fiction, specifically his novel Maurice is analysed in our article by Kate Symondson.

Maurice by E M Forster

The first Penguin edition of Maurice, 1972. Forster's novel was first published a year after his death in 1971, made all the more possible by the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the emerging art forms of television and film gave new mediums through which LGBTQ experiences could be explored. The 1985 Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi portrays a young British Asian man who runs a laundrette with his white school friend, and the romantic relationship that develops between the two. The film is explored further in this article by Sukhdev Sandhu.

Typescript first draft of My Beautiful Laundrette

Omar and Johnny's first kiss in a draft of My Beautiful Laundrette (dated 20 June 1984).

Usage terms © Hanif Kureishi. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. Please credit the copyright holder when reusing this work.

When discussing My Beautiful Laundrette, Kureishi has expressed his interest in representing new types of people beyond the gender roles and identities prescribed by the older generation. He observed how people could be oppressed by their identity and how one may become a victim of other people's language.

These British luminaries have been a beacon for any person who has felt marginalised on the grounds of their sexual identity, and their works have helped to progress society by building empathy with LGBTQ experiences.

Hannah Gabrielle is the Head of Content and Community for the Digital Marketing Operations team at the British Library. She leads on British Library web content strategy. As a keen student of literature and history she completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in postcolonial theory. She also has a particular interest in children's literature.

Sign up to our newsletter

British Library newsletter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LGBTQ themes in the British Library collections | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. LGBTQ themes in the British Library collections Hannah Gabrielle takes a look at how LGBTQ people, narratives and interpretations cut through the British Library's vast collections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
21 Beautiful LGBTQ Books from Around the World | Books and Bao

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Queerness comes in all shapes and sizes, and encapsulates a spectrum of human experiences.

To celebrate all the facets of queerness, here are some of our favourite LGBTQ books from all around the world.

From South America to Japan and everywhere in-between, these queer novels speak for a range of expereinces across the queer spectrum.

Here, you'll find lesbian romances, gay experiences, transgender stories, tales of asexuality, and more. We have done our best to represent a broad spectrum of LGBTQ experiences here.

Must-Read LGBTQ Books from Around the World

The writers on this list identify as multiple different sexualities and genders, and the list has been assembled by a non-binary pansexual writer. It is not a definitive list, by any means; simply a list of important, impactful LGBTQ books by queer writers.

We hope you enjoy this list of queer books by queer writers from Argentina, France, Sweden, Korea, Cameroon, Japan, and more!
Read More: Queer Comic Books & Manga
is a daring and exciting collection of biographies that detail the lives and exploits of some of history's worst gay men and women: kings, tyrants, gangsters, fascists, and so much more.

From the Roman leader Hadrian to the British gangster Ronnie Kray via legendary figures like King James I, and Lawrence of Arabia, we take a detailed look at the lives of these awful people, who all happened to be members of the LGBTQ community.

One chapter focusses on the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin. Another on the fascistic Japanese author Yukio Mishima. These are strange, complex people who did great and terrible things.

All the while, their sexualities and gender expressions were inexorably tied to who they were and what they did.

One repeated theme is the definition of homosexuality itself, and the clash between the unacceptable feminine expression of camp men and the acceptable sexual bonds between two burly, manly men.

Put simply, it's not ok to be effeminate but it is ok to screw your bros.
Translated from the Japanese by Arthur Reiji Morris
is a detailed, wonderfully well-researched, hilariously well-expressed book on the gays that we love to hate throughout history, and how they left their mark on the world.

Taiwanese-born, Japan-based bilingual author Li Kotomi delivers here a powerful queer novel about identity and belonging.

tells the story of a young Taiwanese woman who suffered alienation and trauma growing up as a lesbian. When she moves to Tokyo to start again, she must continue to hide who she is.

Fear, depression, and thoughts of suicide mar Cho Norie's entire existence, and she turns to the books written by similarly depression-haunted authors for comfort.

In spite of how much deals with trauma and dark thoughts, there is a lot of hope to be found beneath the surface, and as the novel goes on.

First and foremost, this is one of those LGBTQ books that empathises with the reader. It offers comfort and understanding. It makes us feel less alone and able to see a light at the end of our struggles.

Cho Norie goes through so much, and she feels frequent pain. She comes close to giving into that pain, but she doesn't. We see her at Pride events, getting therapy, and making friends. She tries.
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
is a beautiful novel, beautifully translated, and beautifully gifted to those of us who need empathy and understanding in our darkest moments.

is a feminist Korean novel by one of the country's greatest modern writers: Kyunk-sook Shin.

We begin with protagonist San, living in a small village in 1970. San is close friends with a girl called Namae, and one day, while the two of them are playing in a minari field, they kiss.

For San, this kiss is a moment of intimate, sexual awakening that she immediately cherishes. She is electrified and she feels alive; connected to her friend.

For Namae, though, this moment - this kiss ‚ is disgusting. She flees, and refuses to speak to or see San again.

From here, we move to San as a young adult in Seoul, taking on a job at a florist. She befriends and eventually moves in with a female colleague, and the two of them form a tight connection.

However, this is also a novel about men and the male gaze; about how men intrude on women's spaces simply by looking at or touching them.

This is a novel that looks at seemingly innocent acts committed by men every day, acts that are actually subtly intrusive, and signs of dominance.

is a Korean novel about men's self-appointed right to touch and look at women, publicly and without shame. But it's also about the female gaze by comparison.

It looks at how women treat one another with greater respect, kindness, and intimate understanding.
Translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus
While it's not one of the most explicitly LGBTQ books out there, shines a light on heteronormativity and patriarchy, and asks us to question these things.

Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto has seen incredible international fame, and for good reason. She is an author intimately attuned to the quiet threads between love, life, and death.

Her books and stories explore love and tragedy in all their forms.

Kitchen begins with Mikage, who was raised by her grandparents after her parents died. After her grandmother's dead, she meets Yuichi and his mother. And so begins a romance between Mikage and Yuichi.

In Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto broke new ground. Published in 1988 in Japan, Kitchen is a Japanese novel that features a prominent transgender character.

Though the novel is a heterosexual love story, the mother of Yuichi, a woman named Eriko, is a trans woman.

This thoughtful and considered trans representation, especially as far back as the late '80s, is inspiring, and our trans character is given full attention, agency, and a personal arc.

Eriko is not entirely defined by her existence as a token trans character. She is a woman with depth, defined by her love for her son and her dedication to protect him and raise him right.
Read our full review of Kitchen here! Translated from the Spanish by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre
Kitchen was a novel ahead of its time and, for that reason, remains one of the most important LGBTQ books from Japan.

A thrilling lesbian novel from Argentina, The Adventures of China Iron is a joyously hilarious and thrilling story of sexual discovery and personal freedom.

China Iron was never given a name. At the beginning of the book, her backstory is established quickly and succinctly.

We learn a little about her parentage, her working for and being raised by two cold abusers, her marriage to a singer who is eventually drafted, and her having given birth at the age of fourteen.

As her story gets underway, China is picked up on the road by a woman named Liz, a Scottish woman looking to make her fortune in this late 19th Century Argentina.

Liz is the beginning of China's freedom, in more ways than one.

Soon after their journey begins, China begins to crave Liz. She has an intense longing for her, demonstrated by some visceral, erotic language that enforces the heat at the heart of China.
"She was my North and I was the quivering needle on a compass: my whole body was pulled towards her, dwarfed by the strength of my desires."
She is a woman who feels a great deal - she lusts and yearns; she wants to love and be loved.

The Adventures of China Iron is a novel about queer freedom. A romance between two women with a lust for life. They turn their noses up at patriarchy and those who reinforce it.

They laugh in the face of normalcy. They explore, they journey, and they love.
Read our full review of The Adventures of China Iron here! Translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich
As a celebration of queerness and lesbian love, this is one of the best LGBTQ books out there.

Chi Ta-wei is a renowned and celebrated scholar of LGBTQ books and literary history. His queer, speculative sci-fi novel The Membranes was written in 1995 and wasn't translated into English until 2021.

Looking at this book through a time-travel lens, it is remarkable to consider how revolutionary the themes and ideas of this short novel were.

The Membranes tells the story of Momo, a woman living around the turn of the 22nd Century. Momo is a dermal care technician with some very prestigious clients.

The world of The Membranes is a post-climate-change one, in which every lives in bubbled cities at the bottom of the ocean, protected from the sun and the scorched Earth.

Despite its setting, The Membranes is a very intimate tale, focussing on Momo's personal history and lived experiences, especially her relationship with her mother.

We experience much of this book through flashbacks to Momo's childhood and specific moments that lead to her life now, age thirty.

What makes The Membranes one of the most profound LGBTQ books of our time is how it explores gender and sexual relationships.

Momo was a test tube baby, born from a decision made by two women. This is also a transgender story (though including the hows and whys of this would be to spoil the story).

Chi Ta-wei wrote this novel at a time of punk art revolutions in a newly politically free Taiwan.

This was a period of change where artists bent and broke the rules concerning sex and gender, and The Membranes reflects this.

Alison Rumfitt is a transgender writer based in Brighton, UK. Her debut novel, Tell Me I'm Worthless is an unflinching, punk trans novel about the UK's treatment of trans people.

It's an unpleasant, twisted, gothic nightmare of a novel, and it's also a work of literary genius; one of the finest LGBTQ books of the past few years.

Tell Me I'm Worthless follows two former friends: Alice and Ila. Alice is a trans woman who is haunted by ghost.

Ila is a vocal TERF who was radicalised after the two spent a night at a haunted house together. Each of them believes the other sexually assaulted them in that house.

Rumfitt's novel is a revolutionary piece of gothic horror that wears its pain on its sleeve. This is a novel that attacks transphobic Britain (or "TERF Island" if you'd prefer).

It ponders what the UK is doing to trans people, rallying transphobes against us and leaving us to live in fear.
Translated from the Korean by Soje
Beyond being an important and angry transgender novel by a fierce trans voice, Tell Me I'm Worthless is also, very simply, a wonderful piece of modern gothic fiction.

In this harrowing post-apocalyptic novel that brings to mind others of its kind - The Road, Oryx and Crake, I Am Legend (the book, not the film) - Choi Jin-young shows us how, against all odds, love can win out in the end.

Set after a disease has ravaged the planet, To The Warm Horizon follows two young Korean women who have met on the road in the cold wilds of Russia.

Dori has lost her parents to the disease and is now in charge of her deaf and mute sister. Jina is travelling with her extended family and childhood friend Gunji.

Dori and Jina's encounter leads to some raw and chilling events, exactly the kind you'd expect to see in a disease-wrought, post-apocalyptic wasteland.

But against all of this, the love and dedication that these two women find for each other keeps the reader hopeful.
Translated from the Spanish by Juana Adcock & Sophie Hughes
This is a beautiful lesbian love story that uses this hook to set it apart from the less hopefully novels that populate the same genre, making it one of the most unique LGBTQ books out there.

Of all the LGBTQ books on this list, An Orphan World is one of the most angry. A Columbian novel about the unfair treatment of gay men from youth to adulthood.

In An Orphan World, Caputo writes with his pen on fire; furious at the threatening beast of a world that young gay men are thrust into.

An Orphan World begins in two places.

One is a part of the past, where our protagonist draws us a picture of his optimistic but penniless father: a man who scrawls on the walls of their shell of a house like a naughty child or a caveman, in a cheap, coarsely creative attempt to bring art and colour to their lives.

The other place is a gay club, a little later on, as our protagonist is in the thralls of self-discovery. The club, through Caputo's description, feels like being inside a drum as it is relentlessly beaten at from the outside.

There is little friendship to be found here; little safety; little comfort. The world is deadly and aggressive, and it revels in that aggression. Even personal sexual exploration is painful and unfair.

This fear and anger is explored with dizzying allure in An Orphan World, as the story is melted down and then folded over itself again and again like the liquid steel of a blade - a blade that Caputo himself is forging to take on an unjust world, teeth bared and both hands on the blade as he goes.
Read our full review of An Orphan World here!
Few LGBTQ books are as raw, angry, and impactful as An Orphan World.

Detransition, Baby made history when it became the first book written by a trans woman to appear on the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Beyond this, Detransition, Baby also happens to be a bold and human novel that explores the dark and the light sides of being a trans woman in the twenty-first century, written by one of the foremost trans authors of our time.

The novel's story, set in Brooklyn, centres around Reese and Ames (formerly Amy). Reese is a trans woman in her mid-thirties who desperately longs to be a mother.

Ames is now living as a man but lived for six years as a trans woman named Amy, and much of that time was spent in a lesbian relationship with Reese.

Detransition, Baby is, unquestionably, one of the most important LGBTQ books written in recent years. A novel by a trans woman about the murky waters of transness.

Lesbian relationships; tearing the mask of heteronormativity; rejecting the patriarchal status quo with regards to relationships, having children, and building a family.

Detransition, Baby explores so many facets of queerness, all while being a complex character drama. One of the great LGBTQ books of our time.

She Who Became The Sun is a genderqueer retelling of the origin story of one of China's most iconic historical figures: Zhu Yuanzhang, founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty.

Set in the 14th Century, She Who Became The Sun takes the story of Zhu Yuanzhang - the story of a peasant who became a monk, then a rebel leader, and finally an emperor - and makes it into a beautiful fantasy-inspired genderqueer epic.

In its first chapter, She Who Became The Sun shows us a peasant family on the brink of starvation.

Though a fortune teller has told the father that his son will find greatness, the father and son are soon killed, and all that's left is the fateless daughter.

This daughter takes the name Zhu Chongba, the name of her brother, disguises herself as a man, seeks refuge at a monastery, and from there rises up through the ranks of a rebel army as they gain power against the mongols who currently occupy China.

As a piece of non-binary fiction, She Who Became The Sun explores the life of someone who is at first a woman disguised as a man, but who later finds their identity as both and neither.
Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
Zhu Chongba is a truly inspiring non-binary protagonist, and this is one of the coolest LGBTQ books on shelves right now.

An Apartment on Uranus is a collection of chronological essays which begin in March 2013 in Paris, one of Paul's three great geographical loves, and ends in January 2018 in Arles (captured by Van Gogh's alluring painting Café Terrace at Night).

Blending personal observations - both inward and outward - with musings on borders, laws, pornography, sex, patriarchy, capitalism, Marxism, and issues surrounding trans rights and the lives of trans people, An Apartment on Uranus is enormous in terms of the ground that it covers and the concepts which it discusses.

An Apartment on Uranus often reads like a call-to-arms. It brings to the surface issues of safety for women's rights to their own bodies, the rights of trans people to do what it takes to survive and exist in this world, and so many more issues besides.

It is not entirely and inescapably political, however (although, as we know, everything is, in fact, political).

Paul is also, throughout An Apartment on Uranus, tracing his own transgender journey. He mentions near the book's end that he has lived his entire life as a lesbian woman, and the last five years as a transgender man.
Read our full review of An Apartment on Uranus here!
One of the most exhilarating books by a trans man, as well as one of the most emboldening LGBTQ books on the shelves, An Apartment on Uranus is a must-read.

Written by UK-based German non-binary author Isabel Waidner, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff is a punk and radical novel that tackles intensely philosophical themes: empire, cultural and national identity, the class system, migrant experiences, and more.

Set on the Isle of Wight, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff mostly takes place in a hotel and follows the surreal episodic lives of two queer migrants who work there.

Queer and migrant experiences, as well as issues created by class disparity, about throughout.

This is one of the most exciting LGBTQ books available right now, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize alongside Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport.

There is no writer in the world like Isabel Waidner and no queer book quite like We Are Made of Diamond Stuff.

Alice Oseman is an asexual author of queer YA fiction and queer comic books. Her novel, , loosely inspired by her own lived experiences, follows a teenager who moves to Durham University, is thrust into the queer world of her peers, and goes on a journey to understand her own sexuality.

As YA novels go, Loveless is wonderful for representation. It features non-binary characters, lesbian romances, as its protagonist's gradual understanding of her own asexual identity.

There aren't many LGBTQ books that do so much for queer representation in literature, while also being an engaging and moving tale.
Translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
Loveless is a very poignant but direct story of asexuality and queerness, featuring a colourful cast of characters, set in a place where many of us undergo a journey of experimentation and self-discovery, and it succeeds at every turn.

Love in the Big City is a gay Korean novel about friendship, youth, self-discovery, hedonism, sex, and romance.

Our protagonist, likely based on the author himself, is a young gay man in Seoul who is best friends with a woman; they drink and party and have fun and meet people together.

We begin with this lovely, charming example of youth and friendship and fun. But eventually Young's friend "grows up" and gets series, and so Young has to do the same.

We watch him become a published writer, enter into a relationship, deal with family troubles, and even health issues of his own.

We spend so much time with Young's experiences and feelings. We sympathise with his struggles: family relationships, homophobia in public, break-ups and heartbreak.

He's a wonderfully likeable, honest, broken protagonist that we grow to love and understand and appreciate.
Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
Love in the Big City is a kind and sweet novel; one of the most charming and warming LGBTQ books around.

Max Lobe is an author from Douala, Cameroon who moved to Switzerland for university and has remained there ever since.

His novel A Long Way From Douala tells the brutal and harrowing journey of a young gay man, depicting the realities of modern-day Cameroon along the way.

After their father dies, Jean's brother Roger disappears. He leaves Douala and heads north, following a dream of becoming a successful footballer. He will likely head to Nigeria and, from there, to Europe.

With the help of their friend Simon, Jean gives chase after his head-in-the-clouds brother.

As they travel, threats of terrorism and violence are every present, and Jean spends time musing on and trying to understand his own sexuality as a young gay man, which is at odds with his own society and the religion in which he was raised.
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
This is a touching story that paints a vivid picture of modern-day Cameroon from a religious, socioeconomic perspective, and this makes it one of the more unique LGBTQ books avaialble right now.

Girls Lost is the tale of three teenagers, exhausted and confused by the system that divides boys and girls and the young men who abuse it, who find the chance to see, for a time, through the eyes of a man in a man's world.

Girls Lost also escalates into a deep exploration of sexuality, primal urges, aggression, and the forms that freedom can take.

While it isn't one of the most out-and-out LGBTQ books, Girls Lost is a YA novel that asks poignant questions about gender and sexuality; the blurred lines and fluidity that exists between both.

If you were to label it in some way, this is a YA novel about gender binaries and pansexuality. As a non-binary and pansexual reader/writer, I found the questions and topics explored in this novel immensely satisfying.

Girls Lost is eager to discuss the walls between genders and sexualities, as well as the journey to womanhood and the relationships we build with our friends and lovers.
Read our full review of Girls Lost here!
It's a frightfully clever book with an ambitious philosophy that is entirely well-executed. It wants you to think, consider, and reconsider your position on sex, sexuality, and gender. And you will, over and over again.

Like many of the LGBTQ books on this list, 100 Boyfriends is an unfettered punk book. In fact, by their very nature, most LGBTQ books are punk: going against the grain, fighting the heteronormative state of our society, and celebrating an alternative way of living and loving.

100 Boyfriends is a collection of twenty-five stories about gay love and gay sex.

Funny, bleak, twisted, horny, heart-warming, heart-rending; these stories stretch across the entire emotional spectrum, entering into taboo and surreal territory.

Rarely are gay love and gay sex depicted with this much humour, rawness, and volume. This is a book that shows queer relationships in their brightest and their darkest moments.

If you want an untamed collection of queer stories, written by a gay, Black, American author with a punk and sardonic attitude, you need to check out 100 Boyfriends. It is a diamond amongst LGBTQ books.

Bryan Washington is another gay, Black American writer making waves in the world of LGBTQ books, first with his short story collection Lot, and now with his debut novel .

Set in both Texas and Osaka, Japan, Memorial traces the troubled lives of two men in love: a Black American named Benson and a Japanese migrant named Mike.

When Mike learns that his estranged father, back in Osaka, is dying, he immediately drops everything to go see him.

Meanwhile, Mike's mother has just turned up at their flat and must now spend time living in an awkward situation with her son's boyfriend.

The narrative flits between Ben and Mike, between Texas and Osaka, tracing the stories of these two men as individuals and as a couple.

We see how their relationship has become so rocky, and we see how they will choose to move forward from here.

Memorial is another raw, angry, but ultimately uplifting novel about queer love and gay relationships. One of the most impactful LGBTQ books of today.

Meredith Russo's novel, If I Was Your Girl, is a joyous narrative piece of transgender fiction that puts the focus on not being a tragedy.

So much trans representation in fiction brings the trans character's story to a tragic ending, which is not the kind of narrative we want to be ingrained in the public discourse.

That's why this particular queer novel is so important. It's a TA trans novel written by a trans author that is full of hope.

If I Was Your Girl, full of highs and lows, but it reminds its trans readers that their own ending can and should be a happy one, making this one of the most vital pieces of transgender fiction, and will go down as one of the great transgender stories and LGBTQ books.

A sequel to Garth Greenwell's original What Belongs to You, is a novel about a nameless protagonist, as torn and broken as the city in which he resides.

Set in the exciting but troubled city of Sofia, Bulgaria (one that captured our own hearts), Cleanness follows the fragmented journey through the troubled waters of love and sex by an American teacher living and working in Bulgaria.

Split into three parts, Cleanness transcends nations and nationalities, ages and generations, as it explores the fraught and sometimes toxic relationships of the men we meet.

Cleanness is a dark and honest novel that holds nothing back; it is often bleak in its discussion of gay relationships, mental health, and existential trouble. It is one of the darker LGBTQ books written in recent times, but a small masterpiece nonetheless.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
21 Beautiful LGBTQ Books from Around the World | Books and Bao

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Queerness comes in all shapes and sizes, and encapsulates a spectrum of human experiences. To celebrate all the facets of queerness, here are some of our favourite LGBTQ books from all around the world. From South America to Japan and everywhere in-between, these queer novels speak for a range of expereinces across the queer spectrum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Gender and sexuality | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gender and sexuality

Examine representations of gender, sex and relationships in medieval literature, from the works of women's writers to tales of courtly love to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gender and sexuality | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gender and sexuality Examine representations of gender, sex and relationships in medieval literature, from the works of women's writers to tales of courtly love to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Research Guides: English Language & Literature: Disability in Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Research Guides: English Language & Literature: Disability in Literature

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Resources for conducting literary research on English & American Literatures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Edward Said's publication of Orientalism (1978) made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation and criticism. Said's intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe's 'others' has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth century...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Marx' Das Capital and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory.

Appearing at the same time as the works of Derrida, Foucault and the French feminists, it set in motion an intellectual turmoil that altered the shape of the canon of Western and Eastern academia. Said argued that while being a military and political project, colonialism was also discursive, involving the documentary and ideological construction of thought and texts through modes of representation like history, literature, music and so on. Thus Orientalism refers to the construction of the East as primitive, pagan, savage, undeveloped, criminal and needing reform. Europe and the Orient were discursively represented as binary opposites. The Orient, Europe's Other, was integral to the very formation of the European identity; it also justified the colonial presence in the East.

Said's Orientalisim exposed the European universalism that takes for granted white supremacy and authority. Describing the "Orient" as a Western cultural construct, Said argued that it is a projection of those aspects of the West, that the Westerners do not want to acknowledge in themselves, for instance, cruelty, sensuality and so on. The East is also understood as the fantastic realm of the exotic, mystical and the seductive, as reflected W.B. Yeats' description of Byzantium in his two Byzantium poems. Further, the West perceives the East as homogeneous masses, who act on impulse rather than with conscious decision, and the perception of their action is determined racially, as exemplified in the allegations against Dr. Aziz In E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.

In the tradition of Althusserian Marxism, Said argued that the native subject is interpellated into colonial structures and roles through ideology. Said endorsed contrapuntal reading of a text, against its grain, in order to detect the racialised imperialist discourse within it and to resist it. Postcolonial literary criticism is possible through such a resistant reading, where we identify the ideological grids of the literary texts; and develop a different historical narrative.

Contrapuntal reading takes into account intertwined histories and perspectives, to interpret colonial texts from the perspective of the colonizer and the colonized. It means, interpreting different perspectives simultaneously and seeing how the text interacts with itself as well as with historical and biographical contexts. It takes in both accounts of an issue; it addresses both the perspective of imperialism and the resistance to it. Contrapuntal reading necessitates a vision in which imperialism and literature are viewed simultaneously.

Said's theory was criticised for its treatment of colonialism as a homogeneous structure, ignoring the differences such as its gender aspect, native complicity and the class dimension. Said's critics argued that Orientalism concentrated too much on imperialist discourses and their positioning of colonial people, neglecting the way in which these people received, contributed to, challenged, or modified such discourses. Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (1992) is one of the strongest critiques of Edward Said and postcolonial theory. He argues that Said is steeped in the High Humanist tradition when he presupposes 1) A unified European identity which is at the origin of history 2) that this history remains essentially the same up to the 20th century 3) and that this history and beliefs are immanent in the great books of the Western canon.

Homi K Bhabha, opposes Said's homogenized approach (to subject formation), drawing on psychoanalytic and poststructuralist notions of subjectivity and language, and suggests that colonial discourses cannot "work" smoothly as orientalism might seem to suggest. Subjectivity, in the process of its formation itself, is diluted and hybridized, and hence, the identities of the colonizer as well as the colonized are unstable, shifting and fragmentary - being caught up in a complex reciprocity, and the colonial subject has various ways of subverting and resisting the colonial domination.

Analysis of Edward Said's Orientalism

Key Theories of Edward Said

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: A Passage to India, Aijaz Ahmad, Byzantium, Charles Darwin, contrapuntal reading, Das Capital, E.M. Forster, Edward Said, Homi K Bhabha, In Theory, Interpellation, Interpretation of Dreams, Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, On the Origin of Species, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, Sigmund Freud, WB Yeats

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the prominent books of the Postmodern era, on par with Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Marx' Das Capital and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) inaugurated postcolonial theory. Appearing at the same time as the works of Derrida, Foucault and the French feminists, it set in motion an intellectual turmoil...

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Anti-racist Shakespeare | Blogs & features

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Professor Farah Karim-Cooper examines the racial meanings behind the language of light/dark and white/black used in Shakespeare's England

This May, instead of sitting in our homes waiting for a global pandemic to run its unrelenting course, we should have been hosting a third Shakespeare and Race symposium at Shakespeare's Globe.

In 2018 we curated a festival devoted to the topic which inaugurated our commitment to racial justice in the fields of academia and performance and to investigating attitudes towards race in Shakespeare's time and what it means to us now. Even though we are unable to welcome speakers from around the country and from the US to have these important conversations, I felt it was important to remind our audiences that the issues that would have been discussed at the symposium are still present in our minds. Some of the questions that we wanted to explore include: how does Shakespeare's work engage with race, racism and people of colour? What was the early modern experience of race? How do modern productions tackle this topic, if at all?

How does Shakespeare's work engage with race, racism and people of colour? What was the early modern experience of race? How do modern productions tackle this topic, if at all?

The topic of race in Shakespeare and pre-modern studies is vast and fraught with its own politics related to lack of diversity in the field of premodern literature and drama and the marginalisation of scholars of colour. It is why a group of scholars of colour formed a consortium and series of conferences called RaceB4Race, led by Professor Ayanna Thompson, Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This forum consists of scholars who study the medieval as well as the early modern periods and provides a safe space to discuss the latest research into a wide range of topics striving to make the discipline anti-racist, to discussions on early modern writers and their preoccupation with the language that constructed a sense of difference that still governs some of the ways we talk and think about race today.

When writing about Shakespeare and race as a scholar of colour there are various challenges that perhaps white scholars don't face. The two main challenges are, first, the realisation that the poems and plays that were written in the early modern period were largely written for a white readership/audience, so a scholar of colour might come to it with an imposed sense of alienation; the second is the grief and hurt caused when reading racist language about people of colour. It's hard, people. Whether it is Iago's racist language in Othello or the seemingly out of place racist slurs Lysander throws at Hermia when he rejects her after being bewitched by the flower: 'Ethiope'; 'Tawny Tartar' in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Each time a scholar of colour encounters such language it stings; it has to be quickly shaken off so that the analysis can take place in spite of this confrontation.

So let's focus on language in order to see how words matter across time and space not just in the moment. 'Words, words, words', as Hamlet says, are the first thing we encounter when reading or listening to Shakespeare. In her ground-breaking study Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Kim F. Hall points to the 'polarity of dark and light' created by words in Renaissance texts. She says that:

Descriptions of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or markers of moral categories, became in the early modern period the conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of "self" and "other" so well known in Anglo-American discourse.

It is a little odd but not perplexing that for years white scholars refused to or did not see the racial meanings behind the language of light and dark or white and black. In Renaissance texts related to beauty, behaviour and courtesy, whiteness is figured as an ideal in interior as well as exterior terms. In the imaginations of Shakespeare's contemporaries, whiteness was linked to a group of qualities associated with virtue and everything that is good. This influenced the ways in which the English began to consider difference. How one appeared in their demeanour, behaviour and physical complexion would have been viewed as a reflection of the inner self. This appears to have been a moment in history when whiteness was being emphatically placed above blackness for all sorts of reasons, skin colour being one tangible way of understanding difference.

How one appeared in their demeanour, behaviour and physical complexion would have been viewed as a reflection of the inner self.

The early moderns would have inherited their ideas about the values of white and black from a range of sources: artists manuals that describe the nature and symbolism of colour; poetry of the classical and medieval periods that praised ideals of whiteness; sermons that talked about death and damnation using the language and imagery of blackness and darkness; and religious painting - portraits and frescoes - that emphasised the shimmering divine light of God or Christ and the darkened complexions of devils, demons and death. Kim Hall talks specifically about Royal portraits of the Tudors which showcase the relationship between whiteness and power. Elizabeth I's portraits in particular often show her with a glowing whitened face - cosmetically enhanced in person - meant to remind the viewer of her virgin purity, Christian grace and monarchical supremacy. Many sonnets that Shakespeare would have read and certainly some of the poetry he wrote tended to use imagery associated with whiteness to describe female beauty:

The Lily in the field,
That glories in his white:
For pureness now must yield,
And render up his right:
Heaven pictured in her face,
Doth promise joy and grace.
Fair Cynthia's silver light [the light of the moon that is!]
Compares not with her white...

This anonymous poem dated around 1593 compares a beautiful English woman to a lily and the moon, suggesting both would be fairly jealous of the lady who is much whiter and shinier than they are - the shine was an important feature since it reflected God's light, showing the lady to have a perfect soul. You get the picture.

If white was considered virtuous then does that mean black was considered bad? Not in every context of course; there was a great appreciation of night by poets (Romeo and Juliet often praise night), even while there was a fear in this period of the palpable darkness of and the 'terrors' of the night, to allude to a pamphlet written by Elizabethan author Thomas Nashe. There was also an appreciation of the melancholy spirit which was produced, according to the ancient theory of the four humours, by a substance in the body known as black bile. Melancholy could be positive- if it was a state of mind held by poets and thinkers in moderation; but it could also be negatively viewed because too much black bile could make an individual excessively melancholic, which, in whacky early modern theory could lead to idleness, villainy or 'madness', characteristics often associated with Black Africans or 'Moors' at the time. Either way it's fairly clear how these concepts are racialised and disturbing to consider the destructive force such language can have.

From looking closely and more deliberately at the language in Shakespeare's England particularly in his own work we can see how binaries of black and white helped create or contributed to concepts of race; we gain a deeper understanding of racial difference today and therefore a deeper awareness of what we are up against in the fight against racism. I think this is one of the chief values of studying Shakespeare and race.

FINIS.

#SuchStuff s1 e4: Shakespeare and Race

Listen

The Sun Queen: Elizabeth I

Read

Pilgrims' hands do touch

Read

HELP SUPPORT OUR BELOVED THEATRE.

We recently temporarily closed our doors to the public until further notice. As a charity that receives no regular government subsidy, we desperately need your support, more than ever before.

Please donate any amount, small or large, so that we can continue to thrive in the future.

DONATE GIFT VOUCHERS

×

We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience from our website.

Carry on browsing if you're happy with this, or find out how to manage cookies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Anti-racist Shakespeare | Blogs & features

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professor Farah Karim-Cooper examines the racial meanings behind the language of light/dark and white/black used in Shakespeare's England This May, instead of sitting in our homes waiting for a global pandemic to run its unrelenting course, we should have been hosting a third Shakespeare and Race symposium at Shakespeare's Globe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Attending to race in Shakespeare's plays generates surprising through-lines between the 16th to the 21st centuries, as well as some clear historical distinctions. How far can these works speak to our modern concerns? Should today's black actors authenticate Othello, written by and for a white man, by performing the role?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Attending to race in Shakespeare's plays generates surprising through-lines between the 16th to the 21st centuries, as well as some clear historical distinctions. How far can these works speak to our modern concerns? Should today's black actors authenticate Othello, written by and for a white man, by performing the role?

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
jeffrey r. wilson 22the trouble with disability in shakespeare studies22 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What can the works of Charles Dickens tell us about race and colonialism in the Victorian era? Dr Alex Tickell, a Senior Lecturer in English, explores...

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Why English Class is Silencing Students of Color

# data[].attributes.headline
Why English Class is failing students of colour 

# data[].attributes.subject
Why English Class is failing students of colour 

# data[].attributes.body
Via Terra Glowach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jamila Lyiscott: Why English Class is Silencing Students of Color

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What if someone told you that the way you use language every day had the power to disrupt or uphold social injustice? Language is saturated with history and culture and memory, yet the way that it is policed within our classrooms and our communities is deeply connected to racism and colonialism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Author Interview With Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: 'Cultivating Genius' (Opinion)

# data[].attributes.body
Via Terra Glowach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Gholdy Muhammad agreed to answer a few questions about her new book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy.

By the way, this is the 100th book-related column published in this blog, including 96 interviews with authors and a handful of book reviews and lists of book recommendations by teachers. You can see them all here.
Dr. Gholdy Muhammad is an associate professor of language and literacy at Georgia State University. LF: You propose a four-part "equity framework" for literacy instruction including: "1) identity development; 2) skill development; 3) intellectual development; and 4) criticality." Could you describe these elements, particularly "identity development" and "criticality" since it seems that teachers might be more familiar with the middle two? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
The historically responsive equity framework is not just for literacy instruction or literacy educators per se but for all teachers across the disciplines. The framework does bring diverse texts and literacies into all content areas in K-12 classrooms. In my research, I take up the ways in which literacy was defined historically within black communities, particularly in black literary societies. And I found that literacy was synonymous with education. Literacy was also defined within the four frames of identity, skills, intellectualism, and criticality, the four-part equity model. In other words, as black people were learning, they were cultivating each of those four areas of their lives. If we compare these four areas to schools today, I find that most educators are teaching skills only, or their state learning standards. Yet, our students need more.

The four-part equity model was derived from examining archives and historical artifacts during the 19th century. I studied black literary societies to understand their literacy practices and learning. I asked questions such as, What types of texts did they read? What were some of their goals for learning? What factors contributed to their personal and academic success? I found that members of literary societies read diverse texts written by diverse authors. They were highly collaborative and believed in the collective responsibility for one another's learning. But importantly, they did not seek to just advance their skills in language, history, math, or science. Instead, they had wider goals for learning, which resulted in the Historically Responsive Model for teaching and learning. Collectively teaching these four goals or standards helps to cultivate students who are socio-conscious beings, who deeply have a strong sense of self and others, and who are academically successful.

Identity is made up of who we say we are, who others say we are, and the people we desire to be. Students are constantly making sense of who they are, and, I argue, classroom instruction needs to be responsive to their identities. Because we are complex beings, we have racial, cultural, gender, environmental, and community identities, to name a few. Not only is it important to teach youths who they are, but educators should also teach students about the identities and cultures of others different from them. When we have true, clear, and complete understandings about people different from us, we are less inclined to hate, show bias, or hold false views of others. When youths have a strong sense of their own histories and identities, it becomes a refuge or a protection. When they don't know themselves, others may tell them, and sometimes that may not be positive. With each lesson or unit plan, teachers should ask, How does our curriculum and instruction help students to learn about themselves or others?

Criticality is the capacity and ability to read, write, think, and speak in ways to understand power and equity in order to understand and promote anti-oppression. I define oppression simply as any wrongdoing, hurt, or harm. This can be racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, or any other oppression. In my work, I discuss the difference between lower case "c" critical, which is just deep and analytical thinking. But Critical with a capital "c" is related to power, equity, and anti-oppression. It is helping youths to be "woke" socio-politically. Criticality calls for teachers to connect their teaching to the human condition and to frame their teaching practices in response to the social and uneven times in which we live. This means helping students understand content from marginalized perspectives. As long as oppression is present, students need spaces to name, interrogate, resist, agitate, and work toward social change. This will support students toward being critical consumers and producers of information. It will also help to build a better humanity for all. With each lesson or unit plan, teachers should ask, How does our curriculum and instruction help us understand power, equity, and anti-oppression?

These four learning standards connect with Gloria Ladson Billings' definition of culturally relevant education as she pushed for academic success (skills and intellect), cultural competence (identity), and socio-political consciousness (criticality) in classrooms. The Historically Responsive Model or the four learning standards I discuss returns the excellence of black educative spaces and uses this history as a blueprint to improve classrooms today. There is not one child who does not need to advance identity development, skill development, intellectualism, or criticality. Collectively teaching and learning toward these four pursuits helps to teach the whole child to be successful for a full and quality life.
LF: You give this four-part framework the name of "Historically Responsive Literacy," connecting it back to 19th century black literacy societies which, I, embarrassingly, had never heard of prior to reading your book. Could you talk about that historical connection? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Actually, many people have not heard of this American history. The author of the prominent book that fully captures the history, Elizabeth McHenry, entitled her book, Forgotten Readers, because our ancestors' stories and histories have been forgotten and left out. I would also add that these histories are not taught in K-12 schools. When I engaged in historical research to better understand these learning spaces, I wanted to know: How can we take the teachings from black historical excellence to advance educational achievement for all youths today? When I study state standards, curriculum programs, state assessments, and teacher evaluations, I don't find that they largely focus on identity and criticality, which is why we don't see this type of teaching in all classrooms. These four critical parts of the system lack culturally responsiveness. Across the nation, we have frameworks, textbooks, and literature that are oftentimes not written by people of color. Nor do these largely represent the fullness of people of color.

I learned that black literary societies were developed by black males in 1828 in the urban Northern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. Membership was from 10-100 people. They were also called reading rooms, lyceums, literary institutions, and writing clubs. They met regularly in basements of churches, classrooms, homes, or anywhere where they could be in community with one another. They paid membership fees, and many of their funds went to texts and cultivating their libraries. Often, they would check out a book, read it, and present a short lecture on the content of the book upon returning it. They read across topics of mathematics, science, history, and English. But literacy was central to all their content learning. They did not just come together to read and enjoy literature (like many book clubs today), but they also had goals of using knowledge to benefit other black people and the conditions of society at large.

Black literary societies' members left meticulous records for our learning today. They recorded and published their activities and other writings in newspapers, books, and pamphlets. I use their practices as a roadmap and plan for reimagining and redesigning curriculum and instruction for students. In Cultivating Genius, I give a fuller list of examples showing how I took teachings from history and applied them to today's classrooms, but a few ideas include how:

Libraries were essential to all achievement, so teachers today can cultivate their classroom libraries to include diverse authorship and international texts.

Literacy was the foundation to all disciplinary learning, so teachers today can bring in opportunities for youths to read and study from multimodal texts in different genres.

Learning was highly collaborative, so teachers today can create opportunities where individualism and competition aren't privileged over collectivism.

When we use the theories and teachings of black historic thinkers, we will have different and more advanced schools and classrooms. We have so long prescribed what youths need, all along leaving black history, black excellence, and black frameworks out of the picture. But when we "return" to and look back on history, we can advance in unique and exciting ways. Black Literary Societies are the blueprint.
LF: "Deficit" thinking and perspectives come up several times in your book. Can you talk about what you mean, how they can impact students, and what teachers can do to change those mindsets? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Yes, "deficit thinking" comes up quite often in the book because deficit perspectives and thinking lead to poor and basic instructional practices. Deficit thinking can be viewed in different ways. First, it is any thinking, perspectives, or ideologies that are negative, false, incomplete, or destructive. It can also be defined as capturing someone's story as a single narrative or starting one's story in false, damaging, or incomplete ways. Deficit thinking is a type of oppression and leads to racism or other forms of harm. Sadly, we have a history of misrepresentation of certain groups using ads, literature, and other media. This type of propagation has conditioned the minds and hearts of people to have deficit views. The conditioning is then perpetuated in homes, communities, and schools.

The consequence of deficit thinking creates trauma and harms our young people. We talk a lot about emotional trauma or trauma from childhood but we talk less about the effects of racial trauma in schools for our students. What happens when teachers think less about other people who share the same race or identity of their students? Do teachers think this type of thinking never manifests or makes its way into classrooms? We don't leave our racism, biases, political agendas, or ideologies at home when we enter classroom spaces. When deficit thinking leads to trauma, our students may be affected for the rest of their lives. Our young people may feel like they don't belong; they may feel worthless or that they are not good enough. Their academics and engagement are negatively affected as a result. This can follow them throughout their lives and disrupt their joy.

When I ask teachers to tell me about their black and brown students, sometimes I hear comments such as, they are unmotivated, they can't read, or they have discipline problems. I follow this question by asking if they would introduce their own children in the same way. Oftentimes, parents would not. They would find something positive to say about their own child. This is why I returned to black historical excellence and named the book Cultivating Genius. I am proclaiming that we start our children's stories with genius, especially black children's, because the nation has struggled to get it right with us the most. We must disrupt deficit ways of thinking and being. Our youths are genius. They are not all those things that systemic oppression has created. And young people deserve to be taught by geniuses, those who seek knowledge and deeply love the students in their classes.

To change the mindset, teachers must do their self-work or find another profession. Just as a person has to heal from abuse in order to be whole, happy, and productive, if teachers have deficit perspectives, they must recognize them, name them, and work toward disrupting and dissolving this type of thinking. That may come from proper education, therapy, or exercises that lead toward anti-racism, anti-bias, and anti-oppression.
LF: Can you share summaries of specific lessons that you think might reflect your recommendations for what literacy instruction could look like? Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:
Usually, when I develop lesson or unit plans, I try to connect the learning around the human condition or a social issue. For example, Flint, Mich., has a water crisis with a lack of clean water. This issue became the impetus for a science and math lesson I was working on for students in Atlanta and New York, but it is an issue that can be explored across different content areas. In this math example, the students learned about the percentages of lead content found in water and graphed equations. In the science class, they defined environmental justice and water quality, which was connected to Next Generation Science Standards. I started this lesson by showing a photo essay by real residents of Flint with captions depicting experiences. This led to the discussion of water and our personal use and dependency. We read political cartoons, youth-spoken word poetry, a timeline, a short news article, photographs, and statistical data of lead content. I layered these short, powerful, and engaging texts as a way for my students to access and engage in learning. We read and discussed the texts together, and the students worked collaboratively in groups. We also had textbooks available to support learning. The lesson plan went across multiple days. What I learned is that identity and criticality became great points of entry for students who struggled with math and science skills. They connected the water crisis in Flint to their local communities. One science teacher in New York followed up by testing the lead content in water near their school. Students also learned vocabulary such as Legionnaires' disease, marginalization, and water crisis.

The students benefited from the unit plan and found the lessons engaging. Units like this prepare students for life and teach them not to be passive consumers of information and news. Instead, lessons like this one teach them to interrogate, critique, and agitate toward social change, especially in their own communities.

This historically responsive unit shifted traditional ways of teaching science and math. First, it brought more literacies and texts into these content areas. Students were taught to read the word and the world. Students read from diverse texts and even read poetry in their STEM classroom. The model also restored intellectualism into the learning, and students learned new knowledge in addition to skills. I assessed each learning standard using discussion, collaborative group worksheets, exit slips, and a summative assessment. This lesson plan can even be extended by setting learning goals in English/language arts or social studies classrooms, too. Here is a breakdown of how the lesson fits into the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework outlined in Cultivating Genius:

1.Identity: Students will understand their personal dependency on water.

2. Skill: (Math) Students will learn to examine percentages of lead content found in water. They will also learn how to create equations with two or more variables to represent relations between quantities as well as graph equations on coordinate axes with labels and scales.

Skill: (Science) Students will define environmental justice and name the importance of water quality for humans.

3. Intellect: Students will learn about the water crisis in Flint, Mich.

4. Criticality: Students will learn to consider how the government prioritizes community needs based on socioeconomic status and/or race and understand the media's role in the government's response to a crisis.

More units like this are offered in the book. This is one example, but I have observed the pure genius of teachers designing learning around the model. In doing so, they keep a few questions in mind as they plan:

What issue is most urgent for students' learning? How does this issue connect to the world? How can I connect content-learning skills to this issue?

What multimodal text can layer in my lesson or unit plan to teach this topic/issue? Teachers think about print and nonprint texts.

What creative and engaging exercises will I engage students in to teach this topic/issue?

How can I assess each of the four learning standards?

LF: Is there anything I haven't asked you about that you'd like to share?
Dr. Gholdy Muhammad:

Cultivating Genius and the historically responsive model offered in the book is for all teachers K-12 across all discipline areas, even physical and health education. I also use the model to frame my college courses and syllabi at Georgia State University. The four learning standards of identity, skills, intellect, and criticality are areas of growth that EVERY child needs in every class.

I am reminded by many wonderful teachers with whom I work that some of the greatest anti-oppressive leaders and change agents in the world have held a strong sense of self and knowledge of other people (identity), skills, intellect, and criticality. We want to help cultivate students who will not be neutral on oppression or students who would contribute to more oppression in the world. Instead, we want to cultivate young people who, across the course of their lifetimes, will disrupt, disquiet, or unhinge oppression.

This means we must teach beyond sanctioned curriculum and standards such as the Common Core. We must evaluate and interrogate the curriculum we are given to teach. We must hold publishers accountable for the lack of diverse and critical content they produce. We must stop trying to make something culturally responsive when it wasn't designed that way in the first place. We have to stop putting fresh coats of paint on the same debilitating structures of education. We must start fresh with a curriculum that was designed with black and brown youths in mind and written by black and brown people, too. We have a growing population of culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse youths and families. It's time for the course of education to change. Indeed, the genius for this transformation is at hand. We need only to properly respond.
LF: Thank you, Dr. Muhammad!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Author Interview With Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: 'Cultivating Genius' (Opinion)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the 100th book-related post in this blog, Gholdy Muhammad agreed to answer a few questions about her new book, "Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy."

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Somalia: A Nation of Poets - Twin Cities PBS

# data[].attributes.body
Via Terra Glowach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Click over to tpt.org/shows to watch your favorite TPT productions and PBS shows, anytime and anywhere.

Not only will this site work on your laptop or desktop computer, you'll also feel right at home on any modern smartphone or tablet. Stream away...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Somalia: A Nation of Poets - Twin Cities PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More than any other country, Somalia is a nation of poets. Their culture revolves around poetry, an art form that remains significant as Somali refugees relocate throughout the world. Poets in Minneapolis and Columbus express the best of this tradition. Produced with Ka Joog and the Somali Museum of Minnesota.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Moses McKenzie: The new talent from ends - The Bristol Cable

# data[].attributes.body
Via Terra Glowach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The debut novel from the 23-year-old Bristolian is an acclaimed coming-of-age story set in Easton, which paints a melting pot of cultures and moral codes.

Moses McKenzie wears a black tracksuit and a reluctant expression, already wearied by the media circuit. The success of An Olive Grove in Ends, the 23-year-old's debut novel set in Easton that hits bookshelves in late April, has thrust him suddenly into the limelight. The local boy is touted as one of the "top 10 debut novelists of 2022," by The Observer, with a TV adaption of the novel already in the pipeline.

The novel follows a young black man, Sayon, as he grows up in Easton - or 'ends' - navigating life, love and loyalties. In his desire for a better life for himself and his loved ones, he dreams of owning a grand house at the top of a hill in affluent Clifton. But after an incident where a boy is murdered, Sayon's fortunes take a turn.

"I was inspired by how uninspired I was! The books were dead; I could write better than that."

Fittingly, we meet on Stapleton Road in Easton - a setting so vividly described in the novel it could be a character in itself: "This road was called Stapleton, and those familiar with her charm might call her Stapes," the main character Sayon recalls.

'Ends' is also where McKenzie calls home. Until the age of seven, the McKenzie family lived in a predominantly white area of Cornwall, and was subject to extensive racism. The experience was formative for the young writer. Moving to Bristol was a new beginning for McKenzie: in the vibrant Caribbean community Easton boasts, he found sanctuary.

McKenzie's face lights up as he recounts his childhood here - out from dawn to dusk, playing in Chelsea Park or St. Paul's Adventure Playground. At his school St. Mary Redcliffe, he formed a tight-knit group of friends. But the school was very segregated, he tells me: "The black yute and the white yute didn't mix - but I liked that, it's a voluntary segregation - people go where they feel safe.

"My bredrin were mainly Jamaican, Somali, a couple Nigerian, one Kenyan bredrin - but back then everyone was just pretending to be Jamaican anyways!" he tells me.

This melting pot of cultures is ever present in An Olive Grove also. Sayon comes from a Caribbean family, with the enigmatic Nanny at its head, her house 'a one stop shop for supplies and yard food.' Here he eats mutton stew and fried plantain, outside he picks up canjeeros from the Somali takeaways. Speech is written in Jamaican dialect, while the language of Sayon and his friends is a mix of Patois and Arabic. Each chapter begins with verse: Jamaican proverbs, a quote from the Bible, a surah from the Quran.

These communities are not just the subject, but the intended audience for the novel as well. "I'm writing for myself first and foremost. For my friends, and anyone who thinks like us. It's not my role to be an educator - especially not white people," McKenzie explains.

Writing? 'You either got it or you don't'

Reluctantly, McKenzie went to UWE to study English Literature. When asked if his studies were the inspiration to write, he snorts derisively. But it was an impetus of sorts: "I was inspired by how uninspired I was! The books were dead; I could write better than that." In his year abroad in Barcelona, he put that to the test, and wrote his first manuscript. It wasN't good, McKenzie laughs, but it did make him decide to make writing his life's work - with authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin as inspiration.

Get our latest stories & essential Bristol news
sent to your inbox every Saturday morning

Three manuscripts later, Moses produced a fourth which became An Olive Grove in Ends. It has received rave reviews and critical acclaim. Reading the novel, with its sophistication of topic and mastery of language, it's hard to believe that Moses is a completely self-taught writer - never taking a class or course in creative writing in his life. "I know it sounds bad, but I think you either got it or you don't," McKenzie explains.

His ideas for writing, he tells me, come from his opinions and beliefs. This book offers an in-depth exploration of morality. Within it are the competing moral codes of Christanity and Islam, their merits and hypocrises, and how to reconcile this with the harsh social reality of 'Ends'. The 'crooked solutions' the community adopts to survive are not recognised by the judicial system, nor are the characters' attempts at redemption. The author himself was raised Christian, and recently reverted to Islam.

It's a nuanced, complex subjectivity that is lost on some people McKenzie has encountered, he tells me: journalists who see a black man and ask whether the book is autobiographical, or simply describe it as being about 'knife crime'. "It's so reductive," he says, exasperated - his earlier reluctance towards media interviews suddenly clear.

The fame, the future

McKenzie has just finished the first draft of his next book, about the St Pauls riots in the 1980s, and is currently researching his third. He has high hopes for his career.

"I feel like I can be the best and that's my ambition - not the best like unequivocally the best, but in the conversation for the best writer - and that's what pushes me," he says.

As for fame, he says, "I pay as little attention to it as I can, to be honest. But, in the least arrogant way possible, I expect this of myself - it shows I'm on the right track. Alhamdulillah* always."
*Praise be to God
Last year, Cable members voted and many told us they wanted to see more stories about culture and community in Bristol. This critically-acclaimed novel about life in 'Stapes' was a fitting place to start, taking us back to our first stomping ground in Easton.

This is just the beginning. Culture comes in many forms - gigs, art, films, community meetings - places for celebration and for resistance, parts of life in Bristol to treasure and to challenge.

Excerpt from An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie

Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
- Matthew 6:26

This is a story, much like any other, of ends and beginnings. Like any story, it is hard to know where to begin. But I think it makes sense to start at home, or a home. Actually, it might be more accurate to call it a house; one that stood alone atop Mount Zion, overlooking Leigh Woods, the Avon Valley and the muddy river that wound beneath.

'Dis is the yard,' I told Cuba, as we waited at its bourn, 'the one man's marge showed man when man was a young buck.'

The Bath stone house in the area known as Clifton was all original features; sash windows and working shutters. It had a vestibule and behind it a long plot of land that tripped and fell into the woods like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It could have been plucked from a fairy tale about two adventurers who had stumbled across the city of God. The front of the house was gated, guarded by statuette men from all nations clothed in white robes and carrying palm fronds. And in the middle of the driveway sat a fountain of living water.

'It's rah massive,' Cuba said. And I understood his astonishment. It was a world away from the one we knew. Even if we owned the yard next to Nanny's and knocked it through, it wouldn't have reached half the size.

We left our push bikes by the fountain and helped each other over the fence and into the back garden. 'Do you know who lives here?' Cuba asked. I shook my head. 'Dey must be up doe, init?'

'Must be.'

My mama used to bring me to this house when I wasn't much older than a toddler. We wouldn't come inside - she wasn't as brazen as Cuba and me - we would only drive to the gate, and she would point up at the windows and tell me how she would imagine herself looking out of them when she was but a child herself.

She would cycle into Clifton and across the Suspension Bridge just to look at the yard. There were other houses on the road, for it was narrow with many mansions, but it was this one that caught her eye. It was the furthest from the street, she explained, as far from the hustle and bustle as one could get.

'You know man's gonna live here someday, cuz,' I announced.

Cuba screwed his face; he didn't mean to doubt me, but he wasn't accustomed to dreams. 'How you gonna buy dis yard, akh? You need white people ps to buy dis - big man ting.'

'Don't watch dat,' I told him. 'Man'll find a way, truss me.'

Cuba put his arms across his little chest and huffed in the manner of a man about to embark upon yet another noble quest. 'Say no more, g, but if you're gonna buy it den man'll help you, init. Dat's what family's for.'

In the back garden the sun caught in the shade and couldn't strike the grass, but its efforts were rewarded with a mellow air that had paid no mind to the weather elsewhere. The grounds were vast, with streams that led from pond to pond, fruit trees and countless flowering shrubs.

'You know deh's horses in the woods, init?' I said, repeating what my mama had told me all those years ago.

'Horses?'

'Yeah, fam. White horses. And my marge told man dat Jesus rides on white horses, blud.'

'I bet dey would sell for ps den, init?' Cuba muttered. We fell silent as we thought about how many packets of sweets we could buy for a white horse that even Jesus would ride. 'You reckon we could sell dem?' he whispered.

I shrugged, and climbed into the low branches of a tree close to a pond. Cuba picked fallen twigs from the base and threw them as far as he could; they broke the surface of the water and floated idly. 'Only if you can catch dem first.' We looked at each other, the fire in our eyes ablaze like jasper stones, then we raced to the bottom of the garden and through the cast-iron gate at its foot.

We spent the entire afternoon chasing the shadows of those white horses, but we didn't catch the swish of a tail, nor the print of a hoof. We returned to the house-atop-the-hill downcast and defeated. I found my place in the tree again, and Cuba took up the twigs.

The water that ran from pond to pond had no foul smell. It was lazy, like a river of clarified honey. I thought if I knelt to taste it I might have refreshed myself after such a disappointing day, but Cuba had other ideas. He pointed toward the house. 'Yo, you wanna see what's inside?'
Moses McKenzie's book An Olive Grove in Ends will be launched at Bookhaus, Wapping Wharf, on 27 April.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Moses McKenzie: The new talent from ends - The Bristol Cable

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The debut novel from the 23-year-old Bristolian is an acclaimed coming-of-age story set in Easton, which paints a melting pot of cultures and moral codes. Moses McKenzie wears a black tracksuit and a reluctant expression, already wearied by the media circuit.

# data[].attributes.body
Via Terra Glowach - Page 8 for advice on how to deal with the racism and sexism of the text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Module 5: Belonging in literature : My College

# data[].attributes.headline
Module 5 of Chartered College course on decolonising literature  

# data[].attributes.subject
Module 5 of Chartered College course on decolonising literature  

# data[].attributes.body
By Terra Glowach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is the fifth in a series of six short online courses about decolonising and diversifying the curriculum. We recommend engaging with the modules in order. Get started with Module 1 here.

Learn about this series of courses:

Content in these modules has been developed by, and with feedback from, a range of expert teachers, leaders and researchers. The courses will support you to increase your knowledge of the multiplicity of British histories and identities, select literature and resources that foster belonging, address the perspectives represented in the curriculum, consider how lenses that decolonise and diversify can be applied to the curriculum, and have confident conversations with pupils about race.

Decolonising and diversifying the curriculum is a lifetime endeavour that involves significant critical reflection, learning and action. These modules are designed as a starting point and not the answer. We intend for your learning on this course to be a catalyst for further growth and development. Each of the modules will signpost you to further learning sources and engage you in considering future actions. As an organisation, we recognise the need to continue our own learning in this space and we commit to revisiting the content of these modules regularly.

As a practising teacher or leader who's already invested in, or beginning to consider, decolonising and diversifying your curriculum, we hope that these modules will provide a space for you to reflect on your decision making and approaches, and engage in dialogue with other educators before planning next steps for your practice.

What will you learn in this short online course?

By the end of this fifth module, you'll be able to recognise the steps teachers can take to foster belonging for all pupils through literature and other resource choices and you'll determine your initial next steps for your own practice to decolonise and diversify the curriculum through literature and resource choices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Module 5: Belonging in literature : My College

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is the fifth in a series of six short online courses about decolonising and diversifying the curriculum. We recommend engaging with the modules in order. Get started with Module 1 here. Learn about this series of courses: Content in these modules has been developed by, and with feedback from, a range of expert teachers, [...]