Overview

In a documentarian investigation of the major LGBTQ archives in the United States, Queer Literacies: Discourses and Discontents identifies the homophobic discourses that prevailed in the twentieth-century by those discursive forces that also sponsored the literacy acquisition of the nation. Mark McBeth tracks down the evidence of how these sponsors of literacy—families, teachers, librarians, doctors, scientists, and government agents—instituted heteronormative platforms upon which public discourses were constructed. After pinpointing and analyzing how this disparaging rhetoric emerged, McBeth examines how certain LGBTQ advocates took counter-literacy measures to upend and replace those discourses with more Queer-affirming articulations. Having lived contemporaneously while these events occurred, McBeth incorporate narratives of his own lived experience of how these discourses impacted his own reading, writing, and researching capabilities. In this auto-archival research investigation, McBeth argues that throughout the twentieth century, Queer literates revised dominant and oppressive discourses as a means of survival and world-making in their own words. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, LGBTQ studies, literary studies, and communication studies will find this book particularly useful.

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9781793617835

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Reviews

Mark McBeth's book is a stirring and significant addition to queer and literacy studies. Through meticulous archival research and nuanced analysis, McBeth reveals how literacy actors, discourses, and institutions coalesced in their attempts to control and thwart homosexual life, desires, and knowledges and how queer literates continually and inventively resisted and rejected their strictures. Replete with tales of subversive librarians, rhetorically-savvy activists, and tenacious queer inquisitors, this book provides an essential account of how queer people worked to shape their own lives and literacies throughout the tumultuous, and sometimes wondrous, landscape of 20th-century North American life. -- Tara Pauliny, The City University of New York

Author Information

Mark McBeth is associate professor of English at City University of New York.

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