Library Guides: Radical South: Gender & Sexuality

Gender & Sexuality

Mab Segrest, Stephanie McCurry, Eva Walton Kendrick, Deborah S. Mower, John Howard, Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman

Panel: Julie Enszer, Greg Herron & Ytasha Womack

Mouse over article titles for details.

Julie Enszer, Greg Herron, and Ytasha Womack

Underground Publishing: Afrofuturist, Popular, Queer

Afrofuturims: The world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture by Ytasha Womack
This book introduces readers to the burgeoning artists creating Afrofuturist works, the history of innovators in the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities. Interviews with rappers, composers, musicians, singers, authors, comic illustrators, painters, and DJs, as well as Afrofuturist professors, provide a firsthand look at this fascinating movement.
Men of the Mean Streets by Greg Herren & J.M. Redmann, eds.
Call Number: special collections
Noir has always been one of the most popular—and darkest—sub-genres of the mystery field. Following in the footsteps of such masters of the form as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, some of the top writers of gay mystery explore this territory of amoral tough guys with a cynical view of the world by giving classic noir a gay twist.
Middlebrow Queer: Christopher Isherwood in America by Jaime Harker
Call Number: PR6017.S5 Z675 2013
Jaime Harker shows that Christopher Isherwood refashioned himself as an American writer following his emigration from England by immersing himself in the gay reading, writing, and publishing communities in Cold War America. Weaving together biography, history, and literary criticism, Middlebrow Queer traces the continuous evolution of Isherwood’s simultaneously queer and American postwar authorial identity.

Eva Walton Kendrick

Lobbying the Heart of Dixie: LGBTQ Advocacy in the Alabama State House

Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman

Race, Class and Struggle Then & Now: Lessons from the Black Radical Tradition

Labor and Capital in the Age of Globalization by Berch Berberoglu, ed.
ch. 10, "Globalization of Capital and Class Struggle" by Katz-Fishman and Scott. a timely analysis of work and labor processes and how they are rapidly changing under globalization. The contributors explore traditional sectors of the U.S. and world economies--from auto to steel to agriculture--as well as work under new production arrangements, such as third world export processing zones.
Globalization and America: Race human rights, and inequality
As globalization expands, more than goods and information are traded between the countries of the world. Hattery, Embrick, and Smith present a collection of essays that explore the ways in which issues of human rights and social inequality are shared globally. The editors focus on the United States' role in contributing to human rights violations both inside and outside its borders.
Understanding Inequality: The intersection of race/ethnicity, class, and gender
As the age of globalization and New Media unite disparate groups of people in new ways, the continual transformation and interconnections between ethnicity, class, and gender become increasingly complex. Includes a chapter by Walda Katz-Fishman, "Downsizing higher education: Confronting the new realities of the high-tech information age global economy".

Check Out These Primary Sources!

Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century This link opens in a new window
The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century includes primary source material from federal agencies, letters, papers, photographs, scrapbooks, financial records, and diaries relating to the Civil Rights movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Website: Anti-Communism in Mississippi
Anti-Communism & Civil Rights page from Mississippi State Library has digital images of pamphlets from the Citizen's Council and the Sovereignty Committee in Mississippi.

More Books

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression by Robin Kelley
Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama -- the center of Party activity in the Depression South. Hammer and Hoe documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture and class without compromising the political narrative,
The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1919-36 by Mark Solomon
The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity.
We Shall Be Free! Black communist protests in seven voices by Walter Howard
A groundbreaking contribution to scholarship of the African American Left, "We Shall Be Free " gives voice to black Communists and recognizes the intellectual contributions found in their protest writings. A fascinating documentary history of seven diverse and historically significant black Communists--B.D. Amis, Harry Haywood, James W. Ford, Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Louise Thompson Patterson, William Patterson, and Claudia Jones.
Sojourning for Freedom: Black women, American communism, and the making of Black left feminism by Erik McDuffie
Sojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women's rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity.

Explore

"In 1927, Richard Wright left Memphis, Tennessee to migrate to Chicago. There, after working in unskilled jobs, he was given an opportunity to write. He joined the John Reed Club in Chicago, an organization set up by the Communist Party to recruit writers into its ranks. Wright joined the Party, and in 1937 he went to New York to write for the Daily Worker, the Party's newspaper." http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_wright.html

Mab Segrest

If Not Now, When?
Mab's Books & Articles

Born to Belonging: Writings on spirit and justice by Mab Segrest
Call Number: HQ75.25 .S44 2002
From the principle that we all belong to the human community, Segrest uses her personal experience as a filter for larger political and cultural issues. Her writings bring together such groups as the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, fledging gay rights activists in Zimbabwe, and resistance fighters in El Salvador. Segrest expertly plumbs her own personal experiences for organizing principles and maxims to combat racism, homophobia, sexism, and economic exploitation.
Memoir of a Race Traitor by Mab Segrest
Call Number: F220.A1 S38 1994
Courageous and daring, this work testifies/documents the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across difference.' bell hooksAgainst a backdrop of nine generations of her family's history, Mab Segrest explores her experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in the American South.
My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian essays on Southern culture by Mab Segrest
Call Number: F216.2 .S44 1985
This collection brings together essays published over the past eight years by lesbian-feminist organizer and editor Segrest, who is the granddaughter of a KKK member and is a former English teacher in a Southern Baptist college.

Lesbian Print Culture, 1960s-1980s

Stephanie McCurry

Reconstructing: A Life Amidst the Ruins

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South by Stephanie McCurry
When the grandiosity of Southerners' national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people - white women and slaves - and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise.

Fighting Chance: The struggle over woman suffrage and Black suffrage in Reconstruction America by Faye Dudden
The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.
To Joy My Freedom : Southern Black women's lives and labors after the Civil War by Tera W. Hunter
For the past two decades, the historical literature has been enriched through monographs on the lives of former slaves, both urban and rural. Rarely has attention been focused on emancipated women. Using Atlanta as setting, Hunter demonstrates that freedom was expressed in domestic labor. It was also accompanied by strikes, resulting in tragic consequences to the community in an increasingly segregated city.
Gendered Strife and Confusion: The political culture of reconstruction by Laura Edwards
This work stands at the juncture of African American history, gender studies, labor history, and Southern history, in a sophisticated retelling of Reconstruction, where families and households (rather than governments and political parties) were remade and redefined during this period of upheaval. Southerners of all races, classes, and sexes had to determine their new relationships to one another after the Civil War swept away the antebellum social structure.

All Things Altered: Women in the wake of Civil War and Reconstruction by Marilyn Mayer Culpepper
ISBN: 0786413395
As survivors in a devastated world, the women of the South made significant contributions to the rebuilding of the region. This book examines the problems that Southern women faced during the Reconstruction Era as mothers, wives, daughters or sisters of men burdened with financial difficulties and the radical Republican regime. Illustrations of their tribulations through the letters and diaries of five different women are included.

John Howard

The American Nuclear Cover-up in Spain: Southern Progenitors, Southern Casualties

Carryin' on in the Lesbian and Gay South by John Howard
To date, lesbian and gay history has focused largely on the East and West coasts, and on urban settings such as New York and San Francisco. The American South, on the other hand, identified with religion, traditional gender roles, and cultural conservatism, has escaped attention. Southerners celebrate their past; lesbians and gays celebrate their new-found visibility; historians celebrate the South--yet rarely have the three crossed paths.
Men Like That: A Southern Queer History by John Howard
Spanning four decades, Men Like That complicates traditional notions of a post-WWII conformist wave in America. Howard argues that the 1950s, for example, were a period of vibrant queer networking in Mississippi, while during the so-called "free love" 1960s homosexuals faced aggressive oppression. When queer sex was linked to racial agitation and when key civil rights leaders were implicated in homosexual acts, authorities cracked down and literally ran the accused out of town.
Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the house of Jim Crow by John Howard
While the basic facts of Japanese-American incarceration are well known, John Howard’s extensive research gives voice to those whose stories have been forgotten or ignored. He highlights the roles of women, first-generation immigrants, and those who forcefully resisted their incarceration by speaking out against dangerous working conditions and white racism. In addition to this overlooked history of dissent, Howard also exposes the government’s aggressive campaign to Americanize the inmates and even convert them to Christianity. After the war ended, this movement culminated in the dispersal of the prisoners across the nation in a calculated effort to break up ethnic enclaves.
Queering the Countryside: New frontiers in rural queer studies by Colin Johnson, et. al., eds.
Chapter title: Digital Queer History and the Limits of Gay Sex. The essays challenge the idea of metronormativity--the idea that gay lifestyles are to be pursued only in large cities where diversity is tolerated and that gays in rural areas are left in the closet. A large literature across disciplines suggests that this simplistic binary conception is false. Rural gays are part of communities that can be supportive, and the evidence is clear that many LGBT individuals are attached to their rural places.
Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on manhood in the South since Reconstruction by Craig Friend, ed.
Chapter title:Southern Sodomy; or, What the Coppers Saw. After the Civil War, southern men crafted notions of manhood in opposition to northern ideals of masculinity and as counterpoint to southern womanhood. At the same time, manliness in the South--as understood by individuals and within communities--retained and transformed antebellum conceptions of honor and mastery.
Creating and consuming the American South by Martyn Bone, et. al., eds.
Chapter title: Me and Mrs Jones: Screening Working-Class Trans-Formations of Southern Family Values. This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been created and consumed. The thirteen essays move beyond both traditional accounts of southern identity .... and emphasize how narratives and images of "the South" have real social, political, and economic ramifications.

Search Guides

Radical South