Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Setting the Stage - Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins
Part I: Foundations for Thinking About Sexualities and Communication
1. The Invention of Heterosexuality: The Debut of the Heterosexual - Jonathan Ned Katz
2. Necessary Fictions: Sexual Identities and the Politics of Diversity - Jeffrey Weeks
3. On Judith Butler and Performantivity - Sara Salih
4. "Quare" Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother [Part I] - E. Patrick Johnson
5. The Use of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power - Audre Lorde
Part II: Performing and Disciplining Sexualities in Interpersonal Contexts
6. Language, Socialization, and Silence in Gay Adolescence - William Leap
7. "Having a Girlfriend Without Knowing It": Intimate Friendships Among Adolescent Sexual-Minority Women - Lisa M. Diamond
8. Accounts of Sexual Identity Formation in Heterosexual Students - Michele J. Eliason
9. M. Dragonfly: Two-Spirit and the Tafoya Principle of Uncertainty - Terry Tafoya
10. Migrancy and Homodesire - Myron Beasley
11. Performing "I Do": Wedding, Pornography, and Sex - Elizabeth Bell
12. A Critical Appraisal of Assimiliationist and Radical Ideologies Underlying Same-Sex Marriage in LGBT Communities in the United States - Gust A. Yep, Karen E. Lovaas, and John P. Elia
Part III: Performing and Disciplining Sexualities in Public Discourses
13. Performing the Rhetoric of Science: Dr. Laura′s Portrayal of Homosexuality - Paul Turpin
14. Disciplining the Transgendered: Brandon Teena, Public Representation, and Normativity - John M. Sloop
15. "Ah, Yes, I Remember It Well": Memory and Queer Culture in Will and Grace - Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed
16. Living in the Middle: Performances Bi-Men - John T. Warren and Nicholas A. Zoffel
17. "Holly Kowalski": Sex Across the Curriculum - Jennifer Tuder
18. Queering the (Sacred) Body Politic: Considering the Performative Cultural Politics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - Cathy B. Glenn
Part IV: Transforming Sexualities and Communication: Visions and Praxis
19. The Spirituality of Sex and the Sexuality of Spirit: BDSM Erotic Play as Soulwork and Social Critique - Robert G. Westerfelhaus
20. Menopause and Desire, or 452 Positions on Love - Mercilee M. Jenkins
21. "Quare" Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned From My Grandmother [Part II] - E. Patrick Johnson
22. Activism and Identity Through the Word: A Mixed-Race Woman Claims Her Space - Wendy M. Thompson
23. Making Alliances - Gloria E. Anzaldua
About the Editors

About the Author

Karen Lovaas (Ph.D. in American Studies, University of Hawaii) is Assistant Professor of Speech and Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Recent publications underscore her interest in sexualities, gender, communication, and pedagogy. The contested terrain of LGBT studies and queer theory, with John Elia and Gust Yep, is in press; it is a follow-up volume to Queer theory and communication: From disciplining queers to queering the discipline(s) (Harrington Park Press, 2003). She authored encyclopedia entries on “gender roles” and “sexism” for The international encyclopedia of [homo] sexualities, education, and cultures (2005), and glossary entries on “cross-dressing,” “free love,” “liberation,” and “sexual assault” for Sexuality: The essential glossary (2004). “A critical appraisal of assimilationist and radical ideologies underlying same-sex marriage in LGBT communities in the United States” (2003), with Yep and Elia, and “Sexual practices, identification, and the paradoxes of identity in the era of AIDS: The case of ‘riding bareback’” (2002), Yep and Alex Pagonis, were published in Journal of Homosexuality. With former undergraduate students Lina Baroudi and S. Collins, Lovaas wrote “Transcending heteronormativity in the classroom: Using queer and critical pedagogies to alleviate trans-anxieties” for the Journal of Lesbian Studies (2002); it was simultaneously published in Addressing homophobia and heterosexism on college campuses (Haworth Press, 2003). “Communication in ‘Asian American’ families with queer members: A relational dialectics perspective,” with Yep and Philip Ho, appears in Queer families, queer politics: Challenging culture and the state (Columbia University Press, 2001). Her ongoing projects utilize critical, queer, and feminist approaches to communication research and pedagogy. Mercilee Jenkins (Ph. D in Speech Communication, University of Illinois) is a professor in the Department of Speech & Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Her publications include her solo performance texts, poetry, and scholarly articles on women’s small group communication, the performance of personal narratives, and communication in the college classroom. She was an Associate Editor for Queer Words, Queer Images edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. Her ethnographic research on gender, sexuality and relationships has resulted in several produced plays, including A Credit to Her Country, based on the oral histories of lesbian in the U. S. military and She Rises Like a Building to the Sky, about the founding of the San Francisco Women′s Building. She received two Horizon Foundation grants for Credit and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant for the development of She Rises.  Her solo performance piece, Menopause and Desire, premiered at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September 2002 and was published in its entirety in Text and Performance Quarterly in July 2005. Dr. Jenkins received the Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance from the National Communication Association in 2004.

Reviews

"There are more than twenty-five contributors to the Reader.  The sheer pleasure that the contributors provide in the way they bring together brilliantly diverse perspectives to enlarge the limits of one′s understanding is not easy to describe.  Particularly stimulating among the collection are the pieces by Jeffrey Weeks and Patrick Johnson.  The intellectual satisfaction derived from the study of the erotic self and the human struggle and search for meaning and means of communicating meaning is quare indeed A book to read and return from time to time."

—The Book Review
*The Book Review - December 2007*