William J. Spurlin

Rebecca Garden

This book provides an overview on critical healing, which draws on queer theory, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and literary and cultural studies in order to theorize productive engagements between the clinical and cultural aspects of biomedical knowledge and practice. The essays in this volume historicize and theorize diagnosis, particularly diagnosis that impacts trans health and sexuality, queer health and identity, and sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS. The chapters also address racialization, disability, and colonialism through discussions of fiction, film, critical memoir, and comics in relation to biomedical discourse and knowledge. Previously published in Journal of Medical Humanities Volume 40, issue 1, March 2019 Chapter “Queer Theory and Biomedical Practice: The Biomedicalization of Sexuality/The Cultural Politics of Biomedicine” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Queer Interventions in Biomedicine and Public Health

Jarrod Hayes

Margaret R. Higonnet

These innovative essays take a comparative approach to queer studies while simultaneously queering the field of comparative literature, strengthening the interdisciplinarity of both. By focusing not only on comparative praxis, but also on interrogating our assumptions and categories of analysis, Comparatively Queer powerfully transforms the paradigms of comparison.

Interrogating Identities Across Time and Cultures

Comparatively Queer

Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism uses queer theory as a hermeneutic tool with which to read against the grain of heterotextual narratives of the Holocaust and as a way of locating alternative pathways of meaning in dominant Holocaust research. Specifically addressing the racialization of sexuality, the book asks how the politics of sexuality can be more explicitly and systematically theorized, along with state-sanctioned homophobia under Nazism, with a clear recognition that homophobia seldom operated alone, but worked in conjunction with other axes of power, including race, gender, eugenics, and population politics. In theorizing gender and sexuality as entangled axes of analysis, the book allows the specificity of lesbian difference to emerge and challenges the received wisdom that lesbians were not as systematically persecuted under National Socialism. William J. Spurlin questions the wisdom of received scholarship that reduces Nazi fascism to latent homosexuality, and examines the possible implications of Nazi homophobia, and its imbrication with other deployments of power, for the study of contemporary culture where the homophobic impulse continues to reverberate, thereby challenging understandings of history steeped in notions of progressive modernity.

William J. Spurlin

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