Gender(s): the newest book by Kathryn Bond Stockton
Why gender is strange, even when it's played straight, and how race and money are two of its most dramatic ingredients.
Meet Kathryn Bond Stockton
Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English, former Associate Vice President for Equity and Diversity, and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film. Two of her books—Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child (Duke University Press)—were national finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. In addition, her recent book Making Out (NYU Press) was a 2020 national finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir. Her forthcoming book (with MIT Press) is entitled Gender(s) and she has also authored God Between Their Lips (Stanford University Press). Stockton has taught at Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory and, along with her university’s top teaching award, she has received the Equality Utah Allies Award for LGBT activism, the NOW Lifetime Achievement Award, the YWCA Outstanding Achievement Award in Arts and Communication, the Crompton Noll Prize for Best Essay in Gay and Lesbian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest honor granted by the University of Utah .
Books
Gender(s)
In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the fascinating, fraught, intimate, morphing matter of gender.
Making Out
Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you’re kissing, where it’s leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies.
The Queer Child
Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as Stockton illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown “homosexual” metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child.
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame
Shame has often been a meeting place for the signs “Black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by Blacks and queers and queer Black people?
God Between Their Lips
Connecting the cultural domains of religion, sex, and work, this book encompasses aspects of feminist theory, post-structuralist materialisms, Victorian thought, and two prominent nineteenth-century women’s novels (Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and George Eliot’s Middlemarch)—to understand desire between women as a form of “spiritual materialism.”
The Child Now
Articles & Essays
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On the Eve of Weather
Afterword to Reading Sedgwick, ed. Lauren Berlant, Duke University Press, 2019
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Jouissance, the Gash of Bliss
Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, eds. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson, Punctum Books, 2017
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If Queer Children Were a Video Game
Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, University of Minnesota Press, March 2017
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The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 22, Number 4, 2016
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What is the Now, Even of Then?
Co-authored with Rebekah Sheldon and Jules Gill-Peterson
(Introduction to “The Child Now,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 22, Number 4, 2016)
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Where Is Queer? In the Neighborhood, the Gesture, the Drug, the Word?
The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Volume 24, 2016, Oxford University Press
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