Queer Theory Reading List

11 Apr 2021 - Anarchist Arborist

Please note, I have not read all these texts. This is as much a reading list for me as for others; as such, if you want to have something added, just send me a message. As well, please look for and read texts on your own; queer anarchism and queer theory more general should not have any strict borders, anyone can write it, and everyone can benefit from it. This will be updated as I find things, friends remind me, and I have to dig up stuff for a request.

Basic Introductions:

• Gender by Jamie Heckert (If you only can read one, read this one. Short.)
• Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstien. (Book)
• Queering Anarchism from AK Press. (Collection of essays.)
• Towards the Queerest Insurrection by A Gang of Criminal Queers/Mary Nardini Gang. (Short)
• Refusing to wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality by Deric Shannon and J. Rogue. (Zine)
• The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life by Michael Warner. (Book)
• Be Gay Do Crime by A Gang of Criminal Queers/Mary Nardini Gang. (I mean the short text here, the book is hard to find.)

General Queer Theory:

• Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology by A Gang of Criminal Queers/Mary Nardini Gang. (Please note: on request from the authors, you should steal this or look around online)
• Bi by Shiri Eisner (Book)
• Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner. (Book)
• Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory edited by Michael Warner. (Book)
• Myths of gender: biological theories about women and men by Anne Fausto-Sterling. (Book)
• Sexing the Body: Biology in a Social World by Anne Fausto-Sterling. (Book)
• The “Empire” Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto by Sandy Stone. (Essay)
• The Screwball Asses by Guy Hocquenghem. [Allegedly] (Short)
• Homosexual Desire by Guy Hocquenghem.
• Love in Relief by Guy Hocquenghem. Fiction
• Can the Monster Speak: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysis by Paul B. Preciado. (Essay)

Queer History:

• Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter. (Please note, this was written in 1993 and thus the language in this is outdated and would be considered transphobic today.) (Book)
• Faeries, Bears and Leathermen: Men in Community, Queering the Masculine by Peter Hennen. (Book)
• Queer Fire: The George Jackson Brigade, Men Against Sexism, and Gay Struggle Against Prison by Ed Mead, Bo Brown et all. (Zine)
• Transgender Warriors : Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg. (Book)
• Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. (Fiction Novel, but important)

Academic Philosophy:

Note that all of these are often harder than the texts above.

• Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. (Book)
• Undoing Gender by Judith Butler. (Book)
• Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed. (Book)
• Queer Necropolitics by Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco. (Book)
• The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault. (Book)
• In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives by Judith Halberstam. (Book)
• Deleuze and Queer Theory edited by Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr. (Book)
• Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar. (Book)
• Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson. (Book)
• Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism: A response to Judith Butler by Nancy Fraser. (Article)
• Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience by Hil Malatino.
• No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman.
• Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women by Anne Balsamo.

Queer Marxism:

• The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd.
• Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism by Rosemary Hennessy.
• Warped: Gay Normality and Queer Anti-Capitalism by Peter Drucker.

Actively Intersectional:

• The Body of the Condemned Sally: Paths to Queering anarca-Islam by Mohamed Jean Veneuse.
• Islam and Queer Muslims by Mohamed Jean Veneuse.
• Transnational Decolonization Is the Solution, Not Movements such as Bernie Sanders’ & the Women’s March by Mohamed Jean Veneuse.
• The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde.
• A Statement from the Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas. (NOTE: Do not use the term from the title of this piece if you are non-Black; the term is a reclaimed slur.)

Proto-Queer Theory and Other Useful Stuff:

• Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici.
• Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman.
• A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.
• Anarchist Counterpublics by Kathy E. Ferguson.
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.
• Liberating Society from the State and other writings by Erich Mühsam.
• The Logic of Gender by Endnotes.
• Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction by Todd May.
• A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon.
• Dead Zones of the Imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor by David Graeber.
• Micropolitics and Social Change: Deleuze and Guattari for Anarchist Theory and Practice by Paul Raekstad. (This provides a good framework to approach Warner’s The Trouble with Normal.)