UWM Libraries Research and Course Guides: LGBTQIA+ Rights and History: Early Queer Theory

Important and Canonical Texts

This page contains a selection books, essays, and creative works that are considered significant to LGBTQIA+ Studies and History. The ideas represented in these works do not necessarily reflect the views of contemporary Queer discourse, rather, they're notable contributions to a long and evolving conversation. This curated list is designed as a starting point for researchers interested in Queer studies, but it is not exhaustive.

Important Early Works

This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga (Editor); Gloria Anzaldúa (Editor); Johnetta Tinker (Illustrator)
Call Number: PS509.F44 T5 1983
Publication Date: 1981
This Bridge Called My Back is a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, "the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation."
The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
Call Number: HQ12 .F6813 1988
Publication Date: 1988
Michel Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality' pioneered queer theory. In it he builds an argument grounded in a historical analysis of the word "sexuality" against the common thesis that sexuality always has been repressed in Western society.
Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Publication Date: 1990-10-16
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed Epistemology of the Closet. Working from classic texts of European and American writers - including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde - Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at the horror of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic and its influence on the text.
Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg
Publication Date: 1996-05-01
This groundbreaking book—far ahead of its time when first published in 1996 and still galvanizing today—interweaves history, memoir, and gender studies to show that transgender people, far from being a modern phenomenon, have always existed and have exerted their influence throughout history. Leslie Feinberg—hirself a lifelong transgender revolutionary—reveals the origin of the check-one-box-only gender system and shows how zie found empowerment in the lives of transgender warriors around the world, from the Two Spirits of the Americas to the many genders of India, from the trans shamans of East Asia to the gender-bending Queen Nzinga of Angola, from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and beyond.
Two-Spirit People by Sue-Ellen Jacobs (Editor); Wesley Thomas (Editor); Sabine Lang (Editor)
Call Number: E98.S48 T86 1997
Publication Date: 1997
Focusing on the concept of two-spirit people - individuals not necessarily gay or lesbian, transvestite or bisexual, but whose behaviors or beliefs may sometimes be interpreted by others as uncharacteristic of their sex - this book is the first to provide an intimate look at how many two-spirit people feel about themselves, how other Native Americans treat them, and how anthropologists and other scholars interpret them and their cultures.
Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 1998
Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them.
Gender trouble : feminism and the subversion of identity by Judith Butler
ISBN: 0203902750
Publication Date: 1999
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is considered a foundational text in Queer theory. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated social performance rather than the expression of a prior reality.
Disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics by José Esteban Muñoz
Call Number: Request from UW System
Publication Date: 1999
There is more to identity than identifying with one's culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture--not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process "disidentification," and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.
Undoing Gender by Judith Butler
Publication Date: 2004-08-17
Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration of her earlier view on gender performativity from Gender Trouble .
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer; Michael Bérubé (Foreword by); Michael Bérubé (Foreword by)
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2006
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other. Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities.

Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical inquiry, 24(2), 547-566.

Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ, 3(4), 437–465.

De Lauretis, T. (1991). Queer theory: Lesbian and gay sexualities an introduction. Differences, 3(2), iii-xviii.

D’Emilio, J. (1983). Capitalism and Gay Identity” Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. New York: Monthly Review Press, 100-113.

Duggan, L. (2002). The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism. In Materializing Democracy (pp. 175–194). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822383901-008

Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993). The five sexes: why male and female are not enough. The Sciences (New York), 33(2), 20–25.4.

Fausto-Sterling, A (2000). The five Sexes, Revisted. The Sciences, 40(4), 18.

Halperin, D. M. (2003). The normalization of queer theory. Journal of homosexuality, 45(2-4), 339-343.

Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the erotic: The erotic as power. In Sister outsider : essays and speeches (pp. pages of chapter). Crossing Press. Originally published as a standalone book in 1978.

Rich, A. C. (2003). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence (1980). Journal of Women's History, 15(3), 11-48. Reprint of original essay published in 1980

G. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Women, Class and the Feminist Imagination, ed. Karen V. Hansen and Ilene J. Philipson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 74–112.

Carmilla by Joseph Le Fanu; Kate Costello-Sullivan (Editor)
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0815633114
Text of and critical essays on the 1872 vampire tale chronicling the experiences of a young woman lured by the charms of a female vampire.
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Call Number: PR6015.A33 W43 1990
Publication Date: 1928
Originally published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness is the timeless story of a lesbian couple's struggle to be accepted by "polite" society. Shockingly candid for its time, this novel was the very first to condemn homophobic society for its unfair treatment of gays and lesbians.
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
Call Number: PS3552 A45 G5x
ISBN: 9780345806567
Publication Date: 1956
Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatraites, liasons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. James Baldwin's brilliant narrative delves into the mystery of loving with a sharp, probing imagination, and he creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the heart.
The Price of Salt by Claire Morgan
Call Number: PS3558.I366 P7 1993b
ISBN: 1562800035
Publication Date: 1952
The Price of Salt (later republished under the title Carol) is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan."
A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between her child and her lover.
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Call Number: Washington Main Collection ; PS3552.R698 R8 2015
ISBN: 9781101965122
Publication Date: 1977 (originally)
A landmark coming-of-age novel that launched the career of one of this country's most distinctive voices. Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirt-poor Southern couple who boldly forges her own path in America. With her startling beauty and crackling wit, Molly finds that women are drawn to her wherever she goes-- and she refuses to apologize for loving them back.
The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
Call Number: PS3557 O457 G5 1991
ISBN: 0932379958
Publication Date: 1991-04-01
"1850s Louisiana, a runaway woman has escaped slavery and is working in a brothel. As she settles into life with the other women of the brothel, they initiate her into vampirism and the secret of eternal life, and she takes on the name Gilda. Over the rest of the novel, Gilda jumps across time — from 1890 California to 1955 Massachusetts to the 2050 “Land of Enchantment.” Jewelle Gomez is recognized as a pioneer in speculative fiction and one of the founders of Afrofuturism." ~BookRiot
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Call Number: PS3556.E427 S7 1993
ISBN: 1563410303
Publication Date: 1993
Jess Goldberg decides to come out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist '60s and then to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early '70s. This book has saved lives.

LGBTQIA+ Rights and History

History of Queer Theory

History of Queer Theory

Important and Canonical Texts

Important Early Works