Libby Leshgold Gallery Reading Room Selections

"Advances in LGBTQ rights in the recent past—marriage equality, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the expansion of hate crimes legislation—have been accompanied by a rise in attacks against trans, queer and/or gender-nonconforming people of color. In Atmospheres of Violence, theorist and organizer Eric A. Stanley shows how this seeming contradiction reveals the central role of racialized and gendered violence in the United States. Rather than suggesting that such violence is evidence of individual phobias, Stanley shows how it is a structuring antagonism in our social world. Drawing on an archive of suicide notes, AIDS activist histories, surveillance tapes, and prison interviews, they offer a theory of anti-trans/queer violence in which inclusion and recognition are forms of harm rather than remedies to it. In calling for trans/queer organizing and worldmaking beyond these forms, Stanley points to abolitionist ways of life that might offer livable futures."--publisher's description

"The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials-early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films-Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the father of American gynecology, to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of cross dressing and canonical black literary works that express black mens access to the female within, he concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience."--Provided by publisher

In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm

The Elder Femme and Other Stone Writings is Odete’s first poetry collection. What starts as an essayistic archaeology searching for traces of transgender lives in mythical Antiquity soon branches off into myriad poetic and visual forms, from intimate free verses and scribbled notes to historical reports, earthy speculations, and magical enchantments. Weaving both English and her native Portuguese, there is a porosity and impermanence to Odete’s language. Equally evocative and testimonial, the book offers, in Odete’s own words, a “paranoid archaeology” that dilutes the borders between the personal and the collective. The Elder Femme works as portal, voicing those that came before and those still to come, as in its opening poem: “one day/ i’ll thank her/ my mother/ for teaching me/ how to glue/ shattered vases”.--from publisher's description

"In Going Stealth Toby Beauchamp demonstrates how the enforcement of gender conformity is linked to state surveillance practices that identify threats based on racial, gender, national, and ableist categories of difference. Positioning surveillance as central to our understanding of transgender politics, Beauchamp examines a range of issues, from bathroom bills and TSA screening practices to Chelsea Manning's trial, to show how security practices extend into the everyday aspects of our gendered lives. He brings the fields of disability, science and technology, and surveillance studies into conversation with transgender studies to show how the scrutinizing of gender nonconformity is motivated less by explicit transgender identities than by the perceived threat that gender nonconformity poses to the U.S. racial and security state. Beauchamp uses instances of gender surveillance to demonstrate how disciplinary power attempts to produce conformist citizens and regulate difference through discourses of security. At the same time, he contends that greater visibility and recognition for gender nonconformity, while sometimes beneficial, might actually enable the surveillance state to more effectively track, measure, and control trans bodies and identities."--publisher's description

"Through combined theoretical and empirical study, Viviane K. Namaste argues that transgendered people are not so much produced by medicine or psychiatry as they are erased, or made invisible, in a variety of institutional and cultural settings. Namaste begins her work by analyzing two theoretical perspectives on transgendered people—queer theory and the social sciences—displaying how neither of these has adequately addressed the issues most relevant to sex change: everything from employment to health care to identity papers. Namaste then examines some of the rhetorical and semiotic inscriptions of transgendered figures in culture, including studies of early punk and glam rock subcultures, to illustrate how the effacement of transgendered people is organized in different cultural sites. Invisible Lives concludes with new research on some of the day-to-day concerns of transgendered people, offering case studies in violence, health care, gender identity clinics, and the law."--from publisher's description

"Shola von Reinhold’s lavish debut novel lays bare, through ornate, layered prose, the gaps and faultlines in the archive. Through obsessive research on an overlooked Black modernist poet, the narrator buckles under the vacuousness of the art world and also curates a queer historical scene, breaking it open and reveling in it. "--from publisher's description

"my hate is pure by Clio Lake is a slim but impactful publication. It’s a poetic meditation on desire and trans identity, with a pleasing, rough, pixelated texture, and a piquant, equally textured vibe."--publisher's description

"In Normal Life Dean Spade presents revelatory critiques of the legal equality framework for social change and points to examples of transformative grassroots trans activism that are raising demands that go beyond traditional civil rights reforms. Spade explodes the assumptions about what legal rights can do for marginalized populations and describes transformative resistance processes and formations that address the root causes of harm and violence. Setting forth a politic that goes beyond the quest for mere legal inclusion, Normal Life is an urgent call for justice and trans liberation, and the radical transformations it will require"-- Back cover.

"In Poetic Operations artist and theorist micha cárdenas considers contemporary digital media, artwork, and poetry in order to articulate trans of color strategies for safety and survival. Drawing on decolonial theory, women of color feminism, media theory, and queer of color critique, cárdenas develops a method she calls algorithmic analysis. Understanding algorithms as sets of instructions designed to perform specific tasks (like a recipe), she breaks them into their component parts, called operations. By focusing on these operations, cárdenas identifies how trans and gender-non-conforming artists, especially artists of color, rewrite algorithms to counter violence and develop strategies for liberation. In her analyses of Giuseppe Campuzano's holographic art, Esdras Parra's and Kai Cheng Thom's poetry, Mattie Brice's digital games, Janelle Monáe's music videos, and her own artistic practice, cárdenas shows how algorithmic analysis provides new modes of understanding the complex processes of identity and oppression and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race."--from publisher's description

"Glissant defines his "poetics of relation"-- both aesthetic and political--as a transformative mode of history, capable of enunciating and making concrete a French-Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. Glissant's notions of identity as constructed in relation and not in isolation are germane not only to discussions of Caribbean creolization but also to our understanding of U.S. multiculturalism. In Glissant's view, we come to see that relation in all its senses -- telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings -- is the key to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies."--from publisher's description

"Productive Archiving discusses a variety of problems of archival organizations. It mainly focuses on the following three issues with archival organizations that are usually overlooked: first, the question of inclusion in or exclusion from the archive; second, the loss of individuality and specificity in the archive, the danger of homogenization; and third, that archiving may become a form of pigeonholing, boxing specific identities into a confined space. Avoiding the archive because of these problems is not an option, because archival organization is a basic symbolic mode on the basis of which we organize our lives, the past, the present and the future. What this book suggests is that it is best to explore constructive and creative solutions for these problems. Especially artistic archives seem to be able to develop these possible solutions, because they offer speculative, unexpected ways to order, select, and narrate specific information, and bring about new connections in archival organizations."-- Page 4 of cover.

Prominent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films.

"Queer Sites in Global Contexts showcases a variety of cross-cultural perspectives that foreground the physical and online experiences of LGBTQ+ people living in the Caribbean, South and North America, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia."--from publisher's description

"Jules Gill-Peterson takes us from the bustling port cities of New York and New Orleans to the streets of London and Paris in search of the emergence of modern trans misogyny. She connects the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai’i to the lively travesti communities of Latin America, where state violence has stamped a trans label on vastly different ways of life. Weaving together the stories of historical figures in a richly detailed narrative, the book shows how trans femininity emerged under colonial governments, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public spaces, and the area between the formal and informal economy."--from publisher's description

"An expansive array of objects chart not a patriarchal history but a gender-neutral, trans-centric hirstory. The first publication of its kind, this survey celebrates trans forebearers, highlights struggles and triumphs, and reflects on the legacies of trans creative expression. Contributions by Kate Bornstein, Ria Brodell, Vaginal Davis, Leah DeVun, Mo B. Dick, Zackary Drucker, David Getsy, Martine Gutierrez, Andrea Jenkins, Jade Guarano Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Abram J. Lewis, Miguel A. López, Amos Mac, Cyle Metzger, Deborah A. Miranda, Morgan M Page, SA Smythe, C. Riley Snorton, Dean Spade, Sandy Stone, Jeannine Tang, Michelle Tea, McKenzie Wark, and many others probe new horizons where institutional critique and trans culture meet. This book is copublished by the Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA), a conceptual art project of artist Chris E. Vargas that is forever “under construction” by design to allow continual transformation."--from publisher's description

"Essays, conversations, and archival investigations explore the paradoxes, limitations, and social ramifications of trans representation within contemporary culture." - Publisher

"Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. To do so, Joynt stages a series of vignettes that place memoir in the context of other sources, media, and stories to create a tapestry - a montage-like experience of reading with surprising and revealing juxtapositions."--from publisher's description

"The Employee was a year-long conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel. Responding to Forest City Gallery’s invitation to participate in an exhibition of institutional critique, Schwebel wrote a Canada Council for the Arts grant to hire a performer-cum-arts administrator who would write funding applications on behalf of the commissioning space. FGC in London, Ontario, is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its founding members contributed to the conception of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens). It has been publicly funded for almost 50 years, yet is staffed and operated by a single employee. By supplementing the insufficient work-force of the gallery, The Employee commented on the precarity of publicly-funded cultural workers and exposed long-present fault lines in systems of funding and labour within the creative economy.
This is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers intended both to reflect on The Employee and to trace the systemically enforced disintegration of boundaries between art-work-life leading up to, during, and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. The methodology of The Employee is most accurately described by Lise Soskolne, director of W.A.G.E., who writes: “artists must acknowledge that their labour is not exceptional in its support of and exploitation by a multibillion-dollar industry, while simultaneously putting their exceptionality to work by engaging their own labour on political terms, and as a political act.” As a contributor to this book, Bopha Chhay writes, “Witnessing The Employee necessitates an acknowledgement that an uncritical participation within these systems upholds a false idea of the neutrality of these organizations, thereby actively denying the reality of current challenges and social responsibilities.”--publisher's description

‘Tangerine, After Grapefruit’ is a collection of printed photographs. Each image is the hand-embroidered front and back of the nine 5’ x 5’ textile pieces. Each booklet is hand-bound with the same thread.--artist's description

"Silverfish Issue 002 focuses on the theme of transition, featuring texts by Anna Daliza and Irum, and artist projects by Saysah Yoroonatii and Lina Wu. The artists and writers featured in this issue explore transition as a way of moving through historical and personal grief; as a way to craft intergenerational and ancestral relationships; as bodily transformation. The poems, stories, dialogues, drawings, sculptures and performance documentation that fill the pages of this issue pull threads from different types of transformation and change, ranging from personal to communal to systemic, crafting a web of transition."--publisher's description

"Silverfish Issue 003 dives into the theme of Hole, featuring texts and artworks by Hannah Bullock, Melly Davidson, Saint Haarlem, Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph, abisola oni, and Sid Sharp. Guest edited by Cason Sharpe, this publication contains a mix of poetry, photography, painting, video stills, screenplays, drawings, and essays, that explore the amorphous Hole from above, below, and inside. Readers will be confronted with a variety of voids and orifices including mouths, eyes, pussies, blackholes, redactions, chemical stains, unnamed pain, and the five holy wounds."--from publisher's description