6 Books to Broaden Your Perspective

Let this holiday serve as a reminder to always be learning, reading, and working to destroy the systems of oppression like racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and sexism that keep us fractured. 

Below are 6 books we recommend that have broadened our minds and perspectives. 

1. Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America (Queer Ideas/Queer Action)

BY GREGORY D. SMITHERS

A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations.

This book was also our November Book Club pick. Learn more about our book club here. 

2. Queer Ancient Ways: A Decolonial Exploration

BY ZAIRONG XIANG

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources (thereby also unlearning queer theory as it has been understood in contemporary, primarily Anglo-American and western European contexts).

3. The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (New Black Studies Series)

BY MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women’s writing.

4. My Government Means to Kill Me

BY RASHEED NEWSON

The debut novel from television WRITER/PRODUCER OF THE CHI, NARCOS, and BEL-AIR tells a fierce and riveting queer coming-of-age story following the personal and political awakening of a young, gay, Black man in 1980s New York City.

 

5. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights

BY LAURIE MARHOEFER

Racism and the Making of Gay Rights shows how Hirschfeld laid the groundwork for modern gay rights, and how he did so by borrowing from a disturbing set of racist, imperial, and eugenic ideas.

6. Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender

BY DR. KIT HEYAM PH.D

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance.