SUNY in Queer Politics and Cultures

Approaches stigmatized sex with candor and curiosity, interweaving experience and analysis to better appreciate the intricacies and intrigue of queer desires and pleasures. Queer theorists have long defended stigmatized sexual desires and behaviors by demonstrating how they are either fundamentally harmless or have some higher political, psychological, or social value. While such defenses may be useful in combatting homophobia, the mandate that sex be either benign or virtuous has impeded our ability to apprehend the nuance and variety of the things that turn us on and get us off. Queer Pleasure Without Apology refuses this mandate, approaching stigmatized sex with curiosity rather than judgment. Greg Goldberg examines his own "bad" desires and behaviors-from anonymous sex to fetishization to playing games-to show how critics keep getting them wrong. Heady and humorous, Queer Pleasure Without Apology challenges us to think about sex in a way that is as playful and perplexing as sex itself.

Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with their presumed innocence always in danger of being lost. Unscripting the Present interweaves analysis of laws and lawsuits, news media, sociological studies, and popular culture both to understand contemporary sex panics and to highlight how queer youth find ways to survive in the here and now. Developing a novel technique of "unscripting," Timothy Gitzen focuses our attention on those impromptu moments when things go awry in representations of queer youth-moments that disrupt securitization's social "scripts." Foregoing well-worn promises of things getting better, texts such as Netflix's Sex Education, the film Love, Simon, and the multimodal show Skam upend the anxious hyperfocus on what's to come in favor of a hopeful present.

An innovative collection of advice, resources, and ideas for faculty teaching LGBTQ politics. Limited resources exist to support faculty teaching LGBTQ politics. The first of its kind, this edited volume brings together scholars from across the discipline of political science to offer guidance on how to better teach LGBTQ issues. Rooted in and focused on the US context, the book is divided into three sections. The first addresses developing and teaching LGBTQ politics courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The second offers suggestions for incorporating LGBTQ topics into other political science courses. And the last homes in on various pedagogical concerns that can arise when teaching LGBTQ politics. Contributors provide a host of resources, including lesson plan templates, reading assignments, and strategies and takeaways from their own experiences teaching in the field.