This chapter surveys recent interventions within queer studies on race in American literature to demonstrate how whiteness depends upon sexuality and gender. Queer studies scholarship on the linked history of whiteness and heterosexuality in turn-of-the-century racial science shows how whiteness draws strength through alliance with heterosexuality as normative, natural, and hegemonic. Meanwhile, the deep skepticism in queer and trans studies of heteronormativity and the biological bases of gender helps to excavate the constructedness of whiteness. Finally, recent scholarship on same-sex desire identifies how homoeroticism has affirmed whiteness across centuries of American literature. The essay further explores these approaches with three novels as case studies: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue (2019). These novels demonstrate how gender and sexuality contribute to race-making and how whiteness can conscript heterosexual romance and homoerotic desire into the project of white supremacy.

In this chapter, we discuss how the design and evolution of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth elevated respect for the lived experience of queer youth in setting policies that impact their lives. Originally founded in 1992, the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was formed to respond to high suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth in the Commonwealth. That original Commission transformed in 2006 into an independent state agency established by law. Today, the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth advises others in state government on effective policies, programs, and resources for LGBTQ youth and produces the Safe Schools Program with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This chapter details the experience of artist and legal designer Alexander (Alex) Nally, who led agency and government relations on the Commission for five years, and focuses on how human-centered design approaches can improve policy interventions.

Marriage equality was a significant achievement, one that yielded both practical and symbolic benefits for hundreds of thousands of queer households. At the same time, marriage equality is not the same as full equality. In the years since the Obergefell decision, LGBTQ rights advocates have continued to fight difficult and demoralizing battles against harmful laws and policies, which have increasingly targeted transgender rights. However, the movement’s past successes should offer hope for the future. The history of gay and lesbian rights advocacy reveals that small victories at the state and local level, brought about by working with nonlegal actors, can transform both the law and society. Although advocates have not yet achieved gay liberation’s visions of the future, they have attained meaningful reforms. The movement’s history thus offers a crucial reminder that the law can change society for the better.

As we’ve seen, bitch has been used against men for almost as long as it’s been used against women. Bitch is still thrown at men and women alike, but it’s used somewhat differently. Bitch can have positive connotations when a woman reclaims it, but when aimed at a man, bitch is rarely a compliment. While a bitch can be a strong woman, it usually means a weak man. But unlike powerful women who are hit with the word, men are targeted with bitch when they are considered to be powerless. Bitch likens a woman to a man, while it likens a man to a woman. It’s an emasculating insult that suggests he’s lacking in courage and strength. Bitch might also accuse him of being effeminate or gay. There are many different versions of the slur for a man – he’s a little bitch, someone’s bitch, a prison bitch, or he’s a son of a bitch.

The history of queer and trans Puerto Rican and Diasporican literature is complex. Its relationship to American literature is fraught with issues of colonialism and linguistic exclusion. Careful analysis of a wide-ranging corpus from the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1882), José de Diego Padró (1924), and Pedro Caballero (1931), reveals a longstanding interest in queer and trans experience in works written in Spanish in Puerto Rico and New York. The massive social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s led to the explosion of critical voices such as those of Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Their pioneering texts, and the complex writing of Nuyorican authors in English, opened the way for late 1990s and early 2000s authors such as Ángel Lozada and Mayra Santos-Febres, for the eventual creation of collectives such as Homoerótica in 2009, and for the widespread acclaim of writers such as Luis Negrón, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Justin Torres, and Raquel Salas Rivera. “Queerness,” as such, and its Spanish-language variant “cuir,” have been spaces of possibility for Boricua expression for more than one hundred forty years.

Biases in decision-making based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities are pervasive in the criminal justice and legal systems. Likewise, the positionality of legal actors and lay people from diverse groups both influences and constrains legally relevant judgments. This chapter uses a case study of racially biased judgments in the criminal justice and legal systems to illustrate how judgment processes can lead to unequal outcomes across social groups. It then describes ways in which law-psychology can expand research on diversity in legal decision-making, addressing issues related to social class, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and reproductive decision-making by women. It also discusses frameworks and perspectives that provide valuable insights on legal decision-making but which often are overlooked by psycholegal scholars, including intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the abolition movement. The chapter concludes by examining the limits of a decision-making framework for understanding unequal outcomes in legally relevant contexts, which frequently are the result of structural and implicit biases in addition to deliberate judgments.

In this chapter, guided by an intersectional feminist theoretical approach, we examine gender and sexuality as ubiquitous ideas in personal identity, intimate relationships, family systems, and social institutions. We critique heteronormativity in relational and family science in order to examine the plethora of relationships formed in the context of gender, identity, and sexuality. We examine how social structures at the macro level and social constructions at the microlevel influence selected issues regarding relationship initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution. We review selected trends in the literature concerning diverse romantic relationships and how they adhere to or critique heteronormative ideologies, thereby, examining ways in which relational partners are both queering and challenging taken for granted assumptions about doing gender and sexuality in relationships.

This chapter studies the expression of queerness, gender and sexual identity, and diversity in comics and graphic novels. It identifies several stages in the history of the medium, from earlier coded or implicit representations of queer identities designed to circumvent the Comics Code Authority to increasingly and openly acknowledged visualizations of non-heteronormative subject matters in contemporary works. The chapter offers close readings of various coming-out narratives that use the graphic memoir form as a space for self-excavation and self-disclosure, drawing connections with a wider social of familial context (Howard Cruse, David Wojnarowicz, and especially Alison Bechdel, whose Fun Home catapulted queer graphic novels into the mainstream). It also contrasts the “normalization” approach of mainstream publishers, who focus on diversity and support equality by featuring queer characters in ensemble casts, albeit at the risk of presenting a superficial image of queerness, and the more exclusive focus of alternative publishers and individually produced comics-zines, more centered on personal experiences.