Condensed Reading List for Interested Parties

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Here are some lists of readings from last semester sorted by interest, because people asked me which of my readings were interesting, and the answer is different for everybody, but I cannot write a different list for every individual who asked me. Hopefully this is helpful to some of you, and to the rest of you, um, here is a cut tag! <3

My top five things I recommend you read regardless of what they are about, some of them theoretically challenging, these are the ones that spoke to me:

• Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, "Agential Realism" chapter: I have notes on this here. SCIENCE.
• Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, "How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?" : This is the most comprehensible D&G I have read. And short. That does not mean it makes sense. But it is the closest to making sense. And it did a lot for me personally.
• Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto For Cyborgs" : Just, if you care about animals and technology, read it. My notes and a link are here.
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble : The whole of this book is way more interesting than the bit everyone cites. There is a wealth to work from here.
• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer : This is so astonishingly useful for looking at both contemporary politics and human/animal relations.

My top five things I recommend you read if you want to read only things that are comprehensible:

• Miguel de Landa, A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History : "Geological History 1000 -- 1700 A.D." chapter, about meshworks versus hierarchies in the development of urban spaces. More generally applicable as well! I used this to talk about the Internet. Notes.
• Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” : Have read this before in a lay genderhead book group, sparks fascinating discussion, I've mentioned it before.
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing, section 7: This is something really short and sweet that we taught to undergrads, but the "spectator-buyer" and "spectator-owner" concepts were new to me and stuck in my head like whoah. I find them really useful.
• Myra Hird, "Animal Trans" : Awesome description of all the ways in which animals are not binarily gendered. Notes.
• Mary Gray, Out In The Country : A professor researching queer youth in Kentucky. Awesome. What I've read of it so far --- we read the introduction and chapter one and I intend to read more --- is very approachable and explains why our work is Not Done even if being queer in Boston and San Francisco is not a Thing so much anymore.

If you are interested in intersectionality:

• Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses" : Is there a good way to do cross-cultural and cross-privilege research? Less pessimistic than "Can The Subaltern Speak?" and provides examples of both good and bad work.
• Social Semiotics Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2009 : Articles using somatechnics to look at intersections around race. Has a Stryker piece I really like called "We Who Are Sexy: Christine Jorgensen’s transsexual whiteness in the postcolonial Philippines" as well as some other excellent articles.

If you are interested in race and gender in direct conversation:

• Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture : This has so much race passing stuff and if I were to do more work on race and gender passing and early African American lit I would use this book so hard. Has a bunch of analysis of Pauline Hopkins, which is !!!!! so cool.
• Ramon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 : The gender studies folks mostly hated this book; the historians loved it. If you are a historian, you will probably love it too. I did not, but there is a lot of detailed quantitative work. The preface is sort of rage-inducing though. :/

If you are interested in psychoanalytic theory being put to good effect:

• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Rolling with her through this is beautiful if you know your Freud and Lacan and Kristeva and Irigaray and so on. Oh I love it so. The notes that I took on this are so useless to you I am not even going to bother to link to them; they are all about a slant reading related to animality.
• David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Astoundingly useful use of Lacan. Also some neat Barthes stuff on the camera. Works with film in cool ways.

If you are interested in trans theory and body modification:

• Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above The Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" : OH MY GOD JUST GO READ IT.
• Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing The Body, dropping so much science.
• Nikki Sullivan, "Transsomatechnics and the matter of 'Genital Modifications'" : Introductory text on the subject, covers a lot of ground, more connected to lived experience than most of the stuff I have been reading.
• Matt Lodder, "A Somatechnological Paradigm: How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?" : Deleuze and body-mods! Two great tastes! Notes.

If you are interested in medievalism and how to use it to talk about the present:

• The first issue of the journal Postmedieval, which is full of fascinating articles!! And is super awesome! You should read it! 

If you want a micro crash course in being able to understand the papers I wrote this semester:

• Karen Barad's "Agential Realism"
• Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer
• Giorgio Agamben's The Open
• Anne Fausto-Sterling's Sexing The Body, chapter 8
• Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology"
• Deleuze and Guattari's "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..."
• Carol Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory
• Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto For Cyborgs"

In theory the papers will make sense without that reading, but if you are looking to Really Get It, those are the major theoretical sources I use.

If you can't tell, the big things that grabbed me are Karen Barad, Giorgio Agamben, and Deleuze and Guattari, with a side of Donna Haraway and Judy B.  In general this semester opened my head up, tossed some new things in, stirred it around a lot, and then closed it back up. I think differently about the world around me than I did six months ago. I am sure that my brain will continue to change, but I think that transsomatechnics will be one of the bigger changes while I am here. We will see! In the meantime uh hopefully this is useful or enjoyable for someone.