My Shadow is My Skin Virtual Panel

In March, the co-editors of the new collection My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, Katherine Whitney and Leila Emery, joined contributors Dena Rod, Darius Atefat-Peckham, and Siamak Vossoughi, along with the University of Texas Press Publishing Fellow Dr. Laura Fish, for an in-depth conversation. The group discussed how the volume of more than thirty essays came together, how the writers have experienced an evolving and inclusive diaspora, how everyone celebrated Nowruz while in quarantine, and more. Enjoy the video of our Zoom panel discussion here, with a full transcript below.

Transcript of Virtual Panel

Hi, I'm Katherine Whitney, with Leila Emery, co-edited this book: My Shadow is My Skin and I'm really happy to be here with all of you today. And I'm phoning in from Berkeley, California.

Hello, I'm Leila Emery and I'm co-editor of My Shadow is My Skin with Katherine. It started in 2015 and it's just such a pleasure to be able to have it out in the world and we're very grateful to our authors and to have the opportunity to do a reading and have a chat.

I'm Laura Fish, I'm a, I'm the publishing fellow at the University of Texas Press, and I've been doing some of the publicity work for My Shadow is My Skin. And so it's very nice to finally see people in person, or on a screen, put voices and names to faces. And I guess I'll be helping to kind of moderate this discussion throughout.

Hi my name is Dena Rod, my pronouns are they/them/theirs. I'm one of the contributors from My Shadow is My Skin. I wrote an essay in there. I wrote about being queer and Iranian and how those two intersections come together. And I'm also phoning in from Berkeley, California today.

Hi, I'm Darius Atefat-Peckham. I'm also a contributor to My Shadow is My Skin. I'm so excited to be here. I am an essayist and a poet, and I'm a freshman at Harvard University, which is currently happening on Zoom as well, so this is kind of cool. I'm already pretty hip to it. And I'm from Huntington, West Virginia, so I'm in, I'm in West Virginia right now.

I'm Siamak Vossoughi. Also a contributor to My Shadow is My Skin, and I want to say thanks first off to Leila and Katherine. This is the first time I've had a chance to say thank you in close-to-person, together, and also to Bailey and Laura and everyone at UT Press for putting this together. I'm very excited to be a part of the conversation, and I am calling from Seattle.

Laura Fish: Katherine asked if I could share some of the reasons why the University of Texas Press decided to acquire your book and publish it, and hearing from the acquiring editor, because I, I wasn't here at the time—I'm new, but also temporary status—hearing from him, Jim Burr, on the decision to get in touch with you and to acquire My Shadow is My Skin, it kind of seemed like a no-brainer. He had met Persis at the Middle East Studies Association meeting a couple of times, and had talked with her about the possibility of a kind of volume like this, and and then he said that he was able to meet with Katherine and Leila about the various stories that would be presented in the volume. And he was very excited about that. He is always on the lookout for stories of underrepresented groups he's, he's acquired previous texts on the Iranian diaspora, and so when he was given the opportunity to publish a volume of nonfiction creative stories, he jumped at that opportunity especially given the current political landscape. He thought that this was a very important volume to get out and and contend with different notions that are present especially within the American political sphere. And I think that, on a personal note of having read the volume, that the variety of stories that are offered within this volume really speaks to every aspect of American and Iranian life that really does provide the opportunity to challenge a lot of the discriminatory beliefs that are often presented about Iran and Iranians and the Diaspora.

Katherine Whitney: Sure, I think that that's a great summary. I mean that's, that piece of representing underrepresented culture/voices, and also we felt strongly in this volume to include a combination of people, of writers, who were emerging and established because we felt like the more different voices and different perspectives we could get out there the better. Because it's really, what we wanted to emphasize was the not just the human stories but the diversity of stories coming from this population. And Leila and I got a chance to really think about how we were part of this new diaspora, and it's not something that I had ever really thought of myself being part of as an American, you know born in America, but having married into an Iranian family and really taken on the culture, I, I came to understand through this process: the writing workshop that we took together in 2015 and then the putting-together of this book that the diaspora is really, the net is very wide and we wanted to reflect that in the writing as well.

Leila Emery: I agree and I think another really important goal of ours was to try to capture the stories that haven't been told before by the Iranians. I'm thrilled about it, and I think a few of the readings beautifully fall into that category, so we feel very very lucky. 

Fish: So I think from here we were going to have the contributors supply a, about approximately five-minute reading from their stories. So I'm not sure who who would like to go first, maybe Dena?

Dena Rod Reading

Dena Rod: Yeah, let me go ahead. This is an excerpt from my essay called "Pushing the Boundaries." This essay was written in 2015, and so it's about five years now, but I still think is really important piece: 

Coming out is not a singular process. Ever. You can never do it just once, because with heteronormativity, everyone assumes you're straight. Coming out to my mom in 2009 was only the beginning. Since then I have constantly come out about my queerness to strangers on the street, cashiers taking my coffee order when I'm holding my wife's hand, or, before I was married, when I first met people and they assumed the fiancée I spoke of was male. Now, it's always an act of coming out when I say "my wife," and there is no misunderstanding anymore about the differences between girlfriend and fiancée.

This protracted coming out also translates to my extended Iranian family. I remember constantly checking in with my parents about which "aunts" and "uncles" I could be honest with. And, however, they're not actually related to me by blood. When my parents first immigrated to America in the early 1980s, fresh off the heels of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, they each heard about the thriving Persian expat community in Northern California. When they met at a wedding in Oakland in 1986, their individual journeys converged. Settling here in California, they imported a desire to belong to the type of community an Iranian village provided for them back home. These woman and men raised me and looked after me as I grew up, gave me advice when my parents couldn't, and tried to prevent any boys from breaking my heart.

Pride Month Reading List

By our Marketing, Sales, and Copyediting Fellow David Juarez

In the early hours of June 28, 1969, a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar in Greenwich Village, sparked a violent riot between LGBTQ citizens and the New York police. This event became a significant milestone in LGBTQ history and the catalyst for gay and lesbian liberation movements across the nation. Since then, June has come to represent Pride Month in the United States, a celebration of LGBTQ identity and a commemoration of LGBTQ history, figures, and achievements.

LGBTQ identity transcends national boundaries, of course, and this post highlights some of the amazing scholarship from UT Press related to LGBTQ representation, identity, and politics across the globe. These books offer different perspectives on how LGBTQ identities intersect with racial, ethnic, and cultural differences, how we read media, how media reads us, and how great scholarship challenges us to understand the people and the world around us. 

1

Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley (forthcoming 2018)

Making headlines when it was launched in 2015, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s undergraduate course “Beyoncé Feminism, Rihanna Womanism” has inspired students from all walks of life. In Beyoncé in Formation, Tinsley now takes her rich observations beyond the classroom, using the blockbuster album and video Lemonade as a soundtrack for vital next-millennium narratives. Woven with candid observations about her life as a feminist scholar of African studies and a cisgender femme married to a trans spouse, Tinsley’s “Femme-onade” mixtape explores myriad facets of black women’s sexuality and gender. Her chapters on nontraditional bonds culminate in a discussion of contemporary LGBT politics through the lens of the internet-breaking video “Formation,” underscoring why Beyoncé’s black femme-inism isn’t only for ciswomen. In the tradition of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and Jill Lepore’s bestselling cultural histories, Beyoncé in Formation is the work of a daring intellectual who is poised to spark a new conversation about freedom and identity in America.

2

Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism by Uriel Quesada, Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz (2015)

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/os faced several forms of discrimination. To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/os organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities. Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/os played, resulting in misinformation, or ignore their work entirely, erasing them from history. Queer Brown Voices is the first book published to counter this trend, documenting the efforts of some of these LGBT Latina/o activists. Comprising essays and oral history interviews that present the experiences of fourteen activists across the United States and in Puerto Rico, the book offers a new perspective on the history of LGBT mobilization and activism. The activists discuss subjects that shed light not only on the organizations they helped to create and operate, but also on their broad-ranging experiences of being racialized and discriminated against, fighting for access to health care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and struggling for awareness.

3

Queer Beirut by Sofian Merabet (2014)

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Gender and sexual identity formation is an ongoing anthropological conversation in both Middle Eastern studies and urban studies, but the story of gay and lesbian identity in the Middle East is only just beginning to be told. Queer Beirut is the first ethnographic study of queer lives in the Arab Middle East. Drawing on anthropology, urban studies, gender studies, queer studies, and sociocultural theory, Sofian Merabet’s compelling ethnography suggests a critical theory of gender and religious identity formations that will disrupt conventional anthropological premises about the contingent role that society and particular urban spaces have in facilitating the emergence of various subcultures within the city. From 1995 to 2014, Merabet made a series of ethnographic journeys to Lebanon, during which he interviewed numerous gay men in Beirut. Through their life stories, Merabet crafts moving ethnographic narratives and explores how Lebanese gays inhabit and perform their gender as they formulate their sense of identity. He also examines the notion of “queer space” in Beirut and the role that this city, its class and sectarian structure, its colonial history, and religion have played in these people’s discovery and exploration of their sexualities. In using Beirut as a microcosm for the complexities of homosexual relationships in contemporary Lebanon, Queer Beirut provides a critical standpoint from which to deepen our understandings of gender rights and citizenship in the structuring of social inequality within the larger context of the Middle East.

4

The New Gay for Pay: The Sexual Politics of American Television Production by Julia Himberg (2017)

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Television conveys powerful messages about sexual identities, and popular shows such as Will & Grace, Ellen, Glee, Modern Family, and The Fosters are often credited with building support for gay rights, including marriage equality. At the same time, however, many dismiss TV’s portrayal of LGBT characters and issues as “gay for pay”—that is, apolitical and exploitative programming created simply for profit. In The New Gay for Pay, Julia Himberg moves beyond both of these positions to investigate the complex and multifaceted ways that television production participates in constructing sexuality, sexual identities and communities, and sexual politics. Himberg examines the production stories behind explicitly LGBT narratives and characters, studying how industry workers themselves negotiate processes of TV development, production, marketing, and distribution. She interviews workers whose views are rarely heard, including market researchers, public relations experts, media advocacy workers, political campaigners designing strategies for TV messaging, and corporate social responsibility department officers, as well as network executives and producers. Thoroughly analyzing their comments in the light of four key issues—visibility, advocacy, diversity, and equality—Himberg reveals how the practices and belief systems of industry workers generate the conceptions of LGBT sexuality and political change that are portrayed on television. This original approach complicates and broadens our notions about who makes media; how those practitioners operate within media conglomerates; and, perhaps most important, how they contribute to commonsense ideas about sexuality.

5

Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema by Daniel Humphrey (2013)

One of the twentieth century’s most important filmmakers—indeed one of its most important and influential artists—Ingmar Bergman and his films have been examined from almost every possible perspective, including their remarkable portrayals of women and their searing dramatizations of gender dynamics. Curiously however, especially considering the Swedish filmmaker’s numerous and intriguing comments on the subject, no study has focused on the undeniably queer characteristics present throughout this nominally straight auteur’s body of work; indeed, they have barely been noted. Queer Bergman makes a bold and convincing argument that Ingmar Bergman’s work can best be thought of as profoundly queer in nature. Using persuasive historical evidence, including Bergman’s own on-the-record (though stubbornly ignored) remarks alluding to his own homosexual identifications, as well as the discourse of queer theory, Daniel Humphrey brings into focus the director’s radical denunciation of heteronormative values, his savage and darkly humorous deconstructions of gender roles, and his work’s trenchant, if also deeply conflicted, attacks on homophobically constructed forms of patriarchic authority. Adding an important chapter to the current discourse on GLBT/queer historiography, Humphrey also explores the unaddressed historical connections between post–World War II American queer culture and a concurrently vibrant European art cinema, proving that particular interrelationship to be as profound as the better documented associations between gay men and Hollywood musicals, queer spectators and the horror film, lesbians and gothic fiction, and others.

Here are other titles that might also be of interest:

• New Maricon Cinema: Outing Latin American Film (2016) by Vinodh Venkatesh
• Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2003) by David William Foster
• Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin (2013) by David Greven
• What Makes a Man?: Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin (2015) by Rashid Al-Daif and Joachim Helfer, translated by Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt
• Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea (2004) by Steven Dillon
• Wicked Cinema: Sex and Religion on Screen (2014) by Daniel Cutrara
• Argentine, Mexican, and Guatemalan Photography: Feminist, Queer, and Post-Masculinist Perspectives (2014) by David William Foster

David Juarez in his element, surrounded by books.

Marketing and Copyediting Fellow David Juarez has accepted a position as editorial assistant at the University of Notre Dame Press in South Bend, Indiana. David has been a key contributor to the University of Texas Press copyediting and marketing departments during his fellowship. We have appreciated his insightful contributions, his delightful sense of humor, and his willingness to discuss all things Marvel Universe with Senior Editor Jim Burr. Congratulations and let's wish David continued success in scholarly publishing!

www.utexaspress.com

LGBT Pride Reading List

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month! We've got a diverse round up of titles spanning the LGBT experience from the colonial Andes to prehistoric Greece, from revolutionary Mexico to modern Lebanon, and from queer representations in film to defining the Chicana lesbian identity in literature. So let's celebrate all the recent victories that have affirmed freedom and fairness, and continue the fight for acceptance that remains.

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Browse more in queer studies on our website!

Queer Beirut
By Sofian Merabet

Going beyond notions of identity that have been defined exclusively on the basis of sectarian and religious affiliation, this book explores the performative practices of gendering by young Lebanese gays as they formulate their sense of what it means to “exist.”

What Makes a Man?
Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin

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Rashid al-Daif and Joachim Helfer
Translated by Ken Seigneurie and Gary Schmidt

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This “novelized biography” by Lebanese novelist Rashid al-Daif and pointed riposte by German novelist Joachim Helfer demonstrate how attitudes toward sex and masculinity across cultural contexts are intertwined with the work of fiction, thereby highlighting the importance of fantasy in understanding the Other.

Pillar of Salt
An Autobiography, with 19 Erotic Sonnets
By Salvador Novo, Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Written with exquisite sensitivity and wit, this memoir by one of Mexico’s foremost men of letters describes coming of age during the violence of the Mexican Revolution and “living dangerously” as an openly homosexual man in a brutally machista society.

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Wicked Cinema
Sex and Religion on Screen
By Daniel Cutrara

With close readings of films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Closed Doors, this book investigates cinematic representations of transgressive sexuality within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to argue that religious believers have become the new “Other”.

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Queer Bergman
Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema
By Daniel Humphrey

Foregrounding a fundamental aspect of the Swedish auteur’s work that has been routinely ignored, as well as the vibrant connection between postwar American queer culture and European art cinema, this book offers a pioneering reading of Bergman’s films as profoundly queer work.

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Psycho-Sexual
Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin
By David Greven


Examining the intertextual reverberations between canonical Hitchcock films and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, this revisionist reading challenges the received opinion of misogyny, racism, and homophobia presented in male desire featured in works by Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin.


Filming Difference
Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers on Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film
Edited by Daniel Bernardi

Reflecting diverse voices in film and television, more than a dozen industry professionals explore how their works represent complex identities.

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The Lieutenant Nun
Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso
By Sherry Velasco

Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650) was a Basque noblewoman who, just before taking final vows to become a nun, escaped from the convent at San Sebastián, dressed as a man, and, in her own words, "went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled, and roamed about."

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Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga?
A B-Novel
By Caio Fernando Abreu

Translated from the Portuguese with a Glossary and Afterword by Adria Frizzi

Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? is a descent into the underworld of contemporary megalopolises where, like the inside of a huge TV, life intermingles with bits of music, film clips, and soap opera characters in a crazy and macabre dance, moving toward a possible catharsis.

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Bridging
How Gloria Anzaldúa's Life and Work Transformed Our Own
Edited by AnaLouise Keating and Gloria González-López

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Thirty-two wide-ranging voices pay tribute to the late Gloria Anzaldúa, the beloved poet and fiction writer who redefined lesbian and Chicana/o identities for thousands of readers.

Reading Chican@ Like a Queer
The De-Mastery of Desire
By Sandra K. Soto

The first full-length study to treat racialized sexuality as a necessary category of analysis for understanding any aspect of Mexican American culture.

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Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema
By David William Foster

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Highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality.

Brown on Brown
Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity
By Frederick Luis Aldama

An investigation of the ways in which race and sexuality intersect and function in Chicano/a literature and film.

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Men as Women, Women as Men
Changing Gender in Native American Cultures
By Sabine Lang

Translated by John L. Vantine

As contemporary Native and non-Native Americans explore various forms of "gender bending" and gay and lesbian identities, interest has grown in "berdaches," the womanly men and manly women who existed in many Native American tribal cultures.

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Decolonizing the Sodomite
Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture
By Michael J. Horswell

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

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Among Women
From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World
Edited by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Lisa Auanger

This book explores a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women's homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt.

www.utexaspress.com