Queer: A Graphic History (Graphic Guides)

I love this book so much!!! It is just so beautifully written and it packs in such a vast and important group of knowledge and history and experiences. As a queer mom of a queer kid and a former teacher and lifelong student whose memory of all the awesome stuff I learned in grad school has basically gone out the window, this book helped reignite areas of my brain in a fun and relatively easy and accessible manner! You should totally get it, and it would make an awesome gift for all of the queers in your life or anybody who is interested in queer theory and queer life! Buy multiple copies! Do it!!!

This is a great book for people looking to step their toes into queer studies! It is beautifully illustrated, very easy to read, and teaches a lot. Worth it!

I love this book. I wish this book was around three years ago when I was first trying to understand queer theory and queer history. MJ Barker takes an intimidating subject and makes it in to an enjoyable experience. The illustrations are excellent and they even acknowledge the restriction of lacking people of color getting their acknowledgement. If you want to learn more, or need a stepping stone in to the queer culture, buy this book. My preference is to read it in print but on a screen I think it would likely be just as nice.

This is a good overview of the History of Queer Theory, and does a good job breaking down the strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures of Queer Theory. However, sometimes it goes over concepts without properly explaining them and leaving them vague and confusing. Also, I was expecting this to be in full graphic novel format, but the pictures were usually mere supplements to the text, not the main form of communication. In fact, sometimes the drawings were unhelpful and unnecessary. Still, overall a good, well-researched introduction to a complex body of work. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in Queer Theory who doesn’t know where to start their research.

The stated aim of this book is to bring out some of the main ideas of queer theory. I’ll hazard a guess that the audience is undergraduate students taking a first or second course in gender and sexuality studies. Bright high school students will benefit, too, and this book belongs in high school libraries. I doubt the book is intended for more advanced scholars. My main take-aways were that queer theory abhors binaries, queer theory doesn’t hold much with essences, and queer theory is rather ill-defined and kind of a mash-up, probably containing the seeds of its own self-destruction. The idea that gender roles are socially constructed and performed, as indeed is human activity in general, is obvious enough these days. Feminism has a lot to say about this too, of course, and performance varies across cultures/races/social class & etc. To make progress in the study of these things, then, requires a difficult decision—what to leave out (temporarily) in order to have something simple enough to understand, and what to leave in. If you put ‘everything’ in right at the start then you have no general theory. The result is that queer theory is in constant tension with itself. I think though, that perhaps too much is made of the idea of fluidity. Certainly genders and sexual orientations are fluid to some extent, but for any particular individual they are also constrained. More needs to be made of the reality of these constraints. I found in this book a lack of distinction between sexual orientation and performance of sexual orientation. The constraints for sexual orientation may be more loose than those of sex, but they are still real. Performance of sexual orientation is another thing entirely. The quote of Harry Hay is apt to be hugely misunderstand. In this book it is presented without a suitable context. In spite of these criticisms, which may be more of queer theory than the book, the book succeeds in its aim. Spryly recommended.

Wish I'd had this book last semester, when I was slogging through dense literary theory and straining to understand it. Besides providing an excellent overview of queer theory, this book breaks down a lot of the usual meaningless grade school buzzwords into terms that actually make sense and apply to reality in some way. If you're in grad school or thinking of enrolling, this book is a great tool for helping you master the specific dialect of academic jargon that English professors love.

Read with our college student for their Queer Studies class. Great information, entertaining layout.

Great book.