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The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers
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About This Book
One of the Financial Times and Guardian Books to Look Forward to in 2020 A groundbreaking look at how the issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world todayMore than five years in the making, Mark Gevisser's The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers is a globetrotting exploration of how the human rights frontier around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide—and describe—the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition is celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the world, and he takes readers to its frontiers. In between sharp analytical chapters about culture wars, folklore, gender ideology, and geopolitics, Gevisser provides sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he's encountered on the Pink Line's front lines across nine countries. They include a trans Malawian refugee granted asylum in South Africa and a gay Ugandan refugee stuck in Nairobi; a lesbian couple who started a gay café in Cairo after the Arab Spring, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, and a community of kothis—"women's hearts in men's bodies"—who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. Eye-opening, moving, and crafted with expert research, compelling narrative, and unprecedented scope, The Pink Line is a monumental—and vital—journey through the border posts of the world's new LGBTQ+ frontiers.
Reviews
"This dense, well-researched project alternates between chapters contextualizing political and legal events from a high-level view and closeup chapters that follow, empathically and personally, the lives of LGTBQ+ people living on the wrong side of the Pink Line ..."
"If the whole of the book is ultimately less than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves can be thought-provoking and may provide the starting point for future studies that are less ambitious but more coherent ..."
"Consequently, sometimes the author's capable storytelling skills take a back seat to what often feels like an excessive overflow of reporting."
"What elevates the book is Gevisser's poetic and queer gaze, his searching language about why he has dedicated almost a decade of his life to understanding a generational transformation."
"This impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights."
"The Pink Line makes impressive strides in chronicling distant and recent LGBT history and progress across the world, punctuating overviews of specific countries every other chapter with intimate stories with LGBT people living in those countries The relative comprehensiveness can at times be tedious, but the humanity and tension with which Gevisser portrays his subjects keeps the prose engaging alongside his incredible and seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of LGBT world history ..."
"He sticks around; he finds people whose lives he can follow over a couple of years."
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