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The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers
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92/99
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82/99
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91/99
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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
"What makes Gevisser an especially compelling narrator and guide to this subject is his awareness of his privilege as a White, upper-middle-class South African from a country with one of the most progressive post-apartheid constitutions in terms of human rights...His self-disclosure liberates him from the sometimes insular and patronizing Western gaze on LGBT communities in postcolonial societies, understanding how American or European cultural power may have galvanized LGBT movements but can also serve to destabilize and in many cases endanger local struggles for sexual and gender diversity."
"This structure reinforces the social justice belief that the personal is political and vice versa."
"Gevisser's opus will knock its Western readers out of any parochial sense of complacency about LGBT rights and challenge them to think both globally and strategically about how best to support their brothers and sisters on the other side of the pink line."
"Not fully compelling but a solidly researched, important addition to queer studies."
"This impressive work is a must-read for anyone invested in social justice and LGBTQ rights."
"This is a valuable book not only for the quality of Gevisser's analysis and the scope of his research, but because he spends a good deal of time with the people on whose lives he focuses."
"this work moves the observation of the evolution of LGBT life and culture to the global scale and is a must-read for all interested in gender studies."
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