Objectionable : The Quasi-Objects of Queer Literacy

"While Mark McBeth has previously researched and explored forgotten homophobic discourses and their rebuttals through the actors of literacy, Objectionable offers a dynamic account of how literacy and its objects work to shape self and society. He reveals the surprising role that police training textbooks, young adult sex education manuals, and syndicated advice columns played in queer life over the last century and continue to play into our own. Anyone who has ever been touched by such objects--that is, all of us--will be moved by what McBeth teaches us about these forces of constriction, composition, and creativity."

—Jessica Yood, Professor of English, Lehman College and The Graduate Center, CUNY

"At a moment when LGBTQ people are facing increasing repression in the U.S., Mark McBeth’s book offers us a vital historical resource that maps the ways queer people have employed textual objects to resist dominant heteronormative regimes that have been designed to silence and erase us."

—J Palmeri, Professor of English, Georgetown University

In a documentarian research study of artifacts from archives across the United States, this book examines how homophobia circulated through literacy-sponsored objects and how Queer literates created countervailing things to upend that heteronormative discourse. Through the theoretical lens of Bruno Latour’s quasi-objects, it analyzes police cadet textbooks, young adult sex education manuals, and syndicated advice columns to show how they had influential agency in Queer lives across the twentieth century.