Faculty Authors 2025

"I'm a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie world," the ubiquitous refrain that dominated the airwaves in summer 1997. Aqua's single from their debut album Aquarium spread like wildfire, topping charts across the globe. With their erotically charged lyrics and dance beats, Aqua moved beyond their Danish Eurodance beginnings and achieved global renown in the late 1990s. In the US, however, they are an infamous "one hit wonder," remembered for their highly publicized lawsuit with Mattel. Although Aqua's fame waned at the turn of the millennium, the 25th anniversary of their debut precipitated a resurgence in their popularity.

This book unwraps a bubblegum dance classic to offer the first in-depth examination of what lies beneath Aqua's sticky-sweet veneer. It traces the history of Aquarium alongside interpretations of the album's singles informed by queer theory and covers by contemporary musicians commissioned for the book. Peeling back the layers of Aquarium reveals a confection rife with unexpected contradictions and possibilities; videos permeated by seemingly innocuous articulates of heteronormativity are held in tension with suggestions of queerness, fetishism, and adolescent lust when heard through the ironic lens of camp.

A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.

In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert's invaginated Jesus and Milton's gestational Adam to the ungendered "glorious body" of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.

In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology's value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.

Contributors to this special issue investigate how spaces and practices of "home" structure and challenge norms of intimate and collective belonging as they play out in everyday life. Asking what it means to queer or reinvent the domestic by examining the diverse functionings of home for LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized groups in both the past and the present, the authors describe historical and contemporary shifts in the meanings of home as an opportunity to rethink domestic spaces, ideologies, and practices in queer politics and culture.

Contributors. Rasel Ahmed, Miguel Avalos, Darius Bost, Zhen Cheng, Ariel Dela Cruz, René Esparza, Jules Gill-Peterson, Gayatri Gopinath, Lauren Jae Gutterman, Joseph Henry, Efadul Huq, Holly Jackson, Jina B. Kim, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Sara Matthiesen, Nivati Misra-Shenoy, Richard Mora, Shoniqua Roach, Cody St. Clair, Maggie Schreiner, Gee Imaan Semmalar, Virginia Thomas, Stephen Vider, Hentyle Yapp