Sometimes you hear cis/het people saying resentfully that being trans/queer is some kind of golden ticket to the publishing industry. It's not, and there are specific barriers faced by trans/queer writers on trans/queer topics.
I’ve found the recent trend of people post Tweet threads recapping the major arguments of their books helpful and productive, so I wanted to do one for my new book The Digital Closet (https://t.co/D7HYWDjzhF) from @mitpbookstore. #queerbooks #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #censorship 1/17
— Alex Monea (@alex_monea) April 16, 2022
How's the Digital Closet going? Amazon.com won't let MIT Press categorize the book as "queer theory" because Amazon treats "queer" as a dirty forbidden word.
Recently, one of our marketers discovered that Amazon does not allow "queer theory" to be included as a keyword in enhanced product descriptions (the fancy graphics you sometimes see at the bottom of a book page on Amazon).
— MIT Press 🏳️🌈 (@mitpress) June 29, 2022
On 13 Jan 2023, the Guardian published a letter to the editor that said: "I suspect that many of the others, like me, consider the term to be insulting and derogatory, and certainly not “reclaimed”. I am a gay man of 66 years with many friends and acquaintances, and know no one who would refer to themselves as queer. It would seem a small minority of activists has encouraged the media to use the word without considering its offensiveness to many people." (What to make of the ahistorical claims that only a small number of people with diverse, marginalized genders/sexualities have used the word queer and that they are unaware of its potential offensiveness? It is simply incorrect.)
See also: "Does the Title of 'Queer' Still Promise a Radical Book?," a 42-minute read by Kravitz M. on Medium.
Clackety-clackety-bing! photo by Art Hupy, c. 1965 © Creative Commons. University of Washington Libraries, Digital Collections. Flickr.
No comments:
Post a Comment