Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies

Authors Meem, Gibson, and Alexander clearly situate debates and readings within clear contexts (History, Literature and the Arts, Media and Politics), providing students with a coherent framework and comprehensive introduction to LGBT studies. While this emerging field is complex, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary (and therefore often inaccessible to students), Finding Out - through its instructional apparatus, primary texts, and organization - provides the ideal introduction for today′s students.

Michelle A. Gibson is Professor Emerita of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her scholarship focuses on Sexuality Studies and pedagogy. Her most recent writing applies queer and postmodern identity theories to pedagogical practice and popular culture. With Jonathan Alexander she edited QP: Queer Poetry, an online poetry journal, and she and Alexander also edited a strain of JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition titled “Queer Composition(s).” With Deborah Meem she coedited Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go (2002) and Lesbian Academic Couples (2005).

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is author, co-author, or editor of twenty-one books, including several works of queer creative nonfiction, including Stroke Book: The Diary of a Blind Spot (Fordham, 2021) and the “Creep” Trilogy, consisting of Creep: A Life, a Theory, an Apology (punctum, 2017), Bullied: The Story of an Abuse (punctum, 2021), and Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir (Acre Books, 2022).  He is also published extensively in LGBT and sexuality studies, including the books: The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetorics (co-edited with Jacqueline Rhodes, 2021), Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Identities, Publics (co-edited with Jacqueline Rhodes, Routledge, 2015); Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self (co-authored with Jacqueline Rhodes, Computers and Composition Digital Press, 2015); Bisexuality and Queer Theory: Intersections, Connections and Challenges (co-edited with Serena Anderlini D’Onofrio, Routledge, 2012); Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice (Utah State, 2008); and Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (co-edited with Karen Yescavage, Routledge, 2004).

Deborah T. Meem is Professor Emerita of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her academic specialties are Victorian literature, LGBTQ Studies, and the 19th-century woman’s novel. She earned a PhD from Stony Brook University in 1985. Her work has appeared in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Feminist Teacher, Studies in Popular Culture, and elsewhere. She has edited four works by Victorian novelist and journalist Eliza Lynn Linton: The Rebel of the Family (Broadview, 2002), Realities (Valancourt, 2010), The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (Victorian Secrets, 2011), and Sowing the Wind (Victorian Secrets, 2015). With Michelle Gibson she coedited Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go (2002) and Lesbian Academic Couples (2005), both published by Routledge Press. With Jonathan Alexander she wrote “Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, and the Queer Closet” (CLCWeb, 2003)