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OSI Fall 2025 Taste of St. Louis Events

Student Success header image with title text and gold stars. Subtext: Recommended reading for help with study strategies, academic writing, mental health, and more.


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This guide offers books and other resources which reflect issues relevant and of interest to the queer community and businesses in St. Louis. Click each title for a link to digital materials or location information for print books.

Queer Economics

UMLS Ebook
Bringing together into one volume many of the salient early articles in the field as well as important recent contributions, this reader is an examination of and response to the effects of heteronormativity on both economic outcomes and economics as a discipline. The first book to consolidate what has been published, filling a gap in the currently available literature and edited by an expert in the field, it contains a brief introductory essay; setting-out the reasons for and aims of the project, and a short section introduction; defining the topic at hand and introducing each of the key readings. This book is necessary reading for students in research areas including political economy, urban studies, economics, economic history and demographic economics.

Resilience

UMSL Ebook
Academia can be overwhelmingly foreign and hostile to those who have poor or working-class backgrounds. For people who are from the working class and also queer, the obstacles to earning a graduate degree may prove insurmountable. Frequently discouraged from attending college in the first place, these students often struggle to pay for their education while they simultaneously battle prejudice and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and blue-collar backgrounds. Resilience offers inspiring personal stories of those who made it: thirteen professors and administrators provide their moving accounts of struggle, marginalization, and triumph in the accomplishments that their parents, guidance counselors, and sometimes even they themselves would have thought out of reach.

Cover Text: After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory and Sexuality in the 21st Century, Edited by Tyler Bradway, E.L. McCallum.

After Queer Studies

Print Book
After Queer Studies maps the literary influences that facilitated queer theory's academic emergence and charts the trajectories that continue to shape its continued evolution as a critical practice. It explores the interdisciplinary origins of queer studies and argues for the prominent role that literary studies has played in establishing the concepts, methods, and questions of contemporary queer theory. It shows how queer studies has had an impact on many trending concerns in literary studies, such as the affective turn, the question of the subject, and the significance of social categories like race, class, and sexual differences. Bridging between queer studies' legacies and its horizons, this collection initiates new discussion on the irreducible changes that queer studies has introduced in literary interpretation and cultural practices.

Queer Times, Queer Becomings

Print Book & UMSL Ebook
Queer theory essays on time and becoming in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, and performance. If queer theorists have agreed on anything, it is that for queer thought to have any specificity at all, it must be characterized by becoming, the constant breaking of habits. Queer Times, Queer Becomings explores queer articulations of time and becoming in literature, philosophy, film, and performance. Whether in the contexts of psychoanalysis, the nineteenth-century discourses of evolution and racial sciences, or the daily rhythms of contemporary, familially oriented communities, queerness has always been marked by a peculiar untimeliness, by a lack of proper orientation in terms of time as much as social norms. Yet it is the skewed relation to the temporal norm that also gives queerness its singular hope.

Queer Career

UMSL Ebook
A history of the LGBT workforce in America. Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as "straight spaces" in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. This book rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, the author positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America.

Cover Text: The Scribner American Civilization Series: encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history in america. Actors to Gyms, Marc Stein, editor in chief.

Encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history in America

Print Book
Review: "Authored by community-based researchers and academics, the articles in this set treat various aspects of LGBT history, culture, politics, and society in America. Some 550 entries cover workplace movements, Queer Nation, fashion and clothing, coming out and outing, family issues, health care and clinics, and federal law and policy. Also included are more than 200 biographies, 230 photographs, a 400-year chronology of LGBT history, and an appendix of repositories in the United States and Canada."--"Reference that rocks," American Libraries, May 2005.

Queering elementary education : advancing the dialogue about sexualities and schooling

Print Book
Queering Elementary Education is not about teaching kids to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight. These essays advocate the creation of classrooms that challenge categorical thinking, promote interpersonal intelligence, and foster critical consciousness. Classrooms where where parents and educators care enough about their children to trust the human capacity for understanding and their educative abilities to foster insight into the human condition.

Queer: a Graphic History

UMSL Ebook
Activist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel.

From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture and our understanding of biology, psychology and sexology; and how these views have been disputed and challenged.

A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality & Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer?

Print Book
A Radical Rethinking of Sexuality and Schooling: Status Quo or Status Queer? offers a critique of unexamined assumptions and liberal notions about sexuality and education in the United States. Tackling issues ranging from anti-gay harassment in school to children's literature on gay themes, gender performances of teachers to HIV education, and graduate school programs in education to gay men's sexual cultures, Eric Rofes presents a compelling argument for the creation of a second generation of activism focused on queers, schools, and education.

Completely Queer

Print Book
Completely Queer is a concise and balanced guide to the history, people, places, and ideas important to lesbian and gay communities worldwide. It explores in depth more facets of today's gay and lesbian subcultures than any other one-volume reference work. Recognizing that the gay communities are far from static or homogenous in their politics, lifestyles, activities, and beliefs, authors Steve Hogan and Lee Hudson have created in this informative book an accessible volume. It features quotes, little-known facts, reading lists, and useful tables: one lists famous pseudonyms; another, gay detective novels.

Cover Image Text: Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory / Michael Warner, editor.

Fear of a Queer Planet

Print Book
Innovative intellectual energies have made queer theory an explosive field of study. In "Fear of a Queer Planet", Michael Warner draws on emerging new queer politics, and shows how queer activists have come to challenge basic assumptions about the social and political world. Existing traditions of theory - Marxism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology, legal theory, nationalism, and antinationalism - have too often presupposed a heterosexual society, as the essays in this volume demonstrate. "Fear of a Queer Planet" suggests a new agenda for social theory.

Cover Text: Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation

Gay Liberation to Campus Assimilation

UMSL Ebook
Drawing upon interviews, extensive reviews of campus newspapers and yearbooks, and archival research across the Midwest, Patrick Dilley demonstrates how the early gay campus groups created and provided educational and support services on campus-efforts that later became incorporated into campus services across the nation. Further, the book shows the transformation of gay identity into a minority identity on campus, including the effect of alliances with campus racial minorities.

A Queer History of the United States

Print Book
A Queer History of the United States looks at how American culture has shaped the LGBT, or queer, experience, while arguing that LGBT people not only shaped but were pivotal in creating our country. Using numerous primary documents and literature, as well as social histories, Bronski's book takes the reader through the centuries--from Columbus' arrival and the brutal treatment the Native peoples received, through the American Revolution's radical challenging of sex and gender roles--to the violent, and liberating, 19th century--and the transformative social justice movements of the 20th.

Queer Pop

UMSL Ebook
Popular culture encompasses and draws on a rich history of works by musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and performers who question the contours of traditional sexual and gender identities, including but not limited to members of LGBTQIA* communities. When encountered on the stage or screen, for instance, in the guise of drag performances, forms of sexual ambiguity often spark fascination. Yet in everyday life in various socio-cultural contexts, sexual and bodily difference in all its forms is still met with hostility, rendering vulnerable those human beings that deviate from the white, male, straight, able-bodied norm. Queer artists today respond to social stigma in multiple creative ways, for example, by transforming negative affect, fostering a politics of care, and rewriting history.

Cover Text: Unpacking Queer Politics Sheila Jeffreys.

Unpacking Queer Politics

Print Book
"Unpacking Queer Politics argues that the strong lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s, which was able to articulate a philosophy and practice that distinguished lesbian politics from gay male politics, was submerged in the 1990s beneath a gay male agenda called queer politics." "The book concludes by arguing that precisely the commitment to equality in relationships and sex that has been so important to lesbian feminists, and so excoriated in much of queer theory, should form the basis of a social transformation. In this way lesbians should be seen as the vanguard of social change."--Jacket.

About Face

Print Book
A survey of 350 artworks by a global and diverse array of LGBTQ+ artists - many underrecognized and overlooked - from the last 50 years Though the Stonewall Riots might now be shorthand for the start of the gay rights movement, so much of art and culture has been 'queer' since the beginning of time. In About Face, art historian and curator Jonathan D. Katz explores this concept head-on, curating a tapestry of works that connect historical threads and reveal how gender and sexual identity have been interwoven by artists contemporaneous to and since Stonewall.