Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving

by Matt Bernstein Sycamore

Overview

Queer survivors piece together the clues to discover their own lives!

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation. Twenty-six stories illuminate the reality of growing up in fear, struggling to rebuild lives damaged by sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. The book explores how abuse turns queer survivors—male, female, and transgendered—into healers, heartbreakers, and homicidal maniacs, presenting brilliant stories that sear and soar.

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving addresses all forms of abuse head-on, representing a cross-section of queer survivors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, education, origin, sexuality, and gender. Contributors use their own life experiences to create a book that takes back control from well-meaning "outsiders," as they recount the daily struggle to overcome the damage done to their minds, bodies, and spirits in a world that denies their gender, sexual, and social identities.

From the editor: "Dangerous Families consists entirely of writing by survivors of childhood abuse. That's right—no therapists analyzing our plight, no talk-show hosts exploiting us—just survivors, exploring our complicated, frightening, and fulfilling lives. These stories dispense with the usual technique of carefully massaging the reader's fragile worldview before plunging this unsuspecting innocent into a world of horror. They go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off-guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back."

Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving is an anthology of 26 true stories of growing up queer in families that magnify the horrors of the outside world instead of offering protection. The book is an essential read for therapists, caseworkers, cultural studies specialists, and anyone struggling to survive childhood abuse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560234227
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/26/2004
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.81(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Dangerous Families: An Introduction
• LANGUAGE
• gonna get my girl body back: this is a work in progress
• Johnny
• Not with the Buckle End of the Belt
• Dog Dreams
• Body of Knowledge
• Dyslexic Process
• population 1200
• the doctor’s daughter
• Pelt
• MONSTERS
• Hate May Not Be a Family Value, but Dysfunction? That’s a Different Story
• Descent into Hell
• Kid Pirate in Suburbia
• Some Notes on Art and Architecture
• This Blood (Beaten Out of Me)
• Contaminated
• Drinking
• Did I Mention That
• My Sister’s Shadow
• Flooding
• ESCAPE
• Escape: A Myth
• Weapons
• S.O.S.
• Walls
• Confessions of a Ghetto Princess
• Those Who Can’t Do, Write, or Daddy’s Little Pornographer
• Absence
• Someday
• Bad Girl
• The Prime of My Life
• About the Editor
• Contributors

What People are Saying About This

Emanuel Xavier

IMPORTANT. . . . Full of complex and daring explorations into abuse. The words explode off the page with righteous anger, gentle sadness, and brutal honesty. Each selection is vibrant and tough with a delicacy of compassion.
—Author of Christlike and Americano

Laura Davis

A GRITTY, PROVOCATIVE ANTHOLOGY that breaks all the rules about political correctness, gender, and sex. With this diverse and graphic collection of stories, the editor has brought us into the next generation of incest literature.
—Co-author of The Courage to Heal; Author of I Thought We'd Never Speak Again