by Mark Gevisser
Picador
06/08/2021, paperback
SKU: 9781250798596
A groundbreaking look at how the issues of sexuality and gender identity divide and unite the world today
More than seven years in the making, Mark Gevisser's The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers is an exploration of how the conversation around sexual orientation and gender identity has come to divide -- and describe -- the world in an entirely new way over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. No social movement has brought change so quickly and with such dramatically mixed results. While same-sex marriage and gender transition are celebrated in some parts of the world, laws are being strengthened to criminalize homosexuality and gender nonconformity in others. As new globalized queer identities are adopted by people across the world -- thanks to the digital revolution -- fresh culture wars have emerged. A new Pink Line, Gevisser argues, has been drawn across the globe, and he takes readers to its frontiers.
Between sensitive and sometimes startling profiles of the queer folk he's encountered along the Pink Line, Gevisser offers sharp analytical chapters exploring identity politics, religion, gender ideology, capitalism, human rights, moral panics, geopolitics, and what he calls "the new transgender culture wars." His subjects include a Ugandan refugee in flight to Canada, a trans woman fighting for custody of her child in Moscow, a lesbian couple campaigning for marriage equality in Mexico, genderqueer high schoolers coming of age in Michigan, a gay Israeli-Palestinian couple searching for common ground, and a community of kothis -- "women's hearts in men's bodies" -- who run a temple in an Indian fishing village. What results is a moving and multifaceted picture of the world today, and the queer people defining it.
Eye-opening, heartfelt, expertly researched, and compellingly narrated, The Pink Line is a monumental -- and urgent -- journey of unprecedented scope into twenty-first-century identity, seen through the border posts along the world's new LGBTQ+ frontiers.
Reviews:
"The Pink Line traces a planet-spanning fissure that runs through the most intimate dimensions of life, documenting the sometimes literally war-torn rift zones where so-called 'traditional values' are being mobilized by states to combat trans, queer and feminist social movements. A smart and sobering book for our times." -- Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution
"Mark Gevisser's sensitive yet firmly broad book coheres the concept of a 'pink line': the difference between the wish of queer individuals for autonomy, versus the increased manipulations of gay and trans identities to shore up power systems. His book is both enlightening and disturbing in a world where the wish to be understood can become a commodity of domination." -- Sarah Schulman, author of Conflict is Not Abuse, The Gentrification of the Mind, and Let the Record Show
"No one understands queerness from an armchair -- and few have captured that truth better than Mark Gevisser. The Pink Line is a vital exploration of queerness around the globe, searching and intimate but also expansive in its scope. Like all the best writing about LGBTQ lives, this book clearly changed its author. It would be impossible not to be transformed by the reading of it." -- Samantha Allen, author of Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States
About the Author:
Mark Gevisser is the author of the prizewinning A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa. He is the coeditor of Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Granta, and other publications. He is the writer of the documentary film The Man Who Drove with Mandela, which won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Born in Johannesburg in 1964, he now lives in France.