Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving, 1st Edition

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 survivorsmale, female, and transgenderedinto 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 rightno therapists analyzing our plight, no talk-show hosts exploiting usjust 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.Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving 1st Edition is written by Matt Bernstein Sycamore and published by Routledge. ISBNs for Dangerous Families are 9781136572432, 1136572430 and the print ISBNs are 9781560234210, 1560234210. Additional ISBNs include 9781560234227, 9780203057247, 9781283840156, 9781136572500, 9781136572364.