The Pink Line

✍ Scribed by Mark Gevisser

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 534
• Edition: First Edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Prologue: A Debt to Love
  1. The World’s Pink Lines
  2. Aunty’s Story: Chimbalanga Village—Blantyre—Cape Town
  3. A New Global Culture Wars?
  4. Michael’s Story: Mbarara—Kampala—Nairobi—Vancouver
  5. The Pink Line Through Time and Space
  6. Amira and Maha’s Story: Cairo—Istanbul—Amsterdam
  7. Pink Folk-Devils
  8. Pasha’s Story: Lyubertsy—Moscow
  9. Gender-Theory Panic
10. Zaira and Martha’s Story: Guadalajara
11. Pink Dollars, Global Gay
12. Fadi and Nadav’s Story: I’Billin—Tel Aviv—Jaffa (and Ramallah)
13. The Transgender Culture Wars
14. The Riot Youth Stories: Ann Arbor and Beyond
15. The New Pink Line: Gender Identity
16. The Kothi Stories: Devanampattinam—Cuddalore—Pondicherry
Epilogue: On It Getting Better
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
ALSO BY MARK GEVISSER
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT