Queer Pollen

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2012.

"Gerstner is a master theorist who renders a compelling and cutting-edge narrative about the complexity of black homosexual desire. The first book of its kind to specifically address the formation of black queer subjectivity in relation to white seduction, Queer Pollen offers a major contribution to African American studies, gender studies, film studies, literary studies, and art history."--E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South

"[Gerstner] is extremely well informed on the landmark work in critical theory...and continues to establish his reputation as an influential daredevil theorist who probes the complexity of identity. Highly recommended."--Choice

 

"Queer Pollen examines the work of three queer black creators: Harlem Renaissance aesthete Richard Bruce Nugent, novelist James Baldwin and filmmaker Marlon Riggs. . . . Like all twentieth and even twenty-first century creators, all three have a relationship to film which emerges in their work in multimedia and in the written word. . . . Gerstner asks us to de-naturalise the cinematic frame of reference and understand how it can be used as a strategy to examine how power relations are manifested as looks and inscribed on the body through desire and shame. Instead of poisoned fruit, these three authors offer insight into the ways in which desire draws its own authenticity by consuming and re-appropriating a collage of different cultural forms."--Dr. Scott Beattie, Somatechnics

"A true companion piece to Baldwin's [Go Tell It on the Mountain]. Provides good intellectual theory."--Film International