Towards a Cultural Geography of Queer Collective Biography

LGBTQ+ life stories have been historically silenced, marginalised, and hidden, and queer books are socially, culturally, and politically significant. This research projects pivots on queer collective biographies, books containing illustrated collections of short biographies of LGBTQ+ people, telling the stories of queer lives from across the world, past and present, famous and the everyday. This research is an interdisciplinary project which brings together human geography, literary studies, and sexuality studies to uncover a cultural geography of queer books about queer lives, exploring the complexities of writing queer lives, asking whose stories are told and how queer lives are written. Calling for literary geographies to pay attention to the genre of biography, this project uses a literary geographies framework, which sees the book as more than just an object, but a network of connections between different people, spaces, and cultural and historical contexts. It attends to the power of telling 'other' stories and uncovers the social, cultural, and political possibilities of queer books about LGBTQ+ lives for representation and education. Using textual and visual analysis of eight queer collective biographies, and semi-structured interviews with creators, circulators, and readers, this research explores four key research questions:
1. Who is involved in the creation and circulation of queer books for example authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, bookshops, and librarians?
2. How have queer books been used as tools of erasure and resistance?
3. How do we write about LGBTQ+ people in non-fiction books, what language is used, and who is included or excluded?
4. What messages do queer books send to audiences about LGBTQ+ people and how can we use biographies of LGBTQ+ people for representation and education?