Sex, gender, and sexuality, terms we use every day and assume have always structured human life, in fact emerge in particular times and places and with often differing meanings. The works gathered here explore the emergence of these categories in feminist, queer, and trans theory, with attention to the role other differences—racial, ethnic, and differences in physical ability— play in contemporary human life.

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Sigmund Freud (Basic Books, 1962)
One of the most important texts by the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud’s much revised Three Essays suggests that what we think of as “perverse” or “abnormal” might not be so foreign to us after all.

The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovancy-Chevallier; Vintage Books, 2010)
In conversation with the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, Beauvoir’s The Second Sex interrogates the treatment of women across history, as well as the psychic and experiential structures that define women’s existence. Beauvoir famously revises the question “What is a woman?” suggesting that one is not born, but instead becomes, a woman.

The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction
Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley; Vintage Books, 1990)
In this book, whose influence over contemporary queer and gender theory cannot be overstated, Foucault proposes a novel analytic of power and demonstrates the ways in which the proliferation of discourse around sexuality constitutes both the normal and the abnormal. He suggests that sexual liberation itself is the result, rather than the refusal, of these discursive regimes.

Speculum of the Other Woman
Luce Irigaray (trans. Gillian G. Gill; Cornell University Press, 1985)
In a wide-ranging engagement with the history of Western philosophy and Freud’s theory of sexual difference, Irigaray repeatedly demonstrates “the blind spots” in the dream of sexual symmetry.

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Judith Butler (Routledge, 1990)
Perhaps the most important living gender theorist, Butler offers a critique of feminism for its reliance on an identifiable, stable subject called “woman,” which she redescribes as an inherently unstable category. Butler offers, instead, a theory of gender as performative—something that is actively (and often unknowingly) constituted in our day-to-day lives.

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture
Hortense J. Spillers (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
Included in this collection of the major essays on race by Spillers, a leading Black feminist intellectual and incisive literary critic and essayist, is the influential essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” a crucial investigation of the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on contemporary understandings of Black gender and sex.

Ornamentalism
Anne Anlin Cheng (Oxford University Press, 2019)
A scholar of Asian American literature and film, Cheng proposes a feminism of and for “yellow women,” what she calls “ornamentalism.” Influenced by Black feminist thought, Cheng asks what it means to be read not as flesh, but as ornament, surface, and thing. In the process she questions the relationship between animacy and inanimacy at the heart of modern Western European conceptions of subjectivity.

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
Paul B. Preciado (trans. Bruce Benderson; The Feminist Press, 2013)
A mix of autotheoretical reflection on Preciado’s personal experience taking testosterone and his philosophical reflection on the nature of sex, gender, and sexuality in what Preciado calls “the pharmacopornographic era,” this vertiginous text from the mind of an incisive trans theorist and art curator continues the work of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
C. Riley Snorton (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
A vital intervention into our current understanding of trans life, in which “Black” and “trans” are often cast as mutually exclusive, Snorton asks what it would mean to see these terms as mutually dependent and, in the process, retells trans history.

The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability
Jasbir K. Puar (Duke University Press, 2017)
A follow-up to Puar’s transformative first book, Terrorist Assemblages, The Right to Maim examines police and state violence against Palestine and Black Americans. Puar argues that political power is no longer about who has the power to cause death or give life, but rather, is about the right to maim: to render a population disabled or debilitated through state-sanctioned violence.