Queer Objects

Pursuing the discursive or material effects of relational queerness, this book reflects on how objects can illuminate, affect, and animate queer modes of being.

In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “multiply transitive . . . relational and strange,” rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts.

Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Guy Davidson is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Wollongong, Australia. His most recent book is Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America (2019).

Monique Rooney teaches literature, film and television in the English Program at the Australian National University. She is the author of Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (2015). She is the editor of Australian Humanities Review.