Queering Desire: Lesbians, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge Research in Gender and Society)

Queering Desire explores, with unprecedented interdisciplinary scope, contemporary configurations of lesbian, bi, queer women’s, and non-binary people’s experiences of identity and desire. Taking an intersectional feminist and trans-inclusive approach, and incorporating new and established identities such as non-binary, masculine of centre (MOC), butch, and femme, this collection examines how the changing landscape for gender and sexual identities impacts on queer culture in productive and transformative ways.

Within queer studies, explorations of desire, longing, and eroticism have often neglected AFAB, transfeminine, and non-binary people’s experiences. Through 25 newly commissioned chapters, a diverse range of authors, from early career researchers to established scholars, stage conversations at the cutting edge of sexuality studies. Queering Desire advances our understanding of contemporary lesbian and queer desire from an inclusive perspective that is supportive of trans and non-binary identities.

This innovative interdisciplinary collection is an excellent resource for scholars, undergraduate, and postgraduate students interested in gender, sexuality, and identity across a range of fields, such as queer studies, feminist theory, anthropology, media studies, sociology, psychology, history, and social theory. In foregrounding female and non-binary experiences, this book constitutes a timely intervention.

Róisín Ryan-Flood is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC) at the University of Essex, UK. Her research interests encompass gender, sexuality, kinship, digital intimacies, and feminist epistemology. Her books include Lesbian Motherhood: Gender, Sexuality and Citizenship (2009), Difficult Conversations: A Feminist Dialogue (2023) and Consent: Gender, Power and Subjectivity (2023). She is co-editor of the journal Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society.

Amy Tooth Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Oral History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Her research interests include butch/femme identities and culture, and queer oral history theory and method. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption and is a Trustee of the Oral History Society.