Queer studies’ inception is canonically marked by two philosophical books: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (1976) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990).¹ Foucault recounts how a “Victorian” view of sexuality rose to predominance in Europe and North America. Its defining formation is confinement: in the home, within a monogamous heterosexual couple, legitimized by the state and religious authorities through marriage. Forms of sexual practice other than heterosexually monogamous domestic reproduction, not to mention the pleasures and cultural understandings that emerge from such alternative engagements, were considered illegitimate or worse. Yet, humans being who they are – pleasure-seekers who emerge from an infantile polymorphous perversity – many stray from this ideal.

Through this model, which Foucault termed the “repressive hypothesis,” sexuality came to be aligned with privacy, secrecy, and purely utilitarian – reproductive – aims. Yet Foucault demonstrated that sexuality is nonetheless imbricated with public, political, and social spheres. In other words, Western understandings and experiences of sexuality are fundamentally bound up with the liberal nation-state and the dominance of the bourgeoisie. This social, economic, and political formation of the liberal capitalist nation-state emerged from the Enlightenment (a period roughly from the middle of the seventeenth century to end of the eighteenth century) and came to full fruition in the period Foucault nominates “Victorian” – the nineteenth century. While the Victorian era shaped much of the thinking in our contemporary world, its “repressive hypothesis” also generated counteractions. Foucault showed that repression produced sexuality rather than simply contained it, and sketched how sexuality’s perverse pleasures might be deployed by other forms of power. Thus, as political, scientific, and economic forms evolve – from liberalism to neoliberalism, from colonial capitalism to globalization, from national governments to multinational corporations, from industrial power to biopower – so too do forms of sexuality evolve. New norms emerge to regulate sexuality even as some communities experiment with how their bodies and pleasures may contest those norms.

Commonly understood as an expression of our innermost self, sexuality turns out to be implanted from outside of us. Butler’s Gender Trouble develops this Foucauldian insight. Butler integrated Foucault’s social constructionism with the psychoanalytic model of how the subject comes to be and the deconstructive model of how language works. Rather than being a static or absolute essence, identity is a performance that we are compelled to repeat; its performance gains meaning within social discourse, in reference to other performances going on simultaneously.

Butler builds on Sigmund Freud, who, despite Foucault’s criticisms, also complicated heteronormativity’s repressive hypothesis. Butler transposes Freud’s notion of melancholia to describe how heterosexuality and gender identity emerge from the twin taboos of homosexuality and incest. Melancholia, Freud suggests, is a perverse reaction to the loss of a desired object. In melancholia, someone has become unavailable to our desire and attachment. When we absorb the prohibitions against incest and homosexuality, Butler argued, the same-sex parent becomes lost to us. Thus, we internalize that person inside our minds. We become them, perhaps only unconsciously, taking on the characteristics of the same-sex parent to preserve our forbidden love for them.

Becoming that lost object of desire is not a one-time event, nor is it merely psychological. Rather, identity has to be asserted in the social world. Here Butler drew on philosophers J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, who showed that language does not have an anchored meaning that refers to things outside of itself. Words, phrases, sentences act in the world, and their meaning relies on contexts that make their actions felicitous or effective. A promise, a bet, a marriage vow – these are what Austin called performative speech acts. Performative speech acts only take place in language and under the right circumstances; there is always a risk of failure. You can name a child “Sue,” but if Sue comes to understand that his name does not align with his gender, then he may want to change it. Or, he may, as in Johnny Cash’s song, redefine how others understand the name “Sue.” Butler argues that identity itself is in this sense performative: an action that requires constant reassertion and interpretation within language. It can succeed – and will succeed to the degree that it is socially intelligible – but our performative expression always risks failure and incoherence.

As we strive to assert an identity that others recognize as coherent, we inevitably fail to perform that identity perfectly. One is never as feminine, straight, Black, or middle-class as the ideal. In part, this is because we are never simply performing one identity but are operating at the intersection of many: gender, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, disability, among so many others. We might be fluent in certain gestures, habits, and ways of speaking, but not all of these fluencies match the ones preferred by dominant culture. Indeed, our identity performances may not be compatible with one another, producing disturbances in one’s social intelligibility that might be called … queer. As José Esteban Muñoz observes, “We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. Queerness is illegible and therefore lost in relation to the straight minds’ mapping of space… [O]ne’s queerness will always render one lost to a world of heterosexual imperatives, codes, and laws.”² To queer is to distance oneself from norms, and to embrace that distance.

Yet while queer is a glitch in the matrix – a disturbance in how smoothly one’s cultural or social intelligibility operates – it can also be a skillful subversion of intelligibility. Through irony, parody, camp, and other deployments of language, some people queer identities and other social practices. Queer marks an opportunity for reinterpretation. In this sense, queer is not an identity, a thing, or an entity but an activity. Queer names a practice, an approach, a way of relating. Scholars and activists seized on the term “queer” as a way to describe not fitting in, not being fully intelligible to mainstream demands for comportment, and even to question those demands for normativity in our desires, pleasures, bodies. As queer, we may be able to articulate how we are not fitting in – to confess to or fear, for instance, being too much of a sissy compared to masculine norms. Or we might resist specifying our queerness – as some people do in affirming nonbinary gender fluidity. While queer offers elasticity, it always hinges on bodies, pleasures, relations, or desires at cross-purposes with heteronormativity. It is a mode of thinking, but also a mode of recognizing the unconscious commitments we find ourselves in because of our desires. In fact, a crucial lesson of queer is that thinking – which might seem to be disembodied – is inherently a bodily practice.

Insofar as queer is a mode of thinking, it is a mode of thinking sideways, of turning around a question in unexpected ways.³ When we reflect on that sideways thinking, we have theory. Theory is a second-order mode of investigation: if literature is creative expression in the world, literary theory is about literature’s creative expression; in other words, it reflects on how literature works. Queer studies looks at a range of ways of being queer – in this volume, specifically literary ways – while queer theory hinges on how we think about queer. Queer theory is thus inseparable from queer studies. Indeed, Ramzi Fawaz and Shanté Paradigm Smalls have noted the irony that the major scholarly texts of queer theory tend to be more widely read than the actual literary works queer theorists analyze.⁴

Although the term emerged in the 1990s, queer theory predates its canonical inception in Foucault and Butler. Two movements define this convergence: feminism and gay liberation. In the feminist stream, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back marks a watershed moment in the thinking of feminism, race, class, and sexuality.⁵ Another landmark essay, Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984), joins the ongoing conversation in the radical feminist philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s, exemplified by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Marilyn Frye, to reconsider what “counts” as sexuality and how sexuality can be wielded against people in oppressive ways.⁶ Similarly, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands | La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) explored the intersectional limits of identity through a Chicanx feminist lens we now recognize as queer, because it reflects on the unintelligibility of being in the world in relation to various communities – within her family and her community of origin on the Texas border, within the white-dominated academy, and among a non-hispanophone Latinx/Chicanx feminist community in the San Francisco Bay area, among others.⁷ Importantly, Anzaldúa’s experimentations with form subverted the norms of serious philosophical writing, anticipating the intimacy of literature and theory in queer studies.

Parallel to the feminist movement, and contemporaneous with Foucault, writers such as Dennis Altman, Guy Hocquenghem, and Leo Bersani grappled with the possibilities of gay liberation in the 1970s and 1980s, presciently laying groundwork for the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s. John D’Emilio’s important essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” appeared in 1983, charting a path for future intersections of queer and Marxist theory.⁸ D’Emilio tied the emergence of urban homosexual enclaves to socioeconomic changes, such as the ability of individuals to support themselves financially rather than rely on family. D’Emilio’s work connects the social formation of individualism to the development of gay liberation, instigated by the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. He provides a Marxist view of sexuality to counter the psychoanalytic model predominant in the mid-twentieth century.

Feminism and gay liberation shared some common intellectual roots in psychoanalytic theory’s radical reconsideration of gender and sexuality as polymorphously perverse, not fixed from birth. Both also launched important critiques of psychoanalytic institutions and discourses, which often imposed and naturalized oppressive sexual norms. Feminist and gay liberationist scholars were also influenced by post-structuralist theory – thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Roland Barthes – who gained ascendancy in US intellectual circles in the 1980s. Arguably, the convergence of these two strands – feminism and gay liberation – can be seen in the appearance of Gender Trouble and its significant intervention in the feminist debates around essentialism and social constructionism.

Yet queer theory’s seemingly ivory-tower thinking was deeply embedded in activist movements. Indeed, Butler’s conceptions of desire and loss were particularly resonant in gay and lesbian communities devastated by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. From the identification of the earliest victims of the epidemic in 1981 through the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS was a death sentence. Only in 1995, when the FDA approved the first protease inhibitors, was HIV+ transformed into a chronic, but not unmanageable, condition. This era is marked by the catastrophic loss of lovers and friends, but it is also a moment of radical mobilization. “Silence = Death” became a rallying cry in a nation where the President refused to discuss AIDS publicly until 1985, and where normative institutions – the government and the medical-industrial establishment – failed to intervene in the crisis. HIV+ people and their allies responded to this silence in a powerful explosion of creative work – prose, drama, poetry, essay, art, performance, film, and television. The untimeliness of AIDS deaths – among a population that was just coming into its own socially, politically, artistically, and professionally – exacerbated the sense of urgency felt by queer communities. The scholarly profession was not without its losses: John Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, a pioneering treatise on gay history;⁹ Craig Owens, noted art scholar and editor of Art in America; Essex Hemphill, African-American poet and essayist; and Foucault himself. AIDS casts a shadow over the development of queer studies that cannot be forgotten; indeed, the crisis crystallized the political and performative stakes of coming out, reading queerly, and queering identity.

We have been tracing a certain origin story without tracing the origin itself. The etymology of the term “queer” shows, rather fittingly, that its origins are somewhat obscure. Origins are suspect in queer studies, for they reinscribe a sense of propriety, lineage, norms; as Robert McRuer notes, “Any myth of origin suggests a linear (or might we say ‘straight’) path of development and implies a pure and singular starting point.”¹⁰ The origin is often mistaken for authority, when really an origin just encapsulates a few potentialities of a term. Yet if we understand an origin as a trajectory, rather than a beginning or essence, it can be useful to chart queer’s “before” as we turn to its “after.” Of queer’s etymology, the OED notes:

We cite this origin story because of its vivid spatial designation for queer: “transverse, oblique, obstructive,” which resonates with our description of queer theory as thinking sideways. The dictionary now acknowledges queer as a formerly derogatory term for homosexual that denoted an “identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender, especially heterosexual norms.” Yet, recalling Austin and Butler, the simplicity of this definition should become complicated by how the term is used. Because it puts identity into question, queer undoes subjects and objects – their limits, relations, formations, and modes of operation. For this reason, queer comes to be used in seemingly undisciplined ways. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”¹² Although she acknowledges that queer sometimes serves “to denote, almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay, whether or not it is organized around multiple criss-crossings of definitional lines,” Sedgwick also locates in queer “experimental linguistic, epistemological, representational, political adventures.” The vast range between simple “same-sex object choice” and experimental “adventures” captures the inherent slipperiness in defining “queer” as well as the opportunities such slipperiness affords.

Queer’s slipperiness bears on the “after” in our title. Recently, queer literary studies has become particularly focused on queering temporality, a move that troubles the linear genealogy we have presented thus far. We see this turn in Lee Edelman’s influential polemic No Future (2004) as well as Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), Valerie Rohy’s Anachronism and Its Others (2009), Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (2010), Peter Coviello’s Tomorrow’s Parties (2013), and Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014).¹³ Despite their differences, these works evince queer studies’ ongoing reconceptualization of past, present, and future – as well as of the modes of periodization, genealogy, history, linearity, and causality that we use to think about queer time.

Alongside the temporal turn, queer studies has begun to ask: Whither queer studies now? In their pathbreaking issue of Social Text, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” (2005), David L. Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz answered this question by contextualizing queer theory alongside the War on Terror, US imperialism, neoliberalism, and “queer liberalism,” which forsakes the radicalism of the AIDS era and embraces assimilation to existing norms of the state, exemplified by the marriage equality movement.¹⁴ Insisting on its political and social relevance, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz called for queer theory to adopt a “politics of epistemological humility” (15). By humbly approaching the question of “what a desirably queer world might look like?” queer theory becomes more ethically and politically responsive to global forms of otherness that continue to be marginalized. While Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz looked ahead, others looked back to reflect on the disciplinary legacies of queer theory, including Janet Halley and Andrew Parker’s “After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory,” a 2007 special issue of SAQ (expanded and published as a book in 2011), Michael Warner’s essay “Queer and Then?” (2012), and Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani’s “Queer Methods” (2016), a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly.¹⁵ In Brim and Ghaziani’s words, our moment is marked by a “reframing [of] the endlessly rehearsed question ‘what is queer theory?’ as the nascent ‘how is queer theory done?’”¹⁶

As our title suggests, we see genealogy itself as a promisingly queer method – a way of thinking queer as well as thinking queerly. In this respect, our book resonates with recent work by scholars such as Rohy, David M. Halperin, and Kevin Ohi, who focus on the passage or transmission of queer knowledge and culture.¹⁷ Rohy critiques the homophobic fantasy of how homosexuals and their cultures reproduce – “through seduction, influence, recruitment, pedagogy, predation, and contagion” – offering an insightful perspective from which to reflect on how queer studies has an “after.” Rohy argues that such homophobic fantasies led lesbian and gay advocates to counter such fears by appealing to biological determinism – that we are “born this way,” as Lady Gaga says. Yet even the question – what causes homosexuality? – is a pernicious one, whose insistence on being asked presumes that finding a cause is necessary – as if homosexuality is in need of explanation. Such investigations share a retrospective form that produces the origin as an effect of their investigations. Queer theory teaches us to be suspicious of backward glances that look for causes, so any genealogy of queer studies – even the limited and partial one posed above – is itself rather a perverse move.

Instead of looking for a beginning or end, the “after” of queer studies might be thought through Nachträglichkeit, a concept Freud used to describe deferred realization. The term literally means “afterwardsness,” and although it stems from Freud’s earliest work, Studies in Hysteria (1895), the term only came to full fruition in Freud’s case study of the Wolf Man (1918), where the subject belatedly realizes that his parents’ seeming violence, which he witnessed as a toddler, was actually sexual congress.¹⁸ Later in the twentieth century, French psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and then queer theorist Leo Bersani located this concept at the core of sexual development. A belated realization often seems to emphasize an impotent or tragic sense of “too late!” – especially as it is used in classical melodrama, like the films of Douglas Sirk. Yet Nachträglichkeit can also bestow power. As Laplanche and Pontalis observe, the term is “frequently used by Freud in connection with his view of psychical temporality and causality: experiences, impressions, and memory traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development. They may in that event be endowed not only with a new meaning but also with psychical effectiveness.”¹⁹ What now is possible?

The afterglow of Nachträglichkeit’s illumination clarifies how we understand the “after” of queer studies as an empowering new stage of development in the field. Our provisional genealogical emphasis on “after” initiates a new discussion on the influences of queer theory, or, rather, what we can only now realize as the catalysts that queer studies has set in motion. If queer theory is a lapidary moment at the end of the twentieth century, it is timely now to trace some of the changes that it initiated in the field of literary studies. We may find that, as Muñoz has admonished us, “we are not yet queer.”²⁰ For this very reason, After Queer Studies weaves its retrospective reflections alongside a consideration of queer thinking and analysis that remains urgently to be done.

The “after” of our title, then, might be understood less as a look backward than a queer mode of looking forward. Of course, the stories we tell about a future often rely on a reproduction of the past and an investment in the persistence of social order itself. Even as it claims to imagine a radical break from the past, reproductive futurism, as Edelman argues, denies difference. By contrast, a desire to think a future for queer studies does not stem from a denial of radical difference. We do not imagine a grand telos for queer studies, nor do we assume its unchanged persistence into the future. Rather, we reckon strange, circuitous, proliferating, and looping temporalities will generate friction and stimulate new potentialities, which may or may not continue under the signifier “queer.”

Precisely because queer is a problem of legibility and interpretation, After Queer Studies centers on literary studies, for this is the discipline that has tackled the queerness of reading, writing, and language. Moreover, literature has been an archive for queer theorizing from the start. Despite its predominately philosophical and psychoanalytical roots, in its formative years queer studies was driven largely by literary scholars. Even when landmark collections like Michael Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet appear in non-literary journals (in 1990 as a volume of the journal Social Text), queer thinking remains marked by Warner’s training as an early American literature scholar.²¹ Similarly, Bersani’s first book was a study of Marcel Proust.²² Sedgwick’s foundational contribution to the field, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), was deeply engaged in literary analysis, while her more widely read and field-defining texts, Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Tendencies (1993), both exhibit polished skills in close reading born of a deeply literary approach to texts.²³ Moreover, her paradigm-shifting essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading in queer and literary criticism initially appeared as an introduction to the anthology Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (1997), which itself grew out of “Queerer than Fiction,” a 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel.²⁴ In this important essay, Sedgwick gave queer scholars a new matrix for articulating how affect motivates compelling new interpretive methods and aims. Although the very distinction of paranoid and reparative emerged from Sedgwick’s work on shame, sexuality, and psychoanalysis, its literary context is often forgotten.

If the intimacy of queer and literary studies has been overlooked – perhaps because it seemed unremarkable or given – so too has the centrality of literature to queer theory and queer communities alike. D. A. Miller elegantly charts this relation in Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style.²⁵ Sedgwick likewise describes a childhood attachment by queers to “a few cultural objects, objects of high or popular culture or both, objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us” (Tendencies 3). These objects become a “prime resource for survival.” Reparative work, as Sedgwick notes, fears that “the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self.”²⁶ This affective dynamic might also be said to underlie the desires that many LGBTQ readers bring to literature. Indeed, there is a profound need for marginalized readers to discover selves reflected in a world that otherwise denies their very existence. At the same time, seeking this identification may fuel a hope, or demand, that literature should accurately, clearly, and positively represent queer lives and experiences. While queer studies by no means discounts the power or value of such representations, it extends its destabilization of identity to literary meaning. As Ohi argues, literature’s failures to cohere – its ruptures in meaning, its thwarted moments of understanding – are the place where it preserves and transmits queerness as potentiality. By defining queerness in terms of a depersonalized, desubjectivized negativity, Ohi follows in the anti-identitarian tradition inaugurated by Bersani. However, in an important twist, Ohi reframes “queer theory as a mode of literary reading” and identifies close reading as a queer mode to “access the potentiality of a literary work – not to settle it, once and for all, in a meaning that masters it, but to rewrite it, perpetually.”²⁷ In short, queer turns to literature not for legible reflections of a self but for moments when the self becomes ecstatically illegible.

In a related move, we do not assume a coherent or privileged identity for “literature.” Our chapters move from William Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Henry James to queer commix, camp performance, and science fiction. This movement is, itself, a queer one – not simply because of the disruption of the boundaries between high and low culture but also because queer reading has historically been marked by its capacious attachment to and appreciation of a range of aesthetic forms. As Sedgwick notes, queer readers “have invented for themselves, in the spontaneity of great need, the tools for a formalist apprehension of other less prestigious, more ubiquitous kinds of text: genre movies, advertising, comic strips” (Tendencies 4). After Queer Studies questions the “spontaneity” of this invention by acknowledging the historical forces that gave rise to the practices we now think of as “queer reading” as well as the role that literature plays in soliciting queer interpretative practices from its readers. Still, Sedgwick’s observation underlines the importance of form – as an aesthetic and social concept – for queer readers. After all, we need only to think of how drag aesthetics, Jamesian and Steinian sentences, or the lines in Assyrian sculpture (to name just a few examples) have galvanized queer thinking.

The refusal to choose between aesthetics and politics is precisely why queer studies is so crucially oriented around literary studies. In “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social,” Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez call for a new thinking of

A relational approach to queerness and form opens up new possibilities for staging a rapprochement between aesthetics and politics. Indeed, as their work suggests, queer thinking needs to account for the political and social work that artists are already doing within form. To do so, we must understand the aesthetic, like queerness, as enmeshed within and responsive to the violences of the social world. We must have a richly intersectional notion of how aesthetic form crosses with the axes of gender, sexuality, racialization, class, and other modes of power. After Queer Studies thus attends to the transversals that link queerness, form, and social power, taking our cue from the relations that queer literature provokes, imagines, and demands. In its latest turn, queer theory deliberates the social implications of formal and aesthetic innovation that literature constantly strives for in its engagements with the world.

Reading might be one idiom for queerness’s engagement with the entwinement of aesthetics and politics. Hence, our chapters do not stage reading or reader relations only, or even primarily, in terms of the binary choice between paranoid or reparative reading. Sedgwick’s heuristic was initially significant for thinking about the affective motivations that inspire queer reading, putting a name to a previously unnamed cluster of affects that undergird critical theory. Yet she also called for an openness to weak modes of theory that do not work toward mastery but operate within the liminal “middle ranges of agency” (Touching 13). Refusing a grand alternative to the repressive hypothesis, Sedgwick’s turn to reparation carved out a less oppositional approach for queer reading. Such potentiality serves not as an end in itself, nor does it counter arguments for queer negativity, asociality, and nonrelation. In this vein, our chapters exemplify queer studies’ increasingly agnostic openness to – and curiosity about – the interleavings of queerness and form that may yet arise beyond the repressive hypothesis. If they contain a common methodological commitment, however, it is an insistence on the indissociability of queerness with the social, historical, and aesthetic forms that conditions its emergence, a commitment that grounds their proliferating relationality to a range of forms (high and low, canonical and marginal, popular and unpopular, etc.).

“Studies,” the final word in our title, might seem to require no remark, given that “queer studies” nominates a disciplinary field. Yet if queer is an activity – a way of thinking sideways – then it raises profound questions about methodology, about how we study the object of literature. Indeed, as the 2013 “Queer Method” conference attests, queer theorists now find themselves reflecting on the “disciplinary effects and affiliations of queer studies.”²⁹ Such a reflection cannot be divorced from the overwhelming loss of prestige suffered by the humanities, particularly the literary and philosophical approaches that we have traced in our genealogy. Indicative of this moment of uncertainty and experimentation, our authors do not presume or argue for one single methodology; rather, each stakes a claim about the methods of queer theorizing they see as most relevant to their cultural objects. Yet we are struck by a twinned persistence of and resistance to the human that arises across the collection, even within single essays. On the one hand, an investment in the subjective, experiential, and affective dimensions of literature persists, despite calls to move beyond the “subject.” On the other hand, our authors ask, as Dana Luciano and Mel Chen urge, “has the queer ever been human?”³⁰ This question confronts the impersonal negativity of sexuality, the monstrous potentiality of inhuman forces, and the social exclusions wrought in the name of the human. We hope these crosscurrents resonate with one another, testifying to the ongoing dexterity of literary studies to think queer and, perhaps more importantly, that their friction suggests traces of queer studies that are not yet legible – readable only through their restless, unstable movements.

Part I, “Reading Queer Literary History,” expands the questions about genealogy and method from this introduction. At the risk of seeming to invoke an origin, we open with Stephen Guy-Bray’s chapter “Shakespearean Sexualities,” but we do so to disrupt an originary gesture for queer literary history. Guy-Bray confronts the questions readers must ask after queer studies: Is a “queer” text one that represents same-sex desire, one written by an author whose biography indicates same-sex erotic attraction, or one that has to be read against the grain to expose its queerness? Guy-Bray replies by urging readers to presume all texts as queer. If this stance is made possible by queer theory, Guy-Bray demonstrates how early modern representations of sexuality prefigure and even exceed contemporary notions of queerness. In this respect, the literary archive preserves a future for queer readings to come. Dana Seitler’s chapter, “Write, Paint, Dance, Sex,” rethinks queer literature as a style – a texture, syntax, or tone. As Seitler argues, style enables readers to understand the “literariness of queerness” but also the “relationship between literature and the social world, between aesthetics and politics.” Her chapter sweeps through the canon of American literature – from Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman, to Stein, Hurston, and Crane – tracing how style forges a nexus between the erotic, the aesthetic, and the social. Seitler’s location of dance as a mode of queer style resonates with Ricardo Ortiz’s chapter, “Queer Latinx Studies and Queer Latinx Literature ‘After’ Queer Theory.” Ortiz positions queer literary studies after the 2016 Pulse dance club massacre, the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ people in the United States, which specifically targeted queer Latinx people. Ortiz links this brutal moment to a long history of systemic violence suffered by and combated among queer Latinx communities. Tracing an intellectual genealogy of queer latinidad, Ortiz unravels fixed distinctions between literature and theory, noting that they “quite often manifest simultaneously in the same discursive, writerly act.” Not only does Ortiz demonstrate the importance of deft movements among literature and theory to queer studies, but he unpacks the fraught relationships that queers of color have had to the genre of “queer theory,” which has often marginalized non-white thinkers and their interests.

Part II, “Reading Queer Writers,” turns to four authors – Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Henry James, and Audre Lorde – whose literature has consistently grounded the scholarship that has become queer studies. These chapters demonstrate that reading a queer writer demands complex thinking about literature’s relationship to authorial biography and historical context. Richard A. Kaye’s chapter, “Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in Queer Time,” juxtaposes Irish writers Wilde and Shaw, contrasting their opposed views of sexual transgression. By taking us into their contemporary moment to defamiliarize our own, Kaye demonstrates the untimeliness that marks the reading of queer writers. Indeed, his essay reveals how their debate over the place of sexuality within the political sphere anticipates and gives rise to contemporary debates around queer liberalism. In “After Queer Baldwin,” Matt Brim similarly demonstrates the historical and conceptual influence of Baldwin’s literature on the emergence of queer of color critique. Baldwin was a pivotal figure both for articulating queer theory prior to its emergence in the 1990s and an interlocutor for later queer theorists of color. If black queer studies finds itself now decentering Baldwin, Brim argues that this is a salutary move that signals a vital expansion of the cultural archive for black queer thought. Moving from the social back to the textual, Kevin Ohi’s chapter, “Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth” directly confronts the perennial problem of conceiving the relationship between literature and biography that plagues the reading of queer writers. In a striking move, Ohi questions queer studies’ allergy to origins. Indeed, through a reading of James’s prefaces, Ohi discovers a “perpetual return to potentiality in writing’s search for its origins.” In their refraction of the relationship between life and writing, James’s prefaces confront the suspension and revision of meaning that conditions queerness and literature alike. Finally, addressing the gender of “origins,” Amber Jamilla Musser’s “All about Our Mothers” turns to Audre Lorde to ask what it means to think about a writer as a “mother” to queer theory. Musser asks why we can “embrace Lorde as a prototype, a mother, shall we say, of queer theory, but we have difficulty grappling with what she says about the mother?” By returning to Lorde’s writing, Musser presses back against queer theory’s resistance to the feminine and especially the maternal, arguing for a queer theory that contends with black women’s experience of racism, capitalism, and colonialism.

Part III, “Reading Queerly,” dives into cultural forms that have often failed to count as “literature” and yet have been central to the development of queer reading. At the same time, this section raises new questions about how an interpretative practice can “queer” a text. Nick Salvato’s “Camp Performance and the Case of Discotropic” braids together these two concerns in its consideration of camp. Camp is an archive of performance as well as a style that playfully engages with mainstream culture. By looking to queer of color camp performances, Salvato pushes camp studies in a new direction. He contests the arch and ironic affect that typically defines white, gay, male camp, clearing room to consider negative affects, such as sadness and somberness, in camp performance. Through these affects, queer of color camp offers a mode for reflecting on the corporeality of trans and racialized subjectivities. Where Salvato sees a future for queer reading in an expanded archive, andré m. carrington argues for a new apprehension of its past. His chapter, “Reading in Juxtaposition,” argues for the centrality of subcultural commix to the formation of queer subjectivities and communities. He contests narrow definitions of the genre, arguing for an acknowledgement of the queer entwinement of comics with other genres. Doing so displaces the marginalization of comics while also bringing into relief how comics have been bound up with queer stigmatization. Where carrington looks to the queerness of the superhero, Rebekah Sheldon turns to the monster, beginning with the Gothic vampire and moving toward more contemporary visions of monstrosity. Sheldon’s “Reading for Transgression” positions queer studies within a broader nexus of feminist new materialism and ecocriticism, questioning the centrality of “trouble making” to conventional definitions of queer reading. Sheldon turns to the archive of speculative and weird fiction to rethink queerness as a monster that cannot be controlled or predicted, and that has little interest in the persistence of humanity. Finally, Sharon Patricia Holland also queers the human, focusing on the distinction between human and animal that arises in the racialization of black, white, and indigenous subjects. “Sovereignty” traces the intersecting margins of US imperialism and minority racialization through Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, deforming the norms of whiteness that prevail in animal studies, American studies, and queer studies. Her chapter makes a powerful case for the endurance of queer theory’s thinking sideways, exemplifying queer theory’s interrogation of its own norms and its assumption that the question of who “we” are is a question of relationality at the limits of the social.

As we have argued, “queer” arises through the nexus of feminism, gay liberation, and the confrontation with the AIDS’s epidemic’s radical dehumanization of subjects who had just begun to claim their place in the social world. By ending with the limits of the human and of life itself, we hope to provoke a compelling set of questions as to what queer studies may be after now.