The 1810s offer decadent examples of Regency queerness including Anne Lister’s diaries, the publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s queer gothic ‘Christabel,’ and Byron’s queer heroes in his Oriental tales. Not singular oddities, these figures speak to queer communities at varying levels of British society. Though Lister documents a series of queer lovers, her writing likewise amasses a queer community, particularly within triadic flirtation and polyamory. ‘Christabel’ and Lister’s diaries both showcase queerness and class-crossings as intertwined and multiple, also apparent in Lister’s own gender movements, identifying as ‘a gent’ and frequently traveling. These connections recur within newspaper stories of gender-crossing patriotic sailors and Byronic queer naval spaces, particularly the sailor-heroes in Lara and The Corsair whose conflicts become symptomatic of queerness in search of community.

This chapter argues that any critical or historical study of life-narrative, memoir, or autobiography by “gay Latino male” writers in the United States must attend to questions or problems unique to the intersecting fields of queer and Latinx literary studies. At the level of genre, such an analysis must address the decades-long influence of testimonio theory coursing through both Latin American and Latina/o/x literary studies as a destabilizing element in any discussion of genre as a tool for understanding literature, or “the literary” per se, especially in its grounding relationship to any claim to historical knowledge, through the modes of either fiction or nonfiction. At the level of gender, such an analysis must address the recent emergence of the self-interrogating mark of the “x” in Latinx (in the mid-2020s perhaps ceding finally to the “e” in Latine) as the refusal to accept the binary logic of gender as imbedded in the orthography and grammar of conventional Spanish. These considerations destabilize but do not disable the possibility of curating a collection of texts that have since the mid-twentieth century comprised an archive of “Gay Latino American Autobiography.”

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In conversations with sex workers and members of VAMP, this chapter engages in the reading of activist texts published by VAMP. The reading and conversations about the texts are located at VAMP’s collective organisational site in Sangli, Maharashtra. Like DMSC, VAMP also emerged through a specific set of conversations between sex workers and others. These conversations were held amongst sex workers, a non–sex worker women’s organisation called Sangram, Dalit and non-Dalit feminist groups in Maharashtra, and Dalit and non-Dalit men’s groups in Sangli. The conversations consolidated women’s collectivisation in Sangli as businesswomen, or dhandhewali, which was achieved through the formation of mutual relations between sex workers’ lives and law. Thus, the sex workers formed VAMP as a registered NGO under state-authorised rules. Through the process of registration, the women shaped their role and responsibility in public life as dhandhewali, and reorganised their specific hierarchical relations of gender, class and caste in Sangli. Simultaneously, sex workers’ relationship with the state, mediated by the reorganisation of hierarchies in their community, attained a form that was distinct from their state-authorised criminal status and conditions.

Non-normative sexual and gender identities are not new to Africa, but their representation in literary texts has grown significantly over the past two decades, establishing queer literature as a burgeoning genre. This chapter focuses on what defines “queer” in African literature and examines its key features. It compares literary production from different regions of the continent, highlighting both continuities and diversity in the representation of queerness. Particular attention is given to Anglophone and Francophone literary traditions to consider the similarities and divergences in representations of queerness across these linguistic and cultural contexts. These literary analyses are interwoven with scholarly debates, showing how literature and academic discourse on African queerness inform and influence one another. Drawing on Keguro Macharia’s concept of “frottage,” the chapter examines how interactions between African and queer identities can evoke both generative and conflictual affects. The chapter ultimately interrogates the politics of queer representation in literature, particularly in queerphobic contexts in Africa. In so doing, the chapter explores how literature not only makes queerness visible but also negotiates difference and nonconformity.

This chapter explores Scotland’s relationship with utopia, arguing that this relationship is complicated by Scotland’s perceived peripheral, and potentially oppositional, identity within the United Kingdom. Twentieth-century Scottish fiction has often been reticent to engage with fully developed utopian paradigms, instead focusing on quotidian experience. However, utopian communities are also positioned as an opportunity to look beyond the nation to examine questions of individual and collective desire. The chapter focuses on three main strands of Scottish utopian fiction from the post-war to the present: the unusual emphasis on death and cyclical return in key utopian texts; utopian novels that explore communal life and homosociality; and queer works that employ storytelling as a utopian act. The texts discussed in this chapter reveal that in Scottish literature utopia is not located in some far-off future but, rather, operates within the continuity created by shared narratives of identity, community, and desire. Examining these themes, the chapter concludes that Scottish utopian fiction is more varied than previous accounts have noted.

This chapter considers the emergence of gay and lesbian voices in the late 1960s and 1970s in relation to political activism and forums such as small press culture, the visual arts and performances. It discusses how some of these were associated with the women’s movement. It notes how an early coalitionist approach transformed into separatism between the lesbian and gay communities, followed by a return to coalitionist approaches in light of the AIDS crisis. The chapter analyses the print culture supporting gay and lesbian writing during these decades. It tracks the emergence of queer poetries that rejected identity categories, including queer Aboriginal poetry. It discusses the mainstreaming of LGBTQ+ writing, including the film adaptation of Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. Lastly, the chapter considers the proliferation of publications by gay, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary poets from 2010 onwards, contextualising them in light of public debates around the Australian Marriage Law postal survey, the Safe Schools Coalition, and protests around police participation in and corporate sponsorship of the Mardi Gras Parade.

Mughal India had a long history of mistress–maid homoeroticism, ambiguously gendered domestic laborers, and slave–servant–concubine continuum. European men in India initially mimicked Mughal elites and maintained harems with Indian bibis (concubines). British colonialism in India, however, led to the domestic transition from bibis to memsahibs (white women). Chapter 1 situates the creation of a new desexualized colonial caregiver, the ayah, in the growing British shame about interracial sex, concubinage, domestic slavery, and mixed-race children from the 1780s. The ayah, Chapter 1 argues, distinguished the respectable, racially pure British imperial home from hypersexualized Mughal households and from mixed-race slave-holding European Catholic households. The brown ayah was crucial for the production and reproduction of British imperial whiteness at a time of heightened racial and sexual anxiety. The desexualized racialized ayah thus erased the embarrassing prevalence of sexual and reproductive labors provided by South Asian women to British men. The final section of this chapter explores the lived experiences of colonial ayahs as they upheld the racial and sexual hierarchies of the British Empire.

This chapter introduces the volume’s central premise that the uneasy relationship between Bloomsbury’s broad influence and perceived elitism is precisely why it continues to gain traction in critical debates. Instead of viewing the group as either radicals or gatekeepers, it is necessary to grapple with Bloomsbury’s imperialist biases and class complacencies at the same time as we resituate the group’s innovative aesthetics, transgressive relationships, and varied involvement in public life in national and global contexts. In response to Raymond Williams’ classic 1980 essay “The Bloomsbury Fraction” – which in considering Bloomsbury’s social position as an upper-class “fraction” settles into a relatively stable description of the group’s form – I propose friction as a more tangible and productive concept to explore Bloomsbury and its lasting contribution to culture.

Michael Field’s notion of ecology includes as fundamental components of their sense of being not only the external elements with which humans interact but also the gestures of curiosity, invitation, and emotional outreach themselves. In conceptualising the act of writing as part of this interspecies mutual realisation, they grappled with the conundrum of existing within their environment while seemingly being forced to render it from an external vantage point. This chapter proposes that they address the issue not simply through formal and other writerly innovations that depict their eco-relationality but also by encouraging a sense of their writing as an actual part of this network of emotional linkages and potentialities. Focusing primarily on their play, William Rufus, and a section of their diaries, this chapter explores that this is an undertaking less invested in reifying an eco-queer identity than in breaching the knowledge structure that scaffolds the concept of identity itself.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.

This chapter places Michael Field within the House Beautiful movement, discussing their practice in relation to Walter Pater, William Morris, and others. I focus on the aesthetic interiors of their two homes, Durdans and Paragon, showing how they were curated around their lyrics. I propose that Michael Field queered the House Beautiful movement, their practice representing a radical queering of the Doll’s House.

Lesbianism figures into María Irene Fornés’s writing in every decade of her career but bears significantly on only a quarter of her more than forty published plays and manuscripts. Through close readings of four plays (Tango Palace, Fefu and Her Friends, Enter THE NIGHT, The House at 27 Rue de Fleurus), Nicole Stodard evinces the the evocative stylistic ways that Fornés’s embodied queerness becomes visible in her body of work through characters’ gender and sexual embodiment, romantic triangulation, shapeshifting categorization, and queer suffering and joy. Stodard argues that Fornés’s work embodied a sexual philosophy that was more expansive and connected with a larger life quest. From depicting couples, queer and straight, to queering coupling through the representation of triangular affection, her legacy ultimately advances an abundant love that is plural, communal, uninhibited, transcendent, and joyful.

Chapter 7, Be Careful about the Publisher, examines how the diverse sources, distribution networks, and audiences associated with sexology undermined Havelock Ellis’s attempts to frame his book on homosexuality with John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (1897), as a serious medical work, and led to its appearance in the obscenity trial R. v. Bedborough (1898). Authorities charged Bedborough aiming to break up a radical group, but sexologists and their allies framed the trial as an ignorant attack on scientific progress. Elaborating on strategies pioneered by birth-controllers, they argued that the censorship of “naturalistic” sexual expression had mired society in sexual ignorance, fostering “abnormal” sexual behaviour and an appetite for pornography, the rightful target of obscenity laws. In positioning their own work as vital to society and pornography as a product of sexual science’s suppression, they obfuscated ways in which early sexologists relied on pornographers and their products. By examining sexologists’ attempts to navigate these issues, this chapter further demonstrates how arguments about obscenity were used tactically to sanitize sexual knowledge and its producers.

This chapter traces the recent turn to form in Latinx literary studies. While the field has long privileged the historical in shaping debates and organizing Latinx cultural production, there is a growing group of scholars taking the formal as their point of departure by studying components that range from genre to word choice, from page layout to punctuation. Concerned less with the who, what, and where of literary texts, this new approach focuses more on how. That is, how our privileged objects of study – race and racism, community and coalition, gender and sexuality – are represented on and off the page. Linking these recent approaches to a longer tradition of queer Latinx performance studies, a branch of scholarship long attuned to the importance of gesture, corporality, and affect, this chapter models formal analysis by taking works by Carmen María Machado and Justin Torres as representative case studies.

This chapter focuses on the question of resistance in D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1988). Love argues that, although Miller’s approach anticipated many aspects of queer modernist reading practice, it is ideologically distinct in evincing skepticism about the liberatory potential of expressions of sexuality, including non-normative sexuality. Miller’s understanding of sexuality as present and licit rather than taboo and unspeakable thoroughly absorbs Michel Foucault’s critique of what he called the “repressive hypothesis.” In this sense, Love argues, Miller offers not only a queer reading of realist fiction but also realist queer criticism, which emphasizes existing realities over political potential.