This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

Patrick Mullen returns to familiar textual moments to discover new forms of Joyce’s subversion of dominant discourses. He detects in moments in “The Dead” such as Lily’s exchange with Gabriel, Molly Ivors’ discussion with Gabriel, and Gabriel’s thoughts on Michael Furey a kind of queerness he associates with “heteronormative failure”: the refusal to marry, the rejection of conventional gender roles, and the experience of homoerotic desire. Adapting Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the sexual closet, he writes of the pantry as the emblem and at times the literal location in Joyce’s story of these alternative behaviors. He traces the subtle presence of these non-normative behaviors in the story’s free indirect discourse; in contrast to the unfettered access to an individual’s thoughts purportedly offered by the stream of consciousness, “The Dead” contains in its conventional third-person narrative voice marginalized perspectives that form unexpected alliances across the globe.