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This introduction situates the entire collection within key historical and conceptual turns in queer theories, marking along the way how the various chapters apply, challenge, extend, and complicate what queer theory was, is, and will be. In particular, it focuses on some of the most significant, and most discussed works in queer theory and their interrogations of both temporality and affect. To map the impact of these, the bulk of this introduction provides a summative sketch of four “turns,” orienting the reader to some of the more recent disorientations that have complicated the field of queer theory. Thus, this introduction narrates four, interrelated turns—an antinormative, an antisocial, a temporal, and an affective turn—signaling where the chapters of the collection turn and twist these in new and important ways, not only within biblical, theological, and religious studies, but within queer studies at large. Indeed, the twist is that these turns have long carried theological resonance and echoed religious themes, all while the religiously oriented have grappled in still other queer ways with apocalypse and memory, utopia and trauma, apophasis and violence, affect and desire. This more explicit coupling already feels like a long time coming.

Expanding on the notion of the primal “brown body” mediating gay modernity, this chapter argues that this brown body (frequently, though not exclusively, embodied as “Latino”) mediates gay male shame. Andy Warhol’s film, Screen Test #2, Douglas Crimp’s essay on that film, “Mario Montez, For Shame,” and the “Gay Shame” conference held at the University of Michigan in 2003, which opened with a showing of the Warhol film, provide the primary texts for analysis. Crimp (and “Gay Shame” by extension) deploys monolithic constructions of “Puerto Rican” and “Catholic” in order to project and universalize (the urbane, white gay man’s) shame onto Montez’s othered (or browned) body. The chapter argues that Montez, rather than merely providing the passive object of Warhol’s experiments in camera-technique and exposure, skillfully pirates the film’s authority in ways that remain illegible to Crimp’s construction of gay shame.

The introduction elaborates the key concepts of the book: homosexuality, value, and labor. It contextualizes the importance of these concepts for modern Irish history and culture. Furthermore, it argues that the study brings together currently alienated critical discussions that both trace themselves to Foucault’s History of Sexuality: queer theory that has developed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Foucault and studies of empire engaged with the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The chapter makes connections among queer theory, Irish studies, modernist studies, and theories of empire.

Chapter three transitions to temporary and explicit displays of queer sexuality in museums, specifically examining how the emotional habitus on sexual display is managed through unofficial museum policy in the late twentieth century. This period, sometimes referred to as the “culture wars,” marks a pivotal moment in the institutionalization of certain sexual display policies such as warning signs that continue to influence the ways in which sexual material culture is consumed in museums. The final section of the chapter juxtaposes the politics and performances of display in temporary sex exhibitions in mainstream museums to the controversy surrounding the display of sex toys at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. This section examines what happens to queer sex when it is displayed in a museum dedicated to representing queer lives and what this means for the application of queer theory in museum practice. The chapter ends by examining theoretical ruminations on the supposed death of queer theory and argues that now is not the time to abandon queer theory, and that now more than ever, theorists and museum practitioners need queer praxis.

This chapter addresses the issue of how — in theory and in practice — feminism should engage bisexuality, intersexuality, transsexuality, transgender, and other emergent identities (or anti-identities) that reconfigure both conventional and conventionally feminist understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. How feminists should imagine and create communities that take the institutions and practices of sex, gender, and sexuality to be politically relevant to freedom, or how might such communities incorporate our manifest and intransigent diversity, and build solidarity, is discussed with reference to the leitmotif of transgender. A critical analysis is made of two very different feminist texts: the 1994 reissue of Janice Raymond's notorious The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (originally published in 1979) and Bernice Hausman's 1995 book Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender. This chapter shows that the differences between the ethical and political dilemmas faced by feminists who are transgendered and those who are not are not as great as some theorists have suggested.

This chapter deals with the relationship between deconstruction and queer theory. It is noted that ‘the more fashionable Queer became, the more it was appropriated by those who wanted to be fashionable and the more inclusive and meaningless the term became’. In Jacques Derrida's view, deconstruction inherits something of the condemnation of ‘spontaneism’ in V. I. Lenin. Derrida's ‘crypto-communist legacy’ entails thinking of the ‘crypto-’, of the hidden and secret. ‘Queer theory’ would have to do with deferred effect and the incalculable, with what cannot be ‘anticipated in advance’; and indeed that this can and must include the possibility of the disappearance or obsolescence of the term ‘queer’ itself. It then argues that homosexuality and queerness constitute a crucial aspect of all Jonathan Dollimore's novels. If Derrida's work argues for, while enacting, a queering of being, the same can be said of time: deconstruction queers being and time.

By following out the argument that the classic social authority of the Symbolic function is waning in the neoliberal episteme, I argue that Althusserian interpellation fails to capture the kinds of subject formation underway in it. I then draw the connection directly to the Althusserian conceptualizations of social difference we inherit from early theorists of queer theory, specifically Judith Butler and Jose Esteban Muñoz. By tracing the Althusserian roots of these two theorists, I demonstrate how the dominant understandings of gender and race spawned by queer theory may be insufficient for thinking resistance in the neoliberal episteme.

Recent queer history has begun to demonstrate that “queer” is very much a historical and historicized category. New work on the variations of sexuality has shown what a queer historical practice—as an epistemology and a methodology—might look like. However, progress in the development of queer historical practice belies the persistence of an “uncomfortable tension” between lesbian/gay history and queer studies. This chapter examines the results of the border crossings between academic history and queer studies in order to clarify what is at stake in determining how or if the history that outsiders produce differs from that of professionals. Some queer critics fashion a historical practice to suit their arguments and show little inclination to deepen their understanding of its range and diversity. Some trained historians, on the other hand, construe queer historical work as cultural criticism and miss opportunities to engage with bold queer theorizing of historicity, transhistoricism, temporality, and change.

The introduction locates the book’s argument at the productive intersection of queer studies, film theory, and Deleuzian philosophy, clarifying where each field stood in the U.S. academy by the 1990s. From there, the introduction reviews seven theoretical tenets from which all of the book’s arguments derive, explaining such key Deleuzian concepts as desiring-production, deterritorialization, and minor cinema along the way and deriving concrete illustrations from different films than those treated in later chapters. Following some words about the origins, historical context, and disciplinary orientations of the book’s argument, the introduction ends with an overview of each subsequent chapter.

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.

This introductory chapter bridges the seeming theoretical disconnect between queer theory and ecocriticism. In doing so the chapter promotes a “queer ecology”—an emerging paradigm in which the ecological stances of the literary works treated in the following chapters are striking precisely because of the contexts from which they emerge—including postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the “post-identity” era—and precisely because they are so self-consciously queer. This chapter argues that these works manage to conceive of concrete, sincere environmental politics even while remaining, to varying degrees, skeptical, ironic, and self-reflexive. And they do so even while, as this chapter shows, queer fictions and theory are known for their cynicism, apoliticism, and negativity, such that “queer environmentalism” sounds like an oxymoron.

This chapter offers theoretical and historical insights into the reasons why, and the ways in which gender theory has developed in the United States as a theory of performance, from John Money's earliest conception of gender as role playing to Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as a repeated “act”. The emphasis on the theatricality of gender in North-American theory helps explain why “drag” and “masquerade” occupy central theoretical stage, and why the figure of the drag queen has imposed itself as the icon of a gender theory constituted from the outset as queer, even before being recognized as such.

Drawing on the insights of leading scholars in the field of transgender studies, the Introduction provides extended consideration of critical and cultural frameworks essential for the project of rereading representations of transgender in twentieth-century literary fiction, including: transgender historiography; feminism and queer theory; LGBT activism and identity politics. More specifically, it examines the following topics: questions of historical representation in relation to historical fiction; the influence of genres of transgender life writing, including memoir and biography; the legacies of Second Wave feminist critiques of transsexuals; the impact of narratives of gender crossing on the interpretation of transgender lives; the relationship between transsexual narratives and intersex bodies; the role of colonial contexts and discourses of ‘race’ in the construction of gender normativity. It concludes with an overview of the book structure, providing summaries of each chapter.

This chapter investigates in detail the queerness of Far from Heaven. The film's queerness can be determined in four specific ways. Firstly, in its bringing to mainstream audiences an ‘independent’, ‘art-house’ or ‘underground’ attitude and approach to melodrama; secondly, in the supporting characters of Sybil (Viola Davis), Eleanor (Patricia Clarkson) and Mona (Celia Weston); thirdly, in its impact on contemporary audiences' understandings and readings of cinema history; and fourthly, in its relation to HIV/AIDS and public responses to the disease. Far from Heaven works as a work of retrospectatorship, or queer reading, on the films it directly quotes. In relation to HIV/AIDS, mourning took on a particular political valence for those affected by the disease. The subjects explored in this chapter provide models for how queer theory can open up Far from Heaven in ways that reveal its complexity, subtlety and significance.

This chapter introduces the reader to Spectrum—the LGBTQ youth drop-in center that is the focus of this ethnography. Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation it argues that this is not a universal story about LGBTQ youth but, rather, one about queer youth specifically. The term “queer” is used both to describe a way of being in the world that opposes normal, as well as to describe sexual conduct and behavior. It argues that the dominant discourse about LGBTQ youth as either at risk or resilient results in an incomplete understanding of what it means to be young and queer. The chapter includes a discussion of the challenges of doing sexualities research with youth and explains the theoretical significance of the sociology of sexualities and queer theory to the analysis. The introduction also addresses the methodological approach used to conduct the research, researcher reflexivity, and specific details about the use of language.

This chapter uses critical models deriving from Lacan's seminar XX, Encore, to suggest that some rather exceptional male characters in medieval texts (notably Galehaut in the Lancelot en prose) offer a queer paradigm of dying for love. Particular attention is paid to the reception of the story of Narcissus, including the most famous account in the Roman de la Rose, and to the psychoanalytic concept of the gaze.

This introductory explains the theme of this book, which is about French queer cinema. The book aims to document forms of contemporary queer representation through coverage of auteur film, pornography, and DIY digital video. It charts the emergence of a radical, DIY digital video culture, combining queer theory, transgender activism, and lesbian pornography. This is the first study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer-authored and queer-themed film and video.