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The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies book cover

1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies

Edited By Melissa E. Sanchez Copyright 2025
    428 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    428 Pages 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge
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    Bringing together twenty-seven established and emerging scholars, The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies discusses the historical development, current state, future directions, and political stakes of queer literary studies as a field of research and pedagogy.

    This innovative collection offers new frameworks for studying and teaching literature, art, film, music, theory, and philosophy from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. The contributors consider the structural implication of gender and sexuality with race, class, gender, ability, colonialism, capital, empire, and relationships between human and non-human life and matter.

    The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies is a vital resource for scholars, students, and teachers working across a range of historical periods, critical methods, and objects of study. It offers a multitude of approaches to queer literary studies, revealing the field to be as vital, and as contested, as ever.

    Introduction: Why Queer Literary Studies (Still) Matter: The Politics of Reading from the Cold War to the War on Woke

    Melissa E. Sanchez

    PART I: Affect and Sensation

    1 Nothing but Color: Reading for Surface in a Colorblind Era

    Melanie Abeygunawardana

    2 Building a World: Sensation’s Queer Intimacies

    Amber Jamilla Musser

    3 Unfeelings that Matter: On Unfeeling as Queer Literary Heuristic

    Xine Yao

    PART II: Genealogies of Queer Studies

    4 Between Us: A (Brief) Poetics of Queer Historiography

    Peter Coviello

    5 Queer Arrangements

    Stephen Guy-Bray

    PART III: The Literariness of Queer Studies

    6 “Scrolls of Silver Snowy Sentences”: Fragments from an Intellectual Autobiography

    Tim Dean

    7 Sexology Otherwise, or the Literary Style of Reasoning

    Benjamin Kahan

    8 Bollywood Screen Queens: On Reading Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla’s Ode to Lata

    Ashvin R. Kini

    PART IV: Race, Materiality, Environmental Studies

    9 “Water Has a Perfect Memory”: Kinship on Soft Ground in The Yellow House

    Davy Knittle

    10 Deformalism, Decomposition, Rot: Deviant Aesthetics at the End of Legibility

    Kyla Wazana Tompkins

    PART V: The Politics of Queer Reading

    11 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora

    Lee Edelman

    12 Thoughts on Queer Adoption; or, All Queers Are Artists* (*and Other Queer Mythologies)

    Octavio R. González

    13 Reading for Political Form

    Mark Rifkin

    PART VI: Promiscuous Selfhoods

    14 Halos: Re-Sacralizing Queer Attachments

    Michael Cobb

    15 The Shape of U, or, Writing What I Am Not

    Madhavi Menon

    PART VII: Queer Maternities

    16 Marie Darrieusecq’s Queer (Maternal) Worldings

    Carla Freccero

    17 Queer Reading Protocols and the Question of Reproduction

    Matty Hemming

    PART VIII: Queer Pasts

    18 Is There a History of Queer Poetry?

    Stephanie Burt

    19 Devils Dance with Angels: John Rechy’s Male Hustler Novel at Mardi Gras

    Richard Rambuss

    20 Twerking with Milton by Quare Allusions in Lil Nas X’s “Montero”

    Reginald A. Wilburn

    PART IX: Relationality

    21 Ethnocuties: Notes on Queer Friendship

    Eng-Beng Lim

    22 Contagious Thought: Quarantine and Communion in Times of Plague

    Kathryn Schwarz

    PART X: Trans Studies, Queer Studies, and Racialized Gender

    23 Not the Same, But Almost, But Not—But Almost: Reflections on Black Trans Feminism, Black/Trans/Feminism, and Queer Theory

    Marquis Bey

    24 “As a Rond of Flesche Yschore”: The King of Tars, Race-Thinking, and Trans Childhood c. 1330

    Nat Rivkin

    PART XI: The Value of Critique

    25 Foucault’s Queer Critique

    David M. Halperin

    26 The Queer Overanalyzer

    Corey McEleney

    Biography

    Melissa E. Sanchez is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her most recent books are Shakespeare and Queer Theory (2019) and Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (2019).

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