Results by title
140 books match the query 'Queer theory' and 9 start with s
Sex Isn't Real
The Invention of an Incoherent BinaryBeans Velocci
Duke University Press, 2026
In Sex Isn’t Real, Beans Velocci traces the history of current high stakes attempts to define sex and to create a world devoid of trans life. Drawing on lab notes, family genealogies, medical case studies, and more, Velocci follows scientists and clinicians from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century and across five disciplines—zoology, eugenics, gynecology, statistical sexology, and transsexual medicine—as their ideas and practices created a definitional tangle. They demonstrate how the sorting of bodies into male and female persists not despite but because of sex’s incoherence: the defining features of these categories shift to contain various understandings of anatomy and physiology, theories of race, developments in research and medical methodologies, and bodies that cannot be accounted for in a binary framework. Exposing the endless work required to produce a world in which most people have a binary gender identity that neatly fits their binarily sexed body, Velocci demonstrates that it is not cis people who fit the categories; it’s the categories that flex to make them fit.
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Sex, or the Unbearable
Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman
Duke University Press, 2014
Sex, or the Unbearable is a dialogue between Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, two of our leading theorists of sexuality, politics, and culture. In juxtaposing sex and the unbearable they don't propose that sex is unbearable, only that it unleashes unbearable contradictions that we nonetheless struggle to bear. In Berlant and Edelman's exchange, those terms invoke disturbances produced in encounters with others, ourselves, and the world, disturbances that tap into threats induced by fears of loss or rupture as well as by our hopes for repair.
Through virtuoso interpretations of works of cinema, photography, critical theory, and literature, including Lydia Davis's story "Break It Down" (reprinted in full here), Berlant and Edelman explore what it means to live with negativity, with those divisions that may be irreparable. Together, they consider how such negativity affects politics, theory, and intimately felt encounters. But where their critical approaches differ, neither hesitates to voice disagreement. Their very discussion—punctuated with moments of frustration, misconstruction, anxiety, aggression, recognition, exhilaration, and inspiration—enacts both the difficulty and the potential of encounter, the subject of this unusual exchange between two eminent critics and close friends.
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Sexual Hegemony
Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World SystemChristopher Chitty
Duke University Press, 2020
In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.
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Sexuality, Disability, and Aging
Queer Temporalities of the PhallusJane Gallop
Duke University Press, 2019
Drawing on her own experiences with late-onset disability and its impact on her sex life, along with her expertise as a cultural critic, Jane Gallop explores how disability and aging work to undermine one's sense of self. She challenges common conceptions that equate the decline of bodily potential and ability with a permanent and irretrievable loss, arguing that such a loss can be both temporary and positively transformative. With Sexuality, Disability, and Aging, Gallop explores and celebrates how sexuality transforms and becomes more queer in the lives of the no longer young and the no longer able while at the same time demonstrating how disability can generate new forms of sexual fantasy and erotic possibility.
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Shakesqueer
A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of ShakespeareMadhavi Menon, ed.
Duke University Press, 2011
Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard’s plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that Shakespeare can be queered but also the many ways that Shakespeare can enrich queer theory. This innovative anthology reveals an early modern playwright insistently returning to questions of language, identity, and temporality, themes central to contemporary queer theory. Since many of the contributors do not study early modern literature, Shakesqueer takes queer theory back and brings Shakespeare forward, challenging the chronological confinement of queer theory to the last two hundred years. The book also challenges conceptual certainties that have narrowly equated queerness with homosexuality. Chasing all manner of stray desires through every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the contributors cross temporal, animal, theoretical, and sexual boundaries with abandon. Claiming adherence to no one school of thought, the essays consider The Winter’s Tale alongside network TV, Hamlet in relation to the death drive, King John as a history of queer theory, and Much Ado About Nothing in tune with a Sondheim musical. Together they expand the reach of queerness and queer critique across chronologies, methodologies, and bodies.
Contributors. Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates
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Shattering the Self in Early Modern English Verse
Gender, Sex, and Queerness Beyond the HumanGina Filo
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Reconfiguring our understanding of early modern English erotic and literary landscapes
Rejecting the ideals of stability and sexual mastery demanded of masculine subjects, early modern English poets threw the limits of bodies and selves into question to embrace erotic experiences of genderqueer and transspecies embodiment and affiliation. Through close readings of still-canonical and lesser-read writers including William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Thomas Traherne, Gina Filo shows how these experimental encounters at the limits of the human were inextricable parts of the early modern literary and sexual imaginaries.
In its exploration of nonnormative forms of erotic attachment and embodiment, Shattering the Self in Early Modern English Verse: Gender, Sex, and Queerness Beyond the Human contributes to the burgeoning fields of early modern trans and ecocritical studies while also drawing on contemporary queer theory. Filo neither seeks to naively recuperate a fantasized past nor cedes relationality, sociality, or generativity to the normative. Instead, she shows how the embrace of erotic possibility, flexible, unstable subjectivities, and querying of the limits of “the human” were core features of early modern poetics, reconfiguring our understanding of English literary history and queer relationality today.
Rejecting the ideals of stability and sexual mastery demanded of masculine subjects, early modern English poets threw the limits of bodies and selves into question to embrace erotic experiences of genderqueer and transspecies embodiment and affiliation. Through close readings of still-canonical and lesser-read writers including William Shakespeare, John Donne, and Thomas Traherne, Gina Filo shows how these experimental encounters at the limits of the human were inextricable parts of the early modern literary and sexual imaginaries.
In its exploration of nonnormative forms of erotic attachment and embodiment, Shattering the Self in Early Modern English Verse: Gender, Sex, and Queerness Beyond the Human contributes to the burgeoning fields of early modern trans and ecocritical studies while also drawing on contemporary queer theory. Filo neither seeks to naively recuperate a fantasized past nor cedes relationality, sociality, or generativity to the normative. Instead, she shows how the embrace of erotic possibility, flexible, unstable subjectivities, and querying of the limits of “the human” were core features of early modern poetics, reconfiguring our understanding of English literary history and queer relationality today.
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Shock and Yawn
Resisting Banal Terror Through Queer StorytellingMegan Sibbett
The Ohio State University Press, 2026
In Shock and Yawn, Megan Sibbett confronts state-sanctioned, mundane violence committed in the name of protection and argues that queer storytelling is an ideal avenue for recognizing, theorizing, and subverting it: Through queer stories, we have a direct window into the real-world ramifications of violence that purports to be for the public good. This violence, reinforced and normalized through surveillance campaigns, failure-to-protect laws, border policies, and government messaging, is obscured by both its banality and its benevolent veneer, in which children, or imagined children, are central to its logic of protection.
Building on queer theorists’ critiques of intimate and administrative violence, especially Gloria Anzaldúa’s “intimate terrorism,” Sibbett develops methodologies for conceptualizing and subverting violence aimed at queer, racialized, and gendered bodies in this era of surveillance and increasing authoritarianism. Sibbett addresses book bans, anti-trans legislation, idealized histories of westward expansion, and more, examining materials that include public service announcements, advertising, social media, news reports, poems, interviews, and novels. In so doing, she demonstrates the crucial role queer testimonies—and queer histories and queer futures—play in revealing systemic violence and illuminating the transformative potential of everyday resistance.
Building on queer theorists’ critiques of intimate and administrative violence, especially Gloria Anzaldúa’s “intimate terrorism,” Sibbett develops methodologies for conceptualizing and subverting violence aimed at queer, racialized, and gendered bodies in this era of surveillance and increasing authoritarianism. Sibbett addresses book bans, anti-trans legislation, idealized histories of westward expansion, and more, examining materials that include public service announcements, advertising, social media, news reports, poems, interviews, and novels. In so doing, she demonstrates the crucial role queer testimonies—and queer histories and queer futures—play in revealing systemic violence and illuminating the transformative potential of everyday resistance.
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Sodomy's Solicitations
A Right to QueernessJoseph J. Fischel
Temple University Press, 2025
Joseph Fischel’s provocative book, Sodomy’s Solicitations, builds out a politics of sexual justice that challenges state sex exceptionalism. By tracing several twenty-first century contestations around Louisiana anti-sodomy laws, Fischel examines patterns and practices of sexual injustice that are too easily eclipsed by our collective focus on marginalized identities.
The political stories narrated in Sodomy’s Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problems—and political possibilities. Fischel indicts U.S. sex offender regulatory regimes as state-sponsored sexual violence; offers a qualified defense for sexual expression in public; and argues that animal sexual abuse laws, with their exemptions for industrial agricultural practices, authorize the suffering they were enacted to deter. He also makes the case that laws criminalizing the exchange of sex for money are unconstitutional, and proposes that the best way to protect trans and queer children might just be to enfranchise them.
Sodomy’s Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formations—a right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism.
In the series Sexuality Studies
The political stories narrated in Sodomy’s Solicitations are undoubtedly stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, but they are also stories of other political problems—and political possibilities. Fischel indicts U.S. sex offender regulatory regimes as state-sponsored sexual violence; offers a qualified defense for sexual expression in public; and argues that animal sexual abuse laws, with their exemptions for industrial agricultural practices, authorize the suffering they were enacted to deter. He also makes the case that laws criminalizing the exchange of sex for money are unconstitutional, and proposes that the best way to protect trans and queer children might just be to enfranchise them.
Sodomy’s Solicitations champions a right to queerness across rather than within identity formations—a right to relatively unpoliced gender, sexual, and intimate pluralism.
In the series Sexuality Studies
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Survival of a Perverse Nation
Morality and Queer Possibility in ArmeniaTamar R. Shirinian
Duke University Press, 2024
In Survival of a Perverse Nation, Tamar R. Shirinian traces two widespread rhetorics of perversion—sexual and moral—in postsocialist Armenia, showing how they are tied to anxieties about the nation’s survival. In her fieldwork with Armenians, Shirinian found that right-wing nationalists’ focus on sexual perversion centers the figure of the homosexual, while questions of moral perversion surround oligarchs and other members of the political-economic elite. While the homosexual is seen as non- or improperly reproductive, the oligarch’s moral deviations from the caring and paternalistic expectations associated with national leadership also endanger Armenia’s survival. Shirinian shows how both figures threaten the nation’s proper social reproduction, a source of great anxiety for a nation whose primary point of identity is surviving genocide. In the existential threat posed by these forms of perversion Shirinian finds paths where nonsurvival might mean the creation of futures that are queerer and more just. Detailing how the language of perversion offers trenchant critiques of capitalism as a perversion of life, Shirinian presents a new queer theory of political economy.
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