Critical Introduction to Queer Theory

Nikki Sullivan currently holds a leadership role in LGBTIQA+ and HIV+ health in Adelaide, Australia. She is the co-author of Queering the Museum (with Craig Middleton, 2020), Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (with Lisa Downing and Iain Morland, 2014), author of Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Sexuality, Ethics and Pleasure (2001), co-editor of Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (with Samantha Murray, 2009) and author of a large number of journal articles and book chapters. Nikki was the co-founding editor (with Samantha Murray) of the Somatechnics journal. Katrina Jaworski is an Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at Adelaide University, Australia. Her research focuses on the agency of suicide, with attention to gender, sexuality, relational ethics and poetry. Sometimes she also researches and writes on Rwandan genocide, the philosophy of dying bodies, trauma and the cultural politics of thinking. Alongside numerous articles and book chapters, to date she has sole-authored The Gender of Suicide (2016) and co-edited Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Dissertations (2015), Rethinking Madness: Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Reflections (2020) and Reframing Suicide: The Development of Critical Suicide Studies (2024). She has forthcoming book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide (2026) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Death (2026). Abraham Weil is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Trained in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona (PhD) and Rutgers University (MA), Weil’s research cultivates relations between politics, life and environment, asking how bodies are entangled in ecological and discursive worlds that redistribute vulnerability, endurance and radically uneven life chances across scales. His work engages questions of racialization, speciation and sexual difference through Black feminist theory, trans studies, continental philosophy, critical animal studies, ecology and aesthetics. He is the co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025).Kelly Sharron is an Assistant Professor in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Sharron completed her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in 2019. Her research broadly considers the multiple state tactics at play in police brutality including the extension of a feminist ethic of care in producing violent effects and Marxist feminisms in reproductive labour and care work. Sharron’s work has been published in Somatechnics, TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly, and Abolition Journal. She is the co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025).

The long-awaited second edition to A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory has been published! This indispensable book gives readers a way to navigate the unruly field of queer theory. Scholars, activists and those interested in disability, race, sex, death, animals and trans studies will all find this book essential reading.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: A Reintroduction to Queer Theory1. The Social Construction of ‘Homosexuality’: From Problem to Pride2. Queer: A Question of Being or a Question of Doing?3. Performance, Performativity, Parody and Politics4. Queering Race5. Queering/Cripping Dis/ability6. Queer Necropolitics7. 'We Pull Up': Queer Kinship as a Method for Being Yourself8. Animal Sex and Species Boundaries9. Queering Straight Sex10. The Evil Twin: Trans Life and StudyBibliographyIndex