Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading

Jeremy Chow is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University (USA). Chow’s scholarship interweaves literary studies, the environmental humanities and queer studies. Chow is the editor of Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023) and the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023). Declan Kavanagh is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent (UK). Kavanagh’s research covers eighteenth-century studies, queer studies, and disability studies. He is the author of Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the literary history of masculinities and queerness.

Queer reading can be casual or urgent, intimate or collective, playful or critical, personal or political – or all at once! In the depth and variety of its brilliant approaches to queer reading, The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading points us to the power and possibilities of the encounter between body, text and world, all the while keeping us attentive to the radical potential of reading itself.

• ContributorsForeword: Queer Reading Saves Lives, Ardel Haefele-ThomasIntroduction: On Queer Reading with Companions, Jeremy Chow and Declan KavanaghCompanion I. Transing Queer Readings1. The (Ongoing) History of an Evil Twin: Queer Theory and Transgender Studies, Desmond Huthwaite2. Flesh and Fluids: The Problem of Sex Determination in Eighteenth-Century Intersex Case Studies, Jolene Zigarovich3. Trans Reading in South Asia: Taxonomies of Loyalty in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Ānandamaṭh, M.A. Miller4. Deviant Sexualities, Dissident Citizenships: Queer Performances During El Paro, Javier Perez-Osorio5. Face, Frevo, and Faz que Vai (2015): Reading Queer and Trans of Colour Performance Between Cosmetic Practice and Stereoscopic Vision, Lawrence AlexanderCompanion II. Reading Queer Ecologies6. Queer Transnational Ecologies: Marrying a Tree, Sushmita Chatterjee & Banu Subramanian7. Hothouse Nature: Queer Hybridity in Nineteenth-Century France, Natalie Deam8. Encountering Queer Becomings in Elizabeth Bishop’s Animal-Human Hybrids, Karen Eckersley9. Erotic Kingdoms: Mating, Materiality and Meaning, Katie Goss & Rebecca Reynolds10. Chicken: A Queer, Visual Ecopoetics, Andil Gosine11. All Tree, All Shade: The Queer Apocalyptic Ecologies of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Jeremy ChowCompanion III. Queer Reading as Practice12. From Buckingham to Varble: Race and Queerness in Early Modern Performance and Appropriations, Anita Raychawdhuri13. Historians of the Closet: Queering the Past in Contemporary Lesbian, Gay, and Trans Fiction, Declan Kavanagh14. Sodomites and White Sticks: Close Encounters and Intersections with E.F.Benson and Edward Carpenter, Chris Mounsey15. Staying With the Sodomy at Prospect Cottage: Derek Jarman and Nature's Queer Negativity, declan wiffen16. Queering the History of the UK’s Anti-Trafficking Sector, Anna Forringer-Beal17. ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’: Queering Derrida and Cixous’ Aimance, Eleri Anona WatsonCompanion IV. Reading Queer Futures　18. Viral Antiretroviral Bodies: Queerness, Sex, Contagion, Joao Florêncio19. Listening to Queer Ghosts, Naoise Murphy20. Queering Feminism, Finn Mackay21. A/biding Time in the Heterocene, Bradley Harmon22. At the Crossroads: Queer Studies and Intersectionality Fatigue, Ben NicholsAfterword: Looking Askance: Reading History, Reading Queerness, GerShun AvilezBibliography