The SAGE Handbook of Queer Studies

The Sage Handbook of Queer Studies: Volume Two, Developments, Challenges, and Futures turns to the most urgent contemporary shifts shaping queer scholarship and queer life. Building on the foundations established in Volume One, this volume engages directly with the ways Queer Studies has been pushed, intellectually and politically, by more thorough attention to ethnicity, race, and on-going legacies of colonialism, and by growing recognition of how global power relations shape the production of knowledge about sexuality. It deepens the handbook’s transdisciplinary ambition by examining how queer identities and experiences are structured not only by culture and representation, but by governance, political struggle, institutional power, and global inequality.

Attuned to the changing political landscape, Volume Two explores the benefits and complications that have come with the political mainstreaming of queer existence and analysis. It examines what is gained when queer issues become more visible in public life and institutional settings, while also confronting the ways this visibility can produce new vulnerabilities, exclusions, and forms of expendability, particularly in a period marked by renewed authoritarianism and a widening global divide over LGBTQ+ rights. The volume reflects critically on how queer studies can remain reflexive about its own histories and locations, resisting assumptions that treat Western trajectories as universal models for sexual modernity, rights expansion, or scholarly development.

Concluding with the issues likely to shape the future of Queer Studies, The Sage Handbook of Queer Studies Volume Two positions the field at a pivotal moment: one in which both the possibilities and the limits of social change are increasingly visible, and in which the need for intersectional, decolonial, and globally aware scholarship is more pressing than ever. Together with Volume One, it demonstrates the full range of theoretical frameworks and empirical approaches that define Queer Studies and insists on the necessity of interdisciplinary thinking to understand sexualities in a rapidly changing world. This volume is a comprehensive resource for researchers to understand the challenges and futures of Queer Studies.

Part One: Seeing the Importance of Race through Intersectional and Postcolonial Impacts

Part Two: Queer Studies and Socio-Political Issues

Part Three: Future Challenges in Queer Studies