Queer Festivals

Konstantinos Eleftheriadis is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre d'études des mouvements sociaux (CEMS-IMM) at the EHESS-Paris. He teaches sociology at SciencesPo-Paris and at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

"Among the many merits of this rich study is also its great readability, including to nonspecialists of social movement sociology, queer theory, or gender and sexuality studies. [...] Eleftheriadis’s Queer Festivals provides an innovative perspective on the realities of the oft-evoked yet insufficiently known queer movement, which is too frequently conflated with queer theory—while "queer" increasingly tends to be loosely applied to characterize any LGBT movements and festivals. One of the book’s theoretical ambitions is indeed to clarify the link between queer festivals and queer theory. This goal is successfully reached, as is that of accounting for the interplay between discourses and practices in the formation of a festival’s publics and the performance of its identity work."- Guillaume Marche, Journal of Festive Studies 3 (2021)

• 1. Introduction: Queer Festivals and the Anti-Identity Paradox: Transnational collective identities beyond the state 2. The origins of queer festivals in Europe 3. Organizing the queer space: Squats, Horizontality and Do-It-Yourself 4. What is 'queer' about queer festivals?: Negotiating Identity and Autonomy 5. 'Not yet queer enough': Constructing Identity through culture 6. Queering Transnationalism 7. Anti-identity, Politics and the State: Queer Challenges and Future Directions, Appendix, References, Index