The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies

Description

This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture. Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this volume foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media. This book traces the intellectual and political emergence of queer studies, addresses relevant critical debates in the field, provides an overview of queer approaches to genres, and explains how queer approaches have transformed understandings of key concepts in multiple fields.

Siobhan B. Somerville is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she chairs the Department of Gender and Women's Studies. She is author of Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Duke UP) and co-editor of several special issues, including "Queering the Middle: Race, Region, and Sexual Diasporas," co-edited with Martin Manalansan, Chantal Nadeau, and Richard T. Rodriguez for GLQ. Her research has also appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, Criticism, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. She is a past recipient of the Passing the Torch Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and the Wise-Susman Prize from the American Studies Association.

'The collection is both an invaluable and authoritative resource for scholars and an excellent teaching tool for use in the classroom.' A. J. Ramirez, Choice