Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism

Description

Indifference to Difference demonstrates that our desires are not ours to be owned; they are indifferent to our differences. This polemical book shows that if we turn to a kind of universalism that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire, then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity.

Madhavi Menon is professor of English at Ashoka University. She is the author of Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama; Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film; and editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

"Madhavi Menon has written an exhilarating manifesto. The tough-minded courage of Menon's intervention is one of this book's great strengths; the fierce intelligence that shapes her arguments is another. Indifference to Difference pursues a supple, peripatetic, and deeply principled methodology, informed by a nuanced theoretical acumen that declares itself at every turn."-Kathryn Schwarz, Vanderbilt University