Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

This chapter addresses the connections between queer theory and the history of sexuality. The chapter introduces the origins and development of queer theory as an approach that perceives sexuality and gender as constructed and rejects the notion of fixed and stable identities. The chapter addresses queer theory’s adaptation to different geographical locations and questions related to the translation of the term “queer” from one language to another. It continues with discussing the connections and tensions between queer theory and the history of sexuality, and addresses queer perspectives on the archive and the practice of oral history as topics on which the queer theoretical developments have particular relevance for historians. The chapter focuses on two aspects in queer theory, namely the continuities and ruptures in history as well as queer approaches to temporality. The chapter closes with a short reflection on the future possibilities of utilizing queer theory for studies on the history of sexuality. The chapter argues that while queer theory and contemporary research on the history of sexuality already converge in essential points, such as understanding sexuality as socially constructed and the distrust of ahistorical identities, the relationship between these two still holds unexplored opportunities for research.

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

Together with Chapter 1, this chapter helps contextualize the closer readings and case studies that follow by providing an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it emerged over the past several decades. It also discusses some of the key features of Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading, including shame, materiality, queer futures, and the oscillation between paranoid and reparative positions.

The final chapter takes the researched practitioner to some next steps along their leadership journey. Numerous topics concerning social justice leadership are introduced and explored at an entry level. The intersectionality of various theories and concepts are presented with the goal of personal and professional growth for each individual leader.

The gender of metal and the relationships between the music, misogyny and women have long raised eyebrows amongst popular commentators and scholars. Yet many metal fans claim that the genre is at heart an inclusive, even equal one, ready to welcome all fans regardless of gender, race and sexuality. This chapter gives an overview of thinking about the gendered meanings of metal, its origins in the music of Black blues women, the constraints on women’s music-making, the 1980s moral panic around metal and sexual violence, the gendering and queering of genre, women’s empowerment in metal and metal as a vehicle for feminist fury. I argue that placing women’s metal stories at the centre of our focus reveals different aspects of metal and its culture, and opportunities for understanding metal’s relationship with gender. Claims to inclusivity are exaggerated because metal exists in a sexist world and is not immune to societal discourses. The myth of equality is problematic because it impedes progression towards better inclusion. And yet metal provides opportunities for joy, power and for challenging misogyny for women, opportunities which are beginning to be grasped.

Chapter Three compares the representation of vulnerable transient youth in the work of Leon Ray Livingston, whose road name was ‘A-No.1’, and the author Jack London. The chapter argues that both writers engage with the frequent abuse and exploitation of young boys, known as ‘punks’ or ‘gay-cats’, on the road. A-No.1’s semi-autobiographical writings are more explicit, obsessively reproducing the same narrative in which the author (or his fictional stand-in) saves a punk from the clutches of an older hobo, or ‘jocker’. For London, who was at the very least what today would be called bi-curious, the questions of transient sexuality and abuse were more fraught. He acknowledges the existence of sexually-vulnerable youths in early stories, written before he became a successful author. However, in his well-known work The Road (1907) he goes to great lengths to persuade his audience that he was never a gay-cat. The text positions London as a young man well ahead of his time, a claim that many critics have taken at face value. Yet paradoxically the text’s narrator seeks out the approval and protection of older men, including one who seems to expect sexual favours in return.

This chapter considers the entanglements between queerness and diaspora. It asks how the vital matter of desire – who we love and how – is roused by the traversing of borders. In particular, it considers the gestures of compliance and knowing, an aesthetic knowledge no less, that queer asylees must evince to be found credible enough to receive political shelter and hospitality in the West. The border regime’s regulations of refugee passage on the basis of ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ ultimately reveals a host of tendencies, definitions and differentiations that cleave our efforts to truly understand queerness as a thwarting of sexual rigidities and an embrace of play. The chapter ultimately makes the case that the genre of queer diasporic literature – a genre specifically concerned with sexual and national border crossings – attends to the caprice of non-normative desire.

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.

David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.

This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpeice, The Twyborn Affair (1979).