Queer Interventions Book Series

RATIONALE FOR QUEER INTERVENTIONS
Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish innovative, experimental and theoretically-engaged work in the burgeoning field of queer studies. This series offers work which considers the term 'queer'; as a positionality or umbrella descriptor, theoretical or political methodology, and ontology or area of study. In this series we are interested in research which interrogates the categorisation and politicisation of desires so that they become imprinted on the bodies of individuals as what are then assumed to be easily readable identities. Thus, we invite theoretical efforts which employ queer theory as an analytical tool to point to the instability, elasticity, borders and limits of identity categories, while making visible, undermining and subverting (even if only conceptually) the system of compulsory heterosexuality. We are not interested in transgression or subversion for their own sakes, but ask potential authors to think practically about the political and ethical implications of challenging and attempting to deconstruct normative systems. The Queer Interventions series explores how a range of critical apparatuses (e.g. feminism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, critical race theory, disability studies/crip theory and gerontology) might be useful for examining sexualities and other identitarian systems governing race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, (dis-)ability and age. We call for a greater contextualisation of queer theorising and more self-reflexivity as authors capture and reflect upon the current state of the field, while also aiming to transform and impact upon it in a politically-engaged fashion. We welcome work that seriously discusses methodological and hermeneutical issues; books which are meta-theoretical or ruminate upon queer theory as an investigative lens rather than a totalising system. Therefore we seek out research which challenges theoretical apparatuses and is attentive to queer theory's shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. The Queer Interventions series aims to promote and maintain high scholarly standards of research and theorising, while encouraging independence, creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and recreate it as something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen.

BOOKS FORTHCOMING
The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory edited by Noreen Giffney & Michael O'Rourke (2008).

Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in Eighteenth-Century England edited by Caroline Gonda and John Beynon.

Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies edited by Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray.

Queer Movie Medievalisms, edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh.

Critical Intersex edited by Morgan Holmes.

Description:
Historical, activist and theoretical work on human intersexuality has reached a point where, in order to mature, it needs to critique its own dominant paradigms. Critical Intersex challenges the primarily North American, and liberal humanist paradigm of intersex identity politics and clinical practices by explicitly adopting ‘queer interventions’—mobile and fluid practices and theories that turn the dispassionate gaze of scientificity back on itself, and also turn the committed but hegemonised identity politic of liberal activism enough to see its own limits.

Critical Intersex draws together a collection of essays from internationally diverse authors and provides a view of intersex studies, rights discourses and activism well beyond the scope of the North American focus that has prevailed since the early 1990s. Because the scholarship represented in the collection is interdisciplinary, the essays are able to examine topics as diverse as the utility of queer theology for the development of intersex as a legitimate form of embodied difference, the limits of legal recognitions of intersex subjectivity in German law, children's rights in Argentina, the analysis of problematic arguments in intersex activism, an epistemological etiology of troubling conclusions in the collaborative cooperation of anthropology and medicine, and a critical assessment of how self-knowledge may be cast variously as a burden and as a duty in the experiences of women with androgen insensitivity. The essays also give voice to emerging scholarship from regions as diverse as Holland, the UK, Germany, Spain, Brazil and Argentina.

Because some of the essays are highly theoretical while others draw deeply on empirical methods, Critical Intersex will appeal to audiences seeking material from either or both social science and humanities orientations to the questions raised in intersex studies.

Editor:
Morgan Holmes is Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada and has been an active lobbyist for and intellectual supporter of intersex rights since 1993. She is the author of Intersex: A Perilous Difference (Susquehanna University Press, 2007) and has published widely on the subject in journals and collections of essays.

Jewish/Christian/Queer : Crossroads and Identities edited by Frederick S. Roden.

Description:
This collection of essays posits the intersection of the Jewish and Christian as a queer space. Prohibitions against the crossroads of Judaism and Christianity may challenge the stability of their meeting place; yet bodies and discourse transgress the contradiction of their mutually exclusive paradigms, querying essentialist claims to the fixedness of either identities or theologies.

The volume seeks to explore the Jewish/Christian intersection through a variety of manifestations, including the queerness of same-sex desire within both Judaism and Christianity and how such queerness is realised in relation to both lived experience and dogma. It moves from Talmud to medieval Christian philosophy and literature; architectural history to Victorian sexology and culture; Freud to lesbian modernism; postmodern theory to contemporary gay literature; civil law to current religious apologetics for homosexuality. Jewish/Christian/Queer extends work in queer theory and religious studies by broadening the place of the non-sexual in the queer as well as the inflections of the queer in the religious.

Contributors include Daniel Boyarin, Eugene Rogers, Steven Kruger, Chris Mounsey, Steven Lapidus, Alan Lewis, Goran Stanivukovic, Richard Dellamora, Caroline Gonda, Michael O'Rourke, Frederick Roden, and Ruth Sternglantz.

Editor:
Frederick S. Roden is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, editor of Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies and co-editor of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives.

The series editors are also currently working with authors and editors on a range of other books for the series.

PROPOSING A BOOK FOR THE SERIES

Anyone who is interested in proposing a monograph or collection of essays for the series should contact the series editors by e-mail in the first instance to discuss their project: noreen.giffney@gmail.com and tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com

All proposals must include:

* a detailed rationale (500-1,000 words),

* chapter summaries (500 words per chapter),

* a discussion of how the proposed book fits into the Queer Interventions series (500 words),

* a completed Ashgate author's questionnaire (available at www.ashgate.com),

* biographical statements for any contributors to collections of essays, and full CVs for editors or authors of monographs,

* authors proposing monographs must also send two sample chapters (including preferably the introduction if it is complete).
* two hard copies of the proposal sent to the series editors.

BOOKS PUBLISHED

Sally R. Munt's Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (2007).

Description:

Why is shame so central to our identity and to our culture? What is its role in stigmatising subcultures such as the Irish, the queer or the underclass? Can shame be understood as a productive force?

In this lucid and passionately argued book Sally R. Munt explores the vicissitudes of shame across a range of texts, cultural milieux, historical locations and geographical spaces, from eighteenth century Irish politics to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, from contemporary US academia to the aesthetics of Tracey Emin. She finds that the dynamics of shame are consistent across cultures and historical periods and that patterns of shame are disturbingly long-lived. But she also reveals shame as an affective emotion, engendering attachments between bodies and between subjects - queer attachments. Above all, she celebrates the extraordinary human ability to turn shame into joy: the party after the fall.

Queer Attachments is an interdisciplinary synthesis of cultural politics, emotions theory and narrative that challenges us to think about the queerly creative proclivities of shame.

Endorsements:

'Queer Attachments affords all the benefit of Sally Munt’s mobile mind and lucid, eloquent writing. But the best thing is how finely she gets into the very guts of the experience of shame - and making space there to move around and explore, reveals immense complexity as well as a profound source of motivation'. Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, USA.

'Edgy and provocative, Queer Attachments tackles the contagious dynamics of gay shame, exploring not only its power to abject and deform, but to produce unpredicted, self-affirming forms of sociality. Passionately argued and sweeping in scope, its analysis of the way shame informs and links queer, Irish and working class identities shows what’s at stake in moving beyond gay pride'. Professor Valerie Traub, University of Michigan USA.

Author Biography:
Sally R. Munt is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She has published extensively in cultural studies and is the author or editor of seven previous books including Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (1998) and (as editor) Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (2000). She has has given numerous keynote speeches and invited lectures in Europe and the US.

To Download:
The full table of contents, introduction and index are available to download from www.ashgate.com

Queering the Non/Human edited by Noreen Giffney & Myra J. Hird (2008).

Discplines:
Queer Theory/ Cultural Studies/ Science Studies/ Posthumanism/ Sociology/ Critical Theory/ Gender Studies/ Sexuality Studies

Description:

What might it mean to queer the Human? By extension, how is the Human employed within queer theory? This book invites a reconsideration of the way we think about queer theory, the category of the Human and the act of queering itself. This interdisciplinary collection of essays gathers together work by international pioneering scholars in queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies and science studies who have written on topics as diverse as Christ, antichrist, dogs, starfish, werewolves, vampires, murderous dolls, cartoons, corpses, bacteria, nanoengineering, biomimesis, the incest taboo, the death drive and the ‘queer’ in queer theory. Contributors include Robert Azzarello, Karen Barad, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Noreen Giffney, Judith Halberstam, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Myra J. Hird, Karalyn Kendall, Vicki Kirby, Alice Kuzniar, Patricia MacCormack, Robert Mills, Luciana Parisi and Erin Runions.

Endorsements:

'Breathtaking in its interdisciplinarity and breadth, Queering the Non/Human is essential reading for anyone interested in literary and cultural studies, queer theory, science studies, gender and sexuality .... in short for anyone who is a serious thinker. I admire this volume not just for its insight but for its sheer panache: the essays are at once serious arguments and great fun to read'. Professor Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University, USA.

'Finally, a collection that truly captures the spirit of critique and the process of wonder that queer theory promises yet too often fails to deliver. Queering the Non/Human is an indispensable interdisciplinary text for anyone and everyone who has ever contemplated (or even presumed) what it means to be human'. Professor Nikki Sullivan, Macquarie University, Australia.

Editors:

Noreen Giffney is a postdoctoral fellow in women’s studies at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the co-editor of Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies and The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, and is the author of a book on queer theory, which is forthcoming in Berg’s ‘The Key Concepts’ series.

Myra J. Hird is Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the Sociology Department, Queen’s University, Canada. She is the author of The Science of Social Relating (forthcoming), Sociology of Science (forthcoming), Sex, Gender and Science and Engendering Violence, as well as articles in journals such as Signs, Feminism & Psychology, Body & Society and Australian Feminist Studies.

Cover Image:

Karl Grimes, Axolotl, from the series Future Nature

Transparency in light box, original in colour, 48 x 72 in., 2003

Table of Contents:
Michael O'Rourke, 'Preface: The Open' [Queer Interventions: Series Editors' Preface]

Donna J. Haraway, 'Foreword: Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding'

Noreen Giffney & Myra J. Hird, 'Queering the Non/Human'
Claire Colebrook, 'How Queer Can You Go? Theory, Normality and Normativity'
Vicki Kirby, 'Confounding the "Human": Incestuous Beginnings'
Noreen Giffney, 'Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human'
Erin Runions, 'Queering the Beast: The Antichrists' Gay Wedding'
Robert Mills, 'Queering the Un/Godly: Christ's Humanities and Medieval Sexualities'
Robert Azzarello, 'Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker's Dracula'

Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, 'The Werewolf as Queer, the Queer as Werewolf, and Queer Werewolves'
Karalyn Kendall, 'The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Coevolution'

Alice A. Kuzniar, '"I Married My Dog": On Queer Canine Literature'

Myra J. Hird, 'Animal Trans'
Eva Hayward, 'Lessons from a Starfish'

Judith Halberstam, 'Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Queer Non-Human'

Luciana Parisi, 'The Nanoengineering of Desire'

Karen Barad, 'Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering'

Patricia MacCormack, 'Necrosexuality'

Jeffrey J. Cohen, 'Afterword: An Unfinished Conversation about Glowing Green Bunnies'

Patricia MacCormack's Cinesexuality (2008).

Cinesexuality explores the queerness of cinema spectatorship. The central premise is that cinema spectatorship represents a unique encounter of desire, pleasure and perversion beyond dialectics of subject/object and image/meaning. This extraordinary relationship is what the author terms 'cinesexuality' -- a libinal mix that encompasses each event of cinema spectatorship beyond gender, hetero- or homosexuality, encouraging all spectators to challenge traditional notions of what elicits pleasure and constitutes desiring subjectivity.

The author argues that cinema images are not gendered forms of reflective of possible objects of desire, yet all spectators take pleasure from film, and are therefore queer or queered. Additionally film seduces through images, ideas and aspects which spectators may find perverse or non-pleasurable outside of cinema, so concepts of what constitutes desire and pleasure are similarly queered.

Through a variety of cinematic examples, including abstract film, extreme films and films which offer examples of perverse sexuality and corporeal reconfiguration. Cinesexuality will encourage a radical shift to spectatorship as itself inherently queer beyond what is watched and who watches. Film as its own form of philosophy invokes spectatorship thought as an ethics of desire. Original, exciting and theoretically sophisticated -- focusing on Continental Philosophy, particularly Deleuze, Guattari, Blanchot, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray and Serres -- this book will be of interest to scholars and students of queer and feminist studies, film and cultural studies, media and communication, post-structural theory and contemporary philosophical thought.

Endorsements:

‘In film and cultural theory, we have lived too long in the age of signification and identification. In her brilliant and challenging book, Cinesexuality, Patricia MacCormack brings us into the era of intensity and becoming. Offering an Anti-Oedipus for image theory, MacCormack has produced a completely original approach to spectatorship as a corporeal and material distribution of desire beyond dialectics. For many readers, this will be an intensely liberating book’. Professor D.N. Rodowick, Harvard University, USA

’MacCormack is the ultimate third millennium sexual radical: she subverts discussions about the gender of the gaze with bold insights into the ethics and the erotics of contemporary spectatorship. She swaps linguistic regimes of signification for corporeal perspectives, semiotics for affect, identifications for hybrid contagions and exemplary cases for productive anomalies. This is a wickedly clever trans-disciplinary analysis of who we are in the process of becoming’. Professor Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Author Biography:
Patricia MacCormack is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Film at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She has published extensively in the areas of the visceral dimension of cinema, corporeality, the post-human, queer theory, ethics and continental philosophy. Not shy of controversy, MacCormack's work fearlessly exposes the darker side of desire. She is well known for her essays on sexual perversion, sadism, masochism, body modification, necrophilia, and polysexuality, which have appeared in New Formations, Body and Society, and Theory, Culture and Society. She is the editor (with Ian Buchanan) of Schizoanalysis and Cinema (Continuum, 2008).

TO BE PUBLISHED SHORTLY
Richard C. Cante's Gay Men and the Form(s) of Contemporary U.S. Culture (2009).

Description:
This book is about the literal and figurative place(s) of what the author calls 'gay historical ambivalence' in post 1960s US cultural forms and formations.

The author closely and critically interrogates a variety of forms through which this ambivalence presents itself in popular and everyday culture, including: gay male video bars; jokes about AIDS; landmark post-social problem films from Philadelphia to Brokeback Mountain; all-male pornography across the transition from film to video to the internet, and from its early 1970s nationalisms through its rigorous globalization since the 1990s; and questions encircling the notion of a gay face.

Products of the present are approached as forms of/from the past when the past is seen, through the presence of gay historical ambivalence, as partially commodifiable form and content. The book attempts to contribute to the development of methods for approaching the present as an archive of the past, and the past as an archive of the present, while accounting for details of the gay male US case over the past 40 or so years.

Demonstrating a series of approaches to seriously rethinking commitments to historical narrative in relation to contemporary sexual cultures, its ultimate goal is the invention of updated modes through which contemporary cultural forms in general can be approached as material and immaterial cultural products wherever, whenever and however gay men might be concerned.

Author Biography:
Richard C. Cante is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a founding core faculty member of UNC-CH's Interdisciplinary Program in Sexuality Studies. He teaches courses in film and media studies, cultural studies, critical theory and sexuality studies.