Building on emergent models of materiality in feminist and queer theory, this interdisciplinary series explores the “embodiment” of gender identity within national and global frameworks of deviance which challenge hetero- and homonormative constructions of the body and the policing of bodies deemed “inferior” or “abnormal”. The scope of the series is broad, but is informed by Patricia Clough’s “affective turn” in contemporary literary and culture studies, that is, a movement that registers the crucial importance of articulating embodied modes of cognition and delineating different relations of the individual and the social.

Titles in the series will respond to, and offer alternative readings of, hetero- and homonormativity across genres and in all its body-shaming manifestations, including misogyny, homophobia, technology and the displacement of the body, xenophobia’s derogation of ‘alien’ bodies, destruction of the natural environment, military conquest, mass incarceration, colonialism, racism, sexual exploitation, and religious orthodoxy. The series aims for specialist and non-specialist audiences, and its interdisciplinary focus appeals to scholars in literary studies, cultural studies, film studies, history, anthropology, and other fields.

Each title in the series will offer space for a queer reading of a particular issue and/or historical period. Individual topics to be explored may include: sex workers, the commodification of bodies in the media, cultural differences in approaches to sex and gender, queer performance art, freakdom and disability, trauma and the queerness of melancholy and loss, elder sex, trans-bodies and the medical profession, literary accounts of non-normativity, and many others.

The scope of the series will be global and transnational. Its time frame is broad, ranging from the medieval period through modernity.

Inquiries and proposals may be sent to: Becca Bostock, Associate Editor.

About the Series Editor

Scott Herring (he/him)is Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. His primary research focuses on the overlap between LGBTQ studies and American literary and cultural studies, with particular interest in critical rural/regional studies, critical age studies, and material culture studies. He is the author of Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life (Columbia University Press, 2022); The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010), winner of a Lambda Literary Award; and Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

He is also co-editor, with Lee Wallace, of Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment (Duke University Press, 2021) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature (2015; Choice Outstanding Academic Title) as well as a scholarly edition of Autobiography of an Androgyne (Rutgers University Press, 2008). He was a 2019–2020 NEH Fellow.