The contributors to Left of Queer offer a detailed examination of queerness and its nearly three-decade academic institutionalization. They interrogate contemporary material conditions that create socially and politically acceptable queer subjects and identities; trace the development of queer studies as a brand of US area studies predicated on American culture and exceptionalism; and bring together queer theory and Marxism to reject claims that the two fields are incompatible. In examining these themes, the contributors explore how emergent debates in three key areas--debility, indigeneity, and trans--connect queer studies to a host of urgent sociopolitical issues. Taking a position that is politically left of the current academic and political mainstreaming of queerness, the essays in this issue examine what is left of queer--what remains outside of the political, economic, and cultural mandates of the state and the liberal individual as its prized subject. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Aren Z. Aizura, Paul Amar, Toby Beauchamp, Marquis Bey, Jodi A. Byrd, Christina Crosby, Aniruddha Dutta, Treva Ellison, Fatima El-Tayeb, David L. Eng, Jules Gill-Peterson, Cristina B. Hanhardt, Kwame Holmes, Janet R. Jakobsen, Eng-Beng Lim, Petrus Liu, Tavia Nyong'o, Jasbir K. Puar, Sherene Seikaly, Eliza Steinbock

Most but not all of them gay, these writers disagree about many things, but they share a common frustration with ideologically out-of-touch gay-activist leaders and "queer studies" theorists, and a dismay with a puerile and counterproductive "queer" image that represents neither the lives nor the goals of most gay people.

Introduction : beginning with Stigma -- The Stigma archive -- Just watching -- A sociological periplum -- Doing being deviant -- Afterword : the politics of stigma.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

DIVProminent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films./div

In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.

Prominent participants in the development of queer theory explore the field in relation to their own intellectual itineraries, reflecting on its accomplishments, limitations, and critical potential.