This issue features a group of leading theorists from multiple disciplines who decenter the human in queer theory, exploring what it means to treat "the human" as simply one of many elements in a queer critical assemblage. Contributors examine the queer dimensions of recent moves to think apart from or beyond the human in affect theory, disability studies, critical race theory, animal studies, science studies, ecocriticism, and other new materialisms. Essay topics include race, fabulation, and ecology; parasitology, humans, and mosquitoes; the racialization of advocacy for pit bulls; and queer kinship in Korean films when humans become indistinguishable from weapons. The contributors argue that a nonhuman critical turn in queer theory can and should refocus the field's founding attention to social structures of dehumanization and oppression. They find new critical energies that allow considerations of justice to operate alongside and through their questioning of the human-nonhuman boundary. Mel Y. Chen, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, also published by Duke University Press. Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America and editor, with Ivy G. Wilson, of Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Karen Barad, Jayna Brown, Mel Y. Chen, Jack Halberstam, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra Hird, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Eileen Joy, Eunjung Kim, Dana Luciano, Uri McMillan, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong'o, ​Jasbir K. Puar, Susan Stryker, Kimberly Tallbear, Jeanne Vaccaro, Harlan Weaver, Jami Weinstein

The Routledge Handbook of Queer Rhetoric maps the ongoing becoming of queer rhetoric in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, offering a dynamic overview of the history of and scholarly research in this field. The handbook features rhetorical scholarship that explicitly uses and extends insights from work in queer and trans theories to understand and critique intersections of rhetoric, gender, class, and sexuality. More important, chapters also attend to the intersections of constructs of queerness with race, class, ability, and neurodiversity. In so doing, the book acknowledges the many debts contemporary queer theory has to work by scholars of color, feminists, and activists, inside and outside the academy. The first book of its kind, the handbook traces and documents the emergence of this subfield within rhetorical studies while also pointing the way toward new lines of inquiry, new trajectories in scholarship, and new modalities and methods of analysis, critique, intervention, and speculation. This handbook is an invaluable resource for scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students studying rhetoric, communication, cultural studies, and queer studies.

Pursuing the discursive or material effects of relational queerness, this book reflects on how objects can illuminate, affect, and animate queer modes of being. In the early 1990s the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “multiply transitive . . . relational and strange,” rather than a fixed identity. In spite of this, much of the queer theoretical scholarship of the last three decades has used queer as a synonym for anti-normative sexual identities. The contributions to this volume return to the idea of transitivity, exploring what happens when queer is thought of as a turning toward or turning away from a diverse range of objects, including bodily waste; frozen cats; archival ephemera; the writing of Virginia Woolf; the Pop art of Ray Johnson; the podcast S-Town; and Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts. Relevant to those studying queer theory, this book will also be of wider interest to those researching identity and the way in which it is represented in a variety of artistic disciplines. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Queering Philosophy provides a critical introduction to and engagement with current conversations and emerging themes at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy. Much more than a summary of recent work, this book presents an intersectional, thematic approach that highlights scholarship at the cutting edge of queer, feminist, disability, and critical race theories, defines the parameters of contemporary queer philosophy, and argues that a queer philosophy must aim to queer philosophy. Queering Philosophy explores the possibility of doing philosophy otherwise. In doing so, the book explores feminist, critical race, and critical disability theories to advance a queer feminist critique, and challenges the unacknowledged whiteness and other forms of marginalization that have characterized the mainstream of philosophy and queer theory’s archive. This accessible and important book is ideal for courses in philosophy and gender, sexuality, race and disability studies.

Julietta Singh challenges the drive toward the mastery over self and others by showing how the forms of self-mastery advocated by anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi unintentionally reproduced colonial logic, thereby leading her to argue for a more productive human subjectivity that is not centered on concepts of mastery.

In The Queer Life of Things: Performance, Affect, and the More-Than-Human, Anne M. Harris and Stacy Holman Jones offer readers a series of chapters united in their fascination with the animals, plants, and things with whom we share and compose our lives. Harris and Holman Jones pick up and follow bread-crumb trails of new materialist, posthumanist, affect, performance, and feminist theoretics as they explore contemporary life and world-making. They use queer theory to break open and go beyond reason, searching for ethical and artful ways of sustaining ourselves, our multi-species companions, and our planet.

Over the past decade cultural theory has seen a number of 'turns' - the materialist turn, the animal turn, the affective turn - that address the human as an affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal embedded in dense webs of more-than-human relations, in short as a posthuman phenomenon. Care philosophy shares this focus on embodiment and vulnerability in its insistence on interdependence as the defining condition of human life, making it well positioned for a posthuman turn. To this end, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care draws together contemporary narrative fictions that challenge humanist conceptions of care in their imaginative depiction of more-than-human affective bonds, arguing for an expansion care philosophy's central figure: the embodied, embedded, and encumbered 'human'. Fictional narratives of care between humans and robots, bioengineered creatures, clones, nonhuman animals, aliens or inanimate things, highlight the limits of humanist ethical models' capacity to register and accommodate posthuman relational intimacies, while gesturing towards a model of care able to accommodate networked interdependencies that extend beyond the human realm. Texts by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Louisa Hall, Eva Hornung, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bhanu Kapil, and Jesmyn Ward, along with films and television programmes like Robot and Frank, Under the Skin, and Real Humans, depict a range of scenarios in which more-than-human care relations not only supersede human-human relationships, but suggest new human/animal/machine ways of being that offer novel insights into the possible presents and futures of posthuman care. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care reveals how these fictions do their own theorizing, imagining the politics, ethics and aesthetics of specific, contextualized scenarios of posthuman contact and companionship. Interweaving posthuman theory, care philosophy and contemporary fiction, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care offers generative visions of care that make room for the incredible range of affects, energies, behaviours, attachments and dependencies that produce and sustain life in more-than-human worlds.