Steven F. Kruger
Queer theory occupies a paradoxical position: while motivated by questions about identity—specifically, how gender/sexual identity operates—it is also openly skeptical of identity, developing an anti‐essentialist critique meant to take apart categories like hetero‐ and homosexual. This simultaneous assertion and challenging of identitarian categories in part reflects a similarly complex genealogy of queer theory itself. On the one hand, it arises from a set of intellectual and political movements that address experiences of gender and sexuality belonging to particular kinds of person: a feminist theory and women’s movement (see Chapter 25, “Anglophone Feminisms”) that ground themselves in the unifying identity of woman/women, and a gay/lesbian studies and liberationist politics that work to make visible disallowed sexual identities, especially those of lesbians and gay men. When queer theory emerged as something recognizably different from feminism and gay/lesbian studies in the early 1990s, it continued to develop their concerns with identity, but it especially picked up on aspects of these projects that were already skeptical of the stability and discreteness of identity categories: the recognition, within feminism, that feminist analysis tends to represent white, middle‐class women more effectively than it does women of color, third‐world women, lesbians, and working‐class women (see, for instance, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; and Riley 1988); the insistence, in some gay/lesbian liberationist discourse that gay is not simply a marker of a minoritarian sexual identity but a force resisting the normalization that characterizes dominant regimes of sexuality (see, for instance, Wittman 1970).
The moment of queer theory’s development was also one in which a number of post‐structuralist intellectual movements were calling into question the naturalness and stability of all categories, and this work informs queer theory’s anti‐essentialist critique. Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction (see Chapter 8, “Deconstruction”) showed how supposedly secure regimes of power, crystallized in the form of asymmetrical binaries modeled on the metaphysical binary of presence/absence, were in fact unstable. Queer theorists saw rich possibilities in deconstructing such binary hierarchies as male/female and hetero/homo. Michel Foucault’s theoretical project examined the work of thinking (theorizing) itself, to show how distinct epistemologies, each in its own moment understood as the “proper” way of knowing the world, change radically over time (see Chapter 14, “Foucault and Poststructuralism”). When Foucault (1978) turned to sexual identity itself in his (unfinished) History of Sexuality, he argued that the modern regime of sexuality, based on a belief in the stability of sexual identities, was historically contingent, superseding an earlier understanding of sexuality as based not in identities but in acts; one might perform a disallowed sexual act but that did not mean that one possessed a disallowed sexual identity. French feminist work, as varied as Hélène Cixous’s, Luce Irigaray’s, and Monique Wittig’s, developed in close connection to, and reaction against (post)structuralist thought like Derrida’s, Foucault’s, and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and itself contributed to incipient queer theory in significant ways. Also influential in the development of queer theory were Marxist/materialist and psychoanalytic lines of thought—the former contributing to an understanding of how ideologies naturalize themselves, the latter analyzing how seemingly inherent identities result from developmental processes that are both normalizing and potentially contingent.
Queer theory was first named by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 in a special issue of the feminist journal differences, but the kind of work grouped retrospectively under that heading had already been developing for some time. Volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality had been translated into English in 1978, and its formulations took firm hold across the next decade within English‐language scholarship. Other crucial early work that we can recognize as contributing to queer theoretical models includes Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex” (1984), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993b), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993a), David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence (1991), Diana Fuss’s edited collection Inside/Out (1991), and Lee Edelman’s Homographesis (1994). Early work that embraced the label queer explicitly includes Michael Warner’s collection Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) and two essays—Butler’s “Critically Queer” (1993b) and Sedgwick’s “Queer Performativity” (1993a)—that were published side by side in the first issue of the new journal GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. This larger body of work is conceptually disparate, but taken corporately, it develops a number of ideas and methods that come to comprise the core of what we now think of as queer theory.
As the use of the word queer—a term of opprobrium repurposed to affirmative ends—suggests, queer theory positions itself in opposition to so‐called normal ways of thinking about gender and sexuality. In a deconstructive move, queer theory, takes apart the binary of normal/queer sexuality, showing that the very idea of a normal depends upon the queer; that is, the normal could not exist as a category without the queer material it excludes. A number of early queer theoretical positions focus particular attention on how queerness enables resistance to normativity. Thus, Dollimore (1991) defines what he calls a “perverse dynamic,” in which “certain instabilities and contradictions within dominant structures” enable “transgressive reinscription,” “an anti‐essentialist, transgressive agency which might intensify those instabilities, turning them against the norms” (Dollimore 1991: 33). Something similar is at work in Edelman’s idea of homographesis (1994): a dominant imperative writes homosexuality as essentially different from its hetero other, but this writing of homosexuality depends upon apprehending in queer bodies an essential difference that those bodies themselves always threaten to confound.
Rubin (1984) develops a compelling graphic model for describing how sexuality is carved up within societies into the natural and unnatural, a “charmed circle” and its “outer limits.” At the same time, she attends to the ways in which sexuality “on the ground” does not just depend upon a single “cut” between hetero and homo, but operates in a sociologically, anthropologically complex manner (involving such factors as age, the number of one’s partners, the use of objects during sex, and so forth). An important strain of queer work has followed Rubin in insisting on such complexity. Thus, in Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick (1990) makes the first axiom of her discussion, “People are different from each other,” and she insists (here and in Tendencies [1993b]) on the value of nonce taxonomies, descriptions of sexual experience and sexuality that may be individual and dependent upon the quirks of specific, “nonce” circumstances.
Still, in Rubin’s taxonomy, queer stands in opposition to a set of norms that define “proper” sexuality, and one major way in which theorists have defined queerness is as a radical renegotiation of sexual norms. Despite recent questions about whether it would be possible to define “queer theory without antinormativity,” a question posed by a special issue of differences with this title (Wiegman and Wilson 2015), much queer work in fact focuses on gender/sexual norms, and the heterosexism and homophobia that these enable. A crucial strain of work within queer theory—especially Butler’s—arises from feminist considerations of gender normativity. As a way of destabilizing the sex‐gender binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine, much feminist work insists upon the social construction of gender, arguing that gender belongs to the changeable realm of the social while sex and the sexed body are biologically determined (see Rubin 1975). Beginning from this feminist position, Butler pushes further, arguing that taking biological sex as given and opposed to a more malleable gender concedes too much to traditional understandings. In a series of books, stretching from Gender Trouble (1990) to Bodies That Matter (1993a) to Undoing Gender (2004), Butler insists that sex and gender are alike experienced in relation to norms, and that, with both, something akin to Dollimore’s transgressive reinscription—Butler calls it “subversive repetition”—might occur.
Although Butler’s work owes much to feminist ideas of social construction, her approach to understanding the malleability of gender and sex is different. She works with the linguist‐philosopher J. L. Austin’s idea of performative speech acts (1962), statements that, given the proper circumstances, bring into being the very situation they articulate (in the marriage ceremony, the officiant’s “I now pronounce you”). Butler approaches Austin with a Derridean treatment of performativity in mind; Derrida (1988) insists that the performative is always a citation of a prior (performative) statement rather than a reference to some established, stable law or norm. In Derrida’s understanding, there is no law separate from the many, reiterated acts of citation that bring into being certain legal effects. Beginning here, Butler works to conceive gender and sex as themselves performative, citational speech acts that produce the effect of being a particular sex or gender. This does not mean that, for Butler, being a woman is a performance, taken on and off at will. Indeed, Butler works to demonstrate the ways in which gender and sexed bodies come to be felt as inherent, stable entities. But, she emphasizes, this sense of a secure sexed and gendered self does not mean that, at our core, there exists some “natural,” given sex/gender that is the cause of our behavior in the world. Quite the reverse: it is a series of accruing gender performatives—conscious or unconscious acts performed in the world and understood as properly belonging to one gender or another—that create the effect of a sexed and gendered identity.
This understanding of sex and gender as performative also has implications for our understanding of norms. Like the sense of a core self that depends on performed sex/gender, norms are not causes or originary forces but rather projected effects. A norm does not precede its citations but instead results from these. It has no necessary ontology and so it can be reworked through the process of “subversive repetition,” a kind of disloyal citation that not only results in the person improperly citing the norm being readable as queer but also potentially repositions or reconfigures the norm itself.
A somewhat different sense of the performative also features in Sedgwick’s queer work (1993a, 2003). If the wedding officiant’s “I now pronounce you …” calls into being a socially sanctioned state of marital (sexual) union, other speech acts like “shame on you” (Sedgwick calls these “deformatives”) bring forth socially stigmatized, queer identity positions. Sedgwick plays, too, with what she calls “periperformatives,” speech acts that have more ambivalent, aleatory effects than do straightforward performatives, and that connect to her interest, throughout her work, in quirky, “nonce” positionings that do not fit neatly into defined structures. In the ambit of a performative like that of the marriage ceremony, a whole set of related speech acts affect individuals—the couple getting married, the officiant performing the ceremony, the witnesses and guests—in socially complex ways that may be part of a large social system (here, compulsory heterosexuality) but that are also socially various and unpredictable.
Queer theory’s rethinking of the bases for individual gender/sexuality also has implications for how the social world is conceived, since gender and sexuality are central to the shaping of social relations—marriage and family, male and female bonding. Foucault (1978) argues that the nineteenth‐century reconception of sexuality as an identity allows for the emergence of new, recognizable social types: “the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult” (Foucault 1978: 105). He also sees the regime of sexuality as participating in a new system in which power, rather than exerting a top‐down, juridical force, operates through a set of local, “biopolitical” force relations that discipline bodies (including sexual bodies) and regulate populations (in part through the policing of sexualities).
Sedgwick (1990), like Foucault, sees new sexual identities arising in modernity, but she argues against a strict division between modern and pre‐modern regimes, positing that part of the force of sexual categories arises from their complexity, and that complexity in part from the ways in which, even as new social forms emerge, older ones persist. Her treatment of non‐sexual male–male relations (the homosocial) in Between Men (1985) stretches back to early modern writers like Shakespeare, and she suggests that the realm of male homosociality has been crucial to the shaping of Western culture, with male desire, and hence heterosexuality, determined as much by competition with and imitation of a male rival (what René Girard [1965] calls “mimetic desire”) as by erotic attraction to a female love object. But Sedgwick suggests here and in her later Epistemology of the Closet (1990) that homosociality exists on a continuum with homosexuality: the difficulty of distinguishing the homosocial from the homosexual—that is, the anxiety men must always have about whether their relations with other men are licitly homosocial or illicitly homosexual—contributes to a policing of masculinity with significant societal consequences.
In Epistemology, Sedgwick takes on a fuller analysis of the system by which sexuality, and particularly male sexuality, is structured in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that, while Foucault may be generally correct that a new regime of sexual identities emerges from an earlier one that focused on acts, in fact sexuality continues to involve both identities and acts. An earlier discourse that is universalizing—any person can commit a sexual act licit or illicit—remains operative alongside one that is minoritizing, identifying particular categories of human being who differ, in their sexuality, from the majority. That is, homosexuality can be defined either as a minority identity or as a set of same‐sex acts equally available to anyone. Similarly, Sedgwick argues, homosexuality is caught between two opposed understandings of gender. In a generally older model of gender transitivity, gay men and lesbians occupy a middle ground between men and women, a space of gender ambiguity or androgyny. But other conceptions depend upon an idea of gender separatism: men who love men are more masculine than others, feeling no emotional pull to the feminine, and women who love women are “woman‐identified,” more quintessentially female than heterosexual women. Sedgwick locates the force of twentieth‐century ideas about homosexuality in the double‐double bind, “the incoherent dispensation” (Sedgwick 1990: 90), that these two interlocking binaries—universalizing/minoritizing, gender transitive/gender separatist—entail.
For Foucault, integral to the new regime of sexuality is a sense that the very truth of the self resides in an ability to speak one’s sexuality, and Sedgwick sees, in the complex formulations of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century sexuality, a system intimately tied up with questions of knowledge and concealment—what she calls the “epistemology of the closet.” If male–male relations structure many aspects of dominant society, there lurks always the danger that these relations might step over an invisible line into the disallowed space of the homosexual, the space that remains concealed as the closet. Sedgwick argues that a number of crucial binary terms in modern culture—private/public, masculine/feminine, active/passive (etc.)—are structured in parallel to the binarism secrecy/disclosure that is thus tied to sexuality and the closet.
Sedgwick’s “epistemology of the closet” meshes with the emerging queer politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Second‐wave feminism had long argued that “the personal is the political,” that the private space of gender relations was in fact a significant site of political struggle. Gay liberation emphasized coming out of the closet as a crucial political act, and lesbian political activists fought against “lesbian invisibility.” Such political redefinitions of the divide between private and public fit Sedgwick’s argument that modern sexuality is deeply enmeshed with the question of the closet, of a hidden knowledge whose exposure might have powerful effects in the world. The AIDS crisis (beginning in 1981) and a sense of growing urgency for lesbian/gay liberation gave rise to more politically confrontational movements—groups like ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Queer Nation, and the Lesbian Avengers—that continued to emphasize the importance of breaching private/public divides. ACT UP organized around the slogan “Silence = Death,” and Queer Nation staged “kiss‐ins” that brought homoerotic behavior into public spaces where it was officially disallowed. In part in relation to these new queer political movements, theorists worked to analyze the ways in which queer sexualities might disrupt sociality and politics as usual. Warner’s Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) collects a number of essays on “the new queer politics,” including Douglas Crimp’s “Right On, Girlfriend!” which responds in part to ACT UP, and Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman’s “Queer Nationality,” which argues that Queer Nation “provides us with … discursive political tactics … as a kind of incitement to reformulate the conditions under which further interventions into the juridical, policy, and popular practices of contemporary America must be thought and made” (Berlant and Freeman 1993: 196; also see Berlant 1997).
Despite such explicit political engagements, one of the early critiques of queer theory was that its insistence on destabilizing categories of identity threatened the possibility of political organizing. If gay/lesbian identities are questioned, around what can sexual liberationist politics organize itself? One powerful response to such critique was Butler’s argument (1993b) that an open, not‐easily defined (non)category like queer has political advantages over discrete categories of identity; Butler posits the democratic openness of queer as a space where political coalitions can be built and where, as new gender/sexual possibilities emerge, common cause against normalizing forces can be forged. Something like this might be demonstrated in the subsequent history of an expanding queer movement that now tries to embrace not only gay and lesbian, or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), but also LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning or queer, intersex, asexual) issues and experiences.
Some theorists, however, have argued against the necessary political implications of queer sexuality. Edelman (2004) has shown how some of the calls for political relevance and action on the part of queer people echo earlier homophobic dismissals of gay men as weak and ineffective. Using a complex Lacanian theoretical apparatus to ground his argument, Edelman in fact argues that queer is most effectively understood as a kind of pure resistance to sociality and to any future‐oriented politics. Bersani (1995) develops a similar argument that gay identity facilitates not so much new forms of sociality as a resistance to sociality, a kind of anti‐ or asociality (also see Dean 2000). Contrastingly, when de Lauretis (1994) theorizes lesbian sexuality, she emphasizes a kind of inherent sociality to the constitution of lesbian identity: “it takes two women, not one, to make a lesbian” (1994: 92, and elsewhere).
The contrast between the treatment of gay male and lesbian sexualities in the work of Bersani, Edelman, and de Lauretis points up one of the major tensions within the enterprise of queer theory, arising from the differences between male and female experience. Despite the grounding of much queer work in feminism, there has been a sense that the field has been centered too fully on gay male sexuality. Sedgwick’s focus, in much of her work, on male homosociality/sexuality makes her frequently the object of such a critique (see de Lauretis 1994 and Castle 1993). Work like de Lauretis’s takes up this critique to emphasize the particularities of lesbian sexuality and an active lesbian “perverse desire” that de Lauretis sees others occluding in favor of such constructs as “sisterhood, female friendship, and the now popular theme of the mother‐daughter bond” (de Lauretis 1994: 116), modes of identification rather than desire. Similarly, Terry Castle argues that Sedgwick’s formulations of homosociality/sexuality must be radically re‐envisioned in order to do justice to the history of female homosociality and lesbian sexuality.
Other critiques of queer studies take work in the field to task for focusing largely on Western, white experience at the expense of sexuality as lived in the Global South or Third World and by people of color. As suggested, some of the earliest work in queer theory developed out of an engagement with the feminism of women of color, and Butler (1993a), for instance, tries to take into account the ways in which sexuality and gender operate in complex combinations with race, ethnicity, and class, analyzing such texts as Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel Passing and Paris Is Burning, Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary about predominantly African American and Latino drag communities. Butler’s readings here were themselves critiqued—for instance, by bell hooks (1996)—but her attempts to develop complex analyses of queer raced and gendered experiences have been influential and, alongside intersectional feminism, have led to the recognition, within much recent queer work, that gender and sexuality cannot be considered in isolation from other psychosocial and political factors like race, class, and nation (see, for instance, the work collected in Eng and Hom 1998 and Johnson and Henderson 2005). At the same time, queer theory has returned to earlier writings by queer people of color like Audre Lorde (1982), Cherríe Moraga (1983), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) to enrich its theoretical formulations; thus, Anzaldúa’s creative theorization of mestiza consciousness and borderlands has provided a rich ground for others’ consideration of states of sexual and racial‐ethnic hybridity and encounter. Relatedly, scholars have recognized the importance of moving beyond U.S. and European frames in thinking about queer sexualities. Some of the most challenging work has brought together queer and postcolonial analysis, as in Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2007), which identifies some gay rights discourses with normalizing impulses—a “homonationalism”—that further Western imperialism, and Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires (2005), which considers how queerness and diasporic cultures come together in South Asian texts and experiences.
Queer theory’s treatment of identity, especially Butler’s performativity, has also come under attack for its supposed de‐emphasis of bodily experience. This critique emerged initially in response to Gender Trouble (1990), and Butler herself addressed it at length in Bodies That Matter (1993a), where she used psychoanalytic formulations to argue that the body itself is not just a material given but develops at least in part as a psychic phenomenon (along the lines Freud explored in defining a “bodily ego”). To her critics, Butler’s analysis continued to scant materiality and to ignore real physical differences that contribute to definitions of sex, and some theorists have argued that a real and essential body needs to be put back into queer analysis of sex, gender, and sexuality. Perhaps most creative has been the line of thought developed by Elizabeth Grosz in the series of books that stretches from Volatile Bodies (1994) to Becoming Undone (2011).
Related to the critique of queer theory’s disembodiment has been a sense that its anti‐essentialism—its treatment of identity as not biologically determined—stands at odds with experiences, like those of many transgender people, that a certain sex and gender belong to them from birth. Butler has attempted to respond to such criticism by analyzing the complex, deeply embedded ways in which gender, sex, and sexuality come to be incorporated into an individual’s experience, discussing trans‐identities in relation to gender norms in her Undoing Gender (2004). Her engagement with questions about transgender has been taken up but also strongly critiqued by a new and growing body of transgender theory, the diversity of which is represented by the wide range of essays in Stryker and Whittle (2006). Judith/Jack Halberstam’s work—from Female Masculinity (1998) on—has been especially formative of this field. In part, transgender theory reiterates identitarian claims about the givenness of identity, but—as in queer work more generally—there is also a pull toward anti‐identitarianism, represented in the embracing of terms like genderqueer.
One further movement within queer theory that arises in response to critiques of its anti‐essentialism and de‐emphasis of the material body is its engagement with affect theory, a body of writing that takes seriously the biological bases of human affective responses. Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) turned to the work of the mid‐twentieth‐century American psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who had posited a set number of inborn human affects, in order to understand the queer affect of shame. Sedgwick (2003) also used Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis to understand the development of different affective and psychic relations to the world. Klein had posited paranoid and depressive positions as two basic psychological modes, and Sedgwick argued, in a very influential formulation, that, while much critical work (including queer theory) takes a paranoid, totalizing view to understanding how culture and society operate, an alternative, depressive but also “reparative,” approach—establishing an affective relationship rather than exerting intellectual control—might be possible. Other significant queer theorizations of affect include Love (2007), Ahmed (2010, 2014), and Berlant (2011).
One significant measure of any theory’s explanatory power is its capacity to reach productively beyond the realms within which it was first deployed. Queer theory, though largely about specifically modern experiences of gender and sexuality, has indeed breached its initial limits. Foucault himself, in the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality (1985, 1986), pushed his analysis back in time—to ancient Greece and Rome—to continue thinking through the significance of sexuality within history (see also Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990). Subsequent scholars have brought queer analysis to the Middle Ages and the early modern era (see, for instance, Burger and Kruger 2001; Fradenburg and Freccero 1995; Goldberg 1994).
Queer theory has also extended its reach beyond the strict realms of gender and sexuality, with theorists recognizing that queer—as a term of resistance to normativity—might usefully describe other (non‐sexual) kinds of antinormative experience. Thus, for instance, critics in disability studies like Robert McRuer (2006), have engaged with queer theoretical ideas in modeling “crip theory.” Mel Chen (2012) brings a queer, affect‐inflected analysis to experiences of race and disability. And theorists have recognized the significance of queer gender or sexuality for a wide range of experiences not directly within the sexual realm, pushing beyond what we generally think of as the “narrow” experiences of sex/gender difference and sexual desire and activity. That is, they have asked how a queer gender or sexuality might matter to everyday experiences that most people would not directly link to gender/sexuality. As Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) suggests, queerness resonates with much non‐sexual experience; the very idea that sexuality represents a basic orientation in the world suggests that walking through life queerly may be very different than otherwise.
Theorists have particularly focused on such basic modes of apprehending the world as space and time in considering the phenomenological significance of queerness. Since, until very recently, essentially all social spaces have been defined as unacceptable for the expression of queer desires, experiences of space for people with marginalized sexualities have been very different than for most other people. Public spaces like bars have often provided locales for the experience and expression of what are usually understood as private matters like sexuality, and a number of works—like Pat/Patrick Califia’s Public Sex (1994)—explore this queer crossing of private/public boundaries. A whole body of work in queer geographies has grown up that considers such disparate matters as the development of gay/lesbian ghettos within cities; what it means to walk through heteronormative spaces in ways that either conceal one’s sexuality or resistantly reveal it; the ways in which coming out reorients one’s relation to the broader world. Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005) takes up this kind of question in relation specifically to transgender experience.
As Halberstam’s title indicates, time and its experience have also been subject to queer analysis. For people who do not necessarily organize their lives around the usual benchmarks of a biography—birth, maturation, marriage, childbearing—a very different experience of aging might pertain, with significantly different kinds of relationship developing, for instance, between people of distinct generations. Elizabeth Freeman (2010) argues that sexual dissonance entails temporal dissonance, a resistance to what she calls “chrononormativity” (also see Freeman 2007). Queer experiences of time (and space) will of course change as queer people gain more visibility and explicit civil rights, including marriage rights, in some parts of the world. But Edelman (2004) has argued strongly that the true force of queer is in always opposing a temporality that he calls reproductive futurism, an orientation to the future that depends upon the ideology of reproduction. In Edelman’s argument, the queer (like the Lacanian Real) represents a kind of pure resistance to such a temporality, a resistance that allows for dwelling in the present, the body, jouissance, without concern for the future. Such a view makes the queer resistant to a reformist, future‐oriented politics, as well, and Edelman’s formulation has been critiqued by those who want queer also to have some future orientation, some association with a possible future that is better for all people, and for queers in particular. The most forceful response to Edelman has been José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), which argues—in connection to a longer tradition of utopian thought—for a specifically queer futurity that would not replicate the ideology of reproductive futurism.
If queerness changes the experience of time and space, we can surely see it as central to much human experience, and the power of queer theory has been not only to facilitate rethinkings of gender and sexuality but also to reorient thinking about humanness and the basic ways in which we inhabit our world. The usefulness of this body of theoretical work is suggested, as well, in its being taken up also to think about the non‐human world. Thus, for instance, the physicist and philosopher of science Karen Barad (2012) has used queer as a way into understanding the very workings of materiality, what she has termed “Nature’s Queer Performativity.”