Comparatively Queer

These innovative essays take a comparative approach to queer studies while simultaneously queering the field of comparative literature, strengthening the interdisciplinary of both. The book focuses not only on comparative praxis, but also on interrogating our assumptions and categories of analysis.

"Addressing a welter of topics ranging from Sapphic tales in early seventeeth-century Europe to animal fables in India, from the tensions between Western bio-medicine and Chinese cosmology in modern-day Hong Kong to the tensions between gender and sexual legislation in contemporary France and the United Status, and from circuses, fairs, and sideshows in Western Europe to Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, Comparatively Queer constitutes a lucid and lively intervention in the newly intersecting fields of queer and comparative literary and cultural studies. It boasts a scintillatingly diverse yet deliciously intersecting array of scholars committed to interdisciplinary work at the interstices of historical and geo-political borders and makes a profound contribution to the productive "troubling" of the Anglo-American and presentist assumptions of much queer theory as well as of the Eurocentric and nationally circumscribed assumptions of much literary and cultural compartivism. Proudly hybrid, even 'promiscuous,' in its methodologies, styles, approaches, and objects of study, Comparatively Queer is sure to be a 'must read' for scholars and students of sexuality, gender, history, culture, and, indeed, life in an increasingly globalized world." - Brad Epps, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Harvard University

"This collection is about crossing borders of every sort; it is about queering not only gender but also time, space, and comparison itself. It explores the possibility of, and the implications for, denaturalizing all sorts of subject formations: sexual, national, racial, social. Hayes, Higonnet, and Spurlin and their colleagues continue the gender studies work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others in a boldly energetic, transnational, and transcultural manner. The nine essays and framing commentaries bring together lives and works that span more than 2,000 years and cover the globe. Additionally they bring queer and gender studies into a productive dialectic with postcolonial, transnational, and critical race studies. Each essay undertakes what the editors term 'crossings,' but each employs the logic of comparison, of crossing from A to B, so as to interrogate rather than to reify binary logics and bright boundaries. Whether in the context of Renaissance Neo-Classicism, Postcolonial Hong Kong, Genet's Palestine, or the Indian diaspora, the 'queering of comparison' and the comparing of queerness is richly explored in this volume and is celebrated in theoretically rigorous and wholly original ways. At the same time, as Traub notes in her afterword, the authors' persistent attention to both difference and incommensurability ensures an ethical core to this intrepid collection. Scholars interested in topics as varied as women's studies, post-nationalism, medieval studies, nineteenth-century popular culture, animal studies, and international law will find the essays that reconfigure our intellectual terrain so as to invite further comparative queerings." - Elizabeth M. Richmond-Garza, Director, Program in Comparative Literature and University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, University of Texas, Austin

JARROD HAYES Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, USA.   MARGARET R. HIGONNET Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut, USA and co-chair of the Gender Study Group at Harvard University's Centre for European Studies.   WILLIAM J. SPURLIN Reader in English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change at the University of Sussex, UK.