Research
My latest book is After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory and Sexuality in the 21st Century (Cambridge UP, 2019), which I coedited with Tyler Bradway and which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. www.cambridge.org/9781108739733
I have collaborated with Mikko Tuhkanen on two edited collections. Queer Times, Queer Becomings (SUNY Press 2011) contributes to the vibrant discussion in queer studies around questions of temporality. Our version of the temporal turn has drawn on the anti-essentialist interrogation of being that queer and feminist theories initiated in order to launch a consideration of how becoming might be embraced as a challenge to normative social forces or as a space for contesting identity politics. A skewed relation to the social norm means that such modes of existence as untimeliness, asynchrony, and belatedness frequently mark the lives and texts of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. https://sunypress.edu/Books/Q/Queer-Times-Queer-Becomings
Our second collaboration took a more global and literary turn, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge UP 2014. www.cambridge.org/9781316190890
My first monograph, Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism (SUNY 1998), argues that fetishism is a crucial tool for analysis by feminist and queer theory. Fetishism fundamentally challenges binary categories of sexual difference–including masculine/feminine, perverse/normal, heterosexual/homosexual–and that challenge extends the subject/object dichotomy at the heart of Western metaphysics, which organizes categories of sexual differentiation. https://sunypress.edu/Books/O/Object-Lessons
Teaching
I have taught a wide range of courses in queer and LGBTQ studies. Most often I have taught ENG355 Readings in Sexuality, although the focus of each course has varied, from the wide sweep of LGBTQ literature from Gilgamesh to contemporary Chinese lesbian stories, to a focus on North American queer writers of color working in a range of contemporary genres, or a focus on New York-based LGBTQ writers. But I also teach the interdisciplinary course WS304 Lesbian and Gay Studies.
In spring 2022 I taguth WS424 as an undergraduate seminar on Queer Feminist Science Studies, in which we examine the intersections of queer theory and science studies from a queer feminist vantage by looking at various approaches to embracing the animacy of matter and beyond-human beings, queer species, and how queer lenses challenge our knowing in scientific ways.
My graduate seminar, Queer Theory: A Theirstory, explored how many different thinkers and writers and movements had been contributing to a vibrant reconsideration of sexual differences, subjectivity, and sociality leading into the emergence of queer theory as a field in the 1990s. Psychoanalysis, Black feminism, deconstruction, academic feminism, the women’s movement, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis are among some of the key influences. Without going so far as to assert a linear chronology, this course looked to the prehistory or the backstory of queer theory, through a sampling of works that appeared in primarily in the 1970s and 1980s.
Previous graduate seminars in queer theory include Reading • Feminist • Reading • Queer • Reading, whose circular title illuminates how integral various practices of reading are to both feminist and queer theory. The seminar examined ways that feminist and queer scholars engaged with what we might call critical reading for decades, contesting who we read, what we read, how we read, why we read.
