QUEER OBJECTS

what does queer have to do with objects?

In her influential discussion of queer in Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defines it as “transitive – multiply transitive […] Keenly it is relational and strange” (xii). The conception of queerness as a relation to an object (“recurrent, eddying, troublant” ibid.) is elaborated in the many critical projects that take “queering” (Queering the Renaissance, Queering Criminology, Queering Masculinities, Queering the Colour Line – to name a random selection of book titles) as their organizing principle. However, much of the queer work that has followed Tendencies – including much that sets out “to queer” – has used queer as a synonym for putatively anti-normative (homo)sexual identity, or, contrastively, has been fixated on a queer subject, positioned as “solitary and outside history,” and shot through with “decollectivizing, shame-inducing, or ego-shattering death drives” (Castiglia and Reed 5). The essays collected in this special issue return to the idea of transitivity. What happens when queer is thought about as an orientation toward certain objects or objectified states of being? What are some of the discursive or material effects of recasting queer as either a turning toward or a turning away from certain objects, things or persons? In intersecting and divergent ways, these essays reflect on how queer subjectivity might be rethought in relation to a range of historically, culturally and naturally situated objects and on how such objects can illuminate, affect and animate queer modes of being.

This issue, the first one of Angelaki devoted to queer matters, appears at a time when the object is receiving close attention across the humanities. Part of the broad theoretical trend of the “post-human” attention to the object includes modes of inquiry such as the new materialism, the study of “nature-cultures” and theories concerning “object-oriented ontologies.” In tandem with and overlapping with these approaches has been a “post-critical” turn that has questioned the dominance of hermeneutic and symptomatic readings in favour of “surface reading,” “thin description” and “actor-network” accounts of meaning-making. Situating subjects and objects in complex networks that comprise the human, non-human life, and the inanimate, these approaches have challenged the subject-centred premises of “the humanities.”

In the context of these shifts, “Queer Objects” explores how queer objects shape their subjects. In contrast to positions taken in some recent debates, the essays collected here do not so much speculate about the capacity for animacy or vitalism in the non-human world (see, for example, the recent “Tranimacies” issue of Angelaki (22.2), or Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter); rather, they engage with the reciprocal interactions between subjects and objects, exploring what happens when subjects become fascinated, beholden and sometimes even repulsed or abjected by the objects on which they focus.

acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the Gender Institute and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University for supporting the early stages of this project. We also wish to thank Robyn Wiegman for her curation of the section of “Queer Objects” devoted to Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. Thanks are due to Gerard Greenway for his enthusiasm and support in publishing this special issue, and to James Hypher and Fergus Armstrong for copyediting.