Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century challenges the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in the long eighteenth century. Drawing from recent and emerging criticisms in Middle-Eastern and Asian studies, Black studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies, the collected authors perform intersectional queer readings, reimagine queer historiographic methods, and spearhead new citational models that can invigorate the field. In charting multidirectional queer horizons, this collection locates new prospective desires and intimacies in the literature, culture, and media of the period to imagine new directions and simultaneously unsettle eighteenth-century studies.
"This collection…is a rare accomplishment — a veritable chorale of voices and methods that unsettles and rearranges relations between gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, and the environment."
— Kate Singer, author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation
"The essays here [. . .] are necessary and important for scholars of any century."
Cover and Background Image: Norval Morrisseau. Compassion (n.d.). Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Image courtesy of the Estate of Norval Morrisseau.
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century on Manifold
Welcome to Unsettling Sexuality on Manifold!
The benefits of an open access collection are legion. While we are often accustomed to flipping through a printed collection sequentially, moving from introduction to final chapter, what Manifold offers Unsettling Sexuality is an opportunity to browse, peruse, and read promiscuously. Readers need not begin with the introduction; indeed, the arrangements provided by Manifold allow for reading queerly—a mode that, for us, does not abide by linearity and chronology. Readers may begin with the coda or approach one of the four sections first.
Readers will notice that each chapter's resources below include information about the author(s), visual accompaniments, and reading resources that might inspire future conversations and scholarship. Through open access we seek to promote accessibility by providing an experience that is reader- and user-friendly, and even more importantly, delinks from the inaccessibility of academia’s ivory tower in which scholarship is too often siloed.
This is precisely why we invoke unsettling.
Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
About the Editors
Jeremy Chow is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University. Chow is the editor of Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (2023) and the author of The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century (2023).
Shelby Johnson is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on gender and sexuality, race and Indigenous studies, and environmental humanities in early literatures of the Americas. She is the author of The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World (2024); her scholarship has also appeared or is forthcoming in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Criticism, and European Romantic Review.
Norval Morrisseau
Featured below is an in-depth profile on Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, whose art is featured throughout the site. Click on the text to learn more about Morrisseau, as well as find resource links to additional sources on his life and legacy.
Below are resource collections for each chapter of Unsettling Sexuality. These resource collections are intended to anchor multi-directional reading and enrich each chapter's content—there you will find short abstracts as well as information on the chapter author(s), relevant land acknowledgements, and additional resources (such as related websites, suggested reading lists, and images from the original text). The Unsettling Sexuality resource collection will contain material connected to the book, including videos, interviews, and podcast episodes, that will cultivate conversations started by the book well beyond its publication.
Praise for Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century
"This collection will fundamentally alter our understanding of the eighteenth-century as undoubtedly and intersectionally queer. It is a rare accomplishment — a veritable chorale of voices and methods that unsettles and rearranges relations between gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, and the environment. [. . .] These readings open a field of queer eighteenth-century studies beyond the critique of hetero- or homonormativity and even beyond the assumption that queerness is subversive or anti-colonial. Instead, we finally have a set of rigorous historical accounts that firmly establish the multitudinous horizons for intimate relations, which can help us re-enliven intersectional pasts and reimagine our futures."
— Kate Singer, author of Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (2019)
"Queer, trans, a/sexuality, Indigenous, race, archive, intimacy, friendship, empire, fiction, fashion—as this volume argues with rigor and gusto, and like no book before it, these should be the braided keywords of eighteenth-century studies. The essays here range across geography and method to unsettle us in productive ways, helping to overcome staid, hegemonic, heteropatriarchal, and often violent intellectual modes towards possibilities for creation and thought, new temporalities, new futures. Necessary and important for scholars of any century."
— Alan Mikhail, author of My Egypt Archive (2024)
Metadata
restrictions
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
rights
The open access publication of this book was made possible by generous donations to the University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press through its Giving Tuesday campaign. The University of Delaware Press thanks donors for contributing to making Unsettling Sexuality freely available to the public, removing barriers of cost and institutional affiliation.
Unsettling Sexuality is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
isbn
978-1-64453-350-5
publisher
University of Delaware Press
publisher place
Newark, DE
rights holder
University of Delaware Press
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