Introduction - Abstract

Introduction: “Unsettling Sexuality”

Jeremy Chow & Shelby Johnson

Abstract: Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century sets out to revisit, reframe, and upheave the traditional ways that scholarship has approached sexuality, gender nonconformity, and sex (as well as its absence) in eighteenth-century studies. In the introduction, Chow and Johnson explore how opening and welcoming alternative, renewed, queer, trans, and decolonial horizons can invigorate eighteenth-century studies by considering the theoretical and metonymic possibilities of a horizon. They wager that a horizon is not something strictly in front of us. A queer horizon can be behind, besides, adjacent, and in front of us. A queer horizon does not exist in a single temporal scape. It is not linear. It is not hierarchical. It is not an ontology. It defers stable signification. Queer horizons are subversive geographies bound up in hope and promise.