Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century

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Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century

edited by Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson
contributions by Nour Afara, Jeremy Chow, Riley DeBaecke, Eugenia Zuroski, Ula Lukszo Klein, Shelby Johnson, Humberto Garcia, Ziona Kocher, Cailey Hall, M.A. Miller and Tess Given

University of Delaware Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-1-64453-349-9

Paper: 978-1-64453-348-2

eISBN: 978-1-64453-350-5 (ePub)

eISBN: 978-1-64453-352-9 (PDF)

About the Book

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition on Manifold, here: https://openpub.udel.edu/projects/unsettling-sexuality.

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. Contributors read with and against diverse European, transatlantic, and global archives to explore mutually informative frameworks of gender, sexuality, race, indigeneity, ability, and class. 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.

About the Author

JEREMY CHOW is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University. Chow is the editor of Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell University Press, 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. In her recent book, The Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World (2024), she argues that figures of a gifted earth organize a set of worlding practices that ground and animate anticolonial intimacies in Black and Indigenous archives. 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.

Reviews

"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. Unsettling Sexuality unearths, for example, alternatives to the marriage plot via asexual romance and forms of Black happiness, the radical affects of racialized sex work, cross-species erotics, and myriad encounters among Europeans, Ottomans, those of African descent, and indigenous people with varied cultures of gender and sexuality. 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, Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation (2019)

"Unsettling Sexuality is an important book because of its direct challenge to the status quo of eighteenth-century studies."

— The Scriblerian and the Kit-Kats

"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, My Egypt Archive (2024)