ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter explains how and why contingency and chance—whose meanings it defines—matter for queer theory and queer American literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. It situates the project’s three critical frames of reference, psychoanalytic, narrative, and queer theory, as well as introducing the book’s three sections, each comprised of two chapters. In addition, this chapter derives from Slavoj Žižek and other writers a formula for the retroactive revision of hegemonic structures that disguises their contingency as necessity. Building on that foundation, Part One, “Heterosexual necessity,” addresses the ways in which heterosexuality, with reproduction as its constant alibi, is treated as necessary, projecting its actual contingency onto a queerness associated with accidents, sterility and abortion, and failures of meaning. In Part Two, “Accidental narratives,” improbable narrative occurrences and chance meetings demonstrate the imbrication of a capitalist economy and racism with heterosexual marriage and homosexual intimacy. Its chapters explore new directions for queer narrative theory beyond the marriage plot, questioning ostensibly necessary categories such as whiteness, wealth, and heterosexuality. The aim of this book is not only to perform queer readings about chance and contingency, but also to read through chance and contingency, which becomes the subject of the book’s third section. Part Three, “Contingent reading,” focuses on two memoirs in order to reflect on the role of chance and contingency in queer hermeneutic methods and the literary texts with which they engage.
