ABSTRACT
The conception of queerness as a relation to an object is elaborated in the many critical projects that take “queering” 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”. 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. In the context of these shifts, “Queer Objects” explores how queer objects shape their subjects.
