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A Critical Introduction to Queer TheorySecond Edition

By Nikki Sullivan, Katrina Jaworski, Abraham Weil and Kelly Sharron

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£90.00

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Published 31 January 2027

About this book

Provides readers with concise, accessible critical overviews of topics that are central to the expanding field of Queer Studies

  • Includes an expanded Introduction outlining where queer theory is at today
  • Offers both a substantial overview of key concepts, texts and thinkers in queer theory and an in-depth critical analysis of the texts cited
  • Analyses the ongoing significance of queer praxis in the face of the wide spread backlash against queer work, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion initiatives, and the gains made over the last half century for LGBTIQA+ and other ‘othered’ folk
  • Performatively engages with the developments of queer theory by doing the work of ‘queering’
  • Recognises and responds to the Anglocentrism of much queer work

This second edition of A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory includes new chapters on sexuality and dis/ability; animal sex and species boundaries; queer necropolitics and queer kinship that focus on key contemporary debates, writers, practices and texts. Existing chapters on topics such as race and trans have been substantially updated to include shifts in both theory and practice that have occurred since the publication of the first edition. Key concepts such as identity politics, heteronormativity, homonationalism, materiality and transsomatechnics are discussed at length. This revised edition maintains the original interdisciplinary focus of the first edition and will be relevant to those working in disciplines as diverse as Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Philosophy, Early Childhood Education and Sociobiology.

Reviews

The long-awaited second edition to A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory has been published! This indispensable book gives readers a way to navigate the unruly field of queer theory. Scholars, activists and those interested in disability, race, sex, death, animals and trans studies will all find this book essential reading.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Reintroduction to Queer Theory
1. The Social Construction of ‘Homosexuality’: From Problem to Pride
2. Queer: A Question of Being or a Question of Doing?
3. Performance, Performativity, Parody and Politics
4. Queering Race
5. Queering/Cripping Dis/ability
6. Queer Necropolitics
7. 'We Pull Up': Queer Kinship as a Method for Being Yourself
8. Animal Sex and Species Boundaries
9. Queering Straight Sex
10. The Evil Twin: Trans Life and Study

Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Nikki Sullivan

Nikki Sullivan currently holds a leadership role in LGBTIQA+ and HIV+ health in Adelaide, Australia. She is the co-author of Queering the Museum (with Craig Middleton, 2020), Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money’s Diagnostic Concepts (with Lisa Downing and Iain Morland, 2014), author of Tattooed Bodies: Subjectivity, Sexuality, Ethics and Pleasure (2001), co-editor of Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies (with Samantha Murray, 2009) and author of a large number of journal articles and book chapters. Nikki was the co-founding editor (with Samantha Murray) of the Somatechnics journal.

Katrina Jaworski

Katrina Jaworski is an Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at Adelaide University, Australia. Her research focuses on the agency of suicide, with attention to gender, sexuality, relational ethics and poetry. Sometimes she also researches and writes on Rwandan genocide, the philosophy of dying bodies, trauma and the cultural politics of thinking. Alongside numerous articles and book chapters, to date she has sole-authored The Gender of Suicide (2016) and co-edited Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Dissertations (2015), Rethinking Madness: Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Reflections (2020) and Reframing Suicide: The Development of Critical Suicide Studies (2024). She has forthcoming book chapters in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide (2026) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Language and Death (2026).

Abraham Weil

Abraham Weil is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the
University of Kansas, USA. Trained in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona (PhD) and Rutgers University (MA), Weil’s research cultivates relations between politics, life and environment, asking how bodies are entangled in ecological and discursive worlds that redistribute vulnerability, endurance and radically uneven life chances across scales. His work engages questions of racialization, speciation and sexual difference through Black feminist theory, trans studies, continental philosophy, critical animal studies, ecology and aesthetics. He is the co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025).

Kelly Sharron

Kelly Sharron is an Assistant Professor in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas, USA. Sharron completed her PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona in 2019. Her research broadly considers the multiple state tactics at play in police brutality including the extension of a feminist ethic of care in producing violent effects and Marxist feminisms in reproductive labour and care work. Sharron’s work has been published in Somatechnics, TSQ: Trans Studies Quarterly, and Abolition Journal. She is the co-editor of Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025).