Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class: Class Notes and Queer-Ies

Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class focuses on the crossover of queer and class, examining a range of texts across languages and genres and spanning nearly a century.

This collection of chapters considers the intersection of queer and class in relation to literary aesthetics, a locus in which the interaction between sexuality and class is rendered with lucidity. Each chapter puts forward class and its manifestations as central to queer analysis of literary and cultural texts in historical and contemporary contexts. The readings adopt Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional paradigm by pointing to its activist as well as literary precedents and elaborations.

These chapters emerged from a long-standing collaboration among three Central European universities whose faculty and graduate students established a joint queer literature and theory research seminar. They are supplemented by a roundtable discussion in which the contributing authors and their colleagues discuss how the concepts of queer and class in theory and (academic) practice have informed their current and previous work.

Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class is intended for scholars in gender and queer studies.

Maria Olive Alexopoulos teaches English and Cultural Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she researches queer and feminist theory and the politics and representation of feminine adolescence.

Tomasz Basiuk is Professor of American Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, whose current focus is on queer studies.

Susanne Hochreiter is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, whose current focus is on gender and queer studies.

Tijana Ristic Kern works at the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, where she researches aesthetics and politics of queer hybrid life writing in twentieth-century British and American writing.