Unsettling Sexuality

"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