The term queer theory floats around in academic settings a great deal these days, cross-pollinating with daily discourse in more and more dance artist’s practices. What does it really mean? The new-to-me book Queer: A Graphic History (2016) is a great way to find out!
This slim volume (174 pages) presents a remarkably comprehensive and thoughtful overview of queer theory, explained in straight-forward language and eloquent drawings. This graphic-novel-style book functions as a primer on a multiplicity of concepts in queer theory. It highlights a wide range of queer theorists, outlining the range of intersections and frictions between their ideas, and it does so in a way that is very readable. Each page has a few sentences of well-crafted text and an illustration that deepens and expands the words’ meanings. The book has a remarkable ability to hold a variety of perspectives with clarity and to take a non-demonizing approach to presenting voices in conflict. The authors define queer theory as a breaking of binaries and a challenging of fixed categories and practices, and they model this in their own approach to the ideas they present. The book manages to question almost every idea it presents, but in a way that opens up possibilities, rather than leading to hopelessness and despair.
I was pretty blown away by what the authors, Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, managed to accomplish in this lively, little, Queer book. I’m sure it leaves some (important) things out, but it covers a remarkable amount in such a short format.
(All that said, I read this book as someone already familiar with many of the ideas it contained. I am excited to share this book with some of my undergraduate students who have less exposure to queer theory and see how it works for them!)