Manchester University Press Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness

In its contributions to the study of material social differences, queer theoretical writing has mostly assumed that any ideas which embody 'difference' are valuable. More than this, where it is invoked in contemporary theory, queerness is often imagined as synonymous with difference itself. This book uncovers an alternative history in queer cultural representation. Through engagement with works from a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century – fin-de-siecle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the tradition of the stud file – the book elucidates a number of formal and thematic attachments to ideas that have been denigrated in queer theory for their embodiment of sameness: uselessness, normativity, reproduction, and reductionism. Exploring attachments to these ideas in queer culture is also the occasion for a broader theoretical intervention: Same old suggests, counterintuitively, that the aversion they inspire may be of a piece with how homosexuality has been denigrated in the modern West as a misguided orientation towards 'the Same'. In offering a fundamental challenge to the frameworks through which it has been imagined as most appropriate to understand and interpret queer lives, this book will be of value to scholars and students of queer theory and culture as well as twentieth literature and culture more broadly. Combining queer cultural and literary history, sensitive close readings, and detailed genealogies of theoretical concepts, Same old encourages a fundamental rethinking of some of the defining positions in queer thought.