Overview

Same old offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to 'difference', queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to 'sameness' only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus - uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism - and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-sicle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the 'stud file' or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place This book provides a new way of understanding queer culture. The frameworks offered by queer theory-steeped in philosophical, theoretical and political commitments to 'difference'-have obscured the important investments in 'sameness' that have been central to queer history. Same old dwells on these investments and elucidates their significance.

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9781526163813

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'Same Old makes a significant contribution to the recent appraisals of critique-as-method that have encouraged scholars to imagine how a field might organize itself in terms other than an Oedipal drama... Same Old nonetheless opens up some tantalizing questions for such a project, as well as for broader considerations of sameness itself.' American Literary History Review -- .

Author Information

Ben Nichols is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin

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