Queer Forms

This is the book I have been waiting for: fearless, brilliant, and filled with love for feminist and queer cultural forms. Rather than fetishizing formlessness as the pinnacle of freedom, Ramzi Fawaz assembles and mines a rich and moving archive of feminist and queer cultural forms that have given us tools to practice intimacy, radical vulnerability, friendship, and worldmaking. Queer Forms was written out of a deep affection for the visionary work of feminist and queer cultural producers, offering us a blueprint for allowing feminist and queer worlds to take shape. (Jennifer C. Nash, author of Birthing Black Mothers) An invigorating work of queer feminist political theory and imagination. Defying the received demand that instances of nonnormative gender identity remain fluid and formless, Ramzi Fawaz dares to present subversive examples of gender and sexual outlaws whose actions track an unfinished project of freedom. In a range of brilliant readings across political movements and cultural texts, he advances new figures of the thinkable and democratic worldmaking that inspire free action in the present. (Linda Zerilli, University of Chicago) Parting ways with queer theory’s preference for the ephemeral, Queer Forms feels the touch and re-touch of shapeshifting forms as it sets queer studies in new and dynamic relation to its objects in the world. In one of his signal claims, Fawaz uses the materiality of form to rethink the pervasive and privileged association of queerness with formlessness and fluidity. Thus, he argues that feminist and queer ideas become meaningful as they take material shape within the realm of popular cultural production, where they change audiences in ways that neither a pedantic politics nor a moralizing theory can. (Matt Brim, author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University) An inspirational history of queer and feminist cultural politics forged in the 1970s and extending to the 1990s. Ramzi Fawaz brilliantly maps the forms of relationality that feminist, lesbian, and gay communities invented to visualize themselves and their futures. In an argument that is both crystalline and capacious, he has discerned patterns across a wide range of popular cultural texts, objects, and images, and he demonstrates how radical change has been—and can be—imagined and enacted. Queer Forms is generously both history and manifesto. It calls on us to ask with each other how we want to see our future take shape. (David J. Getsy, author of Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender) With Queer Forms, Ramzi Fawaz has examined gender and sexual formlessness illustrated by queer and feminist film, literature and visual culture. This ‘shapeshifting’ allows for greater evolution, authenticity and intimacy for all. - Karla Strand (Ms. Magazine) Including detailed footnotes, a thorough bibliography, and illustrative images, this volume will interest and engage those working in the field of women’s and gender studies. - R. Stone (Mt. St. Joseph University) (CHOICE) Ramzi Fawaz’s Queer Forms is a dazzling study of (primarily) late twentieth-century queer and feminist cultural production. (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies) Fawaz’s lengthy introduction is a must read for contemporary scholars working with LGBTQ+ or feminist history… [Fawaz] successfully contributed to the memory of those who came before us who fought in the struggle for freedom, opportunity, and expression. (American Quarterly)

Ramzi Fawaz is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies. With Darieck Scott, he co-edited the special issue of American Literature, “Queer About Comics,” which won the 2019 best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.