This introductory chapter explains the inspirations behind the book’s creation, its structure, and the approach adopted, and provides an overview of the chapters and the manner in which each contributes to the volume and illuminates specific topics and debates in anthropological theory and in the anthropology of gender and sexuality.

This introduction asks what Darwin’s writings still offer to contemporary criticism and humanist thought, highlighting the implications of his work on ecologies, human difference, and aesthetics.

What happens when, with the knowledge and insights gained from queer studies and relevant biographical and historical scholarship, one tries to resituate Stevens not only within the aesthetic circles that may be drawn around his work but also and especially within the social circles in which he moved during his lifetime, and the poetic circles of those who have been attracted to his writings? To diversify the types of scholarship presented in The New Wallace Stevens Studies, Eeckhout’s chapter tilts more toward the biographical than other chapters do. From the new modernist studies, its investigation derives an interest in social networks at the expense of a narrow focus on self-reliant individuals; from queer studies, it borrows a fundamentally querying spirit about sexual identities and desires. Eeckhout offers a bird’s-eye survey of Stevens’s most significant queer precursors, contemporaries, and heirs, paying particular attention to the latter two groups. As case studies, he singles out Stevens’s friendships with George Santayana and José Rodríguez Feo, in which not-knowing played a central role, and the attractiveness of his licensing the fictive imagination to poets such as James Merrill and Richard Howard.

This chapter provides an overview and exploration of the methodological approaches employed by circus scholars in three edited collections published between 2016 and 2018. Reflecting the fact that the majority of published circus scholars have backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, the chapters and articles in these collections largely employ three methodological approaches, which currently dominate circus research: history/historiography, performance analysis, and ethnography. While much circus research relies on archival sources, scholars working on contemporary circus – many of whom started their careers as circus artists – supplement this research with viewing of live performances and the use of ethnographic tools such as interviews and their own professional experience in their data collection. Of emerging importance is the use of social science methodologies such as interviews, surveys, and demographic data to explore and critique circus education, institutions, and spectatorship. Heeding Halberstam and Nyong’o’s call for a ‘rewilding of theory’ (2018), we further take account of emerging circus scholarship which insists on circus as a live, experiential set of practices and on the viability of methods which centre embodiment and note the centering of ethics in scholars’ exploration of circus training and performances, and in circus research itself.

In “Queer Studies,” Debra A. Moddelmog examines the way the maturing field of queer studies has proven a good fit for studying Hemingway and his multifaceted, intersectional explorations of about sexuality, gender, sexual practices, and their intersections with race, class, ability, and nationality. Moddelmog demonstrates that radical changes in Hemingway scholarship around issues of gender and sexuality as well as the studies of his interest in sexology introduced a Hemingway that challenged the iconic masculine persona. Beginning in the 1990s, critics such as Mark Spilka, J. Gerald Kennedy, Carl P. Eby, and Moddelmog herself began examining Hemingway’s newly revealed fascination with androgyny and sexual experimentation. That interest in the new millenium has given way to a richer understanding of the relationship between identity and sexuality, with “queer” and “trans” coming to mean not deviation but exploration from heteronormative standards. Moddelmog argues in particular that sexologist Havelock Ellis provides a useful mirror for redefining Hemingway’s desires, both biographical and in his writing.

This chapter examines queer digital culture, a term that refers to the ways in which LGBTQ+ identities, practices, and theories have been mixed up in the emergence, design, and constitution of digital technology. It highlights significant shifts at the intersections of queer identity and politics and digital communication technologies from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century, including transitions from textual to audiovisual media; from subcultural to mainstream politics; from utopian political aspirations (Afrofuturism; cyberfeminism; cyberqueer) to commercialization; and from identity play and performance to consumer authentication. It concludes by drawing out the contradictory dimensions of queer digital culture which both exacerbate forms of oppression and offer liberatory trajectories. Alongside the rise of new forms of heteroactivism, commodified identities, and ubiquitous but unequal digital access, LGBTQ+ digital media continues to offer the promise of solidarity and intervention in relation to social justice.

What is transgender studies, and what are its major methods? While the field itself is oriented against definitive answers to such questions, transgender studies does indeed possess a history and an emergent set of critical tools, both similar to and yet divergent from the more institutionally embraced field of queer studies. Drawing on Janet Halley’s early mapping of each field’s claims as well as Susan Stryker’s characterization of transgender studies as queer theory’s “evil twin,” this chapter explores the critical relation enacted between the two fields, tracing relevant points of congruence and tension between their methods. Both like and yet unlike queer studies, trans* studies points up queer theory’s limitations while inverting many of its major premises. Rather than envisioning the fields as opposites, however, this chapter seeks to clarify their relation as a fruitful paradox in which each discourse problematizes and yet enlivens the other’s claims. It then concludes by demonstrating some of trans* studies’ core methods through a close reading of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).

This chapter surveys the relationship between eighteenth-century Irish studies and Queer studies. It gives an important account of key approaches in Queer studies to eighteenth-century Irish literature and culture, as well as providing an overview of the current methodological debates in queer historiography, more broadly. As well as presenting readers with an ingress into queer Irish eighteenth-century studies, this chapter also intervenes in scholarly debates on how to account for queerness in the past. Focusing on three case studies, the chapter examines manifestations of queerness in the Anglophone long eighteenth century across the prose fiction and poetry of the satirist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the poet Charles Churchill (1731–1764), and the prolific writer and essayist Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849). From reading the erotic parameters of Swift’s Yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Churchill’s anti-Irish figure of the fribble which surfaced during the mid-century’s fraught Seven Years’ War debates, and then later, re-examining Edgeworth’s queer depiction of Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801), this chapter brings into sharp relief the fluid, and often contradictory, ways in which eighteenth-century ideas about Ireland and Irishness served to queer emerging norms of British colonial identity and culture.