Chapter One makes the case for a new way of seeing. Leaning on bell hooks and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s advocacy for an activist type of looking, it sets up some ways we might begin to read against – rather than with – the dominant narratives about disability. This chapter makes the first in a series of connections between classicism and coloniality that will recur in this book, and sees the process of reading bodies for meaning as rooted in colonial eugenics as well as classically-inspired physiognomy. Crucially for the argument of the book, the chapter concludes that reading bodies for meaning is neither a wholly classical nor a wholly colonial practice – and results instead from a particular way of looking back (or a linear inheritance model of classical reception). In closing, it introduces Michael Rothberg’s concept of the ‘implicated spectator’ as a way to return agency to the spectator in an assemblage-thinking model.

This chapter features the contributions of influential and lesser-known essayists who have written persuasively and engagingly on gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Issues of identity and difference have had a profound effect on the writing of our age, and certainly on the essay, the most elusive of genres. This chapter considers the intersections of the essay, gender, and queer studies/consciousness over the last few decades, first in a general sense, and then through the lens of specific essayists who have had the most significant impact on the direction of the essay since 1970 in the United States. Beginning with second-wave feminism, this chapter discusses the work of those essayists in feminist and LGBTQ+ communities whose foundational writing on gender still resonates today. The chapter examines important essays that emerged from third- and fourth-wave feminism and then pursues the stylistic and thematic innovations brought by lesbian, gay, trans, and queer writers who have explored topics such as gender as performance, HIV and AIDS, misogyny and misandry, intersectionality, discrimination, and the medicalization and mediatization of desire.