Introduction: On Queer Reading with Companions

Whither queer studies, theories, and readings in the 2020s? This edited collection unites a diverse array of scholars to emphasise the necessity of queer reading for a new decade. In locating the intellectual, activist, and everyday spaces in which queer reading is flourishing in the 2020s we have followed paths into trans, eco, temporal, high and low theory, as well as other domains of enquiry. The work collated here also crisscrosses disciplinary bounds and norms in chapters that refuse easy accommodations—easy companionships—in several areas of mainstream study: namely, history, literary studies, media studies, philosophy, political science, autotheory, health humanities, and the social sciences. Across chapters that are richly interdisciplinary, The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading maps out the ways in which queer studies promises, in fact offers up, reading itself as a disruptive and generative practice. However, rather than take this foundational promise of queer studies for granted, each contributor here models and interrogates the use of queer reading in their own work. Put another way, each contributor reads queerly because reading queerly has, at some point in their life, caught and held their attention. Queer reading is part of our own individual histories. It has meant in different times and various places a way forward, survival, as well as a failure and, perhaps, obliteration (of sorts). We know that we speak for many when we say that reading queerly has, overtime, become how we read and are read. In myriad ways, queer reading offers itself as a continual companion to us; it confers upon us ways of being with ourselves and others in the world. As readers of this collection will discover or discover afresh, queer readings amplify the promise of other possibilities, of other worlds, which continue to catch our readerly attention both urgently and creatively.