The Routledge Queer Studies Reader

Abstract

With the publication of 'The Routledge Queer Studies Reader', we pay homage to the publication, nearly twenty years previous, of 'The Routledge Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader'. Consistent with the notion of performativity that was a grounding concept for one influential strand of theorizing in the 1990s, the appearance on bookshelves around the English-speaking world of the 'Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader' confirmed the emergence of a new scholarly field, in so far as its own chunky materiality 'constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express'. It was less its authoritative heft-weighing in at 666 pages, the 'Reader' drew together forty-two essays, dwarfing every other similar title in the field to date-than the fact that, in laying a claim to the genre of the reader, it also laid claim to the broader existence of a capacious and thriving field of work, sufficiently coherent to be understood as lesbian and gay studies.