Queer Precarities - Introduction for themed issue

Abstract

In this introduction to the themed section, we begin to explore how queer and precarity might be used to analyse how vulnerabilities are constituted across diverse spaces. We situate the contents of the themed section in relation to the context in which it was worked on, defined by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased precarisation of Higher Education workers in the United Kingdom, as well as current literature on queerness and precarity. The interdisciplinary articles that follow are the work of early career feminist and queer scholars. We introduce them as grappling with a range of manifestations of precarity and their intersections with various categories of identity that might be recognisable as queer. Foregrounding navigations of embodied and structural aspects of precarity, these articles highlight the practices and relationalities that can emerge from being ‘out of place’, as well as specific opportunities and limitations of the aesthetic, and share a concern with the masking of difference as a function of precarity, including via broad analytic categories such as ‘precarious’ and ‘queer’.