What's Queer about Europe?

Abstract

What’s Queer about Europe is not about queer communities in Europe. It is about the ways in which Queer Theory helps us initiate disorienting conjunctions and counter-intuitive encounters for imagining historical and contemporary Europe. The encounter between a queer perspective and Europe forces a reconsideration of both. This book queers Europe and Europeanizes queer. It refracts received understandings of queer through analyses of historical and contemporary Europe while re-orienting an imaginary of Europe by queering it through specific analyses. What’s Queer about Europe is a collection of articles written by scholars whose interdisciplinary expertise and queer perspective enable them to study Europe relationally. They ask not so much what it is but what we do when we attempt to define Europe.