Same old: Queer theory, literature and the politics of sameness

Same old offers a fundamental rethinking of some of the positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. As with other scholarly projects with their roots in post-structuralism and the politics of social identity, queer theory often imagines the best way to understand the marginalised subjects it represents is through forms of 'difference.' This book uncovers an alternative history in queer cultural representation. Through engagement with works from a range of twentieth-century queer literary genres--fin-de-siecle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the tradition of the stud file--the book elucidates a number of formal and thematic attachments to ideas that have been denigrated in queer theory for their embodiment of sameness: uselessness, normativity, reproduction, and reductionism.