Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness

Same old offers a rethinking of positions that have defined queer theory since its inception in the early 1990s. Steeped in philosophical and political commitments to ‘difference’, queer theoretical frameworks have tended to assume that ideas related to ‘sameness’ only thwart and stymie queer forms of life. But this book takes a number of these ideas as its focus – uselessness, reproduction, normativity and reductionism – and reveals their unexpected formal and thematic importance to a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century: fin-de-siècle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the ‘stud file’ or record of serial sex. Demonstrating how queer cultural objects often stand at odds with the frameworks that have been meant to help interpret and comprehend them, Same old interrogates the genealogy of the aversion to sameness that has kept those frameworks in place.