Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange

Helen Palmer explores the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective, combining new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism, and queer theory to create a dialogue with the affirmations of deviant, errant, alternative, and multiple modes of being. Queer theory celebrates and affirms infinite dimensions of sexuality and gender, creating space for all human beings to express themselves without classification or judgement.

Format: Hardback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2020
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Helen Palmer's exploration of the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective brings together new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism, and queer theory. She examines how we can radically restructure this gesture of making-strange to create a dialogue with the affirmations of deviant, errant, alternative, and multiple modes of being associated with queer theory. Queer theory utilizes the creative potential of indeterminacy to celebrate and affirm infinite dimensions of sexuality and gender, providing space for all human beings to express themselves without the classification or judgment of prescriptive terminologies. Linguistic at its source, queer theory goes beyond this limit, harnessing the liberating force of the removal of terminological boundaries. Palmer asks what a 21st-century queer defamiliarisation might look like and examines the extent to which these affirmative or emancipatory discourses escape the paradoxes of normativity or historicisation.

Weight: 504g
Dimension: 170 x 236 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474434140