Style: A Queer Cosmology

Style: A Queer Cosmology defines style as a mode of expression that makes us more like ourselves and less like everyone else, using texts, performances, and personae from American culture. It is a scholarly intervention that participates in the critical work of revival and attunement, focusing on things and qualities that are immanent and elude paraphrase or social scientific categorization.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 17 October 2023
Publisher: New York University Press

While "style" is often equated with fashion or convention in everyday language, "Style: A Queer Cosmology" offers a different perspective by defining the term as a mode of expression that helps us become more authentic to ourselves and less like others. Taylor Black's interdisciplinary conceptual analysis brings together a diverse range of texts, performances, and personae from American culture that engage in ethical, creative, and performative modes of "abundant revelation." Spanning across time, this book explores American cosmologies cultivated by iconic and subterranean American artists such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery OConnor, Nikki Giovanni, and Bob Dylan. Serving as a guiding conceptual framework throughout is the figure of Quentin Crisp, a philosopher of style who is resurrected in this book. As a scholarly intervention, "Style: A Queer Cosmology" contributes to the critical work of revival and attunement, revitalizing figures, terms, and ideas that have become too familiar. Instead of viewing the critic as merely a stylist, this book leans into the study of things and qualities that are immanent, elusive to paraphrase or social scientific categorization. Style is about the potential rather than the probable, singularity over universals, personality over identity, the emergent and not the new—the mystery of becoming.

Weight: 468g
Dimension: 153 x 230 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479825004