The expansion of queer and trans studies across humanistic and social-scientific disciplines has coincided with a suspicion of the impulse to “queer everything” or “trans everything.” This suspicion may, of course, constitute a thinly veiled attack on the legitimacy of antihomophobic and antitransphobic research. Yet, queer and trans studies scholars themselves have deemed it important to monitor what queerness and transness do, or are expected to do, to the objects to which they are affixed, whether kinship, time, or space. One version of this monitoring, on display in the three books under review, consists of preventing the terms “queer” and “trans” from merely performing an ameliorative function, or adding value to objects of inquiry by making them more interesting, more exciting, better. Yetta Howard, Stephen Dillon, and Aren Z. Aizura’s first monographs show a commitment, varyingly sustained, to queer and trans studies that are wary of their own organizing...

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