Jeremy Chow's The Queerness of Water is a surprising, often demanding, but always interesting contribution to queer environmental humanities and queer eighteenth-century studies. This monograph (Chow's first) finds fascinating, marginal moments in canonical texts including Robinson Crusoe (1719), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and Frankenstein (1818), in which water erodes not just physical matter but the sexualized, gendered, and racialized categories congealed upon it. Water can do this because it was never only an agent of imperial transportation. If the ocean has seemed “the primary conduit by which colonialism materialized” (21), this book reveals instead the more complicated capacity of water both to subtend and contest imperial violence with a violence all its own.
The introduction in which this forceful thesis is theorized begins with the necessary question: “What's Queer about Water?” The book's answer is that what water chiefly undoes is the typology of masculinity concretized in eighteenth-century Europe and its...
