This essay calls for a reinvestment in queer readings of queer literary objects by invoking the Queer Nation polemic, Queers Read This! Tracing the importance and variety of queer reading as a modality of living, an intellectual specialty, and form of sociality, “Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now” takes seriously how, why, and what queers read. Looking to both Eve Sedgwick’s foundational 1996 special issue of Studies in the Novel, as well as the work of Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Gloria Anzuldua, and other queer writers of color in the 1970s and 1980s, this essay orients its readers to the ways that queer reading and queer literature have sustained, shaped, and redefined queer life.
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2018
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