Queer Presences and Absences

"Queer Presences and Absences" explores changes and continuations in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives, identities and spatial practices in the 21st century. Queer futures are situated across local, national and international spaces including the UK, USA, Italy, Brazil, Russia and the Czech Republic. Queer movements, marginalities and mainstreams are located in legislative changes, institutional locations and in everyday spaces: these are mediated through consumption, possession and entitlement, alongside dispossession, poverty and inequality. Rather than positing a queer arrival or a queer present 'everywhere', care is taken to consider the diversity of queer existence. Using a range of methods, including qualitative interviews, ethnographies, auto-biographical 'fictions' and archival research, authors connect pasts, places and policies with contemporary times, linking individual and social presences (and absences) affectively and materially.