Queer Sociality

Abstract

This chapter seeks to review the idea of the queer social by inviting reconsideration of the dynamics of alterity and exclusion, particularly pertaining to sexual subjectivities and aetiologies of belonging. I designate two types of framing that organize ‘queer sociality’: the distinctive and the diffuse. I will then go on to explain how epistemologies of queerness are temporally contingent, and subtly and often rudely spatial, amply nuanced by the necessities of social attachment. I will outline two recent shifts in queer theory that, firstly, explore futurity and the ‘anti-social’ and, secondly, engage with some postcolonial anxieties that emphasize the ethical imperative of acknowledging global social disparities. Of course, we cannot assume that ‘the social’ is a discrete and uncontested entity, rather tautologically — it is socially constructed. Whilst this idea of the socially constructed is addressed later, it might be prudent to add a preliminary qualification to any rendition here to ‘the social’, recalling that in many ways the academic and political construction of the social has routinely excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) people from its purview generally, and also in legal studies (Moran et al., 1998; Fineman et al., 2009). Evidently, we need to explore notions such as the social (with its particular resonance for socio-legal studies) in relation to queer perspectives.