Editors' Forum: "Queer Form"

Q: This special issue of ASAP/JOURNAL on queer form extends from the premise that the renewed focus on method in queer studies occasions a critical return to questions of form: the terms "queer" and "form" are paired as a provocation to consider the extent to which form—understood as the expressive sum of various technical, plastic, figural, conceptual, and aesthetic operations—is significant to the quest for queer expression in all of its embodied instances. How do aesthetic form and formal analysis figure into methods of queer interdisciplinary studies today?

In seeking new approaches to queerness and form, we can presume neither that certain forms are somehow "queerer" than others, nor that formal analysis is a holdover from normative theories and should be approached only with resistance or a politics of transgression. We also cannot meaningfully speak of "queer form" without reference to the social and political dimensions of queerness. How, then, does form inform queerness, and how can politicized queerness be understood as a set of relations to form—relations not limited to binary relations of sameness/difference or to adversarial models of resistance and opposition but instead deformed, informed, by the contingencies of aesthetic, material, and conceptual investment?

For this Editors' Forum, we invited scholars, artists, and authors to reflect on the connection between queerness and form in their disciplines and artistic practices. How does one's own scholarship or creative practice articulate the relationship between form and the queer social and political world? How might an attention to form, broadly conceived, shift the way we approach issues of race, sexuality, politics, and subjectivity that are central to queer scholarship? In what ways is queerness formal, and form itself queer?