Queering Uncertainties in Law and Legal Theory

Queer analysis has always been attuned to the importance of obliqueness. This series seeks to publish innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship that takes that orientation seriously by exploring the usefulness of uncertainty across a range of legal and sociocultural terrains. While queer legal subjects and frameworks are a core focus, books in this series will attend more generally to intersectional and global questions about ambiguity in law and legal theory. Clear categories and their limits or boundaries are primary constituents of legal analysis. But what about sites or experiences that are more nebulous or whose boundaries are squishier? When sociocultural and legal conceptions “bleed” or “rub against” each other, what do they offer, and how does it complicate our understandings of law and society? QUILLT is committed to surfacing the social life of interloping, impostering, incomplete, and incoherent legalities.

Yet queerness is not the only oblique category to convolute legal analysis. Although QUILLT is a safe and inviting home for radical and field-defining queer scholarship and legal theory, the series is invested in bringing together research on legality and legibility across contexts to build more nuanced understandings of uncertainty, focusing on, in addition to queerness, ambiguity and incoherence across a range of citizenship and categorical contexts. Of interest are intersectional projects on race, immigration, ethnicity, indigeneity, caste, disability, bodily autonomy, fatness, and class, particularly if they also build conceptual worlds that extend beyond their given case and engage with the provocations of deviance as a tool for world making and illustrating a broader commitment to critically considering classifications, especially in contexts and temporalities of flux. Foremost, QUILLT is interested in bringing together lineages of scholarship that contend with uncertainty and queer the kinds of rubrics that law, society, and culture take for granted.