Queer’s late style: shifting mood in the late and minor texts

This thesis tracks the development and mood of queer studies, side-stepping landmark works to consider minor texts such as prefaces, anecdotes, memorial special issues, belated introductions, memoirs and autotheory. Simply put, these genres afford autobiographical narration. However, more specifically I argue that they enact a decompression from the project and event; sinking into alternate lived temporalities such as the everyday, generational time and longer durations. Though these temporalities tend to be obscured in major academic outputs, which are organised around interventions and original contributions to knowledge, they are nevertheless crucial in mediating the transmission and dissemination of knowledge production. Therefore, building on recent work which reckons with the heritage, lineage and current status of identity knowledges, this thesis reads minor texts as temporal switchpoints which capture how the project gets reabsorbed into the existing-state-of-affairs. It ultimately finds that these easily overlooked genres can provide insights into the challenges of institutionalising identity knowledges and the practicalities of sustaining their activist energy over time.