Helen Palmer examines the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective, bringing together new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism and queer theory. She explores how we might radically restructure this gesture of ‘making-strange’ to create a dialogue with the affirmations of ‘deviant’, ‘errant’, ‘alternative’ and ‘multiple’ modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. Queer theory harnesses the creative potential of indeterminacy in order to celebrate and affirm infinite dimensions of sexuality and gender, creating space for all human beings to express themselves without the classification or judgement of prescriptive terminologies. Linguistic at its source, but going beyond this limit just like defamiliarisation, the liberating force of queer theory is derived from the removal of terminological boundaries. Palmer asks what a 21st-century queer defamiliarisation might look like and examines the extent to which these affirmative or emancipatory discourses escape the paradoxes of normativity or historicisation.

Queer Defamiliarisation is a truly radical intervention into the field (one where you could set up camp and happily stay) and an example of stylistic brilliance where the form and structure allow for a dynamic reimagining of the ways defamiliarisation, queerness and matter can relate. -- Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain * MATTER *
Queer Defamiliarisation is a truly radical intervention into the field (one where you could set up camp and happily stay) and an example of stylistic brilliance where the form and structure allow for a dynamic reimagining of the ways defamiliarisation, queerness and matter can relate. -- Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain * MATTER *
Endlessly thoughtful, inventive, and smart. Even fittingly, charmingly strange. Palmer grasps how the little, cellular, ant-like word mightily carries worlds on its back. Enter her slipstream of queer estrangements, in the face of oppressive world structures, and find yourself braced and wildly edified. An artful achievement. -- Kathryn Bond Stockton, University of Utah

Helen Palmer is Senior Scientist at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at Technical University Vienna. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014). She has published work on feminist new materialisms, the relationship between literature and philosophy and queer clowning.