'Queering the Second Wave' considers the works and ideas of feminists including Monique Wittig, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Marilyn Frye, Donna Haraway, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga as precursors of queer theoretical writings by names such as Judith Butler, José Esteban Muñoz, Lee Edelman, Paola Bacchetta, and Judith Jack Halberstam. While acknowledging some of the problems and blindspots of second-wave politics and writing, we nevertheless seek to challenge the assumption that second-wave feminism is politically outdated or invalid. Instead, we imagine cross-generational and cross-discursive dialogues, and trace a genealogy of influence between the second-wave past and the queer present, while also speculating, in some cases, on previously unimagined queer-feminist futures.

Lisa Downing is Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality at the University of Birmingham. Her books include, most recently, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and The Modern Killer (2013), the co-authored Fuckology: Critical Essays on John Money's Diagnostic Concepts (with Iain Morland and Nikki Sullivan, 2015), and the edited After Foucault (2018). She is currently writing a monograph on 'selfish women'. Lara Cox is an independent scholar and the author of numerous articles on gender studies, theatre, and performance. Her new book, Afterlife of the Theatre of the Absurd (2018), treats the contemporary intersectional political relevance of avant-garde theatre. Her next project concerns female satire in French and US contexts.