Queer Interventions

Ashgate Book Series Listings

Series Editor: Michael O'Rourke, Independent Colleges, Dublin

Queer Interventions
Selected titles from this
series

Founded by Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke, Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish innovative, experimental and theoretically-engaged work in the burgeoning field of queer studies.

The aim of the series is to attract work which is highly theoretical; queer work which intersects with other theoretical schools (feminism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism); work which is accessible but values difficulty; ethical and political projects; and most importantly work which is self-reflexive about methodological and geographical location. It is also keen to commission empirical work which is meta-theoretical in focus.

The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of essays by new and established scholars. It promotes and maintains high scholarly standards of research and is attentive to queer theory's shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. It also encourages independence, creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and recreate it as something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen.

 

An Interview with Series Editor Michael O'Rourke

What encouraged you to enter academia?

My own passion is for the dissemination of knowledge. I have always strived to find and make spaces where people both inside and outside the academy can think, theorize, and create; philosophise as a way of life.

What made you (decide to) initiate this series?

I was initially excited by the prospect of producing a series of theoretically-motivated works which came from a location outside of the US and which tried to reinvigorate queer theoretical discourse or at least move it on in ways where it became possible to imagine a queer theory which did not necessarily refer to or gravitate towards sexuality as a sole object of enquiry (however valuable and welcome such work is).

What are your academic background and research interests?

My research interests lie in fostering links between continental philosophy and queer theory. I am mostly concerned with and have variously drawn on the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere, Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben, J. Hillis Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani and Judith Butler.

Very briefly, where do you see your discipline going in the future?

If queer theory can ever disintricate itself from lesbian and gay studies and a focus on a problematic identitarianism it will become a place where vibrant, exciting and world-making (that is to say politically significant) thinking can happen. That it has not yet done so makes the work of future scholars in the field deeply important.

What has been the highlight of your academic career so far?

Reading Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits in 1993.

Whose achievements would you like to emulate within your own field?

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s. If I cannot be her then I would at least like to be able to write like her.

What book (not from the series, but generally) has most influenced your own work?

There are many. Books I return to again and again are Lee Edelman’s Homographesis, Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, Luce Irigaray’s To Be Two, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Calvin Thomas’s Male Matters and everything by Sedgwick. Undoubtedly, for the ways in which it revolutionized my thinking, the most important book I have ever read is John Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.

What do you find particularly interesting about your role as series editor?

I enjoy working with young and established scholars and bringing monographs and collections of essays from a germinal, half-formed idea to a finished project which both we and the authors/editors can be proud of. Writing a unique and specific preface for each book allows us to counter-sign every text which appears in the series in a particularly pleasurable way.

Any advice for people wanting to publish in your series?

My advice would be to try and come up with an idea which you think might push queer theory into new territory. And find the courage to try to reshape a field which is fast becoming insular, disciplined and potentially moribund, if not entirely redundant.

What was the last book you read?

I never read fiction. The last two books I have read are Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.

Interview kindly received March 2009.