Beyond Radical
Queer Theory and the UK
(Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Network, 2023-24)
Beyond Radical is an AHRC-funded research network for UK-based scholars, artists and activists interested in the continued interrogation and development of queer theory. While Sustained conceptual engagement with queer thought still tends to happen most prominently in the US, the network’s aim is to make more spaces for this for UK-based scholars and anyone based in geographical proximity to the UK.
The network is also premised on the fact that queer thought finds itself at an interesting juncture. For a while now, scholars have asked if, after 30 years or more, the ‘radical’ impetus behind queerness has waned. Meanwhile, many researchers are energised by other fields of gender and sexuality studies, such as trans studies, which often seem closer to more urgent social and political issues.
One response to this moment of transition in the intellectual and political energies behind queer theory would be to forget about it. But ‘Beyond Radical’ instead takes this moment as an important one in which to reflect on queer theory: not just to critique its exclusions, but to think through and interrogate some of its defining theoretical foundations. To do this, it will run a series of events over the next year around a set of four central themes.
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