Queering Feelings

This book focuses on queer feelings and the meanings assigned to 'queer' bodies, challenging the idea of 'emotions' as gendered and questioning the role of emotion in the designation of sexed and gendered bodies. From a critical humanist position, Queering Feelings examines the role of queer theory when addressing therapeutic knowledge, practice and approaches, engaging with the work of Foucault, Butler, Ahmed and Berlant. It thus disrupts dominant ideas about therapy as representing a form of liberal humanism, replete with the humanistic values of neoliberal Western society. In its place is offered a new conception of 'the human', freed from the the individualistic and humanist agenda often maintained in therapy and placed instead within the context of collective and dialogic social experiences. Drawing on extensive interviews spanning a decade with LGBTQ therapists and their clients, Queering feelings departs from previous accounts of emotion which are founded on normative structures in order to explore the development of new, 'queer' formations of feeling and the manner in which these renegotiate intimacies, sexuality and gender. An empirically grounded, yet theoretically informed examination of the relationship between feeling, gender, emotion and sexuality and the ways in which their significance is constructed by language and practices of labelling, this book will be of interest not only to scholars of gender and sexuality, queer theory and emotion, but also to therapeutic practitioners and counsellors.