Man Woman Cherry Tree Yellow: Queer Elsewheres, Black Elsewhens, Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Queer Eighteenth-Century Studies

Abstract Bawdy, explicit, and heterogenous, the eighteenth century has a lot to teach us about how people thought about queerness before it became the love that dared not speak its name. The works under review demonstrate that queer methods exceed a hunt for queer people in the past. Like racial science, the science of gender and sexuality spread with European imperialism to become a rationale for colonial violence in disparate geographical and cultural contexts. These books join a collective chorus of scholars in many disciplines who have shown the limitations (and harms) of the historically Anglo-American and literary focus of eighteenth-century studies, and the power of mixed temporal methods and artmaking practices such as poetry and painting that enable liberating transhistorical approaches. Following the lead of contemporary Black and Indigenous creatives allows us to view histories of plantation, extraction, displacement, and land and labor theft through an environmental lens. And a turn to considerations of queer temporality and affect as method challenges traditional historical period studies. These books foreground eighteenth-century writings that record losses of unacknowledged bodies, desires and relationships, hidden, stigmatized, and hence ungrievable in Enlightenment epistemologies. This is the context for queer studies in the eighteenth century now.