Introduction [Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries]

Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries engages with queer theory and critical theory to reconceptualize everyday interactions, events and practices. The book emerged from a symposium of scholars who came together to respond to cultural theorist Jack Halberstam’s call to engage in alternative imaginings in their own discipline areas to reconceptualize performances of subjectivity, relations of power and productions of knowledge. The symposium was held by the Narrative, Discourse and Pedagogy Research Node and supported by the College of Arts, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Over two days scholars presented papers engaging with Halberstam’s work, which makes new investments in the notion of the counter-hegemonic, the subversive and the alternative. For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory. Halberstam resists the tendency within cultural studies to produce ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic, and to subject itself to a particular mode of disciplinary authority. Halberstam suggests that Stuart Hall’s notion that theory is not an end unto itself but “a detour on route to something else,” (Hall cited in Halberstam, this volume) might lead us to a better model of cultural theory.