Afterword

Abstract

The authors formulate “queer reconstellations” as a way to push the field of queer studies beyond its critical settlement in programmatic thinking that often organizes the field in predictable pathways. They also challenge those deviations that do not fundamentally transform the field’s subjects and objects. Using “left of queer” as at once a provocation, a nodal point, and a pathway into the arts of being ungovernable, this afterword proposes a constellated approach for wagering methods, histories, ideas, and cases that weaves objectless critique not as telos but as a necessary experiment for expansive thinking, writing, and doing what has not yet been thought, written, or done. To constellate queerness in this planetary mode is to hold on to the different methods and analytics proposed by this special issue’s editors and contributors as necessary rearrangements that may redefine and revivify our cognate fields. In this regard, the authors are inspired to meditate on a broad spectrum of theoretical musings and projects that have taken hold of the field of queer studies, especially in the United States, while asking for more transnational, decolonial, and global South thinking and practices that are at once perverse and world making for our own islands of misfit toys.