Works by
Robert McRuer
(Writer)

The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (1997)
The Queer Renaissance puts a name to the unprecedented outpouring of creative work by openly lesbian and gay novelists, poets, and playwrights in the past two decades. This volume is one of the first to critically analyze this cultural awakening and is one of the only books to consider the work of gay male and lesbian writers together. Most importantly, it is the first book to consider how this wave of creative activity has worked in tandem with a flourishing of radical queer politics. The Queer Renaissance explores the work of such important figures as  Audre Lorde, Edmund White, Gloria Anzaldua, Randall Kenan,  DREAMWalker Group Sarah Schulman, and Tony Kushne to question the dichotomy between art and activism. In addition, it interrogates the ways queer theory deploys, intersects with, and contests contemporary theoretical movements such as cultural studies, feminist theory, African American theory, and Chicano/a theory.

Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies (A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 9, Numbers 1-2) (2003), Edited with Abby L. Wilkerson
In multiple locations, activists and scholars are mapping the intersections of queer theory and disability studies, moving issues of embodiment and desire to the center of cultural and political analyses. The two fields are premised on the idea that the categories of heterosexual/homosexual and able-bodied/disabled are historically and socially constructed. Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies explores how the frameworks for queer theory and disability studies suggest new possibilities for one another, for other identity-based frameworks of activism and scholarship, and for cultural studies in general.

Topics include the study of "crip theory" and queer/disabled performance artists; the historical emergence of normalcy and parallel notions of military fitness that require both the production and the containment of queerness and disability; and butch identity, transgressive sexual practices, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Contributors Include Carrie Sandahl, Catherine Lord, Cris Mayo, David Serlin, Eli Clare, Ellen Samuels, Jo Rendell, Naomi Finkelstein, Patrick White, Robert McRuer, Sarah E. Chinn, and Todd Ramlow

Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006)  -- Finalist Lambda Literary 2006 GLBT Studies Awards
Illustrated.
Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.

Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.