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This is a big book, in a literal and metaphorical sense. It was several years in the making, and takes the form of a compendium of 27 chapters by different authors, plus the useful Introduction and Afterword by the editors. In her Introduction, Noreen Giffney describes it as ‘structured around a series of encounters’ (p. 37), and the book is set out as an interdisciplinary discussion. It is divided into three sections: six chapters from academics, from the perspective of queer theory; 13 chapters from psychoanalytic clinicians, responding to the material in the first section; and finally, seven chapters by a range of authors, from both clinical and academic backgrounds, commenting on the issues raised by the ‘encounter’ in the preceding sections. The psychoanalytic clinicians come from a variety of backgrounds - object relations, Jungian, Kleinian and Lacanian thinking, individuals working with both adults and children. The collection comprises established and newer writers on the themes.
For the potential reader who is familiar with the term ‘queer theory’, the book's essential premise may be obvious. ‘Queer theory’ describes the work of the loosely defined range of thinkers who have emerged in the wake of poststructuralist philosophy and have taken as their starting point a critique of society's prevailing heteronormative values, energized by the moral panic caused by the AIDS crisis. Although opposed to the established forms of psychoanalytic practice, which have tended to reinforce normative assumptions about sexuality, queer writers have used psychoanalytic ideas as a tool for questioning those very assumptions. For example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1998), one of the formative writers of queer theory, says: ‘It is time for genetic narratives like psychoanalysis (and, of course, all narratives are genetic narratives) to stop representing the idiot perseveration of the assaultive and sinister question, Where do homosexuals come from’ (p. 95). Although clinicians and