Review: Queer: A Graphic History

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gosh darn it, I did not want to rate this book so lowly, but it's entirely my fault. I read Erica Moen's glowing review of this book all the way back in 2016 and I guess I forgot (a lot of) the details over time, because I went into this book expecting something very different from what it is.

Based on that subtitle, "A Graphic History", I anticipated a comic-style format introduction to the history of queerness, of being queer, in society throughout history. Instead, Barker and Scheele give us a crash course in queer theory, largely as an academic discipline with only a side order of on-the-street LGBT+ feelings about some ideas--such as the changing perception of "queer" as identity, slur, and reclaimed term.

The format is very different from what I expect when I see the word "graphic"--not panels, but large illustrations that take up most of the page, with the explanatory text shoved up at the top and the bottom in regular font. The illustrations are occasionally helpful illustrations of abstract concepts--and there are a lot of abstract concepts--but they're often just pictures of critical theorists, and these pictures are recycled any time these theorists come up. I might not critique that in a book more like The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, but in that book there more small pictures breaking down and illustrating concepts step-by-step. Queer, while it has the significant benefits of being concise and friendly-looking, does not take advantage of the illustrated format. Even with just a few paragraphs a page, I found my brain floating in space with the kind of "mind blown" feeling that's more like "exploded into bits" than "expanded understanding."

In other words, this book requires work. Not a problem, just waaaaay out of left field compared to what I expected.

Now that I've adjusted my expectations, I'm going to go back and start again. A chief and--I cannot stress this enough--significant strength of this book is how very concise it is. I can tell that these concepts, as difficult as I may find them on an evening where I wanted something lighter, have been boiled down to the basis. I found the first third of the book and approachable and friendly walk through of more basic concepts, like intersectionality. It was only when we started wading into the weeds of which academic/thinker said what that it started feeling really dense, at which point the conciseness was what saved me from being totally lost.

So I do recommend this book--but only if you, unlike me, do your research and know what you're getting into. Fortunately I got lucky and found my copy on the $1 cart at Strand, so I feel like I got a great deal for what is, essentially, a light-but-meaty academic book.

(Here's another case where I'm not sure what to do about the star rating. The two is for me, personally, not for the quality of the book itself.)

((I'm so far behind in reviews... Might just have to do ratings for some of them, sadly.))

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