Our title responds to an adversarial moment in the fields of feminist and queer early modern studies: the long-standing charges that feminism's focus on bodies and the patriarchal family promote essentialism and heteronormativity and that queer theory's lack of attention to gender and misogyny replicates masculinist norms. Of course, both feminism and queer theory offer more sophisticated theories than these condemnations allow: feminists have long understood both gender and the body as constructed, and queried any stable sense of identity; many queer scholars have undertaken thoroughgoing critiques of gendered systems that acknowledge the workings of gendered oppression. But the antagonism remains. Following Lee Edelman's 2004 rejection of futurity, feminist theory has sometimes seemed, ironically, like the past to the future of queer theory. The fraught theoretical debates around temporality and history (two distinct terms, as Valerie Traub notes) associate queerness with subversion and innovation, while feminism and its emphasis on women writers appear at least outdated if not outright reactionary.

In the wake of the 2016 election, though, we with feminist and queer commitments have antagonists enough. Accordingly, we join with other scholars in seeking ‘a strategic collectivity that remains conscious of difference and incommensurability’. How can we understand the relationship between feminism and queer theory as not adversarial, nor substitutive, but as coexisting and mutually galvanizing?