Literally

A lively and accessible look at how queer artists turn everyday culture into surprising sites of humor, insight, and creative possibility

What happens when we take things literally? In Literally: The Queerness of Things Just as They Are, Michael P. Bibler argues that the literal, so often dismissed as obvious or unremarkable, has been a powerful and playful tool in queer cultural production. Examining music, literature, film, and visual art from the 1980s to the present, Bibler shows how queer artists and performers inhabit the norms and categories of mainstream culture as literally as possible, exposing their contradictions and opening new spaces for identity, pleasure, and community.

Through inventive readings of works by the B-52s, Truman Capote, RuPaul, John Waters, and others, Bibler develops an original critical framework he calls “literal camp.” Rather than relying on the irony of hidden meanings, these artists exaggerate basic, literal meanings without altering them, using hyperbole and humor to unsettle normative hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and cultural value. By foregrounding what is already visible on the surface, they reconfigure the relationship between queer and normal and reveal how the straightforward can also be strange, subversive, fun, and transformative.

Positioned at the intersection of queer theory, literary studies, and cinema and media studies, Literally offers a fresh alternative to models of queerness defined solely by opposition or negation. Bibler shows how literalism can “crash the normal” from within and make room for a wide range of identities and attachments to exist on their own terms, literally just as they are. Accessible, witty, and theoretically ambitious, the book builds a vibrant archive of queer cultural production while rethinking the foundations of queer theory itself.

By taking the literal seriously as a site of pleasure and critique, Literally invites readers to reconsider how meaning, identity, and value are made and how they might be remade.