Fabulous, Formless

Abstract

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.