We invite chapter proposals for an edited collection provisionally titled Queering Kubrick. Although Stanley Kubrick’s films have been extensively studied in relation to gender, power, ideology, and aesthetics, queer perspectives on his work remain fragmented, implicit, or underexplored. Building on recent scholarship—including Gender, Power, and Identity in the Films of Stanley Kubrick edited by Ritzenhoff, Metlić, and Szaniawski (Routledge, 2023) and Richard Rambuss’s Kubrick’s Men (2022)—this volume aims to bring queer readings of Kubrick’s oeuvre to the forefront and to establish queerness as a productive analytical framework for engaging his cinema.

Kubrick’s films frequently depict masculinity alongside violence, ritual, discipline, desire, secrecy, and transgression. This collection seeks interdisciplinary contributions that explore how queerness operates across Kubrick’s work through questions of space, performance, affect, power, eroticism, and resistance to heteronormativity. We welcome historically grounded, theoretically engaged, and methodologically diverse approaches.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to): 

• Queer adaptation and intertextuality

• Masculinity, homoeroticism, and power

• Queer space, architecture, ritual, and secrecy

• Gender performativity, masquerade, disguise, and camp

• Eroticism, pornography, and sexual transgression

• Queer affect, trauma, shame, and desire

• Queer reception and audience responses

• Archival discoveries and new research directions

• “Snails and Oysters:” Lawrence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus.

• Homophobia, slang, and military masculinity (Full Metal Jacket)

• Queer and trans futurity (2001: A Space Odyssey)

• Homosexuality and desire in Eyes Wide Shut

• Sexual transgression in The Shining

• Queer hostility, resistance, and empowerment across the oeuvre

• Age, youth, and seduction in Kubrick’s cinema

• Kubrick through contemporary queer theory

We welcome contributions from researchers involved in film studies, media studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, art history, and related disciplines.

Please send: 

• A proposed title, a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note, to: Karen A. Ritzenhoff (Ritzenhoffk CCSU edu) and Dijana Metlić (dijana.metlic uns.ac rs) by April 15, 2026. 

• The final chapters will be approximately 8,000 words (including endnotes, filmography and works cited) and will be due February 15, 2027.

We look forward to your proposals and to opening a productive scholarly dialogue on queerness in Kubrick’s cinema. We also welcome consulting with prospective contributors before submission.