This book requires not one but three introductions. Defamiliarising, queering and mattering: these three verbs and the conceptual apparatus within and without each of them have not been explicitly interwoven before, but here I trace some of their various interweavings through a demonstration of some of the work they can do. I employ a material miscellany across the three introductions to help me demonstrate this: substances: margarine, gemstones, saliva; gestures: shifting, turning, transposing; aspects of language: sound, shape, sensory imprint; concepts: defamiliarisation, queer, matter.

Introduction 1: Defamiliarising

Words matter. Complexly and wonderfully, language in its material strangeness has the power to advance feminist, queer and intersectional politics. This power exists because the operations we perform on language that manifest its materiality share their dynamic potential with movements of emancipatory politics. Such a unification of formal and material processes is at the heart of the argument underpinning this book, which charts three entangled processes. The first perspective outlined below is defamiliarisation: a making-strange; a shift in perception that I trace, back and forward, from its origin in Russian formalist thought into a contemporary theoretical understanding. The second perspective is materialism in multiple senses, but focused mainly on the realms of the material-discursive and the material-semiotic as discussed in new materialism: that is, how language is matter; how language matters. The third perspective informing and inspiring this book is queer, as the deliberate unstraightening and defamiliarisarion of bodies, desires and orientations. My aim is to demonstrate in this book that defamiliarisation can be queering can be mattering. I use that grammatical formulation deliberately: the threefold analogical function (A can be B can be C) does exist in colloquial speech, but perhaps takes us by surprise in academic writing. The syntactical repetition beyond the regular analogy of two (A can be B) takes us out of our automatic perception of ‘transparent’ words and reminds us of their thickness; their realness; their materiality. The power held in that moment of perceptual awakening through ‘making language strange’ is precisely what is investigated in this book. I sketch out these three perspectives and their entanglements below.