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Winner, 2025 Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize, given by the American Studies Association's Q/T Caucus and the Modern Language Association's GLQ Caucus
Honorable Mention, 2026 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association
How deviant materials figure resistance
Yeast ferments, gelatin jiggles, drugs and alcohol froth and bubble, and flesh from animals and plants actively molds and rots. These materials morph through multiple states and phases, and their movement is imbued with a liveliness that is suggestive of volition.
Deviant Matter examines four aesthetic and material categories— gelatinousness, fermentation, putrefaction, and intoxication—to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage deviant populations across multiple scales, from the level of the single cell up to the affective and aesthetic imperatives of the state and its bureaucratic projects. Kyla Wazana Tompkins deploys a new materialist engagement with the history of race and queer life, making an argument for queer of color method as political and disciplinary critique. Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art.
Drawing from the genealogy of Black feminist and queer of color critique, in Deviant Matter rot, jelly, ferment and intoxicating materials serve as figures for thinking about how matter, art, politics, and affect can be read across multiple scales, ranging from the intimate and molecular everyday to the vast print production and inner workings of the state. Tompkins demonstrates that we are moved by our encounters with the materials in Deviant Matter, producing feelings and sensations that she links to a system of social value where these sensations come to be understood as productive, exciting, disgusting, intoxicating, or even hallucinatory. Moving through multiple states and phase changes, falling apart and reforming again, ferment, rot, intoxicants and jelly energize and choreograph both themselves and human behavior. At the same time, these materialities come to signify exactly those populations whose energy escapes the extractive efforts of capitalism and the state.
"In this stunning, profoundly defamiliarizing book, Kyla Tompkins reconsiders lively states of materiality that transgress boundaries. Everyday acts of eating things that infiltrate, grow by decaying, flourish through death, or slither as if by their own energy, Tompkins argues, incorporate aesthetic state violence as well as potential for minoritarian collectivity, ferment, and joy. Read this astute, playful, insurgent book. You'll never look at jelly the same way again."
"Ultimately, this book is about how people in subaltern communities are resistant to attempts of definition, categorization, and control... fascinating and thought-provoking."
"Following the cultural life of matter, its energetic capacities (both literal and metaphorical), and its policing by the state, Tompkins' argument moves swiftly, even vertiginously between scales of analysis. At times while reading Deviant Matter, I felt like Alice drinking and eating in Wonderland, now tiny and in the next moment telescoping to the vast."
"Tompkins treats readers to a delightful, intensely rigorous new materialist reading that is sure to shape the field for years to come."
"A challenging and brilliant text… Deviant Matter is a compelling, highly original, and exciting contribution to a range of fields."
"This provocative text inspires not only in its rigor and originality, but also in Tompkins’s ability to be honest with the reader while also assiduously conceptualizing ways of moving, slithering, gliding, bouncing, or oozing toward something better, together."
"A brilliant work of world-unsettling theory, everyone, especially graduate students and early career scholars, should read Deviant Matter. Then read it again. And again. And again. Tompkins’s ambitious and densely powerful book demands and rewards it. Stay with this trouble; it is challenging and so good."