Peeren's book is a cultural analysis that brings the literary and social theories of Mikhail Bakhtin to bear on artifacts and events from contemporary popular culture in order to theorize gender, sexual, and racial identities as fundamentally intersubjective.

Esther Peeren is Lecturer in Comparative and (Trans-)Cultural Analysis in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Amsterdam. She completed her Ph.D. at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and has published articles on queer television, the chronotopic dimension of diaspora, and the translation theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Jean Laplanche. Her current research explores the spectral dimension of gender and race identities in contemporary literature, film, and television.