The following thesis elucidates my conception of queer adaptation, a theoretical formulation that reads the process of adaptation itself as queer. Queerness and adaptation share several characteristics, chief among them a sense of inclusivity and the tendency to be perceived as secondary. While both fields are individually productive, together they offer a wider range of theoretical possibilities. My conception of queer adaptation is founded in the navigation of various dichotomies: between adaptations and “original” text, between high and low culture, between dominant culture and its subversion. Rather than defining queer adaptation oppositionally, my conception centres an interplay between repetition and transformation. The queerness of a given adaptation, then, is not derived exclusively from its subversion of the text it adapts. Rather, I position these texts alongside one another as intertexts rather than within a hierarchical relationship, allowing for greater insight into adaptations and the texts they adapt. Queer adaptation, then, destabilises textual and cultural dichotomies.

In order to establish my conception of queer adaptation, I begin by tracing the discourses that have animated adaptation theory. The most prominent of these discourses are fidelity and anti-fidelity, which have structured understandings of adaptation. I complement that discussion with an account of cinematic queerness. That account foregrounds depictions of queerness, but it also draws attention to queer reading strategies. These strategies are positioned as their own kind of adaptation, allowing queer viewers to read queerness in any number of texts. The discourses and reading strategies outlined in these chapters inform the arguments that follow, wherein I analyse a number of adaptations – specifically a literary adaptation, a remake, and a multimedia adaptation - in terms of their repetition and transformation of the texts they adapt. Ultimately, queer adaptation is a democratic mode of textuality that perceives every text as potentially incomplete, as suggesting any number of creative avenues to any number of possible adapters.