Doctoral learning entails transition from experienced student to stance-defending researcher, exposed to international critique: a disorientation and reorientation into a new identity. Arts and Humanities candidates typically navigate these moves without much of a map, choosing their own topics, avoiding the more externally defined approach available to STEM students, and mapping out their own research routes. They are often driven by desire and passion for their topic. Much of each candidate's core identity will be inflected by this transition of emergence, a transition that involves their embodiment, emotion and social persona. With intense and sometimes uncomfortable transition in mind, and desire as driver, new materialism, namely nomadic feminism and queer theory, can inform doctoral pedagogy in Arts and Humanities. The destabilization of normativity opens the potentials and challenges of inhabited and performed identity. Queer theory's longstanding negotiation of social and personal tensions gives a heuristic model for understanding doctoral identity transition.