‘Cleaning up’ the neighbourhood: Affective dynamics of environmental gentrification

Sexual Politics, Organizational Practices: Interrogating Queer Theory, Work and Organization

WHAT'S LEFT OF ENGLISH STUDIES? This is a slippery question for me, on a number of fronts. First, I find it hard these days to imagine something to the left of English Studies; despite the reactionary whimpers we can still detect from the conservative haunts of our departments, our discipline has placed itself so firmly on the left that it has become more or less synonymous with progressive politics. There's nothing to the left of English Studies because English Studies is left. The second difficulty for me, though, is my position in this political arena: as a queer scholar working in both textual and cultural studies, I assume I have common cause with the other people writing for this forum, but I'm not really sure what that common cause is. You see, a very cursory survey of English departments across the country reveals that most of the major schools in Canada are not doing queer theory or teaching it to their graduate students, and undergraduates fare no better. There is not much left, in Canada at any rate, of the kind of work I've been doing. Queer theory is one of those methodologies (and there are others: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the new formalism) that have failed to make significant inroads in English Studies as they are practiced in Canada. But why should this be the case? I want in the next few pages to think about queerness in the Canadian academy, its reception, and its relative insignificance. My argument, cryptically put, is this: while there is little of queerness left in Canadian English studies, what's to the left of English studies is the queer. But evidence first. In preparation for writing this essay, I cruised the internet homepages for the major graduate schools in English across Canada to see which ones had full-time faculty who declared queer theory as a primary interest or which offered courses in queer theory. According to the websites (which I admit are never a reliable archive, but they do indicate what is being advertised to the potential grad student) the following departments have queer practitioners, although it doesn't follow that the schools are now or have been offering courses in queer theory: Alberta, UBC, Calgary, Guelph, McMaster, Ottawa, Simon Fraser, Western, Wilfrid Laurier, and York. The following don't: Carleton, Dalhousie, Manitoba, McGill, Memorial, UNB, Queen's, Saskatchewan, Victoria, Waterloo and Windsor. Toronto has someone interested in Sexual Diversity Studies--I'm not exactly sure what that is--and someone else interested in Gay and Lesbian Culture but the particular resonances of queerness are nowhere to be felt. What's even more interesting to me from these websites is that all the graduate schools in this country have people working in feminist studies and post-colonial and race studies. In most cases, there is more than one person in each of these fields. In fact, I once had someone tell me that her department was entirely devoted to materialist political work, yet hers is one of the departments in which no sustained queer work is being done. What does this tell us? Why are positions in queer theory not being advertised, and why are queer scholars (I still assume we are legion) not indicating themselves as such in their department's public documents? the easy answer is homophobia: department members are still very reluctant to have gay and lesbian colleagues. That's the easy answer, but I don't buy it, at least not on the surface. If anything, and lesbians are being saturated with liberal well-wishing from all sectors of the academy today. We are constantly being assured that our work is important, and we are constantly being called upon by departments that can't get around to hiring queer scholars to assist them in the evaluation of queer graduate work. Inch by inch, the wording of university job ads is expanding from the soliciting of visible minorities to sexual minorities or gays and lesbians, a move that presumably counters the exclusion of sexuality by creating more diversified departments. …

Queer scholarship in international law can broadly be understood as questioning or destabilizing the normative—that which has been “taken for granted” or “naturalized.” However, defining queer theory is made harder by the fact that much of queer theory seeks to avoid definition. Queering is a continuous process, a conversation on many levels as opposed to a blueprint that can be clearly defined. Queer theory in international law can therefore perhaps be best defined by looking at what it has sought to resist. Key focal points have included thinking about sex and gender [identity] in alternative and non-hegemonic ways, challenging fixed categories of identity and binary thinking, calling for alternative forms of kinship to be fostered outside and beyond the formal ties deemed recognizable by the state (such as hetero-marriage), and, reaching well beyond what one might think of as its “proper objects,” revealing the exclusionary and hierarchical conceptual architectures of international law emanating from its heteronormative underpinnings. We include a wide array of queer scholarship, including works that focus more on challenging global power relations as well as those that focus on queer lives. The latter were selected, however, due to their counter-normative/counter-binary focus. Therefore, this entry does not cover the wide spectrum of LGBTI+ rights scholarship, but rather seeks to identify what we consider to be some of the queerer pieces from that field. Queer analyses often draw upon and complement feminist theories of intersectionality and postcolonial/TWAIL theories of imperial power and narratives of so-called progress. Like other strands of critical international legal research and activism, queer interventions seek to understand and challenge the multiple ways in which unequal power and oppression are naturalized and normalized through law. What queer scholarship brings to this field is a broader array of key analytical vectors of oppression, centering tropes of gender [identity] and sexuality in new ways, a keener awareness of the exclusionary effects of binary and hierarchized ways of thinking, a commitment to radically rethinking what has been assumed to be “normal,” and an activism that takes all life seriously, including nonhuman life. We have sought to introduce some queer terminologies into this entry by the headings we use, which pair conventional international law nomenclature with queer alternatives. In this way we hope to convey, in a small way, the questioning of the normative that queer theory encourages. Where we use the acronym LGBTI+ and its other variations in our abstracts, we have followed the choice of the author.

<i>De</i>Groove Is in<i>de</i>Move

Queer Theory, Queer Historicism:Recent Works Melissa E. Sanchez (bio) John Garrison. Friendship and Queer Theory in the Renaissance: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 2014, 172 + xxx pages. $148.00 cloth. Valerie Traub. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 462 + xiv pages. $59.95 cloth. Simone Chess. Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature. New York: Routledge, 2015, 196 pages. $155.00 cloth. Jeffrey Masten. Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 354 + xiv pages. $59.95 cloth. Will Stockton. Members of His Body: Shakespeare, Paul, and a Theology of Nonmonogamy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017, 178 + x pages. $25.00 paperback. Over the past decade or so, the question of queer theory's relationship to history has stimulated a good deal of thought and (sometimes polemical) debate in early modern studies. Essays, reviews, books, edited volumes, conference [End Page 141] panels, seminars, and special journal issues have addressed the complex interchange among method, politics, and affect.1 The set of books under discussion here, all published between 2014 and 2017, demonstrate that the conversation is far from over. They not only contribute new knowledge and perspectives to queer early modern studies but also—to borrow Valerie Traub's words—offer rich opportunity for "metacritical reflections on why we do what we do the way we do it" (315). Method and metacriticism can mean a lot of things, but the particular question I am interested in exploring in this review essay is the relation between queer theory and queer history: if theory, as Traub writes, implies an abstract, widely applicable speculation or principle, and history accentuates particularity and specificity, how might these two approaches complement, correct, and expand upon one another?2 Turning to foundational topics for early modern sexuality studies—friendship (Garrison), epistemology (Traub), cross-dressing (Chess), philology (Masten), and Christian marriage (Stockton)—these five books answer that question in ways that are both surprising and compelling. One approach, as Garrison, Traub, and Chess demonstrate, is to return to topics that have been central to queer studies for such a long time that it would be easy to think there is nothing new left to know or say about them. In the cases of these three books, those topics are, respectively, friendship, sex, and cross-dressing. Garrison builds on (and generously engages) a considerable body of scholarship that has established same-sex friendship as a culturally central alternative to heterosexual marriage in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, an alternative that was valued insofar as it offered a model of egalitarian and sincere attachment that contrasted with the hierarchical structure and economic impetus of marriage. However, Garrison's analysis departs significantly from much that has come before; he shows how, even as queer scholars have contested the view that heterosexual marriage is a transhistorical ideal, they may have replicated its structure by emphasizing classical philosophy's overt attachment to the couple form and repudiation of socioeconomic interest. As a result, early modernists have overlooked the extent to which both classical and early modern philosophies of friendship express longing for more varied and numerous attachments. Garrison recovers a number of attempts to expand the definition of friendship not only to include groups as well as dyads, but also to embrace the possibilities of self-interest, in the form of both sexual pleasure and economic profit. Garrison also challenges some of the usual boundaries of period and genre. Along with a reconsideration of Aristotle and Cicero, he traces the influence of medieval [End Page 142] friendship treatises that expand the classical model to encompass group and financially beneficial relations, particularly in a monastic context, and thereby resists a sharp distinction between medieval and Renaissance, religious and humanist, thought. He convenes a range of genres and contexts—from canonical Shakespeare poems and plays to masques produced in the Inns of Court to Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and Milton's Paradise Lost and Epitaphium Daemonis—all works that depict fluid "friendship networks" rather than dyadic pairs.3 The result is that we have a less noble...

Stuck on You Pansy Duncan (bio) A book positively glutinous with sticky moments, Orgasmology opens with the announcement that writing it afforded the author a “momentarily suckering attraction to those words that ha[d] even some passing morphological resemblance” to the figure that Annamarie Jagose possessively proclaims “her” scholarly object: orgasm (2013, xi). These attachments to orgasm’s graphic or sonic proxies are short-lived. Yet their transience only underlines all the more emphatically the tenacity of the book’s attachment to “orgasm,” its guiding belief in “the value of sticking with [this] unlikely scholarly object, attending to the thick textures of its discursive formulations” (xvi; emphasis added). “Sticking with” things, it seems, is what Jagose does best. Tracing the cultural and critical career of orgasm across a range of twentieth-century scenes, texts, and archives—from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne’s notorious photographic studies of the facial spasms associated with orgasm, to the popular early twentieth-century genre of the marriage manual—Orgasmology is everywhere marked by its adherence to the figure it takes as its organizing object. And this allegiance to orgasm both reflects and facilitates a more striking allegiance—to some of the time-honored precepts of the queer theoretical program. While orgasm’s reputation as the sexual hallmark of “quiescent [hetero-]normativity” (xiii) means it will never be spoilt for queer critical champions, it also sets orgasm alongside, say, the wedding-industrial complex and Doris Day’s star persona as a figure whose very implication in fantasies of sexual and social closure prime it for queer critical re-reading.1 Orgasmology’s fidelity to a recognizably queer body of scholarly objects is matched by its fidelity to a recognizably queer scholarly method. In its “systematic demonstration that orgasm is the deconstruction of sex,” to quote David Halperin’s back-cover blurb for the book, Orgasmology delivers a master class in a practice whose signature critical maneuver is essentially a deconstructive one—the demonstration that marginalized sexual and social practices and objects, like the orgasm, may unravel the ties that knit together chromosomal sex, gender, and desire. [End Page 112] What makes this kind of theoretical “stickiness” noteworthy, however, is how atypical it is of queer theory today, when so much of the theoretical energy propelling queer theoretical work is aimed at delaminating “queer” from the practices and objects with which that body of scholarship has traditionally been identified. From Judith Butler’s turn to justice and human rights and Eve Sedgwick’s later work on affect, Buddhism and pedagogy, to recent queer considerations of empire, race, migration, geography, activism, and class, many of queer theory’s heavy-hitters have lately sought to direct their attention away from the objects that initially galvanized work in the field.2 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the titles of issues of recent journals and books in the field tremble with anxious interrogatives: After Sex? wonders Janet Halley and Andrew Parker’s 2011 anthology of critical writing “after” queer theory; “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” inquires the influential 2005 issue of Social Text. From an outsider’s point of view, these astonishing “swerves in attention” (Jagose 2013, 13) come at an unexpected moment, which is to say, just as the field completes its transition from radical disciplinary renegade to recognized disciplinary insider. Yet the fact that queer scholars bridle at an institutional uptake that scholars in other fields might celebrate should come as little surprise. Forged in the activist moment of the early 1990s and fired by a desire to think against the models by which sexuality has conventionally been apprehended, queer theory has tended to put great stock in movement and transformation as a rhetorical and political ideal, especially, as Brad Epps observes, “when it is movement against, beyond, or away from rules and regulations, norms and conventions, borders and limits” (2001, 413). In keeping with what Elizabeth Stephens identifies as a wider tendency across critical theory to associate fixity “with the conservative and normative, while the fluid is associated with the positive, progressive and resistant” (2014, 187), queer theory has tended, according to Epps, to elevate fluidity to the status of a “fetish” (2001, 419). Yet if this muted but...

Queer Theory (QT) and Queer Legal Theory (QLT) provide useful frameworks for Critical Policy Analysis within educational studies. As critical lenses, these theories are particularly attuned to uncovering sites where all forms of oppression, but especially homophobia and heteronormativity, lead to the stigmatization and erasure of queer identities and queer issues in schools and school policy. One of the challenges faced by scholars using QT and QLT has been accessing, or even finding, data for such qualitative and historical research. Consequently, queer scholars have developed creative strategies to scavenge for data and have created hybrid analytic frameworks in similarly creative ways. This chapter discusses scavenging as a queer research methodology, with an emphasis on combining QT and QLT for Critical Policy Analysis in education.

The idea that cities are characterized by socially produced injustices has been well argued. Rather than treating geographies as static physically formed environments that are external to the social sphere, they should be conceptualized as powerful forces that shape socio-political processes and structures and vice versa. Indeed, different disciplines have and continue to recognize the consequential role of geography in our social world. In line with this thinking and using Edward Soja’s (1980) notion of socio-spatial dialectic approach as the central framework, this chapter draws on secondary sources to unpack urban poverty in priority neighborhoods or at-risk low-income neighborhoods in Toronto. The chapter looks at how those who live in such spaces challenge their spatial entrapment and social status. Particularly, I explore the geographic underpinning of social injustice by zeroing in on how Black Canadians in Toronto experience racial discrimination in employment in such priority neighborhoods. I reason that the struggle over access to resources is not only a matter of racial and socio-economic equity but also a matter of curbing spatiality of injustice and injustices of spatiality.

Drone warfare is only the most prominent of a series of social and technological developments leading to remote and abstracted forms of injury and death. In response to Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir K. Puar’s connecting of queer theory with “permanent war” in “Queer Theory and Permanent War,” the present article examines the way in which queer scholarship can productively engage with non-Western bodies and sexualities. Considering sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, it draws on the work of Puar, Achille Mbembe, and others to argue that the post-9/11 wars represent a major context in which queer theory can help us reexamine conflict, trauma, and embodiment.

Investigating the work of pop star Cyndi Lauper prompts new reckonings with such concepts as intensity, ecology, and mood, foundational to affect theory. This essay traces the queer force of Lauper’s music—and its relevance to renovating affect theory—through three central movements: feeling intense, feeling inside/out, and feeling brightness, darkly.

This article argues that, in contradistinction to its widely promoted ethical openness to its future, queer theory has been less scrupulous about its messy, flexible and multiple relations to its pasts, the critical and activist traditions from which it emerged and that continue to develop alongside in mutually informing ways. In particular, it assesses queer theory's tangled, productive and ongoing relations with feminist theory. Returning to the controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality that has been prominently theorized as key to distinguishing between feminist and queer theoretical projects, the article traces the influence of Gayle Rubin's `Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality' through feminist and queer scholarship in order to demonstrate that, however different their projects, feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.

Reviewed by: Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer Historyby Kadji Amin Andrew Ragni Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer HistoryDurham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017, 255pp. ISBN: 9780822368892 T heM ay 2015 issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studiesquestioned queer theory's allegiance to antinormativity. Aptly titled "Queer Theory without Antinormativity," scholars in the journal wondered why antinormative figures or texts proved to be axiomatic for queer critique. The articles therein pursued a queer theory unburdened from this political or theoretical commitment to antinormativity, carving a space for scholarship that highlights and addresses the sticky web of complicities queer peoples share with the state, with the law, and yes, with normativity. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer Historymay be one of the earliest books in the field to take the critical intervention of the differencesjournal as its theoretical touchstone. Kadji Amin regards French writer Jean Genet as the paradigmatic "queerer-than-thou" historical figure animating critical thought and art today; however, by deploying an analytic Amin calls "deidealization," Genet's pederastic relationships, his racial fetishisms, and his earlier praise of France's carceral-pedagogical institutions expose the anti-egalitarian and decidedly not antinormative strains in Genet's writing and political activism. Rather than simply condemn Genet as untenable for [End Page 111]queer scholarship or even queer activism, Amin argues that the "unspeakable" aspects of the renowned pederast reveal a longstanding yet under-analyzed liberal-egalitarian tradition within the precincts of avowedly antinormative queer studies. Why is modern pederasty, in contradistinction to the work of David Halperin, which has focused on pederasty in ancient Greece, an all-but-ignored form of queer relationality within the field, despite its conceptual links to both criminality and deviant sexual behavior (two categories that otherwise enjoy widespread discussion in gender and sexuality studies)? In other words, what does the repression of pederasty in queer studies say about the field's difficulty in "envisioning alternatives to egalitarianism" (35)? Pederasty, Amin observes in concert with Halperin, describes a relation that eroticizes disparities in power, class, and/or age. Is it simply too disturbing of an attachment to study? And how do we account for the transmutation of the pederast into the pathologized figure of the pedophile sometime in the late twentieth century? Amin proposes a genealogical critique of queer studies' disavowed attachments to show how histories of gay liberation inform, in opaque ways, the casting of pederasty as "backward" and regressive in contradistinction to egalitarian or idealized forms of queer kinship. He calls this methodological practice "attachment genealogy," which builds upon genealogical critique to include affective orientations in the queer past that trouble the field's propulsions toward utopian thinking or utopian futurities. In this manner, Amin invokes the work of Heather Love to encounter historical objects that are not so readily redeemable into liberal notions of progressiveness or equality, Genet being chief among them. The structure of the book homologizes this argument, where each chapter's main themes—prison pederasty, racial fetishism, pederastic kinship, and queer terrorism—disappoint or even disturb our contemporary notions of queerness by locating complicity with bad objects as a particular quality of Genet's. By attending to the exclusion of pederastic relationships from gay liberation and the gay rights movement, Amin develops the analytic of "pederastic modernity" to theorize pederasty at the heart of European modernity. He does so by drawing on a number of Genet texts, noting how the youth penal colony of Mettray eroticized hierarchical differences between inmates in a pederastic fashion as a "training ground" for properly nationalist French masculinities: "European modernity is built on mass same-sex institutions—armies, prisons, and schools—that solicit and implant affective attachments to masculine hierarchies" (56). Pederasty, then, is no longer simply a pathologized form of homosexuality nor a diagnostic for degenerate behavior, for it comes to structure the subjectivization of citizens of empire. Therefore, Genet's texts could be said to expose the pederasty at the heart of the relationship between France and its incarcerated boys, its military, and the countries these soldiers occupy. [End Page 112] One of Amin's most convincing arguments troubles...

The Power of the “Knowing Women”

An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly is the first introduction to queer theory written especially for students of literature. Tracking the emergence of queer theory out of gay and lesbian studies, this book pays unique attention to how queer scholars have read some of the most well-known works in the English language. Organized thematically, this book explores queer theoretical treatments of sexual identity, gender and sexual norms and normativity, negativity and utopianism, economics and neoliberalism, and AIDS activism and disability. Each chapter expounds upon foundational works in queer theory by scholars including Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman. Each chapter also offers readings of primary texts –ranging from the highly canonical, like John Milton’s Paradise Lost, to more contemporary works of popular fiction, like Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. Along the way, An Introduction to Queer Literary Studies: Reading Queerly demonstrates how queer reading methods work alongside other methods like feminism, historicism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. By modelling queer readings, this book invites literature students to develop queer readings of their own. It also suggests that reading queerly is not simply a matter of reading work written by queer people. Queer reading attunes us to the queerness of even the most straightforward text.

Introduction