Impossible Objects: Waiting for the Revolution in Summer Will Show

Abstract

One of the most significant challenges faced by scholars in the field of the history of sexuality is a persistent doubt about whether or not sexuality has a history. The field has constituted itself against such disbelief, against claims that sexuality is too private and too idiosyncratic to constitute an object of sustained historical inquiry; that the evidence for a history of same-sex relations is slender; and that any look at the history of queer experience is inevitably a projection of a current state of affairs, a matter of “special pleading.”1 Despite the growth of this discipline over the last several decades, the validity of the history of sexuality as an object of study can still never be assumed, but must always be argued. The construction of queer existence as an “impossible object” of historical inquiry suggests an analogy between the epistemological disadvantage of queer studies in the academy today and the epistemological disadvantage of individual queers, those “impossible people” who, over the course of the twentieth century, have been marginalized not only through moral censure but also through silence and disregard. In this sense, we might say that the history of the field recapitulates the history of the community, and that the demand for the recognition of queer history as a viable practice is charged with a long history of similar claims for the viability of certain “hard to believe” modes of existence and desire. The inventiveness of a whole range of queer historical