Introduction: Queering the Issue

Abstract

‘Is the rectum a grave?’ Leo Bersani’s question was a foundational one for the field of Queer Theory as it developed in the United States in the late 1980s and early 90s in the context of what was dubbed ‘the gay plague’ by a hostile press. Queer Theory was ‘born’, in the work of Eve Sedgwick most particularly, from this epidemic of death. It was an epidemic that confirmed, as Bersani’s defiant question articulates, the phobic association between queerness and annihilation. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2005), Lee Edelman likewise emphasizes the association between queerness and negation in a system governed by ‘reproductive futurism’. Thus, the queer ‘figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place of the social order’s death drive: a place, to be sure, of abjection expressed in the stigma, sometimes fatal, that follows from reading that figure literally’. Both Bersani and Edelman exhort, in their differently inflected ways, a queer embrace of this emplacement to expose and rupture a heteronormative system that must posit the queer as death to maintain its own exclusionary force. ‘Passage’ is the title of the artwork on the cover of this special issue of the Irish University Review, ‘Queering the Issue’. By Galway-based artist Cathal Kelly, the image is of a rectum, figure of queer jouissance that is also a figuration of annihilation within what Joseph Valente calls ‘hetero-semiotics’. Imaged queerly ‘athwart’, the ‘inside’ of the organ is exposed to our view, signalling an opening up that undoes the multiple stigmatizing ‘closures’ associated with the queer. The ‘homo-centric’ work of Bersani and Edelman, as Fintan Walsh describes it, values the spectacle of the anus because of its signification of unproductive, unredemptive sexuality. As Bersani observes, ‘where the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential for death’. While acknowledging the value of what has become known as the ‘anti-social thesis’ in Queer Theory, I choose to read Kelly’s work otherwise: as an opening out to the other that oscillates between the