Queer Humanism

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

This special issue explores a new strategy for addressing an old problem in queer theory and queer Asian studies: how to effectively challenge Western hegemony and provincialize Euro-American experiences of gender and sexuality. Specifically, we are interested not only in how a critical regional and transnational queer studies can generate new knowledge and insight about non-normative genders and sexualities in Asia and Asian diasporas, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how the growing field of queer Asian studies may be uniquely positioned to broaden, challenge, decolonize, expand, and generate new theoretical frameworks and understandings of queerness, both in Asia and beyond. Working from locations as diverse as China, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam, the contributors to this special issue examine how the various communities with whom we work are creating, imagining, questioning, resisting, and witnessing what it means to be queer in Asia, including how the very paradigm of queerness itself can often obscure some Asian experiences of gender, sexuality, and (anti)normativity. By seeking to move the field of queer Asian studies from “queer studies in Asia ” to “queer theory from Asia ,” we hope to offer another possible path toward the centering of queer Asias within queer studies and theory.

Reviewed by: postcolonial-queer: Erkundungen in Theorie und Literatur by Anna Babka Katherine Arens Anna Babka, postcolonial-queer: Erkundungen in Theorie und Literatur. Vienna, Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2019. 304 pp. Anna Babka's postcolonial-queer is one of those monographs that elicits gratitude, as it is broad in scope, informative, gracefully written, and well worth [End Page 160] revisiting because of the author's pronounced ability to synthesize and exemplify a wide range of contemporary theories and exemplary scholarship. The chapters are drawn from earlier publications, but they have been woven together to form an original contribution to today's cultural-theoretical feminist discourses. The volume starts with an introduction that tracks the intersections between today's gender, queer, and postcolonial studies as the driving interdisciplinary site appropriate for today's academic literary and cultural studies, starting with cogent definitions of the assumptions associated with these bodies of theory: Eben das, was Derrida fragend anspricht, das, was zwischen den Disziplinen geschieht, wird im hier vorliegenden Band durch die genuin transdisziplinären Gender-, Queer und Postcolonial Studies einer möglichen Lesart, einer möglichen Perspektive zugeführt. Entlang zentraler Ansätze poststrukturalistischer Theoriebildung, wie der écriture feminine oder maßgeblicher Konzepte der Gender-, Queer- und Postcolonial Studies, wie etwa Identität, Alterität, Zentrum, Peripherie, Hybridität, "dritter Raum" / "drittes Geschlecht," wird die Verhandlung verschiedener Achsen der Differenz reflektiert und literarisch erkundet. (29) The six chapters in the volume's first part following this introduction offer solid, nuanced discussions of the most influential voices in these major areas of contemporary scholarship, offering succinct overviews of how these scholarly projects have evolved, principally in US and Germanophone contexts. The first chapter, "Zur Verwobenheit von Gender Studies, Queer Studies & Postcolonial Studies," makes the brave choice of working conceptually instead of chronologically. In consequence, Babka's work starts with the newest generation of hybrid theory that combines race and gender, starting with Kimberle Crenshaw and Kien Nghi Ha in German, but then proceeds to differentiate it carefully from postcolonial gender studies, the latter of which is much more pronounced in European feminist theory than in US/UK ones. In this chapter, Babka shows off her work's great strength: in all cases, she cites foundational literature in theory (e.g., Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, the work of the Combahee River Collective) and then brings the individual project forward into the newest generation. In this sense, postcolonial-queer can serve as a research guide—particularly important for US GermanistInnen, because their work is all too often done without reference to foundational [End Page 161] terminology in anglophone feminist studies, particularly by theorists of color, or to the Marxist contexts of much first- and second-generation African-American theorists. Similarly, Babka always explains how terms have mutated between disciplinary contexts and within national projects and tracks how terms have crossed national lines as well. Subsequent chapters are then classified into conceptual clusters: "Denkräume" (discussing Spivak and Othering), "Denkfiguren" (Derrida, Butler, and Bettine Menke, reading in one chapter Derrida and Nietzsche so as to evolve a broader idea of the feminine, and then in another Butler's performativity and "colonial Mimicry" in Homi Bhabha), and then once again "Denkräume" (this time about Trinh Minh-Ha and postcolonial feminisms). The first section closes with a discussion of postcolonial and queer theory in Germanistik, speaking about textual canons in literary studies and the need for ongoing self-interrogation of criticism. In all cases her relating of gender identity and cultural positioning is exemplary—a fine reading of two bodies of theory, astutely combined to reframe our contemporary understandings of inherited problems in gender theory. The second large section of the book is devoted to case study readings that show the potential of newly posed approaches to textual reading over queer and postcolonial theory. The first series of cases represents texts from early modern German literatures: Kleist's Marionettentheater is read queer, Karl May's In den Schluchten des Balkan (1892) is read postcolonially, as are then Robert Michel's Die Verhüllte (1907) and Else Lasker-Schüler's Der Prinz von Theben (1914) (the latter with specific reference to Expressionism and oriental miniatures). The...

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan DesireNot Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men from the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis

Race, Sex, and God

YOU CAN’T GO HOMO AGAIN: QUEER THEORY AND THE FORECLOSURE OF GAY STUDIES ERIC SAVOY University of Calgary So, while that happy sexuality may be a paxadise of indeterminacy, it can hardly be thought of as an indeterminate paradise. - D.A. Miller (Bringing Out Roland Barthes 16) I have a million theme songs; what I need is an act. - Bette Midler (Public Performance, August 30, 1993) A n account of the genealogy of the queer project might begin, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, with the 1991 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University. Here the pervasive deployment of the term “queer”— which, however inchoate, seemed to promise a more sharply analytical pur­ chase on gender and sexuality—was accompanied by a startling shift in the program, the sense of community, the general look of the academic confer­ ence. In addition to the displacement of the literary text by popular culture as the primary focus, most participants signified through discourse, dress, and performance their allegiance to a particular camp. On the one hand were women and men (tweed jackets, sensible shoes) who had struggled for several years—in some cases, many years—to gain academic legitimacy for gay and lesbian studies; on the other was an army of mostly younger grad­ uate students (whose uniform consisted of buzz cuts, black T-shirts, Doc Marten’s shoes, multiple earrings) clearly impatient with identity politics and the conventional categories of academic address, who demanded a more radical mode of cultural “queery.” My own performance—which focussed on cross-dressing in Bugs Bunny cartoons to argue the possibilities of “iden­ tity” and “community” within 1950s mainstream culture for gay men—was delivered to a sea of people devoted to T-shirt politics (that is, the current slogan on the fashionable accessory) who were somewhat unsympathetic to my historicizing manoeuvres. Clearly, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. (I stopped wearing a tie after the first day.) Most remarkable in the short history ofthe term “queer”—which includes both its performative role as a defiant adjective and its status as arevisionist category that seeks to undo all categories—are the rapidity of its accession 129 to academic currency and its increasingly, ironically attentuated relation­ ship to the lives and cultural production of lesbians and gay men. At the Rutgers conference, the term escaped denotative scrutiny in that it slipped frequently, often in the same performance, between synonymity with gay or lesbian positionalities and an anxious marking ofdistance from those critical perspectives. By the time of the 1992 MLA Convention in New York, aca­ demic queerness had evidently acquired a defiant spin that included an oppo­ sitional relation to the gay and the lesbian. Increasingly, the queer project’s commitment to what Michael Warner has called “post-identity theory” (19) discerns “gay studies” as being imprisoned by outmoded binary logic, and— according to Simon Watney, who emphasizes the dangerous irresponsibility of queerness’s political indifference or evacuation—its proponents as being “guilty of some vulgar, essentialist error.”1 To a large extent, the emerging hostility between gay studies and queer theory arises from a genuine anxiety that academic institutionalization will diminish or circumvent their differently conceived potential for radical cri­ tique and antihomophobic intervention. Such anxiety is, by now, entirely familiar, as is evidenced by the debates in feminist studies and among people of colour for the last decade. However, because the parameters ofgender and sexual perversity are so unstable—gayness, let alone queerness, has had a hard time in establishing itselfas the kind of “visible minority” recognized by affirmative-action programs—the terms of queer theory’s negotiation with gay studies are slippery, shifting, subject to the finest ironies, and governed by reversal. For example, gay studies in its “traditional” evolution (that is, committed simultaneously to revisionist reception of canonical texts for a homosexual readership and to the recuperation of an elided gay-affirmative cultural production) has often imagined its project as generally separatist; yet from a queer perspective, it is frequently viewed as entirely assimilationist and academically “safe.” Conversely, the proponents of gay studies who are committed to a liberationist politic and the construction of “identity” are coming to see queer theory’s investment in...

This paper considers queer studies in the global geopolitical hotspot of Asia, as well as how we can reimagine queer theories through both the Covid-19 pandemic and the intensified regional and global superpower competition and geopolitical tensions. It argues for a rethinking of queer studies through today’s international relations and geopolitical complications in a sociological political economy. The aim is to connect critical studies with analyses of economic and social class structures, an approach that has been substantiated by the current crises, and to present an expanded queer mobility theory with two brief case studies (mini-critiques) of the current socioeconomic conditions facing marginalized people under Covid-19 and the changing geopolitical landscape. In so doing, this paper actively explores what queer studies can do and can be through the current historical turning point of the pandemic and geopolitical rivalry toward potential post-Covid socioeconomic revival and recovery.

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

Reviewed by: Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman Dennis Denisoff (bio) Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman; pp. xii + 234. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $34.95. In Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, Dustin Friedman asks us to consider aestheticism not so much as a cultural movement or an aesthetic philosophy but as a theory—a theory of sexuality preceding the institutionalized discourses of desire. As such, the book proposes a conceptual pivot to existing scholarship on the articulation of Victorian notions of sexual identity through discourses of aesthetics, particularly Paterian aestheticism. Dozens of scholars have addressed aestheticism as a crucial concept through which some non-normative identities attained conceptual cohesion and cultural recognition. Early works such as Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) reflect the heavy influence of poststructuralism on queer studies, and in particular that of Michel Foucault's models of biopower. With more than a third of Before Queer Theory focusing on Walter Pater and the rest on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field, Friedman positions his study squarely within the context of aestheticism studies. He differentiates his contribution in two key ways. First, he places particular emphasis on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on Pater's queer aesthetics and the aestheticism that developed under its influence. Second, his study is not a reading of the history and works of aestheticism through recent queer theory but a recognition of aestheticism as, in part, a queer theory in itself. When Friedman says, "Aestheticism is one of queer theory's unacknowledged ancestors," he is not denying the decades of groundbreaking scholarship that has explored the queerness of aestheticism (5). Rather, he is emphasizing a Victorian, politicized, theoretical paradigm that arose before sexology, criminology, and related discourses attained cultural coherence and, eventually, became foundational to much of what is now recognized as modern queer theory, principally under the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Avoiding anachronism, Friedman defines the term "queer" rather loosely, allowing it to address a range of attractions, including what we might today read as gay and lesbian desire while also remaining open to forms of aesthetic desire that do not adhere to particular subject/object relations. Friedman argues that contributors to the aesthetic movement "consciously departed from the essentialist understandings of sexual identity promoted by the sexologists. They realized that the aesthetic, as a space located within the social yet not strictly bound by its rules, was a realm where sexual difference could be embraced without being pathologized" (15). It is worth noting that the field of sexology was itself inchoate when Pater began writing. It is true that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis (recognized by Foucault and others as the first work using psychology to articulate sexual regimes) had appeared in Latin in 1844, but it still situated non-normative practices—which included tribadism, necrophilia, and agalmatophilia (sex with statues)—in an ambiguous notion of general excess rooted in the non-procreative act of masturbation. Pater, Simeon Solomon, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other key contributors to early aestheticism would have been open to configurations of sexuality that were less constricted than Foucault's technology of power might imply. Aestheticism, that is, explored desires that preceded the historical moment when sexological identity [End Page 154] formation and institutionalization became dominant fixtures, maneuvering within a more ambiguous sexual "chaos," as Kaan called it (Psychopathia Sexualis, edited by Benjamin Kahan, [Cornell University Press, 2016], 44). One of Friedman's most useful insights arises from his focus on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on aestheticist notions of sexuality specifically. Hegel was perhaps the most influential German philosopher at later Victorian Oxford, although Kate Hext, Billie Andrew Inman, and William Shuter have demonstrated the importance of recognizing the various German philosophers who influenced Pater's aesthetic views. Other scholars have also richly analyzed Hegel's influence on Pater, including Giles Whiteley, whose Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (2010) addresses Pater's oeuvre with particular attention to what Pater calls a Hegelian "radical dualism...

Previous articleNext article No AccessOutlaw Readings: Beyond Queer TheorySally O'DriscollSally O'Driscoll Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 22, Number 1Autumn, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495135 Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 14Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Irene O’Leary Literary dynamics in The.PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 31, no.33 (Dec 2021): 325–344.https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470211059254Mallarika Sinha Roy The Romantic Manifesto: Gender and “Outlaw” Emotions in the Naxalbari Movement, (Oct 2021): 203–229.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79580-1_8Maimunah Maimunah MEMAHAMI TEORI QUEER DI BUDAYA POPULER INDONESIA: PERMASALAHAN DAN KEMUNGKINAN, Lakon : Jurnal Kajian Sastra dan Budaya 3, no.11 (Aug 2016): 43.https://doi.org/10.20473/lakon.v3i1.1926Kai Rands Mathematical Inqueery, (Aug 2016): 183–192.https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55425-3_19Rébecca Lavoie Pratiques artistiques féministes et queers en art vidéo, Recherches féministes 27, no.22 (Jan 2015): 171–189.https://doi.org/10.7202/1027924arKatherine Binhammer Accounting for the Unaccountable: Lesbianism and the History of Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Literature Compass 7, no.11 (Jan 2010): 1–15.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00668.xKarin Sellberg TRANSITIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS, Australian Feminist Studies 24, no.5959 (Mar 2009): 71–84.https://doi.org/10.1080/08164640802645158Caroline Gonda Lesbian feminist criticism, (Aug 2007): 169–186.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167314.013Christopher C. Nagle From Trembling to Tranquility: Women Writers and Wordsworth’s Pleasure Principle, (Jan 2007): 45–67.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609327_3Katherine Watson Queer Theory, Group Analysis 38, no.11 (Mar 2005): 67–81.https://doi.org/10.1177/0533316405049369Belle Rose Ragins, John M. Cornwell Pink triangles: Antecedents and consequences of perceived workplace discrimination against gay and lesbian employees., Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no.66 (Jan 2001): 1244–1261.https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.6.1244Nico J. Beger Queer Readings of Europe: Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and the (Im)potency of Rights Politics at the European Court of Justice, Social & Legal Studies 9, no.22 (Aug 2016): 249–270.https://doi.org/10.1177/096466390000900204Margaret Davies Lesbian Separatism and Legal Positivism, Canadian journal of law and society 13, no.11 (Jul 2014): 1–28.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0829320100005561 References, (): 229–264.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375463-014

This chapter considers the impact of queer theory on queer anthropology, of queer anthropology on queer theory, and of the insights of queer empiricism on queer studies as a whole—a genealogy too often sidelined or erased. The chapter considers three signal moments: queer studies’ transnational turn, Gayle Rubin’s "Thinking Sex," and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. This genealogy highlights anthropology’s queer empiricism as counter to the too-ready dismissal of anthropology as mere data—cross-cultural context for queer study’s abstract concepts ("theory") in the form of exoticized and colonialist case studies. Attending to multidisciplinary conversations and highlighting multiple genealogies, I argue for a reading of theory as situated, extrinsic, partial—queer theories, not theory.

Lisa Tatonetti, The Queerness of Native American Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 304 pages. ISBN 978-0-81669279-8. $25.00 USD paperback.At times, while reading The Queerness of Native American Literature, I found myself wondering for whom this book was written. I tried imagine audience as I negotiated my own position in reading this book. The challenges of intersectionality and multiplicity, one imagines, are that we are always occupying several, but never all, spaces. Thus, 1 read this book as a literary scholar working in queer theory, but not as a scholar working deeply and meaningfully (at least not as much as I would hope) on Native American Studies. So this book was as much an education as it was a reminder of kinds of questions queer theory and literary studies need be asking.Literary studies has had a troubled relationship with canon, Western canon, and even just mere idea of a canon, and The Queerness of Native American Literature is certainly no exception, even as it seeks affirm canon's value. Early on, Lisa Tatonetti explains that project seeks expand and to provide ways of seeing (ix). Expanding archive often seems like a strange analogy, for archive is a kind of limitless possibility that has been deployed in hopes of expanding canon, but importantly, Tatonetti encourages her reader think about ways of of ways of reading these texts that have, for too long, remained uncovered in archive. In thinking about new ways of seeing, I've read this book as a timely and important intervention in literary studies and queer studies, both of which need take account of queer and Native intellectual traditions.In many ways, what I so much in The Queerness of Native American Literature is its treatment of canonical questions. For instance, in second chapter, devoted Maurice Kenny, we are asked: What might be learned from erotic parodies of Wordsworth, A. E. Houseman, and Byron? (29) Indeed, such a question requires that readers recognize source of parody. The author, at no point, imagines moving so far beyond canon that canon serves no purpose; instead, we are reminded, time and again, that of canon may well be in ways it can be subverted.A second, and perhaps more important, value that I appreciate in this work is its insistence upon close reading. In same chapter, we read: Or what's be made of a reverie on a in a homophobic slur? (29) Queer theory, in space of literary studies, is, my mind, at its finest when it is reading closely, dealing with finer details of its texts, and exploring what a misplaced apostrophe might mean for a given text (and Tatonetti will do just that in this chapter!).In this chapter, we also find an important critique of work of late Jose Munoz. Tatonetti notes that Munoz stops short of recognizing importance of Indigenous voices his project of queer recovery (39). While certainly true, one wonders what happens then Indigeneity of feeling brown, Munoz's project, or what happens Indigenous bodies in Latino contexts. While critique is welcomed, it is also a condition of writing: we can never write about everything. Tatonetti, thus, take[s] up invitation here by arguing that if we are really 'desire differently,' as Munoz suggests, we must listen for reverberations of queer indigeneity (39). Queer theory would do well engage, listen to, and learn from this project of listening for those very reverberations.In third chapter, project of expanding canon moves in another direction, thus, we continue the process of recovery, recognition, and reconnection by turning work of one of most renowned authors in American Indian literature, Louise Edrich, and author argues that queerness was always already at heart of Indigenous literature. …

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Thinking Problems

Over the past ten years Marxian-inspired critical social theory has exercised significant influence upon international theory and has emerged as a serious alternative to orthodox approaches to the field. Critical theory has enlarged the parameters of the discipline by showing how efforts to reconstruct historical materialism offer direction to International Relations in the post-positivist phase. The position covered in this chapter, Marxian-inspired critical theory, should be distinguished from post-modern critical theory which displays considerable scepticism towards the emancipatory project associated with Marxism. The relationship between these perspectives is a matter to come back to later. The main aim of this chapter is to consider the achievements of the Marxian branch of critical theory, discuss some of the criticisms which have been levelled against it and suggest areas for further research. As a strand of social theory and as an approach to international relations, critical theory has four main achievements. First, critical theory takes issue with positivism by arguing that knowledge does not arise from the subject's neutral engagement with an objective reality but reflects pre-existing social purposes and interests. Critical theory invites observers to reflect upon the social construction and effects of knowledge and to consider how claims about neutrality can conceal the role knowledge plays in reproducing unsatisfactory social arrangements. In International Relations, these themes have been crucial elements in the critique of neo-realism and in the gradual recovery of a project of enlightenment and emancipation reworked to escape the familiar pitfalls of idealism.