'Queer Theory': Intellectual and Ethical Milieux of 1990s Sexual Dissidence

Abstract

The main problem addressed by this thesis is the question of how to assess the politics and the cultural effects and implications of 'Queer Theory' during the period of the 1990s. 'Queer' was invoked in numerous institutions, spaces, and cultural practices over this period, and yet queer-identified theorists – and many of their critics – have often assumed that this term refers to a relatively unified object. I ask if it is appropriate to treat these 'queer' occasions in this manner, and whether this 'dispersed' object requires a different approach: one that sets out to describe means and routes by which it became possible and desirable to pose 'queer' problems across so many diverse sites and practices. In addition, if there are discernible patterns to these distributed cultural capacities and inclinations, what political significance do they have? These questions inform my account of the career of 'Queer Theory' during the 1990s. A post-humanist approach to these matters is not premised on an essential or a socially constituted general category of 'subjectivity'. Instead, it addresses 'Queer Theory' as a problem, without automatically critiquing it; it is sceptical of the perfectionist pulsion that has treated this critical practice as either a good or a bad object: dual roles that are mandated by the logic of dialectical criticism. These roles are exemplified by the frequent relegation of 'queer' in the relevant literature to the 'innately political' or the 'merely aesthetic'. In this thesis I identify ethical, cultural, and political yields of these conventional choices and the modes of problematisation in which they operate; I positively redescribe them as aesthetico-political practices. My approach therefore not only deviates from the 'good' or 'bad' critical options, but also from a third option: the equally rationalist response of assuming that 'Queer Theory' is fundamentally a problem of under-theorisation.