Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous by Sarah Cooper (review)

Abstract

MLR, 97.4, 2002 991 grew out of a graduate seminar taught forone term at the University of Toronto, is of extremely variable quality. Too many of the chapters have a limited, predictable, and even pedestrian quality to them, verging on the descriptive and over-schematic. This is not helped by some sloppy editing, including inconsistencies in the use of names, and occasionally some rambling and undigested passages. Moreover, for a collection entitled The Cinema ofJean Cocteau, much is lacking, in particular a proper sense of Cocteau as a vital and pioneering film theorist, as well as any engagement with his other less well-known but equally important experimental work such as the 1951 short, La Villa Santo-Sospir. The ultimate value of this volume will paradoxically be to force Cocteau scholars to take greater critical and creative risks. University of Kent at Canterbury James S. Williams Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous. By Sarah Cooper. Bern: Lang. 2000. 231pp. In an essay entitled 'Against Proper Objects', in a 1994 number of the journal differences ,Judith Butler, the doyenne of contemporary queer theory,expresses disquiet at the territorializing impulse that has led some queer theorists to distinguish theories of sexuality from theories of gender, and to claim the investigation of sexuality as their own particular province, offlimits to feminist analysts of gender. In short, she mounts a critique of separatist practices of scholarship that are, in essence, practices of exclusion. In Relating to Queer Theory, a text in which Butler's voice is accorded a primary place, Sarah Cooper pursues the counter-separatist stance Butler promotes, producing an intricate study that not only mobilizes relations between (French) feminism and queer theory, relations that are invoked in Against Proper Objects', by mapping these epistemological fields with and against each other, but also dissects a question left unexplored by Butler: that is, the question of who can perform queer readings of texts. This issue is the fulcrum of the first two chapters of Cooper's monograph. Here, she reflects compellingly on the issue of whether, in order to 'do' queer theoretical analysis, the reader must him/herself be queer-, lesbian-, or gayidentified , elaborating a theorization of reader relations to queer theory that the work of Butler and fellow queer theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick neglects to furnish . Through a virtuoso engagement not only with queer theoretical discourse but also with discussions of ethical and identificatory dynamics proffered by Derrida, Deleuze, and Guattari, and others, she defends the contention that the act of reading queer theoretical texts is a transformative, constitutive act, engendering readers who, regardless of their sexual self-definition, accede to modes of queer identification. Her treatment of the (trans)formative potential of reading queer theory,and her concomitant vision of differentlyidentified queer readers, will undoubtedly reassure those of us who, in enacting queer theoretical exegesis from a straight-identifiedposition, are regularly assailed by doubts as to the ethics of our 'touristic' critical activities. In the remaining four chapters of her study Cooper herself 'does' queer theory,and reviews its relation to feminism, by reading the feminist work of Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, and Cixous in a manner informed not only by her own responses to the queer gestures and/or resistances enacted by the writings of these four French feminists,but likewise by the queer theoretical commentaries those writings have elicited, commentaries with which Cooper dialogues proficiently and productively. The encounters Cooper stages between selected texts by the feminists she takes as her focus and the realm of queer theory produce a series of interpretations that cannot fail to leave her reader dazzled and bewitched, and only too willing to do what Cooper exhorts us to do in her conclusion: that is, make new and previously unauthorized connections between ggz Reviews various, variant theoretical disciplines and discourses. She has written a wonderful book, that will certainly have a significant impact on current critical debate. University of Birmingham Alex Hughes Commencementsdu roman: Conferences du seminaire de Litterature comparee de I'Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Ed. by Jean Bessiere. Paris: Champion. 2001. 216 pp. The preface to this collection suggests that both historical...