Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness by Ben Nichols

Abstract

Reviewed by: Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness by Ben Nichols Chris Coffman Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness. Ben Nichols. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. $120.00 (cloth). Ben Nichols's Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness interrogates queer theory's characteristic tendency to mount anti-normative and anti-assimilationist arguments against reductionism and the utilitarian visions it often serves. Examining the importance of sameness, normativity, and reduction within a critical paradigm that emphatically privileges difference, deviation, and complexity, Nichols convincingly demonstrates that these seemingly opposed impulses often turn back upon one another like a Möbius strip. Despite his often incisive critiques of the continued imbrication of queer theorists such as Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, and Diana Fuss in European poststructuralism, a characteristically Derridean move animates Same Old, which shuttles between difference and sameness to reclaim the latter, subordinated concept. Ably showing that sameness remains an important consideration even for those queer theorists who seek to amplify difference, Same Old ultimately succeeds in avoiding the dangers of sameness, normativity, and reduction whose disavowed importance to queer theory Nichols underscores. [End Page 799] Well-crafted and convincingly argued, Same Old moves from the fin-de-siècle and the modernist era through to the "lesbian and gay liberation movements" of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond (6). Nichols revisits sameness despite its repudiation by queer theorists who rightfully contest early twentieth-century psychoanalysis's conflation of homosexuality with narcissism. The book's chapters—defined by adjectives that either malign queers ("Useless") or are frequently maligned by them ("Reproductive," "Normative," and "Reductive")—cross-read literary with queer theoretical texts to illuminate these concepts' continued salience despite their disparagement. The first chapter, "Useless," focuses on aestheticism's anti-utilitarian ethos, returning to the late nineteenth-century work of Walter Pater (The Renaissance, 1873), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891), and especially Henry James (Roderick Hudson, 1875; The Tragic Muse, 1890) to explore contemporary queer theorists' recent mining of potentially "useful" elements of "what has seemed useless" to straight culture (40). Nichols remarks upon this move's importance to queer thinkers such as Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, and Heather Love, but zeroes in on Edelman's No Future (2004) for sustained dialogue that continues into chapter two. Associating James's aesthetes Roderick Hudson and Gabriel Nash with Edelman's sinthomosexual—the pleasure-seeking queer whose "embrace" of the ostensibly "useless death drive" would collapse the symbolic order and its homophobic representations—Nichols argues that "a particular kind of uselessness has been intimately linked to queer lives" since the fin-de-siècle (50, 73). By considering James's "oblique" and highly "intellectual" inflection of "the principle of art for art's sake," he registers underappreciated connections between the charges of impracticality often leveled at aesthetes and the accusations of irrelevance frequently directed at contemporary theorists (71). Chapter one might leave psychoanalytically informed readers questioning Nichols's reproduction of Edelman's assumption that the drive is completely "useless," conducing only to destroy the symbolic order without offering the possibilities for regeneration queer theorists such as Tim Dean, Teresa de Lauretis, and Mari Ruti find in it (50).1 Yet Same Old's second chapter, "Reproductive," critiques Edelman from another angle by focusing on feminist texts that undermine his characterization of "all forms of reproduction" as heteronormative (77). Drawing on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1916 Herland and late twentieth-century feminist utopian fiction by Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Sally Miller Gearhart, and Nicola Griffith, Nichols challenges Edelman's insistence that the ideology of "reproductive futurism"—which figures "the Child as the preeminent emblem… of every political vision as a vision of futurity"—always and only reproduces a heteronormative order that queers should reject.2 Nichols is unpersuasive in attempting to exculpate Herland from charges of racism by claiming that the book imagines a universalist "dissolution of all particular racial formations into one"; even so, Gilman's "standardised and homogenised" vision remains troubling (109). Nonetheless, this chapter's overarching argument is on point. Observing that feminist utopian texts feature "non-heterosexual—and arguably...