This book is not what I thought it would be. I think I assumed, based on the title, it would be people in lgbtq studies who don’t consider themselves queer theorists. But instead, it’s queer theorists being asked “is queer theory over, if it is over, what happens next, and how does your work you’ve been doing since your queer theory work still relate to queer theory, if it does?”
The pagination is continuous from other issues of this volume of the journal.
Stuff I Marked
p.437 “I have lost the sense of permission to drag readers through a complex process to reach a conclusion I might have just told them in the beginning, using the opinion form, or some other genre.”
p.438 - idea that for many, wanting to desire and wanting to be desired and wanting to have had and have been had are all better than actually being sexually intimate with someone, because being intimate is so vulnerable and scary.
p.479- “So queer denotes not an identity but instead a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other. At the risk (the certainty) of oversimplification, one could say that even if one is born straight or gay, one must decide to be queer.”
p.486-487- “In the field of sexuality studies, the space-time problem looked somewhat different but was related: the anachronists collapsed time by universalizing identity across time, while the ethnocentrists collapsed space by geographically universalizing a culturally specific model of “gay.”
p.497- separating the wedding as a symbolic form from “marriage” as an institution, also noting same-sex marriage as an individualistic goal rather than a collective goal like healthcare or immigration or welfare. Can you be pro-wedding but anti-marriage?
p.502-503- “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains an unresolved terrain. Or rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”
p.516- “Queer theory never worked out how to play multiculturalism. It could not write itself into a narrative of minority inclusion drawing on the powerful rhetorics of civil rights struggle in the United States. A formation called ‘lesbian and gay studies’ has had more success, though it has often needed to make a racial analogy in ways that have invited accusations of appropriation.”
Stuff To Look Up
Susan McCabe, “To Be and to Have: The Rise of Queer Historicism”
p.487-