It's commonly understood within the academy that the terms "man," "woman," and "other" are socially constructed, and that their meanings are maintained by the current political order. But few thinkers have attempted to reconcile that knowledge - which is rooted in Marxism - with queer theory. The few who have, meanwhile, usually attempt to do so through issues of libidinal desire and sexual expression. In the Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis argues powerfully that the emphasis on desire, (...) though seemingly innocuous, is actually symptomatic of neoliberal habits of thought, and consequently, is responsible for a continued focus on the limited politics of identity. Instead, Lewis shows, we should look to the arena of body production, categorization, and exclusion; only through such a reorientation can we create a politics of liberation that is truly inclusive and grounded in lived experience."-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The future is kid stuff -- Sinthom-osexuality -- Compassion's compulsion -- No future.

The last five years have witnessed the birth of a vibrant new group of young scholars who are writing about queer law, politics, and policy--topics which are no longer treated as of interest only to lesbians and gay men, but which now garner the attention of political theorists of all stripes. Playing With Fire --the first scholarly collection on queer politics by US political theorists--opens the intersection of lesbian and gay studies and political theory (...) to a wide audience. It covers a wide range of issues, including: the theory of queer identities; the contrasts among ethnic, racial, and sexual identities; the debate between liberals and communitarians; the right to privacy; and the meaning of equal citizenship. Contributors: Gordon Babst, Lisa Bower, Cynthia Burack, Judith Butler, Paisley Currah, Morris Kaplan, Gary Lehring, Shane Phelan, Anne Marie Smith, Angelia Wilson, and Stacey Young. (shrink)

In The Specter of Materialism Petrus Liu examines what "materialism" means for progressive queer theory and Marxist approaches to China's postsocialist economy. Liu recasts the history of queer theory in light of the Beijing Consensus, arguing that North American queer theory's inability to sustain a materialist analysis is the result of its positioning of the United States, rather than China, as the focal point of contemporary global capitalism. Analyzing relations of gender and sexuality that (...) have been reconfigured by China's global capitalist accumulation-such as dagongmei (female migrant laborers in China's export-oriented sunbelt) and money boys (rural-to-urban sex workers)-Liu argues for a materialist queer theory that positions China at the center. (shrink)

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting (...) the tendency to essentialize identity or conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

Lorey develops an original concept of a presentist democracy based on care and interrelatedness.

Queer Inclusion in Teacher Education explores the challenges and promises of building queer inclusive pedagogy and curriculum into teacher education. Weaving together theory, research findings, and practical "how-to" strategies and materials, it fills an important gap by offering a clear roadmap and resources for influencing the knowledge, beliefs, and actions of faculty working with pre-service teachers. While the book has implications for policy change, most immediately, readers will feel empowered with ideas for faculty development they can implement (...) in their own teacher education programs. Looking at both the politics and practices of teacher education and the ways in which queer issues manifest in schools, it is hopeful in suggesting that if teachers and pre-service teachers can critically reflect on homophobia and heteronormativity, they can begin to think about and relate to queer youth in a different, more positive and inclusive way. A Companion Website [http: //queerinclusion.com] with additional activities and materials for teacher educators and faculty development and a practical guide enhances the usefulness of the book. (shrink)

In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas Petrus Liu demonstrates how queer Marxist critics in China use queer theory as a non-liberal alternative to Western models of queer emancipation, and in doing so, he revises current understandings of what queer theory is, does, and can be.

This article works across multiple disciplinary boundaries, especially queer theory, to examine critically the controversial, and often socially controlling, role of biomedical knowledge and interventions in the realm of human sexuality. It will attempt to situate scientific/medical discourses on sexuality historically, socially, and culturally in order to expose the ways in which “proper” sexual health in medical research and clinical practice has been conflated with prevailing social norms at particular historical junctures in the 20th and 21st centuries. How (...) might the relationship between clinical and cultural spheres be better engaged in biomedical knowledge and clinical practice in understanding sexual health, given the impact of homophobic and transphobic assumptions in the diagnostic histories of homosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood, a new diagnostic category introduced into the DSM following the removal of homosexuality from the DSM-III? The article will argue further that biomedical knowledge is always already mediated through culture by analyzing normative racial, gender, class, and sexual ideologies that regulated early understandings of the epidemiology of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the West and in the postcolonial world while informing global health policy on HIV/AIDS. The article concludes by examining the implications of medical education for both LGBTQI patients and medical professionals, for understanding gender and sexual rights as human rights, and for thinking about new kinds of interventions, contestations, and struggles to resist continued homophobic and transphobic assumptions in biomedical practice today and their ongoing effects in the everyday world. (shrink)

"This book is a succinct, pedagogically designed introduction. As classroom text, Sullivan's work is heady with vibrant debate and slim heuristics; her intellectual clarity is stunning." - Choice A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts. The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged in the (...) West in the late twentieth century. Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples. (shrink)

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on (...) the political and material effects of pro-sexuality. (shrink)

"Annamarie Jagose knows that queer theory did not spring full-blown from the head of any contemporary theorist. It is the outcome of many different influences and sources, including the homophile movement, gay liberation, and lesbian feminism. In pointing to the history of queer theory-a history that all too often is ignored or elided-Jagose performs a valuable service." -Henry Abelove, co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader The political and academic appropriation of the term (...) class='Hi'>queer over the last several years has marked a shift in the study of sexuality from a focus on supposedly essential categories as gay and lesbian to more fluid or queer notions of sexual identity. Yet queer is a category still in the process of formation. In Queer Theory , Annamarie Jagose provides a clear and concise explanation of queer theory, tracing it as part of an intriguing history of same-sex love over the last century. Blending insights from prominent theorists such as Judith Butler and David Halperin, Jagose argues that queer theory's challenge is to create new ways of thinking, not only about fixed sexual identities such as heterosexual and homosexual, but also about other supposedly essential notions such as sexuality and gender and even man and woman. (shrink)

_The Cultural Politics of Queer Theory in Education Research_ represents the editors’ intention to disrupt cycles of thinking about the place of queer theory in educational research. The book aims to encourage dialogue about the objects and subjects of queer research, the forms of politics incited by the use of queer theory in education, and the methodological approaches used by scholars when queering. The contributions to this book come from those who find (...) class='Hi'>queer theory problematic, as well as from those who continue to see a productive place for queer research in education, however that may be defined. The editors have collected contributions that attend to the boundaries that are placed around queer research in education by researchers themselves, and by peers, ethics committees, funding bodies and university and government bureaucracies. Considering how key researchers in gender and education identify with, or deliberately distance themselves from, queer theory, this collection grapples with the contemporary cultural politics of doing queer theoretical work in different education spaces and places. In short, it seeks to disrupt what people think they already know about the ‘place’ of queer theory in education. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. _. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la 'déconstruction'? Quelles sont les origines philosophiques de ce mot magique, brandi par tous ceux dont le but, déclaré ou non, est de criminaliser l'Occident en le réduisant à une expression du racisme, de l'esclavagisme, de l' 'hétéro-patriarcat' et de l'impérialisme colonial? Cette civilisation redoutable dont les proies seraient les peuples dominés, racisés, opprimés, et les minorités essentialisées en tant que victimes systémiques? Ainsi la civilisation occidentale se trouve-t-elle convoquée devant un nouveau grand Tribunal de l'Histoire pour répondre (...) de ses crimes, imaginaires ou réels, et, surtout, elle est la seule civilisation à être mise au banc des accusés. Au croisement de la recherche universitaire et du militantisme politique, le décolonialisme, l'intersectionnalité, la 'théorie critique de la race', la 'théorie queer', la 'théorie du genre', mais aussi le 'wokisme', né d'une corruption idéologique de l'antiracisme et du féminisme importée des campus étatsuniens, se sont peu à peu diffusés dans les médias et dans la société tout entière grâce à une propagande violente et culpabilisante puisant dans un imaginaire victimaire. Dans ce livre incisif et documenté, qui part d'une réflexion sur la pensée de Nietzsche et sur ses mésusages par les disciples français de Heidegger, Pierre-André Taguieff analyse ces théories aussi foisonnantes qu'inconsistantes et dénonce l'émergence de ce nouvel esprit totalitaire qu'il faut se garder de réduire à ses effets les plus médiatisés, comme ces 'déboulonnages' spectaculaires illustrant la violence purificatrice de la 'cancel culture'. De fait, ce néo-puritanisme obscurantiste, inquisitorial et punitif représente, dans les démocraties occidentales, un défi majeur pour les défenseurs de la liberté d'expression, de pensée et de création."--Back cover. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Foucault and the Discourse of Sex‐Desire Power and Pleasure Reading Foucault on Pleasures Foucault's Use of Pleasure The Turn to Ancient Greco‐Roman Ethics Why Embrace an Ethics of Pleasures? References.

This paper elaborates a theory of ‘unbecoming’ to explore how a queering of the subject might transform oppressive social conditions. In this analysis of the subject’s deconstructive relation to the law I take up the interpellation scenario forwarded by Louis Althusser and Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to argue that being ‘unbecoming’ potentially not only alters subjectivity, it also alters the very law that hails the subject into being. First, I deconstruct both subject and law in their relation (...) to each other as performatives, for it is at this threshold of undecidability that the possibilities for political transformation emerge. Second, I demonstrate the creative and transformative political force of queer performativity to show that our agency as political beings lies not merely in affirmative representations of identity. Political agency also emerges in the creative force of a becoming that is also an unbecoming, where in and through our abjection from the social order we critique and transform it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 32.2 (2002) 3-19 [Access article in PDF] (Queer) Theory and the Universal Alternative James Penney Judith Butler. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000. In October 2000, just a few weeks before the US presidential election, a young, fashionable, handsome man handed me (...) a political leaflet while I crossed Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. I didn't give it much thought at the time (apart from noticing that the boy was kind of cute): I was in transit toward the 4th Street subway station and the Port Authority where I would catch the bus back to Cornell. When I decided to write a review essay on the current state of poststructuralism, Marxism, and queer theory through the lens of the two books listed above, I discovered I had lost the pamphlet, certain that my hostile reaction to what I considered its fundamental conservatism and trendy political correctness had unconsciously caused its mysterious disappearance.When I rediscovered the leaflet in the chaos of my move away from Ithaca, I realized that my relation to it had been hysterical: I was reluctant to address its traumatic content, unwilling to excavate my multiple frustrations at the apparent impossibility of being a homosexual and a socialist in America. And yet I couldn't really forget about it either: though not an American citizen and therefore unable to vote, I found myself equally unable simply to dismiss the leaflet as a mere inconsequential symptom of the pseudo-democracy that America has always been, or unequivocally to endorse the snooty CBC/Queen Street condescension of my fellow Canadian Lefties toward the primitive, superficial, liberal (in the worst psychologistic sense), irremediably ideological, and thoroughly depressing state of American political discourse. "Those poor Americans," the far-from-irrelevant logic goes. "They either unquestioningly submit to the individualistic fantasy of the American Dream in order to participate in the 'political process,' or they become hermetically imprisoned in their pseudo-political anti-statist minoritarianism, too cool and too radical to condescend to the public sphere." After six years in the United States, I've now become aware that my inability to swallow much of contemporary queer theory—authored overwhelmingly by young, elite-educated Americans with relatively narrow political horizons—is mostly due to the manner in which it articulates numerous political assumptions fundamentally alien to my own socialization in a country whose political differences from the US are insufficiently appreciated in that nation, and in which extremes of climate and geography have engendered a collectivist ethos in many ways fundamentally hostile to the American-style extreme individualism with which I had lived for so many years.But the interest of this sort of political autobiography is in this context undoubtedly limited. What—you might now find yourself impatiently wondering if you don't already [End Page 3] know—were the contents of this famous pamphlet? And what exactly was my problem with it? Published by a coalition of queer voters in New York called the Empire State Pride Agenda, the pamphlet presented extremely selective profiles of the main candidates, both Democrat and Republican, running for the offices of President, US Senator, State Senator, and Member of the State Assembly. Each profile summarized the history of a candidate's positions with respect to rights issues of concern to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons. The profiles made no concerted effort to represent the candidates' perspectives on any other issue: gun control, education, foreign policy, the death penalty, taxation, health care (generally speaking, that is to say above and beyond the issues related to AIDS-related illness and reproductive rights); only policies directly concerning civil rights for nonheterosexual citizens were thoroughly broached.I should confess that once I got the general idea I threw the pamphlet away in disgust: "Am I supposed to feel interpellated," I asked myself in full hysterical Althusserian mode, "by this utterly pseudo-political claptrap?" Is this what it means to be gay and political in America... (shrink)

This paper outlines the main tenets of poststructuralism and considers how they are applied by practitioners of queer theory. Drawing on both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, queer theory explores the ways in which homosexual subjectivity is at once produced and excluded within culture, both inside and outside its borders. This approach is contrasted with more sociological studies of sexuality (labeling theory, social constructionism). Whereas queer theory investigates the relations between heterosexuality and homosexuality, (...) sociologists tend to examine homosexual identities and communities, paradoxically ignoring the social construction of heterosexuality. Poststructuralism can inform a sociological approach to sexuality by emphasizing the generative character of all sexual identities. A sociological study of sexuality which is informed by poststructuralism would examine the exclusions implicit in a heterosexual/homosexual opposition. In this process, bisexual and transgender identities can become viable cultural possibilities, and a broad-based political coalition established. Whereas mainstream sociology focuses on the ways in which homosexuals are outside social norms, and whereas queer theory exploits the ways in which this outside is already inside, this perspective suggests that a critical sexual politics seeks to move beyond an inside/outside model. (shrink)

An important and original new contribution to lesbian and gay studies, We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Presenting political, historical, legal, literary, and psychological documents which trace the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, it includes documents as diverse as organization pamphlets, essays, polemics, speeches, newspaper and journal articles, and academic papers. We Are Everywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century (...) by Karl Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld, and John Addington Symonds; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications such as Mattachine Review , The Ladder and ONE ; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within "the movement" (bisexuals, S/M, conservatives); and finally, a look at the future of lesbian and gay politics. Together the documents allow readers to examine a diverse set of issues: the concept of gay love before "homosexuality," the development of political movements based on homosexual identity, the history of government persecution of homosexuality, the impact of feminism on the modern lesbian and gay rights movement, and the emergence of queer theory. (shrink)

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity-a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can (...) seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of "the queer," the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's "ab-sens" and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodovar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing. (shrink)

¡PRESENTE! investigates the many answers to a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be present? Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor answers that question by offering an expansive explication of presence as both ethical command and performative knowledge production. Taking the histories of state violence, colonialism, and imperialism as her starting point, Taylor situates being ¡Presente! as an embodied and performed practice of standing alongside those harmed by historical and ongoing violence. Noting that Present/e is simultaneously single and plural (...) in English and Spanish, and drawing on Jean Luc Nancy's formulation of being singular plural, Taylor asks how presence is imbricated in questions of subject formation and collectivity. She begins with reframing the racialization of Latin Americans as a coming into presence through colonial conquest-a presence not as subjects but as subjugated objects-and asks what was made absent through this racialized process. For Taylor, the epistemicide of Indigenous, Native, and African ways of knowing stands at the center of this process of presence and absence. To counter this ongoing epistemicide, Taylor situates ¡Presente! as a performative and decolonial mode of knowledge production that decenters European Enlightenment traditions and seriously takes up Native, Indigenous, and African ways of knowledge and temporality. Grounded in performance studies, this book links knowledge to action as a doing practice, or what Taylor calls a "peripatetic strategy" that emphasis movement in learning. This book offers an expansive theory of ¡Presente! in various locations and situations: the original colonial conquest of Columbus and the Spanish; the May 1968 student protests; a study in Zapatistan autonomy; the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa; queer histories of Mexico; and the former torture centers of the Pinochet dictatorship. Throughout these varied locations, Taylor weaves a methodology, theory, and practice of ¡Presente!. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of performance studies, Latin American studies, American studies, critical ethnic studies, colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, and queer theory. (shrink)

As such, the book will interest readers of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender studies, intellectual history, political theory, and the history of gender/sexuality ...

Marking a ground-breaking moment in the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics," Elizabeth Grosz's Space, Time and Perversion contends that only by resituating and rethinking the body will feminism and cultural analysis effect and unsettle the knowledges, disciplines and institutions which have controlled, regulated and managed the body both ideologically and materially. Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and--in a controversial way--queer theory, Grosz shows how these fields have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the (...) vestigal traces of their production as bodies. Her tour de corpe investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis. Grosz considers their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Begining with an exposition of the epistemological implications of bodily and sexual difference, Grosz examines the effects such knowledge have on the reception of meaning. She looks at the relationship between the knowledge of difference and the way that knowledge validates, affirms, avows and valorizes subjects. Grosz then extends this analysis to an investigation of the relationship between space, time, bodies and the spatial "arts" such as architecuture, urban planning and geography. In the last section, Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity. Controversially showing the ways in which "queer" theory fails to offer a truly transformative conception of bodies and their politics, Grosz finds "queer" a reactive category "which sees itself in opposition to a straight norm and thus defines itself in terms of this norm." Consequentially, "queer" theory inherits the acceptance of an entire range of sexual practices, without "asking what they share and without taking into account the profound tension that may exist among these practices." Grosz's Space, Time and Perversity is a diverse and incisive collection of essays from a renowned feminist philosopher. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges (...) the politics and epistemology of placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the seemingly incompatible epistemologies of sex offered by dominance (‘governance’) feminism and queer theory. While these bodies of work, especially when applied to US legal and political activity on prostitution, are commonly viewed as divergent sparring partners, I propose a ‘convergence’ of the two in the form of a revived and enhanced sex-positive feminism. If dominance feminism is the ‘theory of no’ to heterosexuality’s male gender power, and if queer (...) class='Hi'>theory is the ‘theory of yes’ to the defiant possibilities of sex, sex-positive feminism is a ‘theory of maybe’: it examines practices of gender and sexuality in multiple contexts to find the ways in which heterosexuality can sometimes reify, and other times resist, the transfer of eroticised dominance and submission to political practices of patriarchy. After tracing the split between feminism and queer theory and arguing for a ‘sex-positive queer feminism’, I use the example of prostitution to consider some theoretical and practical implications of this shift in feminist lenses. (shrink)

Mari Ruti offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of queer theory, including debates about affect theory, subjectivity, negativity, defiance, agency, and bad feelings. She gives an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the political divisions that have animated the field in the last decade. In particular, Ruti argues that contemporary efforts by queer theorists to grapple with negativity and bad feelings challenge our society's normative understanding of the good life and have the potential (...) to transform ethical theory and practice. (shrink)

In Between Shadows and Noise, Amber Musser develops a sensuous method of analysis by moving past the representational clarity of Enlightenment thinking and into the irrational and vulnerable space of shadow and the unruly and excessive dimensions of noise. For Musser, shadows and noise are categories of embodied relation or critical situatedness--modes of attending to context, relation, and hierarchy through affective and sensorial body work. The book's analysis of various art objects, such as Jordan Peele's film US and Samita Sinha's (...) sound performance This Ember State, is rooted in Musser's own autobiographical situatedness as a queer middle-class Black Caribbean expatriate woman and the various politics of difference those identities emerge from. Through a series of meditations on blackness, empire, and colonialism, Between Shadows and Noise offers Black feminist methods for sensing one's way through art (and living) using knowledges held by the body. (shrink)

This book interrogates the relation between film spectatorship and film theory in order to criticise some of the disciplinary and authoritarian assumptions of 1970s apparatus theory, without dismissing its core political concerns. Theory, in this perspective, should not be seen as a practice distinct from spectatorship but rather as an integral aspect of the spectator’s gaze. Combining Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator with Judith Butler’s queer theory of subjectivity, Spectatorship and Film Theory foregrounds the (...) contingent, embodied and dialogic aspects of our experience of film. Erratic and always a step beyond the grasp of disciplinary discourse, this singular work rejects the notion of the spectator as a fixed position, and instead presents it as a field of tensions—a “wayward” history of encounters. (shrink)

This article identifies two strands of thinking about sexuality and identity within queer theory: culturalist and naturalist. First, the article critically assesses culturalist queer theory penned by Judith Butler and Lee Edelman by showing that their theories, even when acutely aware of the traps of exclusionary identity politics, remain indebted to thinking on the basis of exclusion and separation by positing a rigid identity and the untouchability of the ‘human’, of the ‘cultural’. The article proceeds by (...) taking acts of sex as objects of analysis and, with the help of Leo Bersani, elaborates how naturalistic thinking might help us break with the double edict of both culturalist thought and contemporary identity politics, i.e. sociocentrism and the injunction to the untouchability and unbespeakability of the singular (‘human’, ‘cultural’, ‘queer’, ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘trans’, ‘black’, etc.). (shrink)

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally (...) and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example,whomto test,whento offer the tests, andhowto explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

The recent widespread transformation in the conjugal rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people across much of the globe may seem to suggest that, at long last, the history of heterosexism has reached its terminus. In Ireland, the Equal Marriage Referendum in May 2015 offered the opportunity for the citizens of the Republic to extend the same rights, permissions, and privileges to same-sex couples that married heterosexual couples freely enjoy. The passing of that referendum and the extension of (...) these rights to same-sex couples denotes a move beyond societal tolera6tion toward societal acceptance, yet it remains to be seen whether or not the affordance of conjugal rights to LGBT people will necessarily mean that all queer subjects will be given the same acceptance.This article examines equal marriage and its potential engendering of binary divisions between queer subjects who adhere to the logic of cultural heteronormativity and those who transgress its structuring forces. It aims to historicise the discourse that surrounds gay marriage by tracing these debates back to the Enlightenment's production of the companionate marriage. The works of Edmund Burke, his aesthetic writings and political speeches, provide the textual basis for an examination of 'normative desire' in the eighteenth century. The article contends that assessing the eighteenth century's regime of heteronormativity will allow us to see the provisional nature of our own heterosexist cultural formations. (shrink)

Recent iterations of feminist theory and activism, especially intersectional, ‘third-wave’ feminism, have cast much second-wave feminism as politically unacceptable in failing to centre the experiences of less privileged subjects than the often white, often middle-class names with which the second wave is usually associated. While bearing those critiques in mind, this article argues that some second-wave writers, exemplified by Shulamith Firestone and Monique Wittig, may still offer valuable feminist perspectives if viewed through the anti-normative lens of queer (...) class='Hi'>theory. Queer resists the reification of identity categories. It focuses on resistance to hegemonic norms, rather than on group identity. By viewing Wittig's and Firestone's critique of the institutions of the family, reproduction, maternity, and work as proto-queer — and specifically proto-antisocial queer — it argues for a feminism that refuses to shore up identity, that rejects groupthink, and that articulates meaningfully the crucial place of... (shrink)

Queer theorists have long staked their politics in an engagement with intersectionality. Yet intersectional scholars have been some of queer theory’s most vocal critics, decrying its failure to adequately engage persistent inequalities. I approach this seeming paradox in three parts. First, I situate intersectionality within the field of critical theory, arguing that it shares critical theory’s view of power. Both traditions, I argue, understand power to generate the very marginalized figures that it subordinates. Second, while (...) intersectional and queer theories share this critical insight, the two frameworks offer fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes a democratic politics of redress. Where intersectional theorists promote coalition-building between differently marginalized subjects, queer theorists tend to figure sexually marginalized subjects as exemplary democratic agents. Finally, I argue that this slippage in conceptions of democracy has had negative consequences for critical theory and highlights the difficult but essential role of coalition as a political resource. (shrink)

In this article, I confront Marcella Althaus-Reid’s thinking with the recent ‘negative turn’ in queer theory, as observed by Judith Halberstam. What remains when the belief in our world as such, and in the future of it, has to be totally rejected, as some queer theorists like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, for example, claim? Or, in theological terms: what could the categories of redemption, salvation and liberation still mean if one wishes to think God within history, (...) but at the same time rejects this history? I investigate these questions by focusing on two central concepts of Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology, incarnation and redemption. First, brought into dialogue with negative queer politics, I argue that Althaus-Reid helps us to develop an understanding of radical incarnation in the flesh on the ‘underside’ of society. Second, I look at Althaus-Reid’s critique of the traditional Christian understanding of redemption and her alternative of a notion of redemption that is connected to love, solidarity and reciprocity, instead of to a one-way act of grace by a transcendent God. I conclude that a ‘negative queer theology’, when developed in line with Althaus-Reid’s insights, necessarily maintains an affirmative undercurrent, a belief in an unknown life. (shrink)

Introduction: Locating the Lacanian left -- Antinomies of creativity : Lacan and Castoriadis on social construction and the political -- Laclau with Lacan on jouissance : negotiating the affective limits of discourse -- Žižek's 'perversions' : the lure of Antigone and the fetishism of the act -- Excursus on Badiou -- What sticks? : from symbolic power to jouissance -- Enjoying the nation : a success story? -- Lack of passion : European identity revisited -- The consumerist 'politics of (...) jouissance' and the fantasy of advertising -- Democracy in post-democratic times. (shrink)

Difference Troubles, first published in 1997, examines the implications for social theory and sexual politics of taking difference seriously. It explores the trouble difference makes not only for the social sciences, but also for the people - feminists, queer theorists, postmodernists - who champion difference. Seidman asks how social thinkers should conceptualize differences such as gender, race, and sexuality, without reducing them to an inferior status. This is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of contemporary social theory and (...) sexual politics, presented with Seidman's familiar imagination and clarity. In addition, it argues persuasively for a pragmatic approach to difference troubles in theory and politics. (shrink)

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that (...) design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to save "the sexual" from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from (...) all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce's movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency. (shrink)

Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, (...) literary criticism, and politics. As a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature. (shrink)

Spanning over nine hundred years, Eight Women Philosophers is the first singly-authored work to trace the themes of standard philosophical theorizing and feminist thought across women philosophers in the Western tradition. Jane Duran has crafted a comprehensive overview of eight women philosophers--Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir--that underscores the profound and continuing significance of these thinkers for contemporary scholars. Duran devotes one chapter to each philosopher and (...) provides a sustained critical analysis of her work, utilizing aspects of Continental theory, poststructuralist theory, and literary theory. (shrink)

David Lyons is one of the pre-eminent philosophers of law active in the United States. This volume comprises essays written over a period of twenty years in which Professor Lyons outlines his fundamental views about the nature of law and its relation to morality and justice. The underlying theme of the book is that a system of law has only a tenuous connection with morality and justice. Contrary to those legal theorists who maintain that no matter how bad the law (...) of a community might be, strict conformity to existing law automatically dispenses 'formal' justice, Professor Lyons contends that the law must earn the respect that it demands. Moreover, we cannot, as some would suggest, interpret law in a value-neutral manner. Rather courts should interpret statutes, judicial precedents, and constitutional provisions in terms of values that would justify those laws. In this way officials can promote the justifiability of what they do to people in the name of law, and can help the law live up to its moral pretensions. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by (...) commentators as diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)