Etiology, Solitude, and Queer Incipience

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-222
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
The World ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick spelled out reasons for queer theory to eschew the etiological questions that preoccupied early advocates of gay liberation: Etiologies of homosexuality are difficult, if not impossible, to insulate from a fantasy of eliminating gay people from the world. Sedgwick’s reparative account would seem, however, to have two objects at least nominally at odds: the proto-gay child in a state of suspension and the gayness that seeks to emerge from that potentiality, and, in emerging, to dissolve it. This chapter suggests that to dwell on queer origin might offer a way to sustain that “proto-gay” thread of potentiality, even within the actualization that makes it retrospectively legible. Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain, and Su Friedrich’s film Hide and Seek offer examples of narrating the “proto-gay” from within: maintaining a relation to gay futures while remaining true to a perspective that does not resolve its present confusions (and pleasures) with reference to that horizon. To tell of proto-gay kids is also to pose the question of inception; they embody what, could we see it, remains forever unformed within us, the potentiality that is the heritage of our beginnings.

scholarly journals Foucault and Sedgwick: The Repressive Hypothesis Revisited

2012 ◽  
pp. 20-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
History Of Sexuality ◽  
Free Indirect Discourse ◽  
Indirect Discourse ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This essay examines the Foucauldian foundations of queer theory in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. The essay argues that Sedgwick’s increasing disappointment with Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is in part produced by the slippery rhetoric of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Specifically, Foucault’s use of free indirect discourse in that volume destabilizes both the theory of repression and the critique Foucault mounts against it, thereby rendering ambiguous any political promise his critique might seem to offer. Returning to the fraught relation between Foucault and Sedgwick, the essay concludes by reading Foucault and Sedgwick together through the lens of a reparative ethics in which the felt experience of knowing the world is also an experiment in new ways of living.

scholarly journals Queering participatory planning

2021 ◽  
pp. 095624782110193
Author(s):  
Vanesa Castán Broto
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Participatory Planning ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Participatory Processes ◽  
And Gender

All over the world, people suffer violence and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Queer theory has linked the politics of identity and sexuality with radical democracy experiments to decolonize development. Queering participatory planning can improve the wellbeing of vulnerable sectors of the population, while also enhancing their political representation and participation. However, to date, there has been limited engagement with the politics of sexuality and identity in participatory planning. This paper identifies three barriers that prevent the integration of queer concerns. First, queer issues are approached as isolated and distinct, separated from general matters for discussion in participatory processes. Second, heteronormative assumptions have shaped two fields that inform participatory planning practices: development studies and urban planning. Third, concrete, practical problems (from safety concerns to developing shared vocabularies) make it difficult to raise questions of identity and sexuality in public discussions. An engagement with queer thought has potential to renew participatory planning.

Queer Worldmaking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hailey N. Otis ◽  
Thomas R. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Queer Of Color ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Lauren Berlant

The theory and practice of queer worldmaking is a vital part of the study of queer communication. Rooted in the acts, activism, artistry, and the everyday lives of LGBT+, queer, and proto-queer people across the world, the theorization of queer worldmaking emerged alongside the founding of queer theory itself in the late 1990s. Surfacing in both José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on minoritarian performance and disidentification as well as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, “Sex in Public,” the term “queer worldmaking” was quickly taken up in communication scholarship, driving Gust Yep’s foundational work on “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies.” Evolving according to various disciplinary demands and cultural influences, contemporary endeavors in queer worldmaking in communication studies largely follow three general paths: (a) drawing upon quare/queer of color theories to theorize worldmaking through/as enactments of disidentification(s), queer futurity, queer utopias, hope, and queer relationality; (b) conceptualizing academia, scholarship, and academic pursuits as productive sites for envisioning and creating queer worlds; and (c) tending to the worldmaking potentialities of queer memories, monuments, and archives. These intellectual pathways overlap, interweave, and split off into unpredictable rhizomatic directions, paving the way for scholarship that converses with, diverges from, and pushes forward queer worldmaking in communication studies in curiously queer directions.

Queer Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gayle Salamon
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
Gay Studies ◽  
Lesbian And Gay Studies ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in queer theory, with particular attention to the challenges it has posed to the concepts of normativity, identity, and the category of “woman.” It explores queer theory’s emergence from lesbian and gay studies, and considers its relation to feminist philosophy and trans theory. The chapter outlines the founding contributions of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, along with several other influential queer theorists, and traces the concept of heteronormativity from its central place in queer theory’s earliest works to more recent reconsiderations.

Paranoia, Feminism, Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Halley
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

In this chapter, Halley reflects on her friendship with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, focusing on the ways in which it provided a conduit between queer theory in the humanities and legal studies. She compares the roles of paranoia, feminism, and law in Sedgwick’s work and her own, particularly as her friendship with Sedgwick turned on cohering and conflicting emotional and political orientations to these key elements of their shared conversation. Because Sedgwick profoundly altered the conditions of possibility in the humanities, while Halley moved into legal studies, this remembrance is also a reflection on the possibilities for interdisciplinary love and longing.

scholarly journals Individuation, Sexuation, Technicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642096740
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Seely
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Feminist And Queer Theory

Within the context of questions raised by gender and sexuality studies about the relationship between sex and technics, I develop a theory of sexuation derived from Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. First, I provide an overview of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, from the physical to the collective. In the second section, I turn to the question of sexuality, outlining an ontogenetic account in which sexuation is conceived as a process of both individuation and relation that is fundamental to certain living beings. Then, drawing on Simondon’s theorization of technics in its mediating function between humans and the world, I resituate understandings of the relation between sex and technics. While each section – Individuation, Sexuation, Technicity – argues for the significance of these concepts to feminist and queer theory, overall the essay uses Simondon’s work as a new paradigm for gender and sexuality studies and calls for the invention of a sexuate culture.

Crimen Sollicitationis

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-192
Author(s):  
Diederik F. Janssen
Keyword(s):  
Child Abuse ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
General Situation ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Feminist Sociology ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Modern

Late modernity’s binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans‐Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity’s guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament “after the orgy”—after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion‐motivated, kin‐pivoted, reproductivist, and gender‐rigid socialities. “Child sexual abuse” illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child’s vital otherness is counterproductively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as “minor.” Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest’s current “survivalist” and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter’s panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most “critical” interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest’s ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity’s dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.

The Body Politic(s) of the Jezebel Spirit

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Jonathon O’Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Warfare ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The World ◽  
Good And Evil

‘Third wave’ neo-charismatic evangelical discourses of spiritual warfare envision the world as caught within a struggle between good and evil, in which demonic forces play an active role in shaping the lives of individuals, institutions, and nations. In contemporary American spiritual warfare discourse one demonic spirit has gained particular notoriety: the Jezebel spirit. Through a close reading of American spiritual warfare manuals, this article explores constructions of the Jezebel spirit and her place in third wave demonology. Constructed as a spiritual force reigning over an errant United States, the figure of Jezebel facilitates a discursive conflation of personal and social bodies in which the ‘present absences’ of ‘deviant’ (gendered, sexualised, racialised) bodies within the nation become figured as threatening to both national and spiritual survival. Drawing on poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer theory, the article unpacks how Jezebel is constructed as a figure of feminised absence and multiplicity, whose ‘illegitimate’ possession of ‘deviant’ places and persons renders them as territories of absence that must be restored to normative presence through the reinscription of God’s will.

Backward glances: Feminism, nostalgia and Joan Braderman’s The Heretics (2009)

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-356
Author(s):  
Michelle Meagher ◽  
Roxanne Loree Runyon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Cultural Workers ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Loss Framing ◽  
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts.

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