Queer Melancholia

GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, founded in 1993, offers an exemplary site for understanding the rise of queer theory, which, from the start, has struggled with the tension between institutionalization and radical resistance. By situating the emergence of this journal and queer theory in general within the AIDS crisis and the literary tradition of the elegy, this essay offers a reading of conventional academic practices as rituals of queer melancholia that comes to challenge the assumption of queer theory’s secularity.

The Bloomsbury Group

Heilbrun’s influential analysis of the sexual dissidence characteristic of the Bloomsbury Group first appeared in Midway in 1968, years before queer studies or even gay and lesbian studies gained momentum and legitimacy as scholarly fields. Heilbrun counters the ‘profound hostility’ directed towards Bloomsbury, arguing that this hostility stems from discomfort with members of the Bloomsbury Group’s acceptance, even flaunting, of homosexuality and disruption of normative expectations for masculine and feminine behaviour. For Heilbrun, the group combined the best attributes of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, to embrace reason and rationality, and to eschew violence, but not passion. But their greatest legacy was their conversation, which was light and fun and serious at the same time. Ideas debated in those conversations inform their immense accomplishments in fields as various as economics and the fine arts, and leads Heilbrun to feel that conversation is ‘the apotheosis of human communication’.

Gender and the Problem of Universals: Catholic Mobilizations and Sexual Democracy in France

In the 1980s, John Boswell analyzed the controversy between ‘essentialists’ and ‘constructionists’ in gay and lesbian studies in the light of the medieval ‘problem of universals.’ This paper revives this analogy to understand the controversy launched by Catholic authorities against the (so-called) ‘theory-of-gender’ pitted against gender studies at the risk of equating God with Nature.