After Queer Studies. Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Tyler Bradway and E. L. McCallum (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 210 p.
After Queer Studies. Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Tyler Bradway and E. L. McCallum (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-108-73973-3, 210 p.
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Index Nominum Tyler Bradway, Stephen Guy-Bray, Matt Brim, andré carrington, Sharon Patricia Holland, Richard A. Kaye, E. L. McCallum, Amber Jamilla Musser, Kevin Ohi, Ricardo Ortiz, Nick Salvato, Dana Seitler, Rebekah Sheldon
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1Whether established, or on the rise, as in French academia, the field of queer studies remains nonetheless controversial for a number of reasons: while some criticize its more radical arguments, others view it as a dilution and obfuscation of crucial political projects. When not argued in bad faith, these polemics highlight the reason why queer studies may still prove relevant: insofar as queerness is closely related to fluidity and a refusal of categorization, it guarantees resistance to dogmatism and a certain openness for thinking through complex concepts and politics.
2So, is it possible to imagine an “after” to queer studies? Or will the field evolve so that it does not so much end as become something else to remain politically relevant? And if we ask what comes after, does that not mean we must also ask what originated the field? Or does this origin/end paradigm replicate the kind of linear, straightforward temporality that queer studies eschew in the first place? And what does queer even mean at this point? These are the questions that E. L. McCallum and Tyler Bradway address in the edited collection After Queer Studies. In true queer fashion, there is no clear-cut, singular answer: no desire to find a grand telos for queer studies, no assumption of an “unchanged persistence” (9) into the future. Instead, the volume showcases the multiple ways queer studies can be used and reimagined into the twenty-first century, seamlessly integrating what is commonly called intersectionality—the enmeshment of several modes of identity—so that the dynamics of queerness (and straightness) are never separated from those of gender, race or class.
3Even in their introductory discussion of the origins of queer studies, McCallum and Bradway avoid the temptation of over-simplification. Reminding the reader that “queer” points first and foremost to a practice, a way of relating, a “mode of thinking sideways” (a reference to Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work), McCallum and Bradway reassert the primacy of the political in the definition and application of queerness. This extends to their decision to foreground queer literary studies. Literature, broadly-defined, has functioned as a political and politicized “archive for queer theorizing from the start” (9) and literary studies have played no small part in the ascension of queer studies: they thus constitute a privileged space to explore what “after” means for queer studies and theory.
4The running thread throughout the chapters is the practice of queer reading as a political gesture, one that reads against the grain, with reparation as its horizon (Sedgwick and Muñoz are regularly referenced). The tripartite structure of the collection touches on three modes of this reading practice: reading queer genealogies, reading queer biographies, and reading texts beyond literature. Quite aptly, Part 1, “Reading Queer Literary History” opens with Stephen Guy-Bray’s dismantling, in “Shakespearean Sexualities,” the oft-made accusation that queer theorists and historians are being anachronistic, reading too much into the past. Pointing out the double standards (demanding iron-clad proof of historical queerness), he offers a new motto: “all texts are queer unless proved otherwise” (22). This reading method is also exemplified in Dana Seitler’s “Write, Paint, Dance, Sex: Queer Styles / American Fictions,” which extends into “strategic misreadings” (48) that neither embrace nor reject the ideology of the text but seek to transform it. Seitler revisits the American canon to point out examples of a queer style, which pays attention to and integrates “counterintuitive reading, temporal disjuncture, the performative, narrative interruption and suspension, non-closure, negativity, ambivalence, affective intensity, color, texture, syntax, and tone” (37). Seitler’s nod to concepts of racialized sexuality and José Antonio Muñoz’s “disidentification” is expanded in Ricardo Ortiz’s “Queer Latinx Studies and Queer Latinx Literature ‘After’ Queer Theory.” There, Ortiz retraces the debates that are still shaping queer Latinx studies and calls for a stronger alternative genealogy, one that would be explicitly feminist and take into account the voices of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, for example.
5If anything, these chapters show that queer studies’ presumed allergy to origins masks deeper attempts to grapple with etiology, which Kevin Ohi tackles in “Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth.” Re-reading Henry James’ prefaces to the New York editions of his novels, Ohi highlights how “step[ping] outside history” induces a “perpetual return to potentiality” (119) through revision and suspension of meaning. Ohi’s reading strategy is emblematic of Part 2, “Reading Queer Writers,” which delves into the complex relationship between literature and reading practices on the one hand, and authorial biography and historical context on the other. The legacy of authors who have been crucial to the constitution of queer scholarship is reassessed to yield fresh insights. In “Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in Queer Time,” Richard A. Kaye convincingly argues that, in their views of erotics, utopianism, and the law, these two queer Irish writers are illustrative of the two main competing conceptions of sexual modernism. The two most interesting chapters of this section are those dealing with the legacy of Black authors James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Reasserting the shared project of Baldwin’s work and queer studies, that of troubling identity by “undermining normative naming practices” (87), Matt Brim presents an overview of what Black queer studies may look like “After Queer Baldwin.” He thus echoes Ortiz’s call for a stronger integration of queer feminist genealogies and criticism. So does Amber Jamilla Musser, who studies Lorde and Moraga’s representations of mothering, to which queer studies has often had an uneasy relationship. Musser emphasizes how viewing mothering as “a set of practices, a mode of touching,” “without reifying the mother as essentially female or feminine” (134), helps think difference and community in fresh new ways.
6The volume’s closing section, “Reading Queerly,” opens up to forms that may not be usually considered as literature but that have nonetheless spurred crucial developments in queer literary studies. As andré carrington reminds us in “Reading in Juxtaposition,” drawing from examples as varied as Bechdel or Gengoroh Tagame, comics have been high-stakes sites of queer representation and queer theorization, materializing reflections on deviance, marginalization, and liminality. In his delightfully-written close analysis of niv Acosta’s performance, Discotropic, Nick Salvato shows how queer of color camp uses alternative affective modes such as unease, indifference, or melancholic to reflect on how trans and queer racialized experiences are embodied. The last two chapters radically expand the scope of analysis. Taking her cue from Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble, Rebekah Sheldon retraces the different avatars of the monster in relation to queerness, from Gothic literature to New Weird and speculative fictions, and dwells on recent shifts in queer studies that turn the field away from transgressive, anti-normative positions, and toward ones “that advocate for ways to build a better shared world” (171-172). Finally, in her attentive close reading of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Sharon Patricia Holland analyzes the function of the “hum/animal” distinction in the racialization of Black and Indigenous subjects and in the deployment of the political concept of sovereignty. She emphasizes the need for fuller, deeper understandings of animality to answer the ever-relevant question: “what is self-determination?” (204).
7“We are not yet queer,” José Antonio Muñoz writes on the very first page of Cruising Utopia (2009). And it may indeed be true: we are not yet queer because we have not yet stepped into our full utopian potential. If that is the case, then wondering what comes after queer studies is a way to maintain futurity open to keep imagining what lays beyond. After Queer Studies takes up the challenge with gusto: it emphasizes that we must both consider our present practices—the way we read, write, and relate to the world—and strive for utopian modes of being. Along the way, it reasserts the foundational bond queerness holds to the social and political world, and revitalizes our understandings of difference, community, materiality, and humanness.
References
Bibliographical reference
Heloise Thomas, “After Queer Studies. Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Tyler Bradway and E. L. McCallum (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 210 p.”, Caliban, 64 | 2020, 379-382.
Electronic reference
Heloise Thomas, “After Queer Studies. Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century. Tyler Bradway and E. L. McCallum (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 210 p.”, Caliban [Online], 64 | 2020, Online since 30 July 2021, connection on 15 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/9424; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.9424
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