The Queer Art of Success: Lisa Duggan’s Fun and Fury

While away at the ASA conference, I assigned the students in my gender, sexuality, and literature class a viewing of Boys Don’t Cry and The Brandon Teena Story. I returned to a room full of unhappy students: seeing these films after The Handmaid’s Tale, Bastard Out of Carolina, Fire, and Brokeback Mountain, students told me they felt mired in misery and despair. In response, I told them about the ASA and Lisa Duggan’s presidential address. They knew of Duggan. We had been wrestling with her formulation of homonormativity, which for many had added to their frustration and hopelessness, whether because the concept confounded them or because they understood it and the traps of neoliberalism all too well. In other words, the stage was well set, and the timing good, for a discussion of Duggan’s keynote—including her theatrical red dress and killer shoes—and for talking about the necessity of fun as well as fury.

The importance of fun as a way to not ignore but rather face and resist misery-inducing conditions is something I learned from Duggan, and “The Fun and the Fury of Transforming American Studies” is one way she provides this much-needed lesson. When the 2014 conference theme “The Fun and the Fury” was announced, I was in over my head with work related to the ASA academic boycott resolution, and I was in no mood for fun. Through hundreds of e-mails and many conference calls, the ASA Caucus on Academic and Community Activism was strategizing as we waited anxiously for results of the membership’s vote, preparing for different outcomes and striving to make the most of an unprecedented opening in the mainstream media. The controversy the resolution was occasioning in Israel and the United States meant not only that the academic and cultural boycott of Israel was receiving acknowledgment in, for example, the New York Times, where it was front-page news, but also that it was becoming possible for the first time in such venues to discuss the reasons for this Palestinian-led campaign: to make Israel comply with international law and end its practices of apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation. Indeed, the Chronicle of Higher Education put the ASA on its “2014 Influence List” because its boycott resolution had “changed the debate about sanctions against Israel.”¹ Alongside this media coverage and caucus correspondence, my inbox held other boycott-related e-mails, including an image of a gun, a wish that I would soon be maggot dust, and a prediction that I would be next in line to be gassed in the showers. As I digested the hate mail—a new experience for me, though an all-too-familiar one for those, including a number of impressive ASA scholars, who have long supported Palestinian liberation—I was also, thanks to the discussions catalyzed by the ASA resolution, becoming increasingly aware of the magnitude of Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians throughout Gaza, East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and inside Israel. So situated, I could understand fury, but its coupling with fun, it seemed to me, made for a theme that bordered on the frivolous.

In responding to Duggan’s address—not only the AQ version but also as a conference event—I want to tell the story of how I came to understand the importance of fun as theory and as practice.

Donning a Queer Optic

I date my awakening to the power of fun to Duggan’s Facebook posting of the December 16 e-mail she received from Caesar Gott that compared boycott politics to hemorrhoid bonding. Gott’s e-mail, so very inducing of fun as well as fury, conformed to a pattern emerging on Facebook and on “BDS Love Letters,” a website archiving the deluge of hate mail sent to ASA boycott resolution supporters. Most of it was directed to those on the front lines: 2013 ASA president Curtis Marez and president-elect Duggan. Whereas attacks sent to Marez often veered off into racist insults or anti-immigration diatribes, those addressed...