What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

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189 n o t e s introduction. queer and europe: an encounter Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello 1. In 1989, three Martinican essayists started their manifesto in praise of Creole culture with a statement: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (Bernabé et al 1993, 75). Refusing the false dichotomies of either Europe or Africa, West or East, they inaugurated creoleness as the acceptance of what may seem as “abnormal,” or “a defect,” and which, instead, “may turn out to be the indeterminacy of the new, the richness of the unknown” (90). 2. Their exacerbated nationalism is what the founding fathers of Europe thought a free and unified Europe would be able to oppose. See, for example, Rossi’s and Spinelli’s Ventotene Manifesto, which was adopted as the program of the Movimento Federalista Europeo after circulating among the members of the Italian Resistance. 3. “L’Europe, qui était naguère un défi ou une espérance est désormais une évidence. Elle s’est banalisée. Pour les nouvelles générations, qui n’ont pas été associés aux controverses de l’après guerre, elle fait partie du paysage. L’idéal est devenu réalité. Du même coup, si rares sont ceux qui rejettent le projet européen, l’enthousiasme n’est plus vraiment au rendez-vous. L’aventure a laissé la place à la routine” (Ferenczi 10). 4. See the beginning of David Ruffolo’s Post-Queer Politics and the introduction to the special issue of Social Text coordinated by David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. 5. See “Black Orpheus,” Sartre’s preface to Leopold Senghor’s 1948 Anthology of African and Malagasy Poetry. 6. The First International Sexual Nationalisms conference held at the University of Amsterdam in 2011 took this recent development of homonationalism as its central problematic. See also the special issue of Public Culture edited by Eric Fassin (2010) and especially “National Identities and Transnational Intimacies: Sexual Democracy and the Politics of Immigration in Europe” (Fassin 2010). 190 Notes to pages 13–28 7. As Sedgwick puts it in Tendencies, “In the short-shelf-life American market of images, maybe the queer moment, if it’s here today, will for that very reason, be gone tomorrow” (Sedgwick 1994, xii). 8. Although “space” here is more a mental and intellectual configuration than a geographical territory. 9. Or rather, the fact that the so-called “New World” keeps forgetting (i.e. narrativizing as its own) its pre-Columbian past. While the myth of the “discovery” of the Americas has more or less lost currency, its consequences (the impression that America does not “have” a history) still sounds like a plausible story. 10. See the time gap between Butler’s publication of Bodies That Matter (1993) and its translation in French by Amsterdam in 2009. Undoing Gender, on the other hand, appears in translation two years after its original release in 2006, which means that for the French public, in this case, the chronology of Butler’s work is reversed. 11. Each disciplinary discourse will draw a different Europe and place different kinds of borders around its object. Geographers, historians, philosophers , politicians, and artists will have their own definition of Europe. Economically , the European Union may be a self-contained territory but Europe is sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than the Union. Most thinkers agree that the borders of Europe are “unresolved” and that it is made up of “uncertain territories” (Boer 2006). (same-sex) marriage and the making of europe: renaissance rome revisited Gary Ferguson 1. Ferguson, Queer: 49–54. On the questions raised by using the terms “sexuality” and “homosexuality” in pre-nineteenth-century contexts, see ibid., esp. 1–49. Cf. Ferguson, “Pour.” This essay was written as an exploratory study for a book in preparation with the working title “Like Man and Wife”? A (Hi)story of Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome. Early drafts were read by David LaGuardia and Jeremy Foster, as well as by participants in a Gender and Sexuality Works-in-Progress Seminar, hosted by the Women’s Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pennsylvania, especially the respondents Rita Barnard and Melissa Sanchez, and a number of colleagues and friends, including Lisa Jane Graham, Kristen Poole, and Meredith Ray. I am extremely grateful for their generous and valuable comments. 2. Ferguson, Queer, ibid. For a study exploring...