A New Queer Companion for the Classroom

"Those of us who teach LGBT/Q classes are always in need of a new anthology that gathers cutting-edge work in the field" (2). Thus, George Haggerty and Molly McGarry validate their collection on all things queer, and thus shall I review this companion, as a tool for teaching sexuality courses. The anthology consists of five sections, on (post-9/11) politics, history/historiography, (trans)gender issues, kinship, and theory —the latter a misnomer, with only an interview with Judith Butler warranting the name. Together, these five sections pack in twenty-four essays, which cannot each be summarized here. Therefore, I shall discuss three contributions that spoke to me and that I anticipate will speak to my students.

The collection opens with a contribution by Janet R. Jakobsen titled "Sex, Secularism, and the 'War on Terrorism.' " Jakobsen builds on Gayle Rubin's insight, expounded in her classic 1984 essay "Thinking Sex," that matters of sex are often related to other political issues, including war.¹ In two ways, Jakobsen applies this insight to the "War on Terrorism," and in particular to the war in Iraq. First, the decision to go to war in Iraq was mainly justified by evoking the concept of freedom, especially after no weapons of mass destruction were found. Jakobsen convincingly traces the genealogy of this concept to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when Luther and Calvin held that in order to become free of the Catholic Church, the clergy, monks, and nuns had to break their vows of celibacy and enter into marriage. This way, sexual regulation became intrinsic to the notion of freedom that crossed the Atlantic Ocean and wove itself into the fabric of American society and morality. Second, Jakobsen zooms in on the Abu Ghraib photographs, showing how they participate in an orientalist discourse that positions Muslims as sexually restricted (and therefore particularly sensitive to the simulated sexual acts the prisoners were forced to perform) versus the sexual freedom that supposedly characterizes the United States (where women do not have to wear a veil, for instance). Jakobsen's two claims are perhaps more encompassing than she has space for, but in combination with Rubin's article, her essay makes for ideal reading to incite a student discussion on whether and how sex matters.

Another staple of sexuality courses is the issue of how to do the history of homosexuality (to echo David Halperin's title).² Next to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (1976), the essay by Valerie Traub in the companion under discussion should be required reading for this topic.³ In "The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography," Traub neatly summarizes the post-Foucauldian debate on continuity versus alterity: can we find continuity in lesbian expressions throughout the ages, or is Foucault correct in positing the second half of the nineteenth century as a watershed moment (alterity) when sexual acts were supplanted by the notion of a sexual identity? In Traub's estimation, this debate has outlived its utility, for after twenty years of publications on the history of lesbian sexuality (many of which are conveniently listed in the notes to her essay), we can attempt to assess the bigger picture or, better formulated, we can attempt to answer the question if there is a bigger picture. While careful not to take up a simplistic continuity position, Traub argues for what she calls "cycles of salience" (126): certain configurations of the lesbian, for example, the romantic friend or the mannish woman, seem to recur throughout history. These recurrences are always historically and culturally specific, yet their resonances over time suggest certain "perennial axes of social definition" (133) underlying them. With these cycles of salience, Traub hopes to open up new directions for lesbian history and historiography —and because she words all this most judiciously, often formulating her statements as questions, I think she might just succeed.

The absolute highlight of the collection is Halperin's essay "Deviant Teaching." At the...