Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future

This essay advances a series of critical points in queer theory. First, a text is queer, regardless of the queerness of its authorial persona, if it carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex. This is argued in relation to Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) and David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996). Second, the understanding of sexuality in queer theory has been compromised by the confusion of sexuality with gender. Despite the liberalization of LGBTIQ gender identities, some sexual identities are still stigmatized as paraphilias (formerly perversions) or identity disorders. Queer theory needs to reconsider sexuality in the Freudian sense of polymorphous-perverse, in its ungovernable, compulsive, and unconscious dimensions. Third, “the antisocial thesis” and the relation of queer theory to queer politics are discussed with regard to Lee Edelman’s book No Future (2008).