LGBTQ: An Alphabet of Interested Writing

Sitting down to write this review of recent queer scholarship and performance, I was reminded of a scene from Split Britches’s Lost Lounge (2011), in which Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw bring on a fragment of a lounge act, accompanied by the sound and image of collapsing buildings, remarking on the new structures that replace the old. Then they lie motionless on the floor while a digital clock marks the passing time. Contemporary queer scholarship resonates with the collapsing of the structures of twentieth-century modes of temporality, identification, political activism, and performance, at times nostalgic for their prior efficacy and enthusiasm for goals, at other times dismissive of those same qualities. The newer critical structures significantly alter the sense of temporality (the “ticking” of the digital clock); ethnic and nationally bounded modes of identification give way to new transnational and migratory forms, and any direct tie to political activism resembles lying prone on the floor—an activist stasis—while the authors wrestle their ways out of ideological strongholds. The term “performance,” once tethered to something like acting and a performance space, now encompasses a spectacularly broad spectrum of things, from poetry and paintings to clubs and pissing contests.

Moreover, the critical strategies of both performance and its interpretation are nourished by metatheories that help to set the critical terms of queer identification and social encounter. Critical theory, once cast in theatre circles as an intrusion, a dalliance, or an elitist transcendence, is firmly rooted in many contemporary queer writings and performances as a way to account for how meaning is produced and distributed through social codes. In the twenty-first century, the notion and experience of “queer” construct a critical space or a lens through which to engage fully with ideologies that seek to dominate civic and global exchange. For example, conservative and fundamentalist ideologies that claim the threat of terrorism as their origin have been confronted in books like Jasbir Puar’s brilliant Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). These critiques organize a critical methodology through which they may regard, or disregard, dominating forms of authority and their attendant violence, offering alternative formations of juridical and civic sociality. Major philosophical systems that organize the very notions of space and perspective have been queered to reveal the gender and sexual bias in their structures by such works as Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), while traditional values of temporality have been refuted through queering the terms of the future by books like Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011).

For the queer movement, defined, in part, by structures of desire and love, the critical treatment of emotions has been central to the development of the field. First inscribed in personalized narratives like coming-out stories, descriptions of sexual awakenings, and the stories of shaming in homophobic encounters, descriptions of the operations of desire and love then became the subject of queer and LGBT writings and performances, particularly in terms of psychoanalytic discourses in the former and seductive acts in the latter. But the arrival of the postmodernist “cool” style froze out the discursive treatment of those emotions. As Fredric Jameson diagnosed in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the “waning of affect” is one of the key symptoms of postmodernism. Accordingly, queer theorists turned to analyses of juridical structures (Butler, George Chauncey, and David Eng) and the queering of global economies (Martin Manalansan IV, Eng-Beng Lim, and Eng).¹ When queer scholars returned to a full consideration of feelings, emotions appeared as inscriptions...