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American Quarterly 56.4 (2004) 1099-1105



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Feeling Queer:

New Histories of Sexual Cultures

An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures . By Ann Cvetkovich. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. 355 + ix pages. $69.95 (cloth), $22.95 (paper).
Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity . By Kathryn R. Kent. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002. 355 + xi pages. $64.94 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).

In a recent forum in GLQ called "Thinking Sex/Thinking Gender," lgbt scholars and activists were asked to contribute short essays about the current status and vitality of queer and gender studies. Underlying the many thoughtful responses that writers provided was a sense that lgbt studies are at something of a crossroads. Recent activist work in transgenderism and transnationalism, for example, suggests that questions about gender and the presumptive fact of its "natural" relationship to the material and the national body are at least as urgent as they were when the discipline of queer theory was first established. At least one scholar, Heather Love, refutes a recent argument about sexuality and queerness—that sexuality as a subject is all played out. Against critics who argue that all of queer theory's major insights have been made, or that its analytic arguments have been so widely disseminated that it seems to have no surprises left, Love and others argue that we still have much to learn from the discipline. In a world that is both shrinking and expanding, studies of sexual cultures, sexual dissidents, and sexuality's various negotiations with gender have not yet come close to explaining how social actors understand their sexuality and their political cultures at different moments and with different intensities.1

On one level, of course, it's easy to feel that queer theory and lgbt studies, for all of their historical bickering, have settled into a comfortable middle age. The heady days of being able to queer straight culture by reading seemingly mainstream cultural and literary texts "otherwise" are all but gone. In the mass media, the analytic tactic of queering is so widely available that there is hardly [End Page 1099] any need for it anymore; the apparent ubiquity of self-consciously queer themes and queer shows has nearly banished "straight" culture as we once understood it. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will and Grace, and various self-consciously risqué cable TV shows seem to have achieved the aims of a generation of queer activists: they're here, they're queer, and by now, we're used to it.

Of course, the appropriation and commodification of queer culture is, like all media appropriations, partial and ambivalent at best. Indeed, instead of indexing the success of a long-term activist strategy of queer visibility, the ubiquity of sanitized representations of gay life seems to have erased the years of activism and struggle over visibility and representation more generally. We also know that media appropriation of gay style is both region and class specific, and that it is therefore coextensive with an increased backlash against queer visibility: more and more states have taken dramatic steps to make sure that marriage—and by extension, health care, for example—occurs only between a man and a woman. It seems that some people got used to the visibility and they still didn't like it.

In the midst of a public culture more confident about its ability to make distinctions about which versions and sections of gay culture it is willing to accept, distribute, and assimilate, what are the tasks that confront queer and lgbt scholars, especially those working in a U.S. context? One answer can be found in work that examines the globalization of Western capital and the corresponding links and disjunctures between sexual dissidents across cultures. Another can be found in studies that look at scholarly and activist projects together, an insistence that has gained new prominence in transgender studies. And yet another, exemplified in the two books under review here, is to see the most commonplace and most...

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