World Enough: Sex and Time in Recent Queer Studies

It was not that long ago—only about six years—that Michael Warner, in the notes to an article on Washington Irving, averred that "the problem of time in modern sexuality remains little understood."¹ No one, I think, would make such a disclaimer today. The intervening years have seen the appearance of an already rich archive of work—books, essays, now a special issue of GLQ—keyed to a range of queer investments in time. This is so much the case that, in place of the old query "what does queer theory teach us about x?" we might now begin to ask of emerging work: What can time teach us about queer studies? Or rather, does a sophisticated critical attentiveness to time yield insights we take to be particularly relevant, and particularly valuable, for queer scholarship and critique? If so, in what areas of queer studies does this value most accrue? What familiar problems and modes of inquiry does a critical investment in time reformulate? What impasses emerge in new and more pliable arrangements or, for that matter, fail to? In what follows, I want to approach recent works by Annamarie Jagose, Carla Freccero, and Elizabeth Grosz not solely through a close scrutiny of their local readings and individual claims but with an eye as well toward these larger disciplinary questions. Though this is perhaps not the most generous approach—inasmuch as it involves reading the works not wholly in or through their own offered terms—still, I think it helps bring into focus the ways these differently conceived books, by such differently motivated authors, might be read as speaking in colloquy with one another. What we might imagine them speaking together about, I think, is the state of the discipline in this long moment of transformation.

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Annamarie Jagose is a scholar and prize-winning novelist, and one of the first things to note about her book Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence—one of the first things to like about it—is the generosity with which it accommodates these not always coincident roles.² This is not to say that Inconsequence is a book of criticism you might read like a novel, nor is it to suggest you need to be a novelist to write fine critical prose. But it is to say something about the sentence-by-sentence unfolding of Jagose's book, and about the pleasures to be had in a mode of critical writing energized as much by writerly ambitions—elegance, grace, humor, clarity of expression—as by the thrill of intellectual insight. The result is a book that, for all its theoretical density, places a notably high premium on communicability.

And it is theoretically dense. Jagose's central claim is, as the title suggests, about sequence and sequentialization; her contention is that heterosexuality naturalizes itself as "original and pre-eminent" through a logic of sequence, of origins and secondary derivations, and that those logics "produce the lesbian as the figure most comprehensively worked over by sequence, secondary and inconsequential in all senses" (ix–x). On the way to arguing these points, Jagose offers a number of subsidiary claims about lesbian criticism and historiography and about what she reads as the impasses of theorizations of "lesbian invisibility." One aim of the book, in its attentiveness to matters of sequence—or hierarchization in and through sequence—is to shift the angle of inquiry in lesbian criticism away from a focus on the politics of visibility, and in particular away from the kinds of naive historicism that sometimes follow in the wake of those politics. Perhaps the greatest strength of Jagose's book is the vigor of its critique of lesbian visibility politics, a critique that manages the neat trick of being other than dismissive...