Trapped in the Closet with Eve

One of the problems with the turn to affect in queer studies is that, when we were talking about sexuality, everyone at least thought they knew what we were talking about, even those who felt we shouldn’t be talking about any such thing. After the affective turn, no one can quite agree what it is we are talking about, including, it seems, us. Consequently, while prudes might now be marginally less paranoid about what it is we’re up to, this state of affairs is not necessarily fortunate. And the intellectual gains that studies of affect have enabled within queer studies are partly offset by the aloofness of the term affect. In talking about affect, I have noticed, one can easily lose the thread quite suddenly, in midconversation, and sometimes cannot seem to pick it up again despite continuous further discussion. This presents a perplexing irony: have our attempts to move closer to the shapes and textures of everyday feeling moved us further from the live wires of felt concern?

I enjoy excellent company in perplexity. In the introduction to Touching, Feeling, a key book heralding the affective turn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proclaimed herself “abashed” at how “little sex” had made it in. She even worried that “in many areas the moment may be past when theory was in a very productive relation to sexual activism.”¹ While I would rush to defend Sedgwick against the implication that her work was guilty of detaching sex from affect, I do think that if there were indeed such a detachment in the broader field, it would be worth a little abashment. Of course, our current moment presents different political imperatives than those of the AIDS crisis and moral panics around the government funding of “obscene” art and performance that occasioned the productive relation between theory and sexual activism that Sedgwick here refers to. Our relationship to that earlier moment cannot be one of nostalgia, wisely defined by Stanley Cavell as “an inability to open the past to the future.”² Recognizing this, one important strand of affect studies—represented for example in Ann Cvetkovich’s writings on lesbian activists in ACT UP— has prioritized the remembering, repeating, and working through of the theoretically saturated sexual activism of the 1980s.³ It seems worth sustaining this effort to work through sex again from within the affective turn. This is not to recommend an effort to revisit sex, as it were, once more with feeling, in some misguided effort to at last get it right, still less to fix queer theory as a new scientia sexualis. Instead, we might do better to draw upon the psychoanalytic tradition that Sedgwick’s own work performed such unpredictable improvisations upon to acknowledge how endemic repetition itself is to the discourses and practices of sex.

Queer theory tends to be most vibrant when people beyond the academy feel caught up in what it is it does. (This may be one reason why transgender theory—which one wit has called queer theory’s “evil twin”—is enjoying such strides.⁴ Whatever else it may be, transgender theory is an account of the world in which many nonacademics feel strongly implicated, and with reason.) This feeling of implication approaches but finally diverges from Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation and its well-known spoken command “Hey you!” Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, among others, have challenged this account of subject formation as too deterministic to account for the ideological paradoxes upon which the bodily matters of desire and excess are born.⁵ The acoustics of implication at work in queer theory and its uncanny doubles are perhaps better captured in the expression “my ears are burning.” At least, it is such a periinterpellative that Sedgwick refers to in the hilarious subtitle to her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.”⁶ As it happens, I did indeed think the essay was about me, at least the first time I read it. And although reading it, as is the case with everything else Sedgwick...