Safe

This hesitation, before what seems the richness of developed theory and the fullness of achieved practice, has the awkwardness, even the gaucherie, of any radical doubt.

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

Compromise comes surprisingly easy.

That’s what I discovered in writing my first book, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. The project was deeply personal, more like a first novel than a tenure book. Writing about the darker aspects of queer history—shame, self-hatred, and loneliness—came out of my own experiences of, well, shame, self-hatred, and loneliness in relation to my own sexual and gender identity. The book was a long time coming, and its final form seemed inevitable, the expression of something that had been brewing in me. It was my book. At the same time, Feeling Backward was also my tenure book and, before that, my dissertation. Profoundly shaped by disciplinary protocols in literary studies, the book also reflected the institutional pressures of the still young field of queer studies: it was polemical, counterintuitive, and advertised its political engagement in a way that was hard to miss. As a credentialing document and a passport to professional advancement, the book did not belong to me but to the university.

If it was possible to write both books in one, it is because many of these agendas were overlapping. There were, of course, painful moments in negotiating between professional and personal imperatives. I sometimes felt overwhelmed and embarrassed by the leakiness and exposure of professional homosexualism, but I also felt an awkward pride; I longed from time to time for a regular job, or at least a more recognizable dissertation topic, but I also found the break with professional etiquette thrilling and strange; and, because of my ambivalence and these conflicting agendas, I didn’t always take criticism well (“Just let me talk about my problems!”). But, in the end, I found I was able to write for the profession and for myself at the same time. There is, of course, no hard and fast distinction between personal and academic expression; intellectual and professional training are as much a part of subject-formation as childhood trauma or one’s first sexual experience. Even before queer studies materialized to give shape to my personal experiences and political commitments, I, like many other queers, had negotiated my difference via obsessive reading. Queer studies had broken with academic convention enough—through experiments in genre, the inclusion of the personal, and through ongoing methodological mash-ups—so that it felt, in relation to the many other kinds of projects I could be doing, truly capacious. And the new field of affect studies, particularly as undertaken in queer and ethnic studies, gave me the license I needed to work the form of the monograph to my own ends. Although queer literary criticism was not the only possible frame for writing the history of my sentimental education, it felt like a fit.

At the time, despite some discomfort, this dovetailing between personal and professional agendas felt incredibly lucky. In the years since publishing Feeling Backward, however, I have been thinking about the costs of this conjunction. We know from Foucault that disciplinary structures are both constraining and enabling. While formerly I focused—had to focus, really, given the pressures of graduate school and the tenure track—on what the disciplines of literary studies and queer studies allowed me to say, recently I have thought more about what this formation excluded. The links between literary studies and sexuality studies—visible in the meteoric rise of queer theory around 1990—made my methodology in the first book (close reading of canonical queer literary texts) productive and recognizable; at the same time, it blocked other kinds of scholarly practice and forms of knowledge. Literature and literary studies made it possible for me to speak with fluency about desire, shame, intimacy, ambivalence, and sex, but made it all but impossible for me to address a range of other topics that were equally, if not more, important to me: social class, labor, violence, and stigma. There were, of course, plenty of queer and literary studies scholars addressing...