“The Queer Debt Crisis: How Queer is Now?”: Introduction

In response to the 2012 MMLA Call for Papers, Madelyn Detloff, Judith Roof with Alanna Beroiza, and I organized a series of linked panels on gender and sexuality. Our objective was to initiate a sustained discussion at the annual conference among scholars in the fields of queer theory and sexuality studies in the absence of a permanent section in these areas. In keeping with the conference theme, our proposals took up various notions of debts in queer, gender, and feminist studies. I organized the first panel, “Academic Debts to Non-academic Communities,” which articulated, and interrogated, the relationship between academic theories and community groups, such as asexuality studies and the asexual internet group AVEN; queer studies and the 1980s activist group Act Up; and the work of Donna Haraway and 1980s coalition building by US Third World feminists. Detloff organized the second, “Queer Economics,” on which she also presented, which took up the notion of “debts” in terms of economies of sexual desire, pleasure, and exchange. (Both panels are described in more detail in Detloff’s contribution that follows.) The third panel, “The Queer Debt Crisis,” which begins the exchange published here, concluded our mini conference. Asserting that queer theory has overextended its critical boundaries and that its dominance in the field of sexuality and gender studies threatens feminism, the last panel challenged the premises of the preceding two panels. And ignited a firestorm.

Whether or not we were successful in launching a sustained discussion of queer and sexuality studies at the MMLA remains to be seen, but when it comes to our desire to create a lively discussion among scholars in the field, we got more than we bargained for. The raucous debate that followed the third panel exposed our different understandings of the term queer, its history and its politics (if, indeed, it is seen to have any politics), and its relation to feminism. Heated accusations and prejudicial caricatures meant to blame or trivialize opposing views were tempered by probing questions and challenges that made all of us reflect more deeply on the political and ideological commitments we clung to so passionately. We have tried to reproduce the main lines of that argument here. Beroiza, Roof, and Dennis Allen begin with revised versions of their remarks, which they presented in dialogue form at the conference, where each read in turn sections of a paper collaboratively produced. Detloff and Carina Pasquesi, whose paper was specifically targeted in the conference debate, then respond to the joint presentation, elaborating on their points of disagreement with “The Queer Debt Crisis,” a title that raises the question of whether queer theory is in crisis (as some presenters seemed to think), or whether there is a crisis in the notion of the debts it owes (as others suggested). Suzanne Bost, who presented on the first panel, closes the essay cluster with a response to this exchange, identifying the main points of contention and offering not so much a solution (for she wants to keep the debate going, to keep things messy, as she says) as an alternative way of understanding what is at stake in this debate.

That MMLA debate was one of the most stimulating that I have participated in at an academic conference (not excepting the face-off between Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam at the 2013 MLA). Something was going on in our exchange, something incredibly important that suddenly crystalized for me in the months when our essay cluster was under review. A debate about sexual labeling that I had tended to see as purely academic became, unexpectedly, deeply personal.

In July 2013 I returned from summer teaching in Rome to find that a dear friend of mine, whom I had known for twenty years, had been arrested and jailed while I was away for viewing, and sharing, child pornography online. I was stunned. My friend was a good man, kind and generous, gentle, funny, sensitive, a loving and much loved son, brother, uncle, and friend. I couldn’t imagine a man like him in jail. Whatever he stood accused of, he...