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Reviewed by:
  • Theory Aside ed. by Jason Potts, and Daniel Stout
  • Christa Albrecht-Crane
Jason Potts and Daniel Stout. eds. Theory Aside. Durham, Duke UP, 2014. 320p.

Theory Aside does not set as its goal to discard theory as such. As Ian Balfour notes in the volume’s astute last chapter that discusses the entire volume, discourse in the academy is, as a matter of course, informed by theoretical assumptions of some sort. However, as he explains, the goal is to do something slightly different with mainstream theory: to present “asides,” approaches and scholarly projects that suggest alternative lines of thought. The editors, Jason Potts and Daniel Stout, explain more specifically in the introduction that they intend to sidestep the standard methodological and intellectual approach to doing theory that usually includes two elements: a reliance on oracular figures and an apocalyptic model that rejects traditional views and instead develops a self-proclaimed, revolutionary correction. They modify this established project and successfully propose a number of thought-provoking asides that include interdisciplinary and multi-methodological scholarship. In this review, I will highlight a number of essays that illustrate the volume’s aims and showcase a variety of approaches and methodologies.

The opening essay in the section titled “Chronologies Aside” is an unpublished talk by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Here, Sedgwick approaches the topic of homophobia obliquely by exposing how authoritative texts (in this case the Britannica entries on Dreyfus and Oscar Wilde) operate by creating and compartmentalizing knowledges about sexuality in disciplinary ways that obscure homophobic misappropriations. In Potts and Stout’s framing, one could then say that Sedgwick’s aside of histories of sexuality happens in her parallel studies of sexuality and the homophobic and specific histories of law, criminality, religion, and economics. Another pointed aside in this section is provided by Elizabeth A. Provinelli, in “On Suicide, and Other Forms of Social Extinguishment,” in which she urges progressively minded scholars to consider the full implications of arguing that individuals from minority groups deserve social and political recognition. Provinelli asks, how does the Other inhabit an equally ethical and legitimate space? She points out that LGBTQ advocates for social change also simultaneously but covertly tend to demonize, scapegoat, and “extinguish” other views of sexual practices, among them “so-called ultraconservative Christians” (87). As she comments, this difficult work ought to be done by liberal minded theorists if they want more fully to account for both the production of new modes of being as well as the extinguishment of traditional views of sexuality.

The essays in the second part, “Approaches Aside,” experiment with alternative and non-dualistic theoretical methods. For instance, in “The Biopolitics of Recognition: Making Female Subjects of Globalization,” Pheng Chea addresses the difficulty of resisting global capitalism; rather than taking the usual, oppositional (and Marxist) approach that sees global capitalism as working oppressively against subjects’ interests, Chea’s aside views global capitalist power as a productive force that enables individuals to become subjects who then can claim rights. Chea uses as an example women workers in Asia and Latin America who, rather than being hapless victims of external, repressive forces, should be seen as rational and willing subjects who participate in global capitalism in order to improve their needs that have been shaped by government policies. For Chea, these women mark capitalism’s limits—created as [End Page 113] global capital, women become subjects with legitimate claims to human rights.

Another interesting aside in this second section is presented by Irene Tucker in “Before Racial Construction.” While established arguments in Critical Race Theory view racial construction as primarily a linguistic process, Tucker suggests an alternative history that examines instead the biological and visual aspect in racialized thinking. She asks, “what does an earlier history suggest about why are so interested in reading skin as the sign of race in the first place” (145)? To that end, Tucker links developments in medicine and a philosophical argument by Immanuel Kant about political equality. She suggests that modern medicine advances the insight that bodies are all the same anatomically; in the critical philosophy of his later work Kant then defines race as the clearest signifier of human sameness made instantly...

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