Wanderlust: Queer Theory beyond a Politics of Difference

Readers struggling to determine what exactly is queer about Madhavi Menon’s new book are advised to skip to the “Coda: Queer and Universal.” But then they will have missed the delicious journey getting there. Indeed, travel is the leitmotif of Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism, and Menon guides us through a diverse archive of art, literature, and performance spanning four centuries and several continents. She would rather show us what is queer than engage in any sustained conversation with contemporary queer theorists. That said, in the context of a decade’s worth of infighting about what constitutes queer (antinormativity, allegiance to the death drive, utopian strivings, etc.), Menon’s book comes as a bit of a relief, as it leads us out of this cul-de-sac.

In the introduction, readers will at first find such straightforward formulations as the following: “If anything, the most widespread truth about our lived reality is that it is too multiple to abide by a code of identitarian difference: lived reality is at odds with identity politics” (3). After that, Menon plunges into Alain Badiou’s notoriously difficult “antiphilosophy,” situating his idea that “universalism names the impossibility of having any particular assume ontological wholeness” in the history of universalism’s bad reputation and its recent reconsideration by Left theorists (126). Here the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau try to reform the universal for an era attuned to diversity; G. W. F. Hegel himself shudders at the revolutionary implications of universalism; Karl Marx embraces a universal undoing of class and property; and Menon steers universalism’s power to intervene in the inevitable failure of identity politics: “Rather than recuperating universalism in the name of difference, then, I want to use universalism’s fury to destroy our investments in difference as the basis of identity” (11). Differences will certainly continue to exist, but if we are to avoid their tendency to justify violence and exploitation more than to effect social justice, we must become indifferent to difference, according to Menon.

Anti-identitarian thought is, of course, not new to queer theory. Neither is Menon’s deferral to desire as the unwieldy truth of “lived reality” writhing under the fixed facade of identity. Psychoanalysis enters this text in uneven ways. Lee Edelman haunts the edges of the project, while Jacques Lacan’s (and Badiou’s) definition of desire is dismissed, his idea of jouissance rallied, and his concept of the object cause of desire virtually reinvented. I found this tendency a bit disappointing, but such idiosyncratic reference to the couch is itself a hallmark of three decades of queer theory, so readers are encouraged to take at face value statements like the following: “Far from inhabiting gay or straight bodies—as though object choice could render desire legible—we are all marked by a superabundance of desire that might be termed queer” (17). So, we are all queer? This too is familiar territory, or rather a periodic cycle in queer studies. At certain moments (often provoked by mainstream assimilationist politics), the urgent need to shake off the strictures of minoritizing identity formations leads to universalizing gestures that can result in an unmoored lack of specificity and less than comforting conclusions like “queerness posits only the horizon of its own impossibility” (18).

The irony here is that it is the particularities of Menon’s case studies that are the book’s greatest strength, as they illuminate the intricate textures and dynamics of said queer impossibility. Indifference to Difference’s three main chapters are, in fact, strikingly different from each other and seem to perform an indifference to nation-period and genre as bounded domains of scholarly inquiry. Chapter 1 addresses the artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE’s queer engagement with “African art” and diasporic identity through the concept of a “museum of desire.” This title of an unpublished short story by John Berger seems to uncannily conjure both Orhan Pamuk’s 2008 novel Museum of Innocence and the Istanbul establishment of the...