A Few Lies: Queer Theory and Our Method Melodramas

This essay claims first that literary study's recent "method" conversations follow a binary structure (depth vs. surface reading, post-critique vs. critique, paranoid vs. reparative reading) more appropriate to a moralized struggle between good and bad kinds of readers than to debates over interpretation, and second that a disavowal of queer literary studies has had a determining but opaque role in some of the influential interventions in that conversation (by Sedgwick, Best and Marcus, and Felski). I argue that the moralism of the conversation depends on forcefully forgetting queer literary study's investment in speaking truth, and that recalling that investment is necessary to an adequate historical sense, and defense of, the seriousness of both queer theory and literary study.