Monthly Archive for January, 2012

By Michael Warner via The Chronicle Review

Duke University Press ends its influential Series Q this month. It has been an impressive ride since the first book in the series: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark 1993 collection of essays, Tendencies. Rereading her introduction, “Queer and Now,” I am reminded of the potent sense of possibility opened up 20 years ago by the idea of queer theory. The sense of a historical moment is strong in the essay, as its title underscores. Sedgwick’s optimism was far from naïve; the same introduction disclosed her diagnosis of breast cancer, which she lived with and against until her death in 2009. Fittingly, the last volume released by Series Q is a posthumous collection of her remaining essays, The Weather in Proust.

Taken together, Sedgwick’s death, the passage of time, and the news from Duke all seem to be occasions for taking stock. Even before the press’s decision, many in the field were already in a retrospective mood. A recent book in the same series, After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, asked leading queer theorists to look back on the great ferment of the last two decades. The title of the book seems to place queer theory firmly in the past, though the editors, Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, generously shift the emphasis in their introduction: “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”

The answer depends on how much queer theory is defined by the speculative energy that the phrase itself generated in the 1990s. The label, after all, came into circulation only after the major theoretical innovations that defined it—in the work of Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, the early Sedgwick, Judith Butler, as well as many others. Those writers had already developed an analysis of sexuality that looked to relations of power rather than to individual psychology or “orientation.” And they had already shown that sex, pleasure, and the formation of sexual cultures posed deep challenges to the normative frameworks by which some kinds of sex are legitimated and institutionalized as the proper form of sexuality. As several contributors to After Sex? point out, queer theory’s intellectual concerns have given rise to newer kinds of work, and are continued under other rubrics.  More…

By Michael C. Dawson via Boston Review

Photo courtesy of Derek Aylward

People who live at the bottom of the social order, especially at the bottom of more than one of its hierarchies, are frequently condemned to a life of crippling disadvantage. The existence of such mutually reinforcing power hierarchies calls the social order itself into question as a matter of justice. Political movements need to disrupt these hierarchies to overcome injustice.

In the United States, a healthy black politics is indispensable to that task. Black politics—African Americans’ ability to mobilize, in?uence policy, demand accountability from government officials, participate in American political discourse, and ultimately offer a democratic alternative to the status quo—have at times formed the leading edge of American democratic and progressive movements; black visions were some of the more robust, egalitarian, and expansive American democratic visions. This status has been lost.

The decline of progressive black politics is apparent in the Occupy actions that have swept the country to protest economic injustice. There has been black participation, and in some areas, such as Chicago, black efforts to mobilize communities have been aided by the presence of a local Occupy movement. But, for the most part, Occupy has been divorced from black politics.   More…