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W H AT S Q U EER A B O U T Q U EER S T U D I E S N OW ?
Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that David L. Eng with
challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual Judith Halberstam
subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, and Jos
natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social Esteban Muoz
processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and
sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specically in
its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender,
class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality.
Fourteen years after Social Texts publication of Fear of a Queer
Planet, and eight years after Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and
Gender, this special double issue reassesses the political utility of queer
by asking whats queer about queer studies now? The contemporary
mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identityas a mass-mediated consumer
lifestyle and embattled legal categorydemands a renewed queer studies
ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to
other modes of difference, and calibrated to a rm understanding of queer
as a political metaphor without a xed referent. A renewed queer studies,
moreover, insists on a broadened consideration of the late-twentieth-cen-
tury global crises that have congured historical relations among political
economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations
of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.
The following sixteen essayslargely authored by a younger genera-
tion of queer scholarsmap out an urgent intellectual and political terrain
for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, kinship, and
belonging. Insisting on queer studies intellectual and political relevance
to a wide eld of social critique, these essays reassess some of the elds
most important theoretical insights while realigning its political atten-
tions, historical foci, and disciplinary accounts. Broadly, these scholars
examine the limits of queer epistemology, the denaturalizing potentials
of queer diasporas, and the emergent assumptions of what could be called
queer liberalism. Collectively, they rethink queer critique in relation to a
number of historical emergencies, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, of
both national and global consequence.
Social Text 8485, Vol. 23, Nos. 34, FallWinter 2005. 2005 by Duke University Press.
Queer Epistemology
In her 1993 essay Critically Queer, Judith Butler writes that the asser-
tion of queer must never purport to fully describe those it seeks to
represent. It is necessary to afrm the contingency of the term, Butler
insists, to let it be vanquished by those who are excluded by the term
but who justiably expect representation by it, to let it take on meanings
that cannot now be anticipated by a younger generation whose political
vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments. That
queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its privileged assump-
tions ought to be safeguarded not only for the purposes of continuing
to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, afrm, and rework the
specic historicity of the term.2 The operations of queer critique, in
other words, can neither be decided on in advance nor be depended on
in the future. The reinvention of the term is contingent on its potential
obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any fortication of its criti-
cal reach in advance or any static notion of its presumed audience and
participants.
That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclu-
sionary operations has always been one of the elds key theoretical and
political promises. What might be called the subjectless critique of queer
studies disallows any positing of a proper subject of or object for the eld by
insisting that queer has no xed political referent. Such an understanding
orients queer epistemology, despite the historical necessities of strategic
essentialism (Gayatri Spivaks famous term), as a continuous deconstruc-
tion of the tenets of positivism at the heart of identity politics. Attention
to queer epistemology also insists that sexualitythe organizing rubric of
lesbian and gay studiesmust be rethought for its positivist assumptions.
A subjectless critique establishes, in Michael Warners phrase, a focus on
a wide eld of normalization as the site of social violence. Attention to
those hegemonic social structures by which certain subjects are rendered
normal and natural through the production of perverse and patho-
logical others, Warner insists, rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration
or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough
resistance to regimes of the normal.3
Queer Liberalism
In her closing comments at the Gay Shame conference at the University to queer
of Michigan, Gayle Rubin suggested that the events participants might
shift for a moment their attentions from gay shame to gay humility. epistemology,
In an age of queer liberalism, Rubins call for gay humility serves as
queer diasporas,
heuristic device for a return to what a desirably queer world might look
like. In our putatively postidentity and postracial age such a turn is
and queer
urgent. In this regard, our attention to queer epistemology, queer dias-
poras, and queer liberalism might be considered one modest attempt to liberalism might
frame queer studies more insistently and productively within a politics of
epistemological humility. be considered
Such a politics must also recognize that much of contemporary queer
scholarship emerges from U.S. institutions and is largely written in English. one modest
This fact indicates a problematic dynamic between U.S. scholars whose
work in queer studies is read in numerous sites around the world. Scholars attempt to frame
writing in other languages and from other political and cultural perspec-
tives read but are not, in turn, read. These uneven exchanges replicate in
queer studies
uncomfortable ways the rise and consolidation of U.S. empire, as well as
more insistently
the insistent positing of a U.S. nationalist identity and political agenda
globally. We propose epistemological humility as one form of knowledge and productively
production that recognizes these dangers.
From a similar perspective, and in regard to a virulent post9/11 U.S. within a politics
militarism that dominates contemporary politics, Judith Butler observes
that the very fact that we live with others whose values are not the same of epistemological
as our own, or who set a limit to what we can know, or who are opaque to
us, or who are strange, or are partially understood, that just means we live humility.
with a kind of humility.11 Butler suggests that that to take responsibility
in democratic polity does not mean to take responsibility for the entirety
of the world but to place ourselves in a vividly de-centered way in a
world marked by the differences of others. An ethical attachment to oth-
ers insists that we cannot be the center of the world or act unilaterally on
its behalf. It demands a world in which we must sometimes relinquish not
only our epistemological but also our political certitude. Sufce it to say
that to appreciate whats queer about queer studies now is to embrace
such a critical perspective and to honor such an ethics of humility.
For their thoughtful feedback and comments, we would like to thank Brent Edwards,
Katherine Franke, Janet R. Jakobsen, David Kazanjian, Ann Pellegrini, Teemu Rus-
kola, Josie Saldaa, and Leti Volpp, as well as the Social Text collective.
1. See, for instance, Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); David L. Eng, Racial Castration:
Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Cri-
tique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Phillip Brian Harper,
Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother
for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Desire and South
Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Martin F.
Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003); Jos Esteban Muoz, Disidentications: Queers of Color
and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
Jos Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York:
New York University Press, 2000); Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays
(New York: New York University Press, 2001); Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer
Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University
Press, 2003); and Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana
Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
2. Judith Butler, Critically Queer, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230.
3. Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and
Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), xxvi.
4. In his book Aberrations in Black, for instance, Ferguson explores how both
Marxist and liberal theories of social power implicitly congure subject formation
through their reliance on an organic distinction between adult heterosexual-
ity and immature and deviant forces of aberrant sexual practices. It is on
the terrain of heteropatriarchy that these seemingly divergent theories of social
power in fact converge. Put plainly, Ferguson writes, racialization has helped
to articulate heteropatriarchy as universal (6).
5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on
Effeminate Boys, Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 1827.
6. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Scattered Speculations on the Theory
of Value, in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge,
1988), 15475.
7. Phillip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, Jos Esteban Muoz, and Trish
Rosen, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender: An Introduction,
Social Text, nos. 52/53 (1997): 1.
8. David L. Eng, Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas, Social
Text, no. 76 (2003): 4.
9. See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics,
and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003).