Guide Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political (Queer Interventions)

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leondumoulin.nl: Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political (​Queer Interventions) (): Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian,​.
Table of contents

Beatrice Michaelis.

Elahe Haschemi Yekani. Moreover, as we have learned from much productive work on queer temporalities see for example Halberstam , Freccero , Dinshaw et al. In contrast to Warner, we posit that, following discussions of the anti-social turn in queer theory in the past years, there has been a renewed interest in queer academic writing on the interrelated issues forming the three main sections of this collection: the role of activisms, the limits of the political, and, last but not least, the question of ethics, specifically in light of a radical turn to negativity.

We feel it is indeed timely to reconsider these topics that have shaped the queer debate from the outset and thus to project the reiteration of queer moments indefinitely into the future s. Consequently, we do not see queer futures standing in a simple binary opposition to queer negativity. For negativity has not only been debated in the Edelmanian vein in relation to anti-sociality, but also regarding its affective and bonding dimension that might prove productive for queer politics. Moreover, the debate around the demise of queer theory looms large and is almost as old as queer theory itself.

This collection of essays by both renowned scholars in the field and early- career researchers provide a contemporary snapshot of the microstructures of queer activisms, the political as a controversial category in queer thinking, and concomitant ethical challenges that will hopefully continue to shape discussions in the future of queer theory.

But what are the concrete objects and interests of present and future queer theories? There has not been one set of people that it caters to exclusively. Nonetheless, sexual dissidence, as an organizing principle in protests against processes of normalization and exclusion, rather than identities, has been seen as a commonality through which coalitions of lesbian and gay, queer and trans activisms are formed that are simultaneously attentive to the interrelating terrains of classism and racism.

Others, such as Lisa Duggan and Jasbir Puar , direct our attention to questions of complicity with the State in an understanding of activism as a road to acknowledgment and inclusion. So while activism might do away with identities, it still relies on agents and agency.

Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political

From the outset, queer activism has also been an intervention into systems of knowledge and power and is therefore closely related to the emergence of queer theory as a form of critical thinking in universities. Consequently, the enquiry into normalizing processes has found its way into university settings, into syllabi, and a modest degree of queer institutionalization.

However, this is mostly restricted to the US and cannot be attested for most European countries,3 where—if at all—queer studies are included into gender studies programs to a varying extent. Queer activisms have also always been invested in building alliances that might be temporal and work across a variety of differences.

Questions of queer complicity in exclusionary practices—regarding race, ability, and location, for instance—have shaped these debates in queer theory with its turn from pride to shame Halperin and Traub , from resistance to the embrace of negativity Edelman , Halberstam , from LGBT civil rights and citizenship to critiques of homonormativity6 Duggan and homonationalism Puar At the same time, the question of agency and activism remains at the core of critical thinking in queer theory. See the protest letter of the Berlin-based project TransInterQueer. Additionally, there are numerous forms of queer activism on the Internet—in blogs that do not always fall on one side of the divide of activist or academic critique, mobilizing flashmobs, SlutWalks, sometimes as part of the worldwide occupy protests—that address questions of poverty, redistribution, and citizenship in a globalized framework and understand them as entangled with sexual and gender regimes of normalization.

And, if indeed queer can be helpful in framing these conflicts, it seems to be with a view to the wariness of simple binaries. In contrast to reading these dilemmas as a dead-end for queer activisms, we see the emergence of a more nuanced debate about how queer needs to be approached. The turn to negativity must not be translated into the shorthand for no action but it can transform into a powerful refusal of inclusionary modes that might oppress or exclude others.

Despite their geographical diversity and different agendas, the queer activisms covered in Queer Futures share a decided interest in exploring terrains of queer intervention.


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Hochberg, opened this debate. Neoliberal cooptation of activism is a central concern, and it is the setting of Pride Parades, for instance, that both Hutta and Raab discuss in their chapters. We have chosen to divide Queer Futures into three separate sections, but they are, of course, interrelated.

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So, while this first section explores concrete mobilizing and sometimes productively immobilizing queer actions, the second part of the collection explores strands in queer theory addressing questions that direct our attention to the political and beyond. This enquiry is intricately linked to both activisms and ethics and therefore functions as a bridge between the two longer sections of this book.

Beyond the Political? There might be an outside of politics, but surely not an outside of the political? In other words, there might not be a beyond the political. Or is there?

Queer futures reconsidering ethics, activism, and the political

What we are interested in, then, is not necessarily an actual beyond of the political. Imagining a variety of queer futures, the texts in this book are constantly on the move towards transformations, always alert not to be stuck in those grids of politics as we know it. Which politics are queer politics then, and what is their relation to the political?

It might be precisely this incalculability of the political and thus the insecurity about what in fact constitutes the political that can become productive for queer theory. Queer undermines fixed identities and explores those areas excluded by such identities. Therefore, queer functions as a kind of catalyst that strategically decenters identity positions without becoming a site of identity or identity construction itself.

Queer politics does not support any kind of minority, group or issue but, on the contrary, derives its political force from undermining any constellation that congeals into a stable structure. It is a cultural practice that dismantles heteronormativity and other norms and processes of normalization and directs our attention to the blank spaces, to that which is not culturally intelligible in any given order Kilian The processes, regimes, and logics that constitute politics simultaneously take the political beyond itself—always moving, always changing.

As Judith Butler reminded us during a talk presented at The State of Things public lecture series for the 54th Biennale in Venice: We should not adopt the dominant limits of the political. The essays in this section therefore take us beyond the confines of the polis precisely by progressing through its streets and houses.

The poststructuralist distinction of the political referring to society or the community as such and politics the rules and regulations that organize it in a specific order is crucial for our purposes here,10 as is the ontological radicalism of the concept of democracy. What is more, we must not lose sight of the contingency of these formations and of alternatives to them. This distancing may be an epistemological move; it may be a bodily act in the streets.

These bodily actions lay claim to a different future, as Butler emphasized in her Venice lecture. What might seem like a movement away from politics is, rather, a mobilization of the political to take us beyond. For Butler, the body speaks the political; it performatively lays claim to the livable and at the same time it constitutes something that is in excess of the sayable. If there is indeed queer work that tests the limits of the political by articulating a desire not to be content with the present, it relies strongly on the relationality of bodies, senses, and things.

Exemplifying this kind of queer work in artistic practice and ethnographic writing that also challenges the limits of representation, both Bobby Benedicto and Amy Villarejo take us to particular histories and localities to offer glimpses of cities and bodies simultaneously bound and mobilized by queer desires.

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These spaces and streets are at once concrete and transposable. This also points us towards the importance of object relations explored by Jeffrey J. Cohen in this book and finally to questions of complicity and participation. For queer theory, though, this rhetoric is ethically necessary.

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Just as we need to dissociate the political from politics, economy has to be taken back from capitalism in order to develop an optics that allows us to see a different imaginary. To question the binary gender order and its regime of sexuality means focusing on those subjects and behaviors that are not intelligible within the dominant framework. To reflect on these constitutive constraints is therefore connected to an ethics of resistance against the restrictive nature of these structures.

In that sense, queer is always in some way entangled with questions of ethics. However, the stance taken by scholars of queer studies on this issue varies considerably depending on the way they envisage the mobilizing power of queer. With this argument, Cohen hovers between decentering the human as a universal reference point by introducing inorganic agential structures, while at the same time recentering it by pulling these nonhuman entities into the orbit of the human through the use of anthropomorphic language in the description of their activities—a move that might be inevitable because the only way we can conceptualize the unknown is through our known frameworks of understanding.

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So decentering the human paradoxically implies an enlargement of the category by redefining its boundaries rather than establishing a viable counter-realm that is able to exert an independent epistemological power. The inextricable bond between the known and the unknown, between the subversive and the hegemonic and its ethical implications is responsible for much of the tension between the different factions in queer theory. If queer theory exposes hegemonic exclusionary practices with the aim to change or abolish them, can it do so without inevitably producing further exclusions by simply moving the boundary between the included and the excluded to a different place?

In other words, the vigilance with respect to exclusionary practices demanded by queer theorists equally applies to queer interventions themselves.

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Addressing these practices has become an important component of the self-reflexive mode of queer studies. A major concern in this respect has been the mainstreaming of queer that Lisa Duggan calls homonormativity. In his new book, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy, David Eng shows how this tendency systematically dissociates sexuality from race by foregrounding acceptable queer lives while obscuring the racial taxonomies on which they are predicated.

The recent publication on Gay Shame takes a slightly different angle on the question of exclusion. They probe the zones excluded from this conformist program: disreputable or unsettling aspects of homosexuality, politically or socially embarrassing gays and lesbians, and the anti-social tendencies of queerness. They make a case for an uncensored approach to queer history that sheds light on all features of queer life, palatable or unpalatable.

As a consequence, the radical position he urges us to inhabit has paradoxically again raised the question of a queer ethics or an ethics of queer. This might be one of the reasons for a renewed interest in these early days, but with a focus on alternative, more unruly and recalcitrant sources that link up with the anti-social and with negativity and do not easily feed into established norms and power structures and are therefore credited with opening up different avenues of thinking.

The search for the most radical, most negative, most resistant stance and its equation with the ultimate in queer theory testifies to the desire to reach out to an ever elusive, always already other place that queer has come to signify. This endeavor also threatens to alienate queer from the details of real-life existence, however. Moreover, it has led tenured academics, who, by their very position, have already to a certain degree succumbed to the lures of normativity themselves, to vie for the most avant-garde ideas in queer theory by putting forth highly speculative assumptions about the benefits of abjection.

The essays in this volume pursue a more productive direction. Each of the sections in Queer Futures will be opened by a section introduction that presents the essays and highlights their contribution individually and in relation to each other to debates on queer activisms, the question of what constitutes or goes beyond the political, and how we might approach ethics from a queer point of view. Together, they provide us with multifarious ways to reconsider queer futures. References Bauman, Z. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell. Berlant, L. Starved, in After Sex?

On Writing since Queer Theory, edited by J. Halley and A. Durham: Duke University Press, 79— Bersani, L. Is the rectum a grave?