Heather Love

Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable Discussion

This roundtable was conducted by email from June 2009 to August 2010. We divided participants into three groups, with each group responding in staggered fashion to the prompts. In this way, group 2 was able to see group 1’s responses before they sent in their own. Group 3 was able to see the responses of groups 1 and 2. Through this process, we were able to not only include a remarkably large cluster of participants but also allow for the possibility of dialogue between groups. Group 1 consisted of Roderick Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, and Lisa Rofel. Group 2 included Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred Moten, and Tavia Nyong’o. Group 3 was Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Miranda Joseph, Gayle Salamon, and Dean Spade. — Jordana Rosenberg and Amy Villarejo.

“SPOILED IDENTITY”Stephen Gordon's Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History

Those who are failures from the start, downtrodden, crushed—it is they, the weakest, who must undermine life among men.”1 Nietzsche’s diatribe against the “born failure” in The Genealogy of Morals anticipates a common reaction to the heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. A few months after the novel’s obscenity trial, a verse lampoon titled The Sink of Solitude appeared, mocking the fate of “pathetic post-war lesbians.”2 The following year Janet Flanner, writing more coolly in the New Yorker, quipped that Hall’s “loneliness was greater than had been supposed.”3 From the moment of its publication, readers balked at the novel’s melodramatic account of what Hall called “the tragical problem of sexual inversion.”4 But the readers who have reacted most adversely to the novel’s dark portrait of inverted life are those whose experience Hall claimed to represent. The Well, still the most famous and most widely read lesbian novel, is also the novel most hated by lesbians themselves. Since gay liberation Hall’s novel has been singularly out of step with the discourse of gay pride. One reader, voicing a common reaction, said that she “consider[ed] this book very bad news for lesbians.”5 According to a model of readerly contagion not unlike the poisoning effect of ressentiment that Nietzsche traces in the Genealogy, Hall’s account of Stephen Gordon’s life is a depressing spectacle that must undermine life among lesbians. With its inverted heroine and its tragic view of same-sex relations, The Well has repeatedly come into conflict with contemporary understandings of the mean-

Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive

This essay considers the lesbian as a modern tragic figure through a reading of David Lynchs 2001 film Mulholland Drive. While many have identified Lynchs representation of female same-sex desire in the film as a textbook example of male fantasy, the film offers a subtle treatment of intimate relations between cultural plots of lesbian fantasy and lesbian tragedy. In this sense, Mulholland Drive insists on the importance of clichés and stereotypes in structuring reality at the same time that if offers several images of the reworking of such clichés in dream and fantasy. The paper considers lesbian representation in the film in the context of a longer tradition of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the tragic of failed lesbian should not be dismissed a mere specter of ideology. Rather, engaging with twentieth-century theorists of tragedy, Love argues that this pathetic figure is better understood as actually tragic, marked as she is by the exclusionary regimes of the modern.

‘The Right to Change My Mind’ New Work in Trans Studies

Kate More and Stephen Whittle, eds, Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle. London: Cassell, 1999. 309 pp. ISBN 0–304–33777–3,

History’s Back Rooms: Carlos Motta Interviewed by Heather Love

55.00 (hbk) Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 363 pp. ISBN 0–674–00925–8–3,

What Does Lauren Berlant Teach Us about X

29.95 (hbk) Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 267 pp. ISBN 0–231–10935–0,

Hard Times and Heartaches

20.00 (pbk)

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

In his socially engaged and intimate art, Carlos Motta attempts to document and redress the exclusions of history. Drawing on archival research and engagements with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities from Ukraine to Norway to South Korea to Colombia, he tracks the effects of colonial violence, the suppression of gender and sexual difference, and economic inequality. Working in film, sculpture, photography, and performance, and incorporating oral history and interviews into his practice, Motta engages with ephemeral and partial evidence in order to bring impossible lives into representation. The target of this effort is the contemporary discourse of tolerance, which incorporates and neutralizes gender, sexual, racial, and national difference. Across a remarkably diverse body of work, Motta mines alternative histories in order to disrupt the present and to open new futures. From April 21 to May 21, 2016, PPOW Gallery in New York City featured a solo show by Motta called Deviations. The show included early largeformat photographic selfportraits; a statue called Hermaphrodite (8) based on a nineteenthcentury photograph by Nadar of an intersex person; a set of miniature gold figures based on preconquest phallic artifacts called Towards a Homoerotic Historiography (2014); and the 2015 video Deseos (fig. 1), which he conceived and scripted with the anthropologist Maya Mikdashi. The video, which plays on a suspended largescale screen in a darkened gallery, brings to life an imaginary exchange between two nineteenthcentury figures: Martina, a Colombian woman charged with hermaphroditism and sins against nature, and Nour, a woman living in Beirut who is married to her female lover’s brother. Interweaving national and personal struggles for selfdetermination, Deseos is an example of Motta’s efforts to bring to life the experience of gender and sexual outsiders and to give history a body.

Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn

This essay considers method and style in the work of Lauren Berlant, with particular attention to questions of evidence, scale, and exemplarity. Berlant has explored these issues through her analysis of the genre of the case study, with its competing demands of singularity and representativeness. The essay tracks her concern with “the becoming general of singular things” from her analysis of queer and cultural studies methodology to the obese body as a case. I argue that, rather than resolving the contradictions of the case-study form, Berlant exacerbates them in order to make visible the political impasse of the present.

Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading

ABSTRACT This paper considers recent critical responses to Rad-clyffe Halls 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. While Halls portrayal of mannish invert Stephen Gordon has had a troubled reception in this century, recent work celebrating butch-femme identity and practice has gained the novel wider acceptance among lesbian critics. While these recuperations are significant in working against homophobic readings of The Well, they often overlook the real difficulties Hall described. This paper argues for the historical significance of Halls work as a reflection of the lived experience of lesbians in a homophobic society.