Jordana Rosenberg

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.

Butler's "Lesbian Phallus"; or, What Can Deconstruction Feel?

The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” begins by waggishly disclaiming its own suggestiveness. We must not, Judith Butler tells us, expect the essay to live up to the temptations of its name; “after such a promising title,” she says, “I knew I could not possibly give a satisfying paper.”1 Though the lesbian phallus may be winking at us, Butler insists that we not expect anything bawdy. Indeed, dwelling on its sexiness only to dispute it, she regards the lesbian phallus as, in at least one respect, no different from any other phallus: “always dissatisfying” (57). Yet from such disappointment springs bounty, as Butler asserts that she will “work” the “failure” of the title (57). As promised, then, the lesbian phallus’s limpness transforms quickly from shtick to fundamental conceit, for a lesbian phallus is not just a double but a triple entendre, whose first sense of dissatisfy, “Can this paper fulfill its stated goals?” gives way to a second, “What can you do with your lesbian phallus?” before arriving finally at a third, “What is our most recurring misconception about what language can do?” For Butler, it is the third level of entendre that we are meant to get to: a lesbian phallus more “interesting than satisfying” (57). So the second, smutty reading sets up a further twist: rather than tender lascivious “satisfaction,” the provocative allusion represents the essay troping its own investment in différance. The dissatisfaction that conjures images of sexual failure connotes as well the disjunction between what a title says and what a paper does, or, if we stretch this figure—as “The Lesbian Phallus” does—between a word and what it signifies. Smut, in other words, has a purpose. For the more we want to see, the more the lesbian phallus becomes a joke at the expense of the visual field altogether—a

Queerness, Norms, Utopia

Extending the recent rapprochement among queer studies, Marxist theory, and political economy, this special issue of GLQ responds to the current crisis of capitalism. Contributors consider how methodologies of queer studies are specially poised to reveal the global, historical, and social dimensions of capitalist economic relations. Using queer hermeneutical tools in combination with globalization studies, secularization studies, and queer of color critique, contributors examine global economic history and the ideological collusion of capitalist production and biological reproduction. The Introduction explores the ways in which capitalism is only made possible by systems of racial, sexual, and national exploitation; further, we seek to interrupt the commonsensical presumption that recuperation from periods of crisis depends on the increasingly violent reassertion of these forms of exploitation. Turning our attention to the set of crises defining the period we understand as neoliberal capitalism—the long wave of recessions and dispossessions stretching from the 1970s to the present—we explore the shared queer and Marxist commitment to concepts of utopia and theories of totality as frameworks for strenuously negating and moving beyond current conditions. By providing an expansive theoretical perspective on current and historical economic patterns, we hope to illuminate and advance our understanding of the complex structures of global capitalism.

Introduction: The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century

This Introduction to our special journal issue is organized around the concept and lived history of dispossession. Its immediate occasion is provoked as much by our current, post-2008 economic crisis as by the legacy of domestic and imperial enclosures in the British Empire of the long eighteenth century. We trace recent debates on dispossession and settler colonialism to Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation and debt, alongside his eighteenth-century sources, with particular attention to the prominent role assigned to Asian states for Enlightenment theorists of absolutism and twenty-first century theorists of capitalism alike.To the extent that recent debates in political economy have centered on China and India as potential rival hegemons to U.S. power, we note that the specter of the “Asiatic” has shaped and continues to shape and disrupt Western chronologies of capitalist development. Moreover, the history of capitalist production—with its attendant crises and violent consolidations of power and resources—must be studied through the development of slavery and race. We argue that literary and materialist approaches to these interconnected phenomena can illuminate the ways in which capitalism’s baleful and bloodthirsty proscriptions have been discursively sedimented; so, too, have otherwise-occluded histories of resistance become aesthetically encoded. The perspicacity and the Eurocentrism of the longue durée approach toward the history of world economic change continue to confront historians and theorists alike, and it is this conversation between history and theory—across time and space—that we foreground here.