Michael Moon

After Sex?: On Writing since Queer Theory

Since queer theory originated in the early 1990s, its insights and modes of analysis have been taken up by scholars across the humanities and social sciences. In After Sex? prominent contributors to the development of queer studies offer personal reflections on the field’s history, accomplishments, potential, and limitations. They consider the purpose of queer theory and the extent to which it is or is not defined by its engagement with sex and sexuality. For many of the contributors, a broad notion of sexuality is essential to queer thought. At the same time, some of them caution against creating an all-embracing idea of queerness, because it empties the term “queer” of meaning and assumes the universality of ideas developed in the North American academy. Some essays recall the political urgency of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when gay and lesbian activist and queer theory projects converged in response to the AIDS crisis. Other pieces exemplify more recent trends in queer critique, including the turn to affect and the debates surrounding the “antisocial thesis,” which associates queerness with the repudiation of heteronormative forms of belonging. Contributors discuss queer theory’s engagement with questions of transnationality and globalization, temporality and historical periodization. Meditating on the past and present of queer studies, After Sex? illuminates its future. Contributors . Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Michael Cobb, Ann Cvetkovich, Lee Edelman, Richard Thompson Ford, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Neville Hoad, Joseph Litvak, Heather Love, Michael Lucey, Michael Moon, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jeff Nunokawa, Andrew Parker, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Richard Rambuss, Erica Rand, Bethany Schneider, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kate Thomas

Turning from the National to the Multilingual

Americanist Ed White points to the title under which Cathy Davidson and I republished a special issue of American Literature—Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill—as a ‘‘simple but telling example’’ of the way nation had, by the early 1990s, joined ‘‘an analytical ‘Holy Trinity’ of Race, Class, and Gender’’—and, indeed, ‘‘threatened to displace’’ the category of class. White goes on to relate this ‘‘turn to the nation’’ to such global events as the end of the Cold War and the rise of Eastern European nationalisms and, more specifically, to trace ‘‘its literary and cultural branch’’ to the timely reissue in 1991 of Benedict Anderson’smassively influential 1983 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (‘‘EAN,’’ 49). Although it seems true enough that the subtitle of Subjects and Citizens was indicative of a ‘‘turn to the nation’’ in literary and cultural studies of the time, I would supplement White’s account slightly by mentioning two other titles that had appeared a year or two before and had led the turn: the English Institute’s Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text edited by Hortense J. Spillers (1991) and Nationalisms and Sexualities edited by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger (1992). In both instances, new work in sexuality studies was a powerfully reorienting addition to the mix of analytical concerns and categories (‘‘Queer Theory’’ had just emerged in 1990–91, in a special issue of the feminist journal differences edited by Teresa de Lauretis). Benedict Anderson had been a key participant in the conference on which Nationalisms and Sexualities had been based, as had historian