Autumn Reading Group
Queer + Public + Performance's Reading Group is meeting on Monday, November 2, 6 PM, in COM 226, Seattle-UW campus. The readings selected for the Autumn Reading group think about, rearticulate, and open the thematic "queer." The hope of the reading group is to identify and discuss lines of inquiry and investigation beyond the usual queer theory canon -- queer on the edges as it were. We open with several keywords from the Keywords for American Cultural Studies collection and include several short readings from After Sex, the Summer 2007 special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly.
Please print out the readings and bring them with you to the Reading Group:
Keyword: Queer
Keyword: Public
Keyword: Performance
Keyword: Sex
Keyword: Gender
After Sex: Intro
After Sex: Still After
After Sex: Cvetkovich's "Public Feelings"
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Eight people + one dog (Burrito) in attendance. Here are some tidbits cribbed during the conversation:
ReplyDelete--what is the status of Queer Theory? Theory expiration date versus culture/lived lives/experiences haven't quite finished with it. Are these QT foundational/archival queer authors really distancing themselves from their previous work behind? Perhaps a reorientation?
--perhaps it's about thinking about the centrality/necessity of "sex" or "sexuality" to queer, queerness, queer theory?
--"The problem is less that queer theory makes 'everything about sex' than that it lodges the 'nonsexual' firmly within the 'sexual'" (Halley & Parker 425)
--Has queer been co-opted by 'non' queer things?
--Might we ask ourselves how we use/live/deploy 'queer' in our own personal, political, and intellectual milieus?
--the institutionalization of queer theory might be part of these 'death knells' of certain radical movements (cf. feminism? civil rights movement? Marxism?)
--might we think about how we have or more importantly haven't embodied the knowledge/the theory of Queer Theory; is there enough practice, praxis?
--because queer theory surfaced as a response to/critique of identity politics (gay and lesbian movement), might that negative critique make it difficult to provide a reparative critique or to put these theories into praxis?
--if queer theory is totally unsettling/totally deconstructive/totally negative, then where do we situate ourselves, where do we live, can we enjoy it? love it? (e.g. experimental avante garde jazz might be interesting or theoretical or challenging, but it is fun to listen to?)
--queer guilt around supporting gay marriage?
--what is a queer aesthetic?
--queer publics: situating an audience?
--how must queer constitute some sort of object to be oppositional to
--how do we suss out the difference between queer aesthetic, queer politics, queer theory, queer cultural productions? Are there differences? Do we need to hold them apart (even temporarily)?
--what if the opposite of queer isn't normativity?
--how do words like queer and normativity or heteronormativity act as short hand, short circuits that do no allow us to see the fractures, slippages, tensions within those terms?
--should we think about queer theories, the plural is important, rather than the standard model of queer theory as a reaction to Western rationale thought/culture
--how might the pluralism (cf. feminisms) be problematic? might the pluralism be politically undermining?
--might this be where queer theory is going in thinking about things like temporality, coalitional politics, alliances, commensurabilities and incommensurabilities?