Rodness 10
Imagining A Non-Queer Theory: Non-Philosophy and the Crisis In Queer Theory
Roshaya Rodness
The transformation in our understanding of non-normative gender and sexuality that came to be called “queer” – twenty years ago, at the height of the AIDS pandemic in North America – remains a contested terrain in humanities scholarship, in large part because “queer” describes a fluid and dissenting way of being in the world. Queerness is—or at least it seemed – intrinsically resistant to definition… and happily so. My dissertation explores what sorts of pressures now threaten to stabilize queer life. Lee Edelman argues that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). And yet what began as a robust critique of both identity politics and conventional ways of practicing theory has been compromised, I argue, by the fate of queer theory in the academy, where it has become one discipline among many and where queer politics has primarily become a matter of seeking civil rights. Yet leading queer activist David Halperin claims that “if queer theory is going to have the sort of future worth cherishing, we will have to find ways of renewing its radical potential … reinventing its capacity to startle, to surprise” (343). My dissertation, Imagining A Non-Queer Theory: Non-Philosophy and the Crisis In Queer Theory, responds to that call to make queer politics and queer theory startle and surprise again. At this critical juncture, although the project of securing civil rights remains exceptionally important, it obscures other crucial questions that are pertinent to queer life, including resistance to the very idea that queers should be more normatively “civil” and that queer politics is reducible to rights rather than an affirmation of new forms of social justice, new ways of imagining social organization, and what it means to be with others and recognize otherness. A case in point is the surge in attention afforded to gay marriage. After Walter Benn Michaels, I argue that the gay marriage “debate” is driven by a desire to make queer people more widely intelligible, i.e., to become individuals who are imagined to be like and to want the same things as more normatively construed individuals. But queer life is predicated on the affirmation of differences; my dissertation explores the ways in which that affirmation has been qualified by an insistence on familiarizing similarities. The future of queer theory, I suggest, must also be a return to the radical originating principles that renew its focus on difference and unintelligibility, and its commitment to social and institutional critique that throws into question the very idea that politics is only the politics of the autonomous liberal subject. My dissertation suggests that while queer theory has expanded into productive new territory (such as “trans studies”) since the 1990s, the methodology that we have put to use to speak about the field and about queerness has remained focused on autonomous subjectivity, the very seat of identity politics. In other words, the object of queer theory has continued to be an identifiable subject in which “gender” and “sexuality” become the terms that compel queer life to account for itself, i.e. as terms that make the subject legible to others. I argue that if queer theory’s political efficacy depends on its paradoxical and productive resistance to definition, we need to incorporate a new methodology that challenges conventional ways of understanding what it means to be an embodied and desirous individual and what it means to forge resistant communities in which the legibly gendered and sexualized individual is not necessarily the root of the social body. My thesis does not posit a queer subject “beyond” gender and sexuality, but rather a way of being in the world in which these terms possess much less definitional power than they have hitherto often been granted.
To meet the challenges that queer theory poses to definition, identity, and tradition, my thesis embraces what is called “non-philosophy.” Developed by the French philosopher, François Laruelle, non-philosophy is not a negative philosophy, but the suspension of a wide-spread mode of conceptualizing work in critical theory that posits a set of determining forces which constitute individuals as such, i.e. thinking which enables our understanding of an identifiable subject made legible through the forces of gender and sexuality. As a method founded on the questioning and ultimate suspension of conventional practices in philosophy, non-philosophy offers queer theory an avenue for recuperating its radical principles in the spirit of critical intervention and the questioning of intellectual tradition.
Chapter One situates my thesis within the philosophical discourse of non-philosophy. Non-philosophy posits a radical immanence of life; that is, a world in which life is not subjected to determining forces and exists in absolute presence. To sustain this radical immanence, non-philosophy unseats the authority of philosophy itself. It claims that philosophies, like the things they study, are empirical data rather than privileged explanatory paradigms separate from their objects of study. As a result, non-philosophy works to unseat the privilege of theories that claim to hold authority over the things they study. In other words, a philosophy of ethics would exist alongside ethics, not over or above ethics. This has tremendous potential for queer political life, where liberal “progressive” discourses of queer life implicitly mark their authority to define it. This brings us to queer theory, which in its most advanced forms still claims authority over its subjects, and where the claim that it cannot define or identify them works to hide its self-authorization to define. The future of queer theory, in other words, lies in its capacity to unseat its own authority. Queer theory will not become irrelevant by any means; rather, it will recognize that it, too, holds no privileged position over queerness and that queerness is not answerable to it, just like it is not answerable to the scientific theories that attempt to diagnose sexual orientation or gender identity. To date, and mostly in Europe, non-philosophy has made significant inroads in scholarship about nature, science, and art; my project, however, brings Laruelle’s insights to bear on a new subject, namely queer life. I argue that because subjects are imagined by the discourses that study them, we need to suspend the authoritative position of queer theory itself in order to realize the challenge it poses to subjectivity. The inherently oppositional language of a “non” philosophy helps us consider how queer life is at odds with subjectivity, a way of living that is very difficult to discuss using methodologies that have a stake in queer theory.
Chapter Two will put my non-queer theory into action by looking at the transformations in the meaning of queer life as it has changed through the AIDS pandemic. Because irrational fears about HIV/AIDS continue to be expressed in homophobic terms in the West, AIDS cultural theorists continue to challenge discourses that link the virus with an essential queer identity (i.e, the conception of the virus as a “gay disease”) while recognizing its undeniable effect on queer communities. AIDS activist Paula Treichler writes that the virus’s association with gay male sex in the early 1980s led to the view that a risk factor for acquiring HIV was “being a particular kind of person rather than doing particular things” (20). Yet my work will argue that even the most advanced theorists continue to posit a politics centred on the autonomous liberal subject, or the unassailable locus of rationality and rights. While queer critiques of AIDS discourses have rightly focused on disassociating the pandemic from subjects identified through gender and sexuality, a non-philosophical queer critique (or non-queer theory) imagines a politics and ethics of AIDS that does not re-inscribe knowable subjects, in this case the subjects of illness.In other words, the queerness of the AIDS pandemic is its radical indifference to the very idea of a recognizable or legible subject, and that includes the subject of gender and sexuality.
Chapter Three shifts its focus to a more immediate instance of queer identity politics by looking at queer resistance to gay marriage. I argue that those who are critical of the movement are not opposed to more rights for queer people but are committed to a mode of social justice that requires not only more legislation but also a fundamental reconceptualization of the political and who consider the discourse of rights and identity to be a foundational mode of political organization. In 2010, for instance, when District Judge Vaughn Walker presided over Perry v. Brown to reverse California’s voter-approved retraction of the legalization of gay marriage (Proposition 8), he heard expert testimony on the nature of sexual orientation to support the reinstitution of gay marriage. The experts claimed that sexual orientation is immutable, or is not subject to change. This assertion, I argue, excludes many important ways of being and coming to be queer and works to determine marriage and essentialism (the idea that our identities are inborn and fixed) as the terms through which we negotiate queer politics. Non-philosophy gives us a vocabulary to unseat the assumptions of such liberal “progressive” discourses and recognize that we can never know the “subjects” of politics.
I am currently in my second year of the PhD program in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. My thesis supervisor, David L. Clark, is a well-known critical theorist with an extensive background in queer theory. His engagement with continental philosophy and his work on the cultural history of AIDS makes him the ideal supervisor for this project.
Bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. “Happiness and Queer Politics.” World Picture 3 (Summer 2009): n. pag. Web. October 2012.
-- Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke U P, 2006. Print.
Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. “What does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110.3 (1995): 343-349. Jstor. Web. October 2012.
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1996. Print.
Brassier, Ray. “Axiomatic Heresy: the non-philosophy of François Laruelle.” Radical Philosophy 121 (2003): 24-35. Print.
-- “Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter.” Diss. University of Warwick, 2001. Print.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
-- “Merely Cultural.” Social Text 52/53 (1997): 265-77. Web. October 2012
-- Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Calarco, Matthew. “Facing the Other Animal Levinas.” Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia U P, 2008. 55-78. Print.
Calarco, Matthew and Steven DeCaroli, Eds. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2007. Print.
Colebrook, Claire. “Queer Aesthetics.” Queer Times, Queer Becomings. McCallum, E.L. and Mikko Tehkanen, Eds. Albany: State U of New York P, 2011. 25-46. Print.
-- “Queer Vitalism.” New Formations 68.16 (Spring 2010): 77-92. ingentaconnect. 2012. Web. October 2012.
Conrad, Ryan, ed. Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage. AE Press, 2010. Print.
Coward, Harold and Toby Forshay, Eds. Derrida and Negative Theology. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992. Print
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law.” Trans. Mary Quaintance. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, Eds. New York: Routledge, 1992. 3-67. Print.
Duggan, Lisa. “Beyond Marriage: Democracy, Equality, and Kinship for a New Century.” Scholar & Feminist Online 10.1-10.2 (Fall 2011/Spring 2012). Web. October 2012.
-- “Making It Perfectly Queer.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. Eds. Lisa Duggan and Nan D Hunter. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 155-172. Print.
Düttmann, Alexander Garcia. At Odds with AIDS. Trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1996. Print.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke U P, 2004. Print.
Epstein, Steven. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1996. Print.
Francois, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2008. Print.
Giroux, Henry A. The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2004. Print.
Gould, Deborah B. Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS. London and Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.
Halley, Janet and Andrew Parker, eds. After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory. Durham: Duke U P, 2011. Print.
Halperin, David. “The Normalization of Queer Theory.” Journal of Homosexuality 45.2/3/4 (2003): 339- 343. Web. October 2012.
Haver, William. The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1996. Print.
Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York U P, 1997. Print.
Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards A Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso, 2001. Print.
Laruelle, François. "What can non-philosophy do?" Trans. Ray Brassier. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8.2 (August 2003): 169-189. Web. October 2012.
-- "A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy." Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale. February 2012. Web. October 2012.
-- Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy. New York and London: Continuum, 2010. Print.
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Print.
Moon, Michael, et al. “Queers in (Single Family) Space.” Assemblage 24 (August 1994): 30-37. Jstor. Web. October 2012.
Morton, Donald. “Changing the Terms: (Virtual) Desire and (Actual) Reality.” The Material Queer: A Lesbigay Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Donald Morton. Boulder: Westview P, 1996. 1-35. Print.
Mullarkey, John and Paul Smith, eds. Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2012. Print.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York and London: New York U P, 2009. Print.
Prozorov, Sergei. Foucault, Freedom, and Sovereignty. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. Print.
Rajan, Tilottama. “In the Wake of Cultural Studies: Globalization, Theory, and the University.” Diacritics 31. 3 (Autumn, 2001): 67-88. Jstor. Web. October 2012