Announcements

1. Announcements • Presentation Thurs: Keith & Chesley • Final Paper Prompts posted tonight – questions Thurs • Papers back Tues 3/5

2. What’s queer about queer studies? Queerness as Identity & Analytic

3. What does “queer” mean? • Grab a partner. • Using today’s readings, try to define what the term “queer” means.

4. Queer as identity category • “In both popular and academic usage in the United States, ‘queer’ is sometimes used interchangeably with the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ or occasionally ‘transgender’ and ‘bisexual.’ In this sense, it is understood as an umbrella term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are ‘not straight’” (Sommerville, 187)

5. Queer as critique • “as a term that calls into question the stability of any categories of identity based on sexual orientation… To ‘queer’ becomes a way to denaturalize categories such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ (not to mention ‘straight’ and ‘heterosexual’) revealing them as socially and historically constructed identities that have often worked to police the line between ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’” (Sommerville, 187) • What does it mean to denaturalize sexuality? • Sommerville, 189 – Foucault’s insistence

6. Queer as intersectional analytic • “the primary axis of queer studies shifted toward the distinction between normative and non-normative sexualities as they have been produced in a range of historical and cultural contexts” (Sommerville, 189) • heteronormativityvs heterosexuality • sexuality & gender  construction of masculine and feminine relies on “heterosexual matrix” • sexual subject formation vs racial formation • Heteronormativity as racialized concept  example of Filipino hypersexuality • “’queer theory as a way of reconceiving not just the sexual, but the social in general’” (Sommerville, 190)

7. Against normative identities • “Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality” (Eng et al, 1) • What does it mean to say that queer is “a political metaphor without a fixed referent”? (Eng et al, 1)

8. Queer epistemology • Epistemology = the theory of knowledge – how the world is known, what can be known about the world, etc • What does it mean to have a “subjectless” critique of queer studies? (Eng et al, 3) • A apriori identity category vs unfixed political metaphor  there is no “proper subject of or object for the field by insisting that queer has no political referent” which can lead to “a continuous deconstruction of the tenets of positivism at the heart of identity politics” • How does one resist the regimes of normal? (Eng et al 3) • “Attention to those hegemonic social structures by which certain subjects are rendered ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ through the production of ‘perverse’ and ‘pathological’ others, Warner insists, rejects a ‘minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of normal’”

9. Queer liberalism • “master’s tools cannot dismantle master’s house” • Liberalism: • Political philosophy emerging during Age of Enlightenment in response to absolute monarchs • Emphasis on liberty, equality, participatory government, citizenship & rights, and private property • Queer liberalism & homononormativity • Attempt to “construct lesbian and gay people as a viable ‘minority’ group and to appeal to liberal rights of privacy and formal equality” (Sommerville, 189) • Gay marriage movement vs denaturalization of marriage • Creation of privileged queer subjects – re-inscription of gender norms and racial marganinalization

10. Queer diaspora • Diaspora – dispersal or scattering of people away from their point of origin or homeland/nation • Queer diaspora – denaturalization of “home” and “nation” • “’…reorganizing national and transnational communities based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments”’ (Eng et al 7) • Ex. Bulosan’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” • Recognition that belonging to the modern-nation state is as much a question of sexuality and sexual development as it is about citizenship, sovereignty, and migration (Eng et al 8)

11. Queer humility • To be incredibly attentive to positionality • To purposely de-center self • Ex. Mohanty’s politics of experience vs politics of location • “An ethical attachment to others insists that we cannot be the center of the world or act unilaterally on its behalf. It demands a world in which we must sometimes relinquish not only our epistemological but also our political certitude” (Eng et al 15)