I’ve been pondering philosophical questions and trying to understand my queer sexuality since childhood. While checking out The Portable Nietzsche in my high school library, the librarian warned me the philosopher was “a bad man.” Then I had to read the book, which not only taught me to become critical of all forms of authority, but also, perhaps paradoxically, empowered me to embrace my queerness. As a college and graduate student, I studied many of the American academic movements based in Continental philosophy grouped under the rubric, “theory.” When queer theory emerged in the early 1990s’, I found a place for myself. I'm convinced that we should never stop putting our identities under critique.
I wrote
The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality
A foundational text of queer theory and queer literary reading practices, Epistemology of the Closet is absolutely irreplaceable.
Originally also an intervention in the AIDS crisis and in late-twentieth-century homophobia, the updated version places the original argument in historical context. The book elaborates on an influential practice later termed “closet reading,” wherein the reader analyzes homoerotic meaning that for various reasons, including censorship, legal repercussions, and social norms, the author couldn’t or wouldn’t state directly.
Sedgwick offers sharp and illuminating interpretations of such writers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. The sweep of the book extends from law, public policy, and Continental philosophy to literary study.
Since the late 1980s, queer studies and theory have become vital to the intellectual and political life of the United States. This has been due, in no small degree, to the influence of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's critically acclaimed "Epistemology of the Closet". Working from classic texts of European and American writers - including Melville, James, Nietzsche, Proust, and Wilde -Sedgwick analyzes a turn-of-the-century historical moment in which sexual orientation became as important a demarcation of personhood as gender had been for centuries. In her preface to this updated edition Sedgwick places the book both personally and historically, looking specifically at…
Beyond Sexuality is the most consequential psychoanalytic intervention in queer theory.
Much of queer theory has used Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to reject or downplay psychoanalysis. Dean argues that psychoanalysis, particularly in the writings and seminars of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, offers a far more useful theoretical model.
Such theorists as Judith Butler misconstrue sexual desire by focusing on identity, rather than language and its effects. Desire, according to psychoanalysis, does not arise from our identifications—not even our gender identifications—but from the failures of identity. Desire is not constructed in language but manifests precisely where language breaks down.
Beyond Sexuality also offers a psychoanalytic reading of HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis.
Combining psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this work of queer theory makes the case for vewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that - rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst - brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire. Dean shows that Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this…
Profit and Pleasure is the most provocative Marxist intervention in queer theory.
Hennessy charges that queer theory’s focus on representation, identity, and subjectivity works to render the structures of capitalism invisible. Postindustrial capitalism produces “gender-flexible” and sexually diverse subjects to meet the demands of today’s globalized commodity system.
Queer theory, instead of addressing this development, has aided in our commodification by repressing the connections between the multiplication of identities and economic exploitation, connections that capitalism works to conceal. Queer theory needs to extend beyond the cultural purview of identity politics to address contemporary capitalism directly.
Drawing on an international range of examples, from Che Guevarra to "The Crying Game," Profit and Pleasure leads the discussion of sexuality to a consideration of material reality and the substance of men and women's everyday lives.
Aberrations in Black is not the only important early queer of color intervention in queer theory, but I find it the most rewarding.
Showing how signal works in the African-American literary tradition pose important challenges to social norms and to the sociological discourse of their times, Ferguson advances an intersectional critique that forefronts race and also attends to gender, sexuality, and class.
The book’s brilliant close readings, such as the reading Toni Morrison’s Sula in the context of The Moynihan Report particularly stand out. The book is a corrective to the apparent colorblindness of much of early queer theory.
A hard-hitting look at the regulation of sexual difference and its role in circumscribing African American culture
The sociology of race relations in America typically describes an intersection of poverty, race, and economic discrimination. But what is missing from the picture-sexual difference-can be as instructive as what is present. In this ambitious work, Roderick A. Ferguson reveals how the discourses of sexuality are used to articulate theories of racial difference in the field of sociology. He shows how canonical sociology-Gunnar Myrdal, Ernest Burgess, Robert Park, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and William Julius Wilson-has measured African Americans's unsuitability for a liberal capitalist…
This is a multicultural epic fantasy with a diverse cast of characters. Sickly fifteen-year-old Prince Psal, the son of warrior-king Nahas, should have been named Crown Prince of all Wheel Clan lands. But his clan disdains the disabled.
When the mysterious self-moving towers that keep humans safe from the Creator's…
Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, originally published in Spanish in 2008 and republished in English translation in 2013, is lusty, hyperbolic, and explosive.
It’s part postqueer, trans-feminist manifesto, part record of a cis-female’s illicit experimentation with testosterone, and part explicit fucking. A much more enjoyable book than Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and it has the advantage of updating Butler’s Foucault-based theory with the twenty-first-century concerns.
Preciado argues that today’s “pharmacopornographic” regime utilizes drugs and erotic imagery—hormone shots and money shots—to control our subjectivity and gender, instating a system of knowledge and power in which the body “no longer inhabits disciplinary spaces but is inhabited by them.”
This visionary book on gender and sexuality weaves together high theory and intimate memoir, with "spectacular" results—"and the gendered body will never be the same again" (Jack Halberstam).
What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny.
In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the…
The Other Orpheus integrates questions of poetry with queer political inquiry, elaborating the significance of literary experiment in the work of Arthur Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. At issue is the extent to which homoeroticism influences formal innovation, as well as how emergent commodity culture informs modernist poetic practice. Much as homosexuality has challenged the norms of Western sexuality and human relations, so the poetry under consideration rewrites the dominant mode of representation in Western poetry, which centers on sacrificial love, and depends on nostalgia and belatedness to articulate the profundities of interpersonal feeling. Long overlooked, The Other Orpheus argues for a paradigm shift in queer theory, on the conviction that close attention to the aesthetic can reward serious political critique.
This delightful fable about the Golden Age of Broadway unfolds the warm story of Artie, a young rehearsal pianist, Joe, a visionary director, and Carrie, his crackerjack Girl Friday, as they shepherd a production of a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream towards opening night.
The Birthright of Sons is a collection of stories centered around the experiences of marginalized people, namely Black and LGBTQ+ men. Although the stories borrow elements from various genres (horror, suspense, romance, magical realism, etc.), they are linked by an exploration of identity and the ways personhood is shaped through…
