Why Can’t Homosexuals be Extraordinary? Queer Thinking After Leo Bersani

Robyn Wiegman (bio)

Abstract

Is “queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?” Leo Bersani laments in Homos, his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory’s now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani’s critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever “a queer thinker,” not a “queer theorist.” Reading with Tuhkanen’s distinction, this essay explores Bersani’s investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship.

Who among us doesn’t know that Leo Bersani was a master of the opening line, a provocateur when it came to puncturing whatever had settled too comfortably in arguments about sex, culture, or art? His now famous 1987 salvo from “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is easiest to remember, in part because it eviscerated the prospect of sex as a domain of intimate connection and redemption: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it” (197). Other rhetorical initiations are equally arresting. Take the first words of “The Gay Outlaw”—”Betrayal is an ethical necessity”—initially published (people often forget) in a 1994 special issue of Diacritics edited by Judith Butler and Biddy Martin (5).¹ Or the revision that essay would undergo before appearing as the final chapter of Homos (1995), the book that would solidify Bersani’s status as the godfather of the antisocial thesis: “Should a homosexual be a good citizen?” (113).² In the first case, Bersani is taking on the deeply homophobic culture of sex that enveloped the first deadly decade of HIV-AIDS and its genocidal equation of disease with homosexuality while arguing for sex as the ecstatic scene of the self’s psychic decomposition.³ In the second, he is leading his reader into a meditation on Jean Genet’s vexed reputation as an outlaw and toward the ethical necessity, for critical practice as much as social life, of “breaking with all familiar connections,” as he would retrospectively put it in a now famous interview with Mikko Tuhkanen in 2014 (“Rigorously” 280). In the third, Bersani establishes what will be his lifelong rejection of gay liberation’s populist equation of freedom with citizenship and the “responsibilities” it demands in intimacy (marriage and monogamy), money (property and taxes), and armed national service (military).

On the face of it, these critical itineraries are a near perfect match for the antinormative instincts that nurtured the emergence of queer theory as a named field for academic activism.⁴ And yet, by the time he wrote the introduction to Homos, Bersani felt the need to issue a warning about queer theory’s self-declared triumph over what it perceived—and perceives still—as the narrow and exclusive identitarian politics that attends homosexuality. To be sure, both Diacritics and the London Review of Books published reviews of Homos in 1996 that sketched, with differing mixtures of affirmation and disagreement, the distance Bersani put between himself and the work being promoted as queer theory in the early 1990s, which tended to emphasize performativity and with it resignification as the holy grail for wrestling sexuality and desire from the psychic and social strongholds of compulsory heterosexuality and its heteronormative supports.⁵ Bersani’s challenge to the emerging consensus begins, unsurprisingly, in the introduction’s opening line. “No one,” he writes, “wants to be called a homosexual”—not “straights,” not “closeted gay men and lesbians who fear, rightly or wrongly, personal and professional catastrophe,” not even “self-identified homosexual activists and theorists” (Homos 1). Bersani generates a few names as evidence—Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, and Michael Warner—in order to specify Homos‘s most polemical point: that queer theory’s embrace of a deconstructive, anti-essentialist commitment to social construction erased gayness in favor of a de-sexualized political affiliation. Is “queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?” he asks in a rhetorical flourish that marks the book’s intervention into queer theory’s formidable mode of critique (2). In rejecting queer‘s emergent utopic ascription as a counter to normalization, Bersani argued in favor of an “anticommunal mode of connectedness” that was both intrinsic to gay desire and a potent force for enhancing, in his words, “‘the homo’ in all of us” (10).⁶

For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani’s critique and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: we may be able to call Bersani “a queer thinker,” Tuhkanen says, but he “may not be a queer theorist” (8). Nevertheless, plenty of us, myself included, have given Bersani pride of place in narratives about queer theory’s origin, with his 1987 provocation “Is the Rectum a Grave?” serving as the inaugural formulation of what is now one of queer theory’s most cited and always contentious canonical traditions: the antisocial thesis. Why did we do this? Or more to the point what does it mean that Bersani’s critique of queer theory was never sufficiently resistant to his incorporation into the post-identitarian politics at stake in queer theory’s ongoing discourse about itself? These questions open a conundrum about the sociality of antisocial theorizing: for if the repudiation of sociality is to be so highly prized, why have critics so seldom attended to Bersani’s hesitation to be cast as an early progenitor, if not founding member, of queer theory’s theoretical intervention?⁷ Tuhkanen broached the matter with Bersani directly. “Are you a queer theorist?” Tuhkanen asked. “Not that I know of,” Bersani dryly responded (“Rigorously” 279).

To be sure, one can be many things without knowing or avowing it, just as a field can be built without its practitioners enthusiastically participating in the practices of competition, name-claiming, and academic kinship that accompanies its emergence. Still, what matters for my purposes arises not from the conundrum of Bersani’s “proper” place in the genealogies of queer theory or from the contradictions that reside in the unassimilable gap between theory-asmanifesto and the institutionalizing forces that structure queer academic worlds.⁸ Rather, I’m interested in tracing the resonances between Tuhkanen’s distinction between queer theory and queer thinking and critical conversations today, especially given the increasingly fallen state of theory—queer or not—in the reputational itineraries of contemporary academic and popular thought. After all, to say that Homos expressed Bersani’s disappointment with the way queer theory would emerge in academic writing to manage the impasse between politics and sexuality doesn’t say nearly enough about the generative force of the book’s early resistance to the queer theoretical enterprise or—and this is my central concern—how such resistance might be described as a definitive characteristic of queer academic work ever since. To be Bersanian about it, you could say that in today’s queer critical universe no one really wants to be a queer theorist but plenty scholars are keenly invested in the prospect of claiming allegiance to queer thinking.

In what follows, I use the distinction Tuhkanen offers between queer thinking and queer theory to generate a through line that demonstrates how, contrary to all appearances, Homos‘s rejection of queer theory in the name of homosexuality as an antisocial force is in sync with contemporary critical practices that have come to abandon the idea that homosexuality is capable of a political perversity worth fighting for. This through line lies elsewhere than in the realm of argument, as the queer theoretic is too deeply riven by political and analytic contentions arising not only from broader turns in the critical humanities and the geopolitics that shape them but also from the multiple and divergent allegiances that bind scholars to the political horizons, archival practices, and analytic critical traditions of their inter/disciplines.⁹ I locate this elsewhere in what I am calling “utopic ambivalence,” which is not an agenda or analytic but the affective disposition that animates queer thinking and its characteristic investment in countering consolidations and incorporations of various kinds, including those very gestures and institutional formations that designate queer theory as a distinct critical tradition, armed with founders, founding texts, prestige journals, signature presses, and unevenly distributed academic clout. Conceptually, utopic ambivalence draws on familiar psychoanalytic ground to designate the tension, impasse, or powerful stasis in which contradictory ideas or affects are held or experienced at the same time—in vernacular terms “mixed feelings”—and raises questions about the anxiety and discontent that arises when there is little expectation or hope for any kind of resolution, dialectical or otherwise. For queer thinking, utopic ambivalence registers its political desire for the not-yet and the yet-to-come while foregrounding its conviction that every queer agenda, destination, or sought after transformation is open to capture—and always at risk of being premature.

You can see the utopic ambivalence of queer thinking in the ongoing revisions of queer theory’s analytic and political origins, which promise to generate a past capable of inaugurating a better future even as the repetition of revision confirms the suspicion that such repair will be inadequate and incomplete, if not over time a regrettable error. You can see it in critiques of the homonationalism of activist agendas, which seek to counter popular political imaginaries that funnel queer world-building aspirations into the smaller enclaves of gay marriage, military service, and other inclusivist gestures but hesitate when it comes to defining an alternate vision of what might replace the hollowed-out institutions of an increasingly diminished popular sovereignty. And you can see it in various modes of analysis that position themselves outside or against the disciplinary protocols of the university (as in calls for feral methodology or undisciplined knowledge or queer posthumanist pedagogies), even as these rhetorical moves are forged from powerful commitments to transform the very conditions and outcomes of institutions and their disciplinary-bound worlds.¹⁰ Across these interventions, utopic ambivalence drives the insurgent potential of queer thinking to unravel and resist the practices and norms that corrupt the queer theoretic’s creative agency, propelling the field away from complicities while promising to transcend the epistemic constraints of our own historically embedded knowing. In this dynamic of desire and risk (should we call it affirmation and negation?), queer thinking offers both the promise and pleasure of wishing for while anticipating losses to come. In this, it serves as a vital source of renewal for engaging and extending queer theory’s axiomatic commitment to antinormativity.¹¹

To make my case, I want to turn first to Bersani’s Homos to explore its investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice and to highlight some of its most belligerent points about the conundrum that anti-identitarianism presents. On what grounds did Homos reject queer theory’s seeming interest, as Bersani understood it, in making queer a resonant referent for politics rather than for sexuality and the erotic? And how did this rejection produce a complicated—if not wholly contradictory—political commitment to antisociality that has become, in the interim, far more aligned within the queer theoretic with politics than with the sexual? Such a discussion acts as prelude to considering the rhetorical practices of contemporary queer commentary where queer thinking flourishes as the counter-determination and rhetorical salve for challenges not only to sexuality as the field’s much critiqued object of study but also to the wrenching conditions of the political present and the difficulties raised by attending to it.

By way of conclusion, I meditate on my contribution’s title, “Why Can’t Homosexuals Be Extraordinary?” by returning to another early critique of the queer theoretic penned by Biddy Martin, whose 1994 “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary” challenges what she calls the “radical anti-normativity” of much early queer theory by elaborating her concern for the gender politics of its celebrated turn away from identity (123). While Bersani is not formally cited, Martin refers in the essay’s final passages to “the romantic celebration of a queerness or homo-ness as the very demise of current forms of societalization,” thereby merging what I take Homos to differentiate in order to mount her critique of the plot lines of the antisocial thesis as nothing more than a utopic dead end (123). Still, Martin’s call for homosexuality to be de-exceptionalized has become an ordinary queer theoretical gesture, even as her critique courses along different critical lines and carries no inkling (how could it?) of how quickly and often queer thinkers would come to find the extraordinary investment in queer both critically and politically suspect, as the ongoing elaboration of taxonomies of queer complicity and failures demonstrates (i.e. queer liberalism, neoliberal queer).¹² In reading utopic ambivalence as the generative force of queer thinking, my essay sets out to track the performative pleasures the field offers in a recursivity that would otherwise offend its critical sensibilities.

_______

Homos, it is important to remember, was born in a cultural environment of public dissent quite different from the one we struggle to know. The multicultural liberalism of our recent past, in which activist successes on liberalism’s traditional terrain of civil rights have been vigorously assailed as the reproductive grounds of a species of unqueer personhood that embraces, indeed celebrates, homonormative entitlements, was still to come. To be sure, Bersani prepared us to be suspicious if not wholly resistant to liberal assimilation, as his work from “Is the Rectum a Grave?” to Homos carried an unmistakable warning that the accumulation of death could engender a flight into familiar and indeed familial modes of social security as the early work of the gay marriage movement in the 1990s certainly demonstrated. But Bersani’s proto-critique of homonormativity grew from different directions, being bound to the loss of a definitional specificity in gayness that queer world-building from the outset was intent to leave behind—hence the turn from gay and lesbian to queer, and from a minoritizing mode of sexual definition, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously called it, to a tacitly universalizing one.¹³ While queer theorists were mining the intersections between AIDS activism and poststructuralist understandings of language, subjectivity, and culture, Homos was warning of a loss that would come with translating sexuality too seamlessly into the discourse and domain of politics as the primary value of critical thought. Hence his interest in posing the question, which reads then as much as it does now as a lament, about the emergent deployment of queer as a designation for “political rather than erotic tendencies” (2).

Bersani well understood the gauntlet he was throwing down, as demonstrated in the book’s arresting first line that is well worth repeating: “No one wants to be called a homosexual” (1). In offering this provocation, he concedes that under the tutelage of religious fundamentalism or a closeted gay life we can understand the designation’s rejection. Even liberal straight people, he notes, who are often “most openly sympathetic with gay causes” might not want to be “mistaken for one of those whose rights they commendably defend” (1). His concern is with “homosexual activists and theorists” whose refusal to “be” homosexual is no mere “lexical” matter but an insistence, he says, “that their chosen self-designations no longer designate the reality we might assume to be indissolubly connected to whatever term is used” (1–2). Bersani, to be clear, is not dismissive of the lessons offered by the emerging dissensus, which include the knowledge that the “stabilizing of identity is inherently a disciplinary project”; that gay identity risks being “exclusionary, delineating what is easily recognizable as a white, middle-class, liberal gay identity”; and that the very conceit of sexual preference as a homo-hetero dyad “imprisons the eroticized body within a rigidly gendered sexuality” (3, 3, 4). His point—and the framework under which the essays collected in Homos proceed—is about what must be given up in order to accede to queer theory’s axiomatic anti-identitarianism. As he puts it a paragraph later: “if these suspicions of identity are necessary, they are not necessarily liberating. Gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their sophisticated awareness of how they have been constructed as gay men and lesbians. … We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us” (4).

The consequences of this erasure, for Bersani, are far-reaching. On the level of identity, they have to do much less with epistemological ideals of self-knowing than with the social world of heteronormative entitlement. “If many gays now reject a homosexual identity,” Bersani writes, “… the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance” (5). In fact, he says, efforts to “resignify” and denaturalize the authority of homosexual identity “can have assimilative rather than subversive consequences” by “eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal” (5, 5, 4). He writes:

The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. … De-gaying gayness can only fortify homophobic oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays. The consequence of self-erasure is … self-erasure.

(4-5; second ellipsis in source)

By rendering the queer critique of homosexual identity as a form of “de-gaying gayness,” Bersani makes clear that the stakes of his argument rest most fully on the matter of sexual desire. “[G]ay critiques of homosexual identity have been desexualizing discourses,” he insists, which leads him to introduce the “homo-ness … in gay desire” to anchor the book’s most sweeping and distinctly non-deconstructive claim: that within homo-ness one can find an “anticommunal mode of connectedness we might all share” (6, 7, 10). This mode, Bersani suggests, “could lead us to a salutary devaluing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome … but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness” (7).¹⁴ Bersani calls this supplement “‘the homo’ in all of us” (10).

How Bersani moves from the specificity of gay desire to “‘the homo’ in all of us” is not only one of the most confounding aspects of the book but the most challenging to the emerging queer theoretic’s critical consensus. Most confounding because in pitching the value of his text to a composite entity, “all of us,” Bersani yields to the very pressure that the book otherwise, belligerently and importantly, resists by securing a universalizing destination for the specificity of gay male desire. Most challenging because in doing so he gives to gay desire a distinctly political capacity: that “inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality” (7). This means, Bersani writes, “sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive aspect of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself” (7). Critics have long critiqued the narrow evidence on which Bersani makes these claims—how his use of Proust, Genet, and Gide provide something less than a robust archive for locating the dynamics of “gay desire”—and more than a few lesbian and lesbian feminist thinkers have proudly rejected what they take as the sheer self-absorption required to represent sexuality’s relation to patriarchal law as if Bersani’s celebration of the “gay man’s erotic joy in the penis” has revolutionary potential for “all of us” (6).

But Bersani was not deaf to these criticisms. If anything, he took them as indicative of the critical predicament that called forth his argument in the first place, which is no doubt why the book’s rarely discussed prologue proceeds under the graphic formulation of “‘We.'” Ensconced in quote marks, this “we” is both a citation in search of the security of a referent and a fugitive from referentiality altogether. In the course of the prologue’s short ten pages it is used in multiple ways: as the familiar inflation of a singular experiential “I” into a falsely plural condition, as when Bersani uses it implicitly and explicitly to mean gay white men. At other times, it gestures toward a collectivity that might exceed such specificity without resurrecting the liberalism at the heart of identity’s constitution under the auspices of difference and multicultural diversity. Bersani is well aware of the inconsistencies that ensue. “My ‘we,'” he writes on the penultimate page of the prologue, “is constantly crossing over into the territory of other ‘we’s’.” But it is precisely such mobility that can or in his words “should create a kind of community, one that can never be settled, whose membership is always shifting. It is also a community in which many straights should be able to find a place” (9; emphasis added). If the double use of “should” here betrays an anxiety about the outcome of the critical endeavor—unveiling his own critical desire for homo-ness to be politically meaningful—it also mimics the way that “queer” was being touted as a replacement for homosexual precisely because it offered a way to signal both the instability of identity and the political utility of the mobility of alliances and attachments. It is thus no small leap to say that even as Bersani resists becoming a queer theorist, he shares and even repeats queer theory’s critical desire to overcome identitarian stasis and normative inclusion. He does this by retrieving (might we call this resignifying?) homosexuality as a force of desire not identity, of relationality not personhood, in order to offer a speculative (might we call this utopic?) outcome held in check only by the uncontrollability of outcomes of any kind. “Should.”

These conundrums—I hesitate to call them contradictions—lead me into the thicket of queer thinking and utopic ambivalence that frames my interest in locating Bersani’s challenge to the queer theoretic in ways that account for more than the substance of his argumentative demurrals.¹⁵ For Bersani is not against the queer theoretic’s critical desire or the reparation it seeks in its turn away from homosexuality to exact the exceptionalism it craves for a project not just of resistant but of rebellious critical thought, one that can carry forth the drive for a world other than the one we know without being upended by acquiescence, betrayal, or the sheer burnout that comes from holding onto optimism in the face of what is. On the contrary, the queer thinking he sets into motion under the framework of gay desire is wholly in sync with the commitment to destablization and critical disorder that has always been a hallmark of queer theory, the agency of its own self-interrogation and the means by which its practitioners continue to distance themselves from its consolidations and political errors. In this regard, Homos makes clear that queer thinking is not other to the theoretic but part of its critical engine and political lifeline, serving then as now as the anti-institutional impulse that simultaneously motivates and corrects the disciplining protocols that the queer theoretic repeatedly threatens to beget.¹⁶ On the one hand, then, we have Bersani in Homos: anti-communal, anti-assimilation, anti-identitarian, antisocial. On the other, we have queer commentary ever since: antinormative, anti-institutional, anti-identitarian, antisocial, anti-antisocial and even, if you insist, anti-antinormative.

From this perspective, the utopic ambivalence that generates queer thinking is foundational, both animating the political desire of the field and the psychic and rhetorical structure of its ongoing discontent. Lest my language mislead, let me emphasize that utopic ambivalence is not isolatable as two positions that can be said to collide or divide—one affirmative and future oriented, the other stalled and riven from within. The two words forge an affective singularity, what I want to call queer theory’s formative disposition, which coagulates the promise of critical and political transgression of queer thinking with a host of field-cancelling hesitations.¹⁷ In Homos, it names the conflict-ridden meeting place between the political and critical discourses of a receding past—i.e. homosexuality; gay and lesbian studies—and the theoretical critique of identity identified, paradoxically, by queer in order to resist the emerging calculus of how and indeed whether (homo)sexuality will be the or even an object of critical value. If, in the twenty-five plus years since Homos was published, the field has been institutionalized under this nomination, it has been so by doubling down on Bersani’s resistance, not to side with his reclamation of gayness but to partake in the critical motion of the complexly affirmative force his thinking so powerfully reveals.

One can see this utopic ambivalence at work in recent discussions that mobilize queer thinking to resist not only the activist movements that align with civil rights demands to the state but also the normativities, blind spots, and political failures seen as consequences of the institutionalization of the academic project. A case in point is the 2020 special issue of Social Text, declaratively titled “Left of Queer.” Here “left” works in multiple ways, heralding a political position that refuses the liberalism of race blindness and multicultural inclusion (evoked in the introduction via the figure of Barack Obama) while also designating a frame for excavating what liberal and US-centric configurations of queer theory have left out. By situating the issue “left of the current mainstreaming and institutionalization of queer studies” and amidst the “remainders of queer theory,” the editors collate the contributions in the volume to a set of “‘third terms’, debility, indigeneity, and trans,” in order to both recall and extend “the radical potential of queer critique beyond the politics of normalization” (5, 4, 2, 5). In this formulation, “queer critique” operates as both a synonym for and mode of queer thinking, one that seeks to evade normalization and institutionalization in nearly all of its registers, leading the editors to define a new horizon for “the next iterations of queer theorizing,” what they describe as “an antinational, nonnational, and no-state queer theory oriented to the art, to borrow a concept from James C. Scott, ‘of not being governed'” (18). While this concept derives, quite famously, from Michel Foucault’s 1978 essay “What is Critique?”, the displacement of the citation performs the volume’s ambivalently held promise of securing a future for the queer theoretic that leaves perceived queer assimilations and geopolitical exceptionalisms behind.¹⁸

And yet, no matter how politically potent this genealogical invention is, the afterword to “Left of Queer” makes clear that there is a familiar loss to be suffered by what authors Eng-Beng Lim and Tavia Nyong’o tellingly refer to as the issue’s “queer program” (153). They write: “A final thought, an almost embarrassing query: what is left of sex in this latest queer program? … What does the absent presence of sex … tell us about how we think about the future queer?” (153-54).¹⁹ While the authors suggest a few figures that might return sex to the discussion without ruining the project of being to the left of queer—”genre-defying porn makers, queer sex workers, and trashy artists”—they nonetheless work hard to overcome their Bersani-like suspicions that a queer theoretical project that stakes its anti-institutional identity on a critical project of political redemption risks abandoning the messy excesses of sexuality altogether (154). “If tarrying with perversities was once a seduction with queer desire and erotic form,” they write, “how is its transmogrification into the immaculately programmatic, or in the theoretical quagmire of the leaderless Left, going to produce the kind of teachable ecstasy that we once held dear in our classrooms, subcultural spheres, and fantasy playgrounds? Or are they to be no more? We hope not” (154).

It is no surprise that Bersani goes uncited here. His work in Homos, after all, easily falls under the charge of seduction in its backward leaning interest in gay desire and erotic form, along with its archive’s circumscription, no matter his contention, of the referential yield of “we.” But even if he were cited, even if the embarrassing query could reconfigure the critical authority and political desire of the “immaculately programmatic,” even if sex could be had without first stipulating a sexually transgressive taxonomy, queer theory would still be the institutionalizing figure of ongoing error. There is no queer theoretic without the queer thinking that sets itself against it, just as there is no value to queer thinking without the utopic ambivalence that runs through it. In making this declaration, I am in no way advocating that attention to the analytic terms and critical rhetorics that structure and sustain the terrain of argument be suspended, or that the keen insights of over four decades of queer commentary as it has tried to register its own historicity be abandoned. What we contest—with the social, with one another—matters. But it is not the only thing that matters, especially not when the pleasure the field grants us comes from performing the belief that we are wholly undisciplined by it. At stake in this performance is a resistance we have yet to name: for no matter how insistent the rhetorical claim (and critical intention) to be against disciplinary practices, our interpretative practices are positively amnestic when it comes to acknowledging the pleasure unleashed by laying down the law, including those that govern what can and cannot qualify as queer, queerness, and queer resistance.

I think Biddy Martin touches on something akin to this in the essay I echo in my title, though her ultimate interests and foci do not match my own. Coupled with other writing during the same period, “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary” takes aim at what Martin perceives as the underlying gender order of the emerging queer theoretic, with its antiidentitarianism seeming to reference—and reject—lesbian and feminist identifications as well as practices of everyday life that involve the unsexy and heavily gendered domestic sphere.²⁰ For Martin, ordinary worlds are ones occupied (at least in large part) by women while prevailing constructions of queerness are held in thrall to “the lure of an existence without limit, without bodies or psyches, and certainly without mothers” (123). Her polemic was not an unfamiliar one at the time, and would be countered four years later by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, who took themselves as targets of her critique. “We think our friend Biddy might be referring to us,” they write before unfurling their powerful rebuttal (“Sex in Public,” 557).²¹ But Berlant and Warner had not published together when Martin’s essay appeared in 1994; their “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” came out in 1995, followed by “Sex in Public” in 1998.²² One doesn’t have to look very hard to see that the unnamed culprit behind Martin’s invective against “the romantic celebration of queerness or homo-ness” is Bersani’s “The Gay Outlaw,” which appeared, as I’ve noted, as the lead piece in the special issue of Diacritics Martin edited with Butler (123). Bersani, whose Diacritics essay introduces readers to the arguments of Homos and forges from Jean Genet’s writing about rimming and anal intercourse the opening salvo of his polemic in favor of “the antirelationality inherent in all homoness” (“The Gay Outlaw,” 10). The irony of course is that the extraordinary homosexual Martin saw in the deft and furious analysis of “The Gay Outlaw” was for Bersani as much a scene of loss as of celebration and subversion, as his deliberation on the political and deconstructive allegiances of queer theory at the outset of Homos would make perfectly clear.

I’m not suggesting that Martin and Bersani were in the end anything like comrades in the antagonisms that erupted as queer theory took on the identity politics of gay and lesbian studies and committed itself to the anti-Enlightenment hermeneutics of poststructuralism. On the contrary, the threat they each sought to register came from different directions, with Bersani’s turn to homo-ness as a reclamation of gay desire serving as an affront to Martin’s investments in the ordinariness of everyday lesbian worlds. Still, I can’t help think, all these years later, that the disjunction between them—Bersani, with his lament that no one wants to be a homosexual and Martin, with her irritation at extraordinary homosexuals—would come to an unlikely convergence as the figure of the homosexual, no less than sexuality itself, lost epistemological ground in the burgeoning archive that we now call queer theory. We could say in fact that Martin got what she wished for—the debunking of the fantasy of extraordinary homosexuals—even if we now know that the “radical anti-normativity” she decried did not need extraordinary homosexuals (or extraordinary queers for that matter) to do its taxonomic and ambivalent utopic work. As to Bersani, his attempt in Homos to hold on to desire while finding a way for gayness to persist in the impersonality of anticommunal and antisocial relations did deliver the tantalizing promise to redeem politics—until it didn’t.

From the perspective of these ruminations, what appears most salient to me in the long durée of queer theory is the endurance of its insistence, no matter the losses it has suffered, on pursuing the political promises that compel it. That those promises are ambivalently held is one of my main points, which is why I think the pleasure the field offers in the utopic ambivalence that drives queer thinking is one it can’t let go. Is this situation and the recursivity that enables it to be lamented or applauded? Indulged, disciplined, or merely observed? These choices are already overdetermined by the relationship between loss and pleasure that I have been tracking, where losing what one desires—a queer queerness, a queer theory that doesn’t betray its queerness—is now foundational to making one’s way back to finding it again. If all this feels, at times, a bit exhausting, it’s possible, as I’ve discovered in writing this essay, to take pleasure in that too.

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University and author of Object Lessons (2012), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), and numerous anthologies that focus on the institutional and political formation of identity knowledges. Her editorial work includes special issues on “Autotheory,” “Queer Theory Without Antinormativity” and “Sexual Politics, Sexual Panics,” which won the best special issue award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019. She is the former director of Women’s Studies at both Duke and UC Irvine.

Notes

My thanks to the editors of this issue for comments on early drafts and to Austin Svedjan, in particular, for organizing the 2022 MLA panel on “Homos at 25,” which served as the initial prompt for my re-engagement with Bersani’s book. I also thank Julien Fischer, Zahid Chaudhary, and Jennifer Nash for their insightful comments on my argument and its rhetorical and organizational execution.

1. “The Gay Outlaw” is the lead essay in the special issue, titled “Critical Crossings,” Butler and Martin organized around the concept of “Cross-Identifications” in order to expand the journal’s official invitation to focus the issue on gay and lesbian studies. Queer theory, they write in their brief introduction, “has promised to complicate assumptions about routes of identification and desire. We wanted to test that promise by soliciting essays that analyze critical, even surprising, boundary crossings,” especially “work that interrogates the problem of cross-identification within and across race and postcolonial studies, gender theory, and theories of sexuality” (3). The issue includes essays by Diana Fuss, Valerie Smith, Harryette Mullen, Phillip Brian Harper, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Parveen Adams, and Carolyn Dinshaw, among others.

2. Robert A. Caserio hones in on this sentence in the opening foray of his introduction to the PMLA forum on the antisocial thesis in 2006, which we might designate retrospectively as the canonizing moment for both the antisocial thesis and Bersani’s leading contribution to it. Notably Bersani is not a participant in the debate. Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz sketch what will become the thesis’s signature contentions, with the latter’s contribution, “Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique,” serving now as the inaugural queer of color intervention into antisocial theorizing. Muñoz develops his critique of the antirelational (more so than antisocial) in Cruising Utopia by rejecting the ontological implications of Lacanian theory in favor of an emphasis on everyday life, ethical aesthetics, and intimate public spheres through an allegiance to the Marxian-Freudian tradition of the Frankfurt School, specifically Ernst Bloch. For a somewhat counterintuitive engagement with Cruising Utopia, see Marasco, who uses Muñoz’s method of hope to develop a “method of despair” to assemble Georges Bataille’s archive of antifascist thought (5).

3. In Sex, Or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman seek to “reformulate … the antisocial thesis” in ways that take the psychic dissolution of the self as preamble to the constitution of nonsovereignty as a political and ethical necessity (xiii). While they admit that the book lacks the sex of its title, their conversation explores the complexity of negativity and self-decomposition as an encounter with and not against the social itself. See my long form review of the book, which touches on a variety of issues at stake in this special issue (Wiegman, “Sex”).

4. Let me emphasize the importance of the qualifier “named” in this sentence as there are now multiple genealogies for queer theory or its doppelganger queer studies, not all of which hew to the high notes of the poststructuralist influence on critical theory that swept the humanities in the US university in the 1980s. It is nonetheless that genealogy, usefully delineated by Annamarie Jagose in her wide-ranging introduction to the field in 1997, that concerns Bersani in his introduction to Homos. For a provocative argument that the poststructuralist queer project has run its course by revealing its absolute incompatibility with emancipatory politics, see Penny. For genealogies that turn toward queer criticism’s entanglements with feminism writ large and with women of color feminism in particular, see Holland; Hong and Ferguson; and Huffer. And for a compellingly comprehensive review of the multiple trajectories and unsettled origin of queer theory, see Amin.

5. For early reviews of the book, see Patrick Paul Garlinger, who derides Homos for its “fear of femininity” and its ultimate inability to differentiate between a theory of gender and one of sexual difference (56); and David Halperin, who calls it an “elegant and infuriating new book”—elegant because of the force of its writing, infuriating because it not only collapses “the distinction between sexual and political powerplays,” but employs such a “passion for disidentification” that its author must “distinguish himself from a crowd of thinkers who hold ideological positions identical to his own … by means of an argument which most would totally reject.” See also Kopelson; and Knadler.

6. In his review of Homos, Halperin aptly describes the book as an attempt to “depoliticize homosexuality (at least provisionally), to return it to its specificity as a sexual practice, to treat it not as either central or marginal but rather as a crime against civilisation, an attack on the foundations of social life as we know it, a challenge to the very possibility of human ‘relationality’ or community. Only if it is understood in such an uncompromising fashion can homosexuality once again become politically productive.” The recursivity that queer thinking enables is strikingly apparent here, as the very purpose of detaching homosexuality from politics is the necessary predicate for politicizing homosexuality. Only by severing the tie (to homosexuality, to identity, to the demand for a political instrumentality) can the queer theoretic’s political commitment be renewed.

7. While my inquiry is organized predominantly around Bersani, I am hopeful that other contributions to this special issue will attend to “the sociality of antisocial theorizing” by taking on the now calcified opposition between the antisocial and the anti-antisocial (also called the relational and collective). This calcification largely pits Edelman’s distinctly Lacanian reading of queerness in No Future against Muñoz’s reclamation of futurity in Cruising Utopia through a binary inscription of race that ascribes negativity, self-shattering, and the symbolic reign of the Child to an untheorized whiteness, and the communal, utopic, and social to minoritized subjects. Such an opposition has too often occluded the ways in which negativity is central to Muñoz’s thought, as Mari Ruti has discussed in her commitment to moving “Beyond the Antisocial-Social Divide” (130). But while Ruti insists on the universality of negativity for queer critique, she concludes that “much of the blame for the rancor must be placed on Edelman’s side” given that “the kind of radical self-dissolution that [he] celebrates can only be undertaken from a position of relative security … [as] those who lead economically precarious lives (that is, subjects whose claim to symbolic identity is shaky to begin with)—simply cannot afford to abandon themselves to the jouissance of the death drive” (125). In this, Ruti comes close to defining the relationship to the death drive in volitional terms, which simultaneously ignores the specificity of the drive in psychoanalytic thought and mutes the conceptual incommensurabilities between Edelman and Muñoz’s work. For my take on this, see Wiegman, “Sex,” as well as related conversations about negativity and antisociality in Bliss; Tim Dean; Marriott; and Weiner and Young.

8. This is not a stab against institutionalization, which I have never been against in that now-canonical way that figures it as the usurper of queer critique’s radicality, as if the priority we give to the political requires the fantasy that we are always outside that which we critique, not bound up in it or even, if antagonistically, bound to it. More to the point, if institutions have betrayed us, it is surely the case that we have also needed them to fail as prerequisite to the promise of our political and critical exceptionality. These matters are very much entwined with the difficult impasse of a cultural present in which no progressive achievement is surviving the rise of theocratic authoritarianism in the breach created by liberalism’s spectacular historical demise, one we’ve wished for but with a far different result in mind. For a discussion of how the anti-disciplinarity in Gender Studies is a form of cruel optimism we seem to need, see Wiegman, “Loss.”

9. A full itinerary of these arguments would be incomplete and no doubt contentious in itself. But as I see it, the demise of poststructuralism’s explanatory power and political purchase has fractured whatever security it held as referent and synonym for “theory” in the last decades of the twentieth century, giving rise to a number of theoretical turns—affect, new materialisms, the posthuman alongside issues of governmentality, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism—that parse the social, historical, and subjective in ways that revise and extend more so than cancel some of poststructuralism’s primary concerns, albeit in ways that displace the centrality of the discursive.

10. To be clear: no one—certainly not this writer or this special issue—escapes implication here, no matter how much rhetorical work might be spent on idealizing, in the name of queer thinking, one’s otherness to the field’s own formation of institutional power.

11. If it seems that I am poking the bear here by raising the specter of what Austin Svedjan calls retrospectively the “Normativity Wars,” my point is not to resuscitate an earlier attempt to consider the distinctly disciplinary force of the field’s axiomatic commitment to antinormativity (1). That attempt was pretty much kicked to the curb at the outset through passionate defenses of antinormativity as the means by which queer theory differentiates its analytic and political force from oppressive regimes of various kinds, including those that arise from the exclusive commitments of a virulent homophobic world (see Wiegman and Wilson; Halberstam; Duggan). But nearly a decade on and in the midst of the far right’s own antinormativity project, it is perhaps possible to wonder if normativity as antagonist can outlive the demise of liberalism and the institutions and subject formations it has generated. I say this not simply because of the way in which normativity is historically wed to the economic and political culture that liberalism has sustained but also because of the felt urgency of our now, which increasingly finds liberalism in ruins not from left progressive or socialist successes but from the expansive rise of white Christo-nationalist illiberalism and its authoritarian compact with zombie capitalism. In no way does this dismiss the utter failure of liberal institutions to serve as anything more than a structural alibi for the “softer” forms of violence—what Chandan Reddy calls “freedom with violence.” My point is simply that at a time when the genres of liberal affect—what Lauren Berlant aptly named cruel optimism—are being outpaced by a widespread and politically diverse apocalyptic imaginary of world endings, the axiomatic antinormativity of queer commentary, in both the domain of theory and the queer thinking that renews and reconfigures it, seems increasingly out of sorts as a framework for understanding the neo of neoliberalism. On this final point, see especially Brown (Ruins; Undoing); Cherniavsky; Jodi Dean; and McClanahan.

12. It is of course the case that in defining the ways in which queerness, queers, and/or queer theory have become incorporated into or complacent with either historical structures of oppression (settler colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist, etc.) or theoretical traditions scarred by their own blind spots or misbegotten allegiances (liberalism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, etc.), there remains a deep investment in the potential radicality of queer nonetheless. Gila Ashtor’s recent book, Homo Psyche, is interesting in this regard as its critique of the displacement of sexuality in queer work—what Ashtor calls erotophobia—holds forth a promise of fulfilling the erotophilic inventions of queer theory. Methodologically, she writes, the book “provides queer theory with an evaluative process that has been elusive in preceding critical endeavors: a technique for marking precisely where, in political-ethical arguments that promise an extreme repudiation of oppressive ideological norms, the uncritical dependence on normative psychological assumptions perpetuates erotophobic formulations that misrecognize the complexity of queer erotic lives and thereby prevent queer critique from elaborating a subversion of sexuality’s status quo” (9).

13. In Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick uses this language to describe the operations of the homo/heterosexual distinction. On the one hand, she writes, the distinction is “of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view)” while on the other hand, it is “of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view)” (1). Homophobia, Sedgwick argues, insinuates itself into both approaches, which allows it to move at times effortlessly as an attack on sexual minorities and as a mode of universal sexual regulation.

14. In his 2014 conversation with Tuhkanen, Bersani inserted a critique of his approach to sameness in Homos while responding to a question about his relation to the antisocial thesis and the role attributed to him:

Apparently I’m put in the same category as Lee Edelman; to some queer theorists we’re the bad guys because we’re presumably “antisocial.” Well, I suppose he is more uncompromising about “negativity” than I am. Already in Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is, trying to adapt the idea of “correspondences of form” to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homosexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness. This now strikes me as taking the sameness in same-sex desire too literally … sameness is obviously not the only thing between gay people, and there’s more difference very often between two gay people than there is between a gay person and a straight person. So the argument in Homos strikes me as a somewhat unfortunate application of the idea of correspondences and connectedness. But to the extent that I was, and have always been, interested in the Foucauldian idea of “new relational modes,” it seemed to me that the precondition for such modes has to be a kind of antisocial breaking-down of relations.

(Bersani, “Rigorously” 280)

15. The demand for non-contradictory writing is always a demand not simply to be fully self-knowing, but for language to be a perfect match for that knowing. It’s a harsh and farcical expectation for any writer to bear, which might be why the writer-as-critic rarely demurs from the pleasure of accusation when the text in question is not their own.

16. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner also argued in 1995—the same year that Homos appeared—against the consolidation of what they called “queer commentary” into a seemingly knowable entity, which was their way of trying to maintain the queerness of queer critical practices in the decade of the emergence of a distinct field of study called queer theory (343). Of course, their anti-institutional warrant appeared in the pages of PMLA, an irony of sorts that has now been repeated multiple times in special issues, guest columns, and book projects that have sought to pre- and post-date the queer theoretic with modes of queer thinking that can outrun its sedimentations into a “theory,” “tradition,” or “identity.”

17. Queer commentary’s response to the decriminalization of sodomy in Lawrence v Texas is a case in point, as the seeming civil rights success was met with much disdain that homosexuality was being domesticated and homosexuals divided by heightened governmental regulation of sexuality. See for instance Franke; Hunter; and Ruskola.

18. Displacement is also a mode of fetishization, which is always the risk that attends critiques of US exceptionalism that figure the geopolitical “elsewhere” as the fantastical ground of the American Americanist’s post-imperial thinking. In this case, the use of Scott’s 2009 book (erroneously listed in the bibliography as 2004) invents a genealogy for the field that displaces the European focus of The History of Sexuality, offering instead a project whose subtitle, The Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, points to the book’s elaboration of a region that is not incorporated into any nation state. Anarchism is thus heralded as queer theory’s proper political future in a critical move that paradoxically produces the figure of the “ungovernable” as a critical demand. Notably, in the cited text, Scott also offers no nod to Foucault in describing the origins of the book’s title. While the matter of citational ownership is always a vexed one, the absence of reference to the Foucauldian resonance of “the art of not being governed” seems quite crucial to the political project of moving “left of queer.”

19. Lim and Nyong’o offer an interesting footnote that opens the door for reengaging the queer of color critique of the antisocial thesis by highlighting the importance of the issue’s turn to new materialisms and objectless critique. They write:

The engagement of this issue with object-oriented materialisms, old and new, inspires us to revisit briefly a polemic otherwise (somewhat gratefully) absent from these pages. We refer to the so-called antirelational thesis in queer theory, especially insofar as it inspired a particularly trenchant response from queer of color critique. In some ways, the invitation that objectless critique provides to move away from life/death binarisms and instead to move toward the new animacies given to us by life/nonlife geontologies might also provide avenues for revisiting what was at stake in the fierce resistance of many queer critics of color to embracing the death drive or social death as paradigmatic of minoritarian existence. (emphasis added)

(152)

The specification of the “or” here points toward an increasingly vast archive in Black studies that considers the ways in which the ontology of antiblackness functions as the condition of the social and its coveted invention, the human. See especially Sexton; Warren; and Wilderson.

20. See also Martin, “Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias,” first published in the special issue of Diacritics in which “The Gay Outlaw” appeared.

21. “To be against normalization,” Berlant and Warner insist, “is not to be afraid of ordinariness. Nor is it to advocate the ‘existence without limit’ [Martin] sees as produced by bad Foucauldians. Nor is it to decide that sentimental identifications with family and children are waste or garbage, or make people into waste or garbage. … What we have been arguing here is that the space of sexual culture has become obnoxiously cramped from the work of maintaining a normal metaculture” (557). If Martin ever responded to Berlant and Warner, it wasn’t in print, but I’m sure she noticed that “Sex in Public” underscored one of her main points by making erotic vomiting its most enduring sex scene.

22. In addition to the problem of publication dates, there aren’t actually any extraordinary homosexuals in “Sex in Public.” Even the riveting scene of a performance of erotic vomiting in a leather bar reveals its queer nature: “Word has gone around that the boy is straight,” Berlant and Warner write. “We want to know: What does that mean in this context?” (565).

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