USA300H1 Lecture Notes - Maggie Nelson, Queer Theory, Sexuality And Gender Identity-Based Cultures
23 May 2018
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USA300H1 – Queering the Field
• West, Cornell, Ruti and meta-argument
o Baptist: historiographic argument about slavery in the doing of history
▪ Argument about how the formulation of slavery in history is problematic;
Baptist calling attention to thought, the way thought affects our behavior
o Cornell: response to ossified approaches to race on the left and right
▪ West wants us to think about how the way we imagine race impacts the way we
actually act, legislate, and so on with respect to race
o Ruti’s ojeties i The Ethics of Opting Out
▪ Ruti on queerness: discourse about how queerness, normativity are figured
• Her text: an effort to bring issues in queer theory to accessibility
▪ Ruti and the approach of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
• Laa’s ifluee liited to a patiula eadig; Ruti adoates fo
alternative readings of Lacan that may resolve divisions in critical theory
▪ Ruti bringing queer theory to bear on other disciplines; Affect theory, e.g.
• Defining terms of Queer Critical Theory
o Quee-ess: ofluee of possile defitios
▪ “edgik: oadly, ueeess aout all fos of sae-sex sexuality; at the
same time, discourses oriented towards intersectionality (of race, for example)
▪ Queerness as that hih is i oppositio to the oatie
o Heteooatiity ad hoooatiity ad its uee itiues
▪ One objection against some theorists: treatment of the anti-normative as the
ultimate good, to the point that all normativity is evil and vice-versa
▪ Heteooatiity: assetio that heteooatie oo sese leads to
the euatio of suess ith adaeet, apital auulatio, faily…
• The simple definition a matter of conventional heterosexual goals like
family, yet also more obscure connections outside of sexuality/gender
• Social institutions that tie things like capital accumulation to
heteronormativity; institutional tendency to reward heteronormativity
o Hey Fod’s aiage ietie ad the iopolitis of aiage,
for example; things like tax breaks for married couples
▪ Homonormativity: hat happes he heteooatiity o-opts the queer
• Queer culture or queer individuals aspiring to conform to the standards
or achieve approval based on the criteria of heteronormativity
• Two texts on homonormativity and its ethics
o Ade “ullia’s olu o LGBT ights
▪ Critique of Queer people who would resist mainstream integration
▪ Prime example of homonormativity: holding up of accomplishments that permit
queer integration into heteronormative society, e.g. military service, marriage
• Advocating that the greatest accomplishments of LGBT movements
towards equal rights are admittance into social institutions
▪ Clai aout the eess of left-wing identity politics, intersectionality
• For Sullivan, something new, but in the domain of queer theory, not so
o Maggie Nelson on X-Men, First Class in her memoir The Argonauts
▪ Binaries between assimilation and non-assimilation, other conflicts perhaps a
way into problems in Queer theory but may not hold up
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