Queer Universal

Rebekah Sheldon

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Issue #73
May 2016










Notes
1

See for example GLQ 21, no. 2–3, “Queer Inhumanism,” eds. Dana Luciana and Mel Chen (2015); WSQ 40, no. 1–2, “Viral,” eds. Patricia Clough and Jasbir Puar (Spring–Summer 2012); differences 26, no. 1,“Queer Theory Without Antinormativity,” eds. Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A Wilson (May 2015); philoSOPHIA 5, no. 2, “Anthropocene Feminisms,” eds. Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein (2016); and Feminist Theory 12, no. 2, “Nonhuman Feminisms,” eds. Myra Hird and Celia Roberts (2011).

2

Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experiments on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006).

3

Mel Chen and Dana Luciana, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ 21, no. 2–3: 189.

4

J. Jack Halberstam, “In Human—Out Human,” ibid.: 241.

5

J. Jack Halberstam, “In Human—Out Human,” ibid.: 241.

6

The term “universal” is sometimes set in opposition to identitarian categories. This is the sense in which Madhavi Menon uses it, for example, in her recently released Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). For my purposes, the universal is a matter of scope and scale regardless of the analytic object or point of view.

7

Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Kvinder, Køn & Forskning NR 1–2 (2012): 39.

8

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1.

9

Halberstam, “In Human—Out Human,” 242.

10

Jeanne Vaccaro, “Feelings and Fractals: Wooly Ecologies of Transgender Matter,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3: 280.

11

Chen and Luciana, “Introduction,” 185.

12

Eileen Joy, “Improbable Manners of Being,” GLQ 21, no. 2–3: 222.

13

Jayna Brown, “Being Cellular: Race, the Inhuman, and the Plasticity of Life,” ibid.: 325.

14

Robyn Wiegman, “Eve’s Triangles, or Queer Studies Beside Itself,” differences 26, no. 1: 48–73.

15

Sedgwick, Epistemology, 9.

16

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 8.

17

Sedgwick, “Introduction,” ibid., 1.

18

Sedgwick, “Introduction,” 1.

19

Sedgwick, “Shame,” 17.

20

Ibid., 16.

21

Sedgwick, “Introduction,” 12.

22

Sedgwick, “Paranoid,” 124; Sedgwick, “Introduction,” 18.

23

Sedgwick, “Paranoid,” 146.

24

Ibid., 135.

25

Ibid., 138.

26

Ibid., 124.

27

On the other hand, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006) is notable for the way it attends to particular objects in order to elaborate a critical methodology and a metaphysics.

28

Sedgwick, Epistemology, 1.

29

Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 124.

30

Sedgwick, Epistemology, 154.