Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medi...

Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games

This essay suggests that thinking, and feeling, with toxicity invites a recounting of the affectivity and relationality—indeed the bonds—of queerness as it is presently theorized Approaching toxicity in three different modes, I first consider how vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in the recent panic about lead content in Chinese-manufactured toys exported the United States This analysis, while seeming at first to hover somewhat outside queerness, is completed in the next section, where I interweave biopolitical considerations of immunity into an account of the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning, rendered in the first person The essay ends by suggesting that the queering and racializing of material other than human amounts to a kind of animacy
	  Animacy is built on the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present, quite beyond questions of personification Theorizing this animacy offers an alternative, or a complement, to existing biopolitical and recent queer-theoretical debates about life and death, while the idea of toxicity proposes an extant queer bond, one more prevalent today than is perhaps given credit Such a toxic queer bond might complicate utopian imagining, as well as address how and where subject-object dispositions might be attributed to the relational queer figure

Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections

Our aim in this introduction is neither to enunciate an ‘after‐queer’ vision nor to denounce queer theory. In thinking through an ‘after‐queer’, we identify and seek to account for particular habits of thought that are often associated with queer research in education and queer research about young people. We trace certain traditions that frame queer research and consider the proper subjects, aims, and locations of such research projects. We contend that these habits of thought require further interrogation because they are intrinsic to researchers’ visions of their own research and to the constitution of fields of research in the broader research imagination. Queer research in education is often conducted in schools and its focus is often young people and their teachers, taking abjection and amelioration as points of departure. In this special issue, we hope to provoke different sorts of imaginings about the accomplishments, problematics, and futures of queer research.

‘After‐queer’ tendencies in queer research

Feminism’s relationship to children and childhood has never been far off the political agenda but its theorization has been slow to follow. As long ago as 1987, Barrie Thorne’s article in the first edition of Gender & Society highlighted the absence of the conceptualization of children and childhood within feminist analyses; and in the humanities, Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, problematizing the desire for knowledge and mastery in adult theorizations of the child, was first published in 1984. But until recently there has been little explicit discussion of how the child and childhood have been, and more importantly, should be understood within feminist theory and politics. Beyond the various swings between proand anti-maternalism (which largely reiterated prevailing oppositions between child-indulgent and conventional femininities versus child-hating and familiar versions of misogyny) the subject of childhood has not featured as prominently within feminist debates as it might have done, given that, as Karı́n Lesnik-Oberstein argues in this special issue, ‘the child and gender are of course mutually implicated at every turn: the child both denies and founds gender and is the lynchpin of the family’. This picture is now rapidly changing with feminist engagements with the question of children and childhood and, more recently, with the figure of the child gaining increasing attention. Work such as Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority (1995), Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), Claudia Castañeda’s Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (2002) and Erica Burman’s Developments: Child, Image, Nation (2008a) has now carved out a set of debates that moves across the fields of history, literature, cultural studies, critical psychology and development studies. Lee Edelman’s influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), focusing the project of

The child and childhood in feminist theory

Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children

An intriguing scholarly investigation, not so much of the ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries articulated pain, but of the ways in which pain itself articulated the late eighteenth-century experience. Through analysis of novels, plays, and poems, the author explores the transition from sensibility as a sense of "selflessness" to Romanticism, which puts the self in the foreground as the mediating consciousness. His tightly focused discussion sets a starting point for further critical investigation of the subject.

Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction

My title suggests a rather straightforward enterprise: I want to account for the enormous popularity of the Gothic - both novels and films - since the Second World War. However, the title proposes more questions than it answers. First, what exactly counts as “the contemporary Gothic”? Since its inception in 1764, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto , the Gothic has always played with chronology, looking back to moments in an imaginary history, pining for a social stability that never existed, mourning a chivalry that belonged more to the fairy tale than to reality. And contemporary Gothic does not break with this tradition: Stephen King’s IT (1987) and Anne Rice’s vampire narratives (begun in the 1970s) weave in and out of the distant past in order to comment on the state of contemporary American culture, while other narratives foreground their reliance on prior, historically distant narratives. Peter Straub’s Julia (1975), Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988), and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (film version: The Village of the Damned [1960]) all feed off The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, itself arguably a revision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), a treatise on the education of two children at a country house. And as many contributors to this volume demonstrate, the central concerns of the classical Gothic are not that different from those of the contemporary Gothic: the dynamics of family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology. How, then, might we define a contemporary Gothic? For to think about the contemporary Gothic is to look into a triptych of mirrors in which images of the origin continually recede in a disappearing arc. We search for a genesis but find only ghostly manifestations.

Steven Bruhm

Papers

Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children

Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction

The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It

Nightmare on Sesame Street: or, The Self-Possessed Child

Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic