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  • Introduction / Janet Halley and Andrew Parker  1
    Genealogies of After  
    Queer Times / Carla Freccero  17
    Still After / Elizabeth Freeman  27
    After Thoughts / Jonathan Goldberg  34
    Glad to Be Unhappy / Joseph Litvak  45
    Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex? / Michael Moon  55
    Post Sex: On Being Too Slow, Too Stupid, Too Soon / Kate Thomas  66
    Affects and the (Anti-)Social  
    Starved / Lauren Berlant  79
    Shame on You / Leo Bersani  91
    Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social / Lee Edelman  110
    Queering Identities  
    What's Queer about Race? / Richard Thompson Ford  121
    Queer Theory Addiction / Neville Hoad  130
    The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep / José Esteban Muñoz  142
    Oklahobo: Following Craig Womack‘s American Indian and Queer Studies / Bethany Schneider  151
    Lesbian and Gay after Queer  
    Public Feelings / Ann Cvetkovich  169
    Queers ________ This / Heather Love  180
    After Male Sex / Richard Rambuss  192
    Neither Freud nor Foucault?  
    Lonely / Michael Cobb  207
    When? Where? What? / Michael Lucey  221
    Queer Theory: Postmortem / Jeff Nunokawa  245
    Disturbing Sexuality / Elizabeth A. Povinelli  257
    After Sex?! / Erica Rand  270
    After After Sex?  
    Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick  283
    Contibutors  303
    Index  307
  • Janet Halley

    Andrew Parker

    Carla Freccero

    Elizabeth Freeman

    Jonathan Goldberg

    Joseph Litvak

    Michael Moon

    Kate Thomas

    Lauren Berlant

    Leo Bersani

    Lee Edelman

    Richard Thompson Ford

    Neville Hoad

    José Esteban Muñoz

    Bethany Schneider

    Ann Cvetkovich

    Heather K. Love

    Richard Rambuss

    Michael Cobb

    Michael Lucey

    Jeffrey Nunokawa

    Elizabeth A. Povinelli

    Erica Rand

    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

  • “Together, the essays that make up this collection offer an engaging insight into the origins, development, expansiveness and potential problems of queer theory. After Sex? does not provide a straightforward, conclusive
    answer to its own ambiguous question, but then it would be somewhat queer – or, rather, unqueer – if it did.”—Forum for Modern Language Studies

    “[A]s the editors of the recent volume After sex? On writing since queer theory states: if it’s not dead, at least queer theory nowadays has a past…. Summarily, I would recommend the anthology to... scholars and doctoral students interested in where the debate is moving today.”—Kalle Westerling, Lambda Nordica

    “…reflect[s] new directions in research as well as a reflexive attitude towards the institutionalization of queer in the academy.”— Sarah Cefai, Somatechnics

    “[T]he value of After Sex? resides in its unwavering commitment to show how the nuances of queer theory aid in making it a powerful form of scholarship and politics. And this motley crew of interdisciplinary scholars reflects the exact kind of bricolage that Cultural Studies argues is productive. More importantly, this book insists that troubling the lenses through which we see the world is imperative if scholars ever want to make sense of a conjuncture that is so complexly intersectional.”—Raechel Tiffe, Cultural Studies

    “[A] a kaleidoscopic collection that rotates around the personal-is-political-
    is-personal axis of denormativization. . . . Queer theory, in short, is alive and kicking. Having proliferated, branched out, and, so far, resisted ossification, it provides space for diversity and disagreement. Testifying to this, the contributions to After Sex? make an illuminating and, yes, entertaining read.”—Sylvia Mieszkowski, GLQ

    Reviews

  • “Together, the essays that make up this collection offer an engaging insight into the origins, development, expansiveness and potential problems of queer theory. After Sex? does not provide a straightforward, conclusive
    answer to its own ambiguous question, but then it would be somewhat queer – or, rather, unqueer – if it did.”—Forum for Modern Language Studies

    “[A]s the editors of the recent volume After sex? On writing since queer theory states: if it’s not dead, at least queer theory nowadays has a past…. Summarily, I would recommend the anthology to... scholars and doctoral students interested in where the debate is moving today.”—Kalle Westerling, Lambda Nordica

    “…reflect[s] new directions in research as well as a reflexive attitude towards the institutionalization of queer in the academy.”— Sarah Cefai, Somatechnics

    “[T]he value of After Sex? resides in its unwavering commitment to show how the nuances of queer theory aid in making it a powerful form of scholarship and politics. And this motley crew of interdisciplinary scholars reflects the exact kind of bricolage that Cultural Studies argues is productive. More importantly, this book insists that troubling the lenses through which we see the world is imperative if scholars ever want to make sense of a conjuncture that is so complexly intersectional.”—Raechel Tiffe, Cultural Studies

    “[A] a kaleidoscopic collection that rotates around the personal-is-political-
    is-personal axis of denormativization. . . . Queer theory, in short, is alive and kicking. Having proliferated, branched out, and, so far, resisted ossification, it provides space for diversity and disagreement. Testifying to this, the contributions to After Sex? make an illuminating and, yes, entertaining read.”—Sylvia Mieszkowski, GLQ

  • “At a moment when many had begun to worry that queer theory was becoming little more than a widespread litany of dogmas and slogans, this volume arrives as a wonderful surprise: not only because it reminds us what a contribution the varied intellectual currents grouped together under that rubric have been making—and for nearly twenty years now—to the renewal of our intellectual life; but also, and more importantly, because it shows to what a degree this theoretical effervescence lives on, and how powerfully productive it still is in all its characteristically marvelous variety.”—Didier Eribon, author of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

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  • Description

    Since queer theory originated in the early 1990s, its insights and modes of analysis have been taken up by scholars across the humanities and social sciences. In After Sex? prominent contributors to the development of queer studies offer personal reflections on the field’s history, accomplishments, potential, and limitations. They consider the purpose of queer theory and the extent to which it is or is not defined by its engagement with sex and sexuality. For many of the contributors, a broad notion of sexuality is essential to queer thought. At the same time, some of them caution against creating an all-embracing idea of queerness, because it empties the term “queer” of meaning and assumes the universality of ideas developed in the North American academy. Some essays recall the political urgency of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when gay and lesbian activist and queer theory projects converged in response to the AIDS crisis. Other pieces exemplify more recent trends in queer critique, including the turn to affect and the debates surrounding the “antisocial thesis,” which associates queerness with the repudiation of heteronormative forms of belonging. Contributors discuss queer theory’s engagement with questions of transnationality and globalization, temporality and historical periodization. Meditating on the past and present of queer studies, After Sex? illuminates its future.

    Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Michael Cobb, Ann Cvetkovich, Lee Edelman, Richard Thompson Ford, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Neville Hoad, Joseph Litvak, Heather Love, Michael Lucey, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Jeff Nunokawa, Andrew Parker, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Richard Rambuss, Erica Rand, Bethany Schneider, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kate Thomas

    About The Author(s)

    Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy, also published by Duke University Press.

    Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College and the editor of Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and His Poor, also published by Duke University Press.
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