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What′s Queer about Queer Studies Now?

An issue of: Social Text

STX 23:3_4 cover image

Journal Issue

Pages: 320

Volume 23, Number 3_4

Published: 2005

An issue of: Social Text

Special Issue Editors: Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, David L. Eng

This special double issue of Social Text reassesses the political utility of the term queer. The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity—as a mass-mediated consumer lifestyle and an embattled legal category—demands a renewal of queer studies that also considers the global crises of the late twentieth century. These crises, which are shaping national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies, include the ascendance and triumph of neoliberalism; the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as deterrents to political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent.

In sixteen timely essays, the contributors map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, family, and kinship. Collectively, these essays examine the limits of queer epistemology, the potentials of queer diasporas, and the emergence of queer liberalism. They rethink queer critique in relation to the war on terrorism and the escalation of U.S. imperialism; the devolution of civil rights and the rise of the prison-industrial complex; the continued dismantling of the welfare state; the recoding of freedom in terms of secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the politics of citizenship, migration, and asylum in a putatively postracial and postidentity age.

Contributors. Michael Cobb, David L. Eng, Roderick A. Ferguson, Elizabeth Freeman, Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Janet R. Jakobsen, Joon Oluchi Lee, Martin F. Manalansan IV, José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Hiram Perez, Jasbir K. Puar, Chandan Reddy, Teemu Ruskola, Nayan Shah, Karen Tongson, Amy Villarejo

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Table Of Contents

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1. Introduction: What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? –David L. Eng with Judith Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz

2. Punk’d Theory–Tavia Nyong’o

3. The Joy of the Castrated Boy–Joon Oluchi Lee

4. Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography–Elizabeth Freeman

5. Tarrying with the Normative: Queer Theory and Black History–Amy Villarejo

6. Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histories of Sexuality–Roderick A. Ferguson

7. Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights–Chandan Reddy

8. Queer Times, Queer Assemblages–Jasbir K. Puar

9. Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City–Martin F. Manalansan IV

10. Bollywood Spectacles: Queer Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11–Gayatri Gopinath

11. You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!–Hiram Perez

12. JJ Chinois’s Oriental Express, or, How a Suburban Heartthrob Seduced Red America–Karen Tongson

13. Shame and White Gay Masculinity–Judith Halberstam

14. Gay Rights versus Queer Theory: What Is Left of Sodomy after Lawrence v. Texas?–Teemu Ruskola

15. Uncivil Wrongs: Race, Religion, Hate, and Incest in Queer Politics–Michael Cobb

16. Policing Privacy, Migrants, and the Limits of Freedom–Nayan Shah

17. Sex + Freedom = Regulation: Why?–Janet R. Jakobsen

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Paper ISBN: 978-0-8223-6621-8 /