Learning In Public | Joan Lubin and Jeanne Vaccaro (29.3)

Cherríe Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh’s “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them” (1981) stages a dialogic intervention into the couple form, modeling learning in public for sexual politics. “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” was first published in issue twelve of the feminist arts and culture magazine Heresies: the “Sex Issue.” The editorial board of Heresies was a feminist collective that was not shy about foregrounding their divergent perspectives and politics as the practice of their feminism. Of their 27 issues, published biannually from 1977 to 1993, number 12 seems to have been among the most contentious—so contentious in fact that the collective could not or would not establish even the most provisional consensus required to consent to the collectivizing “we” of an editorial introduction. Instead, the issue begins with an unsigned editorial statement that announces the irreconcilable fracturing of opinion within the collective, a fracturing both performed and formally resolved over the course of the issue by the inclusion of seven separate unsigned editorial statements appearing at intervals throughout. The one thing they do all agree on in the end is that the issue is nothing like what they wanted. Whose issue is this, finally? It is framed and punctuated by a series of disavowals that come in place of an editorial endorsement or synthesis, a mimetic presentation of the issue’s production designed to let the seams show. The disintegration of the grounds for collective narration in the face of “the sex issue” points to the inevitable disappointments that attend an object like sex when it is nominated as a vehicle for doing politics. Overdetermined as cause, solution, and site of intervention, any object will become an object lesson in collective disappointment. In this sense the so-called feminist “sex wars” were fighting losing battles on all fronts. It is as a feature of this terrain that “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” appears, as a text already glossed in so many ways as inadequate to the desires invested in it, even as it is itself an artifact of the disappointments that accrue around objects like sex, or optics like feminism.

“What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” is a response to a debate about sex that made its participants feel “queerer than anything,” before queer was something to theorize (60). In dialogue with one another, Moraga and Hollibaugh confess their fantasies, their anxieties, their alienation from straight feminists and political lesbians; they describe their sexual desires, their intimacies, their hot, cold, and ugly feelings; they fret over the ambivalent politics of their respective butch-femme sexual practices and the proscriptive sexual politics of feminism writ large; they flirt, they affirm each other, scold each other, and trade notes on their experiences—shared, divergent, parallel, incommensurate, and otherwise. Butch and femme read each other’s feelings into “sexual theory” and flirt their way into a historiographic engagement with the queerness of feminism. Moraga and Hollibaugh luxuriate in gender difference and gender complementarity. Their dialogue is a performance of difference as the grounds for politics, of sex as the grounds for theory. They put the couple form through its rhetorical paces, performing consciousness raising in conversation. For Moraga and Hollibaugh, sex is a language and a game of reading, and if you read right you get intimacy, but along the way you might feel queer, and this indicates an intimacy of another order—the lingering attachments of that “sexual theory” we have since come to call queer theory and the epithet it reclaims as its organizing sign (58).

We see one of the strengths of Moraga and Hollibaugh’s conversation as reminding us that politics are processual. Often taught but under-thought, their conversation enters the curriculum as a historical datum, a waystation in the genealogy that locates queer studies as the implicit horizon of women’s and lesbian-feminist movements. But in fact, theirs was a dialogue about a disappointment with the women’s movement that made them feel “queerer than anything,” and in doing so prompted them to double-down on their investment in that movement, using their queer “feelings as theory” to rearticulate their commitment to feminism. Moraga and Hollibaugh critique feminism for being unwilling to learn new things about the category “woman.” Leveraging lesbianism not as the mere “practice of feminist theory,” or alternately as a betrayal of it, they propose using feelings as the grounds for a “sexual theory” that reorganizes the relationship between the feminist movement and the women who make it. Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue makes the practice of lesbianism a pedagogical scene. “Using feelings as theory” in dialogic form models “the personal is political” as an analytic insight with real consequences and real potentials, rather than a slogan that trades political outcomes for rhetorical satisfactions. Moraga and Hollibaugh enable us to see that consciousness raising need not be understood as a process of abstraction, driving the consciousness to a higher plane, but rather of construction, building up a collective consciousness out of the ground of divergent experience. In their conversation, sex is an occasion for feminism to learn.

Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue is a clue that being disappointing has no clear correspondence to being outmoded. No category can survive all the aspirations attached to it without disappointing someone, or everyone. As Wiegman (2012) has put it in her analysis of the relationship between identity fields and their galvanizing objects, “disappointment lives as the living consequence of the psychic weight of the transferences that bind our theoretical and political attachments” (115). But a given category’s inability to sustain our desires for a transformed future does not exhaust our capacity to learn from it. As Wiegman asks, “why are we so willing to trust that the failure of a category to deliver what we want is always its fault?” (90). Her analysis suggests that no category can make good on all the desires invested in it. Intuiting this insight, Moraga and Hollibaugh try to remake feminism by inhabiting it, rather than nursing a wounded attachment to it or abandoning it for an option less problematic by dint merely of its novelty. They do something recognizable in retrospect as queer: they take their alienation as a sign not of the bankruptcy of the feminist project but as an instigation to theorize their negative attachment to it.

Inhabiting that privileged genre of lesbian feminism, the dialogue, Moraga and Hollibaugh’s conversation embeds a pun on gender roles as it rolls around in bed. Their title, “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With,” activates the inherent capacity of language to be different from itself in order to keep the question of the couple open, but the full title—“What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them”—does one better on the doubleness of the pun by triangulating the problem. Moraga and Hollibaugh marshal the couple to dialogically intervene in the ossification of a relational dynamic into a disciplining social form. Their deployment of the couple against an emergent disciplining group formation—the feminism that excludes them—recognizes that the couple is itself a hegemonic formation, but the couple and the collective are related enough to interrupt one another. Moraga and Hollibaugh show that the couple form and the question of collectivity are linked forms and linked problems. They activate that relation to evade feminism’s inability to think outside of the binaries it attempts to eradicate. These two strategies—doubling and triangulating—work in concert to multiply the imaginary of pairs.1 Because of its status as a foundational social unit in the political imaginary, questions about collectivizing—about how to express shared investments socially and politically—are routed through the couple form. But the couple remains an open question.

We are asking after the relation between the couple and collective, the pedagogical and curricular, the consciousness raising group and the classroom. These sites foster publics and counter publics, discourses and counter discourses, private and semi-private intimacies, practices and norms.2 These related but divergent sites are all ways of organizing a dialogic space around difference, summoning sociality and politics into contact with one another. But they employ divergent strategies to do so, and those divergences are sites of extreme tension—and thus also sites of extreme inhibition, making it difficult to muster the vulnerability required to learn. We are asking whether or under what conditions publics are conducive to learning, and whether learning requires a public as its milieu. One impetus of the present essay is to envision the work of teaching and learning as a material practice of reinhabiting the space of collectivity: learning in public.

The political is personal

This essay is an occasion for us to engage the entangled, collective erotics of the pedagogical scene. “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” is a text we both encountered as undergraduate Women’s Studies majors, one of us at a large public university, the other at a small private women’s college. One of us didn’t know any lesbians and wasn’t sure she was one; the other of us knew plenty and never was one because she was always already queer—or at least that’s what the button on her tote bag said. For one of us, reading their dialogue felt like eavesdropping on a scene, hearing lesbians talk about what it’s like to be alienated from a feminist community because they were members of a lesbian one. That one wasn’t a member of either (or any) community, but wanted to be, and feeling vicariously bad about feminism made her feel closer to a lesbianism she didn’t claim yet. It was also really hot. One of us read it inattentively, as part of a unit on the feminist sex wars, between dates and rallies. One of us read it covetously, repeatedly, fervently; the other of us read it studiously, quickly, strategically. One of us loves fucking; one of us loves processing; their dialogue has something for everyone. One of us remembers the first time, and all the times, she’s read it. The other of us can’t remember ever having read it, though she’s sure she must have. One day we read it to each other. When we became a couple, the obsession of the one of us became a problem for both of us. Then we had to write about it.

We have both taught it. It is hard to teach your attachments. Students struggle with this text because it is not recognizable as academic scholarship; it traffics in language and identities that feel retrograde to contemporary student audiences; discussing its insights requires everyone to admit a familiarity with sexual desire, terminology, and experience that is uncomfortable in a classroom setting. It is an articulation of Moraga and Hollibaugh’s butch/femme desire, which is not meant for public airing—and that is why they wrote it, to confront the “sexual silences” in feminism. You can say things in print that you cannot say in class—or, in a consciousness raising group, as we learn from Moraga and Hollibaugh.

We aren’t far from the feeling of student vulnerability, but teaching tough texts that we love makes us feel vulnerable in a different way, too. This essay is an attempt to teach ourselves what we still have to learn about what we’re rollin around in bed with. “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” is a text that teaches how to stay with the trouble.3 We have also learned how to do this from our teachers, who modeled learning in public, and whose willingness to be speculative was a powerful example not only for the theoretical boldness it entailed but also for the example it set of staying close to the vulnerability of not knowing.4 One of the things that made us love Moraga and Hollibaugh, and that we have learned from our queer mentors, is how disarming and theoretically generative it is to be candid.

We have situated our interest in Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue from our shifting positions as students, teachers, scholars invested in queer feminist politics, and as a couple committed to that form as a genre, discursive mode, and container for a volatile relationship to authorship. In this essay we follow the lines of their dialogue into social configurations that activate relationships between learning and sex, students and teachers, couples and collectives. Moraga and Hollibaugh enable us to parse the way these positions are at once generative and alienating, and to put the bad feelings that inevitably inhere to relational processes back to work in the service of them.

Moraga and Hollibaugh meditate on the disappointments of the women’s movement as it proved unwilling to learn from the evidence of their experience, but take this as a cue to redouble their commitments. This circuit of disappointment and recommitment may seem odd until one consults the example of the couple, disappointment with which seems to be nothing but a spur to deeper entanglement with the form. Possibly the unit of collectivity with the highest rate of turnover due to disappointment is the couple. The couple can get claustrophobic, and as a container for sticking with discomfort it can feel as uncomfortable as the discomfort it is meant to keep at bay. As we discovered in disclosing our work on this essay to others, co-authoring language is the worst nightmare of many or most couples; trying to speak as one requires you to confront the fact that you are two. The couple: its form shelters the fantasy of no longer needing to speak. The oneness of the couple conjures an “anthropophagic” grammar: our preferred pronoun is I, my preferred pronoun is we.5 Because it sustains this fantasy, its reality comes crashing.

In fact, Moraga and Hollibaugh are no couple at all. They conjure the couple form to hold a feminist dialogue between butch and femme; as a dialogic conceit, the couple form comes into focus as a methodological resource. Though for many the couple is precisely that form within which speech is unimaginable, Moraga and Hollibaugh’s example demonstrates its capacity to sustain a discursive engagement, rather than anchor a domestic arrangement. Our thesis is that the couple is ideally a durational dialogic form, irreducible to its erotics even as it is fundamentally premised on them. This is also our method.

Sex in public

In their co-authored essay “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner (1998) expressed their aims for “the radical aspirations of queer culture building” in terms of a critical dismantling of the priority and privilege of “the heterosexual couple” (548). They proposed that “queer social practices like sex and theory” could “unsettle” what they went on to call “heteronormativity,” and open onto a queer terrain of “the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex” (548). Departing from a framework that would theorize sex in terms of intimacy, subjectivity, and the personal, they centered the publics and counterpublics that make worlds and build cultures that organize the utopian horizons of social life. They positioned the couple form as a foundational building block of oppressive heteronormative culture, a sensibility echoed by Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang’s(2019b) recent characterization of the normative couple form as fundamentally “anthropophagic,” subsuming the particularity of its members to the master unity of the couple which resolves the question of sex difference by canceling it. “People are different from each other” is an axiom intuited at every turn, and speciously resolved by the normative couple form, which contains difference among each other, and symptomatizes it everywhere else.

But we see in Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue an alternate genealogy: the couple as heuristic to center self-difference, the non-identity of woman which is disarticulable into roles, extending the concept of gender to capture the range of embodied experiences that exceed the binary of man-woman. The anthropophagy that Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang (2019b) attribute to the normative couple form Moraga and Hollibaugh instead level at the women’s movement, whose universalizing commitments to the category woman subsume the particularity of its members. Anticipating “a twoness that is not predicated on the preexistence of autonomous, self-enclosed individual ones,” Moraga and Hollibaugh animate the couple form as an enabling container for a committed collectivity premised on the recognition of differences (247).

Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue activates the space between the couple form and the butch/femme gender binary, revealing them to be different ontologies of the two. Moraga and Hollibaugh use butch/femme dialogue to hold the couple form and the gender binary in the same space, making them thinkable together and in distinction from one another, rather than bluntly counter posed or collapsed into a single problematic.6 Feminism’s commitment to eradicating the binarisms of patriarchy makes it an overzealous solvent of twoness of all kinds, interpreted as the master binary in disguise. One imagined solution to pernicious binarisms was to insist on an in-group’s self-referentiality, the woman-identified-woman. Moraga and Hollibaugh zero in on the consequences this has for lesbians who find both pleasure and politics in gender difference. They know that lesbianism provides the counter example to the presumed oneness of “woman,” and demonstrate the political promise of activating the difference within to make a dialogic two. Moraga and Hollibaugh cycle through multiple iterations of twoness, resisting what they see as the feminist commonsense that all are binaries reducible to the heteropatriarchal gender binary and its oppressions. But these lesbian feminists, speaking to one another from their differences, want to be able to perform the distinctions, and they do. They write of themselves, in the opening:

We wish to illuminate both our common and different relationship to a feminist movement to which we are both committed... . When we walk down the street, we are both female and lesbian. We are working-class white and working-class Chicana. We are all these things rolled into one and there is no way to eliminate even one aspect of ourselves. (58)

Theirs is a “critique,” a “conversation,” and a “challenge,” (as the authors subtitle it), an “article” (as the editors refer to it), a manifesto, a confession, and a demand. This is a “sexual theory" looking for its genre, cobbling together the forms that help it try to say what it means. Their conversation is a performance of intimacy that interjects lesbian sexual practice into the “sexual silences” of feminism’s intimate discourse. “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” intervenes on the “sexual silences in feminism”—its antipathy to lesbian roles and its verve for pragmatic isomorphism between ideology and action that edges descriptive accounts of varied sexual practice out of the frame. As Hollibaugh puts it, the nascent “sexual theory” of the feminist movement “hasn’t been able to talk realistically about what people are sexually” (58). To talk about what they “are” as a way of “trying to develop sexual theory,” Moraga proposes experience as premise, starting with fantasies and erotics that organize relations in the streets as much as in bed (58). Reading Moraga and Hollibaugh’s conversation as part of what she calls “butch-femme writing,” Ann Cvetkovich (2003) suggests that “the intimacy of sexuality” makes a space for “emotional expression” that is barred entry elsewhere. “Writing about these emotional and sexual intimacies becomes a way of forging a public sphere that can accommodate them,” making up for “the failures of the public sphere” by making up a genre (82). Not only has the public sphere marginalized them, but the intimate public of the consciousness raising group is its own site of alienation. The feminist intimacy of coalition and consciousness raising, upon which a politics could be built, cannot permit of the disruptive vicissitudes of sexuality—an intimacy of subjects that cannot permit of objects. Thus their conversation performs a beneficent slippage between subject and object positions for both participants, and a sexy one, too, as Moraga and Hollibaugh personalize theory to regain a hold on what is political about it.

“We have become a relatively sophisticated movement,” Moraga and Hollibaugh write in their opening salvo, “so many women think they now have to have the theory before they expose the experience” (58). They propose “using feelings as theory” to keep the experience exposed, despite the “fear” of doing so (62). Intervening on the feminist fantasy of sexual sameness among women, Moraga and Hollibaugh animate the erotics of pedagogy in a dialogue that performs feminist consciousness raising in the medium of lesbian sex. They plumb their feelings to generate the beginnings of a “sexual theory” that would serve as a rejoinder to feminist theory’s “sophisticated” flights of abstraction away from the lived experience of women and of lesbians in particular (58). “Using feelings as theory” is a method of drawing upon lesbian experience for feminist politics without drawing lesbianism itself into raw material for feminist theory. Using feelings as theory allows Moraga and Hollibaugh to read practice against theory, interrupting the logic of the pseudo-methodological dictum “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” by reversing its syllogistic thrust: if lesbianism is the practice of feminist theory, how does one theorize that theory’s silent remainder?

Moraga and Hollibaugh identify a bad habit with real consequences as the outcome of this merely formal engagement with lesbianism: the instrumentalization of lesbianism as a supposedly “struggle-free, trouble-free” zone of freedom from heteropatriarchal hegemony on behalf of a feminism that wants to hear nothing of lesbian desire (58). Lesbianism is meant to be a practice, not a desire—if it is animated by desire it should be none but the chastening lust for women’s liberation. When sex is claimed as the object of a feminist optic on behalf of a subject called woman, one thing she will not see and should not be is butch-femme. Moraga and Hollibaugh argue that the idealization of the political utility of lesbianism for feminism has been deeply “damaging” to lesbians. The “‘transcendent' definition of sexuality where lesbianism (since it supposedly exists outside the institution of heterosexuality) came to be seen as the practice of feminism” is both “misleading” and the cause of real harm to both lesbians and the larger movement (58). In “The Critique” that prefaces “The Conversation,” Moraga and Hollibaugh offer a diagnosis of feminist lip-syncing to rallying cries now ossified into slogans of the politics they once animated. In this “relatively sophisticated movement” feminists stand embarrassed of their particularity in the face of their theory. What Moraga and Hollibaugh ironically call sophistication we might read more straightforwardly as commitment to form over content, emptying “the personal is political” of its meaning by repressing personal experience into the theoretical unconscious. “The personal is political” witnesses the undoing of the dialectic of theory and practice it so powerfully animated in the division of labor entailed by its heir presumptive, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”7

“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” is a phrasing usually attributed to Ti-Grace Atkinson, though its genealogy inevitably lapses into mythology. Atkinson’s initial articulation in a 1970 address to the Daughters of Bilitis—“Feminism is a theory; but Lesbianism is a practice"—intended to draw a hard and hierarchical line between its constitutive terms. But her phrasing morphed, through subsequent elisions of “but,” into its near-opposite, in which lesbianism is rhetorically hailed as feminist theory put into exemplary practice.8 Insisting upon lesbianism as “the practice of feminism” places an impossible demand upon its practitioners to make their sex adequate to the politics being propped upon it. The problem Moraga and Hollibaugh diagnose is one of idealization: “Who can really live up to such an ideal? There is little language, little literature that reflects the actual sexual struggles of most lesbians, feminist or not” (58). The solution is to forgo this idealized vision of sexuality and the political possibility it promises in favor of a kind of realism, or getting real: an acknowledgement of “what we’re rollin around in bed with,” as Moraga puts it in her eponymous opening lines of the dialogue (58). This is a critique of idealization, of transcendence, of unreasonable expectations, of desires for politics whose sustaining objects damage their purported subjects. This is also a critique of a method, of the logic of the formulation “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” that removes lesbianism from the grammar of subject-object and makes of it a transitive verb, a weak word for giving women what they want as long as that is not another woman.9

“Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” at once instrumentalizes lesbianism as a political tool and idealizes it as the expression of a theoretical politics. The imagined outcome of this process is that all women will be political lesbians, on course to practice their feminist theory; but what if you already are a lesbian, and you are trying to figure out your sexual politics? The product, Moraga reports, is “QUEER.” She schematizes her experience of butchness confronting feminist sameness in sex:

It goes something like this: She doesn’t want to feel her femaleness because she thinks of you as the “real” woman and if she makes love to you, she doesn’t have to feel her own body as the object of desire. She can be a kind of “bodiless lover.” So when you turn over and want to make love to her and make her feel physically like a woman, then what she is up against is QUEER. You are a woman making love to her. She feels queerer than anything in that. Get it? (60)

Here, “QUEER” is almost a synonym for the idealized lesbian of feminism—the woman-identified-woman who takes a woman as the practice of her preaching. “QUEER” names the affective remainder of a theory that proposes sex without difference as its practice. The feminist attempt to make lesbianism a method for maintaining critical intimacy with sex becomes indistinguishable from its stigma, becomes “queerer than anything.” Queerness is the product of the mismatch between lesbianism and feminism, the mismatch between sexuality and gender. Moraga and Hollibaugh counter the marginalization of lesbianism by feminism not by claiming lesbianism as an analytically or politically privileged position, but rather by focusing on the pain that inheres in it, the abjection of it, the bad feeling that mingles with its pleasures. They derive queer theory from what Love (2007) calls “feeling backward.”

Moraga and Hollibaugh intervene on a bad habit of feminist theory that would insist on lesbianism as its practice, the affective remainder of which they call “QUEER” and propose as grounds for the development of a properly “political” sexual theory. “QUEER” is the name for the affective dimension of lesbian sexual practice under bad feminist hegemony, and it remains (even typographically) unassimilable to either lesbianism or feminism: it is the name for the bad infinity masquerading as universalism of the undifferentiated category “woman.” When we are in bed with the “QUEER” butch we are in the bed feminism has made.

The debate into which Moraga and Hollibaugh marshalled lesbian coupledom to intervene—the debate about how to inhabit the insuperable theory-practice divide—has not gone away, and indeed could not. It achieved specious resolution in the supersession of voluntarist political lesbianism by gender performativity, which found not antinomy nor dialectic but rather identity in the hyphenate gulf of theory-practice by nominating saying as doing. But in that nomination, it edged out of the equation the methods, habits, feelings, and practices that mediate and constitute that hyphen as the space we live within.

That hyphen can shelter a lot of bad feeling in a space of indeterminacy that remains unspeakable and thus incidentally is a place where those who cannot bear to speak can hang out. Likewise, it can get animated as a space of tension and intensity where a lot can be learned and worked out but not instrumentalized. Moraga notes that sexual silence also had its virtues:

I think why feminism has been particularly attractive to many “queer” lesbians is that it kept us in a place where we wouldn’t have to look at our own pain around sexuality anymore. Our sisters would just sweep us up into a movement... . (61)

Sexual silence operates as a movement-scale content warning, creating a bittersweet safe space for “‘queer’ lesbians” to provisionally forget sexual trauma in a headlong bid for women’s lib.

The “movement” is the place you go to lose yourself; the “conversation” is where you might be found. Moraga and Hollibaugh animate the hyphen of theory-practice dialogically, putting theory and practice into conversation, recorded live and transcribed. The dialogue is a signal genre of lesbian feminism, but for Moraga and Hollibaugh it has not quite become a written one: it is tape-recorded for play back, and we see how easily we could have missed it when Hollibaugh almost turns off the tape deck. Moraga reminds her of their commitment to exposing the experience:

I mean what you were gonna do is turn off the tape, so we’d have no record of your being mad. What comes out of anger...if you, one woman, can say I have been a sister all these years and you have not helped me...that speaks more to the failure of all that theory and rhetoric than more theory and rhetoric. (62)

Moraga’s apostrophe of Hollibaugh’s frustration—“I have been a sister all these years”—is a reminder that consciousness raising is, as Sandra Soto has put it,

a commitment that demanded any number of challenging acts: devoting the time, finding the space, showing up physically, making oneself present mentally, speaking-listening-hearing-disagreeing-trusting-analyzing, and–perhaps most taxing–recommitting again and again to that process with the knowledge that it had no foreseeable end. (50)

Moraga and Hollibaugh do not propose ditching feminism for the prospect of some superior alternative with less baggage; rather they wager, “It seems we simply did not take our feminism to heart enough” (58).

Their reiterated commitment alights upon a fundamental political question: how many queer feelings are you willing to endure in the practice of your politics? What concessions are you willing to make in the here and now to bring about changes to the systems that are larger and longer than your life? This is not to inscribe a constitutive antagonism between personal pleasures and transformative politics, but to acknowledge that changing the world requires changing oneself, and it doesn’t always feel good. We are particularly struck, especially in the current climate of cancel culture, by Moraga and Hollibaugh’s total commitment to a feminism that has alienated and marginalized them. While that commitment might seem naive when assessed by the unforgiving standards of our contemporary cultural consensus on how to comport with problematic cultural forms–namely not to comport with them at all–it actually gives the lie to that standard by centering not the question of who or what bears the imprimatur of the properly political, but rather the question of how we become political, again and again.

Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the pedagogy

While many of the insights of “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” have been absorbed by feminist theory, the institutionalization of women’s and gender studies has nonetheless periodized the methods the conversation employs—such as consciousness raising—as moments from the teachable past, rather than practices. Horizontal pedagogy is citational of consciousness raising without enacting it: we can teach “about” consciousness raising but cannot teach by way of it.10 The classroom has operated as a symbolic site of intergenerational negotiation for feminists within and beyond the academy, a kind of periodizing mechanism of its own. While the consciousness raising group was a key site for airing attachments to and disappointments with organizing categories in the feminist movement, the “sojourn in the university” of such categories has made the classroom a primary site for this today (Wiegman, 125). The classroom now bears the burden of all the deferred dreams of the women’s movement, becoming the site to reconfigure the psychic fallout of its disappointments into a curriculum.

The feminist movement attached the fantasy of becoming political to the classroom, institutionalizing a place for change. But the ensuing disciplining trajectory of women’s studies into its successive cognate forms has produced a circumstance in which texts like Moraga and Hollibaugh’s are taught as historical, rather than live repertoires of queer feminist praxis. Consciousness raising enacted the feminist slogan “the personal is political” as a practice, not a dictum. One set of consciousness raising guidelines published in 1975 explain that, “these groups should not be thought of as therapy or encounter sessions, but as forums for mutual self-discovery” (“Trying to Make the Personal Political: Feminism and Consciousness Raising” [1975]2017, 9).11 We see this emphasis on self-discovery articulated by Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogic performance of consciousness raising, one that emphasizes the relays between self-articulation and collectivity. Consciousness raising, in other words, is about political solidarity, the work of finding common ground, but it is also about how to become different from yourself. To the Sedgwickian axiom “people are different from each other” Moraga and Hollibaugh add a quotient of self-difference, and thicken their titular pun with an implicit demand for intersectional analysis: “We are all these things rolled into one and there is no way to eliminate even one aspect of ourselves.”

Moraga and Hollibaugh deconstruct the universality of the category woman by showing how the feminist ideal of the woman-identified-woman does not have identity with itself, making their conversation part of a genealogy of queer theory as much as lesbian feminism. Rescripting the queer presupposition that the sexual subject is non self-identical, their conversation shows how that condition encodes not just a radical world-shattering potentiality, but also a quotidian discomfort, part of the subjective experience of movement building and world making. We want to think with Moraga and Hollibaugh about how we learn to use our discomfort and expose our experience in the service of projects that exceed us.

Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue takes the discomfort of the collective space of consciousness raising and turns it into insight, what they call “using feelings as theory.” In this configuration learning is not shameful, a sign of weakness, of ineligibility for politics, or a drain on political action. That is not to say that it is not vulnerable-making or risky, but they show how vulnerability is also of utility for politics. In our contemporary discourse on the politics of the classroom, vulnerability is cast not as a political utility but precisely its primary inhibitor, denoting the fragility of a millennial student body insulated from learning by a litany of trigger warnings.12 This transcoding of vulnerability throws into question the status of the classroom in the radical imaginary: is the classroom a space for skill-building, a site of prefigurative politics, a place where we stage a dress rehearsal for the utopian social forms we want to reconfigure the world—or an occasion to perform the knowledge we already have?13 The queer allergy to institutionalization has made it difficult to think about the classroom as a site of queer politics, rather than, say, a space of intergenerational misrecognition, or a site where queer professors have to negotiate the imperious post-identitarian trigger discourses of their unteachable students. Lauren Berlant notes in “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy” that one of the potential benefits of interdisciplinarity in fields like queer studies is that it “keep[s] professors closer to experiencing in public the vulnerability of not knowing” (1997, 157), destabilizing the teacher-student hierarchy, but another potential is that it shores up that division by producing anxiety about expertise on both sides. These conditions encourage command performances of political fluency, fostering an anxious relay between emotional labor and self care, which sets up the classroom as a node in an extractive emotional economy where contact with others is conceived in terms of the expenditures of self required to endure what can only be violent contact.

This is not to say that the classroom is a preternaturally utopian scene, thrown off course by recent developments. Groups are ambivalent. But what Moraga and Hollibaugh show in their conversation is how the provisional collectivity of the couple as a dialogic form can siphon off some of the negativity of the group into a counter discourse that centers discomfort as an agent of insight. They make it hot to be unhappy, marshalling the frame of the couple form to hold their negative feelings and train them toward theory. The couple and the classroom reorganize the energies of the consciousness raising group to the extent that each provides a framework for dialogue that activates the disorganizing force of the erotic without being reducible to it. It is easy to see how the couple, an avowedly erotic unit, converts negativity into action; what can happen in the classroom is less predictable. The classroom is a site of collective auto-erotic charge, an erotics of difference where difference is understood to be the difference between you and yourself. People are different from each other; people are also different from themselves. The medium of erotic transmission in the classroom is learning, not sex. This kind of transformation—learning in public—is perhaps even more dangerous and unthinkable than sex in public, as the genre of “queer commentary” has become the critical discourse of queer theory and the institutional form of queer studies.14 The over-identification of queer critique with its primary object, sex, has made it difficult to access what was so useful and exciting about nominating that object in the first place, namely that it opened up new insights unavailable under the frameworks of feminism or cultural studies to date—that is, that sex offered an object lesson in learning and unlearning the way we think about the world. Queer has become a field with teaching imperatives forever fighting against its own worst impulses to self-reproduction as discipline.15 Queer sex has had to contend with its own reproduction. In the classroom, queer studies has had to figure out how to teach sex without having it.

The erotics of the scene of learning are so widely avowed as to be a cliché, but as we know clichés manage the tension they cannot resolve, making careworn phrases out of thorny problems. We are interested in how the discomfort provoked by collective scenes of self-difference is a resource for learning in public. Sex and learning index tense parallel genealogies in the context of queer feminist histories: their contact reanimates deep tensions between queer and feminist politics that have been sidelined rather than resolved.16 The encounter between sex and learning is a problem because of how they have been politicized: sex in public is radical, learning in public is risky; sex interrupts subjective coherence while learning unsettles it only to augment it; learning is feminist, sex is queer. We are asking after the relation between sex in public and learning in public, about the places where one meets the other, and how their convergence has mostly been a massive problem. Setting to one side the apparent divergences between sex and learning, we focus instead on the process of politicization that has organized their meaning, the contours of which might be redrawn dialogically.

What does X teach us about queer theory?

Moraga and Hollibaugh’s conversation was published as a five-page dialogue, eliding the temporal gaps in their exchange, which unfolded over a two-year period and was later selectively transcribed by Moraga to produce this document which, “by virtue of its circulation in print, performs C-R” (Soto 2015, 50).17 “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” is a text that represents the compression of a durational, affectively charged exchange into circulating print, and its transcription was an interpretive practice that required encoding affective tonalities into typography. We are struck by Moraga’s decision to render “QUEER” in all capital letters. It is set off from the rest of their speech, a kind of performative typography: it is both literally queer, unassimilable to the rest, and a shout. It expresses both extraneousness and volume.

This attempt to bend the protocols of language to represent marginalized experience is a shaping insight of Moraga’s work in lesbian and women of color feminism.18 Moraga is still thinking about the politics of typography and the grammars of identity in terms of a signifier multiply encoded into histories of queer studies, Latinx studies, and black studies, among others: “X.”19 Moraga opens her recent essay collection, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness (2011), with a note on her use of “X”:

Throughout this text, I spell Xicana and Xicano (Chicana and Chicano) with an X (the Nahuatl spelling of the “ch” sound) to indicate a reemerging política, especially among young people, grounded in Indigenous American belief systems and identities. I find especially resonant Roberto Rodriguez’s observation in his treatise The X in La Raza that X in many ways reflects the Indian identity that has been robbed from us through colonization, akin to Malcolm X’s use of the letter in place of his “slave” name (86). As many Raza may not know their specific indigenous nation of origin, the X links us as Native people in diaspora (xxi).

Moraga manipulates the spelling of identitarian markers to both perform a solidarity politics with a “reemerging política,” and to mark the space of alterity produced through state violence.

In the ensuing development of what Moraga and Hollibaugh call “sexual theory” into what we have come to know as queer theory, the bad infinity of false universalisms, like “woman,” have been swapped out for variability. In queer theory, x marks the spot of the queer incursion into the operations of a social order that presses sex into a capitulation to the logics of science or state rationality—queer flouts “aboutness” and multiplies its objects. Berlant and Warner’s (1995) wry characterization of queer theory for the profession in “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” articulates its refusal of professionalizing and disciplining logics of legibility through its randomization or deprioritization of the object of investigation (“x”). Chuh’s (2014) recent critique of the “aboutness” imperative of interdisciplinary identity fields allows us to read Berlant and Warner’s(1995) characterization of queer theory’s unsettled objects as equally a refusal of the logic of “about.” Chuh theorizes the logic of “aboutness” to describe the mechanism by which universities invested in productivity over and above knowledge production can endorse identity fields only to the extent that they are reducible to being “about” legible identity categories, rather than social movements and formations. In consultation with Moraga’s note on X, we reconsider Berlant and Warner’s (1995) mobilization of x as a neutral signifier of nothing/anything, and/or as a parodic invocation of state rationality. They use X to delimit the reach of the state into the field, marking the indeterminacy of the critical objects that the university stabilizes to ground an instrumentalist knowledge project. Moraga also uses X to mark the point of contact between state and critical site, but rather than a deliberately evasive indeterminacy orchestrated by theorists who know better, it stands in for the forcible randomization of Indigenous identity at the hands of the state, which produces rather than resolves the space of variability by selectively erasing people and the names they have given themselves. The state strategically produces indeterminacy as much as it indefatigably rushes to resolve it, eliminating anyone and anything extraneous to its logics, rendering them unintelligible to it except as x-marks, incorporating them precisely on the condition of their illegibility.20

“What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” elevates evasiveness to a political strategy. Rather than insisting on the power of the variable to evade state recognition, Moraga’s note on “X” suggests the necessity of marking our commitments. It is instructive to consider this in conjunction with Moraga and Hollibaugh’s treatment of their own misrecognition by mainstream feminism. They remain committed to the project of feminism despite their illegibility to it, and their “QUEER” feelings within it—“It seems we simply did not take our feminism to heart enough.” We can read that commitment as a sign of their conversation’s antedating the conscription of queer feelings as theory into the disciplining apparatus of queer theory as such, in which “the political imaginary of the alternative” operates, as Wiegman (2014) has argued, “as a disciplinary feature,” as it likewise does for “identity knowledges in all of their contemporary manifestations” (20).21 In other words, Moraga’s “QUEER” feeling does not mark her break with the project of feminism, but rather her recognition that all political programs have affective remainders, but need not be abandoned—any other would just have different ones.

“Queer” has in the meantime come to name something precisely like the “sexual theory” Moraga and Hollibaugh propose, but has never lost the sense of straddling the bad feelings of the interpellative hail of hate speech and the transformative project of theorizing sexuality. The “QUEER” feeling Moraga names indexes the bad feeling of ambivalent attachments to movements whose habits damage their subjects’ capacity for taking pleasure in each other and themselves. This ambivalence is habitually resolved by a division of labor, in which queer theory disassociates itself from the baggage of QUEER feelings by defining its project in contradistinction to the identitarian pursuits of LGBT studies. But we might read the turn to affect within queer feminist studies as part of queer theory’s immanent terrain of reconciliation between its internal ambivalences and among its contradistinguishing interlocutors. What Moraga calls “feel[ing] queerer than anything”—the feeling of misrecognition, alienation, or invisibility—queer theory recodes as a sensation immanent to thinking practices against habituation and a recoil from the demands of professional legibility made on “sexual theory” by the university and the state. Queer theory teaches its practitioners how to feel smart, rather than bad, about having ambivalent attachments to unstable objects, including and perhaps especially when those objects are our selves.

n>2

In their co-authored precis to the work of Silvan Tomkins, which doubles as a critical evaluation of the state of queer affect studies, Sedgwick and Frank (1995) assert that “the current thinking routines of ‘theory’” have “evacuated the conceptual space between two and infinity” (14).22 They turn to Tomkins because of his tantalizing proposition that affect could be meaningfully enumerated in a way that is neither “trivializing” nor “infinitizing.” What Tomkins offers is what they call an “analogical” model as opposed to a binaristic one, which they see as an antidote to the operative binary of queer theory, transgressive/hegemonic, or, as Berlant and Warner (1998) put it, “Let’s stay until it gets messy. Then we can leave” (564). Sedgwick and Frank’s critique of the field takes queer scholars to task for hypostatizing difference as such as a political good, without bothering to specify any further. Sedgwick (1990a) sees herself as implicated in this tendency, in part by having proposed difference to be axiomatic—her first “axiom” in Epistemology of the Closet is “people are different from each other”—which lends itself to operationalization as disciplinary norm. “People are different from each other” suggests sheer axiomatic difference, but Sedgwick’s later work clarifies that while this may be the place to start, the place to go is towards repopulating the space “between two and infinity” that Sedgwick and Frank report has been “evacuated” by queer theory.

Sedgwick and Frank attempt to recoup the potentially “infinitizing trivialization” of difference instigated in part precisely by an axiomatic investment in difference as such. They warn that “binary homogenization” and infinitizing pluralism both amount to the same: “the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm, the analogic realm of finitely many (n>2) values” (14). n>2: the best case scenario for the couple is a twoness, though as often it is a windowless monad. The fantasy of coupledom as that special social form in which the necessity for speech is obviated by intimacy is a fantasy of the couple as monad, where it may have the name “two” but functions in every way as “one.” To access the thought-realm of n>2 requires articulating the relationship between the couple and the social field, linked by something other than a normative terrain of continuity between them. It requires asking after a non-normative sociality that can accommodate dialogic forms that generate pairs, without ossifying them into units of social reproduction–letting them stand as units of social transformation. “Couple” is ideally the name for a durational dialogic form, rather than a unit of romantic attachment.

The political cast of lesbian coupledom has changed since 1981 and it is an understatement of the case to say that it is today inadequate to hold up the couple form as a sufficient model of political collectivity.23 The dyadic dialogue can become a closed circuit, and the couple form can only model collectivity to a point. The editorial model of the Heresies issue in which Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue appears does little better in its opening of the closed circuit of dyadic consensus to a total dispersal of perspectives. That editorial fracturing already takes us a long way toward reinhabiting the thought-realm of collectivizing social form, but, like the sloganeering that comes to stand in for theorizing, it offers formal resolution rather than transformative potential. The couple form is transformative but not collectivizing; the collective mapping of dissensus is descriptive but not transformative.

The insistence of “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” on lesbian sociality, over and above mere lesbian existence, is to be counted as a major gain over the wells of loneliness of early sexual dissidents or the uncertain prospects for odd lovers in the twilight before Stonewall. This mobilization of lesbianism is a paradigm shifting intervention into the universalizing discourse of “woman,” one whose significance is marked in the negative by the sex wars and in the positive by the ensuing decades of queer and trans feminist theory and praxis. It is a big development from lonely deviant subject to dialogic lesbian dyad, but it still leaves a long way to go until a full working model of a movement, of sociality, of politics, of consensus, and of sex—Moraga and Hollibaugh animate the couple form to model all of these.

They use the couple to model all of these social and political forms—but not as a recapitulation of the liberal premise that the property-holding hetero-domestic couple is the reproductive and reproducible unit of civil society as such, nor as a queer deconstruction of the couple form through the performative play of butch-femme roles. They are not into performative play—they are all about “getting real.” But nor does that lapse into rote identitarianism. Rather, getting real means operating in a descriptive dialogic mode. In conversation with one another, Moraga and Hollibaugh perform lesbian dyadic gender as dialogue, not binary. Moraga refers to herself in the dialogue as a “butch queer”(60)—more descriptive than identitarian. Both “butch” and “queer,” rather than limning the contours of an identity, articulate Moraga’s alienation from the category “woman” and the feminist politics that proceeds from the valorization of that experience. Moraga’s formulation also suggests“ the gravitational pull that ‘lesbian’ sometimes seems to exert upon ‘queer,’” or what Freeman (2000) calls “‘temporal drag,’ with all of the associations that the word ‘drag’ has with retrogression, delay, and the pull of the past upon the present” (728). The difference between these moments of articulating the relation between “lesbian” and “queer” opens up a space to revisit unresolved questions about sex, gender, feminism, and critique. Thinking with Moraga and Hollibaugh, the couple is not a lost cause, but continues to provide resources for how to think about the ways we feel bad and how to keep going. To Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang’s(2019a) provocation, “Can one be queer and coupled?” (217) Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue offers a resounding yes.

The dialogic dyad is the enabling form of Moraga and Hollibaugh’s intervention, which ultimately has the larger movement in mind. They conclude their dialogue by posing a “challenge” to the larger movement. The sexual theory they envision would emerge from feminist consciousness raising. The movement needs to raise its consciousness to apprehend a new analytic category: rather than queer deconstruction, feminist construction. If one way to understand feminism is as the practice of unlearning patriarchy, then we can see consciousness raising as the formalization of a counter discourse about what it means to learn. Moraga and Hollibaugh give us a way to think “sexual theory” beyond the context of the sex wars, as an intervention in queer method, using queer feelings as theory while feeling queer in feminism. In a field that has flirted with conceiving of itself as “after sex,” the impasses of feminism seem best left in the past, as the hurdle queer theory leapt in its cultivation of an allusive stylistics as an expression of its sexual textual politics.24 It became a genre (“queer commentary”) or a critical discourse (“queer theory”)or a field (“queer studies”), but not a method—regardless of whether it is taken as universalizing or minoritizing in its (inter)disciplinary scope. It is as a genre that it became a theory, and while it could have become a method instead it became a verb—to queer—in the idiom of linguistic play in which it also notoriously engages. (The queer pun carries on in the tradition of revisionist spellings employed so provocatively by feminist herstories of womyn and wimmin and womxn.) Queer theory has named its relation to language in part through the figure of “X,” which signals the political utility of evasive language games, while for Moraga “X” discloses that language is a product of oppression, as well as a tool to combat it. Moraga and Hollibaugh’s dialogue, their emphasis on the practice of conversation, highlights the way that consciousness raising uses language as a medium to enact its method. They do this work with the couple, but they do not stop there. Rollin around in bed with Moraga and Hollibaugh gets us in the mood for n>2. Their conversation demands that an abstracted theory that neglects its own content “get real” and answer to those who for all these years have been showing up, in real time and space, and have not been helped. The thought realm of the finitely many still needs to be reinhabited and its relations modeled. One impetus of the present essay is to envision the work of queer feminist pedagogy as a material practice of reinhabiting the thought-realm of the finitely many, which is to say of collectivity, learning together.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Damon R. Young for his generous reading and incisive comments on an early draft of this essay, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Notes

  1. As Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang (2019a) helpfully describe, the enabling form of queer theory’s insights into what they describe as “sex difference feminism” has often been the triangle, from the Oedipal triangle in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) to the homoerotic triangulation of heterosexual coupledom in Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men. See also Wiegman (2015). ↩

  2. See Rooney (2002) for a theorization of the classroom and the public intellectual in terms of what she calls the “semiprivate room.” ↩

  3. See Haraway (2016). ↩

  4. See Muñoz (2005) and Love (2007). ↩

  5. On “the couple’s anthropophagic one” see Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang (2019b, 226). They note, by way of opening:

    The couple is; the couple rarely are: this grammatical technicality would suggest that when we ask “what is a couple?” we are talking about two ones that have become a new one and thus should be addressed as an ontological unity. (223) ↩

  6. In its heteronormative form, the couple is premised on the gender binary. The unity of that form of the couple is premised on the subsumption of woman to man, whose integrity stands in for them both, vouchsafing the couple’s oneness. A dominant strain of feminism insisted that butch/femme was a problematic reiteration of this logic, parroting the hetero couple form and its gender binary to subsume the feminine subject to the subjective primacy of her butch partner. Queer mobilizations of butch/femme as a performative deconstruction of this normative couple form insisted by contrast that, rather than a reiteration of this relational dynamic, butch/femme constituted a parodic revelation of the unnaturalness of sexual difference in the first instance, pulling the rug out from under the presumed naturalness of the couple form that relies on the subordination of women for its unity. We see Moraga and Hollibaugh articulating a crucial interstitial space in which the subjective naturalness of their respective genders has alienated them from feminism even as it has granted them access to a politicized experience of their own eroticism, constituting the grounds for a theory rather than a camp critique of gender per se. ↩

  7. While this formulation acquired a certain prominence and durability in its consolidation as slogan, lesbianism is far from unique in its nomination as the lowly practical counterpart to high theory. For example, see McDowell (1995). ↩

  8. See Kind (1994), esp. p. 125. ↩

  9. On "transitivity" as a feature of queer object relations, see Wiegman (2012), esp. p. 319. ↩

  10. See Chuh (2014). ↩

  11. This 1975 text by the Women’s Action Alliance was expanded in 2017, and includes a new foreword by Mariame Kaba and an afterword by Jacqui Shine. ↩

  12. See Halberstam (2016). See also the discussion of this blog post in Young (2019). ↩

  13. On learning what we don’t already know, see Tompkins (2016). ↩

  14. “Queer commentary” is the descriptor proposed by Berlant and Warner (1995) in their early anti-state of the field essay “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” For one articulation of the distinction between “queer theory” and “queer studies,” see Wiegman (2012), esp. note 7, p. 305. ↩

  15. In their recent co-edited special issue of differences: a journal of feminist theory, Wiegman and Wilson (2015) contend this is the sign of its disciplinarity. ↩

  16. There is a large and growing body of scholarship devoted to the contentious relationships between queer, LGBT, and feminist/women’s/gender studies. For an influential early example, consider “Against Proper Objects,” in which Butler (1994) close reads the rhetorical contortions perpetrated by LGBT studies as it strenuously labors to produce itself as the supersession of a now outmoded feminism by distinguishing its proper object, “sex,” from feminisms’ supposedly exclusive commitment to analysis of “gender.” Butler finds this distinction ultimately unsupportable, operating instead as a tool to suppress the questions animating feminist theory in favor of new ones, rather than resolving or engaging them further. ↩

  17. Soto makes this observation with respect to the Combahee River Collective statement in particular. ↩

  18. Her most widely known work with the politics of language is probably as co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, first published by Persephone Press in 1981. ↩

  19. This interest in X and the grammars of sex has been taken up broadly in Latinx studies. For example, see de Onís (2017) and Velasco (1996). Consider also the operations of X in two foundational works of queer literary studies: Johnson (1979) and Sedgwick (1990b). Berlant and Warner’s “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” (1995) has anchored its own discourse in the auto-critical tradition of queer institutional critique and field genealogy. For more, see Love (2012); Wiegman (2016); and Jagose (2013). ↩

  20. See Lyons (2010). ↩

  21. “Queer feminist studies” is what Wiegman (2014) has recently proposed calling the hybridized and parallel tracking thought-formation of which we would offer “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” as an exemplary instance if not a crucial genealogical antecedent. ↩

  22. De Lauretis’s(1994) early reflection on the development of queer theory, “Habit Changes” also proposes evacuation as the outcome of the habitual in theory, in which theory becomes a publishing genre, obeying its own immanent conventions rather than attempting to deduce knowledge about the world:

    As for “queer theory,” my insistent specification lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance from what, since I proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal (differences 3.2), has quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry. ↩

  23. There has been a fulsome body of queer scholarship substantiating this point. See for example Berlant and Warner (1995), Ferguson (2005), Duggan (2003), and Eng (2010). ↩

  24. Cf. After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, a contentious special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) and, later, essay collection (Duke UP, 2011), edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Critiques of the volume’s logic largely consolidated around its periodization (or eulogization, as the case may be) of the field–the “after” of its title. One could just as easily find in its title an elision of the difference between queer critique and its nominal object (“ sex”) and thus, implicitly, a denial of the idea that queer theory might have a mediating method that would survive the demise of its object. ↩

Notes on Contributors

Joan Lubin is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Science and Literature in the English Department and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is working on two book projects: Pulp Sexology, a literary history of the quantitative human sciences; and Social Science Fictions, a study of the convergence between the genres of science fiction and campus novel over the course of the long 1970s.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a postdoctoral fellow at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and in the Department of Gender Studies at USC. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation.

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Women & Performance