Queer retrosexualities : the politics of reparative return / Nishant Shahani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Shahani, Nishant, 1976-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homosexuality--Social aspects--United States.

Homosexuality.

Queer theory--United States.

Queer theory.

Homosexuality--Social aspects.

United States.

Physical Description:

x, 171 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Bethlehem : Lehigh University Press, [2012]

Summary:

Queer Retrosexualities: The Politics of Reparative Return examines the retrospective logic that informs contemporary queer thinking-specifically, the narrative return to the 1950s in post-1990s queer and LGBT culture in the United States. The term "queer retrosexuality" marks the intersection between retrospective thinking and queerness-to illustrate not only how to "queer" retrospection, but also how retrospection in some senses can be thought of as already queer. This book examines the historical possibilities that inform the narrative return to the 1950s in queer cultural and literary productions such as Samuel Delany's The Motion of Light in Water, Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven, Sarah Schulman's Shimmer, and Mark Merlis's American Studies-all texts that return to a traumatic past marked by shame, exile, and persecution. Queer Retrosexualities inquires about what motivates the return in these texts to a historical moment informed by the bruises and wounds of history; more importantly, it poses the question of how such a turn backward could be theorized as reparative or even hopeful. This book shows how the framework of queer retrospection offers new ways of understanding history and culture, of reformulating disciplines and institutions, and of rethinking traditional modes of political activism and knowledge production. Even while it seems counterproductive to return to a historical moment that is marked by the persecution of sexual and racial minorities, this book examines how a shared feeling of relationally and community produced by the exile of shame shapes the political value of queer retrosexualities. The retrospective return to the 1950s allows queer thinking to move away from the com modification of queer culture in the present that masquerades as progress. Thus, Queer Retrosexualities theorizes how traumatic history becomes a valuable resource for the political project of assembling collective memory as the base materials for imagining a different-and more queer-future. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction Theorizing Queer Retrosexualities 1

Defining Retrospection 3

"Retro" Commodification and "Bad" History 5

Retrospection and Reparation 9

Theoretical Genealogies 16

(Im)Material Fictions 22

Mobilizing Retrospection 29

Chapter 1 Cutting up the "Dirty Dark Secret" Generation: Reparative Returns to the Fifties 37

"I Love the Fifties" 39

Something Like a "Hole": The Politics of Reparative "Cutting" 42

The Hours after the Hours: Falling out of Time 51

The "Gay 1950s" in the Present: Historical Repetitions 58

Chapter 2 The Surface of Things in Far from Heaven: Refusing Retrospective "Arrogance" 67

How to do the Retrospective History of Homosexuality 68

Far from History as it "Was": Cinematic Revisions 71

Retrospective Histories through the Fetish of Things 75

The Politics of "Retrospectatorship" and Hypothetical Time 82

Chapter 3 Queer Retrospection and the Politics of American Studies: Reparative Returns to the Primal Scene of the Discipline 91

Queer Time and the "Timelessness" of American Studies 92

F. O. Matthiessen and the "Story" of American Studies 94

American Studies and the Retrospective Reimagining of History 97

Changing Time - American Studies and the Denial of Coevalness 99

American Studies and the Promise of Reparation 102

The Future of Queer Studies in American Studies 108

Chapter 4 "Shimmering" Backwards: Schulman's Aesthetic of Pedagogical Failure 115

The Cutting Edge of Irony: The "Queerest" of Rhetorical Devices? 116

Jack Kerouac and the (Queer) Pedagogic Failures of Repetition 119

Working through Failure: Shimmering Backwards 132

Schulman's Historical Materialism 137.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611460988

1611460980

9781611460995

1611460999

OCLC:

756044703