New issue of GJSS on queer methodologies
January 26th, 2009
In the end of December, a new issue of Graduate Journal of Social Science was released online: Queer Studies: Methodological Approaches. The issue is edited by the graduate students Robert Kulpa and Mia Liinason, and it includes a wide variety of articles on newer tendencies in queer studies.
In relation to Trikster, an article of special interest is Judith Halberstam’s text “The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Theory” (pdf). This was the paper Halberstam presented when Trikster interviewed her in 2007. After being published in a short version in PMLA (Vol. 121, No. 3, May 2006), it is great to finally read the paper in full text. In this extended version of her argument, Halberstam discusses the anti-social thesis as developed by Leo Bersani in Homos (1996) and Lee Edelman in No Future (2004), criticizing their focus upon a small white gay male archive, and their disregard for the “far less liberal tradition of homophilia” that is connected to this anti-social tradition. Taking on Sex Pistols’s “God Save the Queen” and their refusal of futurity, Halberstam argues for a more political and eccentric genealogy of the politics of negativity, discussing the work of Jamaica Kinkaid, Valerie Solanas, Yoko Ono, and others. Halberstam urges us to “embrace a truly political negativity”, and thereby, as Kinkaid has formulated it, “make everyone a little less happy.”
Other articles in GJSS that may be of special interest for Trikster-readers are Tiina Rosenberg’s text “Locally Queer. A Note on the Feminist Genealogy of Queer Theory” (pdf.) on the use and deployment of the English term “queer” in a Swedish context; and the Danish queer activist academic Liv Mertz’s text “’I am what I am?’? Toward a Sexual Politics of Contingent Foundations” (pdf.), discussing queer activism in Denmark, with a focus on Enhedslistens Queerudvalg.
Read all the articles in GJSS here.
