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Introduction
W H AT ’ S Q U EER A B O U T Q U EER S T U D I E S N OW ?

Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that David L. Eng with
challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual Judith Halberstam
subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, and José
natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social Esteban Muñoz
processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and
sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in
its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender,
class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality.
Fourteen years after Social Text’s publication of “Fear of a Queer
Planet,” and eight years after “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and
Gender,” this special double issue reassesses the political utility of queer
by asking “what’s queer about queer studies now?” The contemporary
mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity—as a mass-mediated consumer
lifestyle and embattled legal category—demands a renewed queer studies
ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to
other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding of queer
as a political metaphor without a fixed referent. A renewed queer studies,
moreover, insists on a broadened consideration of the late-twentieth-cen-
tury global crises that have configured historical relations among political
economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations
of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.
The following sixteen essays—largely authored by a younger genera-
tion of queer scholars—map out an urgent intellectual and political terrain
for queer studies and the contemporary politics of identity, kinship, and
belonging. Insisting on queer studies’ intellectual and political relevance
to a wide field of social critique, these essays reassess some of the field’s
most important theoretical insights while realigning its political atten-
tions, historical foci, and disciplinary accounts. Broadly, these scholars
examine the limits of queer epistemology, the denaturalizing potentials
of queer diasporas, and the emergent assumptions of what could be called
queer liberalism. Collectively, they rethink queer critique in relation to a
number of historical emergencies, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, of
both national and global consequence.

Social Text 84–85, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–4, Fall–Winter 2005. © 2005 by Duke University Press.

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 What does queer Such emergencies include the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse
of the welfare state; the Bush administration’s infinite “war on terrorism”
studies have to and the acute militarization of state violence; the escalation of U.S. empire
building and the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and
say about empire, patriotisms; the devolution of civil society and the erosion of civil rights;
the pathologizing of immigrant communities as “terrorist” and racialized
globalization,
populations as “criminal”; the shifting forms of citizenship and migration
in a putatively “postidentity” and “postracial” age; the politics of intimacy
neoliberalism,
and the liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and
sovereignty, marriage; and the return to “moral values” and “family values” as a pro-
phylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural
and terrorism? dissent. Indeed, in this intense time of war and death, and of U.S. unilat-
eralismand corporate domination, queer studies now more than ever needs
What does to refocus its critical attentions on public debates about the meaning of
democracy and freedom, citizenship and immigration, family and com-
queer studies munity, and the alien and the human in all their national and their global
manifestations.
tell us about What does queer studies have to say about empire, globalization,
neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism? What does queer studies tell us
immigration,
about immigration, citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human
citizenship, rights? What is the relationship between Lawrence v. Texas, the exalted June
2003 Supreme Court decision decriminalizing gay sex, and the contem-
prisons, welfare, poraneous USA PATRIOT Act? If mainstream media attention to queer
lives and issues has helped to establish the social and legal foundation for
mourning, and the emergence of gay marriage, family, and domesticity, what are the social
costs of this new visibility? And how does the demand for marriage and
human rights? legal rights affect, run counter to, or in fact converge with conservative
promotion of traditional marriage?
While queer studies in the past has rarely addressed such broad social
concerns, queer studies in the present offers important insights. In recent
years, scholars in the field have produced a significant body of work on
theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between
global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on
questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics.1 The vari-
ous essays gathered here insist that considerations of empire, race, migra-
tion, geography, subaltern communities, activism, and class are central to
the continuing critique of queerness, sexuality, sexual subcultures, desire,
and recognition. At the same time, these essays also suggest that some of
the most innovative and risky work on globalization, neoliberalism, cultural
politics, subjectivity, identity, family, and kinship is happening in the realm
of queer studies. As a whole, this volume reevaluates the utility of queer as

2 Eng with Halberstam and Muñoz

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 an engaged mode of critical inquiry. It charts some of the notable histori-
cal shifts in the field since its inception while recognizing different pasts,
alternative presents, and new futures for queer scholarship.
What’s queer about queer studies now?
A lot.

Queer Epistemology

In her 1993 essay “Critically Queer,” Judith Butler writes that the asser-
tion of “queer” must never purport to “fully describe” those it seeks to
represent. “It is necessary to affirm the contingency of the term,” Butler
insists, “to let it be vanquished by those who are excluded by the term
but who justifiably expect representation by it, to let it take on meanings
that cannot now be anticipated by a younger generation whose political
vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments.” That
queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its privileged assump-
tions “ought to be safeguarded not only for the purposes of continuing
to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the
specific historicity of the term.”2 The operations of queer critique, in
other words, can neither be decided on in advance nor be depended on
in the future. The reinvention of the term is contingent on its potential
obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any fortification of its criti-
cal reach in advance or any static notion of its presumed audience and
participants.
That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclu-
sionary operations has always been one of the field’s key theoretical and
political promises. What might be called the “subjectless” critique of queer
studies disallows any positing of a proper subject of or object for the field by
insisting that queer has no fixed political referent. Such an understanding
orients queer epistemology, despite the historical necessities of “strategic
essentialism” (Gayatri Spivak’s famous term), as a continuous deconstruc-
tion of the tenets of positivism at the heart of identity politics. Attention
to queer epistemology also insists that sexuality—the organizing rubric of
lesbian and gay studies—must be rethought for its positivist assumptions.
A subjectless critique establishes, in Michael Warner’s phrase, a focus on
“a wide field of normalization” as the site of social violence. Attention to
those hegemonic social structures by which certain subjects are rendered
“normal” and “natural” through the production of “perverse” and “patho-
logical” others, Warner insists, rejects a “minoritizing logic of toleration
or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough
resistance to regimes of the normal.”3

What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? 3

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 At such a Today, we find ourselves at an ironic historical moment of what might
be described as “queer liberalism.” Mechanisms of normalization have
historical juncture, endeavored to organize not only gay and lesbian politics but also the
internal workings of the field itself, attempting to constitute its governing
it is crucial to insist logic around certain privileged subjects, standards of sexual conduct, and
political and intellectual engagements (a subject discussed in greater detail
yet again on the
below). At such a historical juncture, it is crucial to insist yet again on the
capacity of queer studies to mobilize a broad social critique of race, gen-
capacity of queer
der, class, nationality, and religion, as well as sexuality. Such a theoretical
studies to mobilize project demands that queer epistemologies not only rethink the relationship
between intersectionality and normalization from multiple points of view
a broad social but also, and equally important, consider how gay and lesbian rights are
being reconstituted as a type of reactionary (identity) politics of national
critique of race, and global consequence.
Roderick A. Ferguson observes in his contribution to this special issue,
gender, class, “Of Our Normative Strivings: African American Studies and the Histo-
ries of Sexuality” that while queer studies “has had the most concentrated
nationality, and engagement with the category of sexuality,” its institutional advances should
not convince queer studies that “its engagements with sexuality are the
religion, as well
only and most significant pursuits of that formation.” In other words, if
as sexuality. interdisciplinary sites such as queer studies isolate sexuality within one
epistemic terrain (such as psychoanalysis), or attempt to arrogate the study
of sexuality to themselves alone, these “sites prove interdisciplinarity’s com-
plicity with disciplinarity rather than interdisciplinarity’s rebellion against
the disciplines.” Ferguson’s observations move us away from an exclusive
focus on how sexuality becomes the “propertied” object of queer studies, its
privileged site of critical inquiry. Instead, he focuses on normalization and
intersectionality at once, by asking “in what ways has the racialized, classed,
and gendered discourse known as sexuality dispersed itself to constitute this
particular discipline or interdiscipline?” Configuring queer epistemology in
such a manner insists on a sustained consideration of what happens to sexu-
ality when it is resituated as the effect not only of queer studies but also other
fields of inquiry, such as women of color feminism, queer of color critique,
or queer diasporas.4 Hence critical attentions are drawn to the governing
logics of knowledge production, the constitutive assumptions that form the
foundation of disciplinary fields, rendering them internally coherent while
giving social and political difference their discursive power.
In “Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography,” Elizabeth Freeman expands
on Ferguson’s epistemological investigation in a different register. Freeman
brings queer studies together with one of the most important epistemo-
logical inquiries in postcolonial studies: the disparate mappings of time
and space. Nation-states, she observes, “still track and manage their own

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 denizens through an official time line, effectively shaping the contours of
a meaningful life by registering some events like births, marriages, and
deaths, and refusing to record others like initiations, friendships, and
contact with the dead.” Freeman’s crossing of queer studies with post-
colonial concerns of individual and group “development” reformulates
certain basic tenets of the field such that “queer subjectivity and collectivity
demand, and take as their reward, particularly inventive and time-traveling
forms of grief and compensation.” Reconsidering the spatial and temporal
dimensions of queer traumas, including AIDS, Freeman suggests that
the incorporation of lost others need not be haunted solely by melancholy
and depression. In a historical moment of intense political conserva-
tism, residues of “positive affect”—“erotic scenes, utopias, memories of
touch”—must become available for queer counterhistories of space and
time, alternative narratives of development that have become central to
the notion of queer subcultures, counterpublics, and utopias.
Queer epistemology insists that we embark on expanded investigations
of normalization and intersectionality. In this regard, Tavia Nyong’o’s
opening essay, “Punk’d Theory,” proffers yet another take on “intersec-
tionality,” one interrupting the everyday practices and “litigious process
through which subjects petition for admission to queer theoretical atten-
tion.” Proffering “Punk’d Theory” as, in the words of Eve Sedgwick, a
“nonce taxonomy” full of unrationalized hypotheses about what kinds of
people there are to be found in the world, Nyong’o rewrites a now frozen
dialectic between black and white, as well as straight and gay. He observes
that it is not enough “to take up the simultaneity of race, class, gender,
and sexuality, which it is my argument that the vernacular does constantly
in keywords like punk and punked.” Instead, Nyong’o contends, we must
investigate “the subject transformed by law that nevertheless exists nowhere
within it, the figure of absolute abjection that is, paradoxically, part of our
everyday experience.” Here, queer epistemology rethinks intersectionality
not just as racial, sexual, or class simultaneity but as “a meeting of two
streets, and in a landscape long given over to automotivity . . . a place of
particular hazard for the pedestrian.” According to Nyong’o, “punk’d”
pedestrians must demand both their “rights and more than their rights,
simply to preserve a portion of the mobility they had prior to enclosure”:
workers become “illegal immigrants”; poor mothers, “welfare queens”;
protestors, “potential terrorists.” While all must attack the presumption of
their criminality merely to preserve their way of life, intersectionality will
become positively hazardous to everyone’s health if we choose to adjudicate
among these differences rather than to nurture them all at once.
Extending Nyong’o’s nonce taxonomy of what kinds of people there are
to be found in the world, Joon Oluchi Lee’s essay, “The Joy of the Castrated

What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now? 5

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 Boy,” draws our critical attention, along the lines of Freeman, to queer
pleasures and desires. Lee suggests that the contemporary mainstreaming
of queerness in both popular culture and the social imaginary has resulted
in the embracing of a “mainstream ethics of gender” in queer studies.
Indeed, like several other contributors to this special issue, Lee insists that
certain prevailing epistemological paradigms, such as gay shame, have
been implicitly universalized in queer studies to great social and political
harm. Refusing the disavowal of castration and effeminacy that underwrites
D. A. Miller’s reading of the Broadway musical Gypsy, for instance, Lee
posits an alternative to the anxious glorification of white masculinity that
Miller erects as a defense against the feminine forms of identification that
Gypsy demands and circulates. “I have always considered myself a castrated
boy,” Lee writes in relation to a stereotypical Asian masculinity, “and
learned to be happy in that state because that was the only way I could live
my life as the girl I knew myself to be.” Simply put, Lee offers an “ecstatic”
politics of racial castration in the place of an anxious phallic restoration of
whiteness. Suggesting that the “joy” of the castrated boy might abet in the
project of “undoing” gender—undoing, that is, the idealization of white
masculinity in queer studies—Lee asserts that racial castration preserves a
space of alterity to embrace “femininity as race” and “race as femininity.”
In this regard, Lee advances the groundbreaking project laid out by Eve
Sedgwick in her 1991 essay, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.”5
Like cultural, postcolonial, and critical race studies, queer studies
has been a privileged site for the explicit reconsideration of disciplinarity
and knowledge production. All the essays in this special issue contend in
some way or another with the question of queer epistemology, reorienting
the field’s potential to engage with a wide field of normalization precisely
through a critical reengagement with intersectionality in its manifold
forms and locations. The social and political potential of such a critique
is “precisely calibrated to the degree to which ‘queer’ is deployed as a
catachresis,” Amy Villarejo observes in her essay, “Tarrying with the
Normative: Queer Theory and Black History.” Investigating the 1968
documentary Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed? as a counterarchive for
queer normalization, Villarejo posits a “queer of color” critique as making
“good on the understanding of normativity as variegated, striated, con-
tradictory,” as the persistent tension “between systematization and desire,
between reason and affect, between the literal and the figurative, between
philosophy and literature.” In these interstitial spaces, Villarejo discovers
yet another caveat to the practice of queer intersectionality, encouraging
us to abandon “a certain literal understanding of the role of abstraction as
enforcing a logic of equivalence in the production of the symptom.” Social
and political differences cannot finally be equalized as analogous values

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 or commensurate forms of domination; instead, they must be considered In the shadows
in and through their supplemental deployments.6
of postcoloniality,

Queer Diasporas globalization,

and the now

Attention to queer epistemology generates alternate critical genealogies
for queer studies outside its conventional relationship to francophone and
infinite “war on
Anglo-American literatures and literary studies, as well as its presumed
white masculine subjects. “Women of color feminism” and “queer of terrorism,” queer
color critique” collectively explored by Nyong’o, Lee, Ferguson, and Vil-
larejo mark two such alternate critical genealogies for the investigation of diasporas have
normalization and difference. Queer diaspora is a third.
In their 1997 introduction to “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and also become a
Gender,” the editors note that the “theorization of divergent sexualities
offered by contemporary queer critique and the interrogation of race and concerted
ethnicity undertaken within postcolonial studies and critical race theory
are among the most significant recent developments in social analysis and
site for the
cultural criticism. While the best work in these fields have emphasized that
interrogation
their objects of study cannot be understood in isolation from one another,
the critical ramifications of this fact have nevertheless gone largely unex- of the
plored.” 7 Eight years later, the critical ramifications of such a project have
become part of our intellectual consciousness largely because of a critical nation-state,
mass of scholarship in queer of color critique as well as queer diasporas.
Collectively, these two fields have systematically rethought critical race citizenship,
theory (which takes the U.S. nation-state as its conceptual frame) and
postcolonial studies alongside scattered deployments of sexuality—its imperialism, and
uneven mappings of time and space across domestic as well as diasporic
landscapes. empire.
For instance, in its denaturalizing of various origin narratives, such
as “home” and “nation,” queer diasporas “investigates what might be
gained politically by reconceptualizing diaspora not in conventional terms
of ethnic dispersion, filiation, and biological traceability, but rather in
terms of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency.” By doing so, queer
diasporas emerges as a critical site “providing new ways of contesting
traditional family and kinship structures—of reorganizing national and
transnational communities based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but
on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social
practices or political commitments.” 8
In the shadows of postcoloniality, globalization, and the now infinite
“war on terrorism,” queer diasporas have also become a concerted site for
the interrogation of the nation-state, citizenship, imperialism, and empire.

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 It has examined the numerous ways in which racialized heteropatriarchy
has been universalized as a Western discourse of (sexual) development,
as a project of modernity and modernization, as a colonial and civilizing
mission, as an index of political and social advancement, and as a story of
human liberty and freedom. In this regard, the concerns of queer diasporas
have worked, borrowing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term, to “provincialize”
queer studies, bringing problems of citizenship, sovereignty, migration,
asylum, welfare, the public sphere, and civil society to questions of sexual-
ity and sexual development at the heart of the modern liberal nation-state.
In the process, queer diasporas brings to conceptual crisis contradictions
of global and domestic politics, as it broadens studies of migration in the
Black Atlantic to consider other areas such as South Asia, East Asia, and
Latin America. It shifts critical attention to the incommensurabilities of
sexuality and national belonging while marking the false equivalences of
the nation-state as well as the constitutive limits of “Queer Nation.”
In her contribution to this special issue, “Bollywood Spectacles: Queer
Diasporic Critique in the Aftermath of 9/11,” Gayatri Gopinath delin-
eates the methodology of queer diasporic critique through figurations of
the impure, the inauthentic, and the nonreproductive. If queer diasporic
critique, Gopinath observes, takes to task the “implicit heteronormativity
within some strands of area studies,” it also powerfully challenges “the
parochialism of some strands of queer studies by making the study of
sexuality central to an anti-imperialist, antiracist project.” Reading the
ascension and global circulation of Bollywood cinema as a spectacle to be
safely consumed in a post-9/11 U.S. national imaginary, Gopinath posits
the queer South Asian female diasporic subject as an impossible figure,
one who stands in contradistinction to the neoliberal citizen-subject. The
incommensurability of these two figures, Gopinath contends, creates a
conceptual space for challenging the binary construction of South Asian
bodies as either “terrorists” or “model minorities,” as “inherently criminal
and antinational or multicultural and assimilationist.”
In similar regard, Jasbir K. Puar examines the “queer” figures of
Sikh and Muslim terrorists. In “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Puar
explores how the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” reconciles
queerness to the liberal demands of rational subject formation, employing
a rhetoric of sexual modernization that constructs the imperialist center
as “tolerant” while castigating the backward other as “homophobic” and
“perverse.” In our contemporary political moment, exceptionalist dis-
courses on sexual freedom all too easily conspire with U.S. nationalism
and patriotism in the service of empire. Queer nationalism, Puar observes,
“colludes with U.S. exceptionalisms embedded in nationalist foreign policy
via the articulation and production of whiteness as a queer norm and

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 the tacit acceptance of U.S. imperialist expansion.” In short, nationalist
debates on marriage and gays in the military come to replace any and all
principled objections to state violence and torture, exemplified by Guantà-
namo and Abu Ghraib, on the global stage. Examining the figure of the
suicide bomber as a “queer assemblage” resisting the demands of rational
subject formation—the sanctioned binaries of subject and object—in favor
of affective “temporal, spatial, and corporeal schisms,” Puar suggests that
the ontologies of such figures reorient a diasporic imaginary that queers
the habitus of the nation-state, its geopolitical mandates and imperialist
ambitions.
In “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family: Reviewing the Case
for Homosexual Asylum in the Context of Family Rights,” Chandan Reddy
extends Puar’s notion of “tolerance,” queer nationalism, and U.S. excep-
tionalisms in a different direction. Reddy explores how the figure of the
gay Pakistani asylum seeker works to challenge any contemporary under-
standing of the U.S. nation-state as the central guarantor of “freedom,
destigmatization, and normality” in the global context of human rights or
in the national arena of gay marriage political debate. Noting how recent
U.S. immigration policy has worked to produce a racialized and gendered
low-wage workforce precisely through the rubric of “family reunification”
and its idealization of the heteropatriarchal family unit, he investigates
how the state codes this migration as produced by the petitioning families
themselves. In the process, the state projects itself as “a benevolent actor
reuniting broken families or an overburdened and effete agent unable to
prevent immigrants’ manipulation of its (mandatory) democratic and fair
laws.” Either way, Reddy points out, the state gets to have its cake and eat
it, too: such policies satisfy capital’s need for an ever-expanding low-wage
workforce while exacerbating the conditions of noncitizen life through the
dismantling of economic and social resources for immigrant communities.
In an ever-shrinking civil society, Reddy concludes, family reunification
enables state power to “create heteropatriarchal relations for the recruit-
ment and socialization of labor while justifying the exclusion of immigrant
communities from state power through a liberal language of U.S. citizen-
ship as the guarantor of individual liberty and sexual freedom.”
Such guarantees to individual liberty and sexual freedom provide
little security for undocumented queers, as well as queers of color, in
urban metropoles, an issue Martin F. Manalansan takes up in his essay
“Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City.”
Manalansan explores the decimation of queer diasporic immigrant space
in Jackson Heights, Queens. He notes how the disappearance of Arab as
well as Muslim communities from neighborhood streets after the events
of 9/11 coincided with the simultaneous gentrification of Jackson Heights

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 as a “new exotic gay mecca” for Manhattanites to visit and to consume as
aestheticized commodity. Speculating that the (de)politicizing of nation-
alist politics about terrorism and race is in part shored up through the
neoliberal recoding of queer life and lifestyle as the freedom to travel, tour,
and consume safely in various settings and locales, Manalansan delineates
the urban processes by which global politics in a post-9/11 world come to
be embedded into the built environment. Neoliberalism short-circuits the
politics of queer diaspora precisely through the “stabilizing and normal-
izing of specific forms of capitalist inequalities” in the guise of economic
opportunity and similitude. In the process, queer diasporics, queers of
color, the feminized, the foreign, the colored, and the poor are left with the
short end of the political stick, as discourses of “personal responsibility”
serve to excuse state obligation toward collective, public caretaking.
If Manalansan focuses on how neoliberal and nationalist U.S. politics
post-9/11 eviscerate queer diasporic spaces in the urban metropole, Karen
Tongson’s attention to the suburban and rural periphery in her essay “JJ
Chinois’s Oriental Express, or, How a Suburban Heartthrob Seduced
Red America” relocates queer diasporic critique in the “heartland” of
America. Tongson notes how queerness as hip metrosexuality configures
these other areas as spaces of either departure or bypass. She examines
the performance art of Lynne Chan, a second-generation Asian American
artist, whose transgendered alter ego JJ Chinois denaturalizes a norma-
tive trajectory of queer development as the unidirectional migration from
suburban to urban space by relocating his heartland adventures in the
indeterminate zone of cyberspace. Through his domain name and virtual
space, Tongson tracks JJ Chinois’s exploits in “Red America,” observing
how this “dykeaspora” explodes “sentimental narratives” of longing inher-
ent in not just heteronormative but certain queer renderings of diaspora.

Queer Liberalism

Is “queer liberalism” no longer a paradox?

As numerous essays in this special issue point out, the emergence of
“queer liberalism” marks an unsettling though perhaps not entirely unex-
pected attempt to reconcile the radical political aspirations of queer studies’
subjectless critique with the contemporary liberal demands of a nationalist
gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subject petitioning for rights and recogni-
tion before the law. Indeed, our current historical moment is marked by
a particular coming together of economic and political spheres that form
the basis for liberal inclusion: the merging of a certain queer consumer
lifestyle first established in the 1980s (and now typified by Bravo’s Queer

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 Eye for the Straight Guy) with recent juridical protections for gay and les- While in prior
bian domesticity established by the landmark 2003 U.S. Supreme Court
decision Lawrence v. Texas decriminalizing gay sodomy as well as the Com- decades gays and
monwealth of Massachusett’s legalizing of same-sex marriage in the same
year. While in prior decades gays and lesbians sustained a radical critique lesbians sustained
of family and marriage, today many members of these groups have largely
a radical critique
abandoned such critical positions, demanding access to the nuclear family
and its associated rights, recognitions, and privileges from the state. That
of family and
such queer liberalism comes at a historical moment of extreme right-wing
nationalist politics should give us immediate pause. marriage, today
Given the negative referendum on gay marriage in the 2004 presiden-
tial election that witnessed George W. Bush’s “reelection” on a platform of many members
“moral values,” such rights, recognitions, and privileges might indeed be,
to borrow from Gayatri Spivak, something gays and lesbians “cannot not of these groups
want.” At the same time, queer intellectuals must untangle national forms
of homophobia from the Republicans’ wholesale economic assault on the have largely
poor. Doing so would help to clarify the meaning of anti–gay marriage
votes. For instance, Lisa Duggan’s recent work on the politics of gay mar-
abandoned such
riage suggests that most people in the United States are in favor of limited
critical positions.
domestic partnership rights. However, they oppose gay marriage because
traditional marriage is increasingly the only way to access federal welfare
benefits in the United States. What Duggan has aptly labeled “homonor-
mativity,” the gay and lesbian liberal platform advocating for gay marriage
while rhetorically remapping and recoding freedom and liberation in nar-
row terms of privacy, domesticity, and the unfettered ability to consume
in the “free” market, collaborates with a mainstreamed nationalist politics
of identity, entitlement, inclusion, and personal responsibility, while aban-
doning a more global critique of capitalist exploitation and domination,
state violence and expansion, and religious fundamentalisms and hate.9
The turning away from a sustained examination of the vast inequali-
ties in civil society and commercial life that mark the paradoxes of queer
liberalism find an unwitting accomplice in certain strands of contemporary
queer studies. As numerous essays in this special issue emphasize, the
problems of political economy cannot be abstracted away from the racial,
gendered, and sexual hierarchies of the nation-state but must in fact be
understood as operating in and through them. Yet the current return
to an unapologetic and rapacious white masculine heteropatriarchy in a
putatively “postidentity” and “postracial” U.S. nation-state finds some
odd bedfellows in mainstream queer studies.
For instance, both Hiram Perez and Judith Halberstam take the occa-
sion of an international “Gay Shame” conference at the University of
Michigan in March 2003 to analyze how queer studies has evolved over

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 the last fifteen years to produce, and to reproduce, its own canonical set
of proper subjects and objects, as well as intellectual methods and institu-
tional spaces. In “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Perez
resists queer liberalism’s demand for the “active untroubling” of race in
queer studies. He notes that the conference occurred within a week of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq and in the midst of the Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and
Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) affirmative action cases involving the University
of Michigan, yet it was a conference that included only one queer person
of color out of forty invited participants. Perez speculates that our con-
servative historical moment finds an unfortunate parallel in the attempts
to entrench a “transparent white subject” at the heart of queer studies:
“Queer theorists who can invoke that transparent subject, and choose to
do so,” Perez writes, “reap the dividends of whiteness.” “Brown” is what
needs to be exploited and maintained for a weak multiculturalism to inhere,
the “fixity” of race providing the ground for queer theory’s performative
sexuality, the ground against which the figure of complex (white) gay male
sexuality and shame unfolded. “The chronic failure of establishmentarian
queer theory to revisit its fundamental collusions with American liberal-
ism,” Perez concludes, “consolidates indivisibilities—white, patriarchal,
heteronormative—contrary to any professed anti-identity.”
Like Perez, Halberstam recognizes the political and intellectual prom-
ises of queer studies as yet unfulfilled to the extent that queer too quickly
collapses back into “gay and lesbian” and, more often than not, a “pos-
sessive individualism” that simply connotes “gay,” “white,” and “male.”
In “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” Halberstam contends that the
future of queer studies “depends absolutely on moving away from white
gay male identity politics and learning from the radical critiques offered by
a younger generation of queer scholars who draw their intellectual inspira-
tion from feminism and ethnic studies rather than white queer studies.”
Observing that feminism and queer of color critique offer a rich critical
vocabulary for female and racialized subjects to respond to the politics of
shame and neoliberal claims to rights, Halberstam notes that “the only
people really lacking a politically urgent language with which to describe
and counter shame are gay white men.” Indeed, it is gay white male shame,
Halberstam concludes, “that has proposed ‘pride’ as the appropriate rem-
edy and that focuses its libidinal and other energies on simply rebuilding
the self that shame dismantled rather than taking apart the social processes
that project shame onto queer subjects in the first place.”
Much of queer theory nowadays sounds like a metanarrative about
the domestic affairs of white homosexuals. Surely, queer studies prom-
ises more than a history of gay men, a sociology of gay male sex clubs, an
anthropology of gay male tourism, a survey of gay male aesthetics. The

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 emergence of queer liberalism challenges us to reconsider some of the
canonical ideas of the field—shame and intimacy, normal and antinormal,
publics and counterpublics—for their contemporary liberal deployments.
As crucial as these intellectual paradigms have been to the establishment
of queer studies, it is important to insist on their continuing reevaluation
in both their historical applications and their contemporary contexts. The
discourse of publics and counterpublics, for instance, traces itself to a
Habermasian analysis of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere and
the rise of liberal society in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought.
The homogeneity of Habermas’s public sphere—its assumptions of an
abstract citizen-subject who inhabits and moves with ease through civil
society—reprises the universalizing tendencies of “gay shame” as well as
progress narratives of Western modernity and development that postcolo-
nial, feminist, and critical race studies have effectively deconstructed.
The dialectic of public and counterpublic loses any critical edge to
account for “perverse” modernities, those queer bodies and knowledges
that exist outside the boundaries of sanctioned time and space, legal status,
citizen-subjecthood, and liberal humanism. In this regard, Nayan Shah’s
contribution, “Policing Privacy, Migrants, and the Limits of Freedom,”
rethinks the liberation narrative of Lawrence v. Texas in the context of early-
twentieth-century sodomy cases involving racialized migrant workers in
the rural West. Shah contends that, historically, “sexual identity is not
the determining factor in prosecuting sodomy, but, rather, differentials of
class, age, and race shape the policing that leads to sodomy and public mor-
als arrests.” Finding a contemporary parallel in the mixed-race “couple”
of John Lawrence (who is white) and Tyrone Garner (who is black), peti-
tioners in the Lawrence v. Texas case, Shah asks where and for whom does
privacy, mobility, and freedom of intimate contact apply historically and
legally. He observes that the gay male subject assumed by contemporary
queer theorists in public-counterpublic debates “has both free access to
participate in the public world of the intimate and may also retreat to a
private realm of intimacy.” In turn, Shah posits Samuel Delany’s queer
ethnography of the radical transformation of Times Square beginning
in the mid-1980s as situating “inequality and interclass and interethnic
contact at the center of his analysis of public sex and sexual publics.”10
Tackling the liberatory assumptions of Lawrence v. Texas from another
angle, Teemu Ruskola’s “Gay Rights versus Queer Theory: What Is Left
of Sodomy after Lawrence v. Texas?” asks to “what extent are commit-
ments to queerness and liberal rights compatible?” Noting how Lawrence
v. Texas anxiously inscribes a discourse of “dignity” and “respect” to gay
and lesbian relationships rather than to gay and lesbian sex, Ruskola insists
that an “intimate personal relationship should not be a requirement for

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 having a constitutionally protected sex life.” The insistent analogizing
of homosexual intimacy to heterosexual marriage in Justice Kennedy’s
majority decision in Lawrence v. Texas belies the resilience of compulsory
heterosexuality in its “new, second-generation form.” Gay liberation and
rights do not connote “freedom,” however useful or politically necessary
they might be. Instead, Lawrence v. Texas leaves queer subjects in an under-
regulated and nebulous space between “criminalization and legitimization
through marriage.”
Both Michael Cobb’s and Janet R. Jakobsen’s essays round out the
issue by exploring queer liberation in the context of religion and regu-
lation. In “Uncivil Wrongs: Race, Religion, Hate, and Incest in Queer
Politics,” Cobb investigates religious hate speech as the “limits of liberal-
ism.” Exploring the various religious arguments against homosexuality
as the “horror of incest” and the “decline of the traditional, heterosexual
family,” he observes that the alignment of homosexuality with “like race”
analogies provides a political opportunity to expose the liberal limits of
tolerance and free speech.
Extending Cobb’s insights, Jakobsen’s essay, “Sex + Freedom = Regu-
lation: Why?” offers a careful genealogy of “freedom” in relation to the
institution of marriage. Jakobsen traces how the Protestant Reformation
linked the idea of individual freedom to the institution of marriage. “Mar-
riage, then, like the market,” she writes, “is part of the freedom from the
church that marks the beginning of modernity.” Yet it would be foolish to
think that in the capitalist marketplace freedom is the antithesis of sexual
regulation and that the marketplace is “value-free.” The incitement to
matrimony and reproductive sexuality—the option to wed a partner of
one’s own “choosing”—becomes the only expression of sexual freedom in
the secular age and is thus “constitutive of freedom as we know it.” In the
era of queer liberalism, it would be a mistake to believe that, since sexual
regulation seems to be based in religious intolerance and hate, the answer
would be to defend secular freedom. “Our problem,” Jakobsen concludes,
“is as much secular freedom as it is religious regulation.” That gay iden-
tity, which starts with freedom from the family, has led us so inexorably
and vehemently back to the institution of same-sex marriage ironically
symptomizes this confusion. It is through marriage that gay people fully
become individuals, and this discourse of individualism is precisely the
point at which sexual regulation and gay “liberation” meet.

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 Where Now? Our attention

In her closing comments at the “Gay Shame” conference at the University to queer
of Michigan, Gayle Rubin suggested that the event’s participants might
shift for a moment their attentions from “gay shame” to “gay humility.” epistemology,
In an age of queer liberalism, Rubin’s call for “gay humility” serves as
queer diasporas,
heuristic device for a return to what a desirably queer world might look
like. In our putatively “postidentity” and “postracial” age such a turn is
and queer
urgent. In this regard, our attention to queer epistemology, queer dias-
poras, and queer liberalism might be considered one modest attempt to liberalism might
frame queer studies more insistently and productively within a politics of
epistemological humility. be considered
Such a politics must also recognize that much of contemporary queer
scholarship emerges from U.S. institutions and is largely written in English. one modest
This fact indicates a problematic dynamic between U.S. scholars whose
work in queer studies is read in numerous sites around the world. Scholars attempt to frame
writing in other languages and from other political and cultural perspec-
tives read but are not, in turn, read. These uneven exchanges replicate in
queer studies
uncomfortable ways the rise and consolidation of U.S. empire, as well as
more insistently
the insistent positing of a U.S. nationalist identity and political agenda
globally. We propose epistemological humility as one form of knowledge and productively
production that recognizes these dangers.
From a similar perspective, and in regard to a virulent post–9/11 U.S. within a politics
militarism that dominates contemporary politics, Judith Butler observes
that the “very fact that we live with others whose values are not the same of epistemological
as our own, or who set a limit to what we can know, or who are opaque to
us, or who are strange, or are partially understood, that just means we live humility.
with a kind of humility.”11 Butler suggests that that to take responsibility
in democratic polity does not mean to take responsibility for “the entirety
of the world” but to place ourselves “in a vividly de-centered way” in a
world marked by the differences of others. An ethical attachment to oth-
ers insists that we cannot be the center of the world or act unilaterally on
its behalf. It demands a world in which we must sometimes relinquish not
only our epistemological but also our political certitude. Suffice it to say
that to appreciate “what’s queer about queer studies now” is to embrace
such a critical perspective and to honor such an ethics of humility.

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 Notes

For their thoughtful feedback and comments, we would like to thank Brent Edwards,
Katherine Franke, Janet R. Jakobsen, David Kazanjian, Ann Pellegrini, Teemu Rus-
kola, Josie Saldaña, and Leti Volpp, as well as the Social Text collective.

1. See, for instance, Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
(New York: New York University Press, 1999); David L. Eng, Racial Castration:
Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Cri-
tique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Phillip Brian Harper,
Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother
for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Desire and South
Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Martin F.
Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color
and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
José Quiroga, Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America (New York:
New York University Press, 2000); Robert Reid-Pharr, Black Gay Man: Essays
(New York: New York University Press, 2001); Juana Maria Rodriguez, Queer
Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: New York University
Press, 2003); and Mary Pat Brady, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana
Literature and the Urgency of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
2. Judith Butler, “Critically Queer,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230.
3. Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and
Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), xxvi.
4. In his book Aberrations in Black, for instance, Ferguson explores how both
Marxist and liberal theories of social power implicitly configure subject formation
through their reliance on an “organic” distinction between adult heterosexual-
ity and “immature” and “deviant” forces of aberrant sexual practices. It is on
the terrain of heteropatriarchy that these seemingly divergent theories of social
power in fact converge. “Put plainly,” Ferguson writes, “racialization has helped
to articulate heteropatriarchy as universal” (6).
5. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on
Effeminate Boys,” Social Text, no. 29 (1991): 18–27.
6. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Scattered Speculations on the Theory
of Value,” in her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge,
1988), 154–75.
7. Phillip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish
Rosen, “Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender: An Introduction,”
Social Text, nos. 52/53 (1997): 1.
8. David L. Eng, “Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas,” Social
Text, no. 76 (2003): 4.
9. See Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics,
and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003).

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 10. Ground-level sites of queer belonging are theory-generating spaces. Thus
we think of the collective political organizing of groups like the Audre Lorde
Project and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association in New York City as
offering us valuable knowledge that queer intimacy in a diasporic setting may have
considerable theoretical heft.
11. European Graduate School Faculty, “Judith Butler: Quotes,” www.egs
.edu/faculty/butler-resources.html.

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