At one point in my life as a scholar of queer culture and theory, I thought the point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing social possibilities. On this model, it seemed that truly queer queers would dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics altogether (and indeed, there is one wing of queer theory that does privilege this kind of negating work). But this version of âqueeringâ the social text strikes me as somewhat akin to Eve Sedgwickâs notion of paranoid criticism: itâs about having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more evolved that oneâs context. Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. For while queer antiformalism appeals to me on an intellectual level, I find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough-longing for form that turns us backward to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal. This is the essence of what I think Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we canât know in advance, but only retrospectively if even then, what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around us and stacking it in idiosyncratic piles ânot necessarily like any prexisting whole,â though composed of what preexists. For queer scholars and activists, this culture debris includes our incomplete, partial, or otherwise failed transformations of the social field⊠But perhaps that is a state to enjoy, rather than just mourn.
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