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Rodness 10
Imagining A Non-Queer Theory: Non-Philosophy and the Crisis In Queer Theory
Roshaya Rodness
The transformation in our understanding of non-normative gender and sexuality that came to be called
“queer” – twenty years ago, at the height of the AIDS pandemic in North America – remains a contested
terrain in humanities scholarship, in large part because “queer” describes a fluid and dissenting way of
being in the world. Queerness is—or at least it seemed – intrinsically resistant to definition… and
happily so. My dissertation explores what sorts of pressures now threaten to stabilize queer life. Lee
Edelman argues that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (17). And yet
what began as a robust critique of both identity politics and conventional ways of practicing theory has
been compromised, I argue, by the fate of queer theory in the academy, where it has become one
discipline among many and where queer politics has primarily become a matter of seeking civil rights.
Yet leading queer activist David Halperin claims that “if queer theory is going to have the sort of future
worth cherishing, we will have to find ways of renewing its radical potential … reinventing its capacity
to startle, to surprise” (343). My dissertation, Imagining A Non-Queer Theory: Non-Philosophy and the
Crisis In Queer Theory, responds to that call to make queer politics and queer theory startle and surprise
again. At this critical juncture, although the project of securing civil rights remains exceptionally
important, it obscures other crucial questions that are pertinent to queer life, including resistance to the
very idea that queers should be more normatively “civil” and that queer politics is reducible to rights
rather than an affirmation of new forms of social justice, new ways of imagining social organization, and
what it means to be with others and recognize otherness. A case in point is the surge in attention afforded
to gay marriage. After Walter Benn Michaels, I argue that the gay marriage “debate” is driven by a
desire to make queer people more widely intelligible, i.e., to become individuals who are imagined to be
like and to want the same things as more normatively construed individuals. But queer life is predicated
on the affirmation of differences; my dissertation explores the ways in which that affirmation has been
qualified by an insistence on familiarizing similarities. The future of queer theory, I suggest, must also
be a return to the radical originating principles that renew its focus on difference and unintelligibility,
and its commitment to social and institutional critique that throws into question the very idea that politics
is only the politics of the autonomous liberal subject. My dissertation suggests that while queer theory
has expanded into productive new territory (such as “trans studies”) since the 1990s, the methodology
that we have put to use to speak about the field and about queerness has remained focused on
autonomous subjectivity, the very seat of identity politics. In other words, the object of queer theory has
continued to be an identifiable subject in which “gender” and “sexuality” become the terms that compel
queer life to account for itself, i.e. as terms that make the subject legible to others. I argue that if queer
theory’s political efficacy depends on its paradoxical and productive resistance to definition, we need to
incorporate a new methodology that challenges conventional ways of understanding what it means to be
an embodied and desirous individual and what it means to forge resistant communities in which the
legibly gendered and sexualized individual is not necessarily the root of the social body. My thesis does
not posit a queer subject “beyond” gender and sexuality, but rather a way of being in the world in which
these terms possess much less definitional power than they have hitherto often been granted.
To meet the challenges that queer theory poses to definition, identity, and tradition, my thesis
embraces what is called “non-philosophy.” Developed by the French philosopher, François Laruelle,
non-philosophy is not a negative philosophy, but the suspension of a wide-spread mode of
conceptualizing work in critical theory that posits a set of determining forces which constitute
individuals as such, i.e. thinking which enables our understanding of an identifiable subject made legible
through the forces of gender and sexuality. As a method founded on the questioning and ultimate
suspension of conventional practices in philosophy, non-philosophy offers queer theory an avenue for
recuperating its radical principles in the spirit of critical intervention and the questioning of intellectual
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tradition.
Chapter One situates my thesis within the philosophical discourse of non-philosophy. Nonphilosophy posits a radical immanence of life; that is, a world in which life is not subjected to
determining forces and exists in absolute presence. To sustain this radical immanence, non-philosophy
unseats the authority of philosophy itself. It claims that philosophies, like the things they study, are
empirical data rather than privileged explanatory paradigms separate from their objects of study. As a
result, non-philosophy works to unseat the privilege of theories that claim to hold authority over the
things they study. In other words, a philosophy of ethics would exist alongside ethics, not over or above
ethics. This has tremendous potential for queer political life, where liberal “progressive” discourses of
queer life implicitly mark their authority to define it. This brings us to queer theory, which in its most
advanced forms still claims authority over its subjects, and where the claim that it cannot define or
identify them works to hide its self-authorization to define. The future of queer theory, in other words,
lies in its capacity to unseat its own authority. Queer theory will not become irrelevant by any means;
rather, it will recognize that it, too, holds no privileged position over queerness and that queerness is not
answerable to it, just like it is not answerable to the scientific theories that attempt to diagnose sexual
orientation or gender identity. To date, and mostly in Europe, non-philosophy has made significant
inroads in scholarship about nature, science, and art; my project, however, brings Laruelle’s insights to
bear on a new subject, namely queer life. I argue that because subjects are imagined by the discourses
that study them, we need to suspend the authoritative position of queer theory itself in order to realize the
challenge it poses to subjectivity. The inherently oppositional language of a “non” philosophy helps us
consider how queer life is at odds with subjectivity, a way of living that is very difficult to discuss using
methodologies that have a stake in queer theory.
Chapter Two will put my non-queer theory into action by looking at the transformations in the
meaning of queer life as it has changed through the AIDS pandemic. Because irrational fears about
HIV/AIDS continue to be expressed in homophobic terms in the West, AIDS cultural theorists continue
to challenge discourses that link the virus with an essential queer identity (i.e, the conception of the virus
as a “gay disease”) while recognizing its undeniable effect on queer communities. AIDS activist Paula
Treichler writes that the virus’s association with gay male sex in the early 1980s led to the view that a
risk factor for acquiring HIV was “being a particular kind of person rather than doing particular things”
(20). Yet my work will argue that even the most advanced theorists continue to posit a politics centred
on the autonomous liberal subject, or the unassailable locus of rationality and rights. While queer
critiques of AIDS discourses have rightly focused on disassociating the pandemic from subjects
identified through gender and sexuality, a non-philosophical queer critique (or non-queer theory)
imagines a politics and ethics of AIDS that does not re-inscribe knowable subjects, in this case the
subjects of illness. In other words, the queerness of the AIDS pandemic is its radical indifference to the
very idea of a recognizable or legible subject, and that includes the subject of gender and sexuality.
Chapter Three shifts its focus to a more immediate instance of queer identity politics by looking
at queer resistance to gay marriage. I argue that those who are critical of the movement are not opposed
to more rights for queer people but are committed to a mode of social justice that requires not only more
legislation but also a fundamental reconceptualization of the political and who consider the discourse of
rights and identity to be a foundational mode of political organization. In 2010, for instance, when
District Judge Vaughn Walker presided over Perry v. Brown to reverse California’s voter-approved
retraction of the legalization of gay marriage (Proposition 8), he heard expert testimony on the nature of
sexual orientation to support the reinstitution of gay marriage. The experts claimed that sexual
orientation is immutable, or is not subject to change. This assertion, I argue, excludes many important
ways of being and coming to be queer and works to determine marriage and essentialism (the idea that
our identities are inborn and fixed) as the terms through which we negotiate queer politics. Nonphilosophy gives us a vocabulary to unseat the assumptions of such liberal “progressive” discourses and
recognize that we can never know the “subjects” of politics.
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I am currently in my second year of the PhD program in English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University. My thesis supervisor, David L. Clark, is a well-known critical theorist with an
extensive background in queer theory. His engagement with continental philosophy and his work on the
cultural history of AIDS makes him the ideal supervisor for this project.
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