Post-Queer Politics

212 Pages·2016·1.656 MB·English

by  David V. Ruffolo

POST-QUEER POLITICS
Queer Interventions
Series editor:
University of Limerick, Ireland
and Michael O’Rourke
Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish
innovative, experimental and theoretically engaged work in the burgeoning field of
queer studies.
The aim of the series is to interrogate, develop and challenge queer theory, publishing
queer work which intersects with other theoretical schools and is accessible whilst
valuing difficulty; empirical work which is metatheoretical in focus; ethical and political
projects and most importantly work which is self-reflexive about methodological and
geographical location.
The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of
essays by new and established scholars. The editors intend the series to promote and
maintain high scholarly standards of research and to be attentive to queer theory’s
shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. They aim to encourage independence,
creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and to recreate it as
something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen.
Titles in this series:
Queering the Non/Human
Edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7128-2
Cinesexuality
Patricia MacCormack
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7175-6
Jewish/Christian/Queer
Edited by Frederick Roden
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7375-0
Critical Intersex
Edited by Morgan Holmes
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7311-8
Queer Movie Medievalisms
Edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7592-1
Post-Queer Politics
DAVID V. RUFFOLO
University of Toronto, Canada
© David V. Ruffolo 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
David V. Ruffolo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East Suite 420
Union Road 101 Cherry Street
Farnham Burlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405
England USA
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ruffolo, David.
Post-queer politics. -- (Queer interventions)
1. Sociology--Philosophy.
I. Title II. Series
301'.01-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ruffolo, David.
Post-queer politics / by David Ruffolo.
p. cm. -- (Queer interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7546-7675-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-7676-8 (ebook)
1. Gay men--Political activity. 2. Lesbians--Political activity. 3. Gay
rights. 4. Queer theory. 5. Gay and lesbian studies. I. Title.
HQ76.R183 2009
306.76'601--dc22
2009023289
ISBN 9780754676751 (hbk)
ISBN 9780754676768 (ebk.V)
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface TwO (Theory without Organs) ix
Acknowledgments xv
PLATEAU 1 Post-Queer Mappings 1
“What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” 1
Nomadic Becomings 5
Discursive Inscriptions: From Humans to Subjects 8
Genealogically Queer: Governmentality, Panopticism, Confessions 12
Performative Materializatons 17
Matrix of Un/Intelligibility 23
Dragging Identities 25
Post-Queering Queer 27
The Plateaus 32
PLATEAU 2 A Critical Politics of Becoming 39
Schizoanalytic Assemblages 39
Desiring-Production 43
Rhizomatic Multiplicities 45
Deterritorialized Becomings 48
Body without Organs 50
Not So Happily Ever After-Queer 55
PLATEAU 3 Dialogic Creativities 59
“The Problem of Agency in Foucault” 59
A Problem with Language 61
Dialogism, Speech Genres, and Utterances 65
The Heteroglossia of Political Theorizations 69
Post-Queer Quotes 75
Carnival Regenerations 77
Now That’s Grotesque 81
Creative Potentialities 85
POST-QUEER POLITICS
PLATEAU 4 The Materialities of Life Itself 87
Disciplining Life 87
From Discipline to Control: What Can Bodies Do? 89
From Individual Production to Dividual Metaproduction 95
The Underbelly 97
What’s so Radical about a Plural Democracy? 100
Merely Subjective 107
Deterritorializing Democracy 112
Becoming Radically Nomadic 115
Agency as Schizo 119
PLATEAU 5 Schizo-Academia 123
Disciplining the Academy 123
Scholarly Performatives 125
Academic Becomings 127
Schizo-Academia 129
Masochistic Intensifications 131
Managing and Evaluating through Differential Accumulation 136
Academic Carnivals 145
Immanent Processes 149
PLATEAU 6 Biovirtualities 151
Potentialities versus Possibilities 151
Knowledge Societies 157
Biotechnological Innovations 159
Biosecurity and Biovalue: Producing New Life Forms 162
PLATEAU 7 Involutionary Matters 167
Bibliography 175
Index 185
vi
This project is dedicated to all the creative potentialities of equitable
and social justice virtualities that have yet to be actualized.
This page has been left blank intentionally
Series Editors’ Preface
TwO (Theory without Organs)
David V. Ruffolo’s Post-Queer Politics puts queer studies and queer theory on the
line. The body of queer studies (the institutionalised body of knowledges which
have sedimented queer theory, stultifying it, often empting out its potential) is
he tells us ‘stagnant’, ‘dormant’, ‘solidified’, ‘stale’. Queer has reached its ‘peak’,
reached the end, as it were, of the line. But Ruffolo’s book disrupts this gloomy
narrative by seeking to re-fluidify queer studies, to re-invent a queer theory
with the capacity to intervene, disrupt, and produce (the new, the unforeseen).
Rather than suggesting or glorying in the ‘end of queer’ Ruffolo seeks instead
to re-draw the maps, to bring about new lines of flight, and to effect a ‘potential
deterritorialisation of queer as we know it today’. As Alain Badiou says in
his Handbook of Inaesthetics ‘we want a theatre of capacity, not of incapacity’
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 75) and what we get in Post-Queer
Politics is a theatre for the production of intensive politics, a smooth space where
the potentialities of life can be renegotiated. Ruffolo’s schizoanalytic strategy
is one of reading through rather than rejecting, one of anticipation rather than
paranoia. In the face of the increasing disciplining of all sorts of bodies (of
theoretical work, of knowledge, of thought) he energetically revivifies queer
studies.
The post- of the title is interruptive, anticipatory and Jasbir Puar advocates
a similar strategy: ‘A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression
of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I
advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of ‘politics of the open
end’, of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking
risks rather than guarding against them” (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, xx). We are, the author riskily
tells us, post-subjectivity, post-discursivity, post-identity, post-representation.
This does not mean, nor should it, that we are after subjectivity, or discourse,
or identity. Ruffolo finds such binary thinking unproductive and invents a
new language which is more fructive, less about the after and more about the
beside, the peri- rather than the post- understood as after, assemblage rather than
gridlock. By fusing Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Mikhail Bakhtin (and
implicitly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s later Deleuzian inspired work on affect and
periperformativity) he is able to emphasise crowding, besideness and dialogical
connection. This move has massive ramifications for queer studies and queer
theory, and as Ruffolo himself points out, for theory in general. The post-queering