And Berlant knew how that rupture would go. Their political timing was eerie, perfect: they gave us a story of the “good life” and how it traps us, showed us how we had arrived at that moment in late 2011, after a historical precipice that had birthed the Occupy movement, when people, it seemed, had had enough. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant gave us a theory of how we attach to and protect things we want that are also harmful to us-objects of love, aspiration, and desire.
On the Inconvenience of Other People redescribes discomfort, interpersonal friction, and dependency as potentially productive states-not merely annoying ones-and as new modes that might help us do more than merely survive, to be inconvenient to the reproduction of that which ails us. For decades, they offered a theory of the group in its smallest incarnations-the work of intimates-that scaled back up to the nation and the globe. Berlant’s work, in a way, opens onto crossings such as these and is present in my digression about them. Some of these people, on both coasts, were Berlant’s friends, but I never met Berlant personally or professionally or where those networks cross. Berlant, the literary scholar of national sentiment, affect, the ordinary crisis, and neoliberalism, published Cruel Optimism the month before protesters were pushed from Zuccotti Park, and just three months before my friends would be arrested outside of the Oakland Y or escape arrest by running through the adjacent hospital. Inconvenience serves as a sequel of sorts to Cruel Optimism (2011), the work that guaranteed Berlant’s fame beyond the academy. ” Berlant’s new book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, arriving just a little over a year after their death, is a study in just that. In Lauren Berlant’s words, heuristics don’t start revolutions, but “they do spark blocks that are inconvenient to a thing’s reproduction. Queer theory empowers novel readings of the world, and worldly readings of the novel, opening up new ways of viewing life and text.THE PUNCH LINE OF ACADEMIC THEORY IS A REDESCRIPTION OF THE THING WE ALREADY KNOW, so that we might know it once more, with feeling.
The critiques can be applied to help deconstruct naturalized epistemic frameworks around topics notably including, language, gender, sexuality, history, the subject, universality, the environment, animals, borders, space, time, norms, ideals, reproduction, utopia, love, the home, the nation, and power. Queer theory embraces a multidisciplinary and diverse set of influences, methodologies, questions, and formats. Textual or discursive construction of knowledge is a key theoretical approach of queer theory with important implications for literature. As feminist epistemology asks whose knowledge matters and who creates knowledge, queer theory asks whether knowledge matters and whether naturalized knowledge is constructed. Queer theory attends to both the rhetorical power of language and the broader structures of knowledge formulation. Subsequent work engages topics such as temporality, ecology, geography, and diaspora through the analysis of culture and politics, but also literature, film, music, and other media. The activist roots of queer theory in the 1969 Stonewall Riots places drag, trans issues, class, race, violence, gender, and sexuality at the heart of queer theorizing. Beyond reading for queer characters and desires in texts, queer theory is a tool for seeing below the superficial, and supporting unconventional readings that deconstruct normative assumptions. The analytical tools queer theory provides as a mode of close reading and critique makes it a relevant contemporary approach to literary theory. Queer theory describes a network of critiques emerging from a legacy of activism and looking ahead to utopian futures.
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