Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You

Robyn Wiegman

Cultural Critique, Number 95, Winter 2017, pp. 219-243 (Review)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663849

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SEX AND NEGATIVITY; OR, WHAT QUEER
THEORY HAS FOR YOU
SEX, OR THE UNBEARABLE BY LAUREN BERLANT AND LEE EDELMAN
Duke University Press, 2014

Robyn
Robert
Wiegman
Alford

F or readers uninitiated into the critical concerns of queer theory,

the prospect of talking about sex might herald a thrilling departure
from the conventions of everyday sexual and gender norms. Weird,
wild, naughty, depraved: the adjectives proliferate against a back-
ground drawn in muted tones (straight, cis, domestic, uneventful, rou-
tine). But the stories that queer theory has learned to tell about the sex
we might call its own are not always perversely pleasing. The show-
stopping example is Leo Bersani’s opening line in “Is the Rectum a
Grave?”: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it”
(1987, 197). To elaborate what is now his most famous sentence, Bersani
offers the word “aversion” to describe the anxiety-­inducing arena of
self-­decomposure that sexual activities both beget and represent (198).
His essay cites this aversion as the impulse not only of malignant
homophobia, but also of various feminist and gay projects that seek
to redeem fucking for a higher calling, routinely named “politics.”
Often read as one of queer theory’s foundational texts, Bersani’s 1987
essay raged against the conditions of its present by favoring the “anti-
communal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” implications of
sex at a time when AIDS was being used to justify dominant cultural
fantasies of gay genocide (215). His rejection of any attempt to redeem
sex for the purpose of rehabilitating the cultural reputation of sex-
ual minorities went hand in hand with evolving queer critiques of the
aspirational identity politics of gay and lesbian liberation, but it also
pushed hard against the “redemptive reinvention of sex” that he saw at
work across the Left critical spectrum (215). For Bersani, this redemp-
tive impulse united such contentious perspectives as the censorious

Cultural Critique 95—Winter 2017—Copyright 2017 Regents of the University of Minnesota

220 R O BY N W I E G MA N

antipornography campaigns of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine Mac-

Kinnon with arguments for “benign sexual variation” offered by their
lesbian sadomasochist foes Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia (Rubin, 278).
Even the figure that queer theory has come to cite more often than any
other was implicated in Bersani’s critique, as the theoretical transgres-
sions wrought by Michel Foucault’s famous refusal of sex/desire in
the name of bodies and pleasures harbored, in Bersani’s terms, a “hid-
den agreement about sexuality as being, in its essence, less disturbing,
less socially abrasive, less violent, more respectful of ‘personhood’ than
it has been” (1987, 215).
Today, Bersani is read as the inaugural voice of what is now called
“the antisocial thesis” in queer theory. Along with his book Homos
(1995), “Is the Rectum a Grave?” offered a psychoanalytic approach to
subjectivity that understood the subject as self-­divided and that pos-
ited sexuality as a powerful force for tracking the modern subject’s un-
doing. Importantly, Bersani’s understanding of sexuality broke with
theories of repression, whether deployed in the population discourses
of the social sciences to account for the workings of power or cast
in the psychic terms of a largely humanist tradition that emphasized
freedom by way of the unfettered desire of the individual. By con-
ceiving of sexuality as resistant to the imperative to socialize our con-
ception of it, Bersani put on the emerging agenda of queer theory a
question it continues to debate today: is sexuality primarily a form of
social solidification, an arena if not agency of dependence, collectivity,
and complex relationality; or is it the locus of the social’s disarray, the
place where the very concept of “the social,” along with the composi-
tion of the subjects who would constitute it, fall prey to the fictions
of coherence that otherwise sustain them?1 Queer theory has no sin-
gular answer to this question. Indeed, even the opposition it poses
has been under revision, as scholars who reject Bersani’s focus on self-­
shattering nonetheless write the dissolution of the social as we have
known it as the precondition of queer subjectivity and collectivity alike,
thereby reformulating negativity in more affirmative, if not utopian,
terms. Think Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) as it
confronts and critiques Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and
the Death Drive (2004). For this reason, it is important to say that the
antisocial thesis is not “a” thesis. It is an arena of interpretative battle,
one whose incredible hostilities—­in print, at conferences, and in the
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 221

academic mode of production called gossip—­arise in part because

negativity is queer theory’s most important contemporary idiom, if
not its defining sensorium. It is thus a locus of intense attachment,
self-­definition, and professional capital at once.
In what follows, I defend this characterization of the field by
attending to the arguments we find in the latest work that takes nega-
tivity as its queer theoretical north star, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edel-
man’s collaboration, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014). Cast in its preface as
“a reframing of the antisocial thesis,” the book positions itself against
what Berlant and Edelman describe as a widespread misunderstand-
ing of negativity’s critical and political capacity (xii–­xiii). For them,
“negativity signifies a resistance to or undoing of the stabilizing frame-
works of coherence imposed on thought and lived experience” (xii).
As such, it is not a negation of the social but an “intrinsic” part of it,
which makes negativity a crucial resource for social theory, not its
“quietistic, apolitical, nihilist, [or] defeatist” foe (xiii, xii). To pursue
their claim, the authors offer a preface, three main chapters, and two
separately penned afterwords, each responding to the self-­parodying
question, “How was it for you?” (119). While the preface is written in
the plural, as a collaborative “we,” the main chapters unfold as a dia-
logue, making the volume, in Berlant and Edelman’s words, “an exper-
iment in the forms of theoretical production” (ix). This experiment is
aimed at countering “the privilege of the monograph” by prioritizing
the everyday rhythms of conversation where “interruption, shifts in
perspective, metonymic displacements, and the giving up of control”
are routine (x). In its formal disposition, then, dialogue is intended to
perform at the level of the text what the authors take negativity to mean
for social and psychic life: the disorientation, if not the dissolution, of
the subject’s authoritative self-­knowing, or what they call its “nonsov-
ereignty” (ix). As they put it, “Dialogue commits us to grappling with
negativity, nonsovereignty, and social relation not only as abstract con-
cepts but also as the substance and condition of our responses—­and
our responsibilities—­to one another” (ix).
The conversations that ensue—­part theoretical debate, part close
reading of various cultural objects—­are most interesting for the com-
plex and contradictory sociality they perform as the authors strug-
gle to capture the promise they find in dialogue’s form. The first two
chapters—­“Sex without Optimism” and “What Survives”—­originated
222 R O BY N W I E G MA N

in conference presentations and retain the rhetorical orientation typi-

cal of the conference venue.2 “Lauren’s work directs our attention,”
Edelman tells the audience of the first chapter, to “the various ways
of inhabiting an environment or of being in the world,” while “I tend
to focus on the . . . antagonism inherent in social forms” (10, 11). In
chapter two, first presented at an MLA memorial panel on the work
of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Berlant continues in a similar descriptive
vein, recounting the discussions that fed their collaboration: “Lee and
I muddled for months over how to structure this . . . talk, this elegy,
this conversation, this literature review, this tribute, this convoluted
apostrophe” (35). In “Living with Negativity,” the third and only chap-
ter composed expressly for the volume, the authors finally cease nar-
rating their conversations and begin more fully to have one. The power
of this turn is demonstrated best by the shift in address that accom-
panies it, which moves their engagement from the third person to
the more pointed dialogic “you” (74). “Were I to take on your view,”
Berlant says in the book’s most tense passage, “it would feel as if
I’d withdrawn from the ethics of the conversation,” to which Edelman
responds, “Having you adopt ‘my view’ and so end the movement of
our conversation has never been my goal. . . . But I’d love to be per-
suaded by you” (111, 114–­115). In the end, neither Berlant nor Edel-
man appears persuaded by the other. Berlant’s negativity, in Edelman’s
view, harbors an unacknowledged reparative function, given its affili-
ation with the rhetorics of progressive political transformation, while
Berlant reads Edelman’s repeated negation of such axiomatic utility
as the kind of structuralist commitment her work has long condemned.
If these frustrations echo familiar contestations between Lacanian psy-
choanalysis and the intersectional commitments of much of the work
in cultural studies, their repetition in Sex, or the Unbearable invites fur-
ther reflection on the book’s attempt to shift the critical orientation and
conversational tenor of queer theory’s most enduring debate.
To that end, this extended review situates Sex, or the Unbearable
in a broader perspective than the one it offers, paying special atten-
tion to the book’s largely unspoken relation to the current institutional
and intellectual contours of queer theoretical practice. This approach
is not idiosyncratic, as Sex, or the Unbearable is more than a collabora-
tive work authored by two of the most prominent figures in queer
theory today. It is the first imprint of the new Duke University Press
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 223

series Theory Q, and hence a statement, no matter how implicit, of

the series’s assessment of the scholarly priorities and theoretical ori-
entations of the field.3 For while the authors do not comment on the
book’s inauguration of the series they now edit, Theory Q is the suc-
cessor to Series Q, the highly regarded and for a time only academic
press series devoted to queer studies, which began its Duke Univer-
sity Press run in 1993 with the appearance of Sedgwick’s Tendencies and
concluded in 2011 with her posthumous volume, The Weather in Proust.4
With the title echoing as well as shifting the frame of its predecessor,
Theory Q inherits an institutional location and academic value that
have been key to the development and growth of queer theory. It is in
this context, where continuity and revision are doubly linked, that the
project of Sex, or the Unbearable has implications beyond the terms of its
own articulation. By tracing more fully the contexts in which its delib-
eration on negativity and the antisocial thesis have emerged, I hope to
demonstrate that the argument worth having today lies less in posit-
ing the value of negativity for social theory than in discerning what
queer theory’s debate over the antisocial thesis continues to occlude.

As editorial ventures go, book series are largely commodity forms

that enable presses to market the scholarly reputation of the editors,
a form of branding that helps to diversify disciplinary arenas of study
while shoring up the coherence of interdisciplinary ones. At the same
time, they offer the scholars who serve as editors a valuable means
to shape the critical priorities of the fields they inhabit not simply
through the work they actively promote but through the influence they
can wield—­or strategically withhold. The smaller the field the greater
the career stakes for scholars negotiating the minefields of academic
publication. For queer studies, which lacks departmental status and
its own dedicated organization and conference venue, book series have
been vital to its development, helping to make queer “hot” even when
few jobs have appeared under its signature. Today, as queer studies is
routinely absent from academic employment announcements, special-
ists largely train in traditional humanities-­oriented disciplines, most
often English, or in the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic studies, Amer-
ican studies, or women and gender studies, thereby orienting schol-
arship toward the traffic between cultural studies, critical theory, and
literary studies.
224 R O BY N W I E G MA N

Sex, or the Unbearable evinces these disciplinary orientations, bring-

ing together two scholars well known for shaping their queer theoreti-
cal commitments through the priorities and inclinations of the literary
humanities. For his part, Edelman is typically positioned as a leading
and controversial defender of the antisocial thesis, a role that places
him as Bersani’s accomplice no matter the significant differences that
distinguish their work. Edelman is avowedly, one wants to say monog-
amously, committed to Lacan, while Bersani has had a contentious
but long-­standing relationship with Freud and is alternately enthralled
with and disappointed by Foucault, the figural saint of queer theory.5
While both Bersani and Edelman have been drawn to a familiar set
of key terms—­negativity, self-­shattering, relationality, jouissance—­
through the broader historical and discursive context of AIDS, the
primary stake of Edelman’s work has entailed positing queerness as
both a figure and force of negativity itself. Not so with Bersani, who
has remained equivocal about the radical queerness of queer theory’s
self-­invention, depicting it as “tame” and questioning both its cele-
bration of transgression and its failure to read Foucault’s famous line
“The homosexual was now a species” as a psychic, not an identitar-
ian emergence (Dean et al. 1997, 12; Foucault, 43).6 Nevertheless, in
Bersani’s focus on relationality and in his interest in a nonredemptive
understanding of both sex and sociality, he and Edelman have been
situated as collaborators in queer theoretical circuits, variously cited,
celebrated, and decried for drawing their conceptions of sociality and
subjectivity in distinctly negative terms.7
Berlant, on the other hand, has never been figured as an antiso-
cial thinker, nor has she been aligned uniformly with psychoanalysis
or, for that matter, with any specific analytic tradition other than a
broadly posited cultural studies infused by the political vernaculars
that characterize American Studies in the United States. To be sure,
she has identifiable critical commitments—­to “the minoritized arts,”
for instance, and to the value of close textual reading (2008, ix). But
she rarely devotes herself to theory as either the central object or pri-
mal scene of her critical engagement. Her objects are cultural—­novels,
films, performances—­and her interest in them derives from the plea-
sure she finds in reading their worlds as the means to describe and
theoretically reorient our own. With its emphasis on reorientation,
Berlant’s scholarship is aligned with the contemporary turn to affect
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 225

in feminist and queer studies where concerns for the combined im-
passes of poststructuralism and social construction have yielded new
approaches not only to corporeality, subjectivity, and agency but to the
practices of criticism itself. As an “idiom,” affect theory “focuses not
on orthodoxies of normative institutions and practices,” she writes,
but on “what’s not trainable about people, who are always creating
folds of being-­otherwise in a way that stretches out and gives unpre-
dicted dimensions to historical and subjective experience” (2009, 263).
Less keen to be called “reparative” than other scholars with similar
commitments, Berlant’s major work comprises a quartet on “national
sentimentality,” which began with a book on Nathaniel Hawthorne
before expanding to consider how people—­most often women—­enact
“affective transaction[s] with a world whose terms of recognition and
reciprocity are being constantly struggled over and fine-­tuned” (2008,
xi).8 By focusing on the affective genres of everyday life through cul-
tural objects that highlight and record the precarity of the present,
Berlant nurtures a critical sensibility intent on the possibility of a less
toxic world. “I am a utopian,” she admits at the outset of the new proj-
ect, “and Lee is not” (Berlant and Edelman, 5).
Still, both Edelman and Berlant share an interest in repelling what
they call “the dominant regime of optimism,” which orients the politi-
cal imaginary of modern life toward the future in ways they both take
to be distinctly normalizing. In her most recent book, Berlant describes
this optimism as “cruel” because it attaches social subjects to a set
of cultural fantasies—­romance, national belonging, happiness—­that
impede their “flourishing” by anesthetizing the creativity no less than
the desire necessary for generating alternative social forms (2011, 1).
For Edelman optimism is less a debilitating assemblage of ideologies
that suffocate the subject’s affective resistance than a cover story on
which the fiction of the social itself depends. In No Future he calls this
fiction “reproductive futurism” and finds the political architecture of
heteronormativity at its core, evoked most dramatically in the figure of
“the Child” in whose name the limits of human knowledge are roundly
ignored (2004, 4). Under the auspices of the negativity of the death
drive, Edelman’s book is largely an argument against the contempo-
rary order of the political as it renders the fictions of the social real by
“installing . . . the perpetual hope of reaching meaning through signi-
fication” (5). In its most famous line, he writes, “Fuck the social order
226 R O BY N W I E G MA N

and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie;
fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net;
fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network
of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (29). While
this polemic is easily contrasted with Berlant’s world-­building orien-
tation, both scholars rely on queer theory’s analytic capacity to grap-
ple with liberal fantasies of social and subjective coherence, and both
see sex as an especially fertile ground for producing—­and contesting—­
optimistic attachments to self-­mastery or what they mutually reference
as sovereignty.
Nevertheless, as is often the case in queer theory, the star billing
afforded to sex is not matched by the project’s analytic pursuits. “To
be honest,” Berlant and Edelman confess at the outset of Sex, or the
Unbearable, “there’s not that much sex in the book” (vii). The center-
piece is negativity, which orients and undergirds the book’s aim to
“reformulate discussion of the antisocial thesis” by countering the re-
ductions that arise when negativity is confused with a negation of the
social and political alike (xiii). The necessity of this redefinition begins,
they tell us, with negativity’s relation to the antisocial’s misbegotten
name. “Part of the problem we have to confront in trying to move
[the] debate forward,” they write, “is that the very name ‘antisocial’
disregards our persistent embeddedness in and attentiveness to soci-
ality” (xiii). They argue instead that negativity is “invariably an aspect
of the social,” which means that a critical commitment to it “is not a
matter,” as others purportedly claim, “of standing outside the social or
sociality or against the possibility of creating more capacious social
worlds” (xiv, xiii). On the contrary, negativity is a “source for social
theory” because it carries the force of resistance to normalizing agen-
cies of various kinds, including those agencies that would pretend to
repair “social relations that appear to us irreparable” (xii). Sex, or the
Unbearable takes shape, then, as an exploration of the “social, political,
and theoretical consequences” of negativity “without optimism,” as
they put it, which means without acquiescence to the demand to equate
politics with a fantasy of the social good on which the “ideological
lure of the future” depends (xii, xiii). From this perspective, attention
to negativity is nothing if not an encounter with the social itself.
To say that Berlant and Edelman are playing a game of thread the
needle in their attempt to free the conversation from literal-­minded
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 227

reductions is not to dismiss the importance of their efforts. But it is

striking that while negativity is rendered in terms that far exceed its
most common inflection, the same theoretical vigilance is not applied
to the antisocial, which is cast as an impediment to understanding “our
persistent embeddedness in . . . sociality” (xiii). While such a definition
is barely distinguishable from what the authors otherwise critique as
“clichés about the antisocial thesis,” it nonetheless enables them to re-
formulate the antisocial thesis by devoting their attention to negativ-
ity alone (xiv). In fact, beyond the eleven-­page preface, there are only
two references to the antisocial thesis and each mentions it only in
passing (5, 114).9 The preface itself does not invoke any of the authors
who have contributed to the antisocial’s decades-­long discussion—­
not even Bersani—­nor does it offer an account of how various aspects
of negativity’s redefinition are alive in what we might usefully rede-
scribe as the antisocial’s critical archive. Readers familiar with what
Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young rightly designate as “the acrimony
of the debate” might know, for instance, that these junior scholars
edited a special issue of GLQ on “Queer Bonds” in 2011 precisely to
rethink the oppositional rhetorics that attended the antisocial thesis
as they encountered it in their graduate training (224). Using the lan-
guage of bonds, they structured their introduction to emphasize queer
theory’s divergent interests in both social theory (recalling Michael
Warner’s biting introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet) and sociality
(recalling Sedgwick’s monumental invention of the concept of the
homosocial in Between Men), and argued against the demand to pledge
queer theoretical allegiance to one interest over the other. Such a “false
choice,” they wrote, whereby “one must be ‘for’ (a queer version of)
the social or one must be, as queer, ‘against’ the social (as we know
it),” too easily assumed that “queer social negativity engendered no
bonds and [that] queer collectivities did not take shape precisely in
relation to some negation or incommensurability within the social”
(224). In their view, the history of queer theory demonstrated “an inter-
play between a centrifugal drive away from sociality and a centrip-
etal pressure toward sociable belonging and linkage”—­a set of double
moves that could refute the idea that the “anti” in antisocial could ever
be a politically or theoretically monogamous one (223).10
As valiant as their attempt was to make peace among their
elders—­and hence to negotiate “the acrimony” without alienating
228 R O BY N W I E G MA N

themselves from a camp (or a mentor or a publishing venue, as the

case may be)—­Weiner and Young’s intervention is given no attention
in Sex, or the Unbearable (224). Instead, the book orients its readers
to the debate with a single footnote, the first of the book, which con-
tains a single citation—­to the 2006 PMLA forum on the topic, edited
by Robert Caserio, which was itself a redaction of conference presen-
tations by Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, Tim Dean, and Edel-
man at the 2005 MLA Convention in Washington, D.C. The note reads:
“While evidence of that debate abounds, the most concentrated venue
of its performance can be found in the PMLA roundtable, ‘The Antiso-
cial Thesis in Queer Theory’” (Berlant and Edelman, xii n.1). But there
is no corresponding entry in the references to this title and no elabora-
tion in either the footnote or the text of the ideas or arguments about
the antisocial thesis that are evinced in its performance.11 As a citation,
the footnote goes nowhere, prompting readers to ask what exactly is
“concentrated” in the authors’ own citational act. For if the project of
Sex, or the Unbearable is to move the debate in queer theory about the
antisocial thesis “forward,” it is difficult to discern why the book’s
pedagogical emphasis on conversation does not extend to the history
of the debates that precede it (xiii). To be sure, there is rhetorical power
in such evasion, as the authors can frame contestations about negativ-
ity and sociality in their own idioms, debating matters with a gener-
osity toward one another that the project’s commitment to dialogue
demands. But the consequence for readers is less intimately rewarding,
as we never learn how a point of contention is situated in the larger
critical ecology of the field or when what is evaded is absorbed, refor-
mulated, or ignored. Discerning the arguments and allegiances that
live in the dead-­end citation is a case in point.

As a publication venue, the “Conference Forum” section of the PMLA

is well known for restaging high-­profile and contentious debates from
the organization’s annual meetings. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer
Theory” is no exception, which is certainly one of the reasons it serves
as the singular instance in which Sex, or the Unbearable cites scholar-
ship on the topic. But while the antagonism among the participants is
high, there is no collective resistance expressed toward either negativ-
ity or the framework of the antisocial per se. Rather, as Robert Case-
rio points out in his introductory remarks, it is Edelman’s polemical
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 229

argument in No Future that the participants variously but uniformly

reject. Dean’s contribution seeks to reach “beyond Lacanian psycho-
analytic orthodoxy” to rethink the antisocial thesis, which originates
for him with Guy Hocquenghem, who posited that “Homosexual
desire is neither on the side of death nor on the side of life; it is the
killer of civilized egos” (2006, 827). For Dean, the now famous “shat-
tering of the civilized ego” at the heart of the antisocial thesis must be
understood not as the “end of sociality but rather its inception,” which
leads him to recast “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in light of Bersani’s later
work (827). Halberstam also offers support for the antisocial and the
emphasis on negativity that is taken to frame it while insisting, like
Dean, that Edelman’s account of it needs revision—­in this case, “a
more explicitly political framing . . . one that promises, this time, to
fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up . . . and to abandon the neat, clever,
chiasmic, punning emphasis on style and stylistic order that charac-
terizes both the gay male archive and the theoretical writing about it”
(2006, 824). In his contribution, Edelman focuses almost exclusively on
differentiating Halberstam’s up-­tempo understanding of negativity
from his own. Arguing that “Halberstam strikes the pose of negativ-
ity while evacuating its force,” Edelman reiterates his contention that
negativity cannot be rescued into political coherence without reinstall-
ing the reproductive futurity on which the social depends (2006, 822).
Only Muñoz positions himself against the antisocial thesis, declaring
that “the antirelational” turn, as he calls it, was a politically reaction-
ary response to scholarship on race and gender, one that maintained
a commitment to “the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of differ-
ence” (2006, 825). “Some of us,” he declares, “came to bury antirela-
tional queer theories at the 2005 [MLA] special session” (825).
Muñoz is a familiar figure in the antisocial archive, in part because
he matches the polemical force of Edelman’s rejection of reproductive
futurism with a polemic of his own. As he puts it in the forum’s most
provocative line, “It has been clear to many of us . . . that the antirela-
tional in queer studies was the gay white man’s last stand” (825).12 His
subsequent book, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
(2009) elaborates this contention and positions Edelman’s No Future as
its main (if not sole) antagonist. Here, Muñoz calls Edelman’s rejection
of the future a form of “white gay male crypto-­identity politics,” point-
ing to the way that the heteronormative obsession with the figure of
230 R O BY N W I E G MA N

the child “is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids,
are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (95).13 Halberstam summa-
rizes Muñoz’s position on the book’s back cover. “Refusing to sim-
ply sign on to the ‘anti-­relational,’ anti-­future brand of queer theory
espoused by Edelman, Bersani and others, Muñoz insists that for some
queers, particularly for queers of color, hope is something one cannot
afford to lose and for them giving up on futurity is not an option.”
Muñoz’s critique has been widely influential in queer studies, gen-
erating a topography of the field that situates futurity, hope, and the
relational on the side of queer theoretical commitments to race.14 Still,
in the introduction, Muñoz stipulates that his challenge to the anti-
relational is in no sense a rejection of “the negative tout court” (12).
His goal is to think negativity for futurity and against the present, and
hence to posit queerness, as he puts it elsewhere, as “signal[ing] a
certain belonging through and with negativity” (Duggan and Muñoz,
281). Muñoz names this belonging “collectivity” and defines its criti-
cal value as a project of reparation (277).
Like Sex, or the Unbearable, then, Cruising Utopia is invested in dif-
ferentiating negativity from antisociality by way of a political claim
to negativity as an irreducibly potent force. But whereas Berlant and
Edelman hope to think the negative without recourse to the repara-
tive, Muñoz understands the political capacity of criticism to require
a reparative sensorium, what he calls an “educated hope” (2009, 3).
In an interesting twist of critical affiliations, he lists Berlant as a mutual
traveler in “utopian longing,” citing their collaborative work as mem-
bers of the Public Feelings Think Tank and her attention to “the politics
of affect in public life” as major influences on his project (17).15 Several
years later, in a review of Cruel Optimism, Muñoz would describe the
critical sensibility he shares with Berlant in language that is strikingly
resonant with her own. “Berlant and I are tethered insofar as we share
an interest in . . . outlining the affective work we do to endure and
sustain ourselves during cruel times where we feel the erosion of once
sustaining good-­life genres,” he writes (2013, n.p.). While he notes the
difference in their attention to temporality—­his trained on the future,
hers on the impasses of the present—­he affirms their mutual ability
to “read and hear each other to productive ends” (2013, n.p.). Berlant
has similarly traced her intellectual affinities and collaborative debts
to Muñoz. In her online review of Cruising Utopia, she praises the way
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 231

its “astonishing theoretical work . . . engenders different synergies

among utopian registers in the ongoing present,” while her more recent
contribution to the memorial volume of Social Text on Muñoz’s life and
work focuses on the critical intimacies that defined their intellectual
friendship (2010, n.p.). She writes: “José and I were Marxists together,
as well as queers who theorize. In citation and riffing we enter each
other’s idioms intimately and expand them, taking them somewhere
else but taking our people with us along the way” (2014, 35).
Nevertheless, like Edelman’s other interlocutors in the PMLA
forum, Muñoz makes no appearance in Sex, or the Unbearable, even
as the concepts at the core of his work are named themes in the in-
dex, with entries on “cruising,” “futurity and antifuturity,” “race,” and
“utopianism” (143, 144, 147, 149). In nearly every instance, these entries
reference Berlant’s part of the dialogue, giving credence to the idea
that the critical position she hones is a negotiation of what the foot-
note’s indirection points toward but cannot express: Muñoz’s polemi-
cal rejection of the antisocial thesis as the “gay white man’s last stand”
(2006, 825).16 It is Berlant, after all, who raises the issue of race and
turns in the course of the first chapter, “Sex without Optimism,” to Me
and You and Everyone We Know, a film by Miranda July that has at its
narrative center two children who are not white. Their role in the film,
as in Berlant’s argument, is to establish a representation of sex that
cannot be hitched to the cruel optimism of legible social forms, such
as love, identity, or marriage. By attending to the film’s disorganization
of “love plots and sex plots,” Berlant highlights what happens when,
as she puts it, “conventions shrink . . . and people have to develop
new orientations and modes of attention and extension alongside their
old formulas” (25). Here, as throughout Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant
emphasizes the capacity of “new orientations” even as she articulates
their emergence in scenes that lack the affective charge of optimistic
futures. The negativity she engages is thus largely a condition of the
present, an endless “starting over, not out of optimism for projected
out futures but for being in the world whose pressures are continu-
ous” (25). In this way, Berlant retains fidelity to Edelman’s antifutur-
ity while tacitly honoring Muñoz’s call to attend to the racialized and
queer kids whose futures have never mattered to the political order—­
and she does so in part by locating the utopic in the everyday, not in
the grand telos of a transformed world to come. “I am committed,”
232 R O BY N W I E G MA N

Berlant writes, “to the political project of imagining how to detach

from lives that don’t work. . . . I aim . . . to expand the field of affective
potentialities . . . for how to live beyond survival, toward flourishing
not later but in the ongoing now” (5).
The conversation that ensues between Berlant and Edelman over
the film’s most famous scene is worth examining in detail, as it not
only illuminates their different understandings of negativity and soci-
ality but helps to clarify the role that race has come to play in the
antisocial debate more widely. The scene features the two boys “sex-­
chatting online” with a white woman who has no idea that she is flirt-
ing with two boys (21). When the youngest, Robby, offers her a figure
of incomprehensible desire—­“I want to poop back and forth”—­the
woman asks for an explanation (23). Robby responds, “I’ll poop in
your butt hole and then you will poop it back into my butt and we
will keep doing it back and forth with the same poop. Forever” (23).
In the film, this explanation is converted into an emoticon, )) < > ((,
which is later adopted by the woman, a museum curator, as the sign
for a show titled “Warm,” which features the work of a racially and
geographically diverse group of artists.17 For Berlant, the emoticon’s
nonteleological evocation of difference, repetition, nearness, and sep-
aration is crucial to the narrative’s exploration of the way that “up-
heaval, misery, intimacy, and clarity in the ordinary is lived” (27). As
Berlant describes it, “Racism, homophobia, misogyny, erotophobia,
[and] class antagonism” underscore the “atmosphere of ordinary cri-
sis” that is the very stuff of “the chaotic middle,” or what she calls,
citing Susan Sontag, “‘the way we live now’” (27, 26, 27, 27). Race
emerges in Berlant’s discourse as a structural feature of the social and
hence as an endemic aspect of its negativity, while the biracial children
who set the iconic dissemination of sex without optimism into play—­
tantalizing white liberal femininity with indeterminate meaning—­
become generative agents not of reproductive futurity but of the dis-
ruption of the fantasy investments that perpetuate it.
In his response, Edelman acknowledges Berlant’s reading before
revising it toward the definition of negativity that is at the core of his
work. “Robby’s fantasy . . . image of intimacy as ‘poop’ being passed
between butt holes forever . . . may seem at once a powerful emblem
of nonfutural sexual optimism,” he writes, “but it also can be viewed,
in the idiomatic translation it also seems to solicit, as just more of the
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 233

same old shit” (27). This shit—­“the same poop. Forever”—­describes,

for Edelman, the irreducibility of negativity that, like the death drive,
is a “force not governed by the logic of meaning” (23, 28). While
the predominant language of scholarship in feminist and critical race
theory conjoins otherness to categories of disposable and denigrated
persons, Edelman’s Lacanian hermeneutic assumes the materiality of
signification as the primal ground of the social’s constitution, mak-
ing the quest to secure meaning and subjective coherence the center-
piece of his interest in negativity and politics alike. As he puts it, a
“radical encounter with the other” is an encounter with that “which
is other than signification” (114). In the final pages of the book, Berlant
explicates her difference from Edelman this way: “Your story is about
facing how persons are controlled by [foundational antagonisms] and
their aims to deny them, and my story is that as we move with each
other . . . we can shift the consequences of what’s irreparable and out
of joint in our internal and social relations” (110). For her, this effort is
collaborative and arises from “our desires not to be defeated by life”
(110). Edelman’s rebuttal is steadfast: “I’d love to be able to believe
that. . . . But I don’t, as yet, see proof that we can shift the consequences
of the irreparable” (115). In his terms, any insistence on navigating
negativity “puts the emphasis on a cognitive binding of the subject
to the world of its representations,” which reproduces the fantasy of
self and social coherence that he intends to critique (65). “Negativity
is unchanging as structure,” he writes, “because negativity structures
change” (121). The book ends with Edelman emphasizing the intrac-
tability of negativity and the way “it shrinks from positivization in
any program of political action,” while Berlant restates her resistance
to such determinations (120). “Structural consistency is a fantasy,” she
writes. “The noise of relation’s impact . . . is the overwhelming condi-
tion that enables the change that, within collaborative action, can shift
lived worlds” (125).
Me and You and Everybody We Know is only one text in the larger
archive of cultural objects that Berlant and Edelman assemble. But it
houses all of the book’s attention to race and offers Berlant a strikingly
resonant opportunity to read antifuturity (or, in the language of the
chapter’s title, “Sex without Optimism”) in a narrative about racially
minoritized kids. While Edelman’s rejection of her reading has mul-
tiple components, it is worth noting that he is undiscriminating in his
234 R O BY N W I E G MA N

allergy to redemption, including his own. For as much as Berlant brings

to the conversation a reading that implicitly responds to Muñoz’s cri-
tique, Edelman is unshakable in his conviction that such an approach
to politics, whether couched in the language of collectivity or not, fal-
ters on the faith it must sustain in the sovereignty of meaning. In his
closest address to the criticisms that have followed No Future, Edel-
man forgoes Berlant’s reading to find in Robby’s palindrome ))> <(( a
figuration of negativity that requires differentiation from those antag-
onisms that define and divide the social from within. Passing between
butt holes, “oblivious to particularizing differences such as gender,
race, or age,” the poop as icon demonstrates for Edelman “a relation
to the signifier and all the divisions that determine it” (114). As the
singular instance in which Edelman directly references race, Muñoz’s
charge is not hard to hear: Edelman is inattentive to the “particular-
izing differences” that are at the heart of queer theory’s intersectional
commitments. Muñoz reads such inattention axiomatically, not just
as a sign of indifference or dismissal, but as an antagonistic pledge of
allegiance to “the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference”
(2006, 825). As he puts it in Cruising Utopia, Edelman “ignores the point
that other modes of particularity within the social are constitutive of
subjecthood” (2009, 95). But in Edelman’s theoretical idiom, sexuality
is never translatable into “difference”; rather than constituting “sub-
jecthood,” it repels, interrupts, and de-­composes not only subjective
coherence but the legibility of the subject’s ability to know, indeed
to think, itself. The absence of sexuality in the above quote from Sex,
or the Unbearable, in which “gender, race, or age” name particulariza-
tion, is not an oversight on Edelman’s part, but evidence of the con-
ceptual distinction he affords to sexuality via the negativity of the
death drive.
This, then, is ground zero of queer theory’s antisocial antago-
nisms, as two incommensurate theories of sexuality meet: one makes
its approach through Lacan, casting sexuality as resistant to practices
that portend to socialize it; the other moves in affinity with cultural
studies, framing sexuality in intersectional terms as one among a num-
ber of resonant social differences. To the extent that queer theory has
come to pose these approaches as oppositions and largely accepted
their opposition as a racial formation, it has remained inattentive to
the very conceptual formulation that Muñoz and Edelman most share:
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 235

their understanding of race as a “particularizing” social “difference”

(Berlant and Edelman, 114; Muñoz 2009, 11). As readers of Cultural
Critique well know, this understanding is the consequence of a long
struggle to unseat biologist and essentialist conceptions of race in favor
of constructionist formulations, of which “difference” as a social prac-
tice and political effect has become one of the most widely accepted
critical formulations. For Muñoz, the impact of this theoretical inheri-
tance has been the defining impulse of his scholarship, giving priority
to an analysis of the violence of particularizing fictions as the means
to rework the social meaning and subjective consequences of race,
gender, and sexuality from within the domain of the social itself. As
such, politics for Muñoz always involves an epistemological counter-
punch, what he designates as a methodological reliance on “lived
queer experience” (2009, 3). The political charge for Edelman, indeed
the very centerpiece of his claim to the political, moves in a different
direction, away from epistemologies of experience toward “an end-
less self-­undoing,” one that challenges “the fixity of ‘me’ and ‘you’ and
‘everyone we know’” (Berlant and Edelman, 115). When Berlant offers
a perspective that sides with the political potential of each orientation,
she brings to Sex, or the Unbearable an implicit negotiation of the diver-
gence between an analysis of the unequal governance that figures and
fractures social life and one trained on the negativity against which
the social stands as compensation or alibi. But while her negotiation
bears the promise of lowering the argument’s heat, the critical labor
required to discern it underscores the book’s muted relation to the
contexts and contentions that comprise its reference to the history of
queer theory’s signature debate.
Congealed in the first footnote, then, are some of the most impor-
tant theoretical and political complexities that make the antisocial the-
sis an arena of interpretative battle, generating the need for a much
fuller account of what Berlant and Edelman rightly call the “intensity
of thought on all sides” (xiii). In the interests of that intensity, I have
sought to parse the largely unarticulated critical affinities and miss-
ing references that seed Sex, or the Unbearable. My aim has not been to
deliver an indictment, defense, or reconciliation of any of the debate’s
contending positions, nor have I trained my attention on what the
footnote occludes as if responsibility for addressing the antagonisms
it reveals belongs to Berlant and Edelman alone. On the contrary, this
236 R O BY N W I E G MA N

review has sought to engage closely and carefully with the footnote’s
instruction to read the PMLA conference forum as “the most concen-
trated venue of [the antisocial debate’s] performance” (xii n.1). If,
in doing so, we learn that race became the explanatory language for
differentiating between an insistently Lacanian understanding of sex-
uality and an insistently intersectional one, it is striking to register
how consistently race cohered as a critical concept across the distinc-
tion it was used to name, being at all times the figure of a difference
inscribed in, not against, the social. This lesson raises a number of
crucial questions: does race, conceptually speaking, “belong” only to
one side of queer theory’s contentious distinction between the nega-
tivity of social differences that arise from histories of racial and gen-
dered negation and the negativity that repels and annuls sociality as
such? If we take critical affection for the antisocial as “the gay white
man’s last stand,” what are the implications of the accompanying for-
mulation that minoritized subjectivity by definition begets a temporal
and affective investment in futurity and hope (Muñoz 2006, 825)?18
And most pertinently, perhaps, can we move a debate, any debate,
“forward” without attending to the critical details and polemical rhet-
orics that tend to calcify positions if not stop debate in its tracks (Ber-
lant and Edelman, xiii)?
To be sure, these questions radiate well beyond the parameters of
this review, inviting a fuller engagement with the growing archive
of scholarship that deconstructs the racial ontologization of the sub-
ject as a social being in order to engage the violence of sociality itself.19
In this context, where scholars return to a consideration of structural
antagonisms and the impact of an ontologically prior antiblackness,
the inclinations that have fueled the last thirty years of critical theory,
in which structuralism is suspected of being a retrograde and apoliti-
cal formulation, are being upended. If Sex, or the Unbearable orients
its conversation in ways that largely postpone an engagement with
the issues that beget this material, it nonetheless deliberates exten-
sively on the question of structure—­more explicitly on the politics that
attend Edelman’s emphasis on a structural account of antisocial nega-
tivities and Berlant’s interest in the “noise” that interrupts the capac-
ity of structuralist totalities to drown out imaginative and collaborative
counters to the present world (125). The pedagogy they enact in the
process is perhaps the book’s most important contribution, as there is
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 237

no mistaking the fact that they worked hard to sustain a dialogue that
could live past the ruptures of their own disagreements. Reparation
and hope aside, this is no small achievement in a field that has orga-
nized so many of its antagonisms—­critical, political, and personal—­
not on whether queer critique should remain tethered to negativity
but on defining precisely which relation to negativity its practitioners
should hone.

Robyn Wiegman is professor of literature and gender, sexuality, and

feminist studies at Duke University, where she teaches courses in queer
theory, feminist studies, and cultural studies. She is currently working
on a book project, Arguments Worth Having.

Notes

1. While “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is widely read as a protoqueer theoretical

text, Bersani does not count himself a practitioner in the field. In Homos, he quer-
ies queer theory’s role in desexualizing “gayness” by translating what is queer
about homosexuality from an erotics to a celebrated politics. “Is queer now to
be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies? No longer would a
boy discover that . . . he is queer; indeed, all of us—­even after decades of what we
thought of as extravagant sexual confirmation of our queerness—­would have to
earn the right to that designation and to the dignity it now confers” (1995, 2). For
this and other reasons, Mikko Tuhkanen opens the introduction to his recent
edited collection, Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond, with the provocation, “Is
Leo Bersani a queer theorist?” and repeats the question in the volume’s clos-
ing interview to Bersani himself (2014a, 1). “Not that I know of,” says Bersani
(2014b, 279).
2. The first chapter was written for and presented at the 2009 “Rethinking
Sex: Gender and Sexuality Studies—­A State of the Field Conference” at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania honoring Gayle Rubin’s now-­classic 1984 essay. The sec-
ond chapter, “What Survives,” began as an MLA session honoring the work of Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick.
3. The new series is described in press materials this way: “Theory Q aims
to publish works that keep queerness and theory in productively transformative
relation to each other. The series treats both as unsettled questions that are open
to unexpected connections. Encouraging a wide spectrum of critical approaches,
Theory Q invites the rethinking of disciplinary logics, social life, aesthetic form,
political and cultural practices, and criticism itself. It presupposes little about what
constitutes sexuality except that norms are not laws. Most importantly, it seeks to
cultivate bold and rigorous scholarship whose modes of thought aspire to enlarge
238 R O BY N W I E G MA N

what queerness and theory can do.” See https://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/

ProductList.php?viewby=series&id=71.
4. Theory Q enters the competition for publication pre-­eminence in the U.S.
university in the context of two already established book series—­Duke University
Press’s Perverse Modernities, edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe, and New
York University Press’s Sexual Cultures, founded by José Esteban Muñoz and Ann
Pellegrini and now edited by Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong’o. In ways that have
been performed but rarely discussed in public venues, the critical antagonism gen-
erated by the antisocial thesis has a quite identifiable geography in relation to the
academic publication landscape, demonstrating an intimacy between the political
economy of the field and its critical dissensus.
5. The major example here is David Halperin’s Saint Foucault, but there is
no shortage of work in queer theory that finds Foucault especially enabling for
the radical claims of queer theory as a mode of contemporary Left critique, even
as a position has recently emerged in the work of Drucilla Cornell and Stephen D.
Seely that pits Foucault’s “revolutionary” sensibility against queer theory’s ludic
politics (7). For a perspective that hews more closely to my own, see Annamarie
Jagose’s Orgasmology, which posits the necessity of reading Foucault without con-
stituting either queer theory or its critic as a revolutionary or countercultural agent
of subversion.
6. “There has been an absurd and reductive misreading of the first volume
of the History of Sexuality,” Bersani argues, “a reading that claims that ‘the homo-
sexual’ didn’t exist before the middle of the nineteenth century. I don’t think Fou-
cault believed that for a single moment. I also think he would have been shocked
by the frankly stupid confusion between the homosexual as a category of the psyche
with elaborately defined characteristics (in large part, that is a modern invention)
and the homosexual as an individual primarily oriented toward same-­sex eroti-
cism” (Dean et al. 1997, 12).
7. Bersani has responded to his association with Edelman and the antisocial
thesis this way: “Apparently I’m put in the same category as Lee Edelman; to some
queer theorists we’re the bad guys because we’re presumably ‘antisocial.’ Well,
I suppose he is more uncompromising about ‘negativity’ than I am. Already in
Homos I was trying to think of connectedness, that is, trying to adapt the idea of
‘correspondences of form’ to psychic correspondences; I was thinking of homo-
sexuality as a kind of psychic correspondence of sameness. This now strikes me
as taking the sameness of same-­sex desire too literally. . . . But to the extent that I
was, and have always been, interested in the Foucauldian idea of ‘new relational
modes,’ it seemed to me that the precondition of such modes has to be a kind of
antisocial breaking-­down of relations” (Tuhkanen 2014b, 280).
8. See Berlant 1991; 1997; 2008; 2011.
9. In the preface, the authors link the book’s general absence of “background
knowledge” to the dialogue form, which encourages “clarification” to emerge
“immanently from within the conversation” and not in “objectivized” or “assumed
form” (Berlant and Edelman, x). Such a process, they readily admit, “might make
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 239

any reader . . . desire some dictionary or reference point to stabilize the conversa-
tion or long for an accompanying seminar to fill in the gaps. . . . But conversation,
like relationality, proceeds in the absence of such a reference point or undisputed
ground” (x). Strangely, the authors do not address the difference between a live
conversation (or dialogue) and the performed one that constitutes Sex, or the Un-
bearable as a written text.
10. In her contribution to the special issue, Teresa de Lauretis seems bent on
disorganizing the equanimity offered by the editors’ introduction in order to dif-
ferentiate the work of theory from that of politics. By conceiving of sexuality
as “an undomesticated, unsymbolizable force, not bound to objects and beyond
the purview of the ego,” she raises the question, first asked by Bersani, about the
relationship between sexuality and politics (254). She writes, “Political contesta-
tion, opposition, or antagonism is anything but antisocial; it is constitutive of a
democratic society. What is antisocial is sexuality, the pleasure principle, and most
of all the death drive” (254). As we know, Sex, or the Unbearable opens by reject-
ing this conceptual terrain, making its focus on negativity an inherently political
project, albeit one that eschews the designation of politics as reparative. But as de
Lauretis contends in her reading of No Future, “Self-­reflexive irony . . . is incompat-
ible with the business of politics, as are all rhetorical figures that fissure the solidity
of meaning” (257). This is the case because “literality, or referentiality, is a mainstay
of political discourse where rhetoric is primarily instrumental” (257). De Lauretis
is here hewing to a notion of politics that intends not just to think the relationship
between words and things but to articulate strategies for traveling the distance
that differentiates and separates them. While she once considered theory to be a
participant in that practice, her essay finds it largely incompatible with the demand
for referentiality at the heart of politics. Edelman responds briefly to de Lauretis
in Sex, or the Unbearable by puncturing her distinction between the literal and the
figural, giving us a notion of politics that relies on the instability of meaning that
is the centerpiece of his thought (Berlant and Edelman, 70–­71).
11. The roundtable appears in the references by author, not title, as “Caserio,
Robert, L., Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean”
(Berlant and Edelman, 138). Except for Edelman, none of these names appears
elsewhere in the text or index.
12. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz revises his PMLA sentence to read: “I have
longed believed that the antirelational turn in queer studies was a partial response
to critical approaches to a mode of queer studies that argued for the relational and
contingent value of sexuality as a category. . . . Antirelational approaches to queer
theory are romances of the negative, wishful thinking, and investments in deferring
various dreams of difference” (2009, 11). While characterizing antisocial thought
broadly, Muñoz cites only Bersani and Edelman.
13. David Marriott has usefully drawn a distinction between Muñoz’s cri-
tique of Edelman’s text and the supposition about whiteness that grounds it.
“Although I do take Muñoz’s point that No Future makes no attempt to encapsu-
late the dilemma of how race impacts time, life, and childhood—­as if being queer
240 R O BY N W I E G MA N

were the only thing that precludes the possibility of having a future or an invest-
ment in reproducible life—­the suggestion that only whites are obsessed with repro-
ductive futurity is clearly not so” (107).
14. When Juana María Rodríguez takes up the issue of sociality in her own
work on race and sexuality, she reflects the topography that has become increas-
ingly familiar in the context of Muñoz’s critique of Edelman: “On one side we have
an antisocial position exemplified by scholars like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman
that posits queer as inevitably wedded to antisociality. On the other side, José
Esteban Muñoz counters the antisocial impetus with a queer articulation of utopia
that is always on the horizon and decidedly committed to ‘an understanding of
queerness as collectivity’” (332). While Rodríguez is ultimately interested in the
absence of attention to lesbian sexuality and queer femininities on each of these
sides, she follows Muñoz in configuring “queer sociality” as “a utopian space”
that simultaneously “performs a critique of existing social relations of differ-
ence and enacts a commitment to the creative critical work of imagining collective
possibilities” (332). In her terms both Bersani and Edelman “see queer as what
always . . . stand[s] outside any formulation of collectivity” (332).
15. In her recent book, Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich describes
the Public Feelings project as forging a challenge to “pastoralizing or redemptive
accounts of negative feeling” while “also embrac[ing] categories such as utopia
and hope. In this respect, its work contributes to debates on the antisocial thesis
that have dominated queer theory over the past decade, but it ultimately resists
reductive binarisms between the social and the antisocial and between positive and
negative affect” (5–­6). See also Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture.”
16. In a book that owes many debts to Sedgwick, it is difficult not to recall
Between Men and its instructive dissection of an erotic triangle in which two men
forge a homosocial bond in their rivalrous pursuit of the affections of the same
woman. Sedgwick’s interest was the British novel, and the world she was appre-
hending was distinctly oriented toward what queer theory now considers the
social structures of heteronormativity—­bourgeois sociality, marriage, reproduction,
and masculine creative freedom. As such, she had much less to say about the fig-
ure of the woman as a historical or organizational agency than she did about the
competitive rivalry and ultimately the unacknowledgeable bond between men—­
and nothing at all to say about the erotic triangles of critical theory or the failed
homosociality found in relations (academic or otherwise) between gay men. Never-
theless, the choreography through which Sex, or the Unbearable mediates the PMLA
roundtable’s most famous antagonism has resonance here.
17. For a different conversation about the figure of “poop” in this film, see
Clare.
18. On this point, David Marriot has remarked, “hope is just one way of lis-
tening for the future. It should not be used to exclude Edelman’s radical insistence
on an alternative to the yet-­to-­happen” (n3, 118). His work conjoins other scholars,
such as Lindon Barrett, Antonio Viego, and Darieck Scott, who offer a different set
of coordinates for thinking negativity, race, and sexuality in queer theory than
 SEX A ND NEGATIVITY; O R, WHAT QUEER THEOR Y HAS FOR YOU 241

those concentrated in the PMLA forum. See also Bliss who uses the critique of the
figure of the white child in No Future to argue that “there are many ways of access-
ing and inhabiting the future, and the problem is not that young Black queers have
no access to the future but that the future is, itself, structured by an antiblackness
that shapes access to future(s) for all subjects” (95).
19. The scholarship that constitutes this archive, which has been tagged
“Afropessism” (in contrast to “Afrofuturism”), has many tributaries, but the works
of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson III, and Jared Sexton have
a citational centrality, no matter the different theoretical affiliations and resonant
political affects associated with each.

Works Cited

Barrett, Lindon. Forthcoming. Lindon Barrett: Selected Essays. Ed. Janet Neary. Dur-
ham: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 1991. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and
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