Reductive

Nichols, Ben

doi:10.1215/10642684-3479318

Cited by 24 publications

References 30 publications

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Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Miranda

2024

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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John Rechy is not interested in representation. Yet Rechy’s refusal to engage with identity using the terms offered to ethnic and queer writers has puzzled critics of his work. This article contends with John Rechy’s evasive novel, City of Night (1963), to reconsider Rechy’s attachment to refusal as a formal and political project that confounds any effort to portray a stable transparent minority subject. Through the novel’s rejection of disclosure and recognition, City of Night moves against forms of political stability (normative coupling, categorical identification, and property ownership) to feature ephemeral spaces in which minoritized people gather and shift around at the very moment the US state is restricting and criminalizing Mexican movement and sedimenting heteronormativity into law. By attending to evasion and refusal, I push the boundaries of Rechy criticism that have found City of Night devoid of politics or attachments to ethnic identity. Rather, I argue that the novel moves against individuation to offer ephemeral moments of entanglement with queer racialized Others through the composite form and figure of the “outsider.” Located in the unincorporated mass or crowd, City of Night’s attachment to the “outsider” thinks across difference to reveal the ways racialization underpins the policing of movement, heteronormativity, and citizenship in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, Rechy’s aesthetics of refusal registers the under-examined affinities between migrant, laborer, queer, and brown at the very moment the United States sought to restrict how we think about identity and politics in public.

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Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Miranda

2024

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

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Eve’s Triangles, or Queer Studies Beside Itself

Wiegman¹

2015

Differences

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Responding to the theme of the special issue, Queer Theory without Antinormativity, “Eve’s Triangles” returns to the work of one of queer theory’s most important foundational figures to consider critical sensibilities that are incompatible with the dyadic approach to power and politics now institutionalized in queer studies under the rubric of antinormativity. By focusing on Sedgwick’s appetite for incoherence, the double bind, and nondialectical understandings of contradiction, this essay studies the elegant and cogent model of reading found in Sedgwick’s work in order to value queer critical intuitions that have been subordinated to antinormativity’s allure.

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Conjectures on the Sexual World-System

Kahan¹

2017

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

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This article brings together world-systems analysis, which explores how the world's capitalist markets became globally integrated, and sexuality studies for the first time in order to examine how the homo/hetero binary came to integrate and govern sexual organization throughout much of the world. Zooming out from the metropolitan and national frames that have dominated sexual historiography, this article operates at a different scale and order of magnification to explore forms of sexuality shared in whole and in part across the world. My theorization of the sexual world-system aims to understand the encounter between object choice as the organizing dimension of sexuality and its collision with other sexual knowledges and organizations: intimacy, bodily practice, positionality, sexual acts, behaviors, desires, and so forth. Reading across literary, sexological, legal, and religious archives, I examine the relationship between these varieties of sexual knowledge in order to contribute to a comparative study of sexuality and to write sexuality into what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “geoculture.”

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Reductive

Cited by 24 publications

References 30 publications

Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Eve’s Triangles, or Queer Studies Beside Itself

Conjectures on the Sexual World-System

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