Paige Sweet Week 7

Many of the authors in this week’s readings take up the idea of queer studies as a “subjectless” critique. By this, they mean that queer studies does not have a “fixed political referent” (Eng, Halberstam, and Munoz 2005). There is not a “queer subject” for whom queer studies is the voice. Rather, queer studies is “subjectless” in its constant contingencies and movements, refusing to represent anything or anyone in particular. David Eng calls queer critique a “political metaphor” (2010), which is useful for de-linking queer critique from a particular identity or subject position. Other queer scholars have suggested that queer studies takes a “queer angle” on common sense, meaning that it looks at knowledge or culture in new and different ways and that it deconstructs heteronormativity in that same glance. I think this “subjectless” position of queer studies is incredibly useful for thinking through how to apply it to my own research. In this sense, looking at discourses of trauma and domestic violence from a queer studies perspective would allow me to expose the dominant formations that move in and around these “therapeutic” and “recovery” models. Using this framework, I can also ask a critical question: who has been the “fixed referent” of anti-violence work? Is this still a white victim who calls the police every time she is hurt? In the spirit of Jasbir Puar, I can also examine what new kinds of normativities begin circulating once the old ones are destabilized. If it is no longer the white, middle-class woman who is the “ideal” domestic violence victim, what new subjectivities are anti-violence discourses built around and against?

At its core, this “subjectless” critique that queer studies engages is a reaction against identity politics. Just as Roderick Ferguson deconstructs the very idea that sexuality could be a liberatory identity (because that identity is produced as an effect of power), I need to be attentive to what kinds of identities are produced and nurtured within the anti-violence movement. Part of the work of the anti-violence movement has been to claim and “empower” the status of survivor, to “speak out,” and to champion a particular notion of survivor-dom. Queer critique teaches me to ask, what kinds of power and knowledge categories are in operation here? Are the discourses of the psy-sciences implied in this “survivor” and “confessional” paradigm? How can I excavate the foundations of this paradigm without implying that it is meaningless, without leaving us with nothing as anti-violence activists? For example, Ferguson shows that the very notion of sexuality is developed through and against the immoral and primitive black subject. We might decide, based on this analysis, that sexuality is no longer a useful identity category. We might decide that we need to abandon sexuality as a framework, and yet still take up arms against heteronormativity and the violence of the conjugal family norm. The question becomes, how can we do the latter without the former? How can we critique the violence of patriarchy without recognizing survivors as a group of people, as a type of subject produced within racist and sexist and heterosexist social worlds?