Embracing Alterity: Queer Historicism, Individualizing Difference, and
the Value of Periodization
the Value of Periodization
“History is, and
has always been, an erogenous zone,” Aranye Fradenburg argues in Sacrifice Your Love, and, as such, we ought
to consider historicism as a space of intimate interaction, driven by fantasies
and desires, likenesses and differences. In this paper, I revisit questions concerning
history and our relationship to it, raised by historicism’s overwhelming
emphasis on both the alterity of the past and the necessity for objective
observations; and I propose that we ought to literalize the notion of relationship by thinking of it in terms
of desires, bodies and pleasures, along lines similar to Carolyn Dinshaw’s
“queer touch” in Getting Medieval. Following
the “Temporal Turn” in Queer Theory, especially the works of Lee Edelman, Jack
Halberstam, and Elizabeth Freeman (along with Dinshaw), Queer Theory has opened
ways of drawing attention to and critiquing overly simplified, reified
“identity categories” of periodization; however, the non-identitarian
approaches of many recent queer historicists have resulted in the potential for
universalizing views of history, erasing the importance of difference (and its slippery, metaleptic relationship to the “hetero”) through their praise of similarity
(homo), espoused most notably in the “homohistory/unhistoricism” of Madhavi
Menon and Jonathan Goldberg. By ignoring the importance of identity categories
(i.e. periodization), (post-)modernism becomes the invisible and hegemonic lens
from which everything is read, resulting in a further abjection of any
difference (including, still, the premodern) because of its failure to
correspond to modern readers concerns or tastes, and leading to temporal
relations that are strikingly ordinary, disembodied, even normal (anything but
queer). I propose that queer historicists must consider the most recent work of
queer theorists incorporating identity-politics and embodiment-focused approaches
(critical race theory, disability studies, trans* studies) in ways that
continue to allow for the “non-identity” of queer, while maintaining the
importance of individuation and embodiment. Further, I think that Leo Bersani’s
“impersonal narcissism” model, a model that celebrates relational likeness
despite a lack of exact similarity, might serve as the best model from which we
can break down the divisive, “objective” barriers of history’s alterity,
celebrate our intimate interactions with history, yet maintain the level of
differentiation necessary for any complex relationship to function.
