Embracing Alterity

Below is an abstract for the paper I will present at the University of Virginia's "Method and the Middle English Text" conference  in April, 2016:

Embracing Alterity: Queer Historicism, Individualizing Difference, and
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.