Can queer theory overcomes its ties to sexuality?

Toward the end of the 20th Century, French Philosopher Michel Foucault called into question the ways in which a variety of practices, relations, institutions, and discourses came to be organized under the concept of “sexuality.” The construction of sexuality as a thing, as a category, as a concept that seemingly identifies something crucial about us, operates as a way to make certain individuals, practices, and relations visible: scientifically, institutionally, juridically, and politically. There is, of course, a danger with this visibility, as it brings into the open and identifies individuals so that they can become subject to regimes of power.

Queer theory, and queerness itself, seems inextricably tied to the notion of sexuality: how can some one or some thing be queer if we give up the concept of sexuality? On the other hand, the very notion of sexuality sexualizes everything it touches and thereby reduces the possibilities of queerness itself. Can we think queer without sexuality? Why should we think queer without sexuality? What possibilities are opened by queer thought once it is not longer bound by the image of sexuality?

This week, we are joined by Dr. Nir Kedem, author of A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality (Edinburgh UP, 2024) to talk about how Deleuze might aide us in the project of liberating queer theory from sexuality.

In this episode, we discuss the following texts/thinkers/ideas/etc.:

• Los Angeles-based punk band X
• AI’s energy and water demands
• 16th annual Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp
• Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005)
• Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (1976)
• Nir Kedem, A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
• Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (2009)
• Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 1 (1848)
• Michel Foucault, “The Gay Science” (1978)
• Ibram X. Kendi, “Our New Postracial Myth” (2021)
• Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
• David M. Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory” (2003)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
• Leo Bersani, Queer Theory and Beyond (2014)
• Judith Halberstam, “The Anti-social Turn in Queer Theory” (2008) 
• Leo Bersani, Homos (1995)
• Timothy W. Jones, “A History of the Word ‘queer'” (2003)
• “Queer Theory,” Volume 3, Issue 2 of the journal differences (1991)
• Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1981)
• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968)
• Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? (1991)
• Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (1988)
• Timeline of HIV and AIDS
• The 1969 Stonewall Riots
• Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)
• Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011)
• José Esteban Muñoz. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Theory (2011)

   

  ——————-