Queering Philosophy

Queering Philosophy
Kim Q. Hall

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Title: Queering philosophy / Kim Q. Hall.
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Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy and social sciences. | Queer theory. | Feminist
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Queering Philosophy, Why Now? 1

Chapter 1: Queer Matters 21
Chapter 2: Queer Knowing 51
Chapter 3: Power, Life, and Death 75
Chapter 4: Queer Ecologies 97
Chapter 5: Queer Ethics 115

Bibliography 137
Index 149

v
Acknowledgments

In addition to all the other affective ups and downs that ordinarily attend
writing—anxiety, stress, doubt, frustration, joy, curiosity—the long process
of working on this book has felt like carving a space for existence in the
discipline of philosophy. This might seem like a strange way to open the
acknowledgments section for this book. After all, I am definitely a phi-
losopher with all the requisite degrees and therefore part of the profession of
philosophy. And yet, like many queer philosophers (those of us whose work
can be said to queer philosophy in some way), my place in philosophy is
always in question, a fact most clearly reflected in the frequency with which
I still encounter questions or assertions expressing doubt about whether my
research and teaching counts as real philosophy. If anything, this book is an
effort to explore the queer significance of being in question, philosophically
and otherwise, in ways that also call into question the disciplining boundaries
and function of philosophy.
As such, it seems only fitting to acknowledge those who have helped me
to stay with and in the trouble of a discipline that, too often, closes as many
doors as it opens. Here, I want to acknowledge some of the folks inside and
outside philosophy’s disciplinary walls who have helped me, in various ways,
to understand that philosophy can be otherwise. Whether I’ve met them or
not, some are listed here because of my admiration of their work. Some have
been mentors at various times in my career. Some I know as collaborators and
colleagues, and some are friends and/or family. And some, happily for me,
are all the above. In one way or another and against the odds, all have helped
me to feel mighty real at some point in my queer philosophical career. In the
vein of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy survival kit (2017), they have been part
of my always in-process queer philosophical toolbox.
For their early encouragement and support, I thank Donna Turney, Florence
Martin, and Jeffner Allen. Reading Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, Audre
Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa, along with many other feminist scholars, ignited
a philosophical passion and curiosity in me that, thankfully, has never been
vii
viii Acknowledgments

extinguished. Each of them played a role in introducing me to that work and

helping me to understand that I could be a different sort of philosopher.
For courage and intellectual brilliance that continue to inspire me, I am
grateful for Abby Wilkerson, Alexis Shotwell, Alison Baily, Alison Kafer,
Alison Wylie, Andrea Pitts, Ann Cahill, Ann Fox, Ann Gary, Ásta, Carrie
Sandahl, Charles Mills, Chris Bell, Chris Cuomo, Cressida Heyes, David
Mitchell, Denise James, Eli Clare, Ellen Samuels, Eva Kittay, Gail Hamner,
Gail Weiss, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Gayle Salamon, Hil Malatino, Joel Michael
Reynolds, José Medina, Judith Butler, Kathryn Sophia Belle, Kris Sealey,
Kristie Dotson, Ladelle McWhorter, Lauren Guilmette, Liat Ben-Moshe,
Licia Carlson, Linda Martín Alcoff, Lisa Johnson, Lori Gruen, Lynn Huffer,
Margaret Price, María Lugones, Mariana Ortega, Mel Chen, Nirmala
Erevelles, Perry Zurn, Riva Lehr, Robert McRuer, Rosemarie Garland-
Thomson, Sally Haslanger, Sami Schalk, Sara Ahmed, Shannon Sullivan,
Sharon Snyder, Sue Schweik, Sunara Taylor, Sushmita Chatterjee, Talia Mae
Bettcher, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Yannik Thiem, and too many others to
list here. Their field-expanding work gives me hope and reminds me why I
love what I do.
Thanks also to folks at Rowman & Littlefield for all their patience and
support throughout the process of completing this book. Thanks especially
to Sarah Campbell, Frankie Mace, Natalie Mandzuik, Sylvia Landis, and
Chris Fischer.
Thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences at Appalachian State University
for a summer grant that supported an early stage of my work on this book.
My mom, Judy Hall, was my first model of feminist courage, even though
she probably would not describe herself that way. In more ways than one,
she’s the reason I’m here today. That she has always loved me as I am means
more than I can say.
For the daily miracle of joy and love, I am grateful to Jill Ehnenn and our
feline companions, Sam and Frodo. They have endured the process of this
book’s coming into being and, thankfully, still like my company. Jill read and
commented on all drafts, and this book is better because of her input. Thanks
to Jill for being a bright spot no matter what comes our way. I am grateful for
the life we continue to build together.
Introduction‌‌
Queering Philosophy, Why Now?

I think many adults (and I among them) are trying, in our own work, to
keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in child-
hood; promises to make invisible possibilities and desires visible; to make
the tacit things explicit; to smuggle queer representation in where it must
be smuggled and with the relative freedom of adulthood, to challenge
queer-eradicating impulses frontally where they are to be so challenged.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”

Could it be that not knowing for sure what should and should not be
acknowledged as philosophy has itself a certain philosophical value? And
is this a value we might name and discuss without it thereby becoming a
new criterion by which the philosophical is rigorously demarcated from
the nonphilosophical?
—Judith Butler, “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?”

We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!

—Queer Nation, political chant circa early 1990s

When it comes to queer theory, mainstream philosophy, it must be said, has

never gotten used to it. Despite the fact that many, if not most, other humani-
ties disciplines long ago embraced queer theory as a legitimate area of study
and a desirable area of specialization, queer philosophy has yet to make an
appearance among the officially recognized areas of specialization in phi-
losophy, nor has it regularly appeared among the desired specializations and
competencies listed in philosophy job descriptions in the US. Furthermore,
as far as I can tell from a web search of philosophy curricula, while it may
occasionally appear as a special topics course, queer philosophy is not part of

1
2 Introduction

most regular course offerings in US philosophy departments. Given this, one

might be inclined to declare that when it comes to queering philosophy, it’s
about time! As I hope to show in this introduction, such inclinations wouldn’t
be wrong: queering philosophy is, at least in part, about time indeed.
Despite the fact that queer theory has been a significant area of scholarship
in the US for a little more than thirty years, philosophy as a discipline (what
I will refer to variously in the book as “institutionalized” or “mainstream”
philosophy) has curiously ignored it. In the meantime, some scholars (in
fields other than philosophy, it must be noted) have proclaimed that the time
for queer theory is over, that it is now passé. For example, in 2003, David
Halperin described the current state of queer theory as thoroughly institution-
alized, an accepted part of US academic institutions (341), so much so that
graduate students seek credentialing in the area in order to more competi-
tively position themselves on the job market (342–43). Meanwhile, Michael
Warner made a similar point in his 2012 Chronicle of Higher Education essay
on the end of Duke University Press’s Series Q:

At many colleges, queer theory is now institutionalized as a minor subfield of

LGBT Studies. . . . The broader provocation to the disciplines has been neatly
compartmentalized, with the consequence that many of queer theory’s greatest
challenges—for example, in the analysis of normativity, which should have
become central to philosophy and the social sciences, but has been scrupulously
ignored by them, or the connections between sexuality and secularism that are
central to so many kinds of conflict around the world—remain undeveloped.
(2012, B9, my emphasis)

In this book, I want to push back—ever so gently, perhaps—against this

narrative and the seemingly now commonsensical notion that queer theory
has been totally institutionalized and, as a result, that the critical, radical
edge of queerness has been dulled.1 If queer has become, at least for some,
anachronistic, we might inquire into the position or perspective from which
it appears as such.
For one, such a narrative does not reflect the contemporary state of the
field in professional philosophy. There are people with PhDs in philosophy
who also specialize in queer theory and do queer philosophy (me, for one).
However, many who work in queer philosophy find that their work is charac-
terized as nonphilosophical. Being a queer philosopher and doing queer phi-
losophy is still professionally risky, and many philosophers who have been
and remain important to the development of the field, for example, Judith
Butler, have left philosophy for more congenial academic departments.2
In this book, I suggest that moving beyond a silo approach to theorizing
can further our understanding of queer’s continuing relevance, especially for
Introduction 3

philosophy, as well as call into question the temporal frame in which queer
might appear as now out-of-date. A silo approach depends on a linear, or to
use Elizabeth Freeman’s (2010) helpful concept—chronormative—temporal-
ity in which the past is always superseded by an always better present that
anticipates an even better future. A silo approach to assessing the relevance
of a theory relies, even if unintentionally, on a sense of rigid distinctions
between fields. For example, within a silo approach, distinctions between
queer, feminist, critical race, decolonial, transnational, and crip theories are
drawn in such a way that it is possible to select one as less or more relevant
than the others.3 But, if we take intersectionality seriously as a framework for
thinking through the complexities of how one is situated within contingent,
entangled networks of oppression and privilege, it becomes clear not only
that truly transformative theory and politics requires thinking both within
and between these theoretical frameworks, but also that the complexities and
differences within queer studies and communities should caution us against
a too-quick dismissal of queer theory overall. While it’s true, as David
Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Muñoz indicate, that “queer studies in the
past has rarely addressed such broad social concerns” (e.g., global capital-
ism, racialization, and imperialism) and that its centering of privileged, US
queer subjects contributes to this epistemic ignorance, this is not true for
all contributions to queer scholarship, past and present (2005, 5). In part,
this means that transformative work in queer studies seeks to refigure the
dominant narrative about the queer archive. This approach doesn’t deny the
ongoing importance of figures such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and
Eve Sedgwick but, instead, seeks to both question and augment the standard
archive through critiquing and decentering its whiteness and reclaiming the
work of queers of color such as Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and James
Baldwin, to name just a few. The transformative possibility of queer futures is
intimately related to the conceptualization of queer pasts. Rather than move in
a linear fashion from the past toward a (presumed better) future, the temporal
framing of queer studies moves sideways (Stockton 2009).
Whatever else it has been, queer theory has been about time. In Time
Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman proclaims
that queer was never meant to be hip or in fashion. Instead, its resistance to
normalization places queerness at odds with the present. That which is queer,
Freeman argues, is behind “the times,” out of step:

At one point in my life as a scholar of queer culture and theory, I thought the
point of queer was to be always ahead of actually existing possibilities. On this
model, it seemed that truly queer queers would dissolve forms, disintegrate
identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, and even repudiate politics alto-
gether (and indeed, there is one wing of queer theory that does privilege this
4 Introduction

kind of negating work). But this version of “queering” the social text strikes
me as . . . about having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more
evolved than one’s context. Now I think the point may be to trail behind actually
existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to
be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. (2010, xiii)

Queer temporality, as defined by Freeman, entails a “temporal drag,” an

attention to and even enactment of “outdatedness” that pulls the past into
the present in ways that call into question the figuration of each and their
relationship (xxi).
Given the title of this book, the reader would be right to suspect that I think
the concept of and theoretical perspective offered by queerness remain very
relevant indeed. In my view, queer theory is far from over, whatever that
means for talking about the significance of a substantial, growing body of
critical work. Among the many reasons for mainstream philosophy’s exclu-
sion of queer theory, being passé is not one of them. From the perspective
of the field’s mainstream, queer theory never arrived. One can’t proclaim an
area to be passé in a discipline that has never seriously engaged it. While
there are risks of assimilation that result from a field’s incorporation into aca-
demic institutions, there is, as I propose in the chapters that follow, something
left of field that offers a vital critical perspective on philosophical questions
and institutionalized philosophy itself.
For instance, what does philosophy’s indifference to queer theory suggest
about philosophy itself? How might queering philosophy enable a rethinking
of the field and greater accountability to those who have been marginal-
ized within it? How might the story of philosophy be queered? These are
some of the questions that guide my reflections on queer engagements with
philosophical questions about the self, experience, interdependency, power,
and knowledge. As I consider these questions, I also present critically queer
engagements with how institutionalized philosophy has understood itself.
That said, this book is not a mere application of queer theory to philosophy
or, vice versa, an application of philosophical themes, figures, or questions
to queer theory. Furthermore, it does not offer a comprehensive survey of the
past thirty years of work in queer theory; indeed, such a task would be impos-
sible for a single volume. Instead, in the following pages, I draw on various
contributions in queer theory and philosophy to reflect on what it means to
understand the relationship between institutionalized philosophy and queer-
ness. Rather than an argument for the inclusion of, to borrow from Robyn
Weigman (2012), an unjustly excluded object of study called queer philoso-
phy, my emphasis on queering philosophy highlights an unresolvable tension
between queerness and institutionalized philosophy, a tension that can open
the possibility for a philosophy done otherwise, an otherwise-philosophy.
Introduction 5

According to Ashon T. Crawley, queerness is best understood as an “other-

wise possibility,” a site for otherwise ways of being, becoming, thinking, and
doing philosophy (2017, 6–7). Crawley emphasizes the distinction between
the otherwise and the new: “I do not say new. I say otherwise. Using other-
wise, I seek to underscore the ways alternative modes, alternative strategies,
alternative ways of life already exist, indeed are violently acted upon in order
to produce the coherence of the state” [and, I would add, the mainstream of
academic disciplines like philosophy] (6–7). The field imaginary shaped by a
chrononormative approach to theoretical, conceptual, and political relevance
is one in which a field’s progression is marked by the replacement of the
“old” with the “new,” and it posits that the newer framework is better because
it is more inclusive than the older framework. No matter the object of study,
Robyn Wiegman contends, the trajectory is the same: old “primary objects
of study” are discarded and replaced by new “primary objects of study” that
are deemed better because they are more capacious and inclusive than those
they replaced (2012, 25).
Queering philosophy, I contend, is informed by what Freeman (2010) calls
an arrhythmic4 temporal orientation in which the old is not superseded by
the new but remains in dynamic, queer generational relationship with it. In
particular, it underscores the fact that otherwise temporal orientations, like
queerness, are also political orientations. Critically attending to the politi-
cal dimensions of temporal orientations can further understanding of, for
example, connections between how we relate to the past and how we treat
those who are deemed old in youth-obsessed societies in the Global North.
Too often, change or progress is conceived as that which is brought about
by those who are younger, but this framing of change casts those who are
older as always irrelevant and conceives of the relation between generations
in chrononormative ways. To be politically oriented backward, sideways,
and forward at once creates conditions for cross-generational movements, as
well as critical interventions in mainstream narratives about the past. In other
words, queering normative temporal conceptions of theory and politics means
thinking in cross-movement and cross-generational ways that critically inter-
vene in and resist the normalized disposability of ideas and people deemed
useless because passé or old. It is worth paying attention to whom and how
Western notions of aging stick. For example, in philosophy, historical figures
(like Kant, Plato, Locke, Derrida) are never dismissed in philosophy class-
rooms because their ideas were written in the past and are thus irrelevant for
thinking about contemporary issues. By contrast, feminist essays written ten
years ago are quickly dismissed as passé.
6 Introduction

QUEER THEORY—A BRIEF BACKGROUND

As the standard origin story of queer theory goes, queer theory emerged as
an academic field in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US. While queer
theory has a reputation of being abstract, highly theoretical, and (especially in
some philosophical quarters) difficult to read, it’s important to remember that
the emergence of the field owes a debt to AIDS, LGBTQ, and feminist activ-
ism. The context of anti-LGBTQ violence and the fight for survival motivated
the field’s beginnings.
The authors of what came to be described as queer theory’s foundational
works (e.g., Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and
Gloria Anzaldúa) did not identify their work as contributing to something
called queer theory. Indeed, as David Halperin points out, “no such theory
existed” when their foundational works were published (2003, 340). The term
“queer theory,” Halperin explains, was introduced by Theresa de Lauretis as a
panel title for a conference and “as a joke” (339). Then, as now, some objected
to the term “queer” because of its history and ongoing use as anti-LGBTQ
hate speech (340). De Lauretis used the term because it was being reclaimed
in the world, even if it had not yet been embraced within academia (339).
Queering theory, making it queer and critiquing its heteronormative assump-
tions, was the impetus behind titling the panel queer theory (340).
Queer theory’s genealogical approach to sexuality and gender informs
its critique of identity, a critique that seeks to reconceive rather than reject
identity. Queer critique of identity has important implications. In particular,
it challenges the use of identity as a unifying ground for activism. As Butler
explains, the positing of identity as a shared ground for activism inevitably
leads to a failure to reach one’s desired political goals (1990b, 6–8). It’s not
only that identity-based organizing excludes the obvious—those who aren’t
members of one’s identity group; it’s that identity-based organizing can also
exclude the very people one assumes to be part of one’s group (3–4, 14–15).
In trying to establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for group mem-
bership, one falsely universalizes the experiences and perspectives of one
segment of the group and, thus, alienates the rest. In troubling gender, Butler
proposed what would later be understood as a queering of feminism. By ques-
tioning rather than assuming “woman” as the subject of feminism, queering
feminism forges a politics in which such common grounds are, importantly,
in the making, collectively and contingently conceived and created in the
work of organizing. As a method, queering draws attention to the systems of
power that normalize and naturalize identity’s definitional limits. Rather than
reinforce structures of oppression, queer theory seeks to make visible and
Introduction 7

undo the pervasiveness of the effects of normalizing structures, including our

sense of ourselves and our agency—our subjectivity.

QUESTIONING QUEER EXCLUSIONS

While the version of queer theory’s origins offered above has long counted as
the official origin story of the field, there is much that this account ignores.
More than mere oversight, the gaps in the official account falsely universalize
whiteness and US centeredness and, thus, dull the critical edge of queerness,
threatening to homo-and trans-normalize it.5 While Foucault, Butler, and
Sedgwick (long understood as queer theory’s holy trinity) are tremendously
important, they aren’t the only formative figures. For example, Cherríe
Moraga’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s co-edited This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider
(1984), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(1987) pre-date Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990b) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet
(1990). The challenges to one-dimensional6 analyses presented in those texts
were just as important for Butler’s questioning of the subject of feminism as
Foucault, Beauvoir, and Wittig. Butler acknowledges this context in the fol-
lowing passage from Gender Trouble:

If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive,
not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its
gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently
in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class,
ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.
As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political
and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained.
(1990b, 3)

Butler continues, noting that the fiction of a universal patriarchy “colonize[s]

and appropriate[s] non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of
oppression” and reproduces the notion that gender oppression in non-Western
cultures is “symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism” (3). These
early passages in which Butler frames their project provide evidence of the
foundational influence of writings by feminists of color on Butler’s under-
standing of the inherent instability of gender categories. That said, Lorde,
Anzaldúa, and other queer feminists of color didn’t just critique the racism of
white-centered feminism and the sexism of male-centered anti-racism; they
8 Introduction

critiqued and reframed queerness and queered theory by presenting a way of

doing theory otherwise, grounded in queer of color perspectives.
While queer certainly has been and continues to be used as an identity term
(and nothing I say here intends to diminish or trivialize that), queer within
queer theory signifies that which resists and exceeds the norm, that which
doesn’t fit into categories that establish belonging in dominant and nondomi-
nant contexts.7 Thus understood, queerness is not another word for LGBTQ
people, even as it remains related and accountable to people deemed perverse
and abnormal within white, heteropatriarchal, ableist binary conceptions of
gender and sexuality.
That said, queer theorists have been importantly critiqued as exclusion-
ary themselves. Many queer scholars of color and crip theorists point out
that, despite its critical stance toward universalizing identity claims, queer
theory itself willfully ignores its own exclusions and erasures. For example,
as Cathy J. Cohen notes, the white orientation of queer theory constitutes
a paradoxical, normalizing tendency within the field itself that ultimately
undermines its transformational political potential. Cohen writes, “In many
instances, instead of destabilizing the assumed categories and binaries of
sexual identity, queer politics has served to reinforce simple dichotomies
between heterosexual and everything ‘queer.’ An understanding of the ways
in which power informs and constitutes privileged and marginalized subjects
on both sides of this dichotomy has been left unexamined” (1997, 438).
Rather than a queer politics that clings to identity despite claims to resist and
destabilize it, Cohen underscores the radical potential of queerness to forge an
intersectional theory and politics oriented around complex relations to power
and privilege rather than “some homogenized identity” (438). In this sense,
realizing its coalitional, transformative promise means that queer must adopt
what José Muñoz (1999) calls a strategy of disidentification that resists and
rethinks without simply jettisoning identity.8
The transformative potential of queer lies in its critique of all forms of
purity politics (see Shotwell 2016). Purity politics maintains a commitment to
a linear progression from worse to better conditions, practices, and concepts.
By contrast, a critically queer politics worthy of its name is wayward and vital
for the survival of those lives deemed disposable within heteronormative, rac-
ist, ableist, globalized capitalist neoliberal logics and temporalities. Saidiya
Hartman describes waywardness as a “social poesis that sustains the dispos-
sessed” and “the practice of the social otherwise” (2019, 227). To be wayward
is “[t]o love what is not loved” (227). For Hartman, waywardness is a queer
experiment that enables black survival by engaging in “the untiring practice
of trying to live when you were never meant to survive” (228). Waywardness
resists the suffocating force of boundary policing, whether by the state or by
the social enforcement of conformity.9
Introduction 9

In their special issue of Social Text, provocatively titled What’s Queer

about Queer Theory Now?, David Eng, Jack Halberstam, and José Muñoz
critique queer liberalism and the privileged status of white, Euro-American
experiences and perspectives in queer analyses, pointing to the need for inter-
sectional and transnational approaches to address realities of globalized racial
and gendered violence, empire, and capitalism (2005, 2, 10). However, they
also point out that these exclusions in queer theory do not reflect the total-
ity of contributions in the field. In fact, queer theory becomes synonymous
with exclusion only by ignoring and rendering invisible work by queers of
color and queer scholars in the Global South. They write, “In recent years,
scholars in the field have produced a significant body of work on theories of
race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and
labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship,
national belonging, and necropolitics. . . . [S]ome of the most innovative and
risky work on globalization, neoliberalism, cultural politics, subjectivity,
identity, family, and kinship is happening in the realm of queer studies” (2).
Rather than replace queer studies with a new theoretical framework, Eng,
Halberstam, and Muñoz argue for a rethinking of queerness based in part
on its ongoing relevance. Not only is queer relevant now, but perhaps these
authors would suggest that its radical analyses make it relevant now more
than ever. In this book, I develop and defend a conception of queering phi-
losophy that is characterized by reaching toward generative cross-movement
collaboration.10

QUEER ORIENTATION TO PHILOSOPHY

Sarah Ahmed describes orientation as a tendency, as in what one tends

toward, and far from being natural, tendencies take work (2006, 102). One’s
orientation in space is also a turning toward particular histories, or of being
disciplined by being oriented toward particular histories and texts in par-
ticular ways (23). To be queerly oriented is to turn away from the traditions,
modes of being and knowing, that one is expected to reproduce.
Queering philosophy turns away from the line of Western philosophical
inheritance that traces the origins of philosophy through contributions by
male philosophers in ancient Greece through France, Germany, and Britain,
and ultimately to the US. This doesn’t necessarily mean that queering phi-
losophy turns away from canonized texts in the Western philosophical tradi-
tion. Instead, it means that those texts and figures are read “slantwise,”11 from
positions oriented toward the experiences, histories, cultures, and people
10 Introduction

either dehumanized or deemed inferior by or disappeared from the Western

story of philosophy.
Queer orientation to mainstream disciplinary philosophy is both temporal
and spatial and questions the field’s dictates concerning who belongs where
(if at all) in the philosophical canon, classroom, or discipline. The queer
of queer philosophy is not reducible to sexual or gender identities deemed
abnormal or deviant. As evidenced by the fact there is no necessary connec-
tion between being a woman and doing feminist philosophy or being a femi-
nist philosopher, being L G B T or Q is no guarantee of desiring or practicing
a queering of philosophy, or being queerly situated within the field. In fact,
conflating the two is one of the ways feminist and queer philosophy continue
to be marginalized within the profession, as in, for example, hiring a woman
who does not specialize in feminist philosophy to become the person who
teaches the department’s course in feminist philosophy. This practice allows
a philosophy department to check a diversity box and thus present a face
of demographic diversity without an actual commitment to diversifying the
conception of what “real philosophy” is (see Ahmed 2012).
Being queerly situated within philosophy means facing incessant demands
for proof of one’s belonging in the field (see Dotson 2011a and Salamon
2009). As Gayle Salamon notes, queer philosophers on the job market are fre-
quently asked to demonstrate that what they do is actually philosophy (2009,
228–29). This question/demand for proof of fit and, thus, belonging can also
take the form of being asked during one’s job interview to define philosophy.
For example, after one job talk early in my career, I was asked to define what
philosophy is. I replied using Socrates’s definition of philosophy as a love of
wisdom. This response didn’t satisfy the members of the department, but we
might wonder why not. Plato is certainly part of the canon of Western phi-
losophy, and every year countless introduction to philosophy courses present
this definition to students. But, in the context of my job talk, my orientation
to Plato was a queer one, informed by an understanding of the love of wisdom
as more capacious than that allowed by disciplinary lines of inheritance. As
Mariana Ortega points out, the marginalization of people of color, queers,
women, disabled people, people from the Global South and philosophies
shaped by their experiences, cultures, and perspectives represents a failure of
mainstream Western philosophy to love wisdom (2016, 216). To be queerly
situated in philosophy is to be constantly in question and to do philosophy
from a position between fields, while misfitting12 in all of them.
To be queerly situated with respect to the core values, figures, concepts, and
texts that define institutionalized philosophy is to understand oneself as the
other, over and against which “real” philosophers and philosophy are defined.
How many of those marked as other in philosophy have been told that they
couldn’t work on certain figures or topics and hope to get a tenure-track job
Introduction 11

after graduate school, or that they need to specialize in something mainstream

in addition to, say feminist philosophy, because a specialization in feminist
philosophy would be “too specialized”? While there have been some changes
in the field, the discipline of philosophy remains the least diverse discipline
in the humanities. As Butler puts it, being called upon to demonstrate that
what one does is properly philosophical means encountering a judgment that
“usually takes one of these forms: ‘I cannot understand this or I do not see
the argument here, all very interesting . . . but certainly “not” philosophy.’
These are all voiced by an authority who adjudicates what will and will not
count as legitimate knowledge” (2004a, 233). While Butler acknowledges
that such questions may be important for all disciplines, it certainly seems
as if such questions within philosophy have more to do with politics rather
than content alone. Linda Martín Alcoff notes the “philosophical diaspora”
in which so many continental philosophers, philosophers of race, feminist
philosophers, and queer philosophers now work in departments other than
philosophy (2013, 17).
It’s not hard to understand why those of us who are members of oppressed
groups might be drawn to philosophy. Its critical stance toward dominant
beliefs and values resonates with those who’ve been targeted by the violence
of those dominant beliefs and values. For members of oppressed groups,
philosophy can be particularly alluring, until one realizes that philosophy
itself has been wielded in the service of normalizing violence, rationalizing
oppression, and sustaining injustice (see, for example, Césaire 1972; Lloyd
1984; Mills 1998; and Carlson 2009). Feminist philosophers have suggested
that there’s a connection between philosophers’ attitudes toward feminist
philosophy (that is, whether it is considered “real” philosophy) and the under-
representation of women in the field, especially as one moves up the ladder
in the profession (see, for example, Tarver 2013 and Heyes forthcoming). If
this is the case, mightn’t we draw a similar conclusion about the connection
between philosophers’ attitudes toward queer and trans philosophy and the
climate for LGBTQ philosophers?13 As Alcoff (2013) asserts, it’s well past
time for the profession to address its “demographic challenges.”
As an undergraduate, I was drawn to philosophy because of its critique of
commonsensical conceptions of reality. In Socrates’s challenge to custom,
Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of the meaning of woman, and Angela Davis’s
critique of white racism and US militarism, I found texts that helped me think
in new ways about my own sense of not quite fitting in with heteropatriarchal
norms, as well as about the depths of white privilege. Philosophy, it seemed
to me, was a field for open minds, which was very attractive to someone
who had encountered so few of them in life. In the end, the philosophers
who made me want to be a philosopher were de Beauvoir and Davis. Had I
not read them, I most likely would not have majored in philosophy. At the
12 Introduction

time, I didn’t realize how rare it was for Simone de Beauvoir and Angela
Davis, despite their philosophy degrees, to be taught in an undergraduate
philosophy class.
It is interesting that many of the philosophers who have influenced queer
theorists have had a vexed relationship with the field. For example, Foucault
once said in an interview, “When I write, I couldn’t tell you if I’m doing
history or philosophy. I’ve often been asked what it meant to me to write
what I wrote, what I spoke about, what I was trying to say, why one thing
and not another, if I was a philosopher or a historian or a sociologist, and so
on. I had a hard time answering” (2013, 44–45). Ladelle McWhorter notes
Foucault’s expressed “aversion” to academic philosophy (2016, 23). Like
queerness itself, many of the philosophers who have influenced queer theory
have understood their work as liminal, situated between fields and question-
ing disciplinary boundaries. While credentialed in philosophy, their work
raises questions about the values and assumptions that shape how philosophy
distinguishes itself as a discipline. Poised in the spaces between fields, their
work suggests that queering philosophy rejects the normalizing imperative
that defines philosophy as the application and explication of particular meth-
ods and texts. To queer philosophy is to engage in an experiment in what
philosophy might be, a practice of radical love of wisdom.

METHODOLOGIES FOR QUEERING PHILOSOPHY

Queering philosophy (at least the sense of it I defend in this book) con-
sists of more than adding content about LGBTQ lives and experiences to
existing philosophical theories or peppering one’s philosophical work with
LGBTQ-themed thought experiments while neglecting to substantively
engage LGBTQ scholarship. Instead, queering philosophy is a critical prac-
tice that thinks on and against institutionalized philosophy in such a way that
it points to the possibility of doing philosophy otherwise. When one does phi-
losophy otherwise, one’s work is often characterized as “not real philosophy”
by those who are more normatively situated within the field’s continental or
analytic mainstream. That which is queer is often deemed outside the realm
of “the real.” In the face of the dismissal of their work as not real philosophy,
some queer philosophers might be tempted to refuse the label of philosopher
for themselves, leaving the field to the mainstream. However, queering phi-
losophy does not reject philosophy; it rethinks, reconceives, and transforms
it. A queer perspective on philosophy conceives of a field that can be some-
thing other than it has been or is.
In this section, I propose and briefly describe three methodologies that
are part of a practice of queering philosophy: (1) critical remembering or
Introduction 13

counter-memory, (2) smuggling, and (3) recruitment. I don’t mean to suggest

that there are only three methodologies for queering philosophy or that those
I describe are necessarily better than those others might propose. Rather, as
I think about queering philosophy, these are the methods that seem to me to
resonate across past and current efforts. Each of these methods, in one way
or another, informs thinking at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy, or
thinking on and against the boundaries that define the field.

1. Critical Remembering/Counter-Memory/Counter-Knowing
Disciplines are defined by their archives and the disciplined path by which
one is supposed to access, utilize, and ultimately reproduce the field. Staying
in line with this normalized path is what disciplinary training aims to produce
(see Ahmed 2006). The archive of a particular domain, constituted by autho-
rized texts and concepts, is itself founded on the exclusion of those texts,
concepts, questions, and figures that are disauthorized and delegitimated, or
as Foucault puts it the “disqualified,” “insufficiently elaborated,” “naïve,”
“hierarchically inferior,” “subjugated knowledges” (2003, 7). Exclusions
from the official archive are connected to exclusions of groups of people, cul-
tures, and perspectives from the field because the creation and maintenance
of the archive itself is rooted in a dominant group’s consensus about what is
worth knowing, preserving, and citing. Within academic philosophy in North
America, the differences between continental and analytic philosophy have
been, in part, differences about which post-Kantian archives philosophers
deem worthy of preservation and ongoing attention. As Bertrand Russell
(2004, 116–117) and Max Horkheimer (2002, 255) pointed out, philosophy is
unique among all other humanities in that differences in position, methodol-
ogy, and archive often result in being labeled nonphilosophy.
But much more than a question about which books can be found on one’s
bookshelf, an archive is about memory: remembering that which one deems
worthy of remembering (see Ferguson 2012 and 2019). Archives orient one
within a field in political and value-laden ways. One’s relationship to, as well
as one’s efforts to create and preserve, an archive is part of an ethical practice
of remembering on whose shoulders one stands, those who have made one’s
thinking and existence in a field possible (see Ahmed 2017). Feminist, queer,
and crip archives also enable survival and the creative imagining necessary
for persistence in the work of field transformation. In Living a Feminist
Life, Sara Ahmed writes, “Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we
acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find
our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths
we were told to follow” (2017, 15–16). Ahmed recounts her disciplinary
training—she was expected to engage the work of white male figures and to
14 Introduction

situate herself in the field in relation to them (e.g., as a Derridean, Deleuzian,

or Foucauldian) (15). Ahmed’s observations about disciplinary legitimacy
as a matter of aligning oneself with particular white male figures resonates
with Shannon Winnubst’s point about how one’s legitimacy as a continental
philosopher has been a matter of demonstrating one’s mastery of the masters,
a fact that she argues forms part of the “strange and strained” relationship
between a figure-centered continental philosophy and a more theme-centered
queer theory (2010, 136).
The conventions of institutionalized philosophy, continental or analytic,
don’t enable situating oneself in the field in relation to a not-male philoso-
pher—as a Butlerian, Spivakian, Alcoffian, Davisian, Lordeian, Anzaldúan,
Beauvoirean, or even Ahmedian. Philosophers who work on these figures
tend to characterize themselves in relation to particular fields—like feminist
philosophy or critical philosophy of race or Latinx philosophy, but even so
their specializations are often deemed “too specialized” in the absence of
grounding in another more mainstream area (like phenomenology, ethics,
epistemology, metaphysics, etc.). The result of this training is, as Ahmed
points out, that white men are presumed to be the origin of all ideas worth
thinking about: “Seminal: how ideas are assumed to originate from male
bodies” (16).
In positing counter-memory as a method for queering philosophy, I seek
to intervene in the prevailing archives and origin stories of both queer theory
and philosophy. It’s not simply that I wish to propose an alternative way of
doing philosophy or an alternative site where queer theory happens. After
all, alternatives tend to leave the dominant narrative in its dominant place.
Instead, the practice of counter-memory draws on those texts and knowledges
that have been disqualified, deemed inappropriate, or dismissed as merely
derivative of white male theorists. While the method of counter-memory
enacts a Foucauldian genealogical approach to disciplinary formation and
maintenance, queering philosophy as a practice of counter-memory draws
upon those whose work has been excluded in dominant conceptions of the
origins of queer theory and philosophy. Just as it is not true, to paraphrase
Alfred North Whitehead, that all philosophy is but a footnote to Plato, so
it is also not true that all queer theorizing begins with Foucault, Butler,
and Sedgwick.
Thus, in this book, I will try to highlight and situate contemporary conver-
sations about these themes in ways that also draw upon texts at the margins of
the official archive in both philosophy and queer theory. Counter-memory is
a political and ethical temporality of remembering that strives to think along-
side different strands of work without collapsing them into a single origin or
archive or field—thinking the past alongside the present toward an uncertain,
collaborative future, philosophy alongside queer studies, queer alongside
Introduction 15

disability, race, gender, class, nation, and age. Thinking alongside brings
into question strict or pure boundaries between fields and categories. Hence,
counter-memory as a practice of queering philosophy strives to remember
without monumentalizing and, thus, to reorient oneself in the hopes of doing
philosophy otherwise.

2. Smuggling
Smuggling is the act of bringing in that which is forbidden by the powers that
be because it is useful for and cherished by those who desire it nonetheless.
Sedgwick identifies smuggling as a method of queer theory in an epigraph
that opens this introduction. Queering philosophy is a practice of smuggling
in what one needs (texts, concepts, figures, etc.) to call attention to and resist
queer-eradicating practices in the field and to gather the tools one needs to
survive. Queer-eradicating practices in philosophy can take many forms,
one of which is the failure of institutionalized philosophy to take up or sub-
stantively respond to philosophically relevant contributions in queer studies
(see Winnubst 2010). Those of us who have been engaged in the practice of
queering philosophy share the experience of reading beyond the discipline of
philosophy, not simply because of interest but because so many mainstream
philosophy texts either ignore or pathologize queer and trans lives. While
questions and issues of importance to queer and trans people may be dis-
cussed in mainstream philosophical texts, they are rarely addressed from the
perspective of being queer and/or trans in the world (Mann 2013; Bettcher
2019). Queering philosophy smuggles figures and ideas from nonphilosophi-
cal or philosophically marginalized and discredited texts into philosophy
classrooms, journal articles, and books, where they are used to create a
ground from which to evaluate canonical texts and create another way of
doing philosophy, an otherwise philosophy of the elsewhere and elsewhen
(Crawley 2017).
Smuggling, one form of which is perverse, slantwise reading, is risky. I
recall the white, gender conforming, straight male faculty member who, dur-
ing an on-campus interview, dismissed my reading of how gender and race
informed Kant’s analysis, saying that he simply didn’t see it. Of course, if
he can’t see it, it doesn’t exist—the “it” in this case being the racialized and
gendered dimensions of Kant’s philosophy.
Smuggling as a method of queering philosophy is the steadfast effort to
resist the erasure of queer perspectives, people, experiences, histories, and
knowledges from that which is deemed “real philosophy.” In this book, I
smuggle texts from many disciplines and strive to demonstrate that reflection
on philosophically-relevant concepts, questions, and problems outside the
bounds of institutionalized philosophy cannot be reduced to a mere shadow of
16 Introduction

or supplement to philosophy’s dominant story about itself without eradicating

queerness. In other words, such smuggling strives to think toward a queering
of philosophy—a transformation of the field, rather than mere inclusion or
recognition within it.

3. Recruitment
Queers recruit! Yes, we do, shamelessly! As a method of queering philosophy,
recruitment is about (re)claiming the “others of philosophy” as a site where
philosophy happens. Recruitment is part of the disciplinary promiscuity of
work at the nexus of queer theory and philosophy. Given the fact that, as
previously noted, many feminist, queer, and critical race philosophers are
not currently in philosophy departments, recruitment is a practice of both
refusing to be silent bystanders in the face of their absence from institutional-
ized philosophy and honoring the philosophical contributions of their work.
Through recruitment, queering philosophy brings in work from different
genres and fields. Finally, as a method of queering philosophy, recruitment
aims for expansive, coalitional conceptions of queerness and philosophy,
thinking beyond individual self-identification as queer, a philosopher, or a
queer philosopher, as queer theory itself questions identity as a site of the
operation of normalizing power rather than unmediated description.
Throughout Queering Philosophy, I situate a number of works as queer and
philosophical, regardless of the authors’ sexual and gender identities, disci-
plinary affiliations, or even views about queer theory. In this sense, queering
philosophy builds on queer critiques of identity by focusing not solely on
who authors are but rather on what their work does, the possibilities opened
by their thinking.
I suggest that what makes a text queer is its critical attunement to normal-
ization, both in terms of the problems/questions it poses and explores and
its relation to disciplinary thinking. Furthermore, recruitment as a method
for queering philosophy is about how one directs one’s attention and brings
into philosophical writing insights from non-academic contexts. As a form of
recruitment, queering philosophy resists disciplinary containment and exclu-
sions and aims toward disciplinary transformation. It’s not simply that the
field of philosophy itself is made better through the inclusion of previously
marginalized and ignored people and perspectives; it’s that recruitment makes
possible a philosophy done otherwise, an otherwise-philosophy. Contrary to
the image of the solitary, armchair philosopher, recruitment recognizes that
queering philosophy is a collective effort. Uprisings require recruitment.
Recruitment brings queer studies to bear on philosophy, opening other ways
of doing philosophy.
Introduction 17

BOOK OUTLINE

Chapter 1, “Queer Matters,” focuses on how that which is queer calls into
question philosophy’s institutional habits. I build on Butler’s insights about
performativity and the other of philosophy and Sarah Ahmed’s queer phe-
nomenological analysis of orientation to consider why queer philosophy
has never officially arrived in philosophy. The question of how and whether
queerness matters in philosophy’s mainstream is central to understanding this
phenomenon. This chapter offers an analysis of philosophy’s straight habits.
One of queer theory’s most influential claims is that sexuality delineates an
epistemic rather than a primarily erotic space in Western contexts (Foucault
1990; Sedgwick 1990; McWhorter 1999; Hall 2017a). In chapter 2, “Queer
Knowing,” I discuss work at the intersection of queer, feminist, critical race,
and disability theories that has enabled the emergence of a queer epistemol-
ogy. In addition to explaining how queer theory challenges what is known or
presumed to be knowable about sexuality and gender, this chapter explores
the possibilities of a queer epistemology that is not centered on queer sub-
jectivity but instead opens the possibility of a queer epistemic practice that
reconceives queerness. In addition, I consider what a queer epistemology
contributes to discussions of epistemic ignorance and other forms of epis-
temic injustice in feminist and critical race epistemologies.
In chapter 3, “Power, Life, and Death,” I build on Foucault’s understand-
ing of biopolitics and Mbembe’s understanding of necropolitics to explain
how queering philosophy grapples with the question of whose lives matter
for queer theory and philosophy and how queering philosophy interrogates
what it means for a life to matter in the context of global forces that render
some lives disposable. Important to this discussion is an analysis of recent
queer necropolitical critiques of homo-and trans-normativity that enable the
inclusion of the lives of queer global elites at the expense of the viability of
racialized queer lives. I also present a queer bio/necropolitical reframing of
questions of life and death that inform the story that mainstream Western
philosophy tells about itself. And I consider how queer insights about matters
of life and death place AIDS and COVID-19 in conversation with each other
without collapsing important differences between them.
Queer theory’s denaturalization of sexuality and gender reveals that a
critique of nature, the natural, and what it means to be human have long
been important to the field. In chapter 4, “Queer Ecologies,” I focus on
queer theory’s contributions to ecological thinking and build on work at the
intersection of queer, feminist, critical race, and disability theories to explore
the possibilities of a queer ecology that questions framing assumptions in
mainstream environmentalism and environmental philosophy. In addition to
18 Introduction

its discussion of queer ecological analyses of nature, naturecultural entangle-

ments, the human, and the animal, this chapter explains how queer ecologies
unearth and challenge assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the human.
While critics might argue that queer ecological critiques are abstract and
thus not useful for addressing urgent environmental problems, this chapter
contends that queer ecologies point to the possibility of alternative ways of
being and valuing that are responsive to the realities of a world transformed
by climate change.
The final chapter, “Queer Ethics,” attends to some ethical themes in queer
theory. I explore the role of queer ethics in imagining, creating, and sustain-
ing queer worlds and argue that response-ability, as a critically queer ethical
practice, aims to transform philosophy. Additionally, I critique carceral ethics
and discuss queer ethics as site of experimentation in contexts of uncertainty,
ambiguity, and turmoil. Queer ethics, I suggest, is informed by and makes
possible a politics of radical hope and radical care, including radical queer
care for philosophy.

NOTES

1. For more about the compromised radical edge of interdisciplinary, marginalized

areas of study, and as a condition of their recognition and entrance into the main-
stream of disciplines and the university in general, see Brown (2005), Ahmed (2012),
and Ferguson (2012).
2. See, for example, Judith Butler’s discussion of philosophy’s exclusions and
consideration of the field from a perspective outside its disciplinary understanding
of itself in the last chapter of Undoing Gender (2004a), titled “Can the ‘Other’ of
Philosophy Speak?”
3. Of course, despite its critique of normalizing exclusions, queer theory has been
rightly critiqued for its own failures to think in multidimensional ways about queer-
ness by assuming a white, male, cisgender, Western, and nondisabled queer subject.
For examples of these critiques, see Stryker (2006), Ferguson (2004), McRuer (2006),
Eng and Puar (2020), and Keegan (2020). While these critiques are important and
remain relevant, I’ve chosen not to rehash them in this book for a couple of reasons.
First, in addition to the texts mentioned above, one can read other texts that either
offer or review various critiques of queer theory, such as Jagose (1996), Turner
(2000), and Sullivan (2003). Second, as I make clear in this book, I think queer still
has critical work to do. When I refer to queer and queering, I am thinking of them
in solidarity with crip, feminist, trans, and anti-racist theories and movements. While
I struggled early on with whether to describe my approach as queer crip feminist
(which is how I think about my work in general) I chose to hone in on queer and
queering philosophy in this book, not because I think of queer in isolation from crip
and feminist critique. Rather, in this book I want to ask about the sort of critical work
Introduction 19

queer might do, especially in the context of a discipline (like philosophy) that has
never officially recognized it. In so doing, I resist reading queer and queer theory
as against crip, feminist, and trans theories and movements because I want to focus
on meanings of queer and queering that I take to be in solidarity with them. In this
sense, my consideration of queer builds on Lynne Huffer’s contention that queer and
feminist theories need not be interpreted as opposed to each other insofar as both
contribute to anti-foundationalist thinking about gendered and sexual subjectivity
(2013, 6–7). Queer feminism speaks from and to the resonances between these fields.
I suggest that cross-movement solidarity and coalition require questioning the
chronormative assumption that emergent marginalized areas of study necessarily
displace and render passé other marginalized fields of study. One of the things that
queering as a method can still do is call attention to and think from the edges and
spaces between categories and fields, questioning the terms of their internal coher-
ence. In this book, I focus on queer and queering in order to consider its contribution
to the possibility of thinking and doing philosophy otherwise. Queering is never
accomplished once and for all; its mode is the again and again of a perpetual begin-
ning. Thus, queering philosophy is not a bid for recognition but rather a project of
critical intervention into practices of exclusion. As I use the term in this book, the
queer in queering philosophy is not a fixed category of identity or discrete, unified
school of philosophy, but rather that which defies definition and questions the forces
of exclusion that constitute philosophy as a field.
4. Freeman’s use of arrhythmia as a queer temporal mode points to resonances
between queer and crip temporalities and the possibility of queer crip temporalities.
The connection between crip and queer temporalities is central to the understanding
of queering philosophy I present in this book. For further discussion of the many
dimensions of crip time, see The South Atlantic Quarterly’s 2021 special issue on
Crip Temporalities, edited by Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman.
5. As Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco write, “[H]omonormative
and transnormative identities [are] contingent on settler colonialism, anti-blackness
and permanent war” and “provide the conditions of queer ascendancies” (2014, 2).
Thus, they “refuse a view of the past as finished and the present as democratic and
post-genocidal” (2–3).
6. My use of one-dimensional is inspired by Roderick Ferguson’s distinction
between one-dimensional and mutlidimensional queer politics in One-Dimensional
Queer (2019). Ferguson traces the multidimensional history of queer movements in
which injustice against gender and sexual minorities is understood as inseparable
from racial and economic injustice and US militarism and imperialism. This multi-
dimensional history, Ferguson argues, not Judy Garland’s death as the white-washed
origin story goes, was the context for the Stonewall rebellion in 1969. Terms like
multidimensional and intersectional are frameworks that have informed Black femi-
nist and queer analyses of the simultaneity of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and
ability and the resulting need for a multidimensional politics. For more on the history
of intersectionality, see Gines (2011) and Collins and Bilge (2016).
7. David Halperin defines queer as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the
legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers.
20 Introduction

. . . [I]t describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous

scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance” (1995, 62). Prior to Halperin’s
assertion, Gloria Anzaldúa also defined queer as that which exceeds the normal. She
writes, “The prohibited and the forbidden are [the] inhabitants [of a borderland]. Los
atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the
mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead; in short those who cross over, pass
over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (1987, 3). In her brilliant phenom-
enology of non-belonging, multiplicity, and being between worlds, Mariana Ortega
draws upon Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in understanding the space between as the place
where those who don’t belong, including queers, live (2016, 3).
8. Muñoz cautions against the assumption that disidentification is always, every-
where, and for everyone a viable strategy of resistance. He writes, “At times, resis-
tance needs to be pronounced and direct; on other occasions, queers of color and other
minority subjects need to follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile
public sphere. But for some, disidentification is a survival strategy that works within
and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously” (1999, 5).
9. For example, Hartman recounts the life of Mabel Hampton, a Black queer person
whose waywardness was forged in and sustained a critical relation to boundaries of
class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prevailing gender and sexual categories were not
central to how Hampton thought of herself. Words and categories swirled around,
sometimes taken up and sometimes refused. But at the bottom of it all, Hampton
wanted to be herself (Hartman 2019, 315, 338). While “tribade was thick with the
promise of pleasure, . . . lesbian, which she had read in a book by Havelock Ellis,
meant nothing to her and had little to do with those she wanted and how she wanted
them” (315). Hartman’s description of Hampton continues, “When dressed in trou-
sers, jacket, and tie, she was just being Mabel. Did she ever feel like a man? That was
something she couldn’t answer. She felt like herself. It was simple: she loved women
and didn’t bother about the rest. It didn’t matter what other people called her, whether
they called her a stud or a butch. Some of her friends called her Mr. Hampton. She
called herself Mabel. The only thing that mattered was what she believed; the only
script she had to abide was the one she created. That was the hope” (338).
10. My thinking about the potential of queerness as a useful term for cross-movement
theory and activism is influenced by Alison Kafer’s (2013) coalitional conception of
crip.
11. Sara Ahmed characterizes a straight reading as a reading that “‘corrects’ the
slantwise direction of queer desire” (2006, 72).
12. Here, I build on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2011) analysis of misfit as a
keyword for disability studies.
13. For example, Robin Dembroff (2020) draws a connection between mainstream
analytic philosophy’s “commonsense” that thinking rather than reading is more
important for one’s philosophical work and ongoing transphobia in philosophy.
Downplaying the importance of reading leads to a failure to engage the work of phi-
losophers from underrepresented groups, such as trans and queer philosophers.
Chapter 1

Queer Matters

I was not sure I wanted to be a philosopher, and I confess that I

have never quite overcome that doubt. Now it may be that having
doubt about the value of a philosophical career is a sure sign that
one should not be a philosopher. . . . If one is not absolutely sure
about the value of being a philosopher, then one should surely go
elsewhere. Unless, of course, we discern some value in not being
sure about the value of becoming a philosopher, unless a resistance
to its institutionalization has another kind of value, one that is not
always marketable, but which nevertheless emerges, we might say,
as a counterpoint to the current market values of philosophy.

—Judith Butler, “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?”

Perhaps the habits of institutions are not revealed unless you come up
against them.
—Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism
and Diversity in Institutional Life

Once, while attending a meeting of the American Philosophical Association,

I was sitting in a room waiting for a panel to begin. As it turns out, most of
the people sitting in the room with me were members of various social groups
that are marginalized in the discipline of philosophy, which is to say there
were more white women, women of color, men of color, and LGBT people in
that room than is commonplace at mainstream philosophy conferences. We
were gathered there for a panel in a subfield also marginalized within the
field’s mainstream. While we were waiting, a white, be-suited man opened
the door, took one look at us, and quickly shut the door. So far, none of this is
very unusual (which is part of my point). That said, soon thereafter, another

21
22 Chapter 1

white, be-suited man did the same thing. Several others followed him. One
even opened and closed the door twice! All were completely lost, their bewil-
derment1 apparent in facial expressions and hurried door-closings. There was
no error in the conference program; those of us gathered there were where we
were supposed to be. Without having to confer with each other, people from
underrepresented groups sitting in the room knew what was going on and
there was a beautiful, sparkling moment of spontaneous laughter. Maybe, I
thought, just maybe, in this room, I could be a philosopher, after all.

‌‌
Part of the scene described above captures an ordinary experience at any
conference: the experience of wandering through hotel hallways with confer-
ence map in hand, searching for the location of the panel you want to attend,
and discovering that you are in the wrong place. Conference attendees, like
students searching for their classrooms on the first day of class, often lose
their way. How do you discover you’re in the wrong place? Maybe you look
at the map and realize it’s just a matter of taking a right when you should have
taken a left. In this case, the map (or asking for directions) soon reorients you
by putting you back on the right track. But what if you discover you are in the
wrong place because you open the door and are bewildered and disoriented
by the bodies assembled in the room? Moreover, what if the gathering of
some bodies is so disorienting that you become uncertain about whether you
are at a philosophy conference? Under such circumstances, it seems you are
quite lost indeed.
What if we turn this experience around and examine it from the perspective
of the people sitting in the room who discover that they are a source of con-
fusion and disorientation for the people who open only to quickly close the
door, the be-suited white men who are bewildered by the presence of so many
“not-thems” gathered together at a philosophy conference? Having become
habituated in philosophy by the repetition of being taught by and sitting in
classrooms and conference rooms with people who mostly look and comport
themselves like them, the unexpected encounter of a room full of people who
are “not-them” is a shocking disruption to what they had come to expect as
the familiar hum of institutionalized philosophy’s milieu. A shock, Gayle
Salamon explains, brings to awareness that which has been taken for granted
as features of the world and incorporated into one’s habit body. As she puts
it, “A shock is something that happens that causes us to shift our interpreta-
tion and understanding of an event in our world. Such an event seems actu-
ally to change the nature of the world around us, breaking our modes of
understanding, our habits of seeing, our ways of hearing” (2018, 63–64). In
my recounting of an experience at a mainstream philosophy conference, the
taken-for-granted and incorporated understanding of what real philosophy
Queer Matters 23

is and who is really a philosopher that was disrupted and disoriented was its
whiteness, maleness, and straightness.2
In this chapter I build on Butler’s insights about performativity and the
other of philosophy and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenological analysis of
orientation to consider the following question: Why, after more than thirty
years of queer theory, has something called queer philosophy never been
established in institutionalized philosophy?3 Wrestling with this question
focuses attention on whether and how queer matters in the institution of
philosophy and how both queer theory and philosophy matter outside phi-
losophy’s institutional walls. To clarify, I’m not suggesting that no philoso-
phers (here, simply people with PhD’s in philosophy who currently work in
philosophy departments) work in something we might call queer philosophy;
obviously, if that were true, I would not be writing this book on queering
philosophy. Instead, I’m focusing on the fact that, with very few (even rare)
exceptions, queer philosophy is not an established area of specialization in
the field. In fact, within the institution of philosophy, a proclaimed specializa-
tion in queer theory is taken to be a specialization in an interdisciplinary field
outside philosophy’s proper disciplinary walls. Puzzling over the distinction
between theory and philosophy, Judith Butler notes,

It turned out that I had become something called a “theorist,” and though I
was glad to accept the kind invitations that came my way, I was somewhat
bewildered and began trying to understand what kind of practice this enterprise
called “theory” was supposed to be. Ah, yes, “the state of theory,” I would say
at the dinner table on such occasions, sipping my Chardonnay, and then look
around anxiously to see whether there might be a kind soul there who might tell
me precisely what this “theory” was supposed to be. . . . [I]t wasn’t clear to me
that what I was doing was “theory” and that that term could and should take the
place of philosophy. (2004a, 243)

Critical attention to the distinction between philosophy and nonphilosophy—

between philosophy and theory—can further understanding of how that dis-
tinction functions as a site of heteronormative exclusion rather than a neutral,
transparent description of what philosophy is. I suggest that queer philoso-
phy’s strange absence is a result of the heteronormativity of philosophy as an
institution, a heteronormative structure that has produced and is maintained
and reproduced by philosophy’s straight habits.
My discussion of this issue will proceed as follows. First, I will explain
what I mean when I say that queer philosophy has not yet arrived, as it were,
in philosophy and build on Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to argue that,
more than a demographic issue, the absence of queer philosophy is a mat-
ter of philosophy’s heteronormativity. Second, I consider how philosophy’s
24 Chapter 1

heteronormativity produces and is sustained by the institution’s straight

habits; it is conformity to these straight habits that makes one a “real”
philosopher. Third, I consider queer orientations that open possibilities for
philosophy to be otherwise, discussing the example of queer dance as what
Mariana Ortega calls a hometactic, a practice that enables one to make do and
create space for one’s existence in contexts of non-belonging (2016, 205).

QUEER PHILOSOPHY?

After a little more than thirty years of queer theory, why has queer philosophy
never been a recognized subfield in philosophy? This is especially curious
given that people often listed among the field’s founders include well-known
philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. While there are philoso-
phers who specialize in queer theory, queer philosophy has not been estab-
lished as a subfield. Let’s consider the evidence.
First, the job market in philosophy. As far as I’m aware, queer philosophy
has not been listed as a required area of specialization or competence in the
vast majority of philosophy job ads. In fact, I can think of only one job ad
that listed queer studies in a long list of other possible areas a candidate might
work in, but it was not the main hiring area. In other words, the appearance of
queer studies in this ad might be categorized as an “it would be fine or nice
if but it’s really not necessary” specialization. Occasionally, one might find
the word sexuality somewhere in a philosophy job description; however, this
reference is typically for jobs in areas (like feminist philosophy or philosophy
of race, for example) where there is a stated desire for someone with an inter-
sectional approach to their area of specialization. In this case, again, there is
no specific requirement or stated desire for a specialization in queer theory.
In addition, it is highly unlikely that a job candidate will be asked about their
competencies in queer theory during an interview (I was asked this only
once, and it was so unusual that it surprised me). In fact, one’s competen-
cies in queer theory will likely be used by interviewers as grounds to doubt
that one’s work is really philosophy (see Salamon 2009). All this suggests
that no philosophy departments in the US perceive the absence of someone
who specializes and could teach courses in queer philosophy (or even queer
theory) as a significant gap in departmental expertise or course development
and coverage. If there happens to be someone who specializes in queer theory
in the department, it is most likely because they also specialize in a more
mainstream analytic (e.g., metaphysics) or continental (e.g., phenomenology)
area or figure. As is often the case with marginalized fields like feminist phi-
losophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of disability, or trans philosophy,4 it
is one’s specialization in a more mainstream canonical area that often makes
Queer Matters 25

one competitive on the job market. Undoubtedly, there are individual mem-
bers of departments who perceive the absence of queer philosophy as a gap
in departmental expertise, but they are most likely outnumbered when their
university gives the department the opportunity to conduct a search for a new
tenure-track faculty member.
Second, queer philosophy tends to be folded into courses, conferences, and
journals in other subfields or disciplines. Very few philosophy departments
offer a course in queer philosophy as a regular part of their course offerings.5
Also, rather than entire conferences focused on queer philosophy, presenta-
tions that engage with queer theory are usually panels or parts of panels at
other conferences, in contrast to entire conferences devoted to work in other
marginalized subfields in philosophy. Let me be clear. These are vital, wel-
come professional spaces for philosophers who specialize in queer theory.
Nonetheless, this phenomenon indicates that queer philosophy has never
emerged as a recognized subfield in its own right.
Third, while there are professional organizations that advocate for the inter-
ests of LGBTQ philosophers, advocating for gender and sexual minorities in
the field is not the same as advocating for the establishment of a new subfield.
To consider one obvious point, that one is lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
or gender nonconforming does not mean that one has philosophical expertise
or is even interested in queer or trans philosophy. There is an APA Committee
on the Status of LGBTQ People in the Profession and an APA Newsletter on
LGBTQ Issues in Philosophy. While incredibly important, the presence of
these organizations has not resulted in the establishment of queer philosophy
as a legitimate-even-if-marginalized subfield in the institution of philosophy.
If queer theory were a recent academic development, this would not be sur-
prising. But thirty years after queer theory’s emergence as an academic field,
and while, at present, some queer theorists are wondering what’s left of queer
theory or whether it’s still queer, the fact that queer philosophy has not arrived
is a real head-scratcher. Despite the long-standing legitimization of queer
theory in academia, queer philosophy has not emerged.
Outside philosophy’s institutional walls, queer theory has been around long
enough that some queer theorists are questioning whether there’s anything
left of it (Eng and Puar 2020). Even early texts in the field, such as Judith
Butler’s “Critically Queer” were already reflecting on the field’s future irrel-
evance as its key term “queer” became replaced by terms not yet in existence
but perhaps more salient to a future as-yet-unknown generation, an unknow-
able term that will be deemed better suited to the political work it will need to
do (1993, 228). As Butler writes, “Such a yielding [of queer for another term]
may well become necessary in order to accommodate—without domesticat-
ing—democratizing contestations that have and will redraw the contours of
the movement in ways that can never be fully anticipated in advance” (228).6
26 Chapter 1

There have and continue to be many important critiques of queer theory, and
my aim in this chapter is neither to rehash nor disprove them. Instead, I want
to focus on why, despite those who have proclaimed or anticipated its end,
queer theory has never arrived in the institution of philosophy. What kind of
strange temporal ontology is queerness such that it seems to be, if taken up,
absent upon arrival or, if not taken up as an area, irrelevant or even nonexis-
tent? And, if queerness is a sort of institutional impossibility, how might we
understand what it is like to be a queer philosopher? Understanding and grap-
pling with these questions, I argue, requires a queer materialist analysis that
grapples with how the being of a philosopher is a becoming habituated in a
discipline and with philosophy not just as a collection of questions, methods,
and ideas, but as a workplace. After all, to become habituated is to become
oriented toward and in relation to something, in this case an academic field.
A queer materialist approach to queering philosophy puts on the table the
institution of philosophy in which the work of philosophy happens.
Queer philosophy describes a wayward orientation in the field, an orien-
tation that refuses, to borrow from Sara Ahmed, the lines of philosophical
inheritance premised on both an indifference to and erasure of queerness. To
pursue these issues, I turn to phenomenology in order to put it to queer use.7
Queer use, Ahmed argues, has a “potential [that] might reside somewhere
between our bodies and our worlds” (2019, 201). As Ahmed explains the
question of who is allowed to use what is entangled with question of value,
or of who or what matters (40). A critically queer phenomenological approach
to philosophy attends to embodied being in worlds with others by focusing
not on the individual habituated body alone, but by tracing the habits of
philosophy.

HABITS AND INSTITUTIONS

The epigraphs that open this chapter are about institutions—their value, hab-
its, and effects. The quote by Judith Butler is taken from a chapter of Undoing
Gender (2014a) titled “Can the Other of Philosophy Speak?” in which they
trace what it might mean to think of a queer academic career as a “disciplin-
ary problem,” for example, a career of negotiating judgements about what it
means to do “real” philosophy and, thus, be a “real” philosopher (232–33,
238). Butler reflects on the many feminist and continental philosophers who
left philosophy for more hospitable homes outside its institutional walls.
While such departures have come at some form of professional cost to those
who left, “the institutional foreclosures of the philosophic” have also brought
about “good company and better wine, and so many more unexpected con-
versations across disciplines, such extraordinary movements of thought that
Queer Matters 27

surpass the barriers of departmentalization, posing a vital problem for those

who remain behind” (250). The exile8 of so many PhDs from institutional
philosophy has, Butler suggests, produced a doubling of philosophy that is
an embarrassment to the discipline’s gatekeepers: the work produced by those
exiled from the institution of philosophy is taken up as philosophy and even
cited and taught more frequently in other disciplines (233). Butler writes,
“Philosophy, in its proper sense, if it has a proper sense, wonders whether
it will ever return to itself from this scandalous appearance of the Other. It
wonders, if not publicly, then surely in the hallways and bars of Hilton Hotels
at every annual meeting, whether it is not besieged, expropriated, ruined by
the improper use of its proper name, haunted by a spectral doubling of itself”
(233).9 Somehow, a PhD in philosophy does not, alone, produce someone,
who in the judgement of the discipline’s gatekeepers, is a “real” philosopher
who does “real” philosophy. What might we learn about philosophy’s institu-
tional habits by focusing on that which scandalously haunts it from outside its
institutional walls, or a queerness that resists incorporation within it?
The epigraph by Sara Ahmed that heads this chapter also focuses on insti-
tutions, specifically their habits. Ahmed asserts, “Those who are not quite at
home—in a body, a discipline, a world—have much to teach us about how
things are built” [and, I would add, how things are maintained] (2019, 19).
While we ordinarily think of habits as something only individuals develop,
institutions also have habits. An institution’s values and norms are material-
ized in its habits, constituting the taken-for-granted understanding of what
it is and isn’t, and who belongs or doesn’t belong. Becoming a member of
an institution involves a process of habituation to the institution’s values,
norms, and practices, a process that aims to align one’s own attitudes, ways
of knowing, and practices with those of the institution. This habituation is
a result of consciously undertaken training, to be sure, but it is also a result
of acculturation to the institution’s many unwritten norms. An institution’s
habits shape and are reinforced and reproduced by the habits of individuals
professionalized within it. The embodiment of these habits constitutes one’s
proper belonging in the institution; for example, one is hailed or recognized
as a philosopher.
In their analysis of the heteronormativity of museums (a heteronormativ-
ity co-constituted with white supremacy and patriarchy), Nikki Sullivan and
Craig Middleton draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to describe
how museums are constituted by “embodied dispositions—naturalised ways
of knowing and doing—[that] are inculcated in and through practices of
professionalisation, and to explain how museums conventions work through
individuals at the level of sensibility—something ‘feels’ ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’
‘professional’ or amateurish’” (2020, 10). As naturalized, an institution’s
habitus operates outside conscious awareness such that it seems to be just
28 Chapter 1

the way things are. As Gail Weiss writes about habits, “Through the process
of habituation, horizons are naturalized, taken for granted as ‘the way things
are,’ and this, in turn, makes these horizons even more resistant to analysis,
much less transformation” (2008, 75). Professionalization is a process of
embodying the cartography of an institution. Institutionalized philosophy’s
cartography establishes who belongs in philosophy, or who counts as a “real”
philosopher and what “real” philosophy is. To return to the example of phi-
losophy meetings, an embodied cartography informs how philosophers move
through the hallways of philosophy conferences and the philosophical radar
that just knows when they’ve encountered something that is not philosophy.
Sullivan and Middleton draw on the theory of gender performativity to
explain how ways of knowing and doing that define institutions are perfor-
matively constituted, or the effect of repetition over time. As is well known,
to say that gender is performative is to say it is materialized through the
repetition of acts in a context of a sedimentation of gendered meaning and
norms (Butler 1990a, 270–71, 275). In other words, gender is not an innate
substance reflective of or fixed by the body’s assigned sex. Moreover, Butler
posits that sex (as in the body’s assigned binary sex as male or female) is
also not a mere fact of the body (1990a, 275; 1993, 1–2). Part of Butler’s
point is that whether one experiences one’s gender as a site of play, pleasure,
agency, desire, or profound alienation, one cannot opt out of gender. Within a
context of compulsory heterosexuality, one is compelled to have a gender and
to make one’s gender known. For Sullivan and Middleton, the practices that
define institutions (like museums, but also disciplines) “are performative . . .
they are shaped by inherited codes and conventions that become naturalized
through repetition, and they reproduce—albeit inadvertently—established
and dominant ways of knowing, doing, and being and the privileges and
exclusions they engender” (2020, 11).
The concept of materialization is central to both Butler’s theory of gender
performativity and Sullivan and Middleton’s analysis of the habitus of the
museum as an institution. For Butler, materialization refers to the process
that constitutes the mattering of matter. Thus, “matter,” they write, is “not [a]
site or surface, but [a] process of materialization that stabilizes over time to
produce the effects of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (1993, 9).
Following Butler, the more distant one’s embodied being from naturalized
norms presumed to be simple facts of nature or the material body, the more
one is deemed not to matter.
One often-expressed critique of queer theory is that it fails to take into
account or even outright denies material reality. For these critics, queer theory
is informed by an idealism in which no material bodies exist, only social,
historical, and cultural norms and the minds that interpret them.10 Judith
Butler has been a favorite target of this critique, but I suggest that this is a
Queer Matters 29

misreading of their work. For one thing, Butler doesn’t deny the existence
of the material body but, rather, focuses on the fact that its meaning is not
a transparent fact legible from its surface. Their work on how bodies mat-
ter is about the meaning of bodies and the real material implications of that
meaning in people’s daily lives. As Petrus Liu asserts, “Butler’s account of
the materiality of the body deliberately (and usefully) conflates the problem
of value (what matters) with epistemology (what we know), and epistemol-
ogy with ontology (what is)” (2020, 27). For Liu, Butler’s understanding
of materiality as a site of materialization forms part of the context of the
development of queer materialism at the intersections of Marxism and queer
theory. Liu writes, “The material in both queer theory and Marxism describes
the process whereby a subject comes into existence by virtue of its constitu-
tive outside—what cannot be known or named in advance, what necessarily
escapes categories of identity politics” (36). Both Marxism and queer theory
critique social relations that have become naturalized, and Liu contends that
both are sites of “subjectless critique” in which the material refers not to fixed
matter or economic determinism, but to a critical attunement to that which is
outside norms, current relations, and categories (40–41). Queer materialism is
attuned to the always incomplete and inadequate nature of identity categories,
to the exclusions that attend the constitution of an “I” or a “we.”
To bring these insights to bear on the matter of institutional philosophy,
we might say that straight philosophy has rigid clarity about the distinction
between the truly philosophical and the nonphilosophical; whereas queering
philosophy understands such clarity to be hubris founded on the failure to
understand such distinctions as contingent and indicative of the vulnerability
of institutional philosophy’s self-understanding. To say that the conventions
of institutions are materialized is to understand them as sites of contingent,
exclusionary norms. According to Butler, queerness politicizes this process of
exclusion in an effort to transform what queerness means or might mean. As
they write in Bodies that Matter,

Such a strategy, I suggest, is crucial to creating the kind of community in which

surviving with AIDS becomes more possible, in which queer lives become
legible, valuable, worthy of support, in which passion, injury, grief, aspiration
become recognized without fixing the terms of that recognition in yet another
conceptual order of lifelessness and rigid exclusion. If there is a “normative”
dimension to this work, it consists precisely in assisting a radical resignification
of the symbolic domain, deviating the citational chain toward a more possible
future to expand the very meaning of what counts as a valued and valuable body
in the world. (1993, 21–22)
30 Chapter 1

Queering philosophy politicizes the exclusions of histories, cultures, expe-

riences, and entire geographies that inform institutionalized philosophy’s
self-definition. In so doing, it seeks not recognition or inclusion but, rather, an
attunement to that which is cast outside the category of “real philosophy,” an
attunement that is occasioned by a change in institutional philosophy’s habits.
As a sedimented and iterative phenomenon that appears natural and
innate, gender can also be described as a habit. In The Habits of Racism:
A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (2012), Helen
Ngo uses Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the habit-body rather than Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus to examine how individual embodied habits are shaped
by and reproduce racism. While habitus helpfully conceptualizes how insti-
tutions shape individual embodiments and practices, Ngo contends that
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological accounts of embodied habits provides
a better account of how bodily being in the world is shaped by institutional
norms but also able to resist them. As she puts it, Merleau-Ponty’s phenom-
enology of the lived body helps elucidate how “habits are alive and changing,
but also how habits are inhabited—that is to say, taken up, activated, and
held” (11). Taken together, habitus and the habit body enable an account of
the lived relation between individuals and institutions in ways that allow for
the possibility of responsibility for one’s habits, complicity with oppressive
institutions, and resistance or changing one’s habits (11). Of course, to change
habits, one must first become aware of them. Given the naturalization that
conceals them from conscious awareness, becoming aware of one’s habits is
certainly difficult, but not impossible (see Weiss 2008, 3–4, 96). This means
that the meaning and doing of philosophy and being a philosopher can be
otherwise.11
Habits, Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains, are both structured by the world
and structure the world. “Thus,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “we must not say that
our body is in space, nor for that matter in time. It inhabits space and time”
(1945/2012, 140). Because they are an unreflective way in which we inhabit
the world, critical attention to them can not only help us to understand that we
have certain habitual embodied modes of intersubjective being in the world,
but also reveal the hidden structures of the world that shape our habits and
make meaningful our embodied experiences. For Merleau-Ponty, our habit
bodies incorporate the world and thus move in ways that reflect its contours.
One example of this for Merleau-Ponty is that of the keyboard: “When the
typist executes the necessary movements on the keyboard, these movements
are guided by an intention, but this intention does not posit the keys as objec-
tive locations. The subject who learns to type literally incorporates the space
of the keyboard into his bodily space” (146). The process of inhabiting space
and time is the process of habituation through which the body has a world
(147). In addition, a body’s habits shape the world, much as the letter on an
Queer Matters 31

often-used key on the keyboard is erased over time. While Merleau-Ponty

focused on embodied experiences in seemingly neutral worlds, critical phe-
nomenologists trace the significance of embodied experience in contexts of
oppression and endeavor to reveal the structures of oppression that shape the
experience and meaning of our worlds, bodies, relationships, selves, and hab-
its, as well as the meaning and possibility of resistance (see Guenther 2020,
15–16; Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xiv).
A critically queer phenomenological conception of philosophy’s habits
can reveal the oppressive habits of the institution that produce and maintain
philosophy’s exclusions, as well as how those habits are incorporated and
reproduced by philosophers. One site of the incorporation of institutional
habits is professional training. Professional training seeks to align percep-
tion with institutional norms. Becoming someone who is deemed a “real”
philosopher, I suggest, is a process of training one’s perception such that
one distinguishes between those bodies, questions, ideas, works, and whole
geographies that are possibly or actually part of philosophy and those bodies,
questions, ideas, work, and whole geographies that can’t possibly be part of
philosophy. As habituated engagement with the world, this perception is not
a matter of conscious deliberation; in fact, it is experienced as a simple and
direct matter of perceiving what is.
Queering philosophy draws critical attention to the heteronormative
background that is outside awareness but, nonetheless, structures everyday,
ordinary existence and space within philosophy. It is through a process of
habituation (including professionalization) that heteronormativity is natural-
ized and taken for granted as the nature of reality or how things are. As Gail
Weiss explains, “Through the process of habituation, horizons are natural-
ized, taken for granted as ‘the way things are,’ and this, in turn, makes these
horizons even more resistant to analysis, much less transformation” (2008,
75). Horizons, the taken-for-granted social and temporal milieu in which bod-
ies are oriented, shapes and lends meaning to bodies, lives, and relationships.

PHILOSOPHY’S STRAIGHT HABITS

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes inhabitance, or becoming

habituated, as a process of orientation (2006, 11). To be oriented is to know
one’s way, to have a feeling of familiarity, whether in a space or in a social
form (like gender or sexuality, for example) (6). She writes, “When we fol-
low specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain or even
become out of reach. Such exclusions—the constitution of a field of unreach-
able objects—are the indirect consequences of following lines that are before
us: we do not have to consciously exclude those things that are not ‘on line.’
32 Chapter 1

The direction we take excludes things for us, before we even get there” (14–
15). Orientation is how things—including fields—come to matter, become
reachable possibilities. Whatever else they are, institutions are social gather-
ings, ways of occupying space that are in line with the institution’s aims. How
might we think of the institution of philosophy as a social gathering? How is
one oriented within it as a process of training and professionalization, or, in
phenomenological terms, habituated? When bodies gather within the spaces
of institutionalized philosophy, how are they oriented? What might the habits
that structure those gatherings reveal about the institution’s habits?
Orientations, Sara Ahmed points out, follow lines of inheritance, includ-
ing disciplinary inheritance. One of the things Ahmed says in Queer
Phenomenology is that she is not a philosopher and is, thus, interpreting
phenomenological texts as an outsider to the field. The line of inheritance
in philosophy most often moves paternally from a “great” male philosopher
to another male philosopher deemed poised to take his place, or reproduce a
philosophical line of inheritance. Paternal lines of inheritance give shape to
the universalized Western philosophical canon, the texts that philosophical
training orients one toward, even as one may also specialize in a marginal-
ized area or non-white and non-male figure. Philosophical training involves
habituation to situating questions and figures in relation to a paternal line of
philosophical inheritance. Over time, following these philosophical lines of
inheritance (in their analytic and continental incarnations) orients one in such
a way that one doesn’t notice the field’s exclusions because the process of
habituation naturalizes one’s orientation with the result that one understands
oneself as simply doing philosophy.
To be queer, however, is to be disoriented in ways that make strange the
taken-for-granted horizon of an institution, like philosophy. Queering phi-
losophy is an orientation against the grain of institutional philosophy. “Queer
orientations,” Ahmed writes, “are those that put within reach bodies [and, I
would add, texts, perspectives, fields, and geographies] that have been made
unreachable by the lines of conventional genealogy. Queer orientations might
be those that don’t line up, which by seeing the world ‘slantwise’ allow other
objects to come into view” (107). A queer phenomenological approach to the
institution of philosophy, makes visible that which has been taken for granted
within it, examining it from an excluded perspective, or what Butler (2004a)
calls “the other of philosophy” and opening the possibility of doing philoso-
phy otherwise in ways that resist the constraints of the institution.
Orientations constitute what matters and are sustained by habits. To claim,
as I am, that a straight line of inheritance directs institutionalized philoso-
phy’s orientation is to claim that the institution of philosophy both shapes and
is sustained by habits of heteronormativity. Many (if not most) philosophers
would probably balk at the suggestion that philosophical training/habituation
Queer Matters 33

is a straightening device to ensure reproduction of a line of inheritance.

One objection might reference the liberal attitudes of many philosophers.
In other words, if most philosophers subscribe to anti-homophobic and anti-
transphobic views, there is no reason to think that philosophy as a discipline
is structured by straight habits that make the field unwelcoming for queer,
trans, and gender nonconforming people. This objection mistakenly assumes
that homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of social injustice are mat-
ters of individual consciously-held beliefs, but as feminist and critical race
philosophers have shown, implicit or unconsciously-held biases play a sub-
stantial role in the persistence of racism and sexism in contexts of sincere
egalitarian beliefs (see Saul 2013). Another objection might rely on a feature
of philosophical practice, namely the questioning of prevailing attitudes,
beliefs, and values that constitute the commonsensical. Surely, philosophy’s
professed habit of taking nothing for granted makes it better equipped than
other disciplines to ferret out its own presuppositions. For these critics, find-
ing evidence of heteronormative habits is a matter of consulting the values
and beliefs of individual philosophers (perhaps by a diversity survey or an
implicit association test). While there is certainly a connection between habits
and beliefs, a phenomenological approach to habits does not understand them
to be the product of individual beliefs (see Ngo 2012, 42).
My thinking about the straight habits of institutional philosophy is indebted
to critiques of philosophy’s habits of whiteness.12 For example, George Yancy
argues that philosophy’s culture of whiteness makes the field unwelcoming
for people of color. One way that Yancy tracks philosophy’s culture of white-
ness is by attending to which bodies are made to feel at ease and which bodies
are made to feel uneasy within the various institutional spaces of philosophy.
He writes, “White bodies are ‘at home’ within philosophy departments, phi-
losophy conferences, and such mundane spaces as philosophy department
lounges, and . . . that feeling of being at home is a function of an assemblage
of philosophical practices enacted by white, typically male, bodies, bodies
that have become reified as the paragon of philosophical performance” (2014,
35). Yancy’s analysis demonstrates how institutional philosophy’s racism is
more a matter of its culture of whiteness than the intentional racism of white
people. Embedded within institutional philosophy, a culture of whiteness
explains both the pattern of white students assuming that works by philoso-
phers of color are unnecessary to their philosophical studies and white philos-
ophers perceiving Black philosophers as hotel workers rather than conference
participants. That these patterns are so frequently encountered by Black phi-
losophers in classrooms and conferences points to anti-Black racist structures
embedded in the field and in which philosophical training takes place.13 As
Helen Ngo points out, racism is not only a set of ideas and beliefs but also
embodied habits—modes of bodily comportment and movement in the world
34 Chapter 1

that enact racist exclusions (2017, 1, 13–26. While Ngo focuses mostly on the
bodily habits of human beings, institutions and disciplines have habits too,
habits that materialize and reproduce the coherence and self-understanding of
a collective (an organization, a profession, a university, etc.).
So, if heteronormativity is an embodied habit and not only a set of oppres-
sive beliefs, what are its features? To get at this, it’s important to first grasp
what heteronormativity is. Heteronormativity is the presumption of natural
and thus normal heterosexual desire and erotic practice founded upon natural
and thus normal binary sex and gender. Heteronormativity is a central compo-
nent of compulsory heterosexuality that works to exclude queerness from the
realm of possibility, intelligibility, and reality. Straight habits are produced by
and sustain heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality.
While there are undoubtedly many straight habits, I’m going to focus on
three that shape the institution of philosophy: (1) purity, (2) universalization,
and (3) indifference. These habits, like sexuality and gender themselves, are
racialized and, thus, can manifest in different ways.14 In describing philoso-
phy’s habits as straight, I am not suggesting that these habits are mirrored in
the actions of all heterosexual philosophers. Instead, straight habits structure
the field in which all philosophers are habituated regardless of their sexual
or gender identities. The term straight as I use it here refers to practices, and
ways of knowing and being, that, taken together, inform dominant assump-
tions about what constitutes real philosophy. Straight habits, I suggest, reveal
something about the assumptions that orient the field and inform the standard
stories it tells about itself.
Straight has several meanings, one of which is to be in line. A straight line
is not bent or crooked; it moves from one point to another in a reliable, pre-
dictable way. Straight spaces and bodies are materialized by certain habits,
like the habit of binary oppositional alignment of bodies moving through
space (Ahmed 2006, 92). The alignment functions as a pairing. The binary
pairing of bodies deemed opposite is so frequently repeated in heteronorma-
tive spaces that it recedes into the background. Ahmed writes,

Spaces become straight, which allow straight bodies to extend into them, such
that the vertical axis appears in line with the axis of the body. . . . Our body
takes the shape of this repetition; we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect
of this work. Given this, the work of ordinary perception, which straightens up
anything queer of oblique, is not simply about correcting what is out of line.
Rather, things might seem oblique in the first place only insofar as they do not
follow the line which is already given, or that which has already extended in
space by being directed in some ways rather than others. (92)
Queer Matters 35

As a habit of perception, straightening is a binary sorting device that places

bodies in presumed oppositional gender categories of man and woman.
This binary, oppositional conception of gender heterosexualizes gender (see
Wittig 1992a; Wittig 1992b; Butler 1993). Thus understood, straightening is
a practice of purity. In her analysis of purity and impurity, María Lugones
explains that purity is a mode of perception and being in the world that both
reduces multiplicity to unity and fragments multiplicity into distinct separate
parts, thus rendering unintelligible the being and experiences of the hybrid,
multiple self (2003, 128). Importantly for thinking about institutional habits,
she describes the purifying logic as a training of multiplicity. Lugones writes,
the lover of purity conceives of rationality “as this ability of a unified subject
to abstract, categorize, train the multiple to the systematicity of norms, of
rules that highlight, capture, and train its unity from the privileged vantage
point” (129).
It’s interesting that Lugones describes this perception as animated by the
lover of purity, a description that underscores the understanding of philoso-
phers as lovers of wisdom. Donna-Dale Marcano (2012) and Lynne Huffer
(2020) describe institutional philosophy’s love of wisdom as a denial of eros.
“Eros,” Huffer explains, “functions as the outside or ‘background noise’ of
unreason out of which the rational language of sexuality has been extracted”
(2020, 58). As a method, queering “prowls” eros, attuned to that which
escapes reason’s purifying grasp (59). Also critical of the conception of love
that informs institutional philosophy’s self-understanding, Marcano reads
Socrates’s rejection of Alcibiades’s love in Plato’s Symposium as emblematic
of institutional philosophy’s failure to recognize black women and indeed all
“who understand that we are particularly situated in our race, in our genders,
in our loves” (2012, 232). In the Symposium,

Alcibiades fails in his attempt to be a lover of Socrates and philosophy because

his love is particularized, contextualized, erotic in sensuality. He sees no differ-
ence between love of wisdom in its transcendence and love of wisdom in the
finitude of being human or loving a human. What is bitten? Is it his heart or
soul? It makes no difference; they are indistinguishable. (228–29)

Alcibiades’s failure to distinguish between his soul and his body (or heart)
is a failure to train or purify his desires. But, as Marcano contends, it is not
Alcibiades who fails philosophy; it is philosophy that fails him. Philosophy
fails him in turning away from queer love, queer wisdom that refuses to be
straightjacketed.
Philosophy’s straight habit of purity is connected to its straight habit of
universalization. Central to Lugones’s account of the logic of purity is its
insistence on the binary distinction between bodies and minds, and other
36 Chapter 1

categories of difference, including gender (2003, 126). Monique Wittig

characterizes the insistence on abstract gender binaries as part of the func-
tioning of “the straight mind” (1992a). The straightening that is performed
by abstracting and universalizing an oppositional and binary framework of
difference serves to naturalize and universalize heteronormativity. As Wittig
puts it, the straight mind is characterized by its “you-will-be-straight-or-you-
will-not-be” mandate (28). In the universalizing perception of the straight
mind, Wittig asserts, “homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality” (28).
Heteronormativity straightens all desires and identities, training them to be
contained within the confines of binary, oppositional conceptions of differ-
ence. Marcano best captures the mutual imbrication of philosophy’s straight,
white, and male habits by noting institutional philosophy’s rejection of intel-
lectual work that is grounded in the particular and the contextual, work that
resists and cannot be contained by institutional philosophy’s universalized,
abstract mandate that normalizes a white, straight, male perspective. In uni-
versalizing its binary, oppositional framework, philosophy’s straight habits
deem unintelligible those bodies, selves, and experiences that are between
categories (Ortega 2016). When a member of the binary pair is missing,
habits of straightening fill in the gap, like a crossword clue that asks for the
three-lettered answer to “guy’s date” or the rationalization for paying women
less based on the assumption that their male partners are the primary bread-
winners. The truth of the matter—whether there’s actually a male partner or
whether a guy’s date is actually another guy—is beside the point; habits of
straightening insert the opposite in order to bring the pair into universalized,
heteronormalized alignment.
The requirement to be brought into alignment with norms of philosophy
as a discipline, that is with how mainstream philosophy understands itself, is
another habit of straightening. In this sense, what is straightened is the mean-
ing of philosophy itself, what real philosophy or a real philosopher is. To be
a philosopher is to be straightened, brought into alignment with philosophy’s
norms. This straightening excludes many areas of philosophy, declaring that
they don’t count as properly philosophical. When we’re in the realm of the
improper or unruly or unintelligible, we are in the realm of queerness.
Another straight habit of philosophy is its indifference to queerness, to that
which exceeds its framework. To be indifferent is to be unconcerned, and
in being unconcerned, to make a determination that that toward which one
is indifferent doesn’t matter, doesn’t warrant time, attention, or care. To be
indifferent is to not care one way or the other. So, how does a habit of indiffer-
ence shape institutional philosophy and therefore the training or habituation
of individuals within it? One way to think about this is to recall Foucault’s
observations about the disciplinary apparatus of institutions, namely their
indifference, an indifference that is inseparable from their punitive (including
Queer Matters 37

exclusionary) function (1979, 178–79). This indifference enables an exten-

sion of discipline’s punitive reach toward a “whole indefinite domain of the
non-conforming” (178–79). Foucault is describing the homogenizing, invis-
ible power of the norm; the maintenance of this norm is accomplished by
embodied habits. What does indifference do?

I’ll never forget the cis-straight male philosopher who said he was indiffer-
ent. We were talking about homophobia, and, at some point he said, “I guess
I’m indifferent.” I was taken aback by his comment, so much so that I didn’t
know what to say. I found his comment chilling, and I was speechless. Here
was someone who not only felt indifferent but felt empowered to so casually
avow it to a queer colleague. The conversation ended.

‌‌ say that one is indifferent is to say that one doesn’t care or couldn’t care
To
less about that toward which one is indifferent. To say that one is indiffer-
ent about homophobia is to say that one doesn’t care or couldn’t care less
about discrimination and violence against sexual and gender minorities.15
The casual nature of my colleague’s comment reflects, I suggest, a habitu-
ated indifference that sustains heteronormativity. Habits of thought or action
are things outside conscious awareness. To casually express indifference to
a form of oppression that does not target one is to speak without thinking.
I’ve just offered an example of an individual’s indifference, but what about
an institution’s indifference? What are at least some of the forms and implica-
tions of institutional indifference? Specifically, what are some of the forms
and implications of philosophy’s indifference to queerness? Philosophy’s
habit of indifference to queerness can help to explain why queer philosophy
has never been officially recognized as one of the discipline’s subfields. In
addition, philosophy’s indifference to queerness has informed the exile of so
many queer philosophers from the field who could not find a home in phi-
losophy, who could not be brought in line with disciplinary norms. Of course,
one could say that this sort of gatekeeping happens in all disciplines, but what
makes philosophy so unique is, as Butler suggests, the intellectual contribu-
tions it disavows are recognized, valued, and engaged as philosophy outside
philosophy’s institutional walls (2004a, 246).
Intellectual work that speaks from, and not simply about, marginalized
experiences is the occasion for questioning one’s philosophical credentials.
As many feminist philosophers and philosophers of race have argued, institu-
tional philosophy’s universalized subject is white, male, class-privileged, and
Western (and, I would add, straight and able-bodied). In her critique of that
universalized subject, Bonnie Mann contends that pluralism is not a matter
of demographics alone. Instead, pluralism is accomplished when groups that
have been marginalized in the profession and philosophical canon are able to
38 Chapter 1

offer critiques, including critiques of the discipline itself, from the perspec-
tive of their group history, lives, and experiences and to have those critiques
deemed philosophical (Mann 2013, 737; Hall 2013, 161–62). Philosophy’s
straight habit of indifference functions to disavow and even exclude texts and
people deemed not purely philosophical from the field. But, as Butler sug-
gests, philosophy’s “vitality throughout the humanities” has been occasioned
by its loss of purity outside its disciplinary walls (2004a, 241, 247).
The matter of queering philosophy is not just a question of ideas; it’s also
a question of experience—a queer experience of philosophy that exposes
the walls of an institution and the labor that maintains those walls, walls
designed to keep some in and others out. These walls are forged by habits that
shape movements and gestures and even casual utterances. A queer experi-
ence of philosophy’s orientation is an experience of a heteronormativity that
announces itself as it impedes the passage of queers, or those who deviate
from the norms of the institution. These habits of heteronormativity straighten
the institution of philosophy and, in so doing, exclude queerness by render-
ing that which is queer as absent before it ever even arrives—dead on arrival,
haunting philosophy beyond the institution’s walls.

MATTERING—HOW AND WHERE?

One often-heard criticism of philosophy is that its questioning is contrary to

common sense. In writing about appeals to common sense that often inform
transphobia, Gayle Salamon notes,

Common sense names the way in which knowledge is held and transmitted
within an anonymous mode . . .. When consulted, common sense speaks with
one voice. Common sense promises to resolve rather than generate contradic-
tion . . .. It is that which disciplines the otherwise, brings it back when it has
strayed from a collectively agreed upon course of deliberation and action.
(2018, 108–9)

The commonsensical, like the practical, reflects an agreed-upon understand-

ing about values and the nature of reality, about what and who matters. It
is an example of the straightening habits of purity and universalization that
I discussed in the previous section. Those who are queerly situated in the
world—that is, those whose strange otherness makes them queer—experi-
ence having our lives, relationships, passions, hopes, and dreams criticized
as non-commonsensical and impractical by those who seek to discipline and
bring us back in line with conventional conceptions of the “real world.”
Queer Matters 39

A queer method attends to “what has been designated not much use”
or “useless” (Ahmed 2019, 218). That said, there is a difference between
attending to what has been deemed useless and defining that which is queer
as itself useless or a failure. Queer, as a method and politics, puts what has
been deemed useless to use (Ahmed 2019). Put differently, queer methods
and politics declare that queerness has value against the grain of a world
that declares its uselessness. This is what it means to say that queer matters.
Moreover, the indifference to these concerns might itself reflect certain privi-
lege, the privilege that can afford indifference.
Sara Ahmed’s definition of queer use is particularly poignant: “Queer
uses, when things are used for purposes other than the ones for which they
were intended, still reference the qualities of things; queer uses may linger
on these qualities, rendering them all the more lively” (2019, 26). Putting
one’s education in queer theory and philosophy to queer use involves using
it for purposes not intended by the neoliberal corporatized university. Thus
understood, putting philosophy and queer theory to queer use cultivates the
imagination by critically orienting it not only to ideas but also to how those
ideas are materialized, or matter, in the world and how change is imagined
and realized. This practice is not likely to win friends in high places at the
university or state level, but it is a way to resist the normalizing force of
institutionalization of both queer theory and philosophy.
How something (like an area of study or a body) matters is also about
where it matters. To get a better sense of the connection between the how and
the where of queer mattering, we need to first ask where queer theory and
philosophy are presumed to happen.16 Asking this question orients us toward
grappling with the institutionalized lives of these fields. That such questions
might at first seem to take us far afield from queer theory “proper” highlights
the degree to which, despite its beginnings, some forms of queer theory have
ceased to be queer as they’ve been incorporated into the structures of the
university (see Ferguson 2012, 34–35).
While many scholars have critiqued the unexamined whiteness and
able-bodiedness of queer theory’s founding texts, the classed implications of
queer theory’s embeddedness in the academy has remained largely unexam-
ined. One notable exception is Matt Brim’s (2020) distinction between “rich
queer studies” and “poor queer studies,” a distinction that calls for a reckon-
ing with class and labor issues that structure the everyday institutionalized
life of queer studies. Brim writes,

As Poor Queer Studies foregrounds the lack of access to material resources

that provide one of the most powerfully recurring threads in my queer theory
classrooms, it also connotes other impoverishments—those holes in the field
imaginary where Rich Queer Studies cannot [or will not/doesn’t have to] see its
40 Chapter 1

own class-and status-based epistemologies. In other words, if we are not used to

opposing Poor Queer Studies to Rich Queer Studies, this is because Rich Queer
Studies has not conceptualized its poor queer blind spots concretely enough to
be opposed to them. The fact that poor queer studies schools are getting poorer
in relation to rich ones enlarges those blind spots, making cross-class relation-
ships and ideas less visible. Actively opposing Rich Queer Studies is not only
a way for Poor Queer Studies to be seen but a way to hold the field together in
queer-class tension. (18–19)

Despite their critical work on matter, materiality, materialization, and neolib-

eral global racial capitalism, queer theorists have remained silent about their
own class position within academia and how class matters, not only for the
day-to-day life of queer scholars and students (salaries, research and travel
support, teaching load, the state of the classrooms and libraries, as well as
class sizes, for example) but also for the possibility of spaces where queer
theory and queer existence can happen. Whether and how queer matters is
importantly related to places that support its mattering. The silence about how
class matters for the doing of queer theory, Brim argues, has impoverished
the field overall, orienting it toward the preservation and perpetuation of class
divides within and outside the university.
Brim calls for a queer studies in which the lives of poor queers and poor
institutions matter, and his analysis of the class structure of queer studies gets
real. For example, his is the first queer studies (or any other academic) text
I’ve ever read in which the author shares their salary and lists all the work he
and his colleagues at CUNY Staten Island have done. CUNY Staten Island,
Brim informs his readers, is the poorest institution in the CUNY system.
Brim’s analysis of class structure in academia goes beyond the expected
terrain of contingent faculty to include structural class difference between
tenured and tenure-track faculty who work at rich institutions and those who
work at poor institutions. Brim focuses on the material conditions in which
the work of queer studies is done; in so doing, he calls attention to some of
the habits of queer studies as a field that reflect and reinforce institutionalized
class hierarchies.
The pattern Brim identifies within queer studies has its equivalent in phi-
losophy. Consider the social capital conferred by the name tag at philosophy
(and other academic) conferences. The function of name tags is to enable
others to not only know your name but also to place the bearer of the name
tag. As placing devices, name tags locate their bearer in available social
categories, typically the bearer’s gender and academic place of employment.
The function of the name tag as placement device is, like all processes that
confer social advantage or disadvantage, especially palpable to people who
work at less prestigious institutions. As one moves through the hallways,
Queer Matters 41

rooms, elevators, bathrooms, and stairways (for those who take the stairs) of
the main conference site, it is common (at least for those of us who are not
such stars that most attendees recognize us in the absence of a placing name
tag) to encounter people one doesn’t know and to whom one is unknown.
When someone doesn’t know you, they look at your name tag. In these
moments, those of us who work at less prestigious institutions also have the
experience of people who look at the name tag and decide in a split second
that you are not someone worthy of their time. In those moments, one is
aware of having been placed low in the ranking of prestige. A determination
is made, and one is placed in the category of people and institutions that
don’t matter. As someone who works at an institution whose name conjures
stereotypes of shoeless, toothless, uneducated hillbillies, I can attest to that
experience of being discounted in another attendee’s rush to network with
others deemed more worthy of their time and attention. I maintain that this is
an experience of how class structure orients business as usual at philosophy
conferences, enabling the quick dismissal of people’s value, the value of their
work, and the deep inequities that differently structure the conditions of labor
of philosophers and other academics.
While it’s perhaps too tempting to assume that these issues are removed
from philosophy itself—the arguments and ideas put forward in presenta-
tions, articles, and books—I contend that the conditions in which the doing
of philosophy is made possible, or thwarted, are importantly connected to
philosophy’s institutional life. Understanding how queer matters in philoso-
phy involves understanding the class structure of the field and how being
a “real” philosopher involves becoming habituated in philosophy. This
habituation involves developing an embodied map of where good philosophy
happens---where good philosophers are and where they aren’t.
The placing that happens also reflects assumptions about where the back-
waters are. In the context of this chapter’s discussion, backwaters are places
where both queer theory and philosophy are perceived not to happen—that
is, as places where nothing that matters happens, places of no consequence.
While Brim’s analysis makes a crucial intervention into the disavowed mate-
rialism of queer studies’ institutional life, he reproduces another uninterro-
gated assumption about where queer life and queer studies happen—that is, in
urban rather than rural areas. CUNY Staten Island (CSI) may be the presumed
backwater of the CUNY system, but its location enables faculty who work
there to live in or near New York City, one of the world’s major cities. Brim
acknowledges the attraction of this location in his career aspirations:

[A]fter having lived thirty-three-plus years in rural America, much of it sur-

rounded by fields and farms and homophobia and racism, and, relatedly, having
been closeted through nearly all of my twenties, I knew the most important fact
42 Chapter 1

of the job: it was in New York. Recent work in queer rural studies, had I had
the benefit of it then, would not have made a dent in my single-minded queer
career trajectory. It was gay New York or gay San Francisco or bust. So while I
was delighted to be making my way to Staten Island for my campus interview
. . ., I was initially also a bit dumbfounded to find that there was a Queer Studies
job at a school I had never heard of—a meaningful tautology in this book.
(2020, 26–27)

In a book whose main argument calls for a reckoning with the material condi-
tions of the field, including the professional marginalization and erasures that
are occasioned by assumptions about where queer studies happens and where
it doesn’t, this passage struck me as a stunning contradiction that animated
its own erasures. Admittedly, this is probably a result of my own positionality
as a person whose queer career took me from my tiny, one-stoplight home-
town in the rural US South to my current position as a queer philosopher
at a university in another, though larger, rural town in the US South. Staten
Island may be a “forgotten borough” of the city, but it is nonetheless possible
for Brim to imagine a queer career there because it is within a manageable
distance from the city.
All that said, being within a commutable distance from a major city means
that one lives where queer studies is imagined to happen, even if one’s own
institution ranks low in the hierarchy of prestige. What about queer life and
queer careers in imagined “nothing” and “nowhere” places that don’t appear
on the imagined map of queer theory or philosophy, those places one has
never heard of? In a book that proclaims that coming to terms with the elit-
ism that informs class structures of academia is vital, rather than tangential,
to the real work of queer studies as a field, Brim nonetheless reproduces
an urban/rural distinction that is also classed. Moreover, as indicated in the
passage quoted above, he does so in a way that reflects a certain troubling
indifference to work in queer rural studies—the many insights of this work
wouldn’t have (and presumably still doesn’t) change the desired trajectory of
his queer career.

WHERE FROM HERE? QUEERING PHILOSOPHY

AS AN IMPOSSIBLE DANCE

Emma Goldman once famously quipped, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be
in your revolution.” Now, few things seem as far removed from the realm of
academic philosophy as dance (or revolution, for that matter). Philosophers,
after all, are presumed to value the mind over the body, which also means
Queer Matters 43

abstract thought rather than the undisciplined bodily movement of improvised

social dancing (Buckland 2002).
Yet interestingly, Merleau-Ponty discusses dance as an example of the
possibility of changing embodied habits. Habits aren’t something we merely
have; they are ways of being, knowing, doing that we acquire, and this acquir-
ing of new habits reorganizes the body schema (1945/2012, 143). He writes,

The body is our general means of having a world. Sometimes it restricts itself
to gestures necessary for the conservation of life, and correlatively it posits a
biological world around us. Sometimes, playing upon these first gestures and
passing from their literal to their figurative sense, it brings forth a new core of
signification through them—this is the case of new motor habits, such as dance.
And finally, sometimes the signification aimed at cannot be reached by the
natural means of the body. We must, then, construct an instrument, and the body
projects a cultural world around itself. (144–45)17

For Merleau-Ponty, habits can be broken, creating possibilities for other ways
to be, “altering our existence” (145). As I conclude this chapter, I want to
reflect on how dance has been a site of materializing a queering of philosophy.
The example of dance underscores queering philosophy (and really all
thought) as an embodied practice. Queering philosophy is not only a result
of the sorts of classes queer philosophers teach or the books and articles they
write; it is also a matter of the creativity of queer movement in official and
unofficial spaces demarcated by philosophy as a profession, by the lived
bodyminds of queer philosophers themselves.
Like queerness itself, dance is a social relation. As Fiona Buckland
observes, “improvised social dancing” in queer spaces is a socially, cul-
turally, epistemically, metaphysically, and politically significant aspect of
queer cultures: it builds on and creates shared cultural knowledge, fosters
pleasure, and participates in a collective process of queer world-making
(2002, 2). Queer dance is, she asserts, an “embodiment of experience, iden-
tity, and community” (2). Rather than eliminate tensions “not only between
constituents of lifeworlds, but between the real, imaginary, past, present and
future [bodyminds] of each participant,” queer dance embodies them (9). As
Buckland puts it, queer dance is an embodied process of creating spaces in a
heteronormative society in which “[m]any people who identify as queer are
made worldless” (3). Careful not to overly romanticize queer clubs, spaces
that have also been sites of exclusions (for example racism and ableism),
Buckland contends that the spaces created through queer dance are spaces to
be critiqued as well as sites from which to critique heteronormative conven-
tions (3). As such, spaces created by queer dance have epistemic significance
in ways that are similar to the conception of standpoint in feminist standpoint
44 Chapter 1

epistemology, or spaces to know and from which to know (Code 2006, 40).
Furthermore, the ethical, epistemic, world-making capacity of queer dance
resonates with María Lugones’s (1987) conception of the crucial role of play-
fulness in non-colonizing, resistant world-traveling. For Lugones, playfulness
is an ethical attitude of communication and relationship across differences
and is an indispensable part of cultivating loving rather than arrogant percep-
tion18 and interaction with others. Playfulness, as Lugones defines it, connotes
not so much fun as it does the absence of a plan or agenda coupled with a
mutual openness toward surprise, toward the other, and the decentering of the
self. Building on Lugones’s conception of playfulness, I suggest that through
playful, improvised dance, queers collectively create spaces for themselves
and ways of knowing and being otherwise.
Naming dance as a practice of queering philosophy helps to explain why
dance is so frequently mentioned in queer academic writing, including queer
philosophical articles and books (see, for example, McWhorter 1999 and
Schalk 2013). Furthermore, so many queer, feminist, and crip conferences
feature a dance, and queer dancing has been a site of critical intervention in
mainstream conferences such as the American Philosophical Association.
When I think about academic conferences that I’ve attended over the years, I
think about how many of them have featured a dance on the last night. Even
when a dance has not been part of the conference program, there has been a
history of feminists and queers creating them. Whether in someone’s home,
at the conference hotel, or out on the town, people made time to dance. For
example, for many years a group of friends and I would go dancing in queer
clubs on the last night of the APA. After spending a few days immersed in
the sea of heteronormativity and stale hotel air, as well as the strange and
stressful process of interviews where one had to prove that one’s work in
feminist and queer theory was really philosophical, dancing was joyful. Much
more than letting off steam at the end of a conference, queer dancing in aca-
demic philosophy conferences builds networks, generates ideas, and makes
a space for queer being and knowing in a disciplinary mainstream that has
steadfastly ignored and excluded queer perspectives and people. In philoso-
phy, dance has been a practice of queer world-making in which the “others”
of philosophy create a resistant relationality that opens the possibility of a
transformed field. Queer dancing makes a space for queerness. Often denied
mainstream philosophical recognition and jobs in philosophy departments,
improvisational movements on the dance floor create spaces of queer joy and
survival and open the possibility of another way of being a philosopher and
doing philosophy.
As a practice of queering philosophy, dance is an embodied mode of
disidentifying with institutionalized philosophy. In his ground-breaking
text, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics,
Queer Matters 45

José Muñoz offers disidentification as a strategy of critical engagement

with white-centered mainstream popular culture and queer culture (1999).
Specifically, disidentification is a process of thinking on, with, and against
prevailing cultural forms in which non-dominant groups are either stereo-
typed or completely erased. As Roderick Ferguson puts it, disidentification
is a minoritarian strategy of resistance or engagement with revisions (2004,
4–5). Queer dance in professional philosophical contexts can be understood
as a critical intervention in the cultural space of mainstream philosophy, a
cultural space in which the underrepresentation of queers, people of color,
disabled people, and people who are not cisgender men is normalized. My
conception of the official and unofficial role of dance at philosophy confer-
ences and in queer philosophical writing builds on Sami Schalk’s (2013)
analysis of the Society for Disability Studies’ (SDS) dance as a site of dis-
identification. She writes, “For me, no space is more emblematic of the cre-
ative, affective possibilities of minoritarian disidentification and identifying
with than the Society for Disability Studies Dance” (2013, n.p.). As with all
improvised social dancing, there are no rules on the SDS dance floor; how-
ever, the rules broken at the SDS dance include ableist conventions of what it
means to dance. The queerness of the SDS dance is its collective creation of
queer crip space and new meaning and value of what disability is, about what
it means to be disabled. The SDS dance is the collective embodied creation
of the world that values diverse bodyminds and where disability is destigma-
tized and resignified (Linton 2007; Schalk 2013).
As a practice of queering philosophy, dance highlights how queering
philosophy is not only about ideas and texts but also about queer body-
minds, relationships, and lives. Queer dance interrupts/disrupts the dominant
temporality of mainstream philosophy’s kairotic spaces19 structured by the
ritualized rhythms of mainstream philosophy’s institutional life, rhythms that
tend to work against and discredit underrepresented groups in the field just as
the ritualized rhythms of heteronormativity discredit queer lives as stunted,
immature, and inappropriate (Halberstam 2005, 153–54). To be sure, I’m not
saying that all it takes to change philosophy or the world is striking a pose on
the dance floor. Dance can be a hometactic in Mariana Ortega’s sense, but it
can also be a site of exclusion. We should ask ourselves what other embodied
practices might create spaces and modes of being against the grain of institu-
tional habits. Sometimes, on the dance floor, it’s possible to move along the
edges of the (im)possibility of being a queer philosopher.
46 Chapter 1

NOTES

1. Of course, to bewilder is to cause confusion. There is no doubt that the presence

of so many marginalized groups in the room caused confusion, if not surprise and
shock, for the white male philosophers for whom we just didn’t compute. One could
say that that which is queer is bewildering, or confusing and disorienting to those
habituated to institutional norms.
2. I use straight rather than heterosexual here to indicate that these assumptions
about philosophy are not only a matter of sexual identity. Instead, I use straightness to
characterize normalizing habits of discipline. These habits are straight in that they are
heteronormative ways of understanding and knowing the world (and thus doing phi-
losophy), but they are also not innate to heterosexuality, and they are enmeshed with
other dominant habits, like whiteness, cisgenderism, ableism, and maleness. Straight
habits, as I understand them here, are produced by and reinforce heteronormativity
in ways that are variously racialized, classed, and gendered, depending on context.
3. Randall Halle also notes the “not-yetness” of queer philosophy. The reason queer
theory has not yet become queer philosophy, for Halle, is that it has not yet directly
grappled with its philosophical foundations. He writes, “[I]n contradistinction to gay,
lesbian, bisexual, transgendered studies that relied primarily on positivist, sometimes
quantitative, and formalist analyses of historical events, communities, and texts,
queer theory as critical theory has a distinct ability to engage philosophical discourse
as such—like feminist theory and critical race theory. Yet queer theory has not yet
developed a sustained critical engagement with its own foundation. In this regard,
queer philosophy is an emergent discourse only now coming into its own. For queer
theory to develop into queer philosophy, it requires a critique of its own foundation
in modern Western philosophy. Only through such a critique can it accomplish the
epistemological break that would distinguish it as a self-consistent philosophical
discourse” (2007, 90–91). While Halle characterizes queer philosophy as possible
(and indeed “coming into its own”), my discussion in this chapter will make clear
that I disagree with him. As I contend in this chapter, queer philosophy has still not
been established (thirteen years after Halle’s assertion and more than thirty years
after the establishment of queer theory), and the reasons for that non-arrival rest with
the meaning of queerness and the meaning of philosophy, including a meaning of
philosophy assumed in Halle’s assertion of what it would take for queer theory to
become queer philosophy.
4. Trans philosophy is a newly emergent field of philosophy, and recent essays have
outlined the history of its emergence (Marvin 2019) and philosophical parameters
(Bettcher 2019). Also, since 2016, there has been a trans philosophy conference. The
emergence of trans philosophy is an important and welcome development in philoso-
phy, and it is not my aim to put queer philosophy and trans philosophy in conflict
with each other. Also, the fact that trans philosophy is emerging as a recognized area
of philosophy does not mean that trans philosophers aren’t discriminated against in
the field. In terms of its demographics, philosophy remains one of the most (if not
the most) exclusionary disciplines in the humanities, a field in which racism, sexism,
transphobia, ableism, and homophobia are sadly commonplace (as they are in the
Queer Matters 47

society) and negatively affect the professional experiences of people from oppressed
groups, or to use Kristi Dotson’s phrase, philosophy’s “diverse practitioners” (see, for
example, Dotson 2011a; Dotson 2012; Alcoff 2013; Saul 2013; Zurn 2016). In fact,
queering philosophy, as I discuss it in this book, is a project in solidarity with femi-
nist philosophy, trans philosophy, philosophy of race, and philosophy of disability.
As I suggest in this chapter, the reasons for the lack of philosophical legitimization
for something called queer philosophy is twofold: (1) a consequence of philosophy’s
heteronormativity and the straight habits that sustain and reproduce it and (2) the
meaning of queer and queering itself. Philosophy’s heteronormativity makes the field
less than hospitable for philosophers who deviate from its norms. That said, queering
philosophy is a practice of un-disciplining and, thus, is situated outside and between
disciplines. Increasingly, many queer theorists critique queer theory’s institutionaliza-
tion (in other disciplines, it must be said) as rendering the field less, if at all, queer
(see Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Eng and Puar 2020).
5. At present, I can think of only one philosophy department that regularly offers
a queer philosophy course. Sadly, it’s not my department. While in the past I have
offered a queer philosophy course, it was a “special topics” course. When queer the-
ory or theorists are taught in philosophy departments, it is most likely in the context
of other courses in marginalized subfields like feminist philosophy.
6. Some may think that queer theory is now at that stage—having been incorpo-
rated as part of US academic institutions, it is no longer a field that does the political
work it needs to do. Such a view assumes that queer theory is already here, though as I
discuss in this chapter, that’s not the case in institutionalized philosophy. Queer theory
has animated its own exclusions, which need to be critiqued and reckoned with. At the
same time, I believe the terms queer and queering still have important political work
to do. As Petrus Lui contends, queer theory has yet to reckon with its own exclusions
and to understand that reckoning as a part of the political work of queerness. For Liu,
the project of queer theory grappling with its own “constitutive outside” of “unknow-
able others” is part of intersectional, queer materialist analysis, rather than a negation
of the political efficacy of queer critique (2020, 35).
7. In What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, Sara Ahmed offers many provocative
definitions of queer use, including “to bring to the front what ordinarily recedes into
the background” (2019, 198); using “something for a purpose that is ‘very different’
from that which was ‘originally intended’” (199); and “the work you have to do to
be” (223). While queer use can, over time, lessen the “queer potential” of that which
is put to queer use (44), queer use also identifies potential in what is deemed “use-
less” (218). That said, it’s important to avoid romanticizing the useless. An uncritical
celebration of it (which is not what Ahmed defends) can reflect a privilege that can
afford being deemed useless. Uselessness won’t pay the rent, for example, but criti-
cally understood, a queer use that finds possibility in what has been deemed useless
can be transformative and create spaces for another way to be, to not only survive
but to flourish. Thus, understood queer use is not useless; it puts to otherwise-use
otherwise-valuing that which has been designated as without value.
8. I use exile to highlight the political nature of these departures within institutional
philosophy. Certainly, some chose to leave philosophy for other academic institutional
48 Chapter 1

homes; however, those departures occurred in the context of constraint—for example,

having students directed away from or encouraged not to take one’s classes because
one doesn’t do “real” philosophy. One simply gets tired of fighting those pointless
battles, or hitting that brick wall, as Ahmed (2012) might put it. Others are unable to
find jobs in philosophy or are underemployed (see Alcoff 2013).
9. Butler is quick to add that they are not suggesting that they are the incarnation
of this spectral double, merely that they, along with other exiles, are positioned at
some ghostly distance from institutional philosophy. As Butler puts it, “I don’t mean
to introduce myself as that spectral double, but it may be that my own essay, which is
on philosophy but not of it, will seem somewhat ghostly as a result. Let me reassure
you that the perspective from which I write is one that has been, from the start, at
some distance from the institution of philosophy” (2004a, 233–34).
10. For an overview of feminist new materialist critiques of the cultural or linguis-
tic turn, see Tuana (2021).
11. As Sara Ahmed notes, diversity and inclusion efforts at universities are often
absorbed into institutional aims without transforming the institution’s norms and
values. In this context, doing diversity work can feel like hitting one’s head against
a brick wall (2012, 26–27). As part of academe, neither philosophy departments nor
philosophy as a discipline are immune from this “institutional inertia” (26) in the face
of efforts to make it more diverse, as philosophy’s lack of diversity relative to other
humanities fields and the population attests.
12. Ngo defines performative racism as speech and gestures that “seek to com-
municate racist messages to the people they degrade, or to solicit agreement from
onlookers. As explicit performances, these gestures are intended to be seen, and so
they have in-built, a certain amount of intelligibility” (2017, 14). Ngo distinguishes
between performative racism and expressive racism, indicating that the latter is
habitual rather than intentional (15). Expressive racism resides at the level of habit.
Interestingly, Judith Butler’s understanding of gender performativity is contrasted
with an expressive, essentialist account of gender. It is, in other words, the repeated
acts of gender (the doing of gender) that materializes it. Reading Butler’s understand-
ing of gender performativity alongside Ngo’s analysis of the habits of racism sug-
gests an alternative conception of performative racism in which racism is conceived
as performatively materialized through institutional and individual habits. In this
chapter, I’m suggesting that philosophy’s straight habits are sites of performative
heteronormativity.
13. This is not to suggest that there aren’t other forms of racism embedded in
philosophy conferences. Here, I focus specifically on anti-Black racism because the
particular examples I discuss (classrooms and conferences) come from Black philoso-
phers analyzing their experiences of racism in the field (see, for example, Marcano
2012 and 2014; Yancy 2014). It’s important to both recognize that there is a pattern
of institutionalized racism that shapes philosophy as a field and to avoid flattening
important differences in how racialized groups experience philosophy’s racism.
14. As Siobhan Sommerville explains, discourses of sexuality, gender, and race
were linked in the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century medical obsession with
locating the truth of racial, gendered, and sexual difference in the body’s anatomy,
Queer Matters 49

physiology, and appearance. The mutual imbrication of these discourses pathologized

non-white and non-male bodies (2000, 16–17). That said, Somerville cautions against
collapsing the differences between racializing, sexualizing, and gendering practices or
approaching them analogically.
15. I say gender minorities because, even though my colleague and I were not
directly discussing transphobia, homophobia also targets those whose embodiments
aren’t perceived as conforming to binary gender norms regardless of one’s gender
identity. Homophobia and transphobia read all gender nonconformity as a sign of
queer sexuality.
16. See Hall 2021 for a discussion of how ableism informs geographical assump-
tions about where “good” philosophy happens, and assumptions about the sorts of
bodyminds required to produce “good” philosophy.
17. There’s much more to be said about the presumption of able-bodiedness in Mer-
leau-Ponty’s discussion of the habit-body. See, for example, Joel Michael Reyolds’s
(2018) discussion of the blind man’s cane—which is an example Merleau-Ponty
discusses in the same part of the chapter where he introduces dance. A critical phe-
nomenological perspective attends to the structures of ableism and other forms of
oppression that are assumed in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the habit-body.
18. Lugones is building on Marilyn Frye’s (1983) distinction between arrogant and
loving perception. Arrogant perception seeks the other as a reflection of the self, graft-
ing the other to the self. Loving perception sees and values the difference of the other.
19. See Margaret Price’s discussion of kairotic spaces as “less formal, often unno-
ticed, areas of academe where knowledge is produced and power is exchanged”
(2011, 61). Kairotic spaces are produced by institutional habits, and one’s member-
ship in an institution is determined by one’s access to and successful negotiation of
kairotic spaces. Price critiques the role of ableism in shaping the kairotic spaces that
exclude disabled people from academia.
Chapter 2

Queer Knowing

Epistemic injustices have robust temporal and social dimensions, which

involve complex histories and chains of social interactions that go beyond
particular pairs and clusters of subjects.
—José Medina, Epistemology of Resistance

The truth does not make deviants free.

—Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures

Within queer theory, the question of sexuality has been understood as

inextricably linked to the question—or problem—of truth. Sexuality, as
queer theorists analyze it, is an epistemological issue. One source for this
conceptualization of sexuality as an epistemic issue is Foucault’s work on
the connections between power, knowledge, and sexuality. According to
Foucault, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through to our
present day, there emerged an immense apparatus for the production of the
truth about sex and sexuality. Sexuality became an object of knowledge, or
something that could and must be known. For Foucault, this apparatus didn’t
simply study an innate sexuality that was waiting to be discovered; instead,
one of its effects was that it produced, or brought into being, the very sexual-
ity it desired to know. In other words, the apparatus of power-knowledge that
attended to sexuality compelled sexuality to reveal its secrets and produced in
its operations the notion that every human being has a sexuality.
If sexuality is a secret that must be revealed (Foucault 1990; Sedgwick
1990), one must be made to know one’s sexuality and one’s sexuality must
be made known. This compulsory knowledge about sexuality is a site of the
exercise of disciplinary power over the individual and biopower over the
population. Indeed, Foucault describes sexuality/sex as the hinge that links

51
52 Chapter 2

these two forms of power. Given the significance of this insight for queer
theory, I’ll quote Foucault at length:

[S]ex . . . was at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire
political technology of life. . . . Sex was a means of access both to the life of the
body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines
and as a basis for regulations. This is why in the nineteenth century sexuality
was sought out in the smallest details of individual existences; it was tracked
down in behavior, pursued in dreams; it was suspected of underlying the least
follies, it was traced back into the earliest years of childhood; it became the
stamp of individuality—at the same time what enabled one to analyze the latter
and what made it possible to analyze it. . . . Spread out from one pole to the other
of this technology of sex was a whole series of different tactics that combined in
varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating
populations. (1990, 145–46)

Power, Foucault theorized, is, at once, constitutive of both sexuality as an

object of possible knowledge and the imperative to know it.
Building on Foucault’s understanding of the relation between power
and sexuality, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick stresses the co-constitutive relation
between knowledge and ignorance, thus contesting the assumption that igno-
rance is the absence of knowledge. The imperative to know one’s own or
another’s sexuality rests upon its not being known. It is the relation between
knowledge and ignorance that, for Sedgwick, structures the relations of the
closet (1990, 2, 8, 71, 81). As Sedgwick contends, the relation of the closet
put into play by the homo/hetero binary—the tension between concealment
and appearance that enable something called sexuality to be known—is epis-
temic and foundational to Western culture and institutions. Put differently,
the possibility of knowledge of sexuality presumes a previously unknown,
hidden sexuality that can be ferreted out by attending to particular clues; it
is the knowing of sexuality that makes appear what was once hidden, even
from oneself.
For Sedgwick, the hetero/homosexual binary structured a kind of map-
ping of the self, body, and world, and in the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century in the West, sexuality and gender were co-mingled and
naturalized. As Sedgwick puts it, “[J]ust as [every person] was necessarily
assignable to a male or female gender, [they were] now considered necessar-
ily assignable . . . to a homo-or hetero sexuality, a binarized identity that was
full of implications, however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual
aspects of personal existence. It was this new development that left no space
in culture exempt from the potent incoherences of homo/heterosexual defini-
tion” (1990, 2). The sense that anything might provide a clue about the truth
of sexuality positioned sexuality as part of all aspects of personal, social,
Queer Knowing 53

culture, political, and economic life. It also gave rise to wide-ranging systems
of surveillance designed to ascertain, or make known, the secret of sex lurk-
ing behind the omnipresent closet door. While these systems of surveillance
certainly detect that which is considered normal (cis-heterosexuality), they
are especially focused on knowing that which outlines and gives meaning to
the normal: the abnormal, in this case gendered and sexual deviation from
that which is deemed normal. It is not only that the so-called abnormal must
be made visible and known; every individual must be made to know how they
are situated on the scale of the abnormal and normal. Moreover, this knowl-
edge must take the form of a process of self-discovery—a coming to know
one’s inner truth or true nature.
This chapter focuses on what it means to think of queering as an epistemic
practice. It considers areas of resonance between queer theory and contribu-
tions to epistemology in feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. My
consideration of these issues will focus on the following themes: (1) what it
means to queerly know the self, (2) the relationship between queer knowing
and failure to know, (3) the question of a queer standpoint, (4) queer igno-
rance, (5) institutionalized philosophy’s failure to know itself, (6) the possi-
bility of queer epistemic resistance, and (7) queering philosophy as a practice
of knowing and unknowing philosophy.

SELF-KNOWLEDGE

So far, I have focused on sexuality as an object of knowledge in the West,

at least the account of its emergence as an object of compulsory knowledge
and the desire for this knowledge that has been foundational in queer theory.
Understanding and critically engaging sexuality as an epistemic phenom-
enon was an important focus of Foucault’s and Sedgwick’s approach to the
relation between sexuality and knowledge. But what about how sexual and
gendered subjects come to understand or know themselves, especially those
of us whose desires, erotic practices, and gendered being in the world are
pathologized as abnormal, deviant, and perverse—in other words, queer?
The epistemic character of sexuality, elaborated so brilliantly by Foucault and
Sedgwick, resonates with queer experience because it is a feature of everyday
(dare I say, ordinary) queer existence. Far from abstract reflection on how any
individual S might know that P, analyses of the relationship between power
and knowledge of sexuality and gender distills the affective dimensions of
queer existence—the moments of anxiety, confusion, bewilderment, and curi-
osity that those situated as queer in some way experience at some point, an
affective dimension crystalized in the question, “Does this name refer to me?”
(see Butler 1990b, 3). While many come to make peace with that question
54 Chapter 2

by hanging our hats on the peg that seems to fit best at least in the moment,
the question never really goes away. The dwelling in the question that never
really goes away, the aspects of life and self that aren’t completely contained
in placeholder categories meant to pinpoint the self (like the pin that sticks
the butterfly to the board) is the no-place/between-place of queer existence.
To be queer is to be in question and, as Alison Kafer asserts about a queer/
crip conception of disability, to understand queerness “as a site of questions
rather than firm definitions” (Kafer 2013, 11, 16; see also Butler 1993, 228).
What does it mean to know that which can’t be fully known, that which tends
to ooze from the seams of the social categories by which we are made to
know our selves?
Even though it is felt more acutely by some than others and at some times
and in some places more so than others, the categories by which we are
known and compelled to know ourselves—gay, lesbian, man, woman, trans,
butch, femme, and so on—are never the whole story. A tenet of queer theory
is that there is always something that doesn’t quite fit, something that escapes
(Butler 1993, 226). That something is a site of possibility, a possibility of
being more, a possibility of being otherwise. Even so, to be known, to trans-
late one’s being-in-the-world to others and even oneself involves either mak-
ing use of available social categories or generating new ones. But, make no
mistake, no matter how many categories, they are never sufficient for captur-
ing the complex multiplicity of life, of living in the world with others. So, the
point for queer theory isn’t to generate more accurate categories. Accuracy
pertains to how well they enable one to understand oneself in relation to oth-
ers in a particular time and place. Instead, the point is that there is nothing
natural and inevitable about how we understand ourselves. Gender and sexual
categories are contingent and, thus, not inevitable, invariable facts of our
being. Given this, queering as an epistemic project is not oriented toward the
capital “T” Truth; it is oriented toward the limitations of our knowledge, that
which is outside the realm of knowability but nonetheless crucial for queer
lives, that which is “at the limits of available ontologies, available schemes
of intelligibility” (224).
Moments of ambiguity are queer moments, moments that characterize
what it means to be situated as and know oneself as queer. For Judith Butler,
queer reflects and enacts a critical orientation rather than a constellation of
acts, desires, and embodiments that solidify a queer identity (226–30). One
criticism of queer theory is that it fails to grapple with the realities of our
social identities, the difference identity makes. I want to suggest that queer
theory’s critique of identity is not a rejection of identity or of its significance
in our lives. As evidence, consider Butler’s assertion:
Queer Knowing 55

As much it is necessary to assert political demands through recourse to identity

categories, and to lay claim to the power to name oneself and determine the
conditions under which that name is used, it is also impossible to sustain that
kind of mastery over the trajectory of those categories within discourse. This
is not an argument against using identity categories, but it is a reminder of
the risk that attends every such use. The expectation of self-determination that
self-naming arouses is paradoxically contested by the historicity of the name
itself: by the history of the usages that one never controlled, but that constrain
the very usage that now emblematizes autonomy; by the future efforts to deploy
the term against the grain of the current ones, and that will exceed the control of
those who seek to set the course of the terms in the present. (227–28)

Butler’s account of identity as performative includes the use of queer and any
other existing or future sexual and gender identity categories. As social cat-
egories, gender and sexual identity are established in scenes of social recogni-
tion (227). The sense in which being hailed as a particular gender or sexuality
is a site of trouble rather than comfort, affirmation, and social belonging is a
critically queer affect. Following Mariana Ortega (2016), claiming identity,
for queers, is a home-tactic, a way of making do with available categories—
new and old—while navigating their limitations. For these reasons, queer, as
queer theorists understand the term, is critically related to but not reducible
to terms that signify non-heterosexual and non-cisgender identity. This non-
reducibility of queer to being a gender or sexual minority is reflected in terms
like queer lesbian or queer heterosexual to signal something about one’s
relationship to dominant framings and normalizing exclusions of those terms.
Thus, the queer in queer epistemology is best understood as a critical
positionality rather than a substantive, totalizing, fixed identity. As a way
of knowing, queering persistently troubles and is troubled by that which is
not only marginal to but also rendered invisible by the categories by which
we make sense of ourselves, our relationships with others, and the world.
Queer knowing is knowing from a place of non-or not-quite belonging, a
positionality attuned to erasures and violence that sustain the borders that
determine belonging to a gender, a sexuality, a race, a nation, a species, and
so on. As such, queer knowing is located in silences, the biting of the tongue.
Biting of the tongue is often a form of self-censoring to preserve a sense of
togetherness of a group. In such instances, biting one’s tongue is a form of
epistemic oppression that Kristie Dotson (2011b) calls testimonial smother-
ing. In testimonial smothering, one judges an audience as not prepared for
one’s testimony and, thus, as likely to condemn or challenge one in some way.
In these cases, it’s an act of self-preservation, survival, and radical self-care1
to say nothing. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) describes another form of epistemic
silencing that attempts to discipline/tame what one says as a way of keeping
56 Chapter 2

one’s capacities to know within bounds deemed acceptable by privileged

knowers. Silencing—including the taming of one’s tongue and the biting of
one’s tongue—is a scene of epistemic injustice experienced by those who fail
to belong not only in mainstream institutions but also in those marginalized
spaces that are said to be by, for, and of one’s people. Both sorts of spaces
demand some form of proof of membership. Dotson and Anzaldúa, I suggest,
analyze forms of epistemic injustice that ignore or attempt to stifle queer self-
knowing in order to sustain a feeling of group cohesion.

QUEER KNOWING AND FAILURE

If queerness is characterized by a failure to fit and the impossibility of the

social forms by which we make sense of our selves and the world to fully
capture one’s being and experience, must a queer epistemology conclude that
knowledge is impossible, that all attempts to know are doomed to failure?2
Not exactly. There is a difference between a failure of intelligibility and
the failure or impossibility of knowledge, tout court. For example, consider
Friedrich Nietzsche’s discussion of the relationship between truth and lies
(2006). Nietzsche’s point isn’t that there is no truth or that truth is unneces-
sary for our navigation of the world. Instead, his point is that we must shift
our understanding of what truth is. We misunderstand truth if we think of it
as above the ordinary world like a Platonic form. Such truths attempt to dis-
cipline but ultimately fail life by fossilizing it. An understanding of truth as
contingent and partial (in a non-relativist sense) has the best chance of saying
something meaningful about the complexity of life, a complexity character-
ized by the fact that there is always something about life/living things that
escapes our attempts to grasp them. This insight doesn’t necessitate abandon-
ing truth (as if that were possible). Instead, it requires epistemic humility.
Understanding and navigating one’s failure of intelligibility as a queer person
necessitates a certain epistemic skill honed through sharp awareness of the
contingency and inadequacy of social ontologies, an awareness that culti-
vates an epistemic humility in the face of all that is unknown and perhaps
unknowable. This isn’t an absence of knowledge; it is a slantwise knowing
attunement to something more. To get a better sense of this point, let’s first
consider some examples of discussions of failure in queer theory.
Butler’s observations about what gender is are grounded in queer experi-
ence of the failure to embody the regulatory ideal of gender. That said, to
generalize from this failure to conform to gender norms to understanding
queerness itself as failure focuses on only one dimension of queer experience:
its failure from the perspective of dominant norms. Queerness is also a site
of otherwise-being, otherwise-knowing, what Ashon T. Crawley describes
Queer Knowing 57

as a possibility not captured by prevailing modes of thought (2017, 6–7).

For Crawley, the other-wise names queer possibility, alternatives, that exist
against the suffocating force of dominant conceptions of what is (2). The
traditional, Western philosophical conception of truth was forged within
and continues to be animated by dominant conceptions of what is, but queer
knowing is attuned to entangled past, present, future alternatives that are ren-
dered invisible and silenced in the violent, normalizing declaration that what
is always was and will be.
What and how queers know is based on queer experiences,3 and those
experiences trouble rather than solidify identity categories. Thus, an episte-
mology one could call queer is grounded, in part, in queer theory’s subjectless
critique,4 lending itself to a knowing at the heart of ambiguity rather than
epistemic certainty. Understanding queer as an art of failure5 (rather than
failure as such) is an understanding of that carves out an alternative way of
being, knowing, and relating vis-à-vis that which is deemed a failure in domi-
nant contexts. Consider Ladelle McWhorter’s (1999) reflections on coming
to know herself as one of the abnormal ones, someone who was not allowed
to simply be, someone for whom being is not straightforward. Rather than
being allowed to simply be, McWhorter describes being forced to categorize
herself, to put a label on the particular sort of abnormal others deemed her
to be, no matter how alienating this felt to her own sense of self—at least
initially. One can (though not always) find some way to be within a category
one is forced to occupy, but to be queer is to have trouble with and to trouble
those categories in some way. McWhorter describes her relationship to being
sexually categorized thusly:

I did not want to be a homosexual. But gradually they—peers, teachers, min-

isters, therapists—made me. Not that they wanted me to be queer, of course;
God help us, nobody wanted that. There certainly was no intentional conspiracy
to make me anything at all. It’s just that in our culture people who engage
consistently in homosexual relationships and in some other forms of gender
transgressive behavior are taken to be categorically and fundamentally different
from everybody else, so if you fall into that fundamentally different category, it
is imperative that you stay there and be that or else you threaten the very order
of things. I couldn’t do what I did and escape being what those actions implied
to most people that I was. Eventually, then, I was made to understand that queer
was what I had to be. . . . The very project of resisting this essentializing and
totalizing categorization of me propelled me into it. In order to protect myself
from a serious harm—from losing my self of myself by being reduced to my
sexuality—I had to make my sexuality into a central category, a central issue in
my life; I had to allow my sexuality and the epistemic demands surrounding it to
pervade (as a rigidly policed silence) everything I said and did. I don’t know if it
was ever necessary to destroy a village in order to save it, but it was necessary
58 Chapter 2

thoroughly and completely to sexualize myself in order to save myself from

being thoroughly and completely sexualized. (3–4)

McWhorter credits Foucault’s The History of Sexuality with helping her

to make sense of this experience and to understand sexuality as a “histori-
cally formed classification scheme” rather than a fact about her nature (31).
Foucault’s account of the history of sexuality in the West as an epistemic
project that is never disinterested opened a path for McWhorter to understand
herself queer, or a “round square” (8–9, 28). McWhorter describes the queer
resonance of Foucault’s insight that truth doesn’t always set one free; truth
can also lock you up (13). The truth, according to McWhorter, serves the
interests of those who are “straight-straight-straight” (13), or those whose
compulsory categorization is lived only as natural belonging and never as
risk, failure, ambiguity, anxiety, or alienation.
It would be a mistake to read McWhorter’s reflections as queer because of
her sexual identity, just as it would be a mistake to understand her interpreta-
tion of Foucault’s philosophical voice as queer because of his sexuality. Queer
perspectives are founded on being compelled to know oneself as deviant, as
abnormal. Thus, queer self-knowledge is not forged by the self alone; instead,
one comes to know oneself as queer in relation to others in a particular time
and place. Queer self-knowledge involves grappling with cartoon-like domi-
nant forms of visibility and silences and erasures that accompany inclusion.
This point is central to Sara Ahmed’s (2012) critique of diversity and inclu-
siveness work in institutions that tokenize and give lip service to diversity and
inclusiveness but ultimately maintain exclusion.

QUEER EPISTEMOLOGY AND

THE QUESTION OF STANDPOINT6

Some have suggested that queer epistemology is informed by a queer stand-

point (see, for example, Harding 2004, 3). One of feminist philosophy’s
major contributions to epistemology is the concept of a standpoint or situated
knowing. To understand knowledge as situated is to understand it as informed
by one’s social, historical, and cultural location and to understand that loca-
tion as also something to know (Code 2006). Some might assume that femi-
nist conceptions of a standpoint are rooted in a fixed understanding of social
identity, such that there is a way of knowing as a woman, as a man, and so
forth, and thus at odds with a queer epistemology. However, such a concep-
tion presents a reductive reading of the complexity and richness of work in
feminist epistemology. To say that one’s gender, sexuality, and race informs
a standpoint from which one knows does not mean that one’s knowledge is
Queer Knowing 59

determined by one’s social identity. Standpoint, within feminist epistemol-

ogy, is conceived as an achieved critical perspective rather than an inevitable
consequence of identity. Feminist epistemological accounts of knowledge as
socially situated continue to deepen understanding of how power works to
privilege those who are dominantly situated and oppress those who are mar-
ginally situated as knowers (see, for example, Collins 1991; Harding 2004;
Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011b; Pohlhaus 2012; Grasswick 2021, 202–4).
While these insights have been important for queer epistemology, there
is an important difference between feminist standpoint theory and queer
approaches to knowledge. As Sandra Harding points out, the achievement
of a standpoint is a source of empowerment for oppressed groups that enacts
an “oppositional and shared consciousness” (2004, 3), an understanding also
reflected in Patricia Hill Collins’s characterization of a black feminist stand-
point as a “shared angle of vision” of Black women (1991, 26). By contrast,
queer critiques of identity are attuned to unbelonging and ambiguity that belie
claims to shared understanding. This is not to say that shared understanding is
impossible. Rather, queer epistemology locates the possibility of such shared
understanding in shared politics rather than shared identity per se. Identity is,
of course, relevant and indispensable in political critique, but it is at the same
time a site of internal exclusions. As a site of critical questioning rather than
belonging or shared understanding, identity remains for queer theory, and
thus queer epistemology, a site of critical questions. As a result, the stand-
point that informs queer epistemology is not grounded in an understanding
shared by gender and sexual minorities. The experience of being minoritized
can, depending on the degree to which one is otherwise privileged, inform an
experience of gender and sexual identity as a site of trouble rather than secure
belonging, but this experience is not unique to gender and sexual minorities.
For this reason, queer knowing, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is grounded in
an affective sensibility, an attunement toward that which is not oppositional
and outside zones of belonging (see Hall 2017a). The affective register that
informs queer epistemology is exemplified by Gloría Anzaldúa’s concept of
la facultad, “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper
realities, to see the deep structure below the surface” (1987, 38). The affective
attunement to that which is between worlds is part of what Anzaldúa describes
as the “emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” that is a consequence of
being between worlds, or in what Anzaldúa calls the borderlands (163). For
Anzaldúa, the borderlands are inhabited by los atravesados, “the squint-eyed,
the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-
breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through
the confines of the ‘normal’” (3). Forged in the experience of being between
worlds, queer knowing lacks the certainty of oppositional consciousness, or
what Anzaldúa critiques as reaction rather than resistance (78). Instead, the
60 Chapter 2

affective attunement that characterizes queer knowing opens the possibility of

knowing outside certainties in dominant and marginalized contexts (Shotwell
2011, ix, xii–iii).
If identity is a point of departure for critical questioning rather than the cer-
tainty of shared understanding (see Butler 1993 and Kafer 2013), what are the
possibilities of queer self-knowledge? How might one know oneself queerly,
and what is the critical importance of such queer knowing? Again, it must be
said, queer knowing is not another world for either epistemic nihilism or epis-
temic relativism; queer knowing is an otherwise-knowing that is affectively
attuned to the exclusions that are enacted by inclusion. Far from an occasion
for epistemic despair, the insights of queer knowing are occasions for the cul-
tivation of epistemic humility. Such humility is crucial for cross-movement
solidarity. No matter how much one (here either a person or group) thinks one
has it right, there is always much one doesn’t know. On the surface, this asser-
tion might seem banal, but the unknown and possibly unknowable in the case
of queer knowing calls into question the self-understanding of individuals and
groups. Epistemic humility allows for a critical openness to the contingency
of social categorization and the capacity of queer knowing to undo the self,
enabling the self to become and know otherwise.

QUEER THEORY, IGNORANCE, AND SELF-DECEPTION

Such is the possibility of queer knowing, but unfortunately, queer theory—

especially the field’s institutionalized mainstream—has often failed to queerly
know itself in these ways. In this section of the chapter, I will focus on two
forms of ignorance that have been perpetuated by the field’s mainstream:
an ignorance enacted by its academic incorporation as a respectable field of
study (a form of ignorance I will call the ignorance of respectability) and a
form of ignorance Jasbir Puar (2007) calls queer exceptionalism. Both forms
of ignorance inform the predominantly white, ableist, and US-centeredness
of the field’s mainstream.
Within academia, ignorance of respectability is a form of ignorance in
which a field (and thus, many of its practitioners) turns away from (or ignores)
its more radical edge in a bid for respectability and recognition within a disci-
pline’s mainstream. Academic institutionalization of a formerly marginalized
field involves part of it becoming mainstream. Courses, programs of study,
and positions are created; canons are established; and specializations are rec-
ognized. In the case of queer studies and other area studies programs in US
universities, Roderick Ferguson calls this the “birth of the interdisciplines,”
a process of institutional incorporation wherein “power began to work in and
Queer Knowing 61

through difference in order to manage its insurgent possibilities” (2012, 4). In

his recounting of the history of this process, Ferguson writes,

The academy would begin to put, keep in reserve, and save minoritized subjects
and knowledges in an archival fashion, that is, by devising ways to make those
subjects and knowledges respect power and its “laws.” Put differently, the ethnic
and women’s studies movements applied pressures on the archival conventions
of the academy in an effort to stretch those conventions so that previously
excluded subjects might enjoy membership. But it also meant that those sub-
jects would fall under new and revised laws . . .. The interdisciplines were an
ensemble of institutions and techniques that offered positivities to populations
and constituencies that had been denied institutional claims to agency. Hence
with the interdisciplines connoted a new form of biopower organized around the
affirmation, recognition, and legitimacy of minoritized life. To offset their pos-
sibility for future ruptures, power made legitimacy and recognition into grand
enticements. (13)

I have quoted Ferguson at length because, while his specific focus is the intro-
duction of new areas of study in US universities in response to pressure from
student groups in the 1960s and 1970s, the mode of biopower he describes
is illustrative of how we might understand the incorporation of queer theory
into US universities in the 1990s and beyond.
There are important differences, of course. As many have pointed out,
queer theory was initiated from within academy in contrast to other areas like
race and ethnic studies programs and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies
programs. For one thing, the field was created by scholars who were already
part of the university, even if marginalized due to their gender and/or sexual-
ity. The demand for queer theory programs and courses didn’t come from
outside the university; queer theory was created by academics and academic
committees. More precisely, as Matt Brim (2020) argues, it is epistemically
significant for the field that it emerged from within wealthy US universities.
The theorists who would later be considered founding figures had under-
graduate and graduate degrees from elite academic institutions (like Yale
University). Their Ivy League pedigrees paved the way for employment at
institutions with the kind of teaching loads, service expectations, and research
support that supported the writing of books. All of this gave queer theory an
inroad (at least in certain disciplines) that quickened its academic recognition
and legitimacy.7
Nonetheless, Ferguson’s point is that incorporation disciplines minoritized
subjects and fields within the university. In becoming a recognized disci-
pline, a formerly marginalized area becomes an exclusionary force. As such,
academic recognition of fields is another scene of respectability politics mas-
querading as transformative, revolutionary force. Legitimation, recognition,
62 Chapter 2

respectability—all this coalesces in the service of creating a mainstream of a

formerly marginalized or excluded area that itself critiqued its own exclusion
from a mainstream.
Queer exceptionalism operates as another form of ignorance in the field.
Queer exceptionalism underscores the complicity of LGBT/queer people
and movements with racist, nationalist projects. As Jasbir Puar points out,
“[T]here is nothing inherently or intrinsically antination or antinationalist
about queerness, despite a critical distancing from gay and lesbian identities”
(2007, 77). Through identity-based consumerism and forms of inclusion (for
example, the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage), Western nations (Puar
focuses specifically on the US) present themselves as beacons of liberal, mul-
ticultural inclusion while engaging in imperialist acts of violence against non-
Western people and countries in the name of those very same ideals. Thus,
we should not assume that queerness is always or even necessarily at odds
with the norms of nationalism and citizenship; queerness can also be a site
of exclusion that it fails to critique. The ignorance of queer exceptionalism is
the ignorance of queer movements and queer studies that fails to know them-
selves in a deeply historical, culturally, socially, politically, and economically
contextualized way.
Regarding the field of queer studies, queer exceptionalism is reflected
in a presumed whiteness, ableism, and Euro-Americanness (especially,
US-centeredness) of queerness. Queer exceptionalism instrumentalizes
queerness in the service of nationalism, xenophobia, global capitalism, white
supremacy, misogyny (including trans misogyny and misogynoir), and able-
ism. Despite the field’s critique of identity as a site of normalizing power,
queer exceptionalism ignores the erasures that can be enacted by the term
queer in the absence of contextualized analysis. Within academic institutions,
queer exceptionalism refers to a queerness that has been paradoxically nor-
malized within—especially US—academic institutions, establishing queer
as not only a proper object of study (see Wiegman 2012) but also a proper
epistemic subject in the world (see Eng and Puar 2020).
Within mainstream queer studies, queer exceptionalism is founded on and
enacts a privileged, self-deceived epistemology, or what we might call white
queer studies, queer studies that takes for granted a whitened queerness as its
subject. I use the term “whitened queerness” to question the assumption that
queer is necessarily another word for white, an assumption that dismisses
and renders invisible the history of theoretical and activist work by queers of
color that have been foundational to queer theory. It’s the failure to engage
this work that is a whitening of queerness and performance of queer white-
ness. There is, as David Eng and Jasbir Puar suggest, work to the left of queer
that both calls into question the exceptionalism of mainstream queer studies
and points to work in trans, debility, and Indigenous studies that has been
Queer Knowing 63

the site for emergence of new critically queer subjects and for thinking more
expansively about queerness (2020, 2). These critiques have exposed queer
theory’s failure to know itself queerly. In her critique of the racism of white
feminism, Barbara Smith argued that any feminism that didn’t aim to trans-
form racism, heterosexism and homophobia, ableism, ageism, and classism as
well as sexism was “not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement”
(1980/2014, 134). Smith also critiques queer theory and politics for failure
to understand the importance of anti-racism and the analysis of race to their
work (1993/2014, 180–81; 1997/2014). Smith is critiquing, at least in part, a
white and class-privileged self-deception that has shaped mainstream femi-
nist and queer theories and politics.
Queers of color have long critiqued the unexamined whiteness and
Euro-American centeredness of mainstream queer theory’s epistemic frame
through which is has theorized queerness. Despite its project of critiqu-
ing rather than assuming identity, mainstream queer theory has tended to
privilege a US-based, white Anglo subject. Queer studies scholars such as
Roderick Ferguson (2004), E. Patrick Johnson (2001), José Muñoz (1999),
and Keguro Macharia (2016) critique the exclusionary normativity of queer
theory’s queer subject. Muñoz, Johnson, and Ferguson propose a critical
strategy of disidentification that names and thinks from experiences of criti-
cal negotiation of white-centered conceptions and practices of queer identity
and queer community, asking whose ways of being and knowing the world
are reflected in the term queer in mainstream queer studies. Disidentification
is not a rejection of identity or identification with queerness (or any other
category). Rather, to disidentify is to think with and against identity (Muñoz
1999, 11–12; Johnson 2001, 12).
Exclusions animated by the mainstream of queer studies also highlight the
problem of translation, specifically the failure of queer to translate and thus
resonate in non-white, non-Anglo communities within and outside the Global
North. For example, Johnson uses “quare” rather than queer to name an epis-
temic position shaped by and accountable to Black “quare” experiences of
marginalization, including within the field of queer theory. And Macharia cri-
tiques the predominantly Western onto-epistemological perspective embed-
ded within the word queer itself, a perspective that de-racinates him as an
Africa-based queer studies scholar because it bespeaks a perspective that
doesn’t exist in his “present geography” (2016, 183). Macharia writes, “From
Nairobi, even the deracinating power of ‘black queer’ seems inaccessible, and
I must face other illegibilities” (184). As Macharia points out, the term queer,
and thus queer studies, fails to translate across geographies. This raises the
question of how to do queer studies in a way that troubles and resists queer
exceptionalism. One way is to acknowledge the limitations of the term itself,
a limitation that is part of its critical approach to identity. This approach
64 Chapter 2

makes the question of translation and incommunicability central to a critically

queer approach (see Butler 2019).
María Lugones and Judith Butler have taken up the question of translation
in ways that point to the ethical dimensions of a queer approach to epistemol-
ogy. How to be response-able (that is, how to respond and be accountable to)
that which is outside a given frame of intelligibility, that which is unknown
and perhaps unknowable, depending on one’s own geographic, cultural,
social, and historical location? Butler (2019) focuses on the question of trans-
lation and the importance of attending to that which cannot be communicated
through translation. By understanding gender and sexuality as questions of
translation, Butler argues, feminist and queer theories (and indeed all critical
theories) must grapple with that which is untranslatable without seeking to
resolve it. Understanding gender and sexuality as translation means that the
trouble of gender and sexual categories won’t be resolved by a proliferation
of categories other than queer. Instead, translation highlights the social, com-
municative nature of gender and sexuality, as well as the fact that no transla-
tion is ever perfect. There is always something lost in translation. Given this,
Butler suggests that an important critical theoretical and political project is to
be attuned to illegibility, that which cannot be communicated, but is nonethe-
less an important dimension of knowledge and experience.
María Lugones focuses on the complexity of communication across dif-
ference, a complexity that underscores the obliqueness of communication
across difference (See Lugones 2003, 2006, and 2010; Ortega and Lugones
2019; Lugones and Spelman 1983). Language, including terms that commu-
nicate gender and sexuality—like woman, man, lesbian, gay, queer, and so
on—speaks histories, cultures, and worlds, resulting in a failure of precise,
one-to-one correspondence between, for example, tortillera and lesbian (see,
for example, Lugones 2003, 175–76). As Lugones argues, in the imposi-
tion of their logic enshrined in the linguistic categories through which they
know the world, colonizers dehumanized Indigenous people in the Americas
through the imposition of Western European concepts of gender and sexual-
ity. For Lugones, the question of complex communication is an epistemic and
ethical question that must be grappled with if we are to enact “a new feminist
geopolitics of knowing and loving” that is indispensable for coalitions and
solidarity (2010, 756). For Lugones, the problem of translation is not only
a problem of words; it is an onto-epistemic-ethical problem of understand-
ing the different journeys and ways of being and knowing among those who
occupy the space “outside dominant descriptions,” or the limen (2006, 76,
83). Lugones writes,

Complex communication thrives on recognition of opacity and on reading opac-

ity, not through assimilating the texts of others to our own. Rather, it is enacted
Queer Knowing 65

through a change in one’s own vocabulary, one’s sense of oneself, one’s way of
living, in the extension of one’s collective memory, through developing forms of
communication that signal disruption of the reduction attempted by the oppres-
sor. Complex communication is creative. In complex communication we create
and cement relational identities, meanings that did not precede the encounter,
ways of life that transcend nationalisms, root identities, and other simplifica-
tions of our imaginations. (84)

Lugones’s analysis suggests a path toward a queer epistemology, an episte-

mology affectively attuned to that which is beyond dominant ways of know-
ing oneself, others, and worlds.8 Complex communication, for Lugones, is a
creative, resistance practice of knowing-with others and through a practice of
relational knowing, a coming to know oneself in ways that open possibilities
of otherwise-being.
Reading Judith Butler through the lens of María Lugones allows for a
more complex reading of Butler’s early claim that queer is a term that must
not be taken for granted (1993, 229). Butler is calling for consideration of
“what is at stake in the term” and for the realization that a democratization
of queer politics must be open to the replacement of queer by another as-yet
unknown term (229). I suggest that Butler is saying something more than
the fact that a younger generation will generate terms that differ from those
of their queer-cestors. Instead, I propose that, through reading Butler with
Lugones, one can discern a coalitional impulse that informs critical queer-
ness: whatever terms will replace queer will not be a neologism generated
in the solitude of an individual scholar at their desk or by one marginalized
group alone. Rather, it will be generated in the limen through a practice of
creative knowing-with and being/becoming-with others. A queer approach to
epistemology is critically attuned to that which is outside of and stigmatized
by dominant ways of knowing and being. If it is to be more than a monologi-
cal, monolinguistic and, thus, dominating practice, it must extend its critique
of identity to its own practice. After all, queer, as Eng and Puar (2020) remind
us, was never about proper subjects and proper objects.

PHILOSOPHY, KNOW THYSELF!

Socrates famously proclaimed, “Philosopher, know thyself,” a proclama-

tion that has grounded traditional Western conceptions of philosophy as the
practice of living in ways guided by the light of reason purified of desire. As
Mariana Ortega (2016) and Donna-Dale Marcano (2014) contend, the main-
stream of Western philosophy has failed to know itself because it has refused
to know itself from the perspective of and in relation to those whose lives
66 Chapter 2

and knowledge have been either marginalized and excluded or tokenized by

it. How might we understand philosophy’s failure to know itself as, at least
in part, a failure to know itself queerly?
María Lugones’s analysis of the logic of pluralist feminism is useful for
thinking queerly about the philosopher-self that animates the tradition of
Western philosophy, specifically what and how it knows and fails to know.9
Take, for example, Lugones’s understanding of self-knowledge as relational.
For Lugones, the relationality of self-knowledge means that “[t]o know one-
self and one’s situation is to know one’s company or lack thereof, [in other
words,] to know oneself with or against others” (2003, 65–66). If one doesn’t
know one’s company, or one’s situation as being in relation with past, pres-
ent, and future others, one can’t know oneself. For Lugones, the imperative
to know oneself is not a philosophical abstraction. Rather, knowing oneself
as in relation to others is a necessary part of generating philosophical (or any
other) writing that is more than a conversation with, about, and for others
who are like, or who mirror, oneself. To think, write, and otherwise engage
in the difficult work of trying to make sense of our situation and our relation-
ships, one must engage in the onto-epistemic-ethical task of knowing from
where and among whom one is doing this work. Lugones critiques the failure
of self-knowledge that informs white/Anglo feminist theorizing, a willful
ignorance that stops after providing a disclaimer and proceeds to universalize
from white/Anglo experience as if the experience and knowledge of women
of color have no bearing on the questions, frameworks, and conclusions of
the theory (2003, 69).
Lugones’s critically queer insight is that one’s situation is multiple and
never one’s own. As she puts it, “One just does not go around alone (lonely
maybe), but not individual-style alone making or unmaking anything, ignor-
ing the relations one has, the ones one does not have, the good about the good
ones, the bad about the bad and the good ones” (65). The situated knowing
of the multiple self does not result in knowing more or more objectively or
even necessarily better. The perspective Lugones presents is one of uncer-
tainty and un-knowing/not-knowing, which is to say, otherwise-knowing.
Knowing-with others occasions fissures in the realm of the as-yet known
and knowable, resulting in a knowingness that uncomfortably co-exists with
unknowingness (see Ortega 2016; Anzaldúa 1987; Lugones 2003 and 2006).
These fissures in the as-yet known and knowable shake the self’s onto-
epistemic certainty to the core. While disconcerting, this deep uncertainty
is the ground of possibility of queer insight—knowing the world and one’s
being-with others otherwise.
Thus, to assert, as Ortega and Marcano do, that the mainstream of Western
philosophy has failed to know itself is to assert that it has failed to know itself
relationally. Specifically, it has failed to consider the implications of its claims
Queer Knowing 67

to universality and certainty on those who are marginally situated. Instead,

it has dismissed and discredited the knowledge and experience of those who
are oppressed and whose oppression has historically been rationalized within
the Western philosophical canon. The long-standing pattern of dismissing
and discrediting marginalized ways of being and knowing evidence a pattern
of willful hermeneutical ignorance in the mainstream of Western philosophy.
Willful hermeneutical ignorance, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. explains, is a form of
epistemic injustice in which dominantly situated knowers refuse to attend to
how marginally situated knowers resistantly know and experience the world
(2012, 715–16). Dominantly situated knowers “continue to misunderstand
and misinterpret the world” because they fail to take seriously marginally
situated knowers as “epistemic resource” for knowing differently and better
(716, 721). Pohlhaus’s analysis of willful hermeneutical ignorance clarifies
the epistemic nature of mainstream Western philosophy’s marginalization
and exclusion of non-dominant groups, their work, and entire geographies in
its conception of philosophy’s history and great works. To the extent that it
continues to know itself, or define philosophy, in ways that ignore the ways
of being and knowing the word gleaned from the experiences of those who
are marginally situated, the mainstream of Western philosophy has misunder-
stood and misinterpreted the world. From this perspective, the non-arrival of
queer philosophy as an official sub-field in the discipline is a consequence
of epistemic injustice, a failure of philosophy to know itself in relation to
multiply situated others that informs its misunderstanding and misinterpreta-
tion of the world. Perhaps this is part of why institutionalized philosophy is
currently “scandalized” by the other outside its walls that not only haunts it
but has replaced it as far as most other disciplines are concerned (see Butler
2004, 233). Rather than be scandalized, institutionalized philosophy might
take this situation as an opportunity to reframe itself from that dismissed and
ignored perspective. Philosophy, Ortega argues, needs to become wiser, and
part of becoming wiser is ‘to develop an intersectional praxis of philosophy”
(2016, 218). To be wiser, Ortega stresses, philosophy must abandon its invest-
ments in maintaining its purity, including investments in epistemic purity
(218–19).10 For philosophy to know itself, it must know itself queerly, that
is, otherwise, striving to know with and alongside myriad others who make
up the constitutive outside against which it has labored to secure its purity,
certainty, universal relevance, and self-definition.
68 Chapter 2

EPISTEMIC FRICTION AND QUEER

PRACTICES OF EPISTEMIC RESISTANCE

Knowing with and alongside others involves remaining open to what José
Medina (2013) calls epistemic friction. Medina defines epistemic friction as
the lack of epistemically arrogant certainty that comes from “hold[ing] differ-
ent perspectives simultaneously so that they can be compared and contrasted,
corrected by each other, and combined when possible” (78). It would be a
mistake to interpret Medina’s notion of epistemic friction as another iteration
of the liberal assertion that truth will inevitably rise to the top when all views
are aired. In the era of “fake news,” this assertion is unfounded and naïve. It
ignores the contexts of oppression and privilege that over-value assertions of
privileged knowers and under-value assertions of marginalized knowers. It is
precisely this cauldron of inequality and domination that Medina strives to
address by carving out the meaning and possibility of epistemic resistance.
The seeking out of epistemic friction, he argues, is a key component to
epistemic resistance, to knowing well by knowing differently in contexts of
oppression. The queerness of epistemic friction is animated by its suspension
of epistemic certainty that allows openness to other ways of being and know-
ing. An openness to or even desire for epistemic friction does not render the
knower an epistemic Pac-Man who greedily accumulates all bits of knowl-
edge to their own ends. Instead, epistemic friction deeply unsettles the cer-
tainty of the knower in ways that enable creative and resistant knowing-with
and alongside others that is necessary for epistemic resistance. Epistemic
friction opens access to alternative imaginaries without which resistance and
the realization of an otherwise is impossible (78, 256–57).
Medina’s concept of epistemic friction resonates with María Lugones’s
project of knowing multiply (261–66). Reading Medina with María Lugones’s
project of knowing multiply, the multiplicity of perspectives sustained
through epistemic friction aren’t simply collections of claims or individual
nuggets of wisdom. Certainly, knowledge claims are important, but equally
important is the multiplicity of positions from which one knows, including
the multiple perspectives of the multiple self that, held in epistemic fric-
tion, constitute an ontological and epistemic ambiguity that resists unifica-
tion (Lugones 2003, 74, 123–25; Medina 2013, 262–63). Epistemic friction
informs queer knowledge of self and others. At the level of self-knowledge,
epistemic friction holds in tension how one is known by others, the self one
is in other worlds, and one’s own sense of self, understanding that one is all
those things, even the self one doesn’t want to be. Epistemic friction creates
ambiguity that Lugones describes as “resisting classification” (2003, 125).
Medina describes these insights as important for queer movements not only
Queer Knowing 69

because they open a path for solidarity between and among oppressed groups,
but also because they demonstrate the practical, action-oriented, transforma-
tive effects of a critical relation to identity categories at the heart of queer-
ness (2013, 264). After all, the self and the world cannot become otherwise
unless we know otherwise, and this otherwise-knowing involves epistemic
resistance of practices of purity and domination.
For Medina, epistemic friction is crucial for the cultivation of “kaleido-
scopic consciousness.” Medina defines “kaleidoscopic consciousness” as
“forever open to being expanded” and attuned to “more ways of experiencing
the world than those considered” (200). Kaleidoscopic consciousness is not
access to all perspectives and worlds. Not only is such a position impossible
for any single knower; it would also be a practice of epistemic expansive-
ness,11 a privileged knower’s assumption of absolute comprehension of expe-
riences and knowledge, in other words, an assumption that the knowledge and
experience of others can be rendered completely transparent to the privileged
knower, that nothing worth knowing can elude their powers of comprehen-
sion. As a queer epistemic orientation, kaleidoscopic consciousness is a sen-
sitivity to what one doesn’t and perhaps can never know.12
A kaleidoscopic perspective knows genealogically, which is to say with a
commitment to understanding how the self is situated in the world with past
and present others and the role of epistemic hierarchies in distilling a single
truth from the cacophony of multiplicity in a particular context (see Allen
2017). Queer knowing’s genealogical, kaleidoscopic attentiveness to the rela-
tions of power enacted through the will to a unifying truth offers a conception
of truth more in line with the messiness and complexity of the world. Lynne
Huffer characterizes this attentiveness as a strange eros of thinking-feeling
that is inclined toward that which is something “other than the wholeness of
a philosophical system extending from Plato into its completion in the pres-
ent” (2020, 53). Queer kaleidoscopic knowing is a thinking-feeling at the
edges of a subjectivity, an orientation toward that which remains outside the
grasp of biopolitical categories that delimit subjectivity in the present (53).
For Huffer, the thinking-feeling of strange eros is a border-thinking/feeling
that she identifies as queerly animated in Foucault’s genealogical approach.
There is a common theme in Lugones’s, Medina’s, and Huffer’s critiques of
dominant conceptions of reason and knowledge, a queer epistemic thread in
their analyses of power/knowledge. According to Huffer, border-thinking at
the edge between the philosophical and nonphilosophical “maintain[s] the
difference between them without trying to persuade one into becoming the
other” (53). A queer13 epistemic orientation sustains attention on that which
another frame renders incomprehensible, on that which remains untranslat-
able. Perhaps, from this perspective, a queer philosophy is oxymoronic to the
70 Chapter 2

extent that it claims to do the impossible—incorporate “the thought of the

outside” which is in excess of philosophy (35).

QUEER KNOWING AND UNKNOWING

OF PHILOSOPHY

How does queering philosophy know philosophy? Grappling with this ques-
tion requires thinking about the meaning of genealogy as a queer method.
As a genealogical sensibility honed at the edges between categories and
worlds, queer knowing is sensitive to the failure of social categories (like
the categories of gender and sexuality) to capture the truth about us, as well
as the failure of Western conceptions of truth as universal and timeless. In
looking toward the past, queer knowing attends to the relations of power that
give rise to and support the prevailing episteme and the various subjugated
knowledges that are rendered illegible or erased by it.
In striving to pay attention to that which is silent or erased in the archive,
queer knowing underscores that how we know the past and present and their
relationship could be otherwise; it attempts to listen to the silences, absences,
the unexplained and perhaps unexplainable. That said, it would be a mistake
to conclude from this that a genealogical sensibility enables one to have a bet-
ter, more objective grasp on the past or present, or even a clear picture of an
alternative. Genealogical critique unsettles dominant accounts by highlight-
ing their contingency, a contingency that points toward the possibility of an
alternative, even if it does not and cannot offer a complete accounting of that
alternative. Instead, a genealogical critique reveals and works the cracks in
dominant discourse. As Ladelle McWhorter puts it, “A genealogy functions
as a critique of the dominant view, not merely as a supplement or a thought-
provoking alternative. Genealogy is a critical redescription of a dominant
description” (1999, 43).
Given that queer knowing is an undisciplined knowing, what are the
implications for a queer knowing of institutionalized philosophy? If queering
philosophy, as an epistemic practice, is situated at the edges of philosophy
and is in excess of or outside philosophy, its knowing is also an unknowing of
philosophy to the extent that it critiques institutionalized philosophy’s distinc-
tion between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical. As such, queering
philosophy opens the possibility of an otherwise-philosophy. The otherwise,
according to Ashon Crawley, resists the proclamation of the new—as in a
new area of philosophy (or theology, for Crawley). Thus, rather than herald
something new, as in a new approach, the otherwise indicates how “alterna-
tive modes, alternative strategies, alternative ways of life already exist, and
indeed are already violently acted upon in order to produce coherence of the
Queer Knowing 71

state” or a discipline (2017, 6–7). Crawley’s deployment of the otherwise

and its relation to what he calls an a-theology or a-philosophical traditions is,
I suggest, a queer practice, a practice of slantwise knowing of that which is
normative in disciplines and their histories. Such a practice aims to transform
understanding of the state of a discipline (such as philosophy) while simul-
taneously resisting the expansion of its reach by clamoring for recognition.
Contra Nietzsche’s anticipation of the new philosophers of the future, queer-
ing philosophy is informed by a desire to become something else, something
outside the scope of traditional philosophy that nonetheless critically engages
and challenges it to reckon with that which exceeds it discursive reach. Thus
understood, queering philosophy as an epistemic practice is a practice of dis-
identification, a practice of thinking on and against philosophy as a discipline
in an effort to generate experiments in living and thinking that neither reject
nor dwell within it, animating something other than a new area within the
discipline of philosophy.
As an epistemic practice of the otherwise, queering philosophy unsettles
without resettling the discipline. Queering philosophy is a way of knowing
and knowing between worlds, including the world of institutionalized phi-
losophy. As an epistemic practice, queering philosophy knows philosophy
genealogically, focusing on the relations of power that undergird and (re)
enforce its dominant grid of intelligibility. Max Horkheimer proclaimed
that “philosophy is the methodical and steadfast attempt to bring reason into
the world” (1972, 268). However, queering philosophy knows that bringing
reason has been the occasion of violence against oppressed people’s ways of
knowing and living. Queer knowing is situated between disciplines, thinking
not so much from or across multiple disciplines, but rather with and against
discipline.

NOTES

1. See chapter 5 for more about radical care (including self-care) as a form of queer
ethics.
2. For Jack Halberstam’s discussion of cripistemology as failure to know, see his
contribution to the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies virtual round-
table on cripistemology (in McRuer and Johnson 2014).
3. This is not to suggest that all queers have the same experiences and, thus, know
the same things. Again, queer knowing is not grounded in shared identity as much as
it is grounded in shared relationship to practices of normalization. That shared rela-
tionship is a feeling of misfitting. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson describes misfitting
as “an incongruent relationship between two things: a square peg in a round hole”
(2011, 592–93). This experience of misfitting (rather than misfitting in the same
72 Chapter 2

ways and places, etc.) can form at least part of the basis of cross-movement solidar-
ity between oppressed groups (see, for example, Kafer 2013 on the coalitional crip,
queer, trans, and feminist politics of bathroom revolutionaries).
4. See David Eng and Jasbir Puar (2020) on queer theory’s contribution of “subject-
less critique.”
5. See Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Halberstam writes, “[F]
ailure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage
human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly
and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of
childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children,
winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of
negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides
the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of
contemporary life” (3). Failure, Halberstam contends, finds space for possibility in
“not succeeding” in the embodiment of prevailing gender norms (4). There is much
possibility in Halberstam’s conception of failure in this text, possibility that, I suggest,
is occluded in some of his later characterizations of failure, for example his discussion
of cripistemology as a failure to know (see McRuer and Johnson 2014). In my view,
queer failure is not a failure to know but instead the possibility of otherwise-knowing
grounded in otherwise-being.
6. For more about the similarities and differences between feminist standpoint
theory and queer epistemology, see my essay, “Queer Epistemology and Epistemic
Injustice” (2017a).
7. This is not to suggest that the biopolitical processes of academic incorporation
that Ferguson analyzes did and do not target queer theory. Part of Ferguson’s argu-
ment about the place of minoritized subjects and fields in the academy is that the
biopolitical forces that discipline are fungible. Queer theory and theorists stood on
the shoulders of feminist, LGBT, and race/ethnic studies programs, but its inclusion
did not herald the end of discrimination against gender and sexual minorities in the
university, no more than feminist studies and race/ethnic studies programs heralded
the end of the academy’s sexism and racism. Instead, power morphed and concealed
itself through circumscribed forms of visibility.
8. I am drawing on Lugones’s (1987) use of multiple worlds—multiple worlds of
sense—dominant and marginalized worlds that must be negotiated by those who are
oppressed as a matter of survival. This negotiation involves understanding how one
is known by privileged knowers in dominant worlds.
9. While many have situated Lugones’s work as part of women of color femi-
nisms, specifically Latina feminisms, and Lugones herself never, as far as I’m aware,
referred to her work as part of queer theory, her work makes important contributions
to queer feminist of color (and even queer crip feminist of color) critique. Lugones
also didn’t situate her work as part of disability or crip studies, but her discussions
of pain and the fractured locus produced by the colonial wound are sites where her
analysis brings together race, disability, gender, and sexuality in ways that resonate
with the consistent effort throughout her work to think from the site of multiplicity
and the multiple oppressions in which we are situated. In reclaiming Lugones as a key
Queer Knowing 73

figure in queer crip feminist of color theory, I build on the work of others who have
reclaimed Audre Lorde and Gloría Anzaldúa as key figures in a queer crip feminist of
color tradition (see, for example, McRuer 2006 and Schalk and Kim 2020).
10. For more on purity politics, see Shotwell 2016 and Lugones 2003.
11. Here I build on Shannon Sullivan’s (2006) concept of ontological expansive-
ness that is a habit of white privilege. As ontologically expansive, white people
assume access to all space—including actual physical spaces and the time/space
allotted for conversation.
12. Importantly, a queer attunement to what is unknown and perhaps unknowable
is not a performance of Cartesian doubt that suspends certainty in all beliefs only
to arrive at the one thing that is clearly and distinctly true (i.e., one’s existence as a
thinking thing).
13. Huffer’s concept of strange eros outlines a queer ontological, epistemological,
ethical, and poetic practice that cannot be reduced to a renunciation of normativity.
Instead, strange eros points to queer disturbances of conditions for intelligibility,
disturbances that occasion “experiments in living” that undo the self and “the philo-
sophical ideal of coherence and unity” (2020, 7, 14). The result of such experiments
in living is neither truth nor lie, but something more.
Chapter 3

Power, Life, and Death

[T]rue philosophers make dying their profession, and . . . to them of all

men [sic] death is least alarming.
—Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo

I’ve heard of many people who claim they’d as soon their children were
dead as gay. What it took me a long time to believe is that these people
were saying no more than the truth.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”

To oppose violence is to understand that violence does not always take the
form of the blow; the institutional forms through which it operates compel
us to ask: Whose life appears as a life, and whose loss would register as a
loss? How does that demographic imaginary function in ethics, in policy,
and in politics? If we operate within the horizon in which violence cannot
be identified, where lives vanish from the realm of the living before they
are killed, we will not be able to think, to know, or to act in ways that
understand the claim of relational obligations within the global sphere.
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

At some point in an introduction to philosophy class, students are presented

with the quote for which Socrates is most famous: “the unexamined life is not
worth living” (Plato 1961a, 23). Far more than a quaint adage attributed to an
ancient Greek philosopher, this declaration has become synonymous with the
meaning and value of philosophy itself. In other words, to be a philosopher
is to examine one’s life, by which is meant the taken-for-granted beliefs, val-
ues, and attitudes that constitute a society’s common sense and shape one’s
understanding of one’s self, one’s relationship to and with others, and one’s
75
76 Chapter 3

conception of reality. Socrates’s examination of life (and death, as I will also

discuss) is presented in the trilogy of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, Plato’s
dialogues that are set in the context of Socrates’s trial and death (1961a–c).
To be clear at the outset, I have no quarrel with living an examined life. Ours
is a world that would benefit from less thoughtlessness and more thoughtful-
ness. That said, it is the taken-for-granted pride of place given to Socrates’s
trial and death in institutionalized Western philosophy that, it seems to me,
needs more thought. For one thing, it makes antagonism and self-defense
central to the kind of practice philosophy is assumed to be. At the heart of
Socrates’s trial and death is a story of the meaning and value of life and death;
and within the philosophical mainstream, this story is positioned as a story
of the origin and legitimacy of Western philosophy. Queering philosophy
questions the place of this story in the Western philosophical imaginary. How
have assumptions about life and death shaped the story Western philosophy
tells about itself? What are the material implications of the meaning of life
and death at the heart of the Western philosophical imaginary? How can queer
interventions into the meaning and value of life and death help move toward a
love of other-wisdom1 rather than a “love of exclusion” (Ortega 2016, 216)?2
This chapter examines critically queer approaches to matters of life and
death and how assumptions about life and death have framed conventional
Western philosophy, as well as responses to pandemics. My discussion of
these issues will focus on questions of violence, grievability, and the dis-
course surrounding public health threats. I write this chapter in the context
of violence, destruction, and death declared “unprecedented” in mainstream
media: deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-queer and anti-trans
violence, mass extinction and other consequences of climate change, envi-
ronmental racism, ableism, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence and
neglect. But to call these horrors unprecedented, as the mainstream is wont
to do, ignores the fact that they are the result of ongoing mutually reinforcing
structures of violence instituted by colonialism, imperialism, global capital-
ism, white supremacy, ableism, cisgenderism, and heteropatriarchy: forms
of violence that have been and continue to be rationalized by social and
political imaginaries that shape mainstream philosophy.3 For example, rather
than herald something unprecedented, the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest
manifestation of long-standing inequalities and structural violence.
Critically queer engagements with matters of life and death interrogate state
responses to public health threats, violence, and grievability, all of which are
founded upon and enact assumptions about whose lives and whose deaths will
be acknowledged and mourned (see Butler 2004b; 2010; and 2020). From a
critically queer perspective, questions of life and death cannot be adequately
understood in the abstract but need to be situated within the context of how
to be queer is to be—in different ways depending on one’s race, ethnicity,
Power, Life, and Death 77

class, gender, age, and dis/ability—socially dead. And to be socially dead

is to be deemed outside the realm of full humanity and personhood and, as
a result, to be denied intelligibility of counting as a life (Butler 2010, 6–7;
Cacho 2012, 6–8, 31–32). As I hope to show in this chapter, far from abstract
musings on life’s meaning, queer engagements with questions of power, life,
and death matter for queer lives. I begin my consideration of these issues
with a discussion of biopolitics and necropolitics. Then, I trace the bio/nec-
ropolitics of institutionalized philosophy, developing a connection between
framing assumptions of life and death and the field’s demographics. Next, I
consider how normalizing assumptions about life and death (de)value queer
lives. Finally, I consider how queering life and death reframes responses to the
COVID-19 pandemic, arguing for the end of, rather than return to, “normal”
and the beginning of something else, something more.

BIO/NECROPOLITICS: WHOSE LIFE? WHOSE DEATH?

It is perhaps impossible to overstate the profound impact of Foucault’s

reframing of power on queer theory and the humanities and social sciences
more broadly.4 Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to
morality, Foucault utilizes a genealogical method to reconceive power and its
effects. As Lynne Huffer explains, part of the queerness of Foucault’s method
is its orientation to the past that disrupts chronological teleologies and sharp
divisions between past and present. As a critically queer method, geneal-
ogy highlights the contingent nature of truths that inform our epistemic and
ontological certainties. Far from a rejection of truth and the categories that
frame our understanding of ourselves, others, and reality, genealogy traces
the relations of power that enabled their emergence, emphasizing that they
could be otherwise. Thus, rather than negating the possibility of knowledge, a
Foucauldian genealogical approach opens possibilities for knowing one’s self
and the world otherwise, an otherwise-knowing. Ultimately, Huffer contends,
genealogy’s approach to the past is an improvisational search for what cannot
be known in advance, a looking toward the past that destabilizes the present
in ways that open possibilities for thinking, feeling, and being otherwise
(2018, 102). As Huffer explains, genealogy is characterized by “a disorient-
ing temporality” that is “at once historical and poetic,” that “beckons us back
into the archives of our own queer histories, inviting us to think-feel5 them
as surprising sites of self-undoing (104). Thus understood, as philosophical
method, genealogy understands the way of life that is philosophy as experi-
ments in living in which past, present, and future are neither distinct nor
chronologically related, as opposed to a quest for certainty guided by the light
of pure, unfettered reason. Genealogical truths are messy and contingent, not
78 Chapter 3

clear and distinct. One comes to understand relations of power-knowledge

through attending to a cacophony of silences rather than a crystalline singular
archival aria.
A genealogical approach denaturalizes and politicizes life and death by
examining the relations of power that produce their meanings and the effects
of those meanings in people’s lives. Life and death aren’t universally shared
beginnings and endings that characterize human existence. They are instead
sites of various techniques of power that differentially expose those who
deviate from dominant norms to violence. In other words, life and death are
sites of the operation of bio/necropolitics.
Foucault contends that modern power in Western societies takes two
forms: disciplinary power and biopower (1990, 139). Disciplinary power
and biopower aren’t, for Foucault, distinct types of power but are, rather,
best understood as two sides of the same coin, two techniques of normal-
ization that obscure their workings. Foucault describes disciplinary power
as an “anatomo-politics of the human body” whose effect is docility of the
individual (2003, 242–43). Biopolitics is an operation of power that focuses
on “man-as-species” and whose effect is management of the population. In
Foucault’s words, biopower works to “optimize a state of life,” rather than
ensure and maximize the efficiency and productivity of individual bodies
(246). Put differently, biopower is “a matter of taking control of life and the
biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disci-
plined, but regularized” (246–47). According to Foucault, biopower functions
to “make live and let die,” (254) a function that, he argues, has been histori-
cally central to racism and eugenics.6 Biopower focuses on the population and
aims to manage and secure life, which involves identifying and eliminating
existing and potential threats to it such as epi/pandemics,7 environmental
threats, war, and so on.
While Foucault’s reconceptualization of power makes a crucial interven-
tion that is useful not only for understanding how power works but also how
resistance fails,8 Achille Mbembe (2003) points to a limitation of Foucault’s
understanding of biopower, namely its inadequacy in offering an account
of the global racial capitalist power in which populations are deemed not
only killable but are condemned to a state of disposable non-life, nonexis-
tence. Mbembe’s examples include people and places subjected to Western
imperialism, colonization, plantation slavery, and settler colonialism. The
power at work in these contexts, Mbembe contends, is best understood as
necropolitics rather than biopolitics. Mbembe defines necropolitics as the
“subjugation of life to the power of death,” an operation he distinguishes from
the Foucauldian biopolitical operations of making live and letting die (39).
Mbembe clarifies, “I have put forward the notion of necropolitics and necro-
power to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world,
Power, Life, and Death 79

weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and

the creation of death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in
which vast populations are subjected to the conditions of life conferring upon
them the status of living dead” (40).
Both biopolitics and necropolitics have been important for queer analy-
ses of power, and I do not wish to belabor by-now familiar discussions of
them. Rather than distinct operations, biopower and necropolitical power
work together to shape a bio/necropolitical operation of power in which
the reduction of populations to non-life or near death occurs in the name
of an optimization of life of another population. Jasbir Puar (2007) offers
the concepts of homonationalism and queer necropolitics to attend to how
some queer lives have benefited from the extension of citizenship rights due
to race, class, and ability privileges. Puar uses the term homonationalism to
characterize the population of sexual and gender minorities whose incorpora-
tion into the norms of US citizenship is used to bolster the image of the US
as a protector of the rights of all minoritized groups and rationalize its role
in ongoing destruction of life elsewhere. Homonationalism positions race
and class-privileged sexual and gender minorities as folded into life and its
reproduction and management while rendering black, brown, Indigenous, and
poor queers disposable and exposing them to greater precarity.
For Puar, understanding the operations of queer necropolitics requires
holding in tension biopolitics and necropolitics. She writes, “By centering
race and sexuality simultaneously in the reproduction of relations of living
and dying, I want to keep taut the tension between biopolitics and necrop-
olitics. The latter makes its presence known at the limits and through the
excess of the former; the former masks the multiplicity of its relationships to
death and killing in order to enable the proliferation of the latter” (35). Puar’s
emphasis on queer necropolitics offers a queer politics that understands that
power can fold queerness into life rather than only mark it for death (35–36).

QUEER BIO/NECROPOLITICS AND

PHILOSOPHY: RETHINKING THE DITCH

While it may seem at first glance that the rarefied pages of mainstream
Western philosophy have nothing to do with political violence (or, put differ-
ently, that thoughts from the armchair have little to do with violence in the
streets), thinking about conventional Western philosophy from the perspec-
tive of a queer bio/necropolitics raises questions about complicity between
philosophy’s understanding of itself and structures of violence. Violence, as
Butler reminds us, takes many forms, from the use of physical force to the
bio/necropolitical force of ideas that structure a political imaginary (2020,
80 Chapter 3

338). In this section, I consider the political imaginary that structures insti-
tutionalized philosophy as a field. Within this imaginary, whole populations
and geographical regions are deemed either full of philosophical potential
or excluded as sources of philosophy whether in the past, present, or future
(see, for example, Hall 2021). As Uma Narayan writes about the role of care
in colonial discourse, “While I do not endorse reducing any moral theory
to its ideological uses, I would argue that we must attend to the ideological
functions served by various . . . theories. Pervasive structural relationships of
power and powerlessness between groups, such as those between colonizer
and the colonized, tend to foster ideological justifications for the maintenance
of such relationships” (1995, 136). This means that the contexts of structural
violence in which Western philosophy’s social, political, and ethical theories
have been developed affects both their content and how they circulate in the
world in ways that rationalize structures of bio/necropolitical violence. As
Narayan emphasizes, the rights-bearing agent of Western political theory was
also the agent of colonization (136). A queer critique of Western philoso-
phy’s complicity with bio/necropolitics begins with questioning its framing
assumptions about the meaning of life and death and their relationship.
Through discussion of Socrates’s trial and death, students in introductory
philosophy classes are presented with an image of philosophy as the disci-
pline that both questions all dogmas and is concerned with wisdom rather
than opinion and, despite its critical questioning, remains loyal to the state
whose deified laws are understood abstractly as separate from the people who
make and enforce them. As Socrates argues, one’s obedience to these laws is
grounded in the fact that the state has nurtured and supported one since birth
by such acts as legitimating the marriage of one’s parents, nurturing one since
birth, and providing for one’s education (Plato 1961b, 35–36). It is perhaps
an understatement to say that such pious proclamations ring hollow for mem-
bers of marginalized populations who have been targeted by various forms of
state-sanctioned neglect and violence. Consider Socrates’s account of what
the Laws would say in response to those who would break them:

Come now, what charge do you bring against us and the state, that you are try-
ing to destroy us? Did we not give you life in the first place? Was it not through
us that your father married your mother and begot you? Tell us, have you any
complaint against those of us laws that deal with marriage? . . . [H]ave you any
against the laws which deal with children’s upbringing and education, such as
you had yourself? Are you not grateful to those of us laws which were insti-
tuted for this end, for requiring your father to give you a cultural and physical
education? . . . [D]o you imagine that what is right for us is equally right for
you, and that whatever we try to do to you, you are justified in retaliating? You
did not have equality of rights with your father, or your employer—supposing
Power, Life, and Death 81

that you had one—to enable you to retaliate. You were not allowed to answer
back when you were scolded or to hit back when you were beaten, or to do a
great many things of the same kind. Do you expect to have such license against
your country and its laws that if we try to put you to death in the belief that it
is right to do so, you on your part will try your hardest to destroy your country
and us its laws in return? . . . Do you realize that you are even more bound to
respect and placate the anger of your country than your father’s anger? That if
you cannot persuade your country you must do whatever it orders, and patiently
submit to punishment that it imposes, whether it be flogging or imprisonment?
(Plato 1961b, 3–36)

Who but the most privileged could read these words and conclude that the
benefits they received from the cis-heteropatriarchal family and the white
supremacist, cis-heteronormative, ableist, capitalist state justifies whatever
the state determines should be done with them, including their death? Who
but the most privileged could read this passage and conclude that, yes indeed,
the many benefits and protections they’ve received from the family and state
justifies their position as the state’s “child and servant,” and that the only just
response to this whole state of affairs is one’s “gratitude” (36)? This chilling
passage underscores that it’s not just, as Marx famously put it, that “philoso-
phers have only interpreted the world,” but “the point is to change it.” It’s that
the project of changing the world is written out from the start in mainstream
philosophy’s imaginary.
Building on Charles Mills’s description of white ignorance in The Racial
Contract, passages like Socrates’s imagined conversation with the Laws of
the state reveal that, as with white ignorance, mainstream Western philosophy
is unable to understand both the nature of the field its foundational fictions
have produced and reproduced, as well as the world it aims to understand. As
a result, mainstream Western philosophy still fancies itself a gadfly, while it
continues to marginalize and exclude the gadflies in its midst (e.g., feminist,
queer, and trans philosophers, philosophers of race, Latinx philosophers,
Indigenous philosophers, and philosophers of disability). As Mills asserts
about Western philosophy’s fiction of the social contract that has been used
to argue that the origin of the state maximizes the freedom and secures the
protection of all citizens, Socrates’s agreement with the Laws is “not worth
the paper it was never written on” (1997).
Another framing assumption at the heart of institutionalized philosophy’s
social and political imaginary concerns whose life counts as a life and the
relationship between life and death. To say that the unexamined life is not
worth living presumes that it is only the presence or absence of individual
philosophical questioning that distinguishes between a frivolous and a worth-
while, purposeful life. Framed in this way, mainstream Western philosophy
82 Chapter 3

assumes as its subject one whose life already counts as a life in dominant
imaginaries and worlds. This is one way to understand mainstream Western
philosophy—not as a collection of figures and their ideas, but as a way of life
or practice of living that reflects and supports privileged being in the world.9
The enduring legacy of violence against sexual and gender minorities has
also left a too-often unacknowledged mark on the profession of philosophy.
For example, rejection and violence in families of origin, school, the work-
place, and in public spaces are among the many forces that keep trans people
out of the university in general (Zurn 2016, n.p.).10 For trans academics, Perry
Zurn writes, “the university is quite often a place of isolation, alienation, pre-
carity, and silence” (2016, n.p.). These grim, devastating realities of power,
life, and death for queer and trans people underscore the continued relevance
of Eve Sedgwick’s observation nearly thirty years ago: the survival of
LGBTQ philosophers—let alone the completion of high school, undergradu-
ate, and graduate school, and a job in philosophy—is a miracle (Sedgwick
1993; Zurn 2016). While we may all sit together in classrooms and at con-
ferences, our being in those spaces, what queer and trans people have done
and continue to do to be there, is very different. Miracles, all of us, indeed.
Nonetheless, it’s important to emphasize that miracles alone do not and will
not ensure trans and queer survival, let alone flourishing. Only the creation
of infrastructures to support queer and trans lives and the lives of all from
other groups underrepresented in philosophy will do that. For philosophy,
this entails a reckoning with its past and an understanding that the enduring
legacies of anti-queer, anti-trans, settler colonial, imperialist, ableist, capital-
ist, and racist violence aren’t separate from institutionalized philosophy but,
instead, are endemic to it.
In his insightful book on the enduring legacy of McCarthyism11 in the dis-
tinction between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy in US philosophy
departments, John McCumber (2001) writes about US philosophy’s time
spent “in the ditch” and imagines its future out of it. McCumber’s use of the
ditch as a metaphor for McCarthy-era conceptions of “real” philosophy draws
from yet another story often told in philosophy classrooms. As the story goes,
in his search for timeless, universal truth, Thales of Miletus looked up in
order to focus on the stars rather than the ground and at his feet while walk-
ing and, as a result, fell into a ditch. Upon witnessing his fall, an old woman
wondered how Thales could understand the heavens if he knew nothing of
the ground beneath his feet (xv). For McCumber, the ditch is a metaphor for
political ideologies that influence and ultimately derail philosophy’s pursuit
of the truth. Even though McCumber himself does not subscribe to a notion of
truth as abstract and universal, his conception of a lower-case “t” truth is pre-
mised on an understanding of the work of philosophy as pursuing those truths
and as best able to do so when it is able to dust itself off and get out of the
Power, Life, and Death 83

ditch. Thus understood, Thales’s error wasn’t contemplation of the heavens

but, instead, a failure to mind his feet while he did so. As a result, philosophy
out of the ditch is a philosophy informed by a situated reason that entails
understanding and addressing our situation (164). For McCumber, it seems
that once it knows its situation, philosophy can get out of the ditch or, in other
words, avoid being sullied and hindered by political events and forces (167).
The ditch has a different resonance from the perspective of queering phi-
losophy—namely, the realities of violence against queer, trans, and gender
nonconforming people, especially those who are Black, brown, and poor. Put
differently, queering philosophy attends to the bio/necropolitical management
of the boundaries between life and death, that is how the practices that enable
life (bodyminds that escape the ditch) also bring about death (relegate othered
bodyminds to the ditch). Consider what Eric Stanley says about the ditch in
his essay on queer death and ontological capture:

The ditch ought not be our end. Yet I stay in the place of violence, in the muddy
abjection of the drainage ditch, precisely because it offers no recuperation, no
rescue beyond decomposition. If we start here with an understanding that escape
is not possible and that against the dreams of liberal democracy there may be no
outside to violence, how might we also articulate a kind of near life that feels
in the ontological capture that life might still be lived, otherwise? (2011, 15)

The ditch, Stanley emphasizes, shouldn’t exist, but it is only race, class, and
gender privilege that might allow some queers to believe not only that they
are or can get out of it but that they can also forget it. While not all queers
have “the same relation to violence” (2), understanding queerness requires
thinking from the significance of what Stanley calls the “archive of queer
death” (18). The archive of queer death of which Stanley speaks refers to anti-
queer and anti-trans violence that, while integral to the state, must be made to
disappear in order to normalize the state. Even the spectacular emergence of
anti-queer and anti-trans violence in the mainstream (for example Matthew
Shepherd and Latisha King)12 serves to erase its ordinary everydayness in
white supremacist, ableist, cis-heteronormative, ableist global capitalism.
Staying in a ditch that should not exist involves grappling with normalizing
practices as a bio/necropolitical site of making live and making die.
Roderick Ferguson (2004 and 2019) highlights the foundational role of
theoretical and activist work by feminists and queers of color. More than
demarcating another approach or direction in queer theory, Ferguson reframes
the field in a way that decenters the white, male, and class privileged fram-
ing that has characterized most of queer theory’s institutionalized academic
life—the origin stories told about it, the lives and deaths that are proclaimed
to matter for it. As Ferguson notes in his analysis of institutional inclusion
84 Chapter 3

of previously excluded, identitarian-framed fields, reckoning with the criti-

cal force and possibilities of fields—like queer, feminist, race, and disability
studies—that have been subject to various forms of institutional erasure even
as they have been included requires practices of critical memory that reckon
with the complexity and diversity of the queer archive. I suggest that this
practice of critical memory13 disrupts progressive linear narratives of fields,
epi/pandemics, and movements by enacting a genealogical method that
traces dominant and subjugated knowledges, the coming to voice and the
silences that made possible the incorporated, institutionalized life of fields
and movements.

QUEERING THE OBITUARY:

THE POLITICS OF GRIEVABILITY

Frames, Judith Butler asserts, are “operations of power” at epistemological

and ontological levels (2010, 1). Epistemically, how the meaning of life or
a life is framed informs the extent to which life is perceived as worthwhile
and, thus, grievable (1–2). Ontologically, how the meaning of life or a life is
framed informs the extent to which a life registers or is counted as a life at all
(1–2). Questions of life and death are central to Butler’s analysis of frames of
war because, as she explains, the conceptual and discursive framing of war
makes it “easier, or more difficult, to wage” (2). Frames bring some lives
into view as lives whose loss registers as loss, and erase other lives deemed
non-lives outside the realm of concern and whose loss is not registered as
loss. Butler writes,

Ungrievable lives are those that cannot be lost, and cannot be destroyed, because
they already inhabit a lost and destroyed zone; they are, ontologically, and from
the start, already lost and destroyed, which means that when they are destroyed
in war, nothing is destroyed. To destroy them actively might even seem like a
kind of redundancy, or a way of simply ratifying a prior truth. (2010, xix)

Butler’s point about frames in the context of war are also applicable to how
threats to public health, societal norms, and even disciplines are conceived
and responded to. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the bio/necrop-
olitics animated by frames of life and death that inform practices of exclusion
within discipline of philosophy, societal norms, and conceptions of threats
to public health (specifically HIV/AIDS and COVID-19). In queering these
issues, I seek to reframe them, conceiving of them from the perspective of
those deemed disposable within dominant frames. When dominant frames
define one’s life out of existence by relegating it to the realm of disposability,
Power, Life, and Death 85

nonbeing, and ungrievability, the forms of violence and exclusion that one
experiences don’t register within the dominant frame as violence and exclu-
sion at all. To be counted as harmed, one would have to be counted as existing
in the first place.
Queering philosophy reframes mainstream philosophy from the experience
of those whose lives are deemed not worth living and whose deaths are not
deaths. If, following Socrates, the practice of mainstream Western philosophy
is tied to a life deemed worthy of life, a critically queer philosophy from the
perspective of lives deemed not worthy of living is the practice of an other-
wise-philosophy.14 The practice of an otherwise-philosophy is not a practice
of dying, as Socrates characterizes philosophy, but rather experiments in
thinking and living that open otherwise ways of understanding reality and
possibilities for being in relation with others. The practice of the otherwise is
founded on an other-wisdom, not the abstracting and universalizing wisdom
founded on the myth of purified rationality.15
As Butler notes, reflecting on the obituary can reveal a lot about where,
when, and how lives are valued and deaths are counted as grievable losses
(2004, 34). Within a cis-heteropatriarchal society, life = binary gender =
heterosexuality = marriage = children, a conception that casts queerness and
transness as outside life and has implications for those who are queerly situ-
ated in the world, even if they don’t or don’t yet identify as a member of a
gender or sexual minority group. In “Queer and Now,” a foundational text in
queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins with the still-all-too-relevant
and real fact of lesbian and gay suicides. She writes, “I’ve heard of many
people who claim they’d as soon their children were dead as gay. What it
took me a long time to believe is that these people are saying no more than
the truth” (1993, 2). Queer lives are those lives that are cast out of concern,
lives that are deemed to be without value, if they are considered at all, in the
mainstream. While such contexts of devaluation and erasure give rise to many
forms of resistance, they also give rise to many forms of queer grief.

‌‌ partner and I spent the long weekend after my father’s death attending
My
the wake, the funeral, and the burial, spending time with family members
grieving in their own ways. I haven’t wanted to talk to many people about
all this. Like queer lives in general, too much of what I feel and want to say
has no place in prevailing Western conventions of obituaries and funerals.
Queer grief is erased in the obituary form, a form that tends to center all
the things that count as a life in heteropatriarchal society: nuclear families,
deeds deemed good. Like the silences of the archive so carefully tracked by
Foucault, the silences of obituaries enable their account of the life well-lived.
Obituaries mark a life well-lived in the estimation of a society’s or group’s
86 Chapter 3

dominant norms and values. And yet, the lives of so many remain unacknowl-
edged, erased from the very text of the obituary itself, unmourned.
My father’s obituary listed me as among those who have “survived” his
death. Yes, I survived. I survived him, his life. What does it mean for a queer
person to survive the death of a parent who could never accept you, who
would have preferred your nonexistence? My partner was listed too, though,
unlike straight spouses, by first initial and surname (rather than full first
name only)—as I understand it, a compromise to avoid making uncomfort-
able those who would have preferred to not mention Jill at all.
What does it mean to survive a parent who said that if he had known you
were queer while you were growing up, he would have sent you somewhere to
fix you? I’m thankful for the winds that must have carried some radical faerie
sparkle dust to create a force field around me while growing up. I’m thank-
ful that I grew up with a mom who was able to leave a toxic marriage and
continues to love me as I am. I/we survived him. I thank all the queer bars for
the space and joy. I thank all the queer and feminist bookstores. I thank queer
feminist crip communities for helping me redefine family and for continuing
to give me a language to name what needs to be named.
At the funeral, so many people described my father as a good man. Maybe
he was good to them. I wish I could say my father was a good man. From the
moment I was able to think for myself, my father and I clashed. He thought
I was “bad” and ruining my life for so many reasons—because I chose to
study philosophy, because I’m a feminist, because I’m queer, because I think
the Confederate flag is a racist symbol, because . . .. In my last conversation
with my father, he said he didn’t raise me to be “that way,” that I was going
to hell, and that there was nothing more that he wanted to say to me.
Sometimes, in low moments, I think maybe if I were a better queer, none
of this would bother me, none of it would hurt. But this wound is part of the
rage-tinged grief that I feel. I grieve for a relationship I never had. I grieve
because, despite all the bad, I have some good memories of him. I’m glad he
took time to read to me when I was a child. I’m glad he was willing to catch
while I practiced pitching baseball when he got home from work. I’m glad
he took me for walks in the woods and fishing. I wish these things had been
enough to help him want to work toward a change of heart.

‌‌
Even in the case of a loss of a parent or a parent’s funeral, something experi-
enced as intensely private and solitary, no matter how many others feel/regis-
ter the loss, there is a politics that frames its significance (Butler 2004b, 24).
In posing the question, What does it mean to mourn?, Butler aims to bring
into view the bio/necropolitics16 in which lives and deaths are apprehended.
It’s not that lives and deaths aren’t personally experienced; it’s that one’s
Power, Life, and Death 87

experience of them is never one’s experience alone, and not only because
others also mourn. Butler writes,

Many people think that grief is privatizing, that it returns us to a solitary

situation and is, in that sense, depoliticizing. But I think it furnishes a sense of
political community of a complex order, and it does this first of all by bringing
to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental
dependency and ethical responsibility. (22)

For Butler, one of the ways we can track bio/necropolitical power is through
the obituary, which is ultimately about how we imagine community, whether
marginalized or dominant (34). In other words, the experience of loss, both
one’s sense of what is lost and the significance of that loss, is about how we
understand the scope of “we” (34). Thus understood, obituaries perform the
work of moral repair and community-or nation-building (34). When a life
passes without remark in an obituary, “it is not quite a life . . .. It is already
the unburied, if not unburiable” (34). One of the things that stands out in
this remarkable claim is Butler’s insistence that we must ask about the bio/
necropolitical function of the obituary—what it means and what it does—not
once, as if one eloquent argument could settle the matter and we could get
over it and move on, but again and again, lest lives deemed worth living
become monumentalized, foreclosing what our being-in-relation with others,
our being in community, could become—a community in which the unfa-
miliar is valued rather than annihilated in the name of self-preservation (38).

HOW TO QUEER PHILOSOPHY IN A PANDEMIC

As I finalize this book, the world is gripped by multiple, compounding

pandemics: for example, COVID-19, racism, climate change, and authori-
tarianism. When the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared in Washington State at a
long-term care facility, many in the US assumed it would be contained there;
but as the virus rapidly spread and cases started to appear elsewhere, hospitals
in major cities became overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and deaths,
and airports, businesses, and schools shut down. Millions of people lost their
jobs. This same pattern was repeated in many countries in the world, although
some (like Australia) were able to contain the virus and minimize infections
and deaths, while other countries (like India) were able to contain it for a
while but ultimately became sites of coronavirus catastrophe. Within a year,
nearly half a million people in the US died from COVID-19 before vaccines
became available, and, at the time of this writing, the US still leads the world
in deaths from coronavirus, though Brazil and India are, sadly, nearing closer
88 Chapter 3

to the US death toll. While there is, obviously, little that can be done about
a virus to which no one has immunity, the coronavirus death toll that we are
seeing around the world is not a result of the natural influence of a novel
virus. Instead, it is a result of systemic, deepening injustices in the world and
neoliberal policies that have devastated social infrastructures, thus exposing
those whose are more precariously situated, those who are more vulnerable,
to coronavirus infection and death.
Along with COVID, there have been massive, sustained global protests
in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too
many others. While largely focused on protesting anti-Black racism, there
have also been protests against the wave of anti-Asian racist violence in
the wake of COVID-19. In the US, while former president Donald Trump
deployed the national guard in response to peaceful protests of police mur-
ders of Black people, he sat by and watched as white nationalists stormed
the US capital in an effort to stop the certification of Electoral College votes
that would declare Joseph Biden to be the next president. The difference in
police and military response could not be starker: tear gas, beatings, rubber
bullets, low-flying military helicopters, and arrests in response to unarmed
people protesting against anti-Black racism versus delayed deployment of
the National Guard and police officers who stood by while white nationalist
Trump supporters, with strip ties and various weapons, stormed the US capi-
tal to stop the process of Electoral College vote certification in a presidential
election. This is what fascism looks like.
While it is important to avoid collapsing HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, it is
also true that, as I witnessed these events while trying, somehow, to complete
this book, I couldn’t help but think of the lack of official response to HIV/
AIDS and the death toll of AIDS that was an important context for work
being done in queer theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s.17 After all,
Foucault, who also died of AIDS in 1984, listed epidemics, illness, and heath
as biopolitical sites of the management of the life and death of populations.
And, important to queer AIDS critique during this time was the Foucauldian
observation that the terms population and public, whose health the state
wanted to protect and preserve in its response to AIDS, did not include
minoritized and stigmatized groups like queer and trans people, intravenous
drug users, sex workers, people from sub-Saharan Africa, and others deemed
more at risk. In fact, the early response to HIV/AIDS (initially called GRID,
or Gay-related Immunodeficiency Disorder, by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention [CDC]) cast queer people and queer practices as the
cause of the HIV/AIDS threat to “public health,” and there were proposals to
quarantine queer people to protect the rest of the population. ACT-UP (AIDS
Coalition to Unleash Power) chapters emerged in the US and elsewhere to
demand a response.
Power, Life, and Death 89

As I read, listened, and watched the news about COVID-19 in the US, the
fact that many of the main players are the same is uncanny: the CDC and Dr.
Anthony Fauci, for example. It was Dr. Fauci who worked at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) when ACT-UP stormed the NIH, demanding
inclusion of communities impacted by AIDS in clinical trials and access to
experimental drugs. Fauci worked with ACT-UP representatives to enable the
involvement of HIV/AIDS impacted communities in the process of research
and planning for treatments. Now, Fauci is called America’s doctor.
While the standard account of ACT-UP’s emergence is that it consisted
of mostly white gay men responding to a disease that was killing mostly
white gay men, in fact, AIDS activism of this period also focused on hous-
ing, poverty, access to health care, access to clean needles, the safety of sex
workers, women and AIDS, the affordability of drugs, access to food, and
access to care. Thus, ACT-UP was an organization that included within it
many subgroups focused on particular projects, and there were many tensions
within it. Like all coalitions, there was much disagreement and in-fighting
(see Gould 2009). Many groups within ACT-UP were deeply critical of those
members who were single-mindedly focused on the goal of “drugs into bod-
ies,” as if access to drugs would end the AIDS crisis (France 2012). But,
like COVID-19, the AIDS crisis is also deeply informed by racism, ableism,
global capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia. Until these forms of sys-
tematic injustice are eliminated, neither health crisis can be solved even if
vaccines and treatments are found.
Another oft-repeated story about HIV/AIDS is that it is “over,” that AIDS
is no longer a death sentence due to access to preventative treatments. But
AIDS continues to kill many people worldwide every year, and AIDS con-
tinues to be a crisis in African American communities, poor communities,
and the Global South (see Shahani 2016; Cheng, Juhasz, and Shahani 2020;
Cheng 2020). So, getting drugs into bodies (or vaccines into arms), whether
in response to HIV/AIDS or COVID-19, isn’t the solution to epi/pandemics.
The question isn’t whether scientists find drugs that work; the question is,
Who has access to these drugs? What are the underlying systemic injustices
that continue to make others die so that some may live? As Che Gossett and
Eva Hayward write, there seem to be “echoes” between COVID-19 and
AIDS, echoes that suggest that “[p]erhaps what AIDS and COVID-19 share
is antiblackness and racism” (2020, 527). By resisting the reduction of one to
the other and, instead, placing epi/pandemics “into conversation” (as Gossett
and Hayward put it), we can highlight the fact that long-lasting solutions to
existing and future epi/pandemics can’t happen in the context of bio/necropo-
litical forms of injustice. We can make visible how “discourses of contagion”
and cure (528) inform ongoing legacies of bio/necropolitics.
90 Chapter 3

Judith Butler frames this question as a question of grievability. To be

grievable, one must be considered to have had a life, a life worth living. To
be ungrievable is to be cast out of life by a violent dehumanization. Being
cast out of grievability is, for Butler, what informs state perpetration of and
indifference to the deaths of those who are dehumanized—for example, queer
and trans people, disabled people, poor people, and Black, brown, Asian,
and Indigenous people. In Butler’s words, “Some lives are grievable, and
others are not; the differential allocation of grievability that decides what
kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not,
operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who
is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death”
(2004b, xiv–xv).
Like the obituary, discourses of contagion reflect who is deemed grievable
and whose exile from the human renders them disposable, which is to say
ungrievable. Making the question of grievability a central part of what queer-
ness means requires detaching it from a narrower focus on sexual and gender
identity and reveals that it is a politics more than an identity that is central
to what queer is and what it does. In other words, queer refers to a politics
that exposes and questions sites of normalization, a process that declares that
some must die or be excluded so that others may live or be included, that
decides who’s in or out.
Again and again, we must ask how grievability, power, life, and death
function in response to epi/pandemics, which are also sites of nation-building.
In the context of such massive death, hoarding vaccines or enacting policies
that expose people to preventable death are crimes that reveal the dehuman-
ized and thus ungrievable lives of those whose preventable precarity means
that they suffer more of the epi/pandemic-related dying in the past, present,
and future. The queer temporality of this repetition—again and again—also
questions how the beginning and the end of epi/pandemics are conceived, for
these questions of beginnings and ends are also questions about the circula-
tion of bio/necropolitics as much as they are about the circulation of virus.
First, the issue of naming. What is the difference between an epidemic
and a pandemic? At the level of the commonsensical, the distinction between
them seems to be a straightforward matter of definition: an epidemic affects
a particular geographical region or population, and a pandemic affects numer-
ous countries and affects a large number of people. That said, how might
this distinction be more critically engaged, as itself part of bio/necropolitical
discourse? How many countries and people need to be affected before an epi-
demic becomes a pandemic? Invariably, early articles about the COVID-19
pandemic that mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci would talk about his work for
the NIH during the AIDS epidemic. Again and again in mainstream media:
AIDS epidemic, COVID-19 pandemic. Not only is AIDS characterized as an
Power, Life, and Death 91

epidemic, in contrast to the COVID-19 pandemic, but AIDS is also relegated

to the past, presented as a victory of the biomedical-pharmaceutical indus-
trial complex. But things are not as simple as they may seem, certainly not
when it comes to epi/pandemic discourse. As Paula Treichler writes in her
well-known essay on AIDS discourse, AIDS (and I would add epi/pandem-
ics in general) is not only a biomedical phenomenon; it is also an epidemic
of signification (Treichler 1991, 32). The difference between an epidemic
and a pandemic seems to rest on a calculation of life and death—how many
lives at risk, how many deaths. Epidemics affect fewer lives and result in
fewer deaths; pandemics affect all of us. But this “all of us” seems very
similar to the “public” of public health and the “life” of those lives deemed
grievable. AIDS continues to kill people. In 2019, there was an average of
1.7 million new HIV infections, and there has been an average of 32.7 mil-
lion AIDS-related deaths since the beginning of tracking HIV infections and
AIDS-related deaths.18 Today, millions of people all over the world live with
HIV, and, in some countries, AIDS remains a leading cause of death. Based
on numbers (lives and deaths) alone, AIDS is a pandemic. And yet, officially,
it remains an epidemic. I suggest that this is due to the fact that AIDS remains
highly stigmatized, associated with stigmatized minoritized populations (like
Black people, sex workers, queer and trans people) and that this stigma ren-
ders ungrievable the lives that are affected by the ongoing AIDS crisis. Those
privileged lives that have access to retroviral treatments have been able to
avoid AIDS-related deaths, and their lives alone relegate AIDS to the past, so
much so that talking about AIDS today may seem so 1990s to a younger gen-
eration of, especially, white and class-privileged LGBTQ people. Do ongoing
AIDS-related deaths register as deaths, or are they ungrievable because the
lives that continue to be lost never registered as lives within dominant, global
bio/necropolitical regimes?
Understanding and addressing AIDS, COVID-19, and other epi/pandemics
requires a reframing of their temporality that is responsive to how they are
differently lived (see Cheng, Juhasz, and Shahani 2020). Bio/necropolitical
structures don’t simply produce vulnerabilities and health disparities in the
abstract; they produce different epi/pandemics with different trajectories and
different exposures to death, along with different possibilities for survival.
Epi/pandemics are never just monolithic, homogeneous events. Underlying
globalized bio/necropolitical structures give rise to a queer connection
between AIDS and COVID-19; and it is these structures that queer politics
must address to critically expose and resist the normalization of death worlds
for the most precariously situated in the world in the name of the optimization
of the lives of global elites (see Gossett and Hayward 2020; Shahani 2016).
Queerly reframing dominant accounts of AIDS and COVID-19 involves
critically intervening in the “drugs into bodies” story of ACT-UP’s success
92 Chapter 3

and its perceived promise for biomedical-pharmaceutical capitalist responses

to COVID-19 (Shahani 2016, 4). As Nishant Shahani points out, ACT-UP
was always a more complex group than that (4). His examples include chants
from ACT-UP protests that connected, for example, fighting AIDS and end-
ing war. Robert McRuer also points to the far-reaching message of ACT-UP’s
protest chant, “Health care is a right,” a chant that expresses solidarity with
all who are denied access to health care and is much more than a demand for
access to drugs (2006). Reframing mainstreamed accounts of epi/pandemics
and fields (like queer theory) involves a genealogical approach that tracks
multiple lines of intersection, critique, experience, dissonance, and movement
that form the foundations of fields and make future transformations possible.
This approach resists too-quick dismissals of queer theory as passé to the
extent that it eschews monolithic conceptions of fields that have never spoken
with one voice from one set of experiences and instead strives to think with
and alongside a field’s riotous multitudes.
Queering temporal frames of epi/pandemics, like queering academic fields,
is a practice of attending to the realities of bio/necropolitical structures. Such
an approach involves a queer politics and theory that resists assimilation
and professionalization. As Angela Davis notes, an intersectional practice of
freedom informed by a commitment to cross-movement, global solidarity is a
“constant struggle” (2016). There is, after all, always a frame and thus always
something cast outside it. Foucault famously questions the discourse of free-
dom, ending the first volume of The History of Sexuality with the comment
about how strange it is that we have believed that our liberation is at stake
in speaking the truth about sexuality (1990, 159). Accordingly, Foucault’s
skepticism of liberation struggles is focused on their identitarian form—for
example, the demand for recognition and legitimization of “homosexuality”
used the very terms deployed to “medically disqualify” it (1990, 101). The
practice of freedom Davis cites is, I suggest, not very far from Foucault’s
own sense that the pervasiveness of power from above and below requires
a constant practice of resistance in a way that understands there is no pure
ground from which one resists. Thus, queer politics is a continuous—again
and again—effort to reframe power, life, and death, to grapple with what the
frame renders invisible, illegible, and unknowable. Such reframing, I suggest,
is the work of resisting complicity with regimes of intelligibility that shape
the myriad forms of bio/necropolitical violence.

NOTES

1. Ashton Crawley (2017) is the inspiration for my use of other-wisdom here.

Power, Life, and Death 93

2. Here, I draw from Mariana Ortega’s critique of mainstream philosophy as a

practice of exclusion defined by its whiteness and maleness. Ortega stresses the need
to make Latina feminist phenomenology “visible, audible, and perceptible,” along
with other philosophical works from those whose lives have been erased from the
mainstream philosophical canon and classroom (2016, 216–17). She writes, “We are
in need of works that disclose rather than make invisible, cover up, or distort, the lives
of atravesados, of those who have been excluded or left at the margins of philosophy,
the so-called love of wisdom that has really been a love of exclusion” (216). Ortega
draws on Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) understanding of los atravesados as inhabitants
of the borderlands, the spaces between worlds.
3. Consider the example of how the mainstream characterizes climate change as
unprecedented. Kyle Whyte (2017) critiques the apocalyptic frame of mainstream
climate change discourse that posits the Industrial Revolution as the origin of climate
change impacts we are currently experiencing, climate change to which global elites
disproportionately contribute and from which they disproportionate benefit (see
also Cuomo 2011). The extent to which one perceives such events as unprecedented
depends on the extent to which one’s privilege has insulated them from the lifeworld
disruptions, or climate change, resulting from long-standing forms of structural vio-
lence. Whyte points to the fact that the longue durée of settler colonialism has been
catastrophic to Indigenous worlds, and it is in the context of world-ending settler
colonialism that Indigenous people continue to build on ancestral ways of knowing
and being to both resist and adapt (156–57). From an Indigenous perspective, there
is not one climate change, but many, and the Industrial Revolution was not the cata-
lyst. While the Industrial Revolution plays a role in one form of climate change, it
is not the whole story. Whyte argues that “Indigenous climate change studies” can
be a resource for adapting to radically changed worlds because Indigenous people
have been adapting to climate change inaugurated by settler colonialism. Whyte’s
argument also underscores that effectively addressing and adapting to climate change
will not happen as a result of policies that solely focus on reducing fossil fuel use. To
effectively address climate change, we must address the ongoing forms of extractive
violence that formed the context of fossil fuel use, namely the exploitation of nature
and labor that characterize the histories and legacies of colonialism, imperialism,
slavery, and global capitalism (see also Moore 2016).
4. As is well known, Foucault contends that power is not only a force of repression
that says no; it is also a productive force, generating the very terms within which
oppressed groups advocate for their own liberation:

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence,

and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexual-
ity, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphrodism” made possible a strong advance
of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation
of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that
its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the
same categories by which it was medically disqualified. There is not, on the one side, a
discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses
are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist
94 Chapter 3

different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the
contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing
strategy. (1990, 101–2)

5. Huffer understands Foucault’s thinking-feeling as a queer eros that creates a

different way of doing philosophy. Rather than the priority of reason and certainty,
Foucault’s genealogy is an eros of thinking-feeling, animated by suspension and
experimentation. Huffer writes, “[A]s a poet, Foucault thinks from that border—that
line as suspended relation—where the philosophical touches the nonphilosophical but
maintains the difference between them without trying to persuade one into becoming
the other” (2020, 33).
6. While eugenics is a form of racism, I separate them here to highlight that eugen-
ics is also a form of ableist violence. While many assume that eugenics is part of a
sordid past of actions by bad actors, eugenics continues today in the form of invol-
untary sterilization of intellectually and developmentally disabled people and various
forms of scientific racism (see Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014; Gill 2015;
Roberts 2012).
7. I use epi/pandemics rather than the more common distinction between the two,
epidemics and pandemics, in order to call into question how distinctions between the
two are made, as well as the work these distinctions do. As I shall argue later in this
chapter, the distinction between them is not a mere matter of scientific definition but
itself enacts a bio/necropolitcs.
8. As Foucault explains in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, understand-
ing sexuality is not a matter of understanding something called sexual orientation, it
is instead “a question of orienting ourselves to a conception of power” (1990, 102).
Thus conceived, sexuality is not a “natural given” but “a great surface network”
of power relations (105). In a well-known passage, Foucault writes, “[W]e must
not imagine a world of discourse divided between the dominant discourse and the
excluded discourse, or between the dominant discourse and the dominated one; but
as a multiplicity of discursive elements that come into play in various strategies. It is
this distribution that we must reconstruct, with the things said and those concealed,
the enunciations required and those forbidden. . . . Discourses are not once and for all
subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are” (100–101).
Thus, one should not assume that one resists the hold of oppressive power on one’s
life by breaking silence and coming out. Foucault’s account of power is a queer call
to be vigilant about the possibility of complicity, no matter how liberating one may
experience an act of coming out to be. This doesn’t mean that coming out is unimport-
ant. Rather, queer politics understands that such moments of visibility are not pure
acts of isolated individual resistance immune from power’s reach.
9. Consider Charles Mills’s joke about the whiteness of institutionalized philoso-
phy: “I think of mainstream philosophy as something like Antarctica. . . . It’s a giant,
frozen, hostile, white continent with a few scattered figures of color. Under global
warming, Antarctica is going to turn brown before philosophy does” (quoted in Log-
gins 2021, n.p.). We can also recall Michel Foucault’s own fraught relationship to the
Power, Life, and Death 95

discipline of philosophy and not infrequent refusal to call himself a philosopher (see
McWhorter 2016).
10. Using data from the National Center for Transgender Equality, Zurn specifies
that “57% of trans people experience significant family rejection. Without family
support, they report significantly higher rates of drug and alcohol use, homelessness,
incarceration, and attempted suicide. When they enter grade school, 78% report being
harassed, 35% physically assaulted, and 12% sexually assaulted. Roughly 15% drop
out of school. Once out, 90% report experiencing harassment, mistreatment, or dis-
crimination in their place of work; 26% report losing their job because of their gender
identity. 53% report everyday harassment in public accommodations” (2016, n.p.).
11. Importantly for my focus on queering philosophy, McCarthyism’s
anti-intellectualism combined with the House of Un-American Activities Commit-
tee’s designation of homosexuals, Jewish people, and black and brown people as
enemies of the state played an unacknowledged role in the silencing or outright purg-
ing of queer philosophers, whether or not their work was situated within a Marxian
philosophical lineage (see McCumber 2001, 22, 53–54). During the 1950s in the US,
homosexuality was criminalized, and homosexuality was deemed an illness in need
of a cure. While this history of pathologization and criminalization has typically been
part of standard accounts of gay and lesbian US history, trans theorists and historians
have reclaimed it as also part of trans history because the state’s investment in sur-
veilling and punishing so-called deviant desire was and is linked to its investment in
surveilling and punishing so-called gender deviance (see Stryker 2008, 50–52).
12. For a critical phenomenological analysis of transphobia in the life and death of
Latisha King, see Salamon 2018.
13. Here I build on Alexis Shotwell’s (2016) discussion of the politics of memory
and the critical intervention of remembering that which dominant discourses bury and
assign to the realm of the forgotten.
14. I borrow the term otherwise-philosophy from Ashton Crawley (2017).
15. As every student of philosophy learns, the Greek meaning of philosophy is love
of wisdom. In the Phaedo and Symposium, Socrates characterizes this love of wisdom
as founded on the separation of the soul/mind from the body.
16. I refer to bio/necropolitics rather than biopolitics and necropolitics to highlight
the mutually reinforcing nature of these strategies. While these strategies take dif-
ferent forms—making live and making die, respectively—they work together. Some
populations are made to live while other populations are either allowed to die or
subjected to a death-in-life (Foucault 1990; Mbembe 2003).
17. My intention is to note AIDS as an important part of the context for queer
theoretical work. I do not wish to repeat the AIDS-as-origin story of queer theory.
18. UNAIDS, “Global HIV and AIDS Statistics—2020 Fact Sheet,” https:​//​www​
.unaids​.org​/en​/resources​/fact​-sheet, accessed May 16, 2021.
Chapter 4

Queer Ecologies

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side
by side with a lust for destruction.
—Rachel Carson, “Remarks at the Acceptance of
the National Book Award for Nonfiction”

In general, queer theory does not turn to the past in order to find identity
categories familiar from the present, but instead grants the past the poten-
tial to conjoin its undeniable intimacy to a surprising alterity. Queerness is
at its heart a process of wonder.
—Jeffrey J. Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines

Nature is a thorny issue for queers. Given the history of its use against gen-
der and sexual minorities—to criminalize our erotic practices, to try to cure
us, or lock us up—a queer wariness about nature is understandable. After
all, ideas about nature and the natural have long been weaponized against
those who are queerly positioned in the world: entanglements of compulsory
heterosexuality, compulsory able-bodied-mindedness, white supremacy, and
capitalism have structured a differential racialized and classed diagnostic sys-
tem in which disability and queerness have been deemed sick, abnormal, and
perverse.1 While this is one way nature has been a concern for queer, disabled,
and trans people, it doesn’t exhaust the ways in which nature is a queer mat-
ter. Thus, a framing question for this chapter is: How might we understand
the nonhuman natural world, and our environmental relationships and respon-
sibilities, in ways that don’t reproduce anti-queer violence—in other words,
violence against all deemed unnatural, abnormal, sick, and perverse?
Queer ecology queers mainstream environmental philosophy and environ-
mentalism by putting their central categories (human, animal, plant, nature)
into crisis, revealing and critically interrogating the structures of power that
97
98 Chapter 4

create and sustain the distinctions at the heart of their meaning. Such catego-
ries do more than simply describe the world (and, for queer ecologists, they
don’t do that very well); these categories are performatively constituted (see
Barad 2011, 125). That is, their deployment is a form of doing that constitutes
their being. In critically attending to what mainstream environmentalism’s
categories do, queer ecology also seeks to undo them. As a critically queer
strategy, such undoing is indebted to Judith Butler’s understanding of undo-
ing of the self. To be undone, according to Butler, is to understand that the
question of a livable life is not reducible to the question of the livability of
lives that count as human. For Butler, undoing puts categories like the human,
gender, sexuality, and nature “into crisis” (2004a, 10). In fact, dominant
understandings of the human and the natural have produced and rationalized
precarity of oppressed groups by casting them either to the margins or com-
pletely outside of those categories.2 Undoing calls into question mainstream
environmentalism’s reliance on concepts that assume and reproduce, even if
unwittingly, regimes of binary gender, heterosexuality, patriarchy, whiteness,
ableism, and colonialism (Butler 2004a, 11–13; Lugones 2010; Clare 1999
and 2017; and Taylor 2017).
Thus, queer ecology focuses not on a nature or wilderness as a separate
entity that deserves human recognition and concern, but rather on the rela-
tions of power that hold in place the distinction between human and nature,
or human and animal, and in so doing define some humans out of the cat-
egory of human and life. How this line is drawn varies, but attending to how,
where, and when it is drawn and its effects is a social and an environmental
issue. From a queer ecological perspective, our ecological concern needs to
be larger than the categories of human, animal, plant, nature, and wilderness
allow. This enlargement of concern is a practice of wonder.
Critically queer ecology does not take for granted the categories of human,
animal, plant, nature, or life that, even when critiqued, tend to remain central
in environmental philosophy. Put differently, queer ecology does not seek a
more expansive or inclusive category of the human or even a biocentric or
ecocentric approach. All such approaches, from a queer ecological perspec-
tive, ask the wrong questions. The question isn’t, “Who is human or nonhu-
man and how should we treat or value them or how can we extend our moral
concern to include the nonhuman?” The question is, “What do mainstream
environmentalism’s categories and the distinctions between them do? And
how might we forge a critically queer ecological critique from the non/
human wreckage these categories have wrought?” A critically queer ecology
is a politics that seeks to destabilize the borders between mainstream envi-
ronmentalism’s binary categories (e.g., the human and the nonhuman, animal
and plant, culture and nature, civilized and wild, life and non-life, animate
and inanimate) in order to expose and contest their role in varied forms of
Queer Ecologies 99

structural violence against devalued forms of life. Thus, critically queer

ecology is not against nature so much as it is against the weaponization of
boundaries between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, that informs
injustice carried out in its name.
Queer ecology denaturalizes nature and critically intervenes in presumed
human exceptionalism. As with queer theory in general, queer ecology has
covered much ground in the past few decades, and it would be impossible for
a single chapter to cover all of it. So, in this chapter I focus on queer eco-
logical interventions into the assumptions about the natural and the human in
mainstream environmental discourse and activism. To do that, I first focus on
queer critiques of the meaning of the human in mainstream environmentalism
and the insights offered by queer inhumanism. The next two sections focus on
the meaning of nature and wilderness in mainstream environmental philoso-
phy, and rewilding proposals in mainstream and queer contexts. The chapter
ends with critically queer reflections on what is left of nature and the pos-
sibility of valuing landscapes beyond cure. Ultimately, I propose that a queer
ecological philosophy must grapple with what is left of nature, where “left”
refers both to what remains in the wake of irreversible destruction to plan-
etary life wrought by climate change and other environmental harms and to
the possibility of a critically queer ecological politics that resists mainstream
environmentalism’s rhetorics of purity. Furthermore, I contend that a criti-
cally queer ecology is oriented toward an environmentalism without purity.

THE HUMAN AND THE INHUMAN

The turn to the inhuman in queer ecology is a realization that it’s not only
nature, but also the human, that has been weaponized against queers. In
their introduction to their GLQ special issue on Queer Inhumanisms, Donna
Luciano and Mel Chen note that queer ecology is grounded in a deep know-
ing of the precarity of all deemed queer (2015). In developing this point,
Luciano and Chen underscore the connection between dehumanization,
queerness, and mestiza consciousness in Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, noting that
queerness is a site of dehumanization and that the experience of dehumaniza-
tion shapes a way of knowing and navigating the world that Anzaldúa names
mestiza consciousness (see Luciano and Chen 2015, 186; Anzaldúa 1987).
Of course, this is not to conflate LGBTQ identity with mestiza conscious-
ness, a move that would erase significant differences among LGBTQ people.
Following Luciano and Chen, the queerness of Anzaldúa’s perspective is
her understanding of mestiza consciousness as a way of knowing/being/
navigating the world that, while rooted in the experience of being different,
other, and therefore lesser within dominant contexts, is not an inevitable
100 Chapter 4

outcome of one’s identity (2015, 186). Both context and privilege matter.
Luciano and Chen situate Anzaldúa’s work as foundational for a critically
queer ecology, noting that the concept of mestiza consciousness tells a
story of self and consciousness, belonging and non-/un-belonging in which
the infrastructures of queer mestiza life are more than human and situated
within histories of human-soil, human-parasite, human-plant, human-animal,
human-landscape intimacy.
Yet, while also sites of violence, the dehumanization of minoritized sub-
jects also opens the possibility for critical interrogation of the category of the
human and the generation of non/human intimacies, kinship, and relationship
with the more than human world, which is both other and a part of who we
are. Luciano and Chen name this critical perspective “queer inhumanisms,” a
queer ecology from the perspective of the inhuman of queer subjectivity that
seeks an anthro-decentric ecology rather than a mere reversal of anthropo-
centrism (192). Given the precarities caused by institutionalized racism and
transphobia, queer of color and trans scholars have been at the forefront of
queer ecological analyses of the precarities produced by, not only the human-
animal binary, but the category of the human itself:

[W]e are marking a specific kind of situation—a desire to persist in the face of
precarity—as the primary catalyst for queer thought in general. That situation,
moreover, is particularly generative for queer inhumanist thought, since the
intensification of precarity tends to push putatively “human” subjects to the
critical edge of that category. (It is therefore no accident, we think, that many
of the most generative queer critiques of the human have emerged from queer
of color critique and transgender studies). Queer ecology and many other queer
engagements with the nonhuman also engage in the contemporary context, as
a response to precarity, as the effects of climate crisis extend that condition to
encompass all of humanity, and numerous other species as well. All life, we
might say, is now precarious life. (193)

Such a critically queer ecology does not focus on the human as both distinct
from nature and in need of reconnecting with it; to theorize environmental
problems in these terms, for Chen and Luciano, serves to reinforce the pre-
sumed binary relation between them. Instead, a queer ecological practice of
wonder opens to something more; it is attuned to that which exceeds and
calls into question the categories of human and nature that inform mainstream
environmentalism.
Jane Bennett’s term for the ethical and political posture of this wonder is
loafing, a suspension of absolute verdict informed by a more-than-human
sensibility (2020, 59, 116). Bennett isn’t suggesting that judgment is never
appropriate. Indeed, the devastating realities of social, economic, and envi-
ronmental injustice demand judgment and response. Instead, Bennett is
Queer Ecologies 101

concerned about how frameworks for judgment can themselves perpetuate

oppression and wonders how interventions in systems of violence might be
otherwise practiced. As she asserts, “[D]espite substantial critique from femi-
nist and queer theorists, Indigenous ecologists, and African philosophy, the
story of the sovereign self has persisted and its appeal revived each time we
face a monumental threat, such as climate change today” (116).
Bennett’s account presents an ecological self alive to its enmeshment with
a more than human-natural vibrant world. Nonetheless, there are abstractions
in her rendering that seem to rely on the very sovereign self she wishes to
unseat. For example, Bennett draws on Walt Whitman to propose that suspen-
sion of judgment falls “‘as the sun around a helpless thing’” (59). The word
helpless here points to the role of assumptions about disability in establish-
ing distinctions and degrees of vulnerability, denying agency to all deemed
helpless. And as Kyle Powys Whyte and Chris J. Cuomo have argued, the
discourse of vulnerability prevalent in climate change discourse ignores the
creative, resistant knowledges of those who are the most harmed but who
have contributed the least to climate change, pollution, and other problems
(Cuomo 2011; Whyte 2017; Whyte and Cuomo 2017). In other words, the
emphasis on vulnerable others in mainstream climate discourse eclipses
the agency and knowledge of those deemed vulnerable. This is not to deny
disparate vulnerability to climate change–related harm. Instead, it is to stress
that the role of global elites is not to help others because they know more or
best, but to understand oppressed communities as sites of epistemic agency
and solutions in the face of violent disruptions to ways of life rather than only
passive recipients of charity, pity, sympathy, empathy, or aid.3
Given these critiques of discourses of vulnerability, I propose that Lori
Gruen’s (2015) concept of “entangled empathy” is a better candidate for
queer ecological being with others that respects and leaves space for more
than human difference. Entangled empathy is not suspended judgement but,
rather, critical, self-reflexive judgement. In part, entangled empathy is differ-
ent from compassion, sympathy, or pity because it neither presupposes nor
reifies the vulnerability of the recipients of one’s empathy. Gruen’s account
of entangled empathy builds on Karen Barad’s (2006 and 2011) understand-
ing of “intra-actions,” or the understanding that encounters or relationships
are not interactions between two or more independent entities but are instead
co-constitutive. Interaction preserves the separateness of individuals in rela-
tion; intra-action understands relationships as cutting both ways at once, or, as
Barad puts it, “together and apart” (2011, 125). As Barad argues, intra-action
is nature’s queer performativity, queer in the sense that the identities of beings
in relation don’t precede their relationships but emerge in and through those
relationships (125).
102 Chapter 4

For example, the notion of “crimes against nature”—often deployed

against queer people—not only misunderstands the co-constitutive and
emergent nature of identities in relation but also presumes that humans are
separate from the nature that is victimized or defended (125). Yet at the same
time, Barad emphasizes the importance of avoiding “the pitfall of positioning
everything in relation to the human” (125). The queerness of nature is not
about the erotic practice or inherent sexual and gender identities of beings.
Instead, nature’s queerness is a matter of its becoming in relation.
For Barad, “the ‘posthumanist’ point is not to blur the boundaries between
human and nonhuman, cross out all distinctions and differences, or simply
invert humanism, but rather to understand the materializing effects of particu-
lar ways of drawing boundaries between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans’” (123–
24). According to Barad, nature’s queer performativity requires an ethics of
attention to “constitutive entanglements” of non/human being/becoming, as
well as accountability for how boundaries are drawn and their effects (127).
As a result, vulnerability is not only an effect experienced by those who are
oppressed and caused by those who are privileged. Vulnerability is the con-
dition of relational being. And reckoning with such vulnerability—thinking
ecologically in the midst of it—occasions precisely the kind of wonder and
humility noted in the epigraphs that head this chapter.
While Barad describes their account as posthumanist, other queer scholars
prefer other terms. For example, Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird explain their
preference for non/human rather than posthuman because they wish to avoid
inaugurating humanism/posthumanism as a new proper object and binary
for queer ecology. Queer theory (and therefore queer ecology) attends to the
gaps and silences instituted by binary thinking, in this case human/nature and
human/animal binaries (2008, 3, 5). For Giffney and Hird, reserving the slash
between non/human draws critical attention to the spaces between the human
and the nonhuman (5). Nonetheless, despite their critique of posthumanism,
Barad’s description of intra-actional being and becoming is compatible with
Giffney’s and Hird’s understanding queer non/humanism. Both positions
point to queer ecology’s investment in unseating the restrictions on imagina-
tion and possibility when environmentalism is informed by unquestioned
human/animal, nature/culture binaries.

NATURE, WILDERNESS

One of mainstream environmentalism’s stated aims is to preserve and protect

nature. As a result, much debate about nature’s ontology in Western phi-
losophy focuses on the meaning and existence of nature; and for many, the
image of nature that comes most readily to mind is the image of unspoiled
Queer Ecologies 103

wilderness. Consider, for instance, the discourse surrounding the Wilderness

Act, signed into law by US President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Its purpose
was to preserve and protect wilderness “for the permanent good of the whole
people, and for other purposes.”4 The Wilderness Act defines wilderness as
“an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man
[sic], where man [sic] himself [sic] is a visitor who does not remain.”5 As
exemplified in the language of the act, wilderness is another word for pure
nature, a purity defined by the absence of human dwelling and in opposition
to the cultural and the artificial.
While this definition captures a Euro-American common sense notion
about the meaning of nature, the idea of wilderness is a product of histories
and legacies of settler colonialism, racism, Euro-American imperialism,
nationalism, patriarchy, ableism, and heteronormativity. Pure nature or wil-
derness is not an effect of nature naturing. For example, creating and sustain-
ing this idea of pure nature has involved purging Indigenous people, people
of color, and poor people from their ancestral lands, all in the name of wilder-
ness protection. To the extent that mainstream environmentalism and envi-
ronmental philosophy have uncritically relied on this idea of wilderness, both
have functioned in the service of systems of oppression. In contrast, queer
ecology is critically attuned to the logics of domination that are deployed in
the name of environmental protection.
I begin this section on nature with a discussion of wilderness because the
idea of wilderness outlined in the Wilderness Act is what many US environ-
mentalists and environmental philosophers have in mind when they speak of
nature and the natural. Consider John Stuart Mill’s formulation of nature as
an ambiguous term. Some understand it as “a collective name for all facts,
actual and possible” (Mill 1874, 6), while others understand it as that which
is distinct from humans and human creations (8). The first formulation under-
stands human beings and works as part of nature, while the second formula-
tion understands humans as separate from nature and reinforces the culture/
nature binary. Furthermore, as Steven Vogel (2015) points out, the second
formulation is assumed by environmentalists, like deep ecologists, who
understand the solution to environmental problems as requiring a shift from
anthropocentric human exceptionalism to a biocentrism in which the human
is part of, not superior to, the rest of life on the planet.
The first conception—nature is independent of human beings or human
works—is mirrored in the Wilderness Act’s definition of wilderness and in
contemporary calls for a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene.6
For Bill McKibben, the Anthropocene represents the end of nature (1989).
However, as Steven Vogel argues, to understand the Anthropocene as the end
of nature is to assume that nature refers to something independent of human
beings and our activities (2002, 24).
104 Chapter 4

While a focus on human practices seems more promising from a queer per-
spective than an approach that uses nature as a moral compass, these debates
still don’t get to the heart of the matter regarding mainstream environmental-
ism’s orientation toward nature. For one thing, the question of whether there
is an independent nature that is being harmed by human practices, or whether
nature is nothing other than human practices all the way down, ignores the
issue of whose practices.
As Kyle Powys Whyte, Chris Cuomo, and Axelle Karera have shown,
the emphasis on human practices perpetuates the assumption that it is all
humans, rather than the social and economic practices of particular humans
in the past and present, that have created climate chaos in concert with other
social and environmental harms. Moreover, the curiously decontextualized
debate about nature tends to mark the Industrial Revolution as the beginning
of climate change. This temporal framing willfully ignores7 the destruction
of climate change occasioned by voyages of conquest, the Middle Passage,
settler colonialism, plantation slavery, and their enduring legacies (see Whyte
2017 and Karera 2019). These practices must be reckoned with in order to
address the mutually reinforcing practices of environmental, social, and eco-
nomic injustice.
In its failure to address colonialism and slavery, mainstream environmen-
talism and philosophy can become a tool in the service of colonialism and
racism in the world, all in the name of protecting the environment, or nature
(Liboiron 2021, 11). As Max Liboiron argues, pollution is produced by a
colonial relation to land (6). An example of this colonial relation to land is
enshrined in the concept of wilderness. Wilderness is created by forcible
removal of poor and Indigenous people all over the world from ancestral
lands in order to transform it into a consumable object for the enjoyment of
green-minded global elites, or ecotourism (Guha 1989, 72–74). Following
Ramachandra Guha, the conception of the wild as empty playground for
global elites is materialized in colonial and settler colonial contexts through
the violent expulsion of people from their ancestral lands and means of sub-
sistence (72–73).
If queerness signals that which is disorderly in its defiance of categories
used to organize and know the world, the wilderness, contrary to its enduring
allure as a zone of untamed freedom, is conceived as a space whose untram-
meled purity is ensured by natural, if not human, law. As a space of natural
law, the wilderness is rendered a heteronormative zone whose machinations
are shaped by a logic of repro-futurity (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson
2010). In fact, some environmental philosophers conceive of the wilder-
ness as a site for the cultivation of environmental virtues (like humility and
patience) precisely because of its separateness from the everyday world of
human existence (see, for example, Aaltola 2015). For them, getting back to
Queer Ecologies 105

wilderness is conceived as getting back to not only how things really are, but
how things are supposed to be (see Aaltola 2015). Queer ecology seeks to
unsettle this account.

REWILDING QUEERNESS?

Some queer theorists argue that, despite its historical enmeshment with het-
eronormativity, patriarchal masculinity, settler colonialism, and whiteness,
the wild can and should be reclaimed as a queer space. I’ll call these efforts
queer rewilding projects. One type of queer rewilding project is the effort
to locate queers in nature. Examples include identifying same-sex eroticism
among nonhuman animals; identifying gender transformation and other
forms of beyond-the-binary gender among nonhuman animals and plants;
and queer farming, communes, and other forms of queer being in nature,
including queer forest fucking (Bell 2010). Curiously, these forms of find-
ing or returning queers to the wild have, I suggest, much in common with
mainstream rewilding projects that aim to restore the wilderness. While on
the face of it, these activities seem quite different, both share a certain kind
of response to loss.
Consider, for example, rewilding projects in environmentalism. Rewilding
is a project that involves reintroducing species to their natural habitat and,
thus, restoring the ecosystems of those places. Rewilding is a project moti-
vated by concerns about the devastating impact of human activities in wild
places—that is, the erosion or loss of wild places and their flora and fauna
as a result of climate change, hunting, ranching, extractive industries, and
human habitation. Rewilding aims to restore the wilderness as a place where
humans visit and leave with no trace. While well-intentioned, rewilding is
informed by a number of problematic assumptions. Rewilding is a form of
eco-engineering that is shaped by a mechanistic conception of nature that
rationalizes human domination over nature and the domination of other
humans that have been historically and conceptually differentially associated
with nonhuman nature or conceived as closer to nature in some way (e.g.,
women of all racial groups, men of color, and people of all genders in the
Global South). As such, rewilding’s framing belief in the power of (some)
human reason to control the nonhuman natural world reflects not only a fail-
ure of humility regarding human finitude and interdependency with the rest of
planetary life, but, perhaps more profoundly, a failure to reckon with the loss
and devastation wrought by (some) human activities. The “we can rebuild it”
outlook also ignores the violence of rewilding projects themselves, projects
106 Chapter 4

that can involve making poor people poorer by removing access to sources of
food, water, fuel, and other necessities.
Within queer studies, some have argued for what I call a rewilding of
queerness. While not identical with rewilding projects in mainstream envi-
ronmentalism, queer rewilding also depends upon a problematic fiction of
wilderness that is ultimately, I suggest, counter to the possibilities of a queer
ecology rooted in the complexities of our planetary situation. One example
is the move to reclaim the wild as a queer orientation toward that which is
beyond the human/nonhuman binary. Consider Jack Halberstam’s definition
of wildness as “the order of things we have left behind, the anticipatory mood
that accompanies all claims of coming after something, and the unknown
future that, for now at least, still beckons from the horizon. Wildness is all at
once what we were, what we have become, and what we will be, or even what
will cease to be in the event of postnatural collapse” (2020, 7). Wilderness,
he continues, is “an orientation to the void, an ontology ‘beyond the human,’
and a disorder that reminds us of a time . . . ‘before the world fell at our
feet’” (7). There is much to think about in and with this passage, though what
stands out most to me is the “we” who is oriented toward wildness in the way
Halberstam describes. Who is this we?
Since Halberstam’s exploration of wildness is motivated by a desire to
know (or at least wonder) “what specifically queerness might be after nature”
(6), one obvious candidate for the “we” might be queers themselves. But
who are these queers for whom the call of the wild beckons from the void? It
would seem to be those for whom the wild or wilderness is a place where they
aren’t—those who visit where the wild things are (or at least are purported
to be) but would never dream of living there—rural, remote places without
the New York Times, The Guardian, or a decent $10 cup of matcha tea. In
other words, global elites whose sense of freedom requires the existence of a
wilderness beyond the frontier of the human. This is an all-too-familiar story.
Consider Halberstam’s account of agreeing to a speaking gig on the
Faroe Islands because he wanted to see the islands and the puffins while
such wild places and wild animals still exist (2020, xi–xii). Despite a val-
iant effort through turbulent seas, there were no puffins to be found. Nature
just wouldn’t cooperate, meaning that the wild that he encountered wasn’t
the wild he had in mind. No puffins. Wasted trip. Stuck in a nowhere place
where there is nothing to do. While he acknowledges the risks of reclaiming
a category, like wildness, that has long informed racialized dehumanization
of people deemed uncivilized and the West’s civilizing missions, Halberstam
nonetheless unwittingly reproduces this meaning of the wild in his efforts to
reclaim it as a key word for queer studies. A wildness oriented toward the void
is a wildness that continues to be premised on the disappearance of people,
histories, and relationships, rendering once again the wild as the playground
Queer Ecologies 107

or site of self-discovery and transformation for global elites. This is, as Guha
argues, wilderness as commodity for the enjoyment of global elites.
There is an important difference between such forms of queer eco-tourism
and queer ecology. Here it is helpful to recall María Lugones’s distinction
between tourism and world-traveling as a practice of knowing-with (1987).
For Lugones, world-traveling is a concept for analyzing and thinking with
the survival strategies of those who are oppressed, how one can be oppressed
and privileged differently in different worlds, possibilities of solidarity across
difference, and “ontological confusion” of multiple selves, selves who belong
in, are undone by, and are at the edges of various worlds of sense. But the
concept of the wild as destination does not disorient dominant conceptions
of the wild founded on human/nature and other binaries. When tourists,
including eco-tourists, travel, they consume the people and places they visit,
enfolding them into their own individual life dramas. Such world travel-
ing does not threaten to undo the self who travels. As Jasbir Puar (2002;
2007) argues, homo/trans-national tourism opens the world for queer and
trans global elites while sustaining the closure of borders to those who are
oppressed and excluded by citizenship norms. Eco-tourism participates in
this same dynamic, opening the wilderness for global elites while removing
poor and Indigenous people in the world from sources of cultural and material
sustenance. Informed by the interests and agency of global elites, the focus
on wilderness ignores and exacerbates the causes of environmental and social
degradation. As Melanie Bowman writes in her analysis of Lugones’s concept
of world-traveling, a key feature of non-exploitative world traveling is feeling
ill-at-ease; feeling ill-at-ease is the affective attitude that registers that one has
indeed traveled (in Lugones’s sense) to a different world, that one is open to
surprising, unsettling difference (2020, 480).
Now, some might think of wilderness experience as an excellent example
of world-traveling. After all, it involves leaving the comforts of one’s every-
day life and foregoing many of the things a privileged traveler might take for
granted (running water, air conditioning or heat, refrigeration, a comfortable
bed, television, cell phone reception, etc.). In fact, for Sarah Pohl (2006),
it is precisely the disorienting distance from the everyday occasioned by
wilderness experience that creates the opportunity for cultivating various
environmental virtues that one takes from the “backcountry” to the world
of one’s creature-comfort-filled daily life. Connecting wilderness experi-
ence with the cultivation of environmental virtue, Elisa Aaltola (2015)
argues that wilderness experience opens the possibility for the cultivation
of attentiveness. Furthermore, according to Aaltola, attentiveness is a neces-
sary condition for the possibility of experiencing the wilderness at all. But
what is it about the wilderness, for these authors, that makes it such fertile
ground for environmental awareness and virtue? For Aaltola, the answer is
108 Chapter 4

its “other-worldliness.” It is the solitude of wilderness experience that allows

one to be attentive to the nonhuman natural world and “perceive the world
as it is” (295). Aaltola acknowledges that it is more than simply being in the
wilderness that allows one to cultivate environmental virtues. But nonethe-
less, in their reliance on a notion of wilderness as separate from a zone of
human dwelling, Pohl and Aaltola reinforce the binaries that have contributed
to environmental destructions, binaries that a queer ecology seeks to critique.
Given this, how might we understand queer rewilding projects? Can they
avoid reinforcing dominant conceptions of the wilderness? In her discussion
of rewilding, Andrea Gammon notes that, in the context of ecology, there are
different kinds of rewilding projects, from the more conventional biological
conservation projects that focus on rebuilding ecosystems by reintroduc-
ing absent species (most often large predators) to other forms of rewilding
that focus on human bodies and communities to restore what one might
call the wild within (2018, 336–37).8 Regarding the latter, Gammon writes,
“Rewilding oneself, or as I term it, reflexive rewilding, is a re-discovery of
this potential [of the wild within the human] by making contact and connec-
tions with conditions more wild than those we are used to; ultimately, it is an
activity undertaken for the sake of humans” (336). One example of reflexive
rewilding is “re-worming,” which involves reintroducing bacteria and hel-
minth worms to the gut in order to restore the wildness of the gut’s microbi-
ome and, thus, human health (336–37). Another example is what Gammon
calls “primitivist” rewilding, or projects that aim to restore more simplicity
in human communities through instituting ways of life that are deemed to be
more in sync with nature (337–38). “Primitivist” forms of rewilding aim for
a life “off-grid” by “becoming freer and more self-sufficient, or liberating
oneself from the entanglements with capitalism and domestic life and get-
ting back not to the land but to the wild” (337). In both examples, efforts to
rewild the human purport to disrupt the presumed insuperable line9 between
humans and nonhuman nature, thus conceiving the Anthropocene as a result
of humans turning away from or forgetting the intimacies between the wild
within and the wild outside.
While intriguing, this conception of wilderness in environmental philoso-
phy is, I suggest, at odds with the queer conception of world-traveling offered
by María Lugones. For one thing, it is too decontextualized. World-traveling
requires, for Lugones, grappling with the history of worlds, including histo-
ries that one does not share (2003, 90). Lugones offers the example of being
part of a group discussion in which someone references poodle skirts and the
experience of not knowing what a poodle skirt is. The fact that others in the
group nodded their heads to acknowledge that they also remembered poodle
skirts signaled a shared history among all of them but Lugones (90–91). I
suggest that something similar happens in mainstream environmentalism and
Queer Ecologies 109

environmental philosophy, where there are casual references to experiences

presumed to be shared by readers. Examples include, heteronormative mat-
ing rituals and nuclear families among nonhuman animals and, importantly
for this chapter, wilderness experience. Casual references to the wilderness
universalizes a specifically Euro-American concept of pure nature, ignoring
the violent expulsions that have historically created and preserved the wil-
derness. There is nothing virtuous about ignoring the violence that has made
wilderness experience available for privileged world-travelers. The worlds
Lugones has in mind are social worlds, inhabited by people past and pres-
ent; they are not utopias (87). Wilderness areas are created and policed by
the state, which includes the US National Park Service; they are social and
political zones that allow some to visit precisely because they exclude others
(see Beauchamp 2020).
As Alexis Shotwell emphasizes, “[T]he terms of our ethical thinking must
change in relation to the scale of the ethical problem” (2016, 111). Thus,
the terms of queer ecological thinking matter, which is to say they orient
our approach to problems of environmental, social, and economic justice in
ways that determine what stands out as a problem in the first place. From
a queer ecological perspective, concepts of nature, human, species, and
animal orient mainstream environmentalism in racialized, gendered, able-
ist, and heteronormative ways. One example of the heteronormativity of
mainstream environmentalist discourse is the moral panic that frames toxic
pollution as a hormonal, reproductive, and disabling threat (93, 111; Di Chiro
2010). Concerns about emasculation, infertility, sex change, and disability
are deployed with the aim of rousing the public from its state of ecological
indifference and motivating action to protect and preserve the natural world.
In their characterization of queerness, disability, and transgender as tragic
spectacles of environmental damage, mainstream environmentalism rein-
forces the naturalization of social, political, and economic hierarchies that are
presumed to be mirrored in pristine nature. In contrast, queer ecology begins
from queer lives. This mean that in addition to its critique of the weaponiza-
tion of normalizing frames of the normal, natural, and human against all who
are queerly situated in the world, queer ecology examines the interconnection
between queer flourishing and the flourishing of the more than human world.

LANDSCAPES BEYOND CURE

With so much that queer ecology is against, what might it be for? After all,
queerness as a critical political project is also utopian in José Muñoz’s sense
of “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (2009, 4). The ecological
resonance of Muñoz’s utopian temporality is, I suggest, both importantly
110 Chapter 4

different from and in solidarity with what Kyle Powys Whyte’s (2017, 156)
description of Indigenous conceptions of climate change as “back to the
future,” an understanding that resists settler colonial conceptions of climate
change as unprecedented. Going back, in the context of queer ecology’s
nonlinear temporality resists nostalgic conceptions of the past, a nostalgia
that is a feature of nationalisms of all kinds (see Gopinath 2018). Instead,
Muñoz’s concept of queer utopia is unruly and untimely, queerly sitting with
the imperfections of layers upon layers (Clare 2017) in which normalizing
demarcations between past, present, and future cease to make sense. Like the
tree that imperceptibly and simultaneously reaches out, above, and below,
these layers upon layers of deep non/human relational time are given at once.
Rather than a restoration or reclamation of nature or the wild, critically
queer ecology is a form of what Mel Chen calls “feral theorizing”—theoriz-
ing that challenges and resists the disciplinary boundaries and forces that can
“defang” radical theories when they are institutionalized (2012, 18). As a
form of feral theorizing, a queer ecology that queers environmental philoso-
phy seeks more than the addition of a queer perspective to the field or the res-
toration of queers to a place called nature or wilderness. Instead, it grapples
with complex, entangled genealogies of materialization—the myriad ways
nature, life, and non-life come to matter. This coming to matter of queerness
is, in part, what Chen means by animacy:

Using animacy as a central construct, rather than say “life” or “liveliness” . . .

helps us to theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in
contemporary times, particularly with regard to humanity’s partners in defi-
nitional crime: animality (as its analogue or limit), nationality, race, security,
environment, and sexuality. Animacy activates new theoretical formations that
trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference . . .. In its more sensitive
figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engen-
dering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least,
how we might theorize them. (3)

Following Chen, queerness is animated at the borders between human and

animal, ability and disability, white and nonwhite, organic and inorganic, the
real and the fake.10
Chen’s analysis disorients environmentalisms centered on the preservation
of resources for humans, focusing instead on the logics that transform enti-
ties into living and nonliving resources. To take one example, feral theorizing
offers a framework for thinking of coal as more than inanimate fossilized
remains of prehistoric plants and instead as a site where plants, miners, and
mining communities become coal (see Yusoff 2015; Hamby 2020). These
sites of becoming are sites of potential coalitions between seemingly unlikely
Queer Ecologies 111

allies. Consider the solidarity between LGBTQ and mining communities in

the UK in the 1980s. We can also think of the solidarity between trans and
queer people and miners who blocked railroad tracks after miners in Harlan
County lost their jobs and were denied their last month’s paycheck in July
2019 (Myers 2020, n.p.). Such coalitions are made possible by a queer ecol-
ogy attuned to layers-upon-layers of precarity and disposability.
If it is to resist and unsettle ecofascisms, a queer ecology must be oriented
not toward nature but toward what is left of it. So, what does this mean?
Thinking with crip, trans, critical race, and transnational theories, the queer
in queer ecology is a geopolitical concept attuned to histories and structures
of power that materialize nature as a tool for ecofascism. Of relevance here is
Cristina Crosby’s and Janet Jakobsen’s (2020) geopolitical conception of dis-
ability that foregrounds the flows of labor, people, and natural resources that
sustain ableist racial capitalism. While their analysis is focused on networks
of care that position relatively privileged disabled people in the Global North,
regardless of their intentions and desires, in exploitative debilitating relation-
ships with care workers, Crosby’s and Jakobsen’s geopolitical model of dis-
ability suggests the importance of a geopolitical conception of queerness that
can shape a critically queer ecology. Crosby and Jakobsen themselves gesture
toward the ecological implications of their analysis in their discussion of Eli
Clare’s emphasis on the value of landscapes beyond cure (83; Clare 2017).
As Eli Clare points out, discourses of restoration are entangled with the
logic of cure, and both restoration and cure are buttressed by regulative ide-
als of the normal and the natural. Thus, to grapple with nature, one must
grapple with the fact that there is no pure nature to be protected and restored,
only “layers upon layers of history” (2017, 17). Clare’s crip queer and trans
ecological politics goes deeper than deep ecology and deeper than deep
time to grapple with Earth’s layers upon layers of infrastructure. He invites
us to consider the sedimentation of actions and politics that have shaped
the land, waters, and atmosphere, as well as the caring practices that have
sustained communities of life in the midst of toxic, extractive practices. The
phrase “infrastructure of the Earth” may seem odd to readers who associate
infrastructure with human-made systems that are supposed to support indi-
viduals and communities in ways that allow people to both meet their needs
and flourish. However, the concept of Earth’s infrastructure both challenges
distinctions between nature and culture, rural and urban, and acknowledges
the complex infra-relational interdependencies of all forms of planetary life.
While one might be tempted to understand these planetary systems as
natural, a queer and crip ecology understands the Earth as itself materialized
in and through non/human relations and practices. From this perspective,
the distinction between natural and unnatural is unhelpful for understanding
non/human worlds and our responsibilities. For example, Clare asks, “Is an
112 Chapter 4

agribusiness cornfield unnatural, a restored prairie natural? How about the

abundance of thistle, absence of bison, those old corn farrows? What was
once normal here; what can we consider normal now?” (17). Clare sug-
gests that such questions are ultimately the wrong ones. Instead of focusing
on restoring what was lost—an ultimately impossible task since it would
involve not just re-planting or re-introducing keystone species but, instead, an
undoing of that which cannot be undone—histories and ongoing realities of
white settler colonialism, slavery, and global capitalism. The assumption that
the naturecultural (Alaimo 2010) sedimentation of the Earth can be undone
through technological ingenuity exemplifies a particular form of white
ignorance that fails to understand the world that white supremacy, heteronor-
mativity, settler colonialism, global capitalism, ableism, and misogyny has
made. Structures of oppression are characterized by the kind of forgetting that
sees the present (whether land or philosophy) as the ever-present opportunity
to begin anew. But a queer ecology that strives to be in cross-movement soli-
darity understands the Earth as a deep infrastructural network in which past,
present, and future are not linearly or sequentially distinguished but are given
at once in layers upon layers of non/human histories. Thus, a queer ecology
is an ecology not without or against nature, but an ecology that seeks other,
better questions about non/human harms, how to live, and response-ability (or
our ability to be responsive to non/human others).11
Jina Kim engages such questions in proposing infrastructures of care as
a crip ecological concept. Kim describes these infrastructures as consisting
of both state-supported forms of infrastructure that produce the debilitating
effects of environmental racism (e.g., the placement of toxic industries in
poor communities of color), as well as the informal infrastructures of care
that enable precariously situated communities to support each other in the
context of the environmental injustice that shapes racialized disablement
(2017, 524–25). Here we see that Kim’s and Clare’s focus on endurance is
critically attuned to what’s left of non/human naturecultures, while also valu-
ing the agency of those who are in harm’s way. Thus, they resist the equation
of precarity and vulnerability with passivity that characterizes mainstream
environmentalist emphasis on the vulnerability of those who experience
most of the harms of toxic pollution and climate change. By attending to the
layers upon layers of infrastructure that constitutes nature, a queer crip ecol-
ogy understands precarity as a site of alternative knowledges, practices, and
experiments in living, as well as entangled and differential multidimensional,
cumulative harms.
Rather than restore nature to a mystical, purified whole or focus on what
might come after nature, queer ecology, I suggest, is rooted in what is left
of it, both in terms of its affiliation with environmental, anti-racist, trans,
feminist, disability, and economic justice movements and its efforts to root
Queer Ecologies 113

environmentalism in what remains in the wake of destruction rather than in

a romanticized nature or wild. From the remains of romantic attachments to
nature and the wild, critically queer ecologists can engage in feral theoriz-
ing that builds on non-dominant knowledges and practices of caring for that
which is beyond cure: the Earth and its non/human inhabitants. At a time
when the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has declared
that the climate has already irreversibly changed, a queer and crip ecology of
care beyond cure speaks to the need for experiments in living in and with that
which is not and will never be pure and finding, in what remains, otherwise
ways of being in non/human relation.

NOTES

1. The ongoing implications of this historical association is evident in the March

2021 declaration by Pope Francis that decreed that gay and lesbian marriages should
not be blessed by the Catholic Church because they are contrary to God’s plan. This
decree reflects the theological underpinnings of natural law theory, a theory that
defines the moral good as that which is in line with the laws of nature. In theological
contexts, like the Catholic Church, the moral authority assigned to the laws of nature
rests on the belief that an intelligent designer, in this case God, designed nature and
endowed it with an order. These sorts of arguments continue to be used to condemn
queer and trans people.
2. Of course, as Butler points out, not all ways of becoming undone are desirable or
good (2004a, 1). As Butler puts it, “Sometimes a normative conception of gender can
undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life. Other
times, the experience of a normative restriction becoming undone can undo a prior
conception of who one is only to inaugurate a relatively newer one that has greater
livability as its aim” (1). Ultimately, what is at stake are the terms of recognition that
are themselves sites for the operation of contingent power.
3. For example, Kyle Powys Whyte (2017) offers many examples of how the cur-
rent climate crisis is not the first time Indigenous communities have had to strategi-
cally adapt to climate change, and the knowledge gained from the harmful climate
change impacts of settler colonialism is a resource for survival in the context of global
warming currently impacting the planet.
4. WildernessActText.pdf, public law 88–577, 16 U.S.C 1131–1136, 88th Con-
gress, Second Session, September 3, 1964.
5. WildernessActText.pdf.
6. “The Anthropocene” is a term intended to reflect the fact that anthropogenic
climate change has altered the chemical, geophysical being of the planet. There is
much debate about the adequacy of the Anthropocene. For example, Chris Cuomo
(2017) critiques the term for lumping together all humans as if all humans are equally
responsible for climate change and other environmental harms. Axelle Karera (2019)
critiques the term for its white-centeredness. In addition, many have suggested
114 Chapter 4

alternative terms. For example, Jason Moore (2016) suggests “Capitalocene” would
be a better description.
7. Here I am building on Charles Mills’s (1997) description of white ignorance
as white people’s failure to understand the world they have created through their
practices, or an “agreement to misinterpret the world” (1997, 18). Part of what Mills
critiques is the white ignorance (or “collective hallucination”) that posits the social
contract as the origin of human society and politics. According to Rousseau, the social
contract explains the origin of government as the mutual agreement to exchange
freedom in the state of nature for a more restricted, but mutually advantageous, set
of civil liberties. As Mills points out, Western political philosophy has persisted in its
retelling of this myth of the origin of government, a myth that conveniently forgets
that even though not all whites were signatories of this mythical contract, all whites
were beneficiaries of it (11). As a result, Mills asserts that the social contract is best
understood as a racial contract that secures a white polity at the expense of nonwhites.
Just as there is no social contract, there is no state of nature. I suggest that the nature
at the heart of the myth of the state of nature is also a “collective hallucination” in
the service of a white, heteronormative, patriarchal, settler colonial, ableist, global
capitalist polity.
8. I’m sure the motivations and intentions of both human rewilding camps are
quite different. For example, I’m sure there are advocates for rewilding the human
gut who would not align themselves with principles of deep ecology and may even
offer serious critique of them. That said, my focus is on connections between these
views and deep ecology despite the consciously held beliefs and commitments of
their defenders.
9. Jeremy Bentham proclaims that the capacity to suffer marks “the insuperable
line” between beings that are morally considerable and those that are not (quoted in
Singer 2015).
10. Angela Willey (2020) examines how the real/fake distinction informs critiques
of the place of “fake meat” in vegan diets and the queer politics of inauthenticity,
including foods deemed processed or fake. In addition, Lisa Bergin (2009) uses María
Lugones’s critique of purity to advance her own critique of discourses of purity that
inform critiques of genetically modified foods.
11. Here I draw on Kelly Oliver’s observation, “If subjectivity is the process
of witnessing sustained through responsibility, then we have a responsibility to
response-ability, to the ability to respond. We have an obligation not only to respond
but also to respond in a way that opens up rather than closes off the possibility of
response by others” (2001, 18).
Chapter 5

Queer Ethics

An ethos emerges from an ensemble of practices; when we shift collec-

tive practice, we reconfigure ethos. Practices of care are always part of
an emergent ethos. Because care isn’t abstract, but only ever manifested
through practice—action, labor, work—it is integral to our ways of doing.
—Hil Malatino, Trans Care

What does loving and living the questions mean in everyday terms? It
means, again, allowing the threads of self to loosen and engaging ethics as
experiments in living.
—Lynne Huffer, Foucault’s Strange Eros

Response-ability (that is, one’s ability to respond) in the face of interdepen-

dencies and differential precarities is a question of ethics. What do we owe
non/human others? How might we cultivate response-ability in the midst of
frequently fraught relationships of interdependency? What queer dispositions
open toward otherwise-relationships? To ponder these questions is to enter
into the realm of ethics. In this chapter, I consider how a queer ethics suggests
ways of living and being in solidarity that are response-able to those deemed
different in ways that mark their violent expulsion from care and concern in
dominant contexts. Queer ethics is essential for realizing queer worlds.
Imagining, creating, and sustaining queer worlds requires the cultivation
of a queer ethic, an ethic that cultivates radical care for those worlds and the
relationships that animate them. In this chapter, I develop and defend a notion
of queer ethics as the practice of radical care. In so doing, I build on the work
of feminist, critical race, disability, trans, and queer theorists and activists.
Some of that work is intentionally about ethics, but much is not. Nonetheless,
I smuggle such work into this chapter because of its relevance for understand-
ing the critical project of crafting a queer ethic. The word “critical” here has
115
116 Chapter 5

two meanings. As is perhaps most obvious by now, the term critical signals
that the queer of queer ethics names a politics that is not restricted to minori-
tized gender and sexual identities and an understanding of queer itself as in
question rather than a locus of certainty. But additionally, I use the word criti-
cal to signal political urgency. In the midst of global climate change, pandem-
ics, ableism, the destruction wrought by the extractive logic of global racial
capitalism, as well as misogynist, racist, and anti-trans violence, we urgently
need a queer ethic that can speak to the entanglements of these destructive
forces and offer other ways of being in relation to non/human others. We
need to cultivate practices of radical care in the face of interrelated systemic
injustices, for without radical care for the myriad precarities produced by
systemic injustices, we won’t work to resist them or create better worlds and
better forms of being in relation. A critically queer ethic is about how we can
care, differently.
In addition, a critically queer ethic queers ethics. What might this mean?
To be clear, queering ethics is not a rejection of ethics, or an anti-ethics. After
all, a critically queer ethic of radical care is an ethic. That said, there is an
important difference between an ethic and capital “E” Ethics. Ethics, as I use
it here, refers to the traditional Western philosophical area concerned with
developing and evaluating a system of principles that govern behavior and
policy. By contrast, an ethic is concerned with a more foundational philo-
sophical question of how to live and understands that this question cannot be
answered by adhering to a set of rules that apply to all dealing with similar
circumstances. What it means to radically care in a queer sense will be dif-
ferent in different circumstances; in fact, practices of radical care may not
always resemble conventional Western notions of care. As queer and trans
people who have been rejected by families of origin know well, queer care
can mean breaking rather than trying to mend relationships when the mending
is contingent upon annihilation of one’s self.
Still, a queer critique of Ethics is not a rejection of ethics (lowercase “e”).
For one thing, to assume that queering ethics is anti-ethics would be to surren-
der all possible insights about how to live, or of ethics, to the mainstream—
including the mainstream of Western philosophy. That is neither my objective
nor in the interest of flourishing queer lives. Instead, a critically queer orien-
tation in the world is an ethical practice of creating new values. In this sense,
queer ethics reflects a Nietzschean transvaluation of values and genealogical
approach to morality, or an ethics beyond good and evil (Nietzsche 1967).
Queer ethics, like queer theory in general, is profoundly influenced by
feminist theory, especially feminist philosophical critiques of the abstractions
and omissions of mainstream ethics and the development of a feminist ethics
of care (see Held 2006; Kittay 1999). In the past forty years, feminist phi-
losophers have developed a conception of ethics grounded in and accountable
Queer Ethics 117

to relations of interdependency. An understanding of the human condition as

interdependent and the self as relational has been central to a feminist ethics
of care. While early versions of feminist care ethics tended to rely on essen-
tialist conceptions of gender and heteronormative conceptions of intimacy
within the nuclear family in their efforts to revalue devalued feminized care
labor, these days feminist care ethics has moved beyond the scope of that
early work to develop accounts of transnational and planetary flows of care
and how race, class, disability, and gender shape the contexts of what it means
to provide and receive care (Keller and Kittay 2017). Feminist work on care,
as well as the current multiple, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing crises of
care most recently laid bare by pandemics of racism and COVID-19, the rise
of authoritarianism, and climate change, has resulted in renewed and intensi-
fied interest in rethinking care with an aim toward cultivating just relation-
ships, communities, health care systems, work places, states, and economies.1
Care is in the air, though it must be said that much more of it is needed on
the ground. The queer ethics I explore in this chapter, as with the discussion
of queerness throughout this book, is indebted to and strives to think with or
alongside feminist, disability, critical race, transnational, and other traditions
to the left of mainstream Western philosophy.
This chapter explores a queer ethic as one where the Good is not a polestar
but is, rather, cultivated through the trial and error of relationships. I argue
that a queer ethic is a site of experimentation (specifically experiments in
ways of being, relationship, and living).2 A queer ethic is cultivated in con-
texts of uncertainty, ambiguity, and turmoil, contexts in which one does one’s
best in the absence of knowing what to do or what the best course of action
might be. It is an ethic that is relational in the sense that it is coalitionally
conceived in contexts of marginalization. In such contexts, one doesn’t know
the good so much as struggle to do one’s best, sustaining a radical hope for a
better world. Its aim is solidarity across difference in the creation of otherwise
ways of living. The multiple experiments in living central to a queer ethic are,
I suggest, experiments in promiscuous care.3
My exploration of these issues in this chapter begins by considering vari-
ous forms of skepticism about the possibility of a queer ethics. I then consider
how queer ethics critiques carceral ethics. Next, I discuss queer ethics as a
defamiliarizing orientation and practice of opting out and making do. I end
the chapter with a discussion of queer ethics as radical care. Perhaps fittingly
enough for the last chapter of a book on queering philosophy, I turn to queer-
ing philosophy as a practice of queer radical care for philosophy itself.
118 Chapter 5

IS QUEER ETHICS AN OXYMORON?

It is understandable why some might presume an incompatibility between

queerness and ethics. After all, moralizing and moral panics have long been
deployed to rationalize discrimination and violence against LGBTQ people.
Witness the recent spate of conservative US state legislators trying to banish
trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports or using a public
restroom or changing room, all in the name of protecting girls and women,
exemplifying an Orwellian doublespeak that targets girls and women in the
name of protecting girls and women. Witness also the recent efforts of con-
servative state legislators to ban the topics of systemic racism, sexual orienta-
tion, and gender identity from K–12 classrooms in the US. Queer and trans
people have been cast as threats to public health, safety, and an appropriate,
desirable way of life. Whether as teachers, parents, or just in our very daily
existence, queer and trans people are conceived as corrupters of the youth,
damned by religion, and harbingers of the downfall of society.
What Eve Sedgwick wrote thirty years ago still rings true today: the
moral condemnations of queerness merge into a single, shattering “NO.”
Sedgwick termed this the “Christmas effect” because the overwhelming
uniformity of this message is especially palpable during this time of year
in Christian-dominated societies, regardless of whether one celebrates this
holiday or not. Sedgwick’s point about Christmas resonates with any institu-
tionalized, heteropatriarchal, nuclear family-centered holiday:

The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the
time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice . . .. The thing hasn’t,
finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity, as with propaganda for
Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, and
discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a
year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy
eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which mean-
ings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest
junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? (1993, 5–6)

Sedgwick’s point locates the question of value at the center of homopho-

bia, transphobia, and other oppressive systems: the performative, citational
practices of institutions assign and withhold value from people and practices
or ways of living. Importantly, Sedgwick also notes the queer possibility of
critical interruptions and breaks, the possibility of otherwise-meaning, not
only different or alternative meaning, but meaning something else, something
more. As José Muñoz writes, “Queerness is the thing that lets us feel that
this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (2009, 1). This
Queer Ethics 119

queer feeling that registers the not-enoughness of this world and longs for
something other and more opens the queer possibility of creating new value,
a new ethic. The critical disruptions of dominant meaning and value that are
occasioned by a queer ethic makes room for other things to be thought, other
ways of living that can be sources of new value. Queer ethics unravels the one
voice with which dominant institutions speak and condemn queerness, thus
opening the possibility for lives lived otherwise.
This one voice with which dominant institutions speak informs how applied
ethics courses are conventionally taught in US classrooms. Such courses aim
to be responsive to social concerns of the day, which is good because they
can help students understand the relationship between the things philosophers
like to think and write about and their lives. However, such courses tend to
approach questions of social justice (for example, questions of racism, sex-
ism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism) in ways that are often alienating
to students whose lives are on the line in the discussion, in other words, stu-
dents for whom the topic of the day is not and cannot be an abstract thought
experiment without dissociating from their affective investment in their very
lives. This was my experience as an undergraduate queer student who had
been raised in a milieu that constantly communicated the wrongness, the
immorality, of my very being. While this message was certainly religiously
inflected in my growing up experience, both secular and religious institutions
were in alignment and invested, it seemed to me, in smearing the queers.
While some might be tempted to think such experiences are all in the
past now that the US and many other countries have legalized lesbian and
gay marriage, this extension of legal rights has been accompanied by efforts
to eliminate legal protections for queer and trans people. Many queer and
trans kids continue to be rejected by their families, and despite the American
Psychological Association’s rejection of conversion therapy, as well as the
disbanding of Exodus International, many religious institutions continue to
sponsor these therapies and encourage parents to send their LGBTQ kids to
them, ignoring the evidence of how harmful, how damaging, these practices
are to LGBTQ people. People still want to kill LGBTQ people, and do.
LGBTQ youth continue to have higher suicide rates than other groups. And
LGBTQ philosophers are still all-too-often the first and only one in their
departments. As feminist and anti-racism movements have learned, legal
protections are important, but never the end of work to be done.
All this means that queer and trans students (and professors) come to the
philosophy classroom carrying ongoing homophobic and transphobic trau-
mas with them. Just traveling across campus to go to class can expose one
to subtle and overt homophobic and transphobic hostilities. It is tough to
concentrate when it’s clear that so many don’t care (including people who are
supposed to care because they brought you into the world), when politicians
120 Chapter 5

debate your life, your very existence in the world. Like many LGBTQ people,
I know the sting of all these rejections. When I was an undergraduate student
and newly declared philosophy major, the one parent who could have sup-
ported my education, didn’t. For this person, a philosophy degree, like my
feminist queer self, was deemed worthless. Consequently, being queer and
being a philosopher, indeed being a queer feminist philosopher, has involved
learning not only the ropes of a field—whatever they may be—but also, and
more importantly, how to care about and for what dominant culture deems
worthless.
Learning how to care about and for that which is deemed worthless is
central to queer ethical practice, a form of queer care.4 The care in question
here isn’t a warm, fuzzy, romanticized notion of care. Instead, queer care is
raw, radical care crucial for survival, and it is through practicing this sort of
care that experiments in new ways of thinking and being are forged. Practices
of queer care are practices of resistance. As Audre Lorde writes, “Caring
for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of
political warfare” (1988, 130).
For queer and trans people who find themselves somehow caring about
philosophy, that care is especially difficult when the field’s mainstream seems
to care so little about you.5 Given the obstacles both in and outside academia
with which queer and trans students, faculty, and staff are forced to contend,
the presence of any one of us, to paraphrase Eve Sedgwick, is truly a miracle.6
One way institutionalized philosophy demonstrates its lack of care for queer
and trans people is by reducing queer and trans lives to abstract thought
experiments, or by talking about rather than with or to queer and trans people
and communities or from the perspective of queer and trans lives.7 Ableist
conceptions of disability, along with heteronormativity, work together to
frame queer and trans people and experience as abnormalities and curiosities8
that add spice to whatever abstract philosophical problem is being considered.
Another site of alienation occurs in the debate model that so often structures
the mainstream philosophy classroom.9 In this model, complex social and
political issues are reduced to two sides—for and against. I’ll never forget the
senior colleague who approached me in my first year in the department and
expressed interest in hosting a department event to debate “homosexuality,”
a debate in which I would present the “for” side and he would present the
“anti” side. Of course, I declined his invitation. Still, the experience illustrates
the absurd and alienating environment of conventional ethics classrooms
in which LGBTQ students and faculty are required to take seriously and
engage debates about their lives, all ostensibly in the name of learning how
to do philosophical ethics. Is homosexuality moral—for or against? Should
LGBTQ people be allowed to adopt children—for or against? Should trans
girls and women be allowed to play on girls and women’s sports teams—for
Queer Ethics 121

or against? Is it ok to deny housing, services, or employment protections

to LGBTQ people if it runs counter to a person’s religious beliefs—for or
against? The list goes on and on, with each form of prejudice and discrimi-
nation against LGBTQ people translated into an abstract moral problem for
the philosophy ethics classroom. When this happens, LGBTQ people in the
classroom are placed in the position of debating not a social “issue” but our
very lives, which makes one want to scream “STOP IT!” Thus, it’s tough, if
not impossible, to care about philosophy and ethics in this alienating, dehu-
manizing context.
When the discussion of LGBTQ lives and communities are framed as
debates in ethics classrooms—whether in the textbook itself or in the orga-
nization of topics and readings on a course syllabus—the distortions of a
bifurcated flow of information10 shapes the discussion, just as it does in
inflammatory conservative media outlets like Fox News. While “for and
against” frameworks are often presented as objective and neutral, they are
in fact conservative in their foreclosure of alternative, multidimensional
approaches and in their reinforcement of the mainstream’s terms of debate.
As with the poles of binary conceptions of gender and sexuality, the binary
of for/against serves to stabilize rather than destabilize the frame that sustains
heteronormativity. Rather than expand imaginative and critical, reflexive
capacity for reflection and engagement with difference, the for and against
framework constricts and stifles that capacity. Perhaps this is another reason
why a field called queer philosophy has never officially arrived. Understood
as a social issue up for debate, queerness is positioned as a site of applied
philosophy, rather than a site for the development of philosophical questions,
methods, and field-shaping contributions.
Given all this, it is understandable that there are some for whom queer eth-
ics is oxymoronic. Here, I aim to show that this is mistaken. To queer ethics
is not to reject ethics, any more than a genealogy of knowledge rejects knowl-
edge or truth. To assume otherwise is to engage in a reverse discourse in a
fit of ressentiment. Or, thinking with Gloria Anzaldúa, to reject ethics would
affirm an oppositional framework by simply yelling from the opposite side
of the river bank (1987, 100). Such a practice sustains and strengthens oppo-
sitional logics at the heart of frames of war11 rather than engage in genealogi-
cal critique as part of a queer ethical practice of imagination oriented toward
an otherwise. A queer ethic is a practice of expanding critical capacities to
care,12 for it is only in caring differently and more that otherwise-worlds and
otherwise-being-in-relationship are possible.
Philosophy aims to understand the world, and queers who care about phi-
losophy have tried to use it to change the world. But queer use is not merely
an application of philosophy to queer lives and issues. Instead, queer use ques-
tions and pushes against/contests the limits of philosophy as it understands
122 Chapter 5

itself. As Sara Ahmed writes, “Queer use might refer to how things can be
used in ways other than how they were intended to be used or by those other
than for whom they were intended” (2019, 44). While this doesn’t exhaust
what Ahmed means by queer use, such putting to unofficial, unanticipated,
and undisciplined use captures what is at work in queering philosophy in gen-
eral and queering philosophical ethics in particular. Queering ethics makes
use of philosophy, but not by putting it back into circulation (that is, not by
widening its disciplinary reach). Instead, in being put to queer use, doing eth-
ics becomes something else and in the service of solidarity across difference
rather than an abstract conception of the good. Queer ethics is a practice of
forging the good in relation to and with others, with the aim of promoting
the flourishing of non/human beings and the planet. Thus understood, queer
ethics is a practice of radical care, which involves, to borrow from Gloria
Anzaldúa, a tolerance for contradiction and ambiguity (1987, 101). As such,
queer ethics is something other than judgment in the name of moral principle.
Queer ethics is attuned to spaces and movements where judgment is sus-
pended in an effort to be open to and sit with ambiguity and the unknown.
To be sure, there are times when judgement is needed, and rights need to be
projected. Even so, the suspension of judgement is also necessary for thinking
with and through what is lost in translation between worlds of marginalized
experience. At its heart, ethics is about how to live, and grappling with the
question of how to live cannot be reduced to rule following. Rather than rule
following, queer ethics engages in experiments in living, experiments in how
to live in the world with others in ways that enable the flourishing of those
whose lives have been relegated to the margins of (if not completely erased
by) the mainstream of institutionalized philosophical ethics. The point of eth-
ics, or the point that matters for queer engagements with philosophy, is not
how to live in one’s head (e.g., in the world of runaway trolleys and other
abstract thought experiments)13 but instead how to live with others and in
the world in ways that respect rather than flatten non-dominant differences.
From a queer ethical perspective, experiments in living are also practices of
self-making and un-making (see Huffer 2020). In this sense, the radical care
for others, the world, and self that constitutes queer ethics is a practice of
otherwise-being in the world that also transforms the world.

CARCERAL ETHICS, NORMS, AND

DEPOLITICIZATION

“You and I are estranged,” he said. These were the first words my father
said to me the last time I saw him. While our paths had crossed at various
events that had forced us together, it had been over a decade since we had
Queer Ethics 123

spoken more than a few passing words to each other. He was dying, and that
knowledge brought me to his doorstep that day, to a place that was not (and
never was) my home. The heteropatriarchal norm/ideal of the nuclear family
established a relationship between us that was supposed to, but never did,
create a feeling of kinship between us. Yes, he was my father according to the
laws of the state, but neither of us felt kinship. While he never spoke about his
feelings with me (unless it was anger), we were oil and water. Yes, we were
estranged indeed—always were from the moment I could form and voice my
own thoughts about the world. Nonetheless, I showed up, hoping for a dif-
ferent conversation between us, but the moment he rounded the corner at the
sound of the front door opening, I knew that was just false hope. I watched
his face fall and his expression harden the moment he realized that I was
the unexpected visitor. I was neither the guest nor the child he expected or
wanted. Like so many queers, I know intimately the sting of rejection, of being
disowned by the very people who have known you from your first breath,
the people who, according to all the heteronormative images of smiling and
happy families, will always love you and be there for you no matter what.
Like so many queers, I know the lie of that image. Queers know it’s not only
strangers who call you faggot. As I stood in the doorway that day, my father’s
face said it all: as far as he was concerned, I was repulsive, a faggot, a no one
and nothing. He had nothing to say to me except to repeat that he was going
to heaven, and I was not.

Queer ethics begins from a place of estrangement from all that is equated
with happiness and the good in heteropatriarchy: nuclear families, gender
conformity, heterosexuality, reproductive futurity, and so forth. Within het-
eropatriarchal conventions, while the rejected child is deemed immoral or
bad, the parent who disowns the queer child is deemed good because they
are doing the difficult but virtuous thing. A queer child’s estrangement from
a parent or family of origin is also an estrangement from a life that dominant
culture deems good and desirable. For LGBTQ people, those rejections from
families of origin are often religiously motivated. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes,

Religion always sides with those in power. If you deviate, you’re burned as a
witch, as a faggot, as a lesbian. The great guilt forced on us is that they want us
to merge with the normal, to cut off the unacceptable parts of ourselves—you
know, our sexuality. We have to keep silent and can’t say who we are. I really
believe that religions have to be gotten rid of. (2000, 97)

Anzaldúa distinguishes between religion, a major social institution that has

a long history of aligning itself with state interests, and spirituality, which
she describes as a creative possibility within the self that in its relation to
124 Chapter 5

something outside that which is taken-for-granted about reality remains

open to development and growth (98). “Spirituality,” Anzaldúa argues, “has
nothing to do with religion, which recognizes the soul, that spirit, and then
puts a dogma around it, saying, ‘This is the way things have to be.’ Religion
eliminates all kinds of growth, development, and change, and that’s why I
think any kind of formalized religion is bad” (98). Anzaldúa’s understanding
of the spiritual resonates with Audre Lorde’s conception of the erotic and the
distinction between the erotic and heteropatriarchal conceptions of sexuality.
The erotic, for Lorde, is a source of “creative energy” and empowerment,
and offers insight into how our lives and the world might be different (1984,
55). As she describes it, “[T]he erotic is not a question only of what we do;
it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (54). Both
the spiritual and the erotic, as conceived by Anzaldúa and Lorde respectively,
offer resources for queer ethics and politics. Both are oriented toward that
which is outside the dominant frame. As Lorde writes, “Recognizing the
power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine
change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters
in the same weary drama” (59). The queerness of the spiritual and the erotic
is in their troubling and rejection of dominant institutionalized norms and
conceptions of the good.14
What I am calling carceral ethics in this chapter is an ethics focused on
disciplining judgement and punishment that aims to either tame or eradi-
cate threatening difference. A carceral ethic establishes a relation between
the good and the normal in its creation and application of moral principles.
Queers know that the good, as well as the truth, can lock you up.15 The prin-
ciples of carceral ethics are informed by and reinforce a distinction between
us/good and them/evil. Much of traditional Western ethics, for example,
utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, take this carceral form. Consider,
for example, that traditional Western philosophy, like all theories and ideas,
are informed by the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic con-
text that gave rise to them and to which these theories and ideas attempt to
respond. Like all systems of thought, dominant Western ethical theories are
informed by the historical, social, economic, political, and cultural context in
which they were planted and took root. Traditional Western ethical theories
were formulated and became part of a Western ethical common sense within
the context of settler colonialism, slavery, sexology, patriarchy, and capital-
ism—all systems that divide the world and then rationalize those divisions
in order to conquer it. Thus, to describe traditional Western approaches to
ethics as carceral is to underscore their long-standing use in rationalizing the
status quo surveillance, regulation, containment, and elimination of members
of non-dominant groups by deeming them immoral or otherwise outside the
realm of moral concern and the protections of citizenship. As part of carceral
Queer Ethics 125

power, carceral ethics extend the techniques of discipline and punishment to

all institutions of society and serve to rationalize various forms of violence
against people deemed aberrant. The distinction between the good and the bad
within carceral ethics is, at heart, a distinction between normal and abnormal.
As Foucault argues, carcerality is informed by confinement and correct train-
ing in the name of a pure community and a disciplined society (1979, 198).
Traditional Western ethical theories form part of a carceral common sense.
Some may disagree and contend that I overstate the case. After all, one
could use either a utilitarian or a deontological ethical theoretical framework
to argue against mass incarceration and other forms of violence against people
subjected to sexual, gender, race, disability, and poverty-based oppression.
And this is certainly true. Nonetheless, dominant Western ethical theoretical
frameworks assume the status quo, seeking some form of moral repair within
it. Such an approach ultimately depoliticizes responses to various forms
of injustice, reducing them to matters of individual or policy failure while
accepting the social, political, cultural, and economic status quo as given.
In his analysis of the depoliticization of the Stonewall rebellion, a depo-
liticization advanced by homophile, homophobic, racist, transphobic, sexist,
and pro–free market capitalist groups, Roderick Ferguson builds on Herbert
Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional thinking to advance his own critique
of how the notion of the one-dimensional queer (that is, a single-issue focused
queer person and movement) has eclipsed the actual radical, multidimen-
sional nature of queer and trans politics during and post-Stonewall (2019,
49–52). Ferguson writes, “This depoliticization did not represent the absence
of politics so much as the regulation of politics” (48). Depoliticization func-
tions by portraying positions that seek solutions within the terms of the status
quo as possible because realistic, while casting challenges to the dominant
system itself as violent disruptions orchestrated by bad actors.
Depoliticization undermines efforts to think and work in multidimensional
ways, or in alliance and solidarity with other movements against oppression.
As Ferguson contends,

As a way of disciplining progressive politics, depoliticization as an ideology

worked to confine the political to those standpoints approved by the established
systems. Part of depoliticization’s maneuvers was to neutralize thinking and
actions that tried to transcend the status quo. Neutralizing progressive thinking
and action entailed unraveling the potential for politics to produce a constel-
lation of political endeavors. As such, depoliticization denotes the process by
which social grievances become private and discrete matters. In a moment of
social insurgencies, depoliticization represented a variety of political and eco-
nomic efforts that were attempting to achieve dominance in the context of those
insurgencies. (51–52)
126 Chapter 5

Ferguson’s examples of depoliticization in response to the Stonewall rebel-

lion that was led by the predominantly Black and Puerto Rican, gay and les-
bian, trans and gender nonconforming patrons of the Stonewall Inn include
an article in The Mattachine Society Newsletter that portrayed the uprising
as a clash between drag queens and police in which “‘queens were almost
outnumbered by Black Panthers, Yippies, Crazies, and young toughs from
street gangs all over the city and some from New Jersey. The exploiters had
moved in and were using the gay power movement for their own ends’”
(Teal 1971, 28, quoted in Ferguson 2019, 52–53). As Ferguson points out,
working within prevailing political and ethical frameworks, single-issue
oriented (or one-dimensional) homophile organizations could not fathom a
multidimensional spark for the Stonewall rebellion or the possibilities of a
multidimensional, cross-movement queer and trans radical ethics and politics
of solidarity that sought not inclusion for previously excluded sexual and
gender minorities, but the creation of something else.
Part of the legacy of one-dimensional gay and lesbian ethics and politics
is the reduction of gay and lesbian ethical issues (including in philosophy
textbooks) to debates about gay and lesbian marriage and adoption. In point-
ing this out, it is not my attention to argue for or against gay and lesbian
marriage and adoption. Instead, in this chapter on queer ethics, my point is
that the amount of trees, ink, time, and energy spent on these debates has
served to regulate the possibilities of queer ethics by confining it to questions
of inclusion within dominant institutions and queer ethical stances that are
one-dimensional/single-issue focused. Dean Spade, for example, has long
critiqued the single-issue, privileged focus of the mainstream gay and lesbian
rights movement. Spade writes,

Black people, indigenous people, [disabled people], queer and trans people,
prisoners, and poor people face enormous targeting in child welfare systems.
Seeking “family recognition” rights through marriage, therefore, means seek-
ing such rights only for queer and trans people who can actually expect to be
protected by that institution. . . . The framing of marriage as the most essential
legal need of queer people and as the method through which queer people can
obtain key benefits in many realms, ignores how race, class, ability, indigeneity,
and immigration status determine access to those benefits and reduces the gay
rights agenda to a project of restoring race, class, ability and immigration status
privilege to the most privileged gays and lesbians. (2011, 61–62)

For Spade, centering marriage equality in queer and trans ethics and politics
is a one-dimensional strategy that approaches problems of homophobic and
transphobic discrimination and violence by assuming that dominant legal
institutions, but for one’s gender and sexuality, work to protect one. Thus, a
Queer Ethics 127

queer ethics and politics focused on extending recognition and legal rights
and protections is ultimately a white, nondisabled, and class-privileged
politics. In order to further demonstrate this point, Spade considers the dif-
ference between solutions to problems offered by the mainstream gay and
lesbian rights movement and those offered by queer and trans political move-
ments. For example, the former has sought carceral solutions to the problem
of homophobic and transphobic violence: “Pass hate crime legislation to
increase prison sentences and strengthen local and federal law enforcement;
collect statistics on rates of violence; collaborate with local and federal law
enforcement to prosecute hate violence and domestic violence” (63). By
contrast, a critically queer and trans proposed solution to the same problem
would “[d]evelop community-based responses to violence that support col-
lective healing and accountability [and] join with movements addressing the
root causes of queer and trans premature death: police violence, imprison-
ment, poverty, lack of health care and housing” (63). The latter’s, multidi-
mensional politics is informed by and gives rise to a multidimensional ethics
that does not take as given prevailing ethical frameworks of the status quo.
Race, class, and gender privilege are the grounds for the possibility of pro-
tection through assimilation and inclusion. Critically queer and trans theorists
have critiqued this strategy as a politics of homo-/trans-nationalism. Rather
than eliminating homophobia and transphobia, homo-/trans-nationalist ethics
and politics moves the boundary of exclusion elsewhere, leaving queer and
trans people who are more precariously situated vulnerable to violence from
the state and bigots. Even as the ethics and politics centered on rights and
recognition establishes a moral threshold for acceptable treatment, it comes
at the expense of those on the “wrong” side of that boundary, who continue to
experience various forms of oppression for which they are blamed.

OPTING OUT AND MAKING DO

Queer critiques of normativity and, relatedly, reproductive futurity, constitute

what’s known as the antisocial turn in queer theory. As Mari Ruti (2017)
explains, queer theory’s antisocial turn is exemplified by the defiant queer
subject whose ethical stance is a rejection of the normal. Other abject affects
that exemplify queer rejection of the norm include failure (Halberstam 2011)
and a rejection of hope and the future in favor of the present (Edelman 2004).
Politically, the queer ethics of opting out has put queer theory at odds with the
mainstream LGBTQ rights movement (Ruti 2017). But critical interrogation
of the terms of inclusion and acceptance has long been an important part of
queer theory and activism. For example, in his account of the forgotten inter-
sectional foundations of radical queer and trans activism in the US, Roderick
128 Chapter 5

Ferguson locates the origins of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

(STAR), founded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, in a 1971 sit-in at
New York University to protest the decision by the administration and board
of trustees to ban queer and trans social events on the campus “until a panel of
ministers and psychologists conducted an investigation determining whether
homosexuality was ‘morally responsible’” (2019, 24). As Rivera explains,
NYU’s decision “‘happened when there had been several dances thrown
there, and all of a sudden, the plug was pulled because the rich families were
offended that queers and dykes were having dances and their impressionable
children were going to be harmed’” (Rivera quoted in 2019, 24–25; see also
Rivera, 2013, 52). The dances at NYU were important community events that
brought together diverse people while simultaneously critically intervening
in and rerouting how the university put people in relation to each other on
campus and the relation between the campus and the diverse city in which it
is located. The sit-in at NYU was a protest over the moral panic sparked by
queer and trans social events on campus, as well as a critical calling into ques-
tion of assumptions about the uses and purpose of the university (Ferguson
2019, 27–29).
The fact that queer and trans social events on campus put the university to
otherwise-use was what defenders of the heteronormative status quo could
not abide. Some protesters gave in to the police request to leave; however,
others, like Rivera, refused to yield and were forcibly removed by police (28).
The difference in responses of the protesters reflects ongoing tensions within
LGBTQ communities, between those who seek a place within rather than a
transformation of dominant institutions (e.g., marriage, the military, the uni-
versity, corporations—this pride march is brought to you by VISA!, religious
institutions, etc.) and those who seek to transform those institutions and call
into question the institution’s terms of inclusion. The former tends to appear
most viable to those whose race, class, gender, ability, and other privileges
have largely been served by dominant institutions. The latter strategy has,
according to Ferguson, long been a site of cross-movement solidarity in queer
and trans politics. As Ferguson puts it,

Rivera’s refusal to vacate is significant because it represents a refusal to yield to

the planned routes of an institution. Her disappointment has to do with the pro-
testers ceding ground to the institution’s understanding of itself and the presum-
ably proper practices and people that can be in and represent the institution. . . .
Rivera and Johnson become part of an effort to queer and democratize university
space. It was one of the earliest instances, perhaps, in which queer and trans folks
were attempting to claim the university as an intellectual and institutional space
that could not only accommodate but value queer and trans life. (28)
Queer Ethics 129

STAR worked in solidarity with other groups demanding justice for all
oppressed people. Their work—from protests at Bellevue Hospital to work
with the Black Panthers and Young Lords—refused single-issue approaches
to queer and trans revolution by highlighting areas of common struggle
against dominant institutions that policed and sought to restrict their move-
ments in so-called public spaces. “The takeover at [NYU’s] Weinstein Hall,”
Ferguson writes, “represents refusal of the fable, given to us by Plato, that in
order for society to function ‘everyone’—as Rancière states—’must stay in
his [sic] proper place’” (29; Rancière 2004, 90, quoted in Ferguson 2019).
Queer ethical practices aren’t oriented toward identifying and applying
principles that can help us live in the world as it is; queers know that game is
rigged against us. Just when you think you’ve achieved some room to move
and breathe, the next election cycle takes it away, with each side pointing to
the progressive nature of the state, the temporary set-back at your expense.
Queers call bullshit on that. Queer ethics is a world-creating practice aimed
at deep transformation, not reform and mere inclusion. Inclusion is a rigged
game, as far as queers and other oppressed groups are concerned.
Mari Ruti (2017) calls this stance a queer ethics of “opting out,” a queer
ethics founded on rejection of dominant norms. This opting out can take vari-
ous forms—for example, practices of kinship that aren’t organized around the
hetero-reproductive nuclear family and state legitimization. If opting out is
to be more than a stance of ressentiment, it must do more than simply say no
to the status quo. That said, the significance of saying no is often too quickly
dismissed. Rejecting a way of life that has been extolled as the incarnation of
all that is natural and good from the moment of one’s birth is difficult indeed.
This sort of saying no risks certainty in favor of forging paths with no pre-set
guardrails. Saying no in favor of one’s own survival and flourishing is what
enables queers to be in the first place. There is no development of an other-
wise that doesn’t first involve this rejection. That said, the otherwise-world-
creating potential of queer ethics necessitates that it be more than simply
nay-saying to the status quo. And, in this chapter, my aim is to show that
it does. Queer ethics opts out and, in opting out, it does something else—it
values queer lives, relationships, and worlds.
While opting out tends to get the most attention as a queer ethical practice,
a less considered but nonetheless important queer ethical practice is one we
might call making do. At first glance, it may seem as if making do is a strat-
egy of giving up, selling out, or assimilation—a throwing up of one’s hands
in the face of overwhelming obstacles to one’s flourishing. But I suggest
that making do is a queer ethical world-creating practice that makes some-
thing out of nothing or, in this case, makes value where value is ignored or
denied, values that which is deemed to be without value and puts it to queer
130 Chapter 5

use. Consider, for example, what Mariana Ortega says about making do as a
hometactic for those who are between worlds of sense and belonging:

My account of hometactics is my response to the paradoxical will to belong

while understanding the mythical, magical, and thus unreal, aspects of home.
It is also my disclosure of what multiplicitous selves are already doing in their
everyday experience. I clearly do not oppose grander and more sustained politi-
cal projects, but I do not wish to overlook or forget those moments when multi-
plicitous selves struggle with everdayness and find ways, yes, to “make do,” to
feel comfortable in spite of a clear understanding of the ways in which power
relations are bound to undermine, to hurt, to alienate. (2016, 205)

For Ortega, making do is a “microtechinque of lived experience” that is vital

to survival and flourishing (206). It is a microtechnique of making a space
for one’s multiplicitous self in a context where demands for authenticity and
unity require one to deny some aspect of one’s existence. Making do makes
room for that which is queer, or that which exceeds and calls into question
the boundaries of belonging. Importantly, Ortega’s understanding of making
do is not focused only on the self in isolation. Instead, it is a strategy born of
the lived experience of one’s membership in multiple culturally and socially
marginalized groups and the relationality of the self. Making do is both a
world-making project forged in a context of ambiguous and often conflicted
relations with others and a practice that invites others to understand the sig-
nificance of inter-and intra-group differences, an understanding necessary
for solidarity and co-creation of worlds that welcome difference as opposed
to demand conformity and univocality. As such, I suggest that, in addition
to the “grander” political projects of protest, making do is a queer ethical
world-making experiment in living founded on radical care for self, others,
and worlds. Both opting out and making do are queer ethical and political
strategies. Sometimes to care for oneself and one’s relationships, one opts
out; other times one makes do. Both are experiments in living that open to
the possibility of multidimensional ways of living, being-with, and valuing
otherwise.

AN ETHICS OF CARING QUEERLY

Another feature of the prevailing Western ethical theoretical framework

that has been critiqued in feminist ethics is its emphasis on abstraction and
universalization and its assumption of the autonomous, rational individual
(see, for example, Held 2005). While philosophers often focus on the differ-
ences between ethical theories like utilitarianism and deontology, it has been
Queer Ethics 131

a feminist ethics of care that has maintained that the underlying similarities
between traditional Western ethical theories are greater than their differences
(2006). For example, Virginia Held focuses on their shared framing assump-
tions about the nature of persons (that they are isolated, autonomous, indepen-
dent, and rational) and the distinction between the public and private, which
is both profoundly gendered and establishes that ethical issues, policies, and
decisions pertain to the public not the private realm where heteropatriarchal
authority is left unchallenged (12–13). In other words, it is in the public realm
where we are expected to cooperate by acting in accordance with a set of uni-
versal, moral rules, including principles of equality; however, in the private
sphere, inequality is taken as a matter of fact and all are expected to be subor-
dinate to heteropatriarchal authority (as Held puts it, the man in his castle [12]
or as bell hooks describes it, the fear she experienced as a child hearing her
father’s footsteps at the end of the working day [hooks interviewed in Riggs
1995]). In the heteropatriarchal nuclear family household, it is the father who
is the disciplinarian who enforces his rules.
Instead, a queer ethics builds on work in recent feminist ethics of care.
Within contemporary feminist care ethics, focusing on care calls for analysis
of the social, political, and economic implications of interdependency, as
well as the interpersonal and transnational dimensions of care labor (Tronto
2015; Kittay 1999). Care, as defined by the Care Collective, encompasses
everything necessary for the flourishing of all beings (2020, 5). For their
part, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as “a species activity that
includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that
we may live in it as well as possible” (quoted in Tronto 2015, 3). As Virginia
Held asserts, “The social changes a focus on care would require would be as
profound as can be imagined” (2005, 20).
The reliance on the individual and the nuclear family is a key feature
of neoliberalism, and the justification for privatization and austerity has
depended on a conception of the private individual who bears most respon-
sibility for meeting their needs. Sarah Jaffe describes the “always individu-
alizing” dynamic of neoliberalism by quoting Margaret Thatcher who said,
“‘[W]ho is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and
women and there are families’” (2021, 9). Thatcher’s claim reveals the binary
gendered logic at the heart neoliberal conceptions of the individual and the
family. Foucault proclaimed that, far from standing outside relations of
power, the individual is both the effect and target of power that sorts, ranks,
trains, and rends the individual hypervisible (1979). What I have been calling
carceral ethics prioritizes the rationality, autonomy, and responsibility of the
individual, who is understood to enter into relationship with others but not to
be constituted by those relations. By contrast, an ethics of care begins with an
understanding of the self as relational, a fact that raises important questions
132 Chapter 5

for justice because not all relationships are good or chosen/desired; relation-
ships, even those that purport to be caring, can also be sites of injustice (Card
1990; Narayan 1995; Silvers 1995; Tronto 2015; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018;
Care Collective 2020). Certainly, there are times when ethics needs to be
concerned with individual actions; however, a queer ethic attends first and
foremost to the myriad relationships that constitute the self and the creation
of possibilities for the flourishing of caring relationships to the self, others,
and the planet.
Unfortunately, while care is crucial for the flourishing of selves, rela-
tions, and the planet, we are surrounded by evidence (from the COVID-19
pandemic to the rise of white nationalism to consequences of climate chaos),
that carelessness prevails in our world (Care Collective 2020, 1). In response
to narrow conceptions of the scope of care, the Care Collective argues for
an ethics and politics of “promiscuous care.” Promiscuous care, they con-
tend, is not

caring casually or indifferently. It is neoliberal capitalist care that remains

detached, both casual and indifferent, with disastrous consequences. For us, pro-
miscuous care is an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations
from the most intimate to the most distant. It means caring more and in ways
that remain experimental and extensive by current standards. We have relied on
the “the market” and “the family” to provide too many of our caring needs for
too long. We need to create a more capacious notion of care. (41)

The Care Collective’s account of promiscuous care builds on Douglas

Crimp’s queer response to the HIV/AIDS crisis in which he notes that the
queer promiscuity that was (and is) morally condemned by the political right
also gave rise to crucial networks of care in a world (including many families
of origin) that could care less that gays were dying. The heteropatriarchal
nuclear family that had failed to care for queer kids continued to fail to care
for them as they became ill and died. In the absence of support from families
of origin, queers did what we have always done, we created different kinship
networks, that is, different networks of care (41).
What’s queer about promiscuous care isn’t the sexual and gender identities
of caregivers or care recipients. It’s the expansion of care and responsibility
beyond a scarcity model that dictates that one’s caring responsibilities are
only to one’s self and to one’s state-legitimated family members. Promiscuous
care also challenges heteropatriarchal gendered assumptions that caregiving
is women’s work (Care Collective 2020).
Promiscious care is a queer ethics of care. The question for queer ethics
is how to care more while the privileged, who can afford indifference, care
less and less. Various books have emerged offering models of care from
Queer Ethics 133

queer, trans, disability, and feminist perspectives (see, for example, Malatino
2020; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018; Spade 2020; Care Collective 2020). These
works focus on the importance of recognizing care as work that should be
adequately compensated and supported by state policies, as well as strategies
for navigating the fraught terrain of care inequities that make care a site of
ambiguity. Even though we all need care throughout our lives, care labor is
frequently hard, exhausting work. Caring in a careless world can wear one
down. In addition to policy suggestions, these works present models for how
individuals and communities can build caring networks. These models aren’t
products of abstract thought experiments; they are products of practices in
marginalized communities who have had to forge networks to meet their own
care needs because the dominant context does not meet them.
Those who care promiscuously also need promiscuous care from others.
A queer ethics is a practice of creating experiments of care to address needs
of those who fall outside the dominant context’s realm of caring concern.
Placing care at the center of queer ethics acknowledges that vulnerability is
both a shared condition of life, even though that vulnerability does not result
in an equally shared condition of precarity, and a condition of ethical action
in the world (Butler 2020).

QUEER CARE FOR PHILOSOPHY

As this book comes to a close, I want to think about the extent to which
promiscuous care, along with Lynne Huffer’s Foucauldian ethics of eros, sug-
gests the possibility of a queer care for philosophy. Huffer shares Foucault’s
Nietzschean suspicion of the norming function of ethics in society—a func-
tion that ultimately preserves the position of the powerful and conceals state
violence even as it claims to promote the good for all (2020, 13). Huffer’s
concern illuminates the significance of an ethics of eros for queering philoso-
phy as a practice of queer promiscuous care for philosophy. To care queerly
for philosophy is to aim at something other and more than philosophical
respectability in the form of inclusion or legitimization. Queer thinking
resides at the edges between fields, calling into question their terms for
inclusion. Queering philosophy, I suggest, is a form of promiscuous care
that pushes against institutionalized philosophy’s efforts to contain critical
practices of curiosity, wonder, and questioning, in other words, what doing
philosophy might mean.16
Huffer describes Foucault’s attention to the “murmurs” in the archive as an
“erotic poetic method [that] is also ethical. Like Audre Lorde’s conception of
the power and uses of the erotic, Huffer understands the erotic as not reduc-
ible to the sexual but instead as a relation to that which is outside the self that
134 Chapter 5

both undoes the self and is a source of invention (2–3, 11, and 15). An ethics
of eros, she argues, is not an ethics of finger wagging and the exclamation
mark (the “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not” of institutionalized theological
and philosophical approaches to ethics). Instead, an ethics of eros is an ethics
of the ellipsis (5). Such an ethics is informed by an openness to that which is
outside and other to the self in a way that undoes the self (37).
While conventional ethics attempts to discipline wayward desire, an ethics
of eros suspends discipline and instead emphasizes the possibility of wonder.
Following Huffer, an undisciplined ethics of eros suspends certainty, includ-
ing self-certainty:

Might eros teach us to veer off course: to get lost? Foucault’s eros undisciplined
offers a way to approach these questions, to keep living by holding living open
as a question: one that loosens us, that leaves us with more questions. . . . [A]s a
poet, Foucault thinks from [the] border—that line as suspended relation—where
the philosophical touches the nonphilosophical but maintains the difference
between them without trying to persuade one into becoming the other. (33)

The practice of suspending and holding in tension rather than collapsing and
resolving the difference between the philosophical and the nonphilosophical
is, I suggest, a practice of radical queer care for philosophy. Huffer makes
this connection to care when she relates Foucault’s understanding of “that
nonphilosophical excess of philosophy as a small, humble ‘light which kept
watch,’” or, in other words, cared.
And so I end where I began, with questions about the meaning of phi-
losophy. Mariana Ortega is right that mainstream philosophy has been a
love of exclusion, not a love of wisdom (2016). Queering philosophy is
an otherwise-love of wisdom, a practice of radical care for philosophy that
understands the possibilities of philosophy outside institutionalized philoso-
phy’s exclusions. This is, it seems to me, at least part of what Butler means
when they refer to the other of philosophy. What it means to otherwise-love
wisdom, is to practice philosophy against itself—that is, against its exclu-
sionary tendencies. Radical queer care for philosophy is attuned to those
who are silenced and subjugated in the name of philosophical coherence and
certainty. To practice radical queer care for philosophy means to ask who’s in
the room, on the syllabus, in the department, or any of the other places where
the philosophy deemed official gets done; and it asks this question again, and
again. Queer promiscuous, radical queer care for philosophy thinks against
the forces of institutions that seek to contain it. Queer promiscuous, radical
care for philosophy demands a philosophy that understands the border that
divides the philosophical from the nonphilosophical as an occasion to become
Queer Ethics 135

less, rather than more, certain of itself. Only then, perhaps, can philosophy
intervene in, rather than reproduce, the carelessness of the world.

NOTES

1. A number of important books and special journal issues on queer, trans, crip, and
feminist radical conceptions of care have been recently published. See, for example,
Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018), Malatino (2020), the Care Collective (2020), Spade
(2020), and Hobart and Kneese (2020).
2. Lynne Huffer discusses Foucault’s understanding of ethics as experiments in
living (2020, 14). I’ll discuss this as a queer ethics of radical care later in this chapter.
3. See the Care Collective’s use of Douglas Crimp’s concept of “promiscuous care”
(2020, 40–44). They define promiscuous care as “an ethics that proliferates outwards
to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant. It means caring
more and in ways that remain experimental and extensive by current standards” (41).
4. See also Matt Brim’s discussion of students at lower-tier, under-resourced, pub-
lic institutions for whom survival requires fighting for their LGBTQ identities and,
thus, their lives. The fact that these students seek out queer studies courses to help
them negotiate that rough terrain must, Brim argues, temper queer theory’s critique of
identity lest queer studies becomes a field that can speak to only privileged LGBTQ
experience (2020, 67–68). Brim’s point is that queer and trans identity for less privi-
leged students can be a fragile tether to a possibility of another, flourishing life.
5. To take just two examples, consider the debates about “homosexuality” and les-
bian and gay marriage and adoption that are often part of courses like “contemporary
moral problems.” Also, consider the use of trans lives as a thought experiments in phi-
losophy, a practice Talia Bettcher (2018 and 2019) rightly critiques. In both examples,
queer and trans people and experience appear as “problems” for philosophy to tackle,
rather than lives that flesh and blood queer and trans people are living. A related point
can be made about people of color and other marginalized groups in philosophy. In
such cases, members of marginalized groups appear as diversity puzzles for philoso-
phy (and universities in general) to solve rather than as philosophers who can offer
critical insight on the mainstream of the field itself.
6. Eve Sedgwick’s (1993) point about the presence of lesbians and gays in aca-
demia still rings true today. See, also, Perry Zurn (2016) about trans people’s experi-
ences of transphobia in and outside of academia, all of which impacts whether and
how many trans philosophers are in the profession.
7. See Robin Dembroff’s discussion of mainstream philosophy’s lack of engage-
ment with trans lives and trans philosophers writing about trans experience. They
argue that a factor that contributes to “philosophy’s transgender trashfire” is not only
that most have not troubled themselves to read gender theory, they also don’t think
they have to read gender theory to participate in and evaluate philosophical work in
gender theory (2020, 400). Dembroff writes, “Thinking—and speaking—before read-
ing is not merely tolerated in philosophy; it is advised. At the very least, it is assumed
a standard way of doing serious and original philosophical work. Five minutes of
136 Chapter 5

reflection will tell us that this methodology creates a disciplinary culture in which
so-called common sense is self-justifying and universalized” (402). Dembroff’s
remarks are directed at trends in mainstream analytic philosophy; however, one could
also say reading gender theory is not a prerequisite for participating in the mainstream
of continental philosophy.
8. There are many ways to think about curiosity and many forms it can take. As
Perry Zurn writes, curiosity can work to maintain oppressive societies or transform
them (2021, 3). My point about how queer and trans lives are positioned as curiosi-
ties, or a parade of the abnormal, within institutionalized philosophy, draws on the
racist, ableist, and heteronormative history of curiosities. See, for example, Eli Clare’s
(1999) discussion of the history and legacy of freak shows. In treating queer and
trans lives as curiosities, institutionalized philosophy fails to realize its own potential
as a critique of prevailing, taken-for-granted norms, values, and attitudes. In such
moments, rather than being attuned to the lively multiplicity of the world, it reduces
the diversity of life to calcified, abstracted conceptual nuggets.
9. For more on the problem with “for and against” approaches to social issues in
philosophy, see Hall 2013. I’m not claiming that issues are presented this way in
every classroom, but the debate form of ethics textbooks and conventional approaches
to teaching contemporary moral problems, coupled with ongoing efforts to either roll
back extensions of citizenship rights to LGBTQ people or double down on legalizing
discrimination against us, makes LGBTQ experience the sort of “issue” or “moral
problem” that appeals to those invested in these sorts of approaches.
10. As Heidi Grasswick demonstrates in her analysis of the impact of a bifurcated
flow of information on knowledge about climate change, reducing the complexity of
an issue to two sides can have an ultimately conservative (that is, status quo sustain-
ing) effect (2014, 546).
11. As Judith Butler (2010) argues, frames of war cast some lives as worthy of
protection and grievable and other lives as non-lives beyond the realm of concern.
12. Here, I build on the Care Collective’s (2020) discussion of capacities of caring
and imagination that must be expanded if we are to change the disastrous, careless
world in which we live.
13. Lisa Schwartzman (2012) also critiques thought experiments in philosophy for
their presumption of a shared position of privilege in the world.
14. According to Michael Warner (1999), queer ethics begins with dignity founded
on a bedrock of shame. Taking the shame of the world and throwing it back or refus-
ing it is the queer beginning of crafting a life otherwise-lived.
15. As Ladelle McWhorter writes, “Unless you’re straight-straight-straight, if
you’re honest about your sexuality, liberation is not what follows; lockup is. The truth
does not make deviants free” (1999, 13).
16. Perry Zurn builds on Foucault’s discussion of curiosity to describe curiosity as
a form of “‘care’ [for] ‘what exists and what might exist’” (2021, 93). Thus, curios-
ity can be a queer practice of care for the possible, a form of care that Zurn argues
constitutes a “critical, philosophical practice . . . that resists institutionalization of
knowledge” (93).
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Index

Aaltola, Elisa, 107–108 Baldwin, James, 3

ableism, 49n17, 49n18, 49n20, 89, Barad, Karen, 102
94n6, 120, 136n8 on intra-action, 101
environmental racism and, 112 Bennett, Jane, 100–101
mainstream Bentham, Jeremy, 114n9
environmentalism and, 109 Bergin, Lisa, 114n10
queer exceptionalism and, 62 Bettcher, Talia, 135n5
philosophy and, 82 biopolitics, 17, 51, 61, 78–79, 95n16
ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash HIV/AIDS and, 88–92
Power), 88–89, 91–92 Black Panthers, 126, 129
Ahmed, Sara Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 30
on citation, 13–14 Bowman, Melanie, 107
on inclusion, 48n11, 58 Brim, Matt, 39–42, 61, 135n4
on orientation, 9, 17 Buckland, Fiona, 43
on queer use, 38–39, 121–122, Butler, Judith, 2, 3, 11, 18n2, 98
47n7, 121–122 and feminism, 6–7
Alcoff, Linda Martín, 11 on gender as translation, 64
anthropocene, 103, 113n6 on gender performativity,
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 3, 6–7, 121 28–29, 48n12
la facultad, 59 on grievability, 84–87, 90, 136n11
los atravesados, 59–60 on queerness, 54–55, 65
on epistemic silencing, 55–56 on the other of philosophy, 21, 23,
metiza consciousness and, 99–100 27, 48n9, 134
on queerness, 20n7 on the subject of feminism, 6, 7–8
on the difference between religion
and spirituality, 123–124 capitalism, 39, 40, 62, 76, 83, 89, 93n3,
ambiguity, 18, 54, 57, 58, 59, 68, 117 97, 108, 111, 112, 116, 124
American Philosophical Association carceral ethics, 124–125, 131
(APA), 21–22, 25, 44 care

149
150 Index

feminist ethics of, 116–117, 131 eco-tourism, 107

promiscuous care, 117, 132–133 Eng, David, 3, 9, 62–63, 65
radical care, 116, 134–135 epidemics,
The Care Collective, 131, 136n12 pandemics and, 90–92, 94n7
Chen, Mel. 99–100 epistemology:
on animacy, 110 cripistemology, 71n2
on feral theorizing, 110 epistemic friction, 67–68
Clare, Eli, 111–112, 136n8 epistemic humility, 56, 60
climate change, 113, 132 epistemic ignorance, 3, 17, 52, 67, 112
Industrial Revolution and, 93n3 epistemic injustice, 17
Indigenous knowledges and, 93n3, epistemic purity, 67
109–110, 113n3 feminist standpoint, 43, 58–59
vulnerability and, 101 Indigenous knowledges,
coal mining, 110–111 93n3, 109–110
Cohen, Cathy J., 8 Exodus International, 119
Collins, Patricia Hill, 59
colonialism, 76, 93n3, 98, 104 Fauci, Anthony, 89, 90
COVID-19, 17, 76–77, 84, feminism, 6, 84, 116–117, 119
87–92, 117, 132 queer crip feminist of color
Crawley, Ashon T. tradition, 72n9
on the otherwise, 5, 57, 70, 95n14 queer feminism, 19n3
Crimp, Douglas, 132 queer theory and, 18–19n3
crip theory, 8, 18–19n3, 20n10, 72n9 race and, 7–8
coalition and, 71n3 feminist philosophy, 10, 11, 14, 24,
ecology and, 111–113 46–47n4, 47n5, 53,58,
queer theory and, 8, 62–63 Ferguson, Roderick, 60–61,
temporality and, 19n4 63, 72n7, 128
Crosby, Christina, 111 on disidentification, 45
Cuomo, Chris J., 101, 104, 113n6 on institutional inclusion, 83–84
curiosity, 120, 136n8 on one-dimensional and multi-
dimensional queer politics
dance, 42–45, 128 19n6, 125–126
Davis, Angela, 11–12, 92 Fisher, Berenice, 131
de Beauvoir, 7, 11–12 Foucault, Michel, 3, 6, 7, 12, 37, 92,
debility, 62–63 93n3, 94n8
De Lauretis, Theresa, 6 reverse discourse, 93–94n4
Dembroff, Robin, 20n13, 135–136n7 on biopower, 78, 88
disability, 97, 101, 109 on disciplinary power, 78
geopolitical conception of, 111 on genealogy, 77
philosophy of, 24, 46–47n4 on sexuality and knowledge, 51–52
disability studies, 8, 72n9 on subjugated knowledges, 13
disidentification, 8, 20n8, 44–45, 63 philosophy and, 94n9
Dotson, Kristi, 10, 46n4, Freeman, Elizabeth, 3–4, 19n4
on testimonial smothering, 55 arrhythmic temporal
Duke University Press, 2 orientation and, 5
Index 151

chrononormativity and, 3 habits of, 34–38, 46n2

crip time and, mainstream environmentalism
Frye, Marilyn, 49n19 and, 108–109
museums and, 27
Gammon, Andrea, 108 wilderness and, 104
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 20n12 heteropatriarchy, 123, 131
on mifitting, 71n3 Hird, Myra, 102
gay and lesbian rights HIV/AIDS, 6, 17, 84, 88–92, 132
movement, 126–127 queer theory and, 97n17
genealogy, 14, 70, 77–78, 94n5 homophobia, 49n16, 89, 109, 118,
Giffney, Noreen, 102 119–120, 127
Goldman, Emma, 42 homonationalism, 79, 107, 127
Gossett, Che, 89 hooks, bell, 131
Grasswick, Heidi, 136n10 Horkheimer, Max, 13, 71
Gruen, Lori, 101 Huffer, Lynne, 19n3, 69, 77, 115,
Guha, Ramachandra, 104, 106–107 133, 135n2
on the ethics of eros, 133–134
habits on strange eros, 73n13, 94n5
dance and, 42–43 human and non-human, 98
habitus, 27–28 human exceptionalism, 99, 103
heteronormativity as, 31–32, 34
institutions and, 26–31, ignorance
45–46n1, 49n20 respectability and, 60
Merleau-Ponty on, 30–31 willful hermeneutical, 67
museums and, 27–28 imperialism, 3, 19n6, 76, 79, 94n3, 103
orientation and, 32–33 interdependency, 4, 105, 115, 117, 131
racism as, 30 intersectionality, 19n6
of institutionalized philosophy, 31–38
whiteness as, 33 Jaffe, Sara, 131
Halberstam, Jack, 3, 9 Jakobsen, Janet, 111
on cripistemology, 71n2, 72n5 Johnson, E. Patrick, 63
on failure, 72n5 Johnson, Lyndon B., 103
on the wild, 106 Johnson, Marsha P., 128
Halle, Randall, 46n3
Halperin, David, 2, 6 Kafer, Alison, 20n10, 54, 71n3
Hampton, Mabel, 20n9 Karera, Axelle, 104, 113n6
Harding, Sandra, 59 Kim, Jina, 112
Haritaworn, Jin, 19n5 King, Latisha, 83
Hartman, Saidiya, 20n9 Kinship, 129
on waywardness, 8 Kuntsman, Adi, 19n5
Hayward, Eva, 89
Held, Virginia, 131 lesbian and gay marriage, 126–127
heteronormativity, 43–45, 47n4, Liboiron, Max, 104
120, 136n8 Luciano, Donna, 99–100
as performative, 48n12 Liu, Petrus, 29, 47n6
152 Index

Lorde, Audre, 3–7 HIV/AIDS and, 88–92

on the erotic, 124, 133 queer necropolitics, 79
Lugones, María, 68, 72n9 New York University, 128–129
on complex communication, 64–65 Ngo, Helen, 30, 33, 48n12
on purity, 35–36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 56, 71, 116
on relational knowing, 66 norms (See also,
on world-travelling, 43–44, heteronormativity), 53, 59
107, 108–109 homo-and trans-normativity, 19n5
institutions and, 44–45n1
Macharia, Keguro, 63 normalization, 90
Malatino, Hil, 115
Mann, Bonnie, 37–38 Oliver, Kelly, 114n11
Marcano, Donna-Dale, 35, 65–66 Ortega, Mariana, 10, 130
Mattachine Society, 126 on hometactics, 24, 55
Mbembe, Achille, 78–79 on mainstream Western philosophy,
McCarthyism, 82, 95n11 65–66, 67, 93n2, 134
McCumber, John, 82–83 on the multiplicitious self, 130
McKibben, Bill, 103 orientation, 9–10
McRuer, Robert, 92 queer temporality as, 5
McWhorter, Ladelle, 12, 57–58,
70, 136n15 philosophy. See also disability,
Medina, José, philosophy of; feminist philosophy;
on epistemic friction, 67–69 race, philosophy of; trans philosophy
on kaleidoscopic consciousness, 69 common sense and, 20n13
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 30–31, conferences, 40–41, 44–45
42–43, 49n18 debate model in, 120–121, 136n9
Middleton, Craig, 27–28 ethics and, 116, 119
Mill, John Stuart, 103 straight habits of, 17, 36, 48n12
Mills, Charles imaginary of, 76, 80–82
on philosophy’s whiteness, 94n9 indifference and, 4, 36–37
on the racial contract, 81 jobs in, 24–25, 47n8
on white ignorance, 81, 114n7 other(s) of, 10–11, 18n2
Moraga, Cherríe, 7 otherwise-philosophy and, 4–5
Moore, Jason, 113n6 queer courses in, 47n5
moral panic, 109, 118, 128 racism of, 48n13
Muñoz, José, 3, 9, 63, 118 thought experiments in, 136n13
on disidentification, 8, 20n8, 44–45 whiteness of, 94n9
on utopia, 109–110 plantation slavery, 78, 104
Plato (see also Socrates), 76
Narayan, Uma, 80 Symposium, 35
nature, 102–105 Pohl, Sarah, 107–108
anti-queer violence and, 97 Pohlhaus Jr., Gaile, 67
environmental virtue and, 107–108 Posocco, Silvia, 10n5
laws of, 113n1 posthumanism, 102
necropolitics, 17, 78–79, 95n16
Index 153

precarity, 79, 82, 90, 98, 99, 100, race

111, 112, 133 philosophy of, 14, 24, 46–47n4, 53
Price, Margaret, 49n20 queer ecology and, 100
Puar, Jasbir, 60, 62–63, 65 racism, 30, 33, 88, 112, 136n8
on queer necropolitics, 79 as performative, 48n12
on tourism, 107 feminism and, 63
purity, 67 philosophy and, 48n13, 82
logic of, 35 queer exceptionalism and, 62
mainstream queer theory and, 62–63
environmentalism and, 99 wilderness and, 103
nature as, 103, 112 respectability, 60, 62, 134
politics of, 8 rewilding, 105–109, 114n8
straightening as, 35 Reynolds, Joel Michael, 49n18
Rivera, Sylvia, 128–129
queer exceptionalism, 60, 62, 63 Russell, Bertrand, 13.
queer inhumanism, 99–100 Ruti, Mari, 127, 129
queer materialism, 29
queer non/humanism, 102 Salamon, Gayle, 10, 22, 38
queer methodology: Samuel, Ellen, 19n4
counter memory as, 13–15 Schalk, Sami, 45
recruitment as, 16 Schwartzman, Lisa, 136n13
smuggling as, 15–16 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 3, 6, 7,
queer theory, 4, 84, 102 15, 85, 135n6
antisocial turn in, 127 on epistemology, 51–53
background of, 6–7 on the Christmas effect, 118
class and, 39–40 self
crip theory and, 18–19n3 as multiplicitious, 130
exclusions in, 7, 18n3 as relational, 130, 132–133
feminism and, 18–19n3 settler colonialism, 93n3, 103, 104, 107,
genealogy and, 6 110, 113n3
queer rural studies, 41–42 philosophy and, 82
racism and, 63 Shahani, Nishant, 92
trans theory and, 18–19n3 Shepherd, Matthew, 83
whiteness of, 8, 39, 63 Shotwell, Alexis, 95n13, 109
queerness, 19–20n7, 118 Smith, Barbara, 63
as wayward, 8, 20n9, 26 Society for Disability Studies (SDS), 45
dance and, 43–45 Socrates (see also Plato), 65, 75,
disability and, 54 80–81, 85, 95n15
experiments in living and, Sommerville, Siobhan, 48n14
73n13, 130 Spade, Dean, 126–127
failure of intelligibility as, 56 Stanley, Eric, 83
rewilding of, 106–107 Street Transvestite Action
the otherwise and, 65, 119 Revolutionaries (STAR), 128–129
whiteness and, 62 Stonewall rebellion, 19n6, 125–126
Sullivan, Nikki, 27–28
154 Index

Sullivan, Shannon, 73n11 anti-black, 88

dehumanization and, 90, 100
temporality, 109–110 mainstream environmentalism
chrononormativity, 3 and, 98–99
crip time, 19n4 Vogel, Steven, 103
disorientation and, 77–78
epi/pandemics and, 91–92 Warner, Michael, 2, 136n14
orientation and, 5 Waywardness, 8, 20n9
queer temporality, 3–4, 19n4 Weiss, Gail, 27–28
reproductive futurity, 127 whiteness, 110, 112
temporal drag, 4 museums and, 27
Thatcher, Margaret, 131 philosophy and, 33
tourism, 104, 107 queer studies and, 3
trans philosophy, 24, 46–47n4 white nationalism, 88, 132
transphobia, 49n16, 89, 95n10, 118, Whyte, Kyle Powys, 93n3, 101, 104,
119–120, 127 109–110, 113n3
mainstream Wiegman, Robyn, 4, 5
environmentalism and, 109 wilderness
philosophy and, 82, 135n5, virtue and, 104–105, 107–108
135n6, 135–136n7 Wilderness Act and, 103
trans studies, 18–19n3, 62–63 Willey, Angela, 114n10
queer ecology and, 100 Winnubst, Shannon, 14
Treichler, Paula, 91 Wittig, Monique, 15, 35–36
Tronto, Joan, 131
Yancy, George, 33
US National Park Service, 109 Young Lords, 129

violence, 76, 79–80, 82–83, 97 Zurn, Perry, 82, 95n10, 135n6

anti-Asian, 88 on curiosity, 136n8, 136n16