Ranciere and Queer Theory, Queer Gender Fem
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b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal
rancière & queer theory
VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009
Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Queer
Theory
Editors: Samuel A. Chambers and Michael O'Rourke
ESSAYS
INTRODUCTION
Paul Bowman
Samuel A. Chambers
& Michael O'Rourke
Roger Cook
ESSAYS
Todd May
Daniel Williford
Samuel A. Chambers
AFTERWORD
Adrian Rifkin
Chas. Phillips
Oliver Davis
REVIEWS
Anatoli Ignatov
Sudeep Dasgupta
Nina Power
Hector Kollias
Edward Cavanagh
Patricia MacCormack
Richard Stamp
Rancière
Mark W. Westmoreland
  b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal
on irritable attachment
VOLUME 8 NUMBER 2, 2009
Rancière and Queer Theory: On Irritable Attachment
Oliver Davis
Abstract
The article begins by examining the obstacles to an encounter between Rancière’s work
and queer theory, Foucault and psychoanalysis, and by questioning Rancière’s own view
of queer theory. The article then argues that Rancière’s formalist account of political
subjectivation is open to a queering which allows his assumptions about queer theory to be
set aside. It goes on to outline a Rancièrian queer theory which is methodologically
egalitarian in its commitment to taking seriously the self-understandings of ordinary queer
subjects and which remains true to Rancière’s scepticism about ‘theoreticism’ and his
critical perspective on disciplinary formation. It finds in Rancière’s critique of progressivism
and the value he places on singularizing self-realization in the present the sources of a
queer understanding of futurity and kinship in certain respects consonant with Lee
Edelman’s. The article concludes that the affective disposition and relational mode implicit
in Rancière’s practice of irritable attachment offer queer theory the vision of a less fraught
and more liveable response to ambient heteronormativity.
The full article is available as a PDF document:
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V O L U M E 8 N U M B E R 2 , 2009
INTRODUCTION
Jacques Rancière on the Shores of Queer Theory
Samuel A. Chambers
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Michael O’Rourke
Independent Colleges, Dublin
This special issue of
Borderlands
proposes to consider an
engagement that has never occurred, between two fields of thought
that have never been (and have often resisted becoming) proper
‘fields.’ This issue itself must therefore
stage
that encounter, but to do
so both the issue and the pieces that comprise it must flirt with a
particular danger: namely, that the engagement staged here will be a
‘staging’ in the worst possible senses.[1] Staging could mean a false
and forced construction, a merely academic exercise, or perhaps just
a sham. While it goes without saying that we, as editors of the issue,
hope to bring about a different sort of
staging
, it remains for us to say
what sort, and why. In thinking through the encounter orchestrated
and presented here, we consider the meaning of staging as a
mise en
scène.
We might think such a staging in Rancière’s sense as a
particular partition of the sensible. In a response to a recent issue of
Parallax
devoted to his work, Rancière, speaking in the third person,
discusses precisely the ‘dramaturgical’ aspects of his work and its
refusal to solidify into a ‘field’ or a ‘method’: ‘This is not a theory of
politics, setting the principles
for
political practice. This is a
dramaturgy of politics, a way to make sense of the aporias of political
legitimacy by weaving threads between several configurations of
sense’ (Rancière, 2009b: 120). We might also think such a staging in
the terms of queer activism, as a political confrontation (for example,
ACT-UP’s ‘staging’ of kiss-ins or die-ins). Therefore, this special issue
rests on the wager that the
encounter
between the thought of Jacques
Rancière and the work of queer theory will add up to much more than
exercises in comparison/contrast or trumping efforts; an effective
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b o r d e r l a n d s 8 : 2
staging of this encounter must seek to transform both fields of
thought. Rancière conveys just this sense of transformation:
Performing or playing, in the theatrical sense of the word, the gap
between a place where the
demos
exists and a place where it does
not … Politics consists in playing or acting out this relationship,
which means first setting it up as a theatre, inventing the argument,
in the double logical and dramatic sense of the term,
connecting
the unconnected
. (Rancière, 1999: 88, emphasis added)
Despite being well aware ourselves that queer theory, even broadly
construed, has shown little interest in the writings of Rancière, and
despite understanding fully that Rancière has at best entirely ignored,
at worst actively disdained, the work of queer theory (see Rancière,
2005), we chose to make this wager (as did, in their own unique ways,
the authors who responded to our invitation to write and whose work
constitutes this issue) for a number of significant reasons.[2] First,
even a superficial reading of Rancière’s conception of politics and
police orders, of his understanding of subjectivization
(
assujetissement
), of his theory of the subject as ‘in-between’ reveals
powerful affinities with queer theory’s thinking of norms, subversion,
and subjectivity as positionality, as relationality (Rancière, 1995b;
2001). More felicitously,
the logic of the tort, which is so central to
Rancière
's thinking of politics, may share an etymological link with the
word queer.[3]
Furthermore, a number of thinkers working in and
around queer theory, including such influential figures as Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), Adrian Rifkin (2003, 2004), and Lauren
Berlant (2007) have also taken a keen interest in Rancière – despite
not necessarily bringing these areas of interest together in any explicit
way.[4] Andrew Parker, translator of
The Philosopher and his Poor
,
hearteningly concludes a recent essay by foregrounding this possible
conjunction:
one of the best approximations of what Rancière defines as
'properly' political is the emergent Anglo-American model of queer
politics: anti-identitarian, anti-statist, anti-normative in its emphatic
swerving from the rhetoric of gay and lesbian civil rights. If 'We're
here, we're queer, get used to it' is something other than a claim on
behalf of an identity, queer theorists might look indeed to
Rancière's work for its way of posing rigorously the relation
between voice and body and the impossible speech acts that bind
and divide them. (Parker, 2007: 75)[5]
All of this adds up to a strong case for actively engaging Rancière with
queer theory, queer theory with Rancière, since the possibilities for
new lines of thinking begin to multiply rapidly.[6] And, indeed, we have
tried to bring together a diverse group of thinkers and writers to carry
out the staging of this encounter, precisely so as to begin that process
of multiplying possibilities.[7] In a recent interview, Rancière himself
(in
Les Inrockuptibles
, where he shares a cover with Nicole Kidman)
comments with no small degree of amusement upon the impending
queering of his work in the present volume and the potential dis-
agreements he might have with such an endeavour. Responding to
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b o r d e r l a n d s 8 : 2
the interviewer’s question about the overlaps between the queer
project and Rancière’s own disidentificatory work in
The Philosopher
and his Poor
, Rancière admits to being intrigued by queer theory. But
he goes on to claim that the question of the sexual lies at the heart of
the project of queer theory, and this question, he continues, does not
have a special place in his own
oeuvre
(Rancière, 2008: 29).[8]
Taking our cue from Parker’s work, we might suggest that the radical
potential in such an encounter lies precisely in working through the
non-sexual
aspects of queer thinking. However, before developing a
suggestion such as this, we should state directly at the outset what
should become quite clear upon reading their work: the contributors to
this volume have no shared agenda,
certainly not ours
. And their
articles were chosen (through a double-blind external review process)
not for their ability to achieve any particular predetermined ends, but
for their capacity to bring different, vibrant theoretical backgrounds
and political perspectives to their readings of the two broadly-
construed areas of inquiry that make up the axes of this special issue.
Many of our contributors do choose to leave the sexual in place in
queer theory (though surely not without problematizing its centrality),
while others establish a critical distance from sex/uality and identity as
they gravitate towards modes of queer inquiry that have little or
nothing to do with the sexual.
None of this is to say, however, that we do not have our own
theoretical and political concerns. And just as it would be intellectually
ungenerous and stifling to inquiry if we had sought to press those
concerns upon the authors (or the selection thereof), so also would it
be slightly disingenuous of us to mask those investments and
interests behind the screen of editorial objectivity. Much of the
impetus for this special issue can be captured by the account of the
fecund yet nascent connections between queer theory and Rancière’s
thinking that we documented in the preceding paragraphs. But our
enthusiasm in bringing these areas of inquiry together also arises
from a particular set of theoretical and political commitments and
concerns. Put succinctly, within queer politics we worry about an
increasingly normative swerve toward identity politics, and a narrow
focus on state-sanctioned gay and lesbian marriage (see Stryker
2008). Within academic work receiving the general label of ‘queer
theory’, we find ourselves anxious over the trend to make sexuality
the only proper object of study, since such work quite often reduces
understandings of sexuality to fixed identities or orientations. The
institutionalization, domestication and one might even say
banalization of queer theory has taken many forms both within and
outside the academy, but most obvious have been preoccupations
with same/sex marriage, the emergence of neoconservative agendas,
and the return to an essentialist identitarianism (to a solidifiable
subject). In the end, we have some serious concerns that the
mainstreaming of the term queer, and the tendency to use it as a
catch-all general term for the cumbersome stringing together of
identity categories (L, G, B, T, Q, A...) may serve to make queer
studies nothing more than a substitute for gay and lesbian studies.
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