The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies

Abstract

In the name of “homohistory,” “queer temporality,” and “unhistoricism,” some early modernists have accused queer historicists of promoting a normalizing view of sexuality, history, and time. These early modernists announce their critique of the “straight temporality” allegedly caused by a framework of teleology as a decisive break from previous methods of queer history. Using the accusation of teleology as an analytic fulcrum, this essay scrutinizes these scholars' assumptions regarding temporality, representation, periodization, empiricism, and historical change. Ascertaining the conceptual work that the allegation of teleology performs, I reconsider the meanings and uses of the concept queer, as well as homo and hetero, in the context of historical inquiry. I also assess some of the affordances of psychoanalysis and deconstruction for the history of sexuality. At stake are not only our emerging understandings of the relations between chronology and teleology, sequence and consequence, but also some of the fundamental purposes and destinations of queering.

Forming History, Inhabiting Form in Marvell's “Upon Appleton House”

“…Recent theoretical formulations of the nature of history pose a version of the same question. New Formalist work looks to a supple and bilateral interplay of literary form and historical context; in another critical development, "new unhistoricism," as Traub (2013) wittily describes this emergent work, asks whether the foundational focus of historicist inquiry on temporal succession is inherently problematic. Chronology, the argument goes, has bracketed out other, equally important connections among texts and contexts; as an alternative, queer theorists suggest that we be more "attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future loops that often pass undetected 28.…”

“…This does not privilege the "timeless" but produces instead a phenomenology of the historical, describing how we 29. For a defense against the charge that historicism is problematically teleological and a summary of how early modern studies have taken up the notion of queer temporality, see Traub 2013. experience historicity as we live in the present. As critics, mindfully detecting the past in the present might prevent us from unwittingly projecting the present into the past.…”

Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema

“…Grounded in history and anthropology (Traub 2013), what follows reflects a wider, interdisciplinary investigation. In some ways, I return to the nineteenth-century sexologists for inspiration.…”

Economies of Scale: Shakespeare and Book History

“…Debates about unhistoricism have been particularly vigorous and generative in queer studies. See Traub for an overview.…”