QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking (Web)

Proposals by: 15.01.2022

We live in a moment when the cultural and political legacies of the 1990s are subject to frequent and contentious reassessment. From one angle, the 1990s are ‚back,‘ as tastemakers both earnestly and cynically cater to the nostalgia of a generation of ’90s kids,‘ some of whom are now equipped with modest consumer power, by proclaiming a return to the era’s pop-cultural aesthetics. Yet 1990s nostalgia can also take on a special political valence for GLBTQ+ people, beset by what Kevin Murphy calls ‚the melancholy of homonormativity‘ (Murphy 2010, 315) who yearn for the radicalism of ACT UP or Riot Grrrl culture or a time when sex-positivity or queer identity was seen to occupy an insurgent ground.

It might also plausibly be claimed that the 1990s have never left. Many of the period?s grimmest geopolitical-economic legacies ? from retrenchment of the welfare state to the first U.S. invasion of Iraq on false pretenses to the intensification of neoliberal economic globalization to the dramatic expansion of the racist and xenophobic U.S. carceral state – continue to make life harder for many GLBTQ+ people throughout the world. And while Andrew Sullivan infamously f?ted ‚The End of AIDS‘ in 1996 the uneven, racialized and classed geographies of HIV/AIDS continue to give the lie to such a claim (Thrasher 2018). There remains much to learn from contemporaneous political and scholarly responses to all of these grim material conditions, in shedding light on the roots, limits and promises of contemporary social movements and scholarship (Levenstein 2020). If the queer 1990s are not over, then it behooves us not to get over the 1990s.

This special issue seeks to convene a lively space of exchange among scholars, artists, and activists concerning what might broadly be called the queer 1990s. We are interested in work that critically examines the (geo)political-economic and cultural contexts that generated queer politics and scholarship in the U.S. and other global sites, in staging debates over which aspects of 1990s queer cultures, politics, and scholarship warrant renewed attention, repudiation, reformulation, or a mix of those.

This is an open call to academics and non-academics.

Queer Cultures

The 1990s was marked by ‚culture wars‘ on several fronts in the U.S., from right-wing legislators‘ attempts to defund the arts by scapegoating queer, of color, and HIV-positive artists to the dramatically divided critical reception of the 1993 ‚identity politics‘ Whitney Biennial. While the insights of critical race theory and the legacies of earlier political movements were radically reshaping the visions of cultural institutions and the artists they supported, the backlash intersected with a systematic attack against affirmative action, immigrants and public arts and education funding that became the staple of a right-wing political agenda in the next century.

At the same time, the legacy of artists and cultural workers from that period such as Marlon Riggs, Audre Lorde, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres have had an undeniable impact on art and culture today, whether that influence is explicitly recognized or calls out to be excavated and honored. We welcome new considerations of individuals, institutions, collectives, practices or spaces from 1990s queer cultures that might help us better understand both that era and queer culture in the present moment.

Queer Politics

Neoliberal economic retrenchment worldwide and the grinding expansion of a racist and xenophobic carceral state in the U.S. have dramatically deepened inequalities over the past three decades. Yet if the 1990s saw political and economic reforms that intensified inequalities, they also nurtured social movements, often led by queer and trans people, whose ideas have recently commanded significant attention and power. Consider the long-haul work of Critical Resistance for prison abolition in light of the global uprising against anti-Black state violence in 2020 (Nwanne 2020), or echoes of ACT UP’s embrace of universal single-payer healthcare in contemporary democratic socialist movements (Day 2019). If the 1990s are nowhere near finally over, then, perhaps we are at least starting to see cracks in the reproduction of some of their most toxic legacies. What might yet be learned from 1990s queer politics – as well as from social movements primarily addressing questions of race, class, migration, empire, or patriarchy in which queer and trans people played an outsize role?

Queer Scholarship

Contemporary reassessments of the 1990s have also turned to the key theories and preoccupations of Queer Studies itself. Shannon Winnubst has invited queer studies to ask whether Judith Butler’s classic *Gender Trouble *(1990) might also be read as ‚a playbook of neoliberal celebrations and incitements toward nonconformity‘ (2015, 126). And Kadji Amin provocatively argues that ‚the future of the field of Queer Studies’as well as its relevance for scholarship on prior historical periods, racialized populations, and areas outside the United States?requires a reckoning with the field?s affective haunting by the inaugural moment of the U.S. 1990s‘ (2017, 177). Amin calls for a Queer Studies that grapples with the histories and complicities that haunt its peculiar ideals and that de-idealizes its objects?including exceptionality, negativity, futurity, and coalition attachments–without discarding them.

In sympathy with Winnubst and Amin, we invite examinations of the formative moments and origin stories of the field, both for the ways that the present moment can reframe foundational publications and events and for what the field’s affective investments in this earlier moment might reveal or obscure. These examinations might focus on key publications that span the decade–such as Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s *Epistemology of the Closet *(1990), the 1991 and 1994 special issues of *differences *devoted to queer theory, Cathy J Cohen’s essay Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens (1997), and Jose Esteban Mucoz’s *Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics *(1999) or they might consider the convergences, parallels and tensions between queer scholarship as it emerged and named itself in the U.S. in the 1990s and scholarship in other disciplinary or global sites.

Key Questions and Submission Details

• The complex legacy of the 1990s for queer life today invites a number of questions that we hope to address in this special issue:
• Are the queer 1990s over? Are ‚we‘ over the queer 1990s? Whose queer 1990s?
• Where in the world do we find the queer 1990s? How queer were the 1990s throughout the globe? How can reconsiderations of the queer 1990s further provincialize queer theory as a U.S. or Euro-American project?
• What affective traces of the queer 1990s call for attention, exploration, or retirement?
• What are the politics of revisitation? What are the different ways that the 1990s serve as origin story for contemporary forms of political organizing, cultural production, or scholarly discourse? And how do tropes of origin shape these forms and their future possibilities?

The editors encourage contributors to be creative in their approach to and interpretation of the above questions. We are especially interested in proposals from scholars, teachers and activists from historically underrepresented or marginalized groups, non U.S. sites and/or contributions that attend to the intellectual, artistic or political contributions of these groups

Contributors may submit original academic research or relevant non-academic research (7,000-9,000 words). We welcome traditional, queered, and queering forms for this special issue.

The editors also seek shorter pieces for a forum discussion (4,000-5,000 words) that responds to the following question:

• What emblematic moments, texts, practices, institutions or people do we want to remember or forget?
• What do the 1990s mean to you?
• How do/did the queer 1990s feel from your temporal and global location?

In your proposal, please indicate the contribution type: academic research, non-academic research, or forum contribution.

Timeline

• 250-500 word proposals due: January 15, 2022
• Invitations for full manuscripts: February 1, 2022
• Full manuscripts due to editors: June 1, 2022
• Publication: Fall 2023

Please submit proposals to David K. Seitz (dseitz@g.hmc.edu) and Eve Oishi (Eve.Oishi@cgu.edu).

Please feel safe and free to inquire with questions or concerns before deadlines.

References

Amin, Kadji. 2017. *Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1990. *Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.* London: Routledge.

Cohen, Cathy J. 1997. ‚Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics.‘ *GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies*. 3. 4: 437-465.

Day, Meagan. 2019. ‚I’m Gay and I Want Medicare for All.‘ *Jacobin*. 6 June. https://jacobinmag.com/2019/06/medicare-for-all-lgbtq-healthcare-rights.

Levenstein, Lisa. 2020. *They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties.* New York: Basic Books.

Munoz, Jose Esteban. *Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics*. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Murphy, Kevin P. 2010. ‚Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History.‘ In *Queer Twin Cities*, edited by Jennifer L. Pierce, Kevin P. Murphy, and Larry Knopp, 305-318. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nwanne, Gem. 2020. ‚There is No Queer Liberation without Prison Abolition.‘ *Them*. 19 June. https://www.them.us/story/no-queer-liberation-without-prison-abolition.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. *Epistemology of the Closet*. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Thrasher, Steven W. 2018. ‚The U.S. Has an HIV Epidemic – and its Victims are Gay Black Men.‘ *The Guardian*. 30 May. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/30/black-gay-men-aids-hiv-epidemic-america.

Winnubst, Shannon. 2015. *Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics*. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

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