Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Emotional rescue -- Permanent exile : Walter Pater's queer modernism -- The end of friendship : Willa Cather's sad kindred -- Unwanted being : Stephen Gordon's spoiled identity -- Impossible objects : Sylvia Townsend Warner and the longing for revolution -- Epilogue: The politics of refusal

The appearance of deviance as a fact of social life—a permanent and unavoidable feature of social life and an object of study for the social scientist—distinguishes postwar deviance studies from the antimethod, anti-institutional, and antinormative field of queer studies. While deviance studies focused on the description and analysis of social norms, queer scholars saw themselves as participating in their subversion. This collapse of the position of the scholar and the social deviant produced transformations in the ethos and style of scholarship, and yet it did not profoundly change the material conditions or the power relations between professional academics and the marginal subjects they study. The refusal of social scientific methods undermines queer scholars' claims to interdisciplinarity. While queer studies has understood itself alternately as interdisciplinary and as antidisciplinary, it has failed to grapple with methods of description and objectification that would allow for a fuller apprehension of social worlds and of the position of the researchers who study them. Through a return to the history of postwar sociology, this essay shows that the account of deviance as part of the social world rather than a departure from it offers an important model for queer scholarship and for the apprehension of the queer ordinary.

Abstract
This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, "Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies," revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

This essay pays tribute to the work of D. A. Miller, focusing in particular on the sociological dimensions of his criticism. Miller is often understood as a purely formalist critic; I argue that his formalism is in tension with a mapping of social and material realities, including not only the conditions of modern gay urban life but also social class in the postwar United States. Following biographical traces throughout his writing, I place him in relation to the tradition of the "scholarship boy" and suggest that secrecy and shame in his work are indexed not only to sexual but also to economic marginality.

This introduction for "Rethinking Sex" frames the contributions of Gayle Rubin to the contemporary field of sexuality studies through a discussion of her 1984 essay "Thinking Sex." It discusses the 2009 conference that was the basis for this special issue as well as the significance of Rubin's career and her scholarship, focusing in particular on links between feminism and queer studies, empiricism and description, coalitional politics, and memory and the significance of archives.