seminar question

Love, Heather.

Epilogue: The politics of refusal

Love, Heather., (2007) "Epilogue: The politics of refusal" from Love, Heather., Feeling backward: loss and the politics of queer history pp.146-163, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press ©

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Epilogue The Politics ofRefusal

Imust make the finalgesture ofdefiance. and refuse to leI this be absorbed bythe final story;must ask for a structure of political thought that willtake allof this,all thesesecretandimpossible stories. recognize whathasbeen madeout on the margins;and then. recognizing it, refuse to celebrate it; a politics that \10;,11, watching this pastsay "So what?";and consign it to the dark.

-<:arolyn Kay Steedman, LAndscapefora Good Ilbman

This book traces a tradition of backwardness in queer representation and experience. Backwardness means many things here:shyness,ambiva- lence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heart- break, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair,shame. 1describe backwardness both as a queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography. In telling a history of early twentieth- cenlury representation that privileges disconnection. loss. and the re- fusal of community. I have tried 10 bring my approach 10 the past in line with dark. retrograde aspects of queer experience. If the gaze I have fixed on the past refuses the usual consolations-including the hope of redemption-it is not. for that reason, without its compensations, Back- wardness can be, as Willa Cather suggests, deeply gratifying to the back- ward. Particularly in a moment where gays and lesbians have no excuse for feelingbad.rhe evocation ofa long history ofqueer suffering provides, ifnot solace exactly; then at least relief. I have tried 10 resist the criterion of utility as a standard of judgment

for the feelings and experiences that I describe. 1 have argued that the

146

TIle Po/ilics of Refusal 147

pressure within queer studies to make use ofbad feelings has not allowed for sustained engagement with the stubborn negativity of the past: critics have ignored what they could not transform. Still. despite my hesitancy about alchemizing queer suffering. I do want to think in the linal pages about the relation between backwardness and the queer fu- ture. It is not the aim of this book to suspend absolutely the question of the future; that is Lee Edelman's project in Na Future, and although I see its value, I am interested in trying to imagine a future apart from the reproductive imperative, optimism, and the promise of redemption. A backward future. perhaps. There are forms of queer negativity that are in no sense "good for pol-

itics." There are others-s-self-hatred.despair, refusal-that we have yet to consider because their connection to any recognizable form of politics is too tenuous, Still. many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present; a more capacious under- standing of political aims and methods might in fact draw on such expe- riences. As many critics have argued, the politics of gay pride will only get us SO far.Such an approach does not address the marginalsituation of queers who experience the stigma of poverty. racism, AIDS, gender dys- phoria, disability, immigration, and sexism. Nor does such an approach come to terms adequately with sexualshame-with the way that the closet continues to operate powerfully in contemporary society and media. Fi- nally, the assertion of pride does not deal with the psychic complexity of shame, which lingers on well into the post-Stonewall era. While critics and activist groups have attempted to cultivate a polit ics

of the negative in recen t years, the great problem 10 be reckoned with in such approaches is the problem of political agency. Many of the queer ligures that I have considered in this book are characterized by damaged or refused agency. Is it possible that such backward ligures might be ca- pable of making social change? What exact ly does a collective move- ment of isolates look like? What kind of revolutionary action can we ex- pect from those who have slept a hundred years?

Left Melancholy

Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" is a preeminently backward figure, an emblem of resistance 10 the forward march of progress. In his "Theses

148 Epilogue

on the Philosophy of History: Benjamin sketches a scene that recalls the image of Lot's wifegazing back on the destruction of Sodom:

A Klee painting named "Angelus Nevus" shows an angel looking as though he isabout to moveawayfromsomething he is fixedlycontem- plating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angelof history His faceis turned toward the past. Where we: perceive a chain orevents, he sees one single catas- trophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feel. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead. and make whole what has been smashed. Buta storm is blowing from Par- adise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. while the pile ofdebris before him growsskyward. This storm iswhat wecall progress.'

History in Benjamin's description is a "single catastrophe: a pile of wreckage that just keeps getting bigger. He suggests that while most people are content to forget the horrors of the past and move on toward a better future . the angel resists the storm of progress. By turning his back on the future and fixing his gaze on this scene of destruction. the angel refuses to tum the losses of the past. in Adorno and Horkheimer's terms. into the material of progress. The angel longs to redeem the past-Ow make whole what has been smashed"-but he cannot, As he tries to linger with the dead. the wind tears at his wings. carrying him. against his will. into the future. Benjamin emphasizes the violence to which the angel is exposed in

his failed attempt at redemption. Like Lot's wife. the angel faces back- ward; like Odysseus. however. he keeps moving forward while he looks backward. Benjamin suggests that taking the past seriously means being hun by it. He is damaged both by the horrible spectacle of the past and by the outrage of leaving it behind. The angel of history has become a key figure in recent work on loss

and the politics of memory. trauma. and history. In contemporary criti- cism. Benjamin's sacrificial witness functions as something like an eth- ical ideal for the historian and the critic. Yet this figure poses difficulties for anyone thinking about how to effect political change. What are we to do with this tattered, passive figure. so clearly unfit for the rigors of the protest march. not to mention the battlefield? The question is how to imagine this melancholic figure as the agent of any recognizable form of

TIl< P,,/ilics "J ReJ""'/ 149

activism. At the heart of the ambivalence about the angel of history is a key paradox of political life. Although historical losses instill in us a de- sire for change, they also can unfit us for the activity of making change. If we look back, we may not be able to pull ourselves away from the spectacle of Sodom in names. Wendy Brown warns against the potentia l dangers of such an orienta-

tion in her essay "Resisting Left Melancholy." Brown discusses the pos- sibilities for sustaining hope after the "death of Marxism." In a reading of Benjamin's article "Left Melancholy," Brown auernpts to make a dis- tinction between productive and paralyzing forms of political melan- cholia. Left melancholy is a form of nostalgia for an expired past-a way of clinging to a broken and outdated dream of class revolution. To this form of melancholy she opposes a productive clinging to historical loss. which is what she sees in the allegory of the angel of history Brown asks a series of questions about how to imagine the future

after the breakdown of historica l master narratives. She considers our feelings about the future when we no longer believe in the inevitability of historical progress and when our dreams for a global revolution have died. What do dreams of freedom look like after the ideal of freedom has been smashed? Brown diagnoses a pervasive despair on the Left, a melancholic attachment to earlier forms of politics that has proved disastrous for responding to contemporary political condi- tions. Brown's diagnosis of this structure of feeling is apt, and this essay is a

crucial exploration of the state of contemporary affective politics on the Left: rather than adopting a position that simply condemns apathy as a cop-out, a failure ofnerve, she tries to map the response 10 losses on the Left as a melancholic response. Brown comes 10 diagnose, not to punish. Melancholic leftists cling to the lost objects because of actual feelings of love, actua ldesire for radical social change: the problem with their poli- tics is not the attachment but rather the paralyzing effects of melan- cholic incorporation and disavowal. Contemporary critics and activists ought to attend to her suggestion that the "feelings and sentiments- including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses-thaI sustain our attachments to Left analyses and Left projects ought to be examined.'? Brown's call for an investigation into these feelings sounds, however, at times more like a request that such feelings should nOI exist, She writes:

150 Epilogue

What emerges lin the present moment] is a Left that operates without either a deep and radical critique of the status quo or a compelling al- ternative to the existing order of things. But perhaps even more trou- bling, it is a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginalityand failure, a Left that is thus caught in astructure ofmelancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly,whose structure ofdesire is backward looking and punishing. (463-464)

Whereas Brown is writing in one sense from the perspective of a Left melancholic, someone trying to think of alternative political structures of feeling given the contemporary context, here her critique seems to shade into the kind of chin-up neoliberal polemics that she abhors. Al- though that essay sets out to think about the affective consequences of historical losses, in a passage such as this one Brown points to these bad feelings themselves as the problem. Why would this essay, so sym- pathetic to melancholic politics, make a final call for the dissolution of melancholy into mourning? Although I think Brown sets out to widen the range of political affects, thinking about the political usefulness of feelings like regret and despair. in the end she returns to what is invari- ably invoked as the only viable political affect: hope for a better future. Despite Brown's claims to the contrary, it is difficult to distinguish be-

tween "good" and "bad" melancholy; melancholia itself cannot be sealed off from more problematic feelings and attitudes such as nostalgia, de- pression, and despair. The anxiety to draw acomonsanitairearound politi- cally useful affects is legible in many quarters; one could certainly argue that Benjamin's own diatribe against left melancholy is fueled byanxieties about the political valence of his own melancholic identification. Such anxieties are also legible in his "Theses," where Benjamin's tiger leaping into the past seems to serveas a revolutionary.can-do alibi for the angel of historyand where the historical materialist is distinguished from the his- toricist because he is "man enough to blast open the continuum of his- tory" (262). It is much easier to distinguish between productive and paralyzing

melancholia on paper than it is in psychic life. where even the best feel- ings can go bad-and they give no warning. If we are serious about en- gaging with the terrain of psychic Iife-and at the same time, challenging a progressivist view of history-then it seems crucial that we begin to

The Politicsof Refusal lSI

take the negativity of negative affect more seriously. Bad feelings such as rage, self-hatred, shame, despair, and apathy are produced by what Lauren Berlant calls the routine "pain of subordination." Tarrying with this negativity is crucial; at the same time, the aim is to turn grief into grievance-to address the larger social structures, the regimes of domi- nation, that are at the root of such pain. But real engagement with these issues means coming to terms with the temporality, the specific struc- ture of grief, and allowing these elements of negative affect to transform our understanding of politics. We need to develop a vision of political agency that incorporates the damage that we hope to repair. Carla Freccero, returning to Benjamin's angel, considers such an ap-

proach in Queer/Early/Modem. Throughout her book Freccero considers the political possibilities in what she calls "queer spectrality"; she argues that allowing oneself to be haunted can open up a "reparative future" (102). Exploring the ethics and politics of melancholia, Freccero finally wonders about the implications of her theory for the question of politi- cal agency.

If this spectral approach to history and historiography is queer, it might also be objected that it counsels a kind of passivity,both in ILeoI Bersani'ssense of self-shattering and also potentially in the more mun- dane sense of the opposite of the political injunction to act. In this re- spect it is also queer, as only a passive politics could be said to be. And yet, the passivity-which is also a form of patience and passion-is not quite the same thing as quietism. Rather, it is a suspension, a waiting, an attending to the worlds arrivals (through, in part, its returns), not as a guarantee or security foraction in the present, but as the very force from the past that moves us into the future, like Benjamin's angel, blown backward by the storm. (104)

Freccero specifically links passivity to queer politics, suggesting that a passivity that is "not quite" quietism might constitute an alternative ap- proach to the problem of agency. Although some might argue that Ben- jamin confuses the issue of seeingatrocity with the need to do something about it (confusing the historical materialist with the revolutionary), Freccero ventures to suggest that the angel himself might be a model po- litical actor. The consequences of such a shift are clearly troubling to Freccero,

who follows this suggestion with a footnote in which she responds to Brown's concern about political passivity.

152 Epilogue

Wendy Brown. in PoliticsOut of History, notes that the angel is para- lyzedand helpless and that it is therefore incumbent upon us to seize the moment, to interrupt the storm. She describes Benjamin's under- standing of the agents of this process in what seem 10 me to be hu- manist terms. in that weare indeed the agentsofhistory whodo the in- terrupting. In using this image. 1want first 10 suspend the definirionof the storm, which in Benjamin's text is "what we call progress: and also. if possible, to suspend the question of agency within the image. What, after all. wemight ask, is an angel? (I47, n.105)

In this remarkable final note. Freccero performs an exemplary act of backwardness, clinging 10 the "paralyzed and helpless" figure of the angel even as Brown urges action. Far from "seizing the moment," Freccero-Iike Benjamin's angel. or like one of Paler'sshy and shrinking figures-begs for a reprieve. Resisting the rhetorical force ofBrown'scall to arms. she heads underground. and suspends each of the key terms in the passage-progress. agency. angel. The queer exemplarily of this move has nothing to do wi th any traditional sense of political agency; rather, queer activism here consists in evasion, latency, refusal, and in turning Brown's injunction back on itself. What is 10 be done? We don't know,just as we don't know what an angel is.

Backward March

In his 1999 book, Disidcntificarions,Josc Esteban Munoz offers a longue- in-cheek version of what a queer, backward activism might look like. Recounting a joke that he shares with a friend, Munoz describes plans Cora "gay shame day parade";

This parade. unlike the sunny gay pride march, would be held in Feb- ruary . . . Loud colors would be discouraged; gay men and lesbians would instead be asked to wear drab browns and gra)'S. Shame marchers would beasked to carrysigns no biggerthan a business card. Chanting would be prohibited. Parade participants would be asked 10 parade single file. Finally. the parade would not be held on a central city street but on some backstreet, preferablyby the river.'

Through this image of silent . orderly marchers filing through the backstreets of the city, Munoz suggests that the shame and self-hatred associated with life in the closet persist in the contemporary moment.

The Polilies oj ReJusal 153

The e imaginary figures , joined in abjection, have not "yet" decided against the logic of their exclusion. Although Iunoz is clearly joking in this evocation of a gay shame

march, his joke has become more relevant to di cussions of queer feeling and politic in the past several years . Munoz's book came out one year after the activist collective Gay hame formed in ew York City. The movement drew on impulses that were also important to Munoz's work and to that of many other queer scholars at the time: a ense that the transformational possibilities ofgay pride had been exhausted, and that it had instead become a code name for assimilation and for the commodification of gay and lesbian identity. In particular, Gay hame was disgusted \ ith the new look and feel ofgay ev York. Gay hame San Francisco (perhaps the most important offshoot of the original movement) narrates the history of the group on their Web site.

Gay Shame emerged at a very specific moment in New York City his- tory. II was June 1998, the height of Mayor Giuliani's reign of terror known officially as the "Quality of Life" campaign, during which ram- pant police brutality against unarmed people of color was the norm, community gardens were regularly bulldozed to make way for luxury housing, and homeless people were losing services and shelter faster than Disney could buy up Times Square .. . Gay Shame emerged to create a radical alternative to the conformity of gay neighborhoods, bars, and institutions most clearly symbolized by Gay Pride. By 1998, New York's Gay Pride had become little more than a giant opportunity for multi-national corporations to target-market to gay consumers . .. The goal of GayShame was to create a free, all-ages space where queers could make culture and share skills and strategies for resistance, rather than just buying a bunch of crap:'

The emphasis of Gay Shame was on the shame of gays selling out, on an- tisex zoning laws, and the gay move to the mainstream that was turning the movement into just another excuse for buying "a bunch of crap." Rather than focusing on shame per se (as a feeling), the movement fo- cu ed on the shamefulness of gay pride (and gay consumerism and gay gentrification and gay mainstreaming more generally). Each year on the day of the gay pride march, Gay Shame an Fran-

cisco holds a march, where nothing is for ale and protesters voice their oppo ition to the mainstreaming of gay life. The tone of the Gay hame events is a far cry from the quiet backstreet march describ d by Munoz,

154 Epilogue

however. Gay Shame San Francisco practices rowdy in-your-face forms of direct action: though they embrace shame as a counterdiscourse to pride, they do not act ashamed.' Gay Shame San Francisco has in fact made explicit their understanding of the relation between gay shame and activism in statements they made in the wake of a conflict that took place at the 2003 Gay Shame conference at the University of Michigan. Like Gay Shame the activist movement, the conference responded to the cultural moment ofgay normalization but in a somewhat different way. The main statement for the conference read as follows:

The purpose of the conference is to inquire into various aspects of les- bian and gay male sexuality, history, and culture that "gay pride" has had the effect of suppressing. The conference intends to confront the shame that lesbians, gay men, and "queers" of all sons still experience in society; to explore the transformative impulses that spring from such experiences of shame and to ask what affirmative uses can be made of these residual experiences of shame now that not all gay people are condemned to live in shame.·

This statement argues, from a queer academic perspective, what critics including Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and Douglas Crimp (among others) have understood as the political potential ofshame. As is perhaps to be expected, the conference focused less on matters of real estate, zoning, and class war than the activist movement ; instead, the focus was primarily on issues of representation, culture, and expe- rlence.? Members of the Gay Shame collective were invited to the conference

and they appeared on the Gay Shame Activism panel during the second day. The panel was marked by conflict, and eventually fights broke out between members of the panel and the audience. In the wake of the con- ference, Mattilda (Matt Bernstein Sycamore) published an attack on the conference titled "Gay Sham."! Mattilda accuses the organizers of the conference of inviting Gay Shame San Francisco only as fetish objects or token representatives to stand in for radical queer activism. In the after- math of the conference, the Gay Shame Web site offers an exhortation specifically aimed at academics seeking to write about gay shame. Under the heading "Gay Shame &: Academia: the authors write:

If you are writing a paper, GAY SHAME offers plenty of materials on- line and hopefully our meetings are great sources of inspiration. We

The Polilics ofRefuSilI ISS

hope that once your paper has been turned in that you remember to unleash your defiance on the world for all to see. GAY SHAME chal- lenges you to step away from the classist pillars of theoretical "dis- course" and celebrate direct action deviance (see HOW TO START A DIRECT ACTION page for ideas)."

During the conference, many academics in the audience responded to Gay Shame's critique by arguing that they were also activists, and that the distinction is not so easily drawn. Gay Shame San Francisco was not impressed. The question as they saw it was not whether different profes- sors or academics "did activism." Rather, it was a more direct confl ict about the fact that academics are, by and large, a professional class and so have very different aims as well as different ways ofarticulating those aims. It is interesting to note how little tension there is between shame and

action in Gay ShameSan Francisco's rhetoric. The organization is not in- terested in feeling shame, or in the feeling of shame, although the tone of their material is dependably dark. Rather, they deploy shame: against gay landlords in San Francisco as well as against radical academics who do not back their theories up with direct action. Through their tactics at the Gay Shame conference and afterwards, GSSF activated (somewhat successfully) what we might call leftist academic shame- the feeling that results from diagnosing social ills without doing anything about them. Still, despite Gay Shame San Francisco's hard line about the relation-

ship between feeling, thought, and direct action, the Web site features an interesting acknowledgment of the affective difficulties of activism, which they diagnose as post action depression:

P.A.D.S. (Post Action Depression Syndrome)

After your first action, you may find yourselves experiencing a wide range of extreme responses: mania, ecstasy, dizziness, lightheadedness, nausea, dysphoria, vomiting, rage, enlightenment, empowerment, inspi- ration, disappointment , confusion, numbness, betray-al,vulnerability, eu- phoria, sensitivity, awareness, invulnerability wanderlust or enchant- ment. This is common. It is important to continue organizing. Brainstonn future projects to help keep the group focused, effective and inventive. Don't beworried ifpeoplehateyou- whenyou takean unpopularstance (and we certainlyhope you do), expect to be unpopular.

156 Epilogue

This may bea great time to collectively write a statement of purpose in order to communicate the group's politics.This mayhelp build con- sensus within the group, encourage more people 10 gel involved and create future actions that work together to build a sustainable culture of resistance. Astatement of purpose maygive the group focusand di- reclion in order to work toward future actions that articulate the poli- ticsof the group in as many relevant directions as possible. Of course, this may also lead to arguing endlessly over differences instead of building an environment where direct action can nourish, so proceed with caution, creativity, glamour. intrigue and clamor.to

Gay Shame San Francisco offers a stunning account of the complex and ambivalenl feelings that activism (and social opposition more generally) inspires. While insisting on the importance of direct action, the state- ment also offers an account of the potential pitfalls-s-rhe bad feelings and broken connections-that can inhibit such action. The statement ends, appropriately enough, with a directive. but also with a warning: "Proceed with Caution"-the implication being that "getting stuck" is a danger that comes with the territory.

Feeling Bad, Acting Up

Both the GayShame movement and the depression march recall a longer history of queer activism in which bad feelings were central. In tracing such a hislOry I would point not only to certain risky and disorganized forms of protest in the gay liberation movement but also to the insis- tence on bad feelings in the early days ofqueer activism. Acknowledging damage- and incorporating it-was crucial to the tum to queer politics and queer studies in the late 1980s. With the AIDScrisis raging, Reagan in office, and homosexuality recriminalized in the Bowers v. Hardwick decision, damage was all around. The activist group Queer Nation (an offshoot of the group ACT UP) was formed in response to this atrno- sphere of crisis. In one of their pamphlets from 1990, they discuss their choice of the word "queer: emphasizing the importance of "trouble" to the concept.

Queer! Ah,do we reallyhaveto use that word? It'strouble. Everygayperson

has his or her own take on it. For some it means strange and eccentric and kind of mysterious. That's okay, we like that. But some gay girls

TItrP..liticsojRrJu",' 157

and boys don't, They think they're more normal than strange, And for others "queer" conjures up those awful memories of adolescent suf- fering. Queer. II's forcibly biuersweet and quaint at best-weakening and painful at worst. Couldn't we just use "gay" instead? II's a much brighter word and isn't it synonymous with "happy"? When will you militants grow up and get over the novelty of being difTerent? Why Queer . , . Well, yes, "gay" is great. II has its place. But when a lot of lesbians

and gaymen wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we've chosen to call ourselvesqueer, Using "queer" is a wayof reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world. II'sa way of tellingourselves wedon't have to bewiny and charming people who keepour livesdiscreet and marginalized in the straight world. (Anony- mous Queers, 1990)

The idea that queer could be reclaimed from its homophobic uses and turned to good use-while still maintaining its link to a history of damage-was crucial to the development ofa queer intellectual method in the late 1980s and early 199Os. While queer studies borrowed from the general approach of queer activism at the time, it did not always fully embrace the "forcibly bittersweet" tone of the movement. Another Queer Nation pamphlet from 1990,AnAnny ojLovers Ca"''''1

Lose, borrowed its title from the 1970 Statement of the Male Homo- sexual Workshop at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Conven- tion. In this statement, the authors emphasize their relation to the old days of gay liberation and their distance from the current ethos of gay assimilation: "being queer means leading a difTerent sort of life. It's not about the mainstream, profit.margins, patriotism, patriarchy, or being assimilated. It's not about executive director, privilege and elitism. It's about being on the margins, defining ourselves; it's about gender-luck and secrets, what's beneath the belt and deep inside the heart; it's about the night" (Anonymous Queers, 1990). It is important to note that the mainstream indicated here is the mainstream of gay and lesbian organizing-as is indicated by the allusion to "executive director: not "CEO." It was this aspect of the queer movement that Michael Warner underlined in his definition of queer as "against the regimes of the normal" in his introduction to the 1993 volume Fraroj a Queer Planet." The statement also emphasizes the importance of feelings, both good

and bad, in the constitution of the movement. This was a movement

158 Epilogue

that hit below the belt; that did not disavow the long history of secrecy but made it central; that was "about the night." The pioneers of queer organizing saw suffering and shame as essential to social transforma- tion. Such a focus linked them with some of the most interesting mo- ments in the movement for gay liberation and with the efforts of slm and butch-femme lesbians to get their dissident desires on the radar screen during the late 1970s and 1980s. As well, it linked them with a longer history of queer abjection that was also, they insisted, a crucial legacy. At the heart of the queer movement was not only the question of the

history of identity and the meaning of slurs but also the problem of feeling bad-e-of ' waking up in the morning feeling angry and dis- gusted: Queer politics broke with the progressive utopian historical vi- sion of some versions of gay liberation and second-wave feminism. At the same time that condi tions for the most privileged gays and lesbians were improving. it was hard to hold on to optimistic historical narra- tives during the darkest days of the AIDScrisis. Queers focused instead on the ongoing problem of homophobia and its material and psychic ef- fects. Typicalof this moment is the "Dyke Manifesto" distributed by the New York Lesbian Avengers at the 1993 mareh on Washington. The poster on which the manifesto is printed features an opening address-- "Calling All Lesbiansl Wake Up!" Written over the entire poster in red are three words: POWER SEX ACTIVISM. Recalling the revolutionary rhet- oric of earlier movements, the Avengers' manifesto also gives voice to negative and retrogressive tendenciesat odds with the utopian call to ac- tion. In small print. they write that Lesbian Avengers "ARE OLD FASH- IONED: PtNE, LONG. WHINE, STAY IN BADRELATIONSHIPS: " What place pining. longing, and whining (or staying in bad relation-

ships, for that mailer) might have in radical activism is not clear. Never- theless, it is true that many activist movements-s-and some critics--find the question worth exploring. Ann Cvetkovichs 2003 book. AnAn:hive of Feelings, makes backward feelings central. Cvetkovich considers the relation between lesbian public cultures and trauma;she pays particular attention to a form of trauma that has been difficult to discuss in lesbian contexts: childhood sexual abuse. Looking at a range of materials both popular and elite. Cvetkovich explores the way that queereore bands, lesbian artists. and zinesters have negotiated the intimate damage of mi- sogyny and homophobia.

TIlrP"lilie, "J RrJusal 159

Early in the book, Cvetkovich discusses her use of the term "trauma" and comments that the book is both about bad feelings and infonned by the experience of feeling bad:

As a name for experiences of socially situated political violence, trauma forges oven connections between politics and emotion, Sexual acts, butch-femme discourse, queer transnational publics, incest, AIDS and AIDSactivism, grassroots archives-these are some of the sites of lesbianpublic culture where I havenot only found the tracesof trauma hut ways of thinking about trauma thatdo not pathologize it, that seize control over it from the medical experts and forge creative responses to it that far outstrip even the most utopian of therapeutic and political solutions ... The kinds of affective experiences that I explore here are lost in discourses of trauma that focus ani» on the most catastrophic and widely public events .. . I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma's effectsare still being felt. Traumadis- course has allowed me to ask about the connection between girls like me feeling bad and world historical events"

Cvetkovichs book is centrally concerned with trauma. Although she is interested in examples of subjec ts who seize control over trauma and who forge creative responses to it, the bad feelings do not drop out during this process. Rather. the nontherapeutic approach to trauma that she describes suggests a wild utopianism-a hopefulness in despair- that is reminiscent of thc politics of despair Sylvia Townsend Warncr describes in Summa WillShow. For her examples, Cvetkovich turns to artists and activists whose work is bound up with the everyday experi- ence of feeling bad. Cvetkovich is involved with an academicand activist organization, the

Public Feelings Project. that has attempted to create a political move- rnent that takes seriouslysuch apparently useless feelings. The Chicago- based "Ieeltank" associated with the group organizes an annual depres- sion march. The protesters march in bathrobes and slippers, carrying signs that say. "Depressed? It might be political: and passing out fake prescriptions for Prozac. The point of an event like this is not only that the political landscape is bad but also that it makes you feel bad. and that it may make you less capableoftakingaction,or of taking action in a way that accords with traditional understandings of activism. Whether such backward fonns of activism can make a difference in the present remains

160 Epilogue

to be seen; it seems clear that movements that attempt to ignore such feelings or wish them away will have to deal with them sooner or later. The history of political depression is long; furthermore, il is a feeling that thrives in exile.

What Is an Angel?

In Fuling Backward, I have argued that "feeling bad" has been a crucial element of modem queer experience but that it has not been adequately addressed in histories of queer representation or in writing about queer politics. For some critics, however, work in queer studies has been "too focused" on bad feelings and negativity in recent years. In her recent work Elizabeth Freeman argues that the tum to suffering in queer studies has made it impossible to imagine a politics of pleasure:

So far, a simultaneously psychoanalytic and historicist loss-perhaps replacing or subsuming structuralist lack-has emerged as one of fin de steelequeer theory'skey terms ... I would like to suggest, however, that this powerful turn toward loss-toward failure, shame, negativity, grief, and other structures of feelinghistorical-may also be a prema- ture tum away from a seemingly obsolete politics of pleasure that could, in fact,berenewed byattention to temporal difference. This is, melancholicqueer theory mayacquiesce 10 the idea that pain-e-eithera pain wedo feel or a pain weshould feel but cannot, or a pain we must laboriously rework into pleasure ifwe are to haveany pleasureat all- is the proper ticket into historical consciousness."

For Freeman, feeling pain about gay and lesbian history is an unwanted duty, a responsible activity that blocks access to the real pleasures that feeling (up) the historical record can afford. She suggests that with a shift of focus "we might imagine ourselves haunted by ecstasy and not just by loss; residues of positive affect (erotic scenes, utopias, memories of touch) might be available for queer counter- (or para-) histonogra- phies" (66)." Freeman is undoubtedly right to suggest that the queer historical

record is chock full of untapped pleasures. It is also the case that bad feelings have a certain prestige within academic discourse both because of their seriousness and also because of their relation to long philosoph- ical traditions of negativity ("lack" becomes "loss"). Vet her suggestion that melancholic queer theory "acquiesces, however subtly, to a Protestant

TIle Politics oj ReJusal 161

ethic in which pleasure cannot be the grounds of anything productive at all" (59) does not account for the stigmatized and unproductive forms ofqueer sulTeringthat this book. at least, takes as its subject. Many of the bad feelingsunder review here-s-self-pity; despair. depression. loneliness. remorse-c-are in fact bound up with pleasure. with preciseI)' the son of pleasure that gelSregularly excoriated as sentimental. maudlin. nostalgic, self-indulgent. and useless. I would suggest thai pan of the reason that these feeling-states continue 10 be denigrated is thai they are associated with pleasures-even ecstasies-s-so internal that they distract attention from the external world. While melancholia or the sense of failure may borrow some prestige from philosophical accounts of negativity. when it comes to enlisting feelings for queer political projects, these ones are picked last,I. The main problem with such feelings is thai they are not good for

action-s-they would seem to disqualify the person who feels them from agency or activity in any traditional sense. Judith Halberstam has re- cently made an argument on behalf of negative feelings that are closely tied 10 action. In a forum on "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory" published in PMLA and in her ongoing work on failure. Halberstam de- tails the affective archive of what she sees as a "truly political negarivity, one that promises . . . 10 fail. to make a mess. to fuck shit up."? Drawing on Cvetkovichs An Archive oj Feelings and responding 10 l ee Edelman's No Future, Halberstam proposes an archive of negative political feelings that includes "rage. rudeness. anger. spite. impatience. intensity. mania. sincerity, earnestness. overinvestment, incivility. and brutal honesty" as well as "dyke anger. anticolonial despair, racial rage. counterhegemonic violence. [and] punk pugilism" (824). While there is no doubt that these underappreciated feelings have their place in political life, and thai unruly behavior has been at the heart ofmany breaks in the social fabric. I have been interested in Feeling Backwanl in forms of failure thai are less closely lied 10 action. While feeling bad can result in acting OUI, being fucked up can also make even the apparentlysimple act of "fucking shit up' seem out of reach. In this same forum. lee Edelman olTers a critique of Halberstams ar-

ticle that suggests that she misunderstands negativity, seeing it not as an antagonism internal 10 the social order itself but as a positive aspect of social life. He writes, "Affirming . . . as a positive good. 'punk pugilism' and its gestural repertoire. Halberstam strikes the pose of negativity

162 Epilogue

while evacuating its force."'· Although the conflict that emerges be- tween Edelman and Halberstam might be understood as a product of unreconeilable methodological differences-and an attendant disagree- ment about the constitution of the soeial-they do have something im- portaru in common: they share a commitment to a notion of negativity that is equated with destructive force. Edelman ups the ante in his con- clusion when he introduces a hammer into the fistfight: the "spurious apostles of negativity hammer new idols out of theirgood. while the aim of queer negativity is rather to hammer them into the dust. In the pro- cess, though. it must not make the swing of the hammer an end in itself but face up to political antagonism with the negativity of critical thought" (822). Although I agree with Edelman that making the "swing of the

hammer" the sine qua non of political negativity is not a good idea, I do not think that is because the concepts of "gestural repertoire" and "stance" are not Important for political life. In fact, it is the question of the recognized or allowed styles of political subjectivity that has con- cerned me throughout this book. This debate argues eloquently for the need for an expanded gestural repertoire.l?1am interested in feelings at some distance from those identified by Philip Fisher as the "vehement passions," feelings on the model of anger and wonder that indicate "an aroused and dynamic spirit."20 It is the lack of vehemence and lack of dynamism that make the backward feelings I survey here difficult to imagine as political. They make clear the need to imagine and work toward an alternative form of politics that would make space for various forms of ruined subjectivity: Walter Pater's shrinking refusal of the "gift" of public homosexual identity;Willa Cather's melancholic identification with impossible or lost forms of community, and her antagonism toward the future; the "spoiled identity" and loneliness of Radclyffe Hall's Stephen Gordon; and Sylvia Townsend Warner's grief-stricken revolu- tionary activism. These accounts are almost unrecognizable as versions of political subjectivity. Although we may have become attuned over the past several years to forms of radical politics that are not celebratory, we still have not yet begun to imagine a politics that allows for damage. Given the scene of destruction at our backs. queers feel compelled to

keep moving on toward a brighter future. At the same time, the history ofqueer experience hasmade this resolute orientation toward the future difficult to sustain. Queers are intimately familiar with the costsof being

The Politics of Refusal 163

queer-that, as much as anything. makes us queer. Given this state of affairs, the question really is not whether feelings such as grief, regret, and despair have a place in transformative politics: it would in fact be impossible to imagine transformative politics without these feelings. Nor is the question how to cultivate hope in the face of despair, since such calls tend to demand the replacement ofdespair with hope. Rather, the question that faces us is how to make a future backward enough that even the most reluctant among us might want to live there.