GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

"Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel," by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. GLQ 1.1 (1993).

Children animate the field of queer studies. Children—literal and figural, dead and alive, queer and nonqueer—have been a focal point for queer thought since long before Lee Edelman asked queer folks to fuck the Child and the discriminatory present the deployment of this figure enables. The very first issue of GLQ reveals why the child was and has remained an enduring figure for the field to generate its theories and worry over its futures—and asks us to interrogate if the field's focus on the child is actually about children at all.

In the inaugural issue, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's invocation of figural children sets the stage for generational divides that have come to characterize the field. From the beginning, Sedgwick was already exasperated with the children of this newly institutionalized queer theory: graduate students. The piece opens with Sedgwick (1993a: 1) lamenting how "hundreds of graduate students" were using Judith Butler's Gender Trouble to examine acts of possible gender subversion. Sedgwick (1993a: 15) returned in her final paragraph to this graduate work emerging in the field, from which she famously concluded, "The bottom line is generally the same: [all acts are] kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. I see this as a sadly premature domestication of a conceptual tool whose powers we really have barely yet begun to explore." Sedgwick expressed anxiety over how the younger generation was foreclosing its own future—and the future of the field—through a narrow focus that did not mine the possibilities of the "conceptual tool[s]" Butler's work provided. Fear of how the children were already shaping the field for the worse frames the piece: queer theory could be over just as it is beginning. [End Page 29]

In the same article, Sedgwick's own critical practice reveals why she was anxious over the work of the children of the field. In her analysis of Henry James, she remarked on the "startling metaphor … of the 'inner child': the metaphor that presents one's relation to one's own past as a relationship, intersubjective as it is intergenerational" (ibid.: 8). Graduate students of the 1990s were the "inner child" of Sedgwick and a generation of academics building a field out of loss, pain, shame, stigma, and opposition. The earlier generation's own self-reflection emerged from care and concern that then manifested as critiques against this new generation entering the field.

Sedgwick understood the reparative work the formative practitioners of queer theory were doing in her opening of Tendencies. She provocatively began the text claiming that the deaths of queer youth are the "motive" for "everyone who does gay and lesbian studies" (Sedgwick 1993b: 1). Reflecting on her colleagues, she continued, "I think many adults … are trying, in our work, to keep faith with vividly remembered promises made to ourselves in childhood … with the relative freedom of adulthood" (ibid.: 3). Published in the same year as her GLQ contribution, here Sedgwick turns to both queer children and the "inner child[ren]" of queer theorists to understand field formation. In this formulation, all queer theory is an act of care: it is a fulfillment of childhood promises of the "inner child," and these childhood promises are projected onto all queer youth. The "relative freedom" afforded by adulthood inspires this desire to rescue both past selves and youth who will not grow up. Queer adults who have made it want to create futures for those who have been denied that future; creating that future depends on an elision of the past child self and a generation of queer youth. Literal children get conflated with figural inner children in order to monitor those entering and shaping the field. A reparative move has paranoid effects: an attempt to open up the future for a younger queer generation actually delimits that generation's ability to enter the field at all. The child is deployed to maintain adults' control of the present of the field.

Children recur as threats to the future in metaphorical forms throughout queer work. Children animate queer studies insofar as they risk destroying it. As a queer scholar whose work focuses on literal children, I am fascinated by the figural child who haunts the field and manifests in kinship metaphors deployed to understand field formation. The field of queer studies emerged out of minoritarian fields, and it has been in an oppositional relationship with these fields since its institutionalization, a moment that the first issue of GLQ materializes. A generational divide emerged between scholars doing queer theory and those doing feminist critique, women's studies, and lesbian and gay studies, the latter fields critiqued as [End Page 30] backward, too invested in identities, and not invested enough in sexuality. In her meditation on the relationship between queer theory and feminist critique, Heather Love (2007: 302) notes that at queer theory's inaugural moment, "many wondered whether such legitimacy could be achieved only at the cost of significant exclusions." In queer theory's commitment to "examining the process by which the norm and the margin were created" (ibid.), it created its own norms for the field that excluded and marginalized other sites and productions of knowledge. Love notes the tense "relationship between feminist 'mothers' and queer 'daughters'" (ibid.) that resulted from this generational divide, a tension that remains very much alive. The institutionalization of queer studies queers children: potential practitioners are excluded from the field ostensibly to ensure its future. This is a discipline that disciplines. Queer theory generates its own queered children.

Queer theory does not need to kill its children, just the generational logic that keeps them queered. Sedgwick's (2003: 8) call in Touching Feeling to explore the capacity of the preposition beside might offer a way to think of queer work outside the generational mode: "Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking." What if the child was invoked "beside" adults as opposed to behind or before them? What if children were not an origin, a future, or a past but co-present? Sedgwick herself explores what possibilities for relationality emerge when age as a factor that separates subjects into different generations collapses. In her afterword to Gary in Your Pocket, Sedgwick (1996: 280) writes that after her own diagnosis of cancer, "I finally felt we [Gary and I] were finding our feet with each other, and some ground to put them on. At least, the particular awe or shyness that can separate the healthy from the ill no longer kept us apart." Fisher was a graduate student of Sedgwick's who passed away from AIDS complications before completing his degree. Sedgwick explains that both hers and Gary's illnesses forged their relation in a new way; illness disrupted both of their presents and altered their relationship to the future, aligning them alongside each other temporally in a way that was previously unimaginable. The collapse of and alteration of their relation to time are reflected in the material text. Sedgwick was originally slated to write the book's introduction, which Gary would publish; his untimely death resulted in a posthumous publication that Sedgwick completed, and her textual contribution shifted from introduction to afterword. Illness necessitated a reversal of the usual unfolding of roles according to a normative timeline—the mentee passed before the mentor, and the mentor completed the work of the mentee; instead of opening the text, positioned before what was to come, she drew it to a close. For Sedgwick and Fisher, illness illuminated the illusory stability of age, relation to time, and how subjects in different times [End Page 31] should interact. Generations can be reconceptualized "beside" one another, and this proximity can enable community and relations that would otherwise be foreclosed when only conceptualized in temporal language.

The field's reliance on the child has worked to secure its—the child's and the field's—future. It is the current children of queer theory who may have no future if the logic of the generational mode continues to follow normative patterns of distrust and paranoia.