2022 marks the 25^th publication anniversary of Leo Bersani’s Homos, a seminal text in the, then nascent, field of queer theory. With scathing critiques of gay and lesbian politics of the day and field-shifting reflections on sexuality, psychoanalysis, and nationalism, Homos has been a touchstone for a wide breadth of scholarship since its publication. Despite this, however, critical engagement of Homos has typically been limited to the text’s final chapter, “The Gay Outlaw,” notable for its reputation for commencing the animated debates surrounding “the antisocial thesis in queer theory.” This proposed special session, “Homos at 25,” seeks, then, to reappraise Homos’ better-known claims and their subsequent reverberations while also returning to the text for what has been less attended to. The presider, Austin Svedjan, will introduce the speakers for 4 minutes. These four presentations—of about 12 minutes each—contextualize Homos in the long span of queer theory, as well as extend the text’s claims to their own thinking in critical race theory, literary criticism, and identity politics. In doing so, these timely presentations speak to a variety of disciplines and remind attendees of Homos' continued relevance for queer theoretical thinking today.

Mikko Tuhkanen will initiate the panel by considering the familiar differences in politics between Homos’ production of “homoness” as opposed to the “cult of difference” offered by the, then and now, dominate theories of identities as “performative”. Tuhkanen then proceeds to compare this tension between Bersani and Butler to a similar critical feud between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Paul Sartre. Blanchot, as Tuhkanen surveys for us, develops a concept of “worklessness” against Sartre’s concept of “committed writing” as working toward political ends. Noticing the harmony between this “committed writing” and Butler’s “performative acts,” Tuhkanen considers how Blanchot and Bersani evacuate “work” as a site of change in cultural politics. Tuhkanen then connects this evacuation to Bersani’s oeuvre post-Homos and the later theories the book would come to serve as foundational for, providing attendees with a wider scope of Bersanian thought with which to (re)consider Homos.

Bobby Benedicto then illustrates how Homos continues to be useful to queer theoretical thinking today. Moving beyond the now routinized claim that Bersani’s oeuvre assumes a universal white subject, Benedicto examines how Bersani’s interrelated calls for an erotics of “self-shattering” and an ethics of “homoness” complicate and are complicated by the accounts of racial difference, violence, and dispossession. Benedicto draws attendee’s attention to key moments throughout Homos where the specter of race is raised to see how the stakes of Bersani’s project might shift if race were to be introduced as a central analytic category. Putting Bersani in conversation with critical race theorists like Frantz Fanon, Benedicto charts a new genealogy of queer of color critique through Homos’ theorizing of an ethics of difference.

Next, Robyn Wiegman returns to the oft-overlooked prologue of the book, “‘We’.” Entombed in quote marks, this “we,” is both a citation in search of the security of a referent and a fugitive from referentiality altogether. At times Bersani uses “we” in ways that reveal the familiar inflation of a singular “I” into a falsely plural condition while at others it gestures toward a collectivity that might be spoken without falsifying its constituencies. Bersani, Wiegman argues, is well aware of the contradictions that ensue—“My ‘we’,” he writes “is constantly crossing over into the territory of other ‘we’s’”—but his expectation that the reader will thereby experience “a pleasing instability” to the “we” of this book suggests less a break with the emergent queer theoretical consensus than a promise to match its belief in queer thinking as a mode of destabilization. In this way, Wiegman reads the prologue to demonstrate that Homos is Bersani’s “most anti-queer” theoretical work of queer theory. Wiegman’s analysis of this relatively obscure part of the text with renewed attention emphasizes to attendees just how narrow the reception of Homos’ multivalent project has been.

In closing, Svedjan presents on Homos’ third chapter, “The Gay Daddy,” wherein Bersani considers S/M practices as a method of imagining new psychic relational modes. Considering the text’s own invitation to relate in new ways, Svedjan returns to one of the book’s epigraphs (“Families, I hate you!”) to consider how a simultaneous, sadomasochistic call to at once relate and disavow those relations might be extended to a reader's textual relation to Homos itself, occasioning a reflection on our own lasting attachments to the book since its publication.

Following these presentations, Svedjan will invite the audience to engage in approximately 20 minutes of unstructured discussion.