This panel reflects on the role that identity plays in queer studies, despite the field’s resistance to identity politics. The panelists show how conversations on identity and identity politics have not only shaped the field but also continue to reorient relationships between race, region, theory, and writing.

In their Introduction to the Special Issue of Social Text (2005), David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz demanded “a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a firm understanding.” This emphasis on a “renewed” field, in the light of the US ‘war on terror’ and the rise of neoliberal economies, assumed that “queer has no fixed political referent” so that the “subjectless critique of queer studies” is positioned in opposition to the “tenets of positivism at the heart of identity politics.” A few years prior to this publication, Cherríe Moraga’s self-reflexive Foreword to the second edition of Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (2002), written after the 9/11 attack, offered a critical commentary on the global invasions carried out by the US, and their role in endangering the lives of Americans, who are then forced to support the narratives of ‘War on Terror.’

While Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz’s call for “renewed queer studies” is an acknowledgment of the limitations of the field, it frames identity politics in a way that leaves out feminist activists and writers whose existence is already queer due to their situatedness as “Third World Women.” By contrast, the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) and E. Patrick Johnson’s (2001) ‘quare studies’ situate identity in relation to difference and emphasize intergenerational and intra-community dialogues. More recently, Gayatri Gopinath (2019) and Eng Beng Lim (2013) emphasize South-South relationality, thereby offering a transnational turn in the field.

This panel begins with Míša Stekl’s presentation, “A Racial Genealogy of Queer (Non)Identity” which argues how race was central to the concept of queer negativity with came to be associated with Lee Edelman (2004) and Leo Bersani (1987). Stekl relies on Kadji Amin’s (2017) scholarship to show how FHAR (Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, or Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action), a ‘70s French gay movement anticipates both “liberationist” and “psychoanalytic” negativity by affirming queer sexuality as transgressive of identity, subjectivity, and the social order. Through close readings of archived FHAR texts, they point out that FHAR’s affirmation of negativity was underwritten by a peculiar conception of homosexuality as a “race d’ep”—a “race of pederasts” or, less literally, a “race of fags.” Stekl argues that homosexuality became a “race” only in (non)relation to Blackness’ position as the lowest degree of sexual difference.

Annie Burkhart’s “‘An Echo from a Larger Lyre’: Amy Levy’s Quare Poetics in A Minor Poet” focuses on disability and “quareness” to offer an alternate reading of Levy’s poetry. Rather than assuming that Levy’s work has a fundamental “whiteness” to it (as most Victorians have) or that she explicitly owns her Sapphism (as many modern poets do), Burkhart’s intersectional approach reconceives a history that has chronically overlooked multiple and simultaneous aspects of Levy’s marginality. While Victorians like Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (1995) refuse to acknowledge Levy’s sexual variance and deafness, and Christine Pullen’s biography (2010) forwards a heteronormative reading of Levy’s life and writing, Burkhart’s analysis of the poet’s Jewish heritage and language builds on Johnson (2001) to make a case for quare sociality and disability justice in Victorian studies.

Ipek Sahinler’s paper “Comparing Between and Beyond Fronteras: Reading Turkey as a Borderland via Anzaldúa” concludes the panel by drawing a transnational comparison between modern Turkey and Mexico – socio-political climates informed by multiple borders, ecologies, languages, as well as sexual, religious, and ethnic identities. She uses Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of borderland identities and liminal subjects to unravel the overlooked parallels between seemingly irrelevant yet culturally similar border regions that are parts of the Global South. She builds on Ralf J. Poole (2022), Evren Savci (2021), as well as GLQ’s June 2021 issue entitled “Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality and the Incommensurable” to address the question – “how can Queer Theory not speak for, but about the periphery?”

During the presentations, the presider, Rajorshi Das will keep time so that each presenter gets 15 minutes. In the closing, they will also draw from the presentations to insist on new modalities and temporalities of queer futurity and invite the audience to engage in an unstructured discussion.