Why Can't Homosexuals be Extraordinary? Queer Thinking After Leo Bersani

Is "queer now to be taken as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies?" Leo Bersani laments in Homos, his 1985 text that helped launch his reputation as the god father of queer theory's now famed anti-social thesis. For Mikko Tuhkanen, Bersani's critique of queer theory and its reverberations engender a crucial distinction: Bersani is forever "a queer thinker," not a "queer theorist." Reading with Tuhkanen's distinction, this essay explores Bersani's investment in queer thinking as a mode of anti-institutional critical practice in order to track the centrality of the conflict between the political and erotic in the past and present work of queer scholarship.

Duke Scholars

Author Robyn Wiegman Literature