READING FOR POLITICAL FORM

On the whole, queer studies has not been all that interested in questions of political form. While issues of governance, territoriality, sovereignty, and belonging to a people certainly have played significant roles over the years, they’ve largely been cast as a negative pole against which to envision forms of queer freedom, feeling, and worldmaking. If there’s been any number of critiques of viewing queerness as inherently antagonistic to the normative, in ways that can homogenize both, the predominating tendency with respect to the matter of what a political order can or should be has been to situate queer analysis as against or beyond such questions. ¹ In the recent collection “Left of Queer,” David Eng and Jasbir Puar argue for “an antinational, nonnational, and no-state queer theory oriented to the art, to borrow a concept from James C. Scott, ‘of not being governed.’” ² The work of Scott’s on which they draw is about the hill regions of Southeast Asia and the ways what have been taken to be autonomous polities are really expressions of flight from and reaction to the power of states. This example says much about queer studies framings in which the imagination of being “ungoverned” is less about envisioning and tracing modes of governance, collectivity, and emplacement than a broad and elliptical negation of the state that implicitly reifies it as the principal form that a political order might take. This deconstructive orientation highlights the (heteronormative) lineaments and limits of particular nationalisms and, perhaps, the state-form more broadly, but it does little in providing alternative models or norms for collective self-organization or for understanding extant modes of place-based collectivity and peoplehood. The liberal state serves as the implicit background for understanding what governance is without really considering what other kinds of political form and modes of collectivity might be already extant or possible (to what other options one might turn). My work largely has been driven, in one way or another, by considerations of Indigenous political forms and how engaging with them complicates understandings of what we might mean by the history of sexuality and the critique of heteronormativity. Within this work, I consistently have attended to literary texts as a way of gauging popular and official formulations of normative domesticity and its relation to US national geography and jurisdiction and, conversely, engaging with Indigenous intellectuals’ formulations of peoplehood, particularly the ways they did not fit within the narratives and frameworks organizing US law and policy.