Contact & registration: queerformalism@gmail.com

Two provocations: The history of queer theory is one of a disarticulated investment in form and formalism, and formalisms (can) produce queer readings of texts. What is at stake, in short, is an unlikely encounter between methodology and politics, between a set of academic dispositions and a conceptual culture. That is the prompt for this reading group and the organizing principle behind the selection of texts we want to read together, which re(t)read queer theory and its central interventions in critical thinking through the spectre of its aesthetic investments, its wavering attachment to form, and its shy formalisms.

Two movements:

1) Queerness to form(alisms). Queer theory’s relationship to form and formedness, and to formalist reading practices, is at once disarticulated and smuggled into queer theory under various disguises. It is true that neither the Russian formalists of the 1920’s nor the American New Critics of the 1950’s spring to mind as particularly queer readers of literature. And yet our suggestion is that there is in queer theory an undertheorized element of such highly interested (and interesting!) readings of form. It is none other than Eve Sedgwick, after all, who tells of a childhood marked by “a kind of formalism, a visceral near-identification with the writing I cared for, at the level of sentence structure, metrical pattern, rhyme” (“Queer and Now,” 1993). Entirely against a traditional understanding of who or what ‘the formalist’ is, she redescribes formalism as the trait of a “perverse reader.” Lee Edelman likewise argues without condemnation that “formalism expresses the excessive element in any world that exposes that world as not-all” (Bad Education, 2022). And Leo Bersani succeeds his work on sex, homosexuality and AIDS (“Is the Rectum a Grave?,” 1987) with a book dedicated entirely to formalist readings of Beckett, Rothko and Resnais (Arts of Impoverishment, 1993), as if to imply that there somehow exists an obvious and complete continuum between theorizing sexuality and formalist readings of art.
What, then, is this relationship between sex, sexuality and form; between queer theory and formalism? But if there is indeed one, how to think about the seeming opposition between queer theory’s common celebrations of ambivalence (Berlant) and even formlessness (Halberstam), and the rigorous, methodological fascinations with form that formalism champions, with all its emphasis on the innocuous in objects: lines, rhymes, rhythms, shapes? How and where does (or should?) queerness encounter form(s), and queer theory  formalism(s)? And what is finally  at stake in neglecting such an encounter?

2) Form(alisms) to queerness. Recent strands of formalist scholarship, such as the work on methodology by Eugenie Brinkema, sound increasingly and remarkably queer. Brinkema’s plea for a “radical formalism” attends to the “disaffordances” of form — its “capacity to trouble, disrupt, even void grounds of meaning, to render readings that are bad investments.” Her work presents an unmistakable echo of queer theory’s infatuation with bad educations, non-reproductions, failures, non-essentiality. At the same time, however, this queer-like formalist tendency stands in stark contrast with the work of other contemporary formalists, such as Anna Kornbluh and Caroline Levine. Both, in different voices, have recently turned to the promises of meaning and structure that form can afford. In urgent responses to crises of the university and politics (if not the world!), they call for a greater attendance to (theories of) form for the purposes of critical and social betterment, to counter what Kornbluh has called critique’s fatal retreat into the “beautific fantasy of formless life.” Indeed, what to think of queer theory’s own contributions to that fantasy, with all its utopian emphases on breakdown, anarchitecture, disruption? And, more broadly: how can form be at once what escapes any definitive politics and what sounds so politically relevant?
“Form” has meant surface shape and inseparable essence, superficial part and inalienable whole. “Formalism” has been used to justify a retreat from history and politics and to argue for their return to critique. Our starting point is not any one definition but the minimal proposition that form makes up the world we inhabit, and that queer and trans theories at best offer tangential tools for accounting for that proposition. Expect, then, readings of both canonical and lesser known queer theory scholars matched with readings on political form, textual form, social structure, and methodological formalisms, ranging from literary studies (like Eric Savoy’s “Primer on Queer Formalism”) to Brinkema’s work all the way back to, yes!, the New Critics and Russian formalists. These meetings open up, we hope, a different path through the central debates of contemporary theory, from issues of (anti)normativity to the antisocial and negativity, from destitution to infrastructure, in the spirit of an encounter with otherness that, in a phrase by Berlant and Edelman, “exceeds and undoes the subject’s fantasmatic sovereignty.”

Readings may include work by Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, Helen Palmer, Sarah Ahmed, Robyn Wiegman, Judith Butler, Eva Hayward, Eliza Steinbock, Sybil Lamb, Rizvana Bradley, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Malabou, John Paul Ricco, David J. Getsy, William J. Simmons, Anna Kornbluh, Carolina Levine, and early and historical formalists.

Schedule

First session

Our first session takes place on Monday March 10, 13:00. We will read and discuss Leo Bersani’s 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” next to and against the first chapter of Eugenie Brinkema’s 2022 book Life-Destroying Diagrams, on form, horror and the body: “Horrere or.”

More information on subsequent sessions will follow…

Credit Details

You can earn 1 ECT by attending two sessions before the end of the academic year (2024/2025), out of an expected total of four sessions. Students will be expected to do the readings, attend the session, and participate in the discussion. Reading materials will be distributed upon registration. Register by sending an e-mail to queerformalism@gmail.com with your name, student number (if applicable), what you study, and whether you’d like to receive the ECT.