A Queer Politics of the Democratic Miscount (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

I called it the count of the uncounted, the part of those who have no part. It was sometimes misunderstood as the part of the excluded. Ranciere, 'Misadventures of Critical Thinking' (2008: 15, emphasis added) Is it possible to be 'old-fashioned' when it comes to queer theory and queer politics? This seems an odd question to ask of two entities whose history is still less than two decades long, but I pose it at the start of this essay because I fear that my arguments here might be critically construed as insisting on a set of positions, relations, and analytical distinctions that many feel have already been 'surpassed.' Of course, queer has been surpassing itself from the beginning: in an early essay within what we now might call the 'history' of queer theory--an essay that paradoxically helped to instantiate 'queer theory' as a term and concept--Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner suggested that queer was a fad that had already run its course (Berlant and Warner, 1995). Today, of course, queer is not just 'hot' (as Berlant and Warner described it so many years ago) in certain segments of academic and activist communities; queer is now completely mainstream. It shows up not only in the titles of television programmes, but also in just about every place imaginable within academia. Indeed, just because 'queer' appears in the title of an academic paper, one should not necessarily expect to hear anything about queer theory a la Sedgwick, Warner, or Butler; nor should one expect a discussion of queer politics or activism.