Queer Today, Gone Tomorrow (English Studies) (Essay‪)‬

WHAT'S LEFT OF ENGLISH STUDIES? This is a slippery question for me, on a number of fronts. First, I find it hard these days to imagine something to the left of English Studies; despite the reactionary whimpers we can still detect from the conservative haunts of our departments, our discipline has placed itself so firmly on the left that it has become more or less synonymous with "progressive" politics. There's nothing to the left of English Studies because English Studies is left. The second difficulty for me, though, is my position in this political arena: as a queer scholar working in both textual and cultural studies, I assume I have common cause with the other people writing for this forum, but I'm not really sure what that common cause is. You see, a very cursory survey of English departments across the country reveals that most of the major schools in Canada are not doing queer theory or teaching it to their graduate students, and undergraduates fare no better. There is not much left, in Canada at any rate, of the kind of work I've been doing. Queer theory is one of those methodologies (and there are others: phenomenology, psychoanalysis, the new formalism) that have failed to make significant inroads in English Studies as they are practiced in Canada. But why should this be the case? I want in the next few pages to think about queerness in the Canadian academy, its reception, and its relative insignificance. My argument, cryptically put, is this: while there is little of queerness left in Canadian English studies, what's to the left of English studies is the queer. But evidence first. In preparation for writing this essay, I cruised the internet homepages for the major graduate schools in English across Canada to see which ones had full-time faculty who declared queer theory as a primary interest or which offered courses in queer theory. According to the websites (which I admit are never a reliable archive, but they do indicate what is being advertised to the potential grad student) the following departments have queer practitioners, although it doesn't follow that the schools are now or have been offering courses in queer theory: Alberta, UBC, Calgary, Guelph, McMaster, Ottawa, Simon Fraser, Western, Wilfrid Laurier, and York. The following don't: Carleton, Dalhousie, Manitoba, McGill, Memorial, UNB, Queen's, Saskatchewan, Victoria, Waterloo and Windsor. Toronto has someone interested in "Sexual Diversity Studies"--I'm not exactly sure what that is--and someone else interested in "Gay and Lesbian Culture" but the particular resonances of queerness are nowhere to be felt. What's even more interesting to me from these websites is that all the graduate schools in this country have people working in feminist studies and post-colonial and race studies. In most cases, there is more than one person in each of these fields. In fact, I once had someone tell me that her department was entirely devoted to materialist political work, yet hers is one of the departments in which no sustained queer work is being done.