No Sex Please, We’re
American
Celibacies: American
Modernism and Sexual
Life. Benjamin Kahan.
Duke University Press,
2013.
Sex, or the Unbearable.
Lauren Berlant and
Lee Edelman. Duke
University Press, 2014.
Sexual Futures, Queer
Gestures, and Other
Latina Longings. Juana
María Rodríguez.
NYU Press, 2014.
American Literary History, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 614–624
doi:10.1093/alh/ajv030
Advance Access publication June 7, 2015
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Tim Dean*
There is an open secret about sex: most queer theorists don’t
like it. Three decades after anthropologist Gayle Rubin inaugurated
what would become known as Queer studies by announcing “[t]he
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time has come to think about sex,” the field remains deeply conflict-
ed about its object of study (267). Not just a question of methodolog-
ical differences and debates (one expects nothing less in an
interdisciplinary field), this issue concerns fundamental disagree-
ments over what the basic object of research in Queer studies is or
should be. Rubin’s aim in 1984 had been to develop a conceptual
framework for thinking critically about erotic practice, without as-
suming heterosexuality as the paradigm and without relying on the
often heterosexualizing lens of feminist analysis. “I want to challenge
the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a
theory of sexuality,” she argued. “Feminism is the theory of gender
oppression. To automatically assume that this makes it the theory of
sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one
hand, and erotic desire, on the other” (307). Coming out of lesbian
feminism, with its intensely polarizing debates around pornography
and sadomasochism, Rubin yearned for a critical discourse capable
of approaching human sexuality, in all its variation, with the custom-
ary prejudices and moralisms set aside. Her gambit of differentiating
sex and sexuality from wholesale determination by the categories of
gender—albeit still controversial among feminists—was a field-
defining gesture that retrospectively conferred upon “Thinking Sex”
the status of urtext.
Alas, it turned out to be tougher than we imagined 30 years ago
to think critically about sex, rather than about gender, race, ethnicity,
transnationality, or any of the other categories with which Queer
studies in the US has become considerably more comfortable in the
*Tim Dean is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
His latest book, edited with Steven Ruszczycky and David Squires, is Porn Archives
(2014).
 American Literary History 615

years since. There is something about sex—understood not as ana-

tomical difference but as erotic practice—that many scholars in
Queer studies find oddly aversive. Critics before me have noticed
glimmers of this phenomenon and have explained it in various
ways.1 What I wish to add to the conversation is a claim that critical
squeamishness about sex appears especially pronounced in Queer
studies within the US. This essay’s title alludes to the long-running
West End stage farce No Sex Please, We’re British (1971), which pic-
tured the dilemmas of a naïve English married couple who become
overwhelmed by sexually explicit material sent to them in error from
Scandinavia. Here I’m trying to suggest that Queer studies’ diffidence
about sex is nationally specific, having to do with the history of the

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professional-managerial class in the US, with the social sciences’ com-
mitment to identitarianism, with deep legacies of Puritanism and indi-
vidualism, and with the institutional organization of knowledge.
My claims cannot be developed fully here. But, in the context
of academic knowledge production, it is worth considering why the
modern research university has no established place outside of the
experimental sciences for the study of sex. Our universities offer
many venues for the study of gender and various forms of multicul-
turalism (albeit without the same institutional support as the sciences
receive). Every North American university allocates institutional re-
sources for gender, whereas almost none sets aside money or tenure
lines for sex-related research. Outside the laboratory, research on sex-
uality takes shelter ambivalently under the umbrella of gender
studies, where its justification tends to be framed in identitarian
terms. Sex is deemed worthy of study principally when wedded to
identity or personhood. It is now mostly okay to talk about lesbians
or gay men or transgendered folk or bisexuals. When attached to the
dignity of personhood, sex merits research inasmuch as those it
marks are deemed worthy of legal and institutional protection. When
detached from the dignity of personhood, however, it becomes much
sketchier. The recurring anxiety is that sex will demean personhood;
it is assumed to need strong identity formations to redeem and render
it safe. On campus, as elsewhere, identity works to contain sexuality.
Queer theory, developed in the early 1990s as a multibarreled
philosophical and political critique of identity, was supposed to
counteract this tendency. Yet the institutionalization of queer theory
as Queer studies has had the opposite effect, by converting sex and
sexuality into what Robyn Wiegman aptly calls “identity knowledg-
es” (5). In Object Lessons (2012), Wiegman lays out the stakes of
academic disciplines that are based on identity categories—Women’s
studies, African American studies, LGBTQI studies, and so on. Her
analysis of their disciplinary dilemmas helps to make apparent how
what gets lost in the struggle for recognition motivating the rainbow
 616
To be properly queer in
the academy today
means . . . to stop
thinking about sex in
favor of what are
perceived as more urgent
problems. Queer
studies . . . has won
institutional respectability
by strategically distancing
itself from the messiness
of the erotic.
No Sex Please
coalition of LGBTQI identities is precisely sex as a variable set of
practices that undermine the terms through which recognition could
be dispensed. One need not be a strict Freudian to grasp how sex is
not primarily an expression of identity but its undoing. And when
sex serves as anything other than a vector of harm or oppression, it
seems inevitable that other matters should take precedence for critical
attention. “What does queer studies have to say about empire, global-
ization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and terrorism?” asked the editors
of a queer special issue of Social Text in 2005 (Eng, Halberstam, and
Muñoz, 2). “What does queer studies tell us about immigration,
citizenship, prisons, welfare, mourning, and human rights?” (2).
Regarded as insufficiently serious, sex must yield to weightier issues.
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To be properly queer in the academy today means—contra Rubin—
to stop thinking about sex in favor of what are perceived as more
urgent problems. We need to be thinking globally (or at least transna-
tionally) if we are to achieve social justice. Queer studies, like the
broader lesbian and gay political movements to which it bears a
complex relationship, has won institutional respectability by strategi-
cally distancing itself from the messiness of the erotic. Academic
high-mindedness easily edges out attention to bodily desire.
The books under consideration here are more or less aware of
the peculiar history of the field, and they navigate its contradictions
with varying degrees of success. One of them wants to restore the
heat of eros to Queer studies; one wishes to bury sex in abstractions;
and one wants to claim that not having sex is, in fact, the queerest sex
of all and should be acknowledged, even embraced, “as a sexuality in
its own right” (Kahan 2). Here I quote from Benjamin Kahan, who
opens his book, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life
(2013), with a line—“The time has come to think about celibacy”—
that evokes Rubin’s field-inaugurating call from 1984 while studious-
ly ignoring everything her work represents (1). Although he never
puts it in so many words, Kahan makes apparent that celibacy is
itself a way of thinking about sex. However, he argues that celibacy,
far from a negative mode of thinking about sex, has historical associ-
ations with reform that can be reclaimed for radical sexual politics
today. More than simple erotophobia, celibacy in Kahan’s hands
yields nuanced literary readings of a range of queer writers and
artists, from Henry James to W. H. Auden, Mina Loy, and Marianne
Moore; and from the neglected Harlem Renaissance religious leader
Father Divine to the paradigmatically unneglected Andy Warhol.
There is something wonderfully counterintuitive about Kahan’s
characterization of celibacy as a form of sexuality rather than the
absence of one. Yet in order to depathologize celibacy and treat it as
something other than a version of the closet, he insists over and over
that celibacy is a choice. The language of sexual voluntarism pervades
 American Literary History 617

the book: “What I am suggesting is that historically celibacy was a

choice, and this choice was a site of radical politics, of feminist orga-
nizing, of black activism, queer citizenship, and other leftist interven-
tions” (153). Not only a choice, celibacy is advocated throughout as a
politically progressive one—indeed, as “queer, revolutionary” (53).
Now, you do not need to read far into Foucault (or Freud) to come
across the idea that sexuality is hardly a choice. For at least 40 years,
the epistemology of social constructionism has elaborated conceptual
frameworks that demystify “choice” as a viable alternative to either
sexual essentialism or the specter of erotic compulsion. Although
Celibacies is an impressive first book, thoroughly researched and ele-
gantly written, its ostensible sophistication is belied by its wholesale

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amnesia about the most basic lessons of queer theory. Its commitment
to a neoliberal ideology of choice forgets Foucault for all the wrong
reasons.
What accompanies Kahan’s sexual voluntarism is a profound
commitment to identitarianism that likewise appears oblivious to
queer theory’s fundamental insights. “This project understands celiba-
cy primarily as a coherent sexual identity rather than as a ‘closeting’
screen for another identity,” he announces in his introduction (2).
Does anyone in the humanities today still believe in the hoary notion
of “coherent sexual identity”? What kind of critical fantasy is this?
Kahan’s blithe dismissal of all things psychoanalytic does not serve
him well here. One understands the impulse to argue that celibacy may
be more interesting than it seems at first glance, and one admires
Kahan’s retrieval of its lost history, but the attempt to reify celibacy as
an identity—and, moreover, an exclusively progressive one—rings
false. If, as he claims, celibacy’s “meanings are as variable and myriad
as those of sex,” then it remains unclear why the only meanings Kahan
discloses align so perfectly with left academic politics (2). Whence the
conviction that a topic is worth researching only insofar as it reflects
contemporary values and prejudices?
It may be stating the obvious to remark that celibacy was
always going to be a bitter pill for this reader to swallow. The further
I read into Celibacies, the more keenly I felt that its identitarianism,
voluntarism, and progressivism rendered celibacy as utterly distinct
from anything resembling sexuality. Kahan claims that his book
“attempt[s] to think sexuality without sex and to find the sexiness of
no sex,” which is certainly a catchy formulation, even if “the sexiness
of no sex” sounds as hollow as an advertising slogan upon closer in-
spection (27). What Celibacies offers is, indeed, sexuality without
negativity—a Pollyanna sexuality that has evacuated everything that
makes sex disturbing, exciting, and intellectually worthwhile. Rather
than as a sexuality, celibacy emerges from Kahan’s study as an
ego-ideal with deep historical roots. Quite unlike sexuality, celibacy
618 No Sex Please

offers a moral position that can be embraced for reformist ends. In

this respect, celibacy works similarly to how queer currently func-
tions in the North American academy, namely, as a progressive
ego-ideal—something to aspire to—that inevitably conforms to the
logic of identity. Institutionalized as an identity knowledge, queer
has become about the ideological purity of academic egos rather than
about sex. Needless to say, that purity requires extensive disciplinary
policing.
Nowhere are these lamentable dynamics more vividly on display
than in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s book, Sex, or the
Unbearable (2014). The unremitting dreariness of much recent work in
Queer studies plumbs new depths here. By dreariness, I mean the field’s

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commitment to recondite vocabularies and abstractions that exemplify
the worst of academic jargon. Early exponents of queer theory, such as
Judith Butler, David Halperin, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, were all
notoriously poor prose stylists. But the so-called dialog staged by this
new book is nigh unreadable. Here, for example, is Berlant pressing a
point: “Breakup forces facing the nonrelation that accompanies conven-
tional optimism about attachment and points to the necessity of fantasy
within the ordinary to provide a ground for the extension of relation
whether or not an adorable nonsovereign mutuality is achieved episodi-
cally or, as we will see, on the affective virtual plane of ‘forever’” (22).
If only this sentence were an exception or attributable to printing errors.
Unfortunately, however, such sentences are par for the course, and
therefore context offers little aid. It sometimes seems as though the
authors were trying to outdo each other in unintelligibility—as if
writing illegibly were the approved mode of academic queerness. To
graduate students working in Queer studies, we are compelled to iterate
once again that this is not how to do it.
When Berlant utters sentences such as the one quoted above—
and I am fighting the urge to quote more—it is not clear what would
constitute a meaningful response. Although the authors organize their
book as a series of dialogs on the topic of sex and negativity, the poten-
tial interest of the dialog form is squandered by Berlant’s treating it as
an opportunity for upping the ante in abstraction and incoherence.
Instead, Sex gives us a series of airy, self-justifying monologues that do
little to illuminate or enhance either critic’s position. Its title suggests
that the book is about sex, but the reader is quickly disabused in the
opening paragraph when the authors confess, “To be honest, there’s not
that much sex in the book” (vii). Instead of discussing sex, these queer
theorists juggle a handful of abstract nouns—“affectivity,” “antago-
nism,” “attachment,” “futurity,” “negativity,” “optimism,” “relational-
ity,” “reparativity,” “sociality,” and “sovereignty”—that they maneuver
into various positions on their verbal chessboard. The predominance of
the negative permits each of the terms to be doubled via negation; there
 American Literary History 619

is much talk of “nonsovereignty” and “antisociality,” for example.

None of the terms means what one might expect it to mean; frequently,
the authors themselves squabble about the terms’ meaning. The specta-
cle of these two at cross-purposes over their precious jargon is unedify-
ing, to say the least.
What can be retrieved from this mess? “We were brought togeth-
er as like-minded polemicists against futurity,” observes Berlant in a
moment of lucidity (116). Here, she is referring to previous work—
principally Edelman’s No Future (2004) and her own Cruel Optimism
(2011)—that elaborated critiques of futurity understood in terms of tel-
eology, reproduction, and various projects of social normalization.
Both critics are concerned about what we all seem prepared to put up

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with, in the here and now, for the sake of some promised future. They
regard sex as involving the promise of future happiness and, at the
same time, as an encounter in which those promises are undone. Or, as
Edelman puts it, “we both see sex as a site for experiencing this inten-
sified encounter with what disorganizes accustomed ways of being”
(11). It may be worth noting that, in their claims about the effects of
sex on subjectivity, Berlant and Edelman do not differentiate straight
sex from queer sex; apparently, the distinction remains irrelevant.
Viewing sex as involving a disorganization of selfhood, they draw
heavily on Leo Bersani’s early work, particularly his contention, in
The Freudian Body (1986), that “sexuality would be that which is in-
tolerable to the structured self” (38). This is the idea, germinal for
queer theory, that sex undermines identity—a line of thinking that
Bersani, a notably lucid writer, has elaborated in several contexts in
subsequent decades. With Berlant and Edelman, however, this vital
psychoanalytic idea becomes muddied and convoluted.
The problem stems from how Edelman has taken a moment in
Bersani and aggrandized it into a doctrine. That doctrine, known as
“the antisocial thesis” in queer theory, is distinguished by the fact
that almost nobody subscribes to it. Even Edelman now acknowledg-
es the limits of its utility. The antisocial thesis nevertheless has taken
on a life of its own, provoking many in Queer studies ( particularly
younger scholars) to argue at great length against a critical position
essentially devoid of defenders. Hence, for example, Kahan insists
upon “the sociability of celibacy” (xi) against a background abuzz
with the noise of the antisocial thesis, while Juana María Rodríguez
situates her argument in direct opposition to No Future, as her book’s
title attests. Sex, or the Unbearable represents an attempt on the part
of its authors to clarify their respective positions vis-à-vis the antiso-
cial thesis. Yet it makes for such a rebarbative reading experience
that one cannot help hoping their book spells the death knell for the
whole dispiriting debate.
620 No Sex Please

The basic idea of the antisocial thesis is that erotic experience

harbors the capacity to undo not only selfhood but also conventional
social relations. This idea may be traced to the final paragraph of “Is
the Rectum a Grave?” (queer theory’s other urtext from the 1980s),
in which Bersani argues, “If sexuality is socially dysfunctional in
that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-
shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart, it could
also be thought of as our primary hygienic practice of nonviolence”
(222). Social and political consequences ensue from the paradox that
sex brings people together only to push them apart. The psychoana-
lytically derived notion that erotic experience involves a disruption
of coherent selfhood is, in part, what Berlant and Edelman are refer-

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ring to when they speak of “negativity.” This is the negativity in sex
that rationalizes cultural negativity about sex, and it is precisely what
must be elided for Kahan to characterize celibacy as a sexuality.
Furthermore, it is this self-shattering aspect that prompts
Berlant and Edelman to speak of “nonsovereignty,” by which they
mean a dethroning of “His Majesty the Ego,” to put it in Freud’s
terms (150). The would-be sovereignty of the human ego, in inter-
subjective and social relations, is undermined by the negativity of
sex. Describing this process in the idiom of “sovereignty,” Berlant
and Edelman aim to bring out the political dimensions of the arrange-
ment—to indicate, in other words, that it is not just about subjectiv-
ity, the private realm, or the individual. Following Bersani, they are
trying to show how sex is politically significant not only insofar as it
functions as a vector of domination or oppression. And yet by claim-
ing that negativity challenges subjective sovereignty—that it undoes
liberalism’s fetish of autonomous selfhood, as well as neoliberal-
ism’s false promises—they constantly risk rehabilitating negativity
as politically progressive. This is the risk that Edelman repeatedly
diagnoses in Berlant’s contributions, and it accounts for why these
two can never get on the same page.
It should not go unremarked that their discourse of sovereignty/
nonsovereignty/postsovereignty attempts to politicize negativity without
taking account of the complex politics or history of sovereignty as such.
The nuance required to register that complexity would entail reference
to particular sociopolitical contexts. For example, as Rodríguez points
out in the context of Puerto Rico, “Conceptualizing sovereignty through
indigenous studies, North American tribal land claims, or anticolonial
movements productively informs and troubles sovereignty’s connection
to violence” (71). Here, the specificity of context challenges Berlant and
Edelman’s abstract generalities as well as the political credibility they
aim to achieve by deploying a particular vocabulary.
Thus far I have tried to gloss and contextualize some of the
terms these critics lob back and forth, though I must admit that doing
 American Literary History 621

so feels a bit like translating Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for

nonnative speakers. There are moments in their book when its authors
appear to grasp that needing an English-language translator might be a
problem. They explain that they have included the full text of Lydia
Davis’s short story, “Break It Down,” as an appendix to their discus-
sion “so that there will be something outside of the hermeticism of the
idiom we develop between us” (68). The Davis story is the best part of
the book. Not just a virtuoso example of the dramatic monologue in
prose, “Break It Down” provides some ballast against their flights of
abstraction, as well as demonstrating, if only by painful juxtaposition,
how long sentences, when properly crafted, may be beautiful rather
than ugly. An unnamed narrator’s attempt to analyze and quantify a

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heterosexual relationship that has ended, “Break It Down” gives us a
male monologue uninterrupted by any other voice or perspective save
Davis’s quiet irony. This irony rebounds on the dialog between
Edelman and Berlant, as when the latter asks, “Why else, after all, is
the story told to a silent listener? Perhaps he hopes that the listener will
shut up and nod, so that he can pretend that his monologue is a
genuine exchange” (93). As witnesses to the excruciating monologues
that make up Sex, or the Unbearable, readers doubtless are expected
simply to “shut up and nod” at these critics’ portentous observations.
It is hard not to see the authors’ love of abstraction as simultane-
ously a disavowed hatred of sex. Abstraction enables the maintenance
of a hygienic distance from the messiness of embodied desire. Hatred
of sex likewise manifests itself in the form of a preoccupation with
affect—or “affectivity.” At one point, Berlant notes the “complexity of
talking about sex when it would be so much easier to be reflecting on
feelings” (20). Here she registers, even as her own work exemplifies,
how the turn to affect in Queer studies has enabled a decisive turning
away from sex. Often rationalized in terms of renewed attention to
embodiment, affect studies conveniently manage to forget about those
experiences of embodiment that directly involve eros. This, of course,
was precisely the point of Silvan Tomkins’s attempt to redescribe
human emotion in physiological terms, without the benefit of psycho-
analysis, and it was central to his appeal for Sedgwick. Since
Tomkins, the North American progenitor of affect studies, did not
regard sex as a significant factor in human motivation, it is no small
irony that his work should have been championed by a founding figure
of Queer studies.2 In Tomkins, the body may be coursing with affects
but it is resolutely deeroticized.
How to get sex back into the picture? If abstraction distances us
from embodiment, then one possibility for redirecting critical atten-
tion to the erotic body would be corporeal gesture. That, at least, is
the wager of Juana María Rodríguez’s new book, Sexual Futures,
Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), whose sensuous
622 No Sex Please

prose and unequivocal commitment to thinking sex come as a

welcome relief after the desiccations of Berlant and Edelman. What
I find most significant about this book is less its engagement with the
antisocial thesis than its elaboration of a queer theory of gesture
capable of illuminating sexual politics at both micro and macro
levels. Rodríguez provides an expansive understanding of gesture
that draws on performance theory to explain how “gesture functions
as a socially legible and highly codified form of kinetic communica-
tion, and as a cultural practice that is differentially manifested
through particular forms of embodiment” (6). Gesture entails con-
ventions of intelligibility but also offers opportunities for subverting
those conventions. Focusing on gesture thus returns us to the speci-

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ficities of bodily movement even as it indicates a potentially utopian
beyond of the present moment. It is the anticipatory gestures of politi-
cal movements—their gestures toward a better future—no less than
the “specific corporeal articulations of fingers, thighs, and tongues”
that Rodríguez braids together in Sexual Futures (4).
Her focus on gesture positions Rodríguez to tackle a methodo-
logical problem central to humanities research on sexuality, namely,
the fact that “sex leaves little archival trace” (Jagose 189).3 This is es-
pecially true of nonreproductive sex, which holds a distinctly phantom
status in official archives and standard historical records. Physical ges-
tures exemplify the material yet evanescent qualities of nonreproduc-
tive sex, insofar as they tend to be over quickly and resist written
documentation. “To write about gesture,” argues Rodríguez, “is to
engage that which exceeds language through language, to reach out to
touch figures in motion that are no longer there, to capture in static
black and white marks the scent of a body that has left no trace” (99).
Sexual Futures pursues a vital project of expanding the archive via
documenting the ephemeral. In an especially fascinating chapter,
Rodríguez connects the gestures of Latin dance to those of sex, elaborat-
ing the erotic implications of disco, mambo, rumba, salsa, and meren-
gue, while also drawing attention to the often transient spaces in which
bodies congregate for pleasure (the physical locations, as well as the
gestures, are ephemeral). Given that bodily gestures may be captured
best in visual media, it is no surprise that Rodríguez turns to the hetero-
geneous archive of Latina/o pornography; but she also explores, in the
context of politicized kinship, those Daddy fantasies often found in
BDSM sex scenarios. These archives and their richly elaborated con-
texts illuminate her claim that “sex is always more than personal” (17).
The claim that sex exceeds the personal remains axiomatic for
Queer studies. It’s a claim that (as with feminism) leads us from the
personal to the political, from the private to the public, and from the
individual or the couple to the social and the collective. It may even
encourage us to reflect on the impersonal dimensions of intimacy.
 American Literary History 623

Yet the claim that sex exceeds the personal also risks abstracting eros
from embodiment by refocusing attention on social or institutional
power relations. This, after all, was one of the complaints directed at
Foucault’s introductory volume of the History of Sexuality—that it
contained so little sex. Exploring the fantasies of BDSM offers one
way to keep sex and power in focus together, even as erotic power
dynamics never exactly mirror institutional relations of power (and
therefore the one cannot serve as a reliable allegory of the other). Sex
may be political, but this fact should not license the wholesale drift-
ing of critical attention from the former to the latter.
If abstraction represents one problem, then displacement repre-
sents another. Queer studies developed by forging connections

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between sexuality and other axes of social exclusion, most notably
race, ethnicity, and disability. As Rodriguez’s book makes clear, US
racial (and racist) history has made it a priority to link sexuality with
issues of racialization. Although its point of departure is the Latina
femme rather than paradigmatic blackness, Sexual Futures is typical of
recent Queer studies scholarship in its deep concern with racial differ-
ence. What distinguishes the book as atypical is Rodríguez’s admirable
determination not to allow the specificities of sex to get lost in the in-
tersectional mix. The doctrine of intersectionality—characterized by
Wiegman as “an imperative to attend evenly and adequately to iden-
tity’s composite whole: race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, nation,
religion, and increasingly age and ability”—has generated the fantasy
of “a critical practice that never excludes” (31, 242). The paradox is
that North American Queer studies, in its middle-class horror of being
thought exclusionary, has repeatedly excluded eros from consideration.
Sexual Futures makes plain that this exclusion, while all too common,
is far from necessary or inevitable.
In No Sex Please, We’re British, explicit sexuality is unwelcome
because regarded as irremediably foreign, other. A certain psychoana-
lytic perspective would insist that the challenge of sex stems from its
contamination by the unconscious and that, indeed, human sexuality
(in contrast to the animal kind) is other. What I find striking about
recent work in Queer studies, whether couched in psychoanalytic
terms or not, is its genteel reluctance to engage sexuality save through
the domesticating lenses of identity. With certain notable exceptions,
Queer studies has become nothing short of xenophobic about sex.

Notes

1. See Bersani, Homos (1995); Michael Warner, Trouble with Normal: Sex,
Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999); and “Queer and Then?” Chronicle of
624 No Sex Please

Higher Education 58 (6 January 2012): B6–B9; After Sex? On Writing Since Queer
Theory (2011), ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker; Jagose, Orgasmology; and
Michael O’Rourke, “The Big Secret,” forthcoming in InterAlia: A Journal of Queer
Studies. It is worth noting that the latter two critiques hail from outside the US—
from Australia and Ireland, respectively.

2. See Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness (1962–1992); Shame and its Sisters:
A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank; and
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2009), who writes,
“I’m rather abashed that Touching Feeling includes so little sex” (13).

3. I take this phrase from Jagose, though it encapsulates a problematic that has ani-
mated a range of recent scholarship, including that of Anjali Arondekar’s For the
Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2009).

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Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren and Lee Edelman. Sex, Jagose, Annamarie. Orgasmology.

or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke UP,
2014.
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