Overview

In As If!, Chase Gregory explores the stylistically strategic, often campy, and productively fraught cross-identifications of early queer criticism. Gregory calls this form of AIDS-era criticism as if! - a mode of writing in which authors struggle to read, write, and identify with and across categories of race, sexuality, and gender. Analyzing the work of Robert Reid-Pharr, Deborah McDowell, Barbara Johnson, and Eve Sedgwick, Gregory shows how their writing productively challenges fixed ideas of identity and knowledge production. Using these four writers as case studies of a larger trend within early queer criticism, Gregory demonstrates that even when critical attempts at relation are met by impasse, as if! criticism breaks down social relation, especially within those fields influenced by queer theory, deconstructionist feminist theory, and black feminist theory. By advocating a return to as if! criticism as a politically useful blueprint for contemporary cultural inquiry, Gregory draws attention to the obstacles to forging identification across difference and insists on the impossible project of solidarity across such difference.

Full Product Details

9781478028895

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Can a man write as a woman? Can a white lesbian write as a black lesbian? . . . As if! Staging a surprising, yet timely return to early queer and gay/lesbian criticism's experimentations with cross-identifications across gender and race, As If! masterfully demonstrates how all identifications, even those with identities to which one legitimately 'belongs, ' are at once generative and fraught.""--Kadji Amin, author of ""Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History""

“Can a man write as a woman? Can a white lesbian write as a black lesbian? . . . As if! Staging a surprising, yet timely return to early queer and gay/lesbian criticism’s experimentations with cross-identifications across gender and race, As If! masterfully demonstrates how all identifications, even those with identities to which one legitimately ‘belongs,’ are at once generative and fraught.” - Kadji Amin, author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

Author Information

Chase Gregory is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University.

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