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14/11/19: On Heteropessimism


Renée Magritte, "The Lovers II"

The next meeting of the Queer STS Reading Group will take place on Thursday 14th November from 5pm-6pm in the Alice Farrands Room on the ground floor of the STS Department (22 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AW).


We’ll be discussing Indiana Seresin’s (2019) essay for The New Inquiry: “On Heteropessimism.” Heterosexuality has a confusing status within queer theory: at once claimed and disregarded as its “proper object” of study. While queer theorists committed early on to ‘queer’ as a critical theory of cis-hetero-society as a whole, the discipline has largely failed to make good on this promise, lapsing instead to what Eve Sedgwick termed a “minoritising” view of sexuality in particular. Where feminism has often successfully established patriarchy to be everybody’s problem, queer theorists have largely failed to do the same for sexuality as a category. There are two major consequences (that spring to mind) here. Firstly, queerness, as the major pre-occupation of queer studies, endures the corollary of being demarcated as more constructed than its cis-heterosexual counterpart. All the while, heterosexuality remains unscathed: tacitly inscribed as more ‘natural’, less ‘constructed’. Secondly, as a result of its shielding from the critical gaze of queer studies, where heterosexuality has been a focus of study — e.g. in studies of “toxic masculinity” within contemporary feminism — the unfortunate side effect has been a recolonising or restoration of the project of heterosexuality: implying that the construct of heterosexuality is something that can be fixed.


This is the terrain that Seresin maps out in “On Heteropessimism.” Seresin explores shifts in contemporary discourse on heterosexuality and the emergence of something Seresin terms “heteropessimism,” which she defines as “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.” Taking heteropessimism as a starting point, Seresin invites the reader to reproblematise the project of heterosexuality and to look more closely at it and with a sense of political urgency.


The essay can be found here: https://thenewinquiry.com/on-heteropessimism/

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