-Antonin Artaud
-Dr. Schreber
-Michel Foucault
-Friedrich Nietzsche
-Franz Kafka
-Yukio Mishima
-Georges Bataille
-Alan Turing
-William S. Burroughs
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
-Jean Genet
-Derek Jarman
-Rainer Werner Fassbinder
-Pier Paolo Pasolini
-Todd Haynes
-Gregg Araki
This project of course will run into many obstacles, both within the general field of cultural studies and within the niche discourses of media studies, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies. Interdisciplinarity is required to think our way out of the untenable disciplinarity of medium specificity and identity politics, but is simultaneously resisted by an ossified corporate research university structure that enlists minoritarian discourse only to reiterate its politically evacuated notion of "diversity" as a strategy of its marketing and branding. This leads to a double-bind where we are once encouraged to work across disciplines, but must remain rigorously representative of our 'assigned' discipline. If the administrators of academic institutions were actually interested in interdisciplinary work, they would realize the rigidity of academia, as it has been traditionally constructed, based on 19th century divisions of the humanities and sciences, needs to become something else in order to foster a space where new work can be done successfully. This can only be done with experimentation and risk, and thus, some form of speculative work that penetrates the arbitrary boundaries between disciplines. In the 1980's and 1990's, with the formation of area studies departments such as American Studies, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, as well as the enshrining the more interdisciplinary (if theoretically biased) departments such as Film and Media Studies and Comparative Literature, somehow lead to further balkanization and less interdisciplinarity. Race, class, gender, and sexuality, as the primary modes of thinking difference, each now has their own space where that work can happen and not contaminate the "proper," "sanitized," "true," disciplines that they were radically disrupting.
In the most general sense, I use queer to mean 'resisting normalization' in ways that are not tied to the normalizations of gender, sex, race and class, which, at its worst, simply leads to academics who police difference more than think it. Given their status as that which is different from the norm, it is surprising how much research has been done in the vein of identifying homophobia, sexism, racism and elitism in various historical, political, social and cultural discourses. This kind of research seems to comfort itself in knowing that there is always more hatred of difference to be uncovered in the next cultural product or public debate, leading to the smug smile-and-knod of the Daily Show, or the refusal to think through differences that have little to do with the researcher's lived body, which often leads to aggressive tactics of refuting them on the basis of one's own desires, concerns or politics. Thus, allies are turned against each other, and even legitimization of difference only functions to short-circuit the radical projects that these programs originally promised by pitting them against each other. In order to do work that does not insult the concerns of the these groups, we have reached a point where only the most bland, mediocre, politically void kind of research is embraced by administrators, committee members, and job openings. Relying on the alleged "objectivity" of a Marxist-inflected social science that despises most forms of cultural representation as mere symptoms of capitalist ideology and bourgeois taste (or loves them for the same reason). In order to avoid the tendency in Marxist work to to identify how every discipline is objectively wrong that doesn't foreground its interests in modes of production, labor and class (Miller, Lefebvre) we must formulate a mode of queer theory that is at once singular to specific concerns of thinking difference, while opening up spaces where confrontations with other modes of thought within the traditional university can take place, not to find the "right" answer, but to experiment, question and problematize both bodies in the event of the encounter. Nobody will walk away unscathed in the encounter with difference. We can strategically weaponize submission as a mode of thought that perhaps can be thought of as a productive failure (Halberstam). Mobilizing queer theory in the academy will open thought to both the risk of contagion and the productive assemblages that these encounters necessarily unleash from potentiality, only to retreat again back into the virtual.
