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miraveta 's review for:
Queer: A Graphic History
by Meg-John Barker
informative
reflective
In general a fairly good and broad explainer of various aspects of queer theory and its intersections with other fields.
I have two annoyances:
1. The authors loooooved describing as many things as possible in binary ways and then adding a footnote saying 'hey, see that? another binary!' (Ex: identity politics/queer politics, nature/nurture, good/bad, smart/foolish, etc).
I think doing this so many times was annoying. It also risks minimizing the real importance of analyzing and deemphasizing binarist thinking in the most important cases where it does the most harm. It also gave off the impression that all of these binaries were equally pointless -- when really, some were genuinely common binary models frequently perpetrated by our society and pushed on people, while others were more so just cases where the authors had only bothered to address 2 aspects of a much broader discursive space. (Not to mention cases where there is actual value to analyzing two things as mirrors of each other! It doesn't necessarily mean the people involved in those discussions think those are the only two ways of looking at the world!) They do try to address this later on in the book but I feel that it's not really enough to subvert the impact that has already occurred by then.
2. In a similar vein, the authors mention late in the book that one of the key critiques of much of queer theory is the tendency to whitewash and/or prioritize white Western voices while erasing nonwhite/non-Western ones. This is true and important to discuss. But they point it out and write their book in a way that in and of itself kind of contributes to that erasure:
I have two annoyances:
1. The authors loooooved describing as many things as possible in binary ways and then adding a footnote saying 'hey, see that? another binary!' (Ex: identity politics/queer politics, nature/nurture, good/bad, smart/foolish, etc).
I think doing this so many times was annoying. It also risks minimizing the real importance of analyzing and deemphasizing binarist thinking in the most important cases where it does the most harm. It also gave off the impression that all of these binaries were equally pointless -- when really, some were genuinely common binary models frequently perpetrated by our society and pushed on people, while others were more so just cases where the authors had only bothered to address 2 aspects of a much broader discursive space. (Not to mention cases where there is actual value to analyzing two things as mirrors of each other! It doesn't necessarily mean the people involved in those discussions think those are the only two ways of looking at the world!) They do try to address this later on in the book but I feel that it's not really enough to subvert the impact that has already occurred by then.
2. In a similar vein, the authors mention late in the book that one of the key critiques of much of queer theory is the tendency to whitewash and/or prioritize white Western voices while erasing nonwhite/non-Western ones. This is true and important to discuss. But they point it out and write their book in a way that in and of itself kind of contributes to that erasure:
"However, few of the queer theories we have covered so far have considered race as centrally important (and, relatedly, how many of the queer theorists mentioned have been white?)."
This is true --but also, you chose who to put in your book and who to leave out?!? This way of discussing it gives the impression that there just aren't as many key nonwhite theorists which is laughably false. And the book knows and says it's false -- but still centers white theorists and activists for most of the book while missing opportunities to mention the nonwhite theorists and activists also involved in key moments. (How do you talk about black feminists' influence, including Audre Lorde, and not even mention the Combahee River Collective? How can you talk about Stonewall without ever mentioning STAR???) And honestly, it even felt like there was a bias in the few that were mentioned -- it seemed like white theorists and activists were way more likely to get a dedicated drawing of their face and key ideas, while black and brown activists were more likely to appear only in the text or squished together into 1 shared picture.
In general I think the authors were aware of these biases and mentioned them, as they should. They also covered a much broader scope than I had originally expected when starting this book -- even I learned a few things, and I've read a lot. This just makes it all the more frustrating that they nonetheless kind of reproduced certain biases themselves.