After Sex?

Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is the author of Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism and Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s Anti-Gay Policy, also published by Duke University Press.Andrew Parker is Professor of English at Amherst College and the editor of Jacques RanciÈre’s The Philosopher and His Poor, also published by Duke University Press.

“At a moment when many had begun to worry that queer theory was becoming little more than a widespread litany of dogmas and slogans, this volume arrives as a wonderful surprise: not only because it reminds us what a contribution the varied intellectual currents grouped together under that rubric have been making-and for nearly twenty years now-to the renewal of our intellectual life; but also, and more importantly, because it shows to what a degree this theoretical effervescence lives on, and how powerfully productive it still is in all its characteristically marvelous variety.”-Didier Eribon, author of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self “[A] a kaleidoscopic collection that rotates around the personal-is-political-is-personal axis of denormativization. . . . Queer theory, in short, is alive and kicking. Having proliferated, branched out, and, so far, resisted ossification, it provides space for diversity and disagreement. Testifying to this, the contributions to After Sex? make an illuminating and, yes, entertaining read.” - Sylvia Mieszkowski (GLQ) “[T]he value of After Sex? resides in its unwavering commitment to show how the nuances of queer theory aid in making it a powerful form of scholarship and politics. And this motley crew of interdisciplinary scholars reflects the exact kind of bricolage that Cultural Studies argues is productive. More importantly, this book insists that troubling the lenses through which we see the world is imperative if scholars ever want to make sense of a conjuncture that is so complexly intersectional.” - Raechel Tiffe (Cultural Studies) “Together, the essays that make up this collection offer an engaging insight into the origins, development, expansiveness and potential problems of queer theory. After Sex? does not provide a straightforward, conclusive answer to its own ambiguous question, but then it would be somewhat queer – or, rather, unqueer – if it did.” (Forum for Modern Language Studies)

• Introduction / Janet Halley and Andrew Parker 1Genealogies of After Queer Times / Carla Freccero 17Still After / Elizabeth Freeman 27After Thoughts / Jonathan Goldberg 34Glad to Be Unhappy / Joseph Litvak 45Do You Smoke? Or, Is There Life? After Sex? / Michael Moon 55Post Sex: On Being Too Slow, Too Stupid, Too Soon / Kate Thomas 66Affects and the (Anti-)Social Starved / Lauren Berlant 79Shame on You / Leo Bersani 91Ever After: History, Negativity, and the Social / Lee Edelman 110Queering Identities What's Queer about Race? / Richard Thompson Ford 121Queer Theory Addiction / Neville Hoad 130The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep / José Esteban Muñoz 142Oklahobo: Following Craig Womack's American Indian and Queer Studies / Bethany Schneider 151Lesbian and Gay after Queer Public Feelings / Ann Cvetkovich 169Queers ________ This / Heather Love 180After Male Sex / Richard Rambuss 192Neither Freud nor Foucault? Lonely / Michael Cobb 207When? Where? What? / Michael Lucey 221Queer Theory: Postmortem / Jeff Nunokawa 245Disturbing Sexuality / Elizabeth A. Povinelli 257After Sex?! / Erica Rand 270After After Sex? Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 283Contibutors 303Index 307