The Long 1990s: Queer Theory in the Archive
Description
Over the past four decades, scholars have framed the origins of queer theory in contradictory ways. While many feminists in the 1990s understood it as a masculinist or elitist project that traded activist solidarity for theoretical abstraction and gay male institutional clout, others sought to shape it as a model of engaged scholarship that carried forward the political commitments of Black and pro-sex feminism. In the conflict between these and other competing narratives and political aims, the contexts prompting queer theory’s emergence in the 1990s have remained strangely obscure. As a result, scholars have either maintained a focus on the contemporary or looked for earlier foundations to narrate the field. Kadji Amin has diagnosed this critical situation as a “haunting” and queried why the field’s “historical emergence in precisely the U.S. scene of the 1990s [is one] that contemporary queer studies often seems … eager to forget or move beyond.”
This seminar seeks to revisit the contexts and critical archives that accompany the lost memory of the 1990s in queer scholarship. We invite papers that push beyond both heroic and condemnatory narratives to offer granular and situated accounts addressing the history and metacritical investments of early queer theory, including forgotten or calcified debates, unknown or repudiated figures, and new angles on the decade’s political antagonisms. The point is not to forge a single origin story but to consider what such a return---without a fantasy of resolution—yields today as we face a state agenda keen to fulfill that decade’s far-right genocidal dreams. These dreams include not only the dismantling of all institutional vestiges of the Cold War liberal project (the university, media, public health, the so-called welfare state, etc.) but the elimination of bodily and sexual autonomy, counter histories of the nation and its people, and forms of expression (creative, activist, academic) that do not accord with far-right ideology and policy.
In calling this seminar the long 1990s we mean to register both a specific historical framework and the temporal leakiness and psychic haunting that accompanies periodization. What of queer theory belongs to or retreats from the 1990s, and what might the field learn by asking this question now? Seminar presentations might address these and related questions by considering: contestations over historical, periodizing, and archival methods; early debates about the critical value of “queer”; competing theoretical genealogies and disciplinary orientations in 90s queer theory; the relationship between 90s queer theory and feminism/lesbian and gay studies/trans studies; the sexual and racial politics of 90s culture war; HIV/AIDS and the queer theory archive; anti-identitarianism; queer aesthetics in the 90s; changing conceptions of sex and gender; and how we teach early queer theory now.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
David Kurnick is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton, 2012) and The Savage Detectives Reread (Columbia, 2022). In recent publications he has been exploring the intersections of literary criticism and queer theory. He is working on a book about the erotics of population in nineteenth-century realism.
Speaker Bio
Matt Johnson is Assistant Professor in the Dept. of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and subsequently taught at the Ohio State University and Lund University. In addition to current research on the interrelation between Yiddish- and German-language literature and culture, he is beginning work on projects about the media archaeology of testimony and about the history and theorization of the “queer novel.”
Speaker Bio
Julien Fischer is a literary theorist and candidate psychoanalyst based in Oakland. Julien holds a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, where he teaches in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is a member at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. Chase Gregory is an Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University. They are the the author of the recent monograph As if! Queer Criticism Across Difference (DU Press, 2025).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sylvie Thode is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently writing her dissertation, Alone Song: Anticollectivism and Survival in the HIV/AIDS Crisis. Her writing has appeared in Victorian Poetry, Chicago Review, Cambridge Literary Review, and Jacket2; her dissertation work has also been featured on the podcast Close Readings. She serves as Assistant Editor for the journal Critical Times.
Speaker Bio
Samuel P. Catlin is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies at Trinity College. He previously served as the Shuman Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Thought and Affiliated Faculty in the Gender Institute at SUNY Buffalo, and received a dual doctorate in Comparative Literature and Religious Studies from the University of Chicago. He is currently completing a book on the uncanny "returns" of religion in American literary and critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s.
Speaker Bio
Blase A. Provitola is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies & Women, Gender and Sexuality at Trinity College. Their research on lesbian activism, queer postcolonial studies, and transfeminism has appeared in TSQ, Genre, sexualité & société and Modern and Contemporary France. Their current book project de-heterosexualizes constructions of North African femininity in France and brings intersectional lesbian feminism to bear on queer postcolonial studies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Joshua Falek is a 2025 - 2027 SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Literature at Duke University. Their writing, which has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, differences, and Feminist Theory, contends with the role of (anti-)Blackness in the field imaginary of trans studies. They are the editor of “Aporias,” a special section of Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association that publishes writing by junior scholars about ongoing disputes in cultural studies.
Speaker Bio
Nora Fulton holds a doctorate in English Literature from Concordia University. Her research investigates the special relationship that philosophical treatments of the event have enjoyed with models of sexual difference and the sexed capacity for change. Her critical and theoretical work has been published in or is forthcoming from Radical Philosophy, Diacritics, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Oxford Literary Review, Textual Practice, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and elsewhere.