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.