Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment

About the Book

The contributors to Long Term use the tension between the popular embrace and legalization of same-sex marriage and the queer critique of homonormativity as an opportunity to examine the myriad forms of queer commitments and their durational aspect. They consider commitment in all its guises, particularly relationships beyond and aside from monogamous partnering. These include chosen and involuntary long-term commitments to families, friends, pets, and coworkers; to the care of others and care of self; and to financial, psychiatric, and carceral institutions. Whether considering the enduring challenges of chronic illnesses and disability, including HIV and chronic fatigue syndrome; theorizing the queer family as a scene of racialized commitment; or relating the grief and loss that comes with caring for pets, the contributors demonstrate that attending to the long term offers a fuller understanding of queer engagements with intimacy, mortality, change, dependence, and care.

Contributors. Lisa Adkins, Maryanne Dever, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Scott Herring, Annamarie Jagose, Amy Jamgochian, E. Patrick Johnson, Jaya Keaney, Heather Love, Sally R. Munt, Kane Race, Amy Villarejo, Lee Wallace

Table of Contents:
Foreword: Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey / E. Patrick Johnson  vii
Introduction: A Theory of the Long Term / Scott Herring and Lee Wallace  1
1. Committed to the End: On Caretaking, Rereading, and Queer Theory / Elizabeth Freeman  25
2. Loss and the Long Term / Amy Villarejo  46
3. Unhealthy Attachments: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Commitment to Endure / Sally R. Munt  63
4. A Lifetime of Drugs / Kane Race  89
5. Death Do Us Part / Carla Freccero  117
6. Never Better: Queer Commitment Phobia in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life / Scott Herring  134
7. Race, Incarceration, and the Commitment of Volunteer / Amy Jamgochian  155
8. The Color of Kinship: Race, Biology, and Queer Reproduction / Jaya Keaney  175
9. Toward a Political Economy of the Long Term / Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever  199
10. Serial Commitment, or, 100 Ways to Leave Your Lover / Annemarie Jagose and Lee Wallace  223
11. The Long Run / Heather Love  250
Contributors  267
Index  271

About the Author :
Scott Herring is Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and author of The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture.

Lee Wallace is Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and author of Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage, also published by Duke University Press.

E. Patrick Johnson is Annenberg University Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

Review :
“Every now and again an edited volume comes along and sets a new agenda for a field. This absolutely dazzling piece of scholarship is precisely such a landmark contribution. Encountering the scrambled landscape of gay life in the post-Obergefell world while grappling with the new possibilities for commitment made possible by the legalization of gay marriage, Long Term is a truly original and outstanding work.” - Benjamin Kahan, author of (The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality) “The essays in Long Term enter the quotidian realm of queer commitments not to settle scores with the outsized celebration of antinormativity that writes the political into prerecorded narratives of heroic refusal, but to inhabit the small acts and minor tempos that compose the work, anxiety, and yes even the pleasure of ordinary endurance. Lushly descriptive and wholly engaging, this collection is both a living document and a critically nuanced guide to the persistence of queer commitments.” - Robyn Wiegman, author of (Object Lessons) "Disability and carework are the volume’s most prominent scenes of queer commitment: palliative care for a dying mother or companion animals; living on after a partner’s catastrophic stroke; living with gendered and queered chronic illness. . . .  The authors pause on small scenes of the mundane, finding queer attachments in 'suspended time and repetitive actions' and the thickness of the everyday." - Margot Weiss (Public Books)

“Long Term plunges us into everyday scenes of belonging, which are rife with complicity, ambivalence, and damage. We move from deathbeds to the dance floor, from prisons to hospitals, from gay adoption to companion species caretaking. . . . Herring and Wallace loosen heteronormativity’s fierce grip on the narration of the long term while better attuning queer theory to practices of care that enable queerness to endure."

- Tyler Bradway (American Literary History)