As If!: Queer Criticism Across Difference(Theory Q)

In As If!, Chase Gregory explores the stylistically strategic, often campy, and productively fraught cross-identifications of early queer criticism. Gregory calls this form of AIDS-era criticism as if! - a mode of writing in which authors struggle to read, write, and identify with and across categories of race, sexuality, and gender. Analyzing the work of Robert Reid-Pharr, Deborah McDowell, Barbara Johnson, and Eve Sedgwick, Gregory shows how their writing productively challenges fixed ideas of identity and knowledge production. Using these four writers as case studies of a larger trend within early queer criticism, Gregory demonstrates that even when critical attempts at relation are met by impasse, as if! criticism breaks down social relation, especially within those fields influenced by queer theory, deconstructionist feminist theory, and black feminist theory. By advocating a return to as if! criticism as a politically useful blueprint for contemporary cultural inquiry, Gregory draws attention to the obstacles to forging identification across difference and insists on the impossible project of solidarity across such difference.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Introduction. Reading and Writing As If! 1 1. Miscarrying On 19 2. Barbara Johnson’s Passing 48 3. Shock Therapy 83 4. Gale-Male-Oriented and Now 110 Conclusion. On Recognition 139 Notes 147 Bibliography 167 Index 177

About the Author :
Chase Gregory is Assistant Professor of English at Bucknell University.

Review :
“Can a man write as a woman? Can a white lesbian write as a black lesbian? . . . As if! Staging a surprising, yet timely return to early queer and gay/lesbian criticism’s experimentations with cross-identifications across gender and race, As If! masterfully demonstrates how all identifications, even those with identities to which one legitimately ‘belongs,’ are at once generative and fraught.” - Kadji Amin, author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History “Chase Gregory’s insightful readings return us to the early days of queer theory to track how scholars enacted cross-identification within their literary criticism. As If! is an important, revelatory, and groundbreaking reinterpretation of queer theory’s methods that develops an account of queer reading that will inspire a new generation to take seriously the playful and politically generative possibilities of cross-identification.” - Teagan Bradway, author of Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading