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THINKING AFTER SEX

Let’s talk about sex, baby. . . Actually, let’s not. Let’s talk about what queer theorists talk about when they’re not talking about sex. This is the impetus behind After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, a collection of essays that Halley and Parker compiled to address a contemporary debate within that field. What does it mean when queer theory superstars take their research out of the bedroom and into the realms of, for example, Israel and Palestine (à la Judith Butler) or religion (à la Michael Warner)? As the editors reveal in the introduction, making the claim that there is an ‘after’ queer theory, and that this ostensible post-state is also post-sex, is controversial. A handful of recruits for the collection were outraged enough to abstain from participation. The scholars who did participate, however, offer diverse responses to what it is to ‘do’ queer theory now that the field has a past. Many still insist that although their sites of analysis may go beyond gay and lesbian bodies, sex is still very much a part of making sense of ostensibly non-sexual phenomena. Halley and Parker thoughtfully organize the collection into sections ‘Genealogies of After,’ ‘Affects and the (Anti-) Social,’ ‘Queering Identities,’ ‘Lesbian and Gay after Queer,’ ‘Neither Freud nor Foucault?’ and include a final essay by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose canonical Epistemology of the Closet is referenced by many of the book’s contributors. The overarching theme in the 22 essays is that there is no overarching theme that exists ‘after queer theory’ probably because the terrain of queer theory’s origin was never fully agreed upon in the first place. The authors featured in the first section engage with questions of temporality and challenge the ability to distinguish the sexual from the nonsexual. That queer theory is still too ambiguous to be concisely defined as ‘over’ is argued throughout the section, perhaps most compellingly in Michael Moon’s analysis of the recluse artist Henry Darger’s paintings of genderambiguous children at war. Moon rejects that the images of little girls with