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We Are Not Yet Queer (in Victorian Studies): Response

I am quoting my late colleague Jose Esteban Munoz’s formulation (except the Victorian studies part) in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Munoz writes about radical hope: he recommends that we keep our eyes on a “then and there,” a new world beyond the “prison-house” of the present (1). In our scholarship, this means rejecting the normative, the “natural,” and the known. Scholarship can become too timid, too straight, and too straitlaced, especially in perilous times. I chose three papers from the 2014 NAVSA conference that I thought were strange, risky, daring, and therefore queer in the broadest and oldest sense of the word. These papers remind us that scholarship is utopian, always imagining a future in which we break out of the intellectual bonds that now hold us back. These three graduate students are also literally our future; their work asks us to move along toward it, to assume it will be there, to imagine it into being, to work for it. Derek Bedenbaugh’s “Novel Violations: The Hermaphrodite and the Failure of Form,” Thomas J. Joudrey’s “Penetrating Boundaries: An Ethics of Anti-Perfectionism in Victorian Pornography,” and Natalie Prizel’s “The Non-Taxonomical Mayhew” all use bodies to interrupt texts. Their papers then interrupt our own bodies, or remind us that our bodies are always interrupted and perhaps only experienced as coherent because of texts. Bedenbaugh makes us wonder if the men and women of the Victorian marriage plot actually exist as such except as textual creations. Joudrey reminds us that pornography shows us not only or even mostly a utopia of splendiferous sex, but rather failing