The Cultural Politics of (Sexual) Knowledge

It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that significant differences between theorists concerned with alterity (whether of race, class, gender...) evolve around issues of essentialization and naturalization and, furthermore, that once supposed naturalness of any particular sexual (or indeed other cultural) practice is abandoned, chances for political change are decisively improved. Yet, as discourses proliferating in today's reformist academy amply demonstrate, political optimism based on interrogation and dissolution of those conceptual entities called essence and nature as ultimate explanations for normative hierarchies has been premature. Those traditional opacities (let us call them this to mark them as concepts beyond which argument presumably need not go) have been readily replaced today by others which produce equally mystifying effects. In 1989, even while seeking to evade concept of a feminine essence under influence of deconstruction and Lacanian analysis, many prominent feminists, American and European, continue to represent woman as a site of opacity, as an unknown and indeed perhaps unknowable difference, inviting implication that other alterities may be similarly understood.2 Such a strategy has distinct disadvantage not only of leaving opaque to dominant system what dominant system has already designated as opaque, but also of accepting opacity as such as a part of strategist's own self-understanding. Considering these limitations, such conceptual maneuvers stand forth more and more markedly as complicitous with status quo. When, furthermore, to serve ideological needs of dominant academy, this intellectual occlusionism is stretched to its outer limits, it results in such remarkable statements as that by Eve Sedgwick, who writing recently in Raritan concludes that the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues of homo/hetero/sexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that available to, say, Proust. 3 The present inquiry aims to illuminate ways in which texts of a relatively forgotten cultural critic of recent past, Paul Goodman, constitute a still relevant intervention in today's knowl

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Ideology · Normative · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

• Elements of Vogue

  Marcos Becquer, José Gatti•Third Text•1991

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• Unfinished situations

  Tavia Nyong’o•Women & Performance a journal of…•2009

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• Gestalt Therapy

  Frederick S Perls, Paul Goodman et al.•Gestalt Therapy•1994

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