After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics - Hardcover

Penney, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745333796 ISBN 13: 9780745333793

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2013

Synopsis

After Queer Theory makes the provocative claim that queer theory has run its course, made obsolete by the elaboration of its own logic within capitalism. James Penney argues that far from signaling the end of anti homophobic criticism, however, the end of queer presents the occasion to rethink the relation between sexuality and politics.

Through a critical return to Marxism and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), Penney insists that the way to implant sexuality in the field of political antagonism is paradoxically to abandon the exhausted premise of a politicised sexuality.

After Queer Theory argues that it is necessary to wrest sexuality from the dead-end of identity politics, opening it up to a universal emancipatory struggle beyond the reach of capitalism's powers of commodification.

About this title

About the Author:

James Penney teaches cultural theory at Trent University, Canada. He is the author of The Structures of Love: Art and Politics beyond the Transference (2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (2006).

Review:

"James Penney has done it again. As with his previous work, he is careful , in After Queer Theory, to explain his key theoretical terms and ground them in an informed and nuanced history of where the terms come from. Perhaps one of the most original (and intriguing) aspects of the project is his idea of the 'homosexual unconscious', which is worked out dialectically through reference to a multiplicity of urgent, current, socio-political events. He is correct to state that Queer Theory is now at a crucial turning point, when the only option is to undertake a radical and thorough critique of its presuppositions and present state. No other critics have undertaken such a project at the present time." – Professor Clive Thompson, University of Guelph

About this edition

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0745333796
• ISBN 13: 9780745333793
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224