Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

A really interesting engagement with questions about what it might mean to embrace negative feelings (especially shame) when thinking about queer history, and how to hold that shame with the seemingly-compulsive need to paint a progressive queer history--and how it might be useful to consider given the room it leaves for the "tragic" figures of early queer history (esp. sad queens and butches.)

I should say that this book barely brushes up against actual queer historiography as a field (she mentions Gay New York in a footnote, to talk about Foucault and not even the historiographical work itself, but otherwise doesn't actually speak about any works of historiography) so if that's what you're looking for, this is probably not for you. show more She's engaging really more with queer theory and queer literary readings than she is with historiography itself, but what she has to say about thinking about a queer past is nonetheless really valuable, I think, and could really aid those of us who are interested in history itself as a practice. Her focus on texts might benefit the reader who has a greater familiarity more than it did me, but honestly it made me more excited to read The Well of Loneliness.

I would also have liked to see her use Jose Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications a little more, as I think it serves one possibility of how to grapple with what she's working with, but I guess I get to write that paper later, then. (For the record, she cites it as an important text she's drawing from in her readings, and she uses disidentification as a methodology when talking about the texts/authors themselves, but not when considering how critics approach the texts, which I found weird? But again, I am a pendant and officially the Worst because of grad school, so this is a complaint like two people care about.) show less