Session intro: How
does ‘queerness’ feel? And how does this feeling
of queerness travel, transform itself, and sediment
in bodies, places, and movements? This panel
rearticulates recent interdisciplinary research on
affect through the lens of queer of color critique
to explore how, locally specific LGBT practices
enable or destabilize the emergence of a (trans)national
queer “structure of feeling” (Williams) that
imagines subjects as bound—however momentarily—within
a wide range of affective networks extending beyond
the politico-discursive. By looking simultaneously
to the movement of queer affects and to affect as
political movement, we ask how affective
similarities and disparities are conveyed and felt
across geographic, political, racial, or affinal
boundaries, all the while interrogating the limits
and preconditions of entry into these translocal
communities of
queer feeling. Each paper calls into question how a
politics of queer affect produces feeling as the
ontology by which we have come to exist as queer
beings (we are queer because we feel queer). Drawing
upon recent critiques of homonormative neoliberalism,
we argue that queer structures of feeling not only
fail to maintain their coherence in the diverse
material sites in and through which queer bodies,
practices, and ideologies are created, experienced,
and given name, but in fact, globalized queer affect
may be mobilized as a technology for the policing of
‘perverse’ practices, ‘abnormal’ identity
constellations, and ‘deviant’ political and
sexual desires.